In my last post I described psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of creative flow. Now I want to focus on how coaches and managers can help creative professionals achieve creative flow more often in their work - and by doing so, produce creative work of a higher standard.

If you are responsible for managing or developing professional creatives or artists, I invite you to consider how you use the following behaviours, which can help you engage their full enthusiasm and continually raise the bar of creative performance.

Flow can be unpredictable and elusive. It requires a delicate balance of many different elements, so it cannot be controlled – in fact, a controlling mindset tends to interfere with it. But through coaching it is possible to influence performance in a way that increases the likelihood of achieving flow. And it should be taken as read that the following needs to be applied with sensitivity to the needs of each individual.

Creative flow is defined by Csikszentmihalyi as “An almost automatic, effortless, yet highly focused state of consciousness” that occurs when we are working at the peak of our creative abilities.

See my previous post for a more detailed description of the nine characteristics of flow. Below I’ve listed these characteristics again, with each one followed by ways that you can influence it through coaching to help people achieve creative flow:

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Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is a psychologist who has devoted his career to researching happiness and fulfilment. His research has shown that although people enjoy indulging in pleasure, such as eating and drinking, sex and shopping, this eventually wears off, leaving us feeling unsatisfied. True happiness comes from learning and developing our skills to overcome meaningful challenges. When we are fully absorbed in doing this, we experience what Csikszentmihalyi calls ‘flow’:

Flow – “An almost automatic, effortless, yet highly focused state of consciousness.”

(from Creativity by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi)

When we are in flow, we are fully absorbed in whatever we are doing and find it easy to achieve peak performance. The experience is accompanied by intense feelings of pleasure and satisfaction.

Flow can occur in many spheres of human activity, physical and mental. Athletes call it being in the ‘the zone’, but we don’t have to run a marathon or win an Olympic medal do experience flow - we have all experienced the enjoyment of becoming absorbed in doing a task well.

Flow is particularly common in artistic and creative spheres, during those times when ideas, images, feelings and/or words seem to flow easily and the work takes on a momentum of its own. Many artists make big sacrifices in other areas of their lives so that they can pursue creative flow. Professional creatives have typically had powerful experiences of flow, and can relate to the intense feeling of satisfaction when they enter flow – and equally intense feelings of frustration when they are unable to get into flow in their work.

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I started working with artists and other creative professionals when I began practising as a hypnotherapist 10 years ago. Here’s an article I wrote a while ago about Hypnosis and Creativity for Creative Review.

EDIT: Brian Clark over at Copyblogger has written a post on hypnotic copywriting that’s almost a mirror-image of the process I describe in my article: I wrote about the trancelike state we enter when absorbed in producing creative work; Brian has written about the trance we enter when absorbed in the product of that creative work, whether a novel, film, conversation or advert.

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I’ve just launched Mark McGuinness|poetry, a blog about reading and writing poetry.

It includes links to my own poems and articles that are published elsewhere. Currently there’s a link to a recording of me reading a poem at the launch of The Wolf magazine No.3, and some of my reviews and articles for Magma. Other poems and articles will be added as they appear online in archives.

I will also be writing about poetry I’m currently reading and some of my old favourites. I originally intended to include all of my poetry posts on this blog, but it feels as though the poetry wants a space to itself. So the Wishful Thinking blog will continue to focus on media-neutral creativity and its application in business and the arts.

There will be some cross-over between the two blogs, with some posts (or parts of posts) appearing in both spaces, so the poetry has not been completely banished from Wishful Thinking - it’s just built an annexe of its own. Let me know what you think of it.

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I once ran a business training with a team of on-the-road sales people. They were great - bright, enthusiastic, professional and likeable. We had a lot of fun and got a lot of work done. Almost inevitably, one of their requests was for help in ‘dealing with difficult people’. This one crops up in just about every training I run, it’s up there with ‘How do I find more time?’ and ‘How do I deliver negative feedback?’.

When I asked them what they meant, they described ‘the people at head office’, who sounded like they were on a mission to obstruct the sales team at every step - ‘bureaucratic’, ‘nit-picky’, and ‘difficult’ were some of the nicer words used. So we spent some time looking at ways to influence these people and minimise the interference.

From the feedback I got in the post-seminar coaching sessions, the new options were helpful and they were able to spend less time arguing with administrators and more time improving their sales targets.

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Here are some tips for dealing with writer’s block, based on my own writing experience and the most common patterns I encounter with coaching clients.

Although this post concentrates on writers, many of the tips can be applied to other kinds of creative block.

Let me know if you find them useful!

1. Make a deal with your Inner Critic
All writers have an ‘Inner Critic’ or editor at the back of the mind. We need one, to maintain quality control. The purpose of your Inner Critic is to make you a better writer - but sometimes s/he gets a bit carried away, and starts pulling your draft to pieces before you’ve even got it down. So every time you try to write, you end up listening to a nagging inner voice telling you everything that’s wrong with your work and why you’ll never cut it as a writer.

If this starts happening, imagine sitting down with your inner critic over coffee, and make the following deal: Read the rest of this entry »

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