Coaching creatives to have a more joyful creative process is what I do as a creativity coach, and it’s a group of people I’m passionate about helping, as I believe creating is at the core of well-being.

There’s a fair bit of educating people on what a creativity coach does. I understand this. It’s not the most common job title ;-)

As a creativity coach, I help people in their process of creating.

Creativity is a working process. When you have a job, there’s a job description to guide you. When you do creative work on your own, there’s no job description, you just have yourself and that can be challenging.

Coaching creatives is not about becoming rich and famous or creating every day. It’s about tapping into what can only be expressed by you: your creativity.

It’s navigating the personal fears and challenges that come up for you when you do creative work that I help you with.

Coaching creatives to a joyful process

I love coaching creatives to build a joyful creating process. This creating process is personal to you, and I feel passionate about this. Creating new work is a process that comes from within, where you use everything you’ve learned, know, and are inspired by, and bring your spin on it.

If you come across a coach who tells you to follow their process, I suggest you run for the hills. How your process is, is how you work. And how your process is, depends on who you are, what experiences you have, how your life is, and sometimes how you are feeling.

There is no one size fits all.

What I help you do, is build your own empowering process that works best for you. That means you work in ways that suit your personality, and energy level and fit into your life. It’s a process that leaves space and time for resting and digesting what goes on in your life, and just as important, a process that has you focus on inspires you creatively.

Many of us are so used to listening to experts, wanting to be and do good, that we forget how to truly listen to ourselves. But the only expert on you is YOU.

Creativity is a funny size. There’s no right or wrong answer. And we like the right answers, don’t we? We like to be right and feel certain. Coaching creatives is also about helping you sit comfortably in uncertainty.

Ways to create a joyful creative process

The beginning of a new coaching journey with me starts with getting some clarity of where you’re at in your life, where you want to go, and what creative work you want to do. It’s good to take a realistic and honest look at your life and the commitments you have. There’s not much point in wanting to set aside 4 hours to work on a project if your commitments will only allow 2 hours that week. That’s setting yourself up for disappointment and that’s not joyful, or empowering.

Find a work rhythm that suits you best. If that’s working a few hours in the morning and a couple of hours in the evening, then that’s what you do. The point is to allow your own rhythm to take the lead. And not follow someone else’s opinion on “how successful people work”. Ugh!

It’s easier to feel creatively inspired and energized when working in a way that feels good, in surroundings that feel good to you.

Focus on the work you enjoy and practice getting good at it. Do work that lights you up. Really spend time on working out what the work is you feel inspired by, energized by, and do more of that. It sounds kind of obvious but it isn’t.

It’s normal to look for help and inspiration when we don’t know what to do. It’s also part of the process at times, but what easily happens, is that we only look to other people for guidance and end up believing their way is our way. And that’s when we step off our own path and onto someone else’s.

An inspiring and joyful creative process is about being at home with yourself, bringing your unique twist to your work, and doing the work that only you can do. This is how you build creative confidence.

Is creativity coaching for you?

Creatives come to me looking for solutions to one, several, or all of the following challenges:

• Having so many ideas and not knowing which ones to pursue, getting distracted by new ideas, and not finishing any of them.

• Perfectionism. Thinking they’re not good enough, afraid of being seen as a failure and comparing their beginning stage with someone else’s more advanced stage on the journey.

• Overwhelmed by “sole proprietor syndrome”, being one person having to do creative work and learn about the website, marketing, branding, emails, etc.

• Not enjoying the process and as a result, quit or don’t get properly started.

I believe the gold is in the process. You can do all the courses, get all the freebies, and buy all the programs, but unless you do work you enjoy and that you want to keep doing, it’ll feel like swimming upstream.

Read more about how coaching can help you move forward in a gently structured and empowering way on my coaching page, where you can also drop me a line.

Your art is needed in the world, no matter how small or what it is.