One of my favourite words to describe my clients is accomplished. As in, highly-skilled experts who have accomplished things.
The writers and artists I work with aren’t beginners ~ they’re seasoned mid-career professionals who have published books and mounted exhibitions.
They’ve won awards and grant money and edited journals and given TEDx talks and sold their work to admiring fans. They are damn good at what they do.
So what’s the problem? Why do they need a creativity coach?
Why would you?
Because your accomplishments just aren’t enough for you.
You wish you could have done more and done it better. These wishes are flavoured with regret, bitterness, and even despair.
For every book that saw the printing press, two more languished in draft form.
For every painting that was sent to be framed, a dozen more were conceived but never executed.
A short story took a year to write.
You never submitted that application for writer-in-residence.
Whatever work you complete, your appetite for accomplishment remains unsatisfied. Each success pales when held up to all the possible projects that never came to fruition.
There’s a Swell Season song that captures this feeling:
“I know, we’re not where I promised you we’d be by now.”
“I thought I would have found an agent with this manuscript.”
“I had really hoped I’d be making a living with my designs after all these years.”
“Everything ground to a halt when I had kids.”
When you’re really in the mood to torment yourself, you compare yourself to people who were, at one time, even-steven with you. Classmates from grad school. Colleagues from your writing group. Artists who had a booth next to you at the annual city sale.
Now this one has won a Commonwealth Prize and that one has a two-book deal with a major publisher and this other one is licensing her artwork worldwide. You started at the same place but they pulled ahead and now you feel so hopelessly behind that you will never catch up.
And you question whether you should even be in this race, since you clearly aren’t as driven as they are.
You know they’re not more talented, and that’s the part that stings the most. It could have been you.
Nothing you do will be enough, because of all that lost time.
Lost to the demands of life ~ making a living, raising children, caring for parents, renovating houses, moving, dealing with illness.
Lost to the figuring out your creative process ~ how to carve out time and lower your anxiety enough to get started and keep going and finish.
Lost to other interests that beguiled you because they were refreshingly novel and just plain easier than wrestling with your art.
You’ll never get that time back, which means that you’ll never live up to your potential.
Well, I call bullshit.
“I will never live up to my potential” is a broken truth that’s slashing your resolve to ribbons.
The whole truth is:
You don’t know what the future will bring.
Believing that you haven’t done enough only holds you back from doing more.
If you’d been ready to create more in the past, you would have done so. Ergo, you weren’t ready.
Everything you’ve said or done has been an expression of yourself. You have left a trail of truth and beauty in your wake. Your very life is a work of art. And at this moment, you can seize the opportunity to express yourself with more purpose.
No one can take your art away from you.
How can you start questioning your belief that you haven’t done enough?
By taking a few hours to appreciate what you have accomplished.
In your head, those past projects have telescoped down and their brilliance is faded.
When was the last time you read that first poem you published? When did you look at the first painting that made you think, “Damn, this is what I was made for”?
Read again. Look again. Remember and honour what you’ve done.
The Field Guide to Truth and Beauty is a self-guided retreat that leads you on an exploration of your body of work. I’ve created audio and ebook resources that show you how to spend two hours with your art and writing, reflecting on their value to you and the world. When you come out of this process, you’ll have new confidence and inspiration to keep on keeping on.
If you are plagued by the thought that you haven’t accomplished enough, I implore you to check it out.
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