THE INSPIRATION PLACE PODCAST
Miriam Schulman:
Well, hello. This is your host, artist Miriam Schulman, and you’re listening to episode 114 of The Inspiration Place Podcast. I’m so honored that you’re here. Today, we’re talking all about the power of daily practice. In this episode, you’ll discover why bringing playfulness to your practice doesn’t undermine your seriousness, common misconceptions about the role of discipline in your daily practice, and finally, why creating a ritual of daily practice can add much-needed meaning to your life.
Today’s guest is the author of more than 50 books on creativity and personal growth, including his latest, The Power of Daily Practice. Widely regarded as America’s foremost creativity coach, he is a retired family therapist and a noted leader in the movement known as critical psychology. He writes the Rethinking Mental Health blog for Psychology Today and facilitates creativity and deep writing workshops around the world. Please welcome to The Inspiration Place Eric Maisel. Well, hello, Eric. Welcome to the show.
Eric Maisel:
Hi, Miriam. Great to be back with you. By the way, not around the world anymore. Those deep writing workshops are all online nowadays.
Miriam Schulman:
Yeah. How many do you host at a time?
Eric Maisel:
One group at a time. Now that I’ve moved them from week-long in Paris or London or Dublin to weekends online, it’s a sad change, but it had to happen.
Miriam Schulman:
Yeah, well, I guess you can’t lock the writers in a room anymore. Because that’s what we talked about last time, I was like, “What do you basically do, lock them in a room?” And you said, “Yeah, it’s more or less it.”
Eric Maisel:
Well, but with cappuccinos, I mean, it’s not so bad.
Miriam Schulman:
Okay, so we have a lot to talk about, and I kind of want to keep in mind three creative archetypes. I know that you help a lot of different creatives, and in your book, it’s nice the way you give different examples. But the three people I have, fantasy people we have in mind are the painter, the cellist, and the writer. So, the cellist is my daughter, the painter would be me, and actually, the writer is also me right now.
Eric Maisel:
You’re all three creatives.
Miriam Schulman:
So, that’s who we’re pretending to help. All right-
Eric Maisel:
I can do that, I can remember three things, sort of.
Miriam Schulman:
Okay. So, those were the examples we’re going to pull from real life, a couple of things that have been stumping both me and my daughter. By the way, she’s 23, so she’s no… We’re not talking about an eight-year-old having an authoritative mother making her practice. First of all, you’ve written so many books. What is different and special about this one? What inspired you to feel that you had something new to say with this book?
Eric Maisel:
Well, as you indicate, I’ve been writing about the creative life, the challenges of the creative life, for a very long time, different issues like creativity and depression, creativity and anxiety, creativity and addiction, all the things that trouble us and challenge us. But one thing that became clear to me, and now doing this for 30 years, is how much time is lost the second we lose even a few days to not working. It isn’t about a few days; that doesn’t really matter one way or the other. If you don’t write for two days, maybe you’re living your other life purposes, or whatever’s going on, that’s not such a significant loss. The problem is when you lose those two days, you look up, and weeks and months and years and decades have disappeared. That’s the real problem. As soon as we stop this work, which is essentially hard work, it’s very hard to return to it.
So that’s why I thought speaking about daily practice, not just about practice, which is its own important idea, but underlining the word “daily.” If we don’t stick to our work in a daily way, and that’s seven days a week, because our meaning needs don’t disappear on the weekend… That’s an odd idea that we would not have meaning needs on the weekend. So if we don’t work seven days a week, we’re really at risk for losing huge chunks of our life to inactivity.
Miriam Schulman:
Why daily?
Eric Maisel:
Just for that reason. This is empirical; it’s not really an abstract idea, it’s empirically, it looks like, if a writer stops writing for three or four days, that novel goes into a drawer somewhere.
Miriam Schulman:
Yeah.
Eric Maisel:
Life’s exigencies take over. We all know what we’re going through, whether it’s making a living or figuring out how to deal with our days, organize our days, orchestrate our days. So much is going on, and so much of it is anxiety provoking, that something that requires the kind of presence that writing or painting, playing the cello, anything requires, we’re not up for it that easily. And so, if we lose three days to it, we’re just very likely to lose much more than those three days.
Miriam Schulman:
Yeah, the way my daughter describes it… So, she’s actually working on an alternate life purpose right now, she’s working as a student teacher in the schools, and so that’s what she’s been focusing on, and she has let her practice go by, and she gets very anxious about feeling that she is, she likes to call it out of shape, that now she’s out of shape, and it’s going to be hard for her to get back into practicing again. She doesn’t even have a performance coming up; it’s really for her own self.
Eric Maisel:
That’s right. What you’re speaking to is the necessity that many people find of having multiple daily practices because we have multiple life purposes. We think if we get to one life purpose, that’s enough, and that’s already plenty, most people aren’t even getting to one of their life purposes in a daily way. But also, one may not be sufficient, and it’s hard to have two important habits going on simultaneously, like whatever, dieting and exercise in the same day, or any two things that are not necessarily that easy.
But when we announce to ourselves or for ourselves that two things are important, then we have to pencil them both in. They have to get penciled in. They won’t happen if we don’t get them penciled in. So, she has her lesson plans to create for the student teaching and the student teaching itself, but the cello practicing has to get penciled in too. And then a decision comes up about what’s the first… Temporally, what’s the first one? How should that work? And for painters, writers, musicians, typically the creative practice ought to be the first one for a variety of reasons, but a main reason is that we, for creative folks, we get to make use of our sleep thinking. If it’s our first practice, then whatever our brain’s been working on the night before, we get to make use of that by turning to our painting or our writing first thing.
So, just again, it’s almost a practical matter. As a practical matter, it’s good to get to the creating first, because we have that reservoir of information available right then. When we turn to the new day, that reservoir of information goes… It empties, it goes away. As soon as we’re thinking about bagels or bran flakes or bacon or whatever we’re thinking about next, we’ve lost all of that good sleep thinking.
Miriam Schulman:
That’s so true. I also find that as the day wears on, I get decision fatigue. It gets harder and harder for me to make decisions as the day goes on, and if you’re doing something creative, that definitely requires decision making, whether you are a painter, a writer, even musician. Even if you’re playing notes on a page, you’re still making decisions, so… And also, isn’t it true that willpower fades as well, there’s a reservoir of willpower that gets used up during the day too?
Eric Maisel:
That’s right. We just get tired, we get mentally tired. We also get sad as the day goes on. If we haven’t gotten through our real work, then we get a little depressed as the day goes on. We may not call it depression or may not notice it, it may masquerade as fatigue, but by not getting to our life purposes, by not getting to our real work, we end up putting that day in the ledger of not such a good day. And at 8:00 in the evening, we’re just not ready to turn to our real work, especially for performers, for our cellist, when we’re talking about… We’ve had for 300 years a very strong metaphor in the American culture, comes from the Transcendentalists, from Emerson and Thoreau, the idea of progress. Americans are supposed to make progress. We’re supposed to keep making progress. Well, what’s the progress exactly that a cellist is making if she spends her hour there, repeating, repeating, repeating? Has anything gotten exactly noticeably better? Maybe not. It may just be that she has to do that work in order to maintain what she already has.
So we have to be very careful about demanding progress from our daily practice. We believe that we should be making progress, but we have to have a conversation with ourselves to make sure that we don’t demand progress. If you’re a writer, the day might be putting in 20 words and taking out 30 words. Doesn’t feel like we made progress on that day; that was still, though, an honorable writing day. We showed up, and we should congratulate ourselves for showing up, even though we might not have made this thing called progress.
Miriam Schulman:
It’s interesting what you say about progress, because also… I’m not sure this is an original idea I’m presenting here, but I don’t remember who said it. The world is always in motion, so if we’re not moving forward, we’re not really staying in the same place, we’re actually going backwards, because the world is continuing to move ahead without us. Do you agree with that?
Eric Maisel:
Sure. Well, I’m a big fan of the pre-Socratic philosophers, and maybe I’m the only fan of them wandering around anymore, but it was Heraclitus who said you can’t step in the same river twice; the river keeps moving, that life keeps changing. And that’s exactly right, and even with respect to the biggest things, like our life purpose choices, they change. We wish that they wouldn’t, we wish that life could settle down. I think this year has proven that life ain’t settling down. But we wish that our life purpose choices could be decisions that we make for all time, but they’re not, because they’re contextual and they’re contingent. If the world changes, we may not have been much of an activist on day one, and then the world changes, and suddenly one of our life purposes is activism. We hadn’t expected that from ourselves, we hadn’t really wanted that for ourselves, but the world has changed, and now we have to do new things.
Miriam Schulman:
Speaking of the way the world is today, and you may know something about this, how is what’s happening now, the stress and anxiety, how does that affect our creativity? Because what I notice both in myself and with the clients I work with, it’s very difficult to create from that place of stress and anxiety, like not having… starting with calm.
Eric Maisel:
Yeah. I think artists are extra disappointed right now. That’s my experience of what’s going on. They’re disappointed in the world, of course, but they’re disappointed in themselves, because they have, so to speak, more free time, they’re getting less work done, and that’s disappointing. I think they’re not crediting the difficulty of the situation enough. It’s hard to get three billion neurons in a row all gathered together for the sake of writing your novel when so many hundreds of millions of those neurons are thinking about other things. So, this is really a special time to do personal cognitive work, to try to think thoughts that serve you, to try to shut out as much of what you don’t need to be knowing as possible. It’s really not valuable to have news that you can’t act on. That’s just noise; it’s not valuable to take in all of that noise. So, it’s an especially difficult time for creative folks, and they’re taking a lot of that as blame upon themselves, disappointment in themselves if they’re not getting their work done.
Miriam Schulman:
I’m really glad you shared that. I assume that you finished this book pre-pandemic, is that correct?
Eric Maisel:
Yes.
Miriam Schulman:
All right. There’s one part that I’ve been using, that I’m really glad that you talked about in the book, and I wanted to highlight today, because this is a strategy that actually I’ve been using and leaning into, and that is the idea of bringing playfulness to my art. And it’s not even necessarily so much that I’m painting differently, although I kind of am. It’s more in the attitude, to bring a lightness to my art. I consciously said “to my art” instead of “to my work,” that it was very heavy for me to think about, “I have to go work on my art,” and when I started changing my language, both in my thoughts and what I was saying to my family, I would just say to them, “Hey, I’m going upstairs to splash around some paint,” and they would laugh. And that’s not exactly what I’m doing up there, but bringing kind of that mental attitude to my studio has really helped me, and you wrote so beautifully about the idea of playfulness, so I’d like if you could share a little more on that.
Eric Maisel:
In the book, the book’s divided into three parts, and the first part is about the elements of practice, and I believe that there are many elements of practice, many things to do, many things to pull together to create a strong practice. I believe I discuss 20 elements of practice. But playfulness quite pointedly follows solemnity in that list of practices, because it’s… There’s a dance here. Many of these ideas are duets, devotion and discipline, one thing and another, and here I think you don’t want to be, as an artist, only playful, because then you’re not being serious enough in some sense, but you also can’t just be serious, because then you’re really not allowing enough of your imagination in, enough freedom in. For me, if I think of playfulness, for me it’s a very clear idea of rolling around on the floor with the grandkids. It’s that kind of playfulness. It’s the fun of that and the joy of that.
Let me circle back around to the pair of discipline and devotion, because they connect to the pair of playfulness and solemnity. Most artists think they need more discipline, or that they’re not disciplined enough, and in fact, it’s more devotion that they need. They need to find the source of passion and love and enthusiasm and interest and curiosity. They’re all synonyms for a place we come from when we do the work, and I think it’s a loving place.
Pavarotti had a quote I’ve always liked, which is, “People say I’m disciplined, and it’s not discipline, it’s devotion, and there’s a big difference.” There’s a big difference between the two. We need our ounces or pounds of discipline, but we also need the lightness of devotion, the joyfulness of devotion, coming to the work with love. Can’t do it as just a dry pencil, you know? It’s really got to be more colorful than that.
Miriam Schulman:
That’s really helpful, Eric.
By the way, I wanted to make sure you knew that I do have room and am taking applications for 2021 for my Artist Incubator Mastermind. If you’re lacking a solid strategy or a winning mindset, or maybe you’re disappointed with your current art sales, I can help with that. If you’ve been listening to this podcast and you’ve found my tips helpful, then maybe it’s time to take the next logical step and work with me on a deeper level. The Incubator Mastermind program is for professional and emerging artists who are ready to move ahead for 2021. I’m already reviewing applications, so if you’re ready to invest in your career and join a dynamic community of artists who want to do the same thing, go to schulmanart.com/biz to apply now. And now, back to the show.
Something else that I wanted to share with the listeners that I’m finding personally helpful, and maybe you can help me unpack this, in addition to that lighter attitude… And just like you said, it’s not that the art is less serious; it’s more that the invitation to my art studio is lighter, if that makes sense.
Eric Maisel:
Yup.
Miriam Schulman:
But the other element that I’m finding helpful to me is I’m turning off the video camera, I’m turning off the sharing on social media with my art, and I’m making it more private once again, because I’ve found that that was creating a heaviness for me as well, the idea that everything that I was creating was for consumption.
Eric Maisel:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Miriam Schulman:
Not that I’m not selling the art, in fact, this is actually a commission, but the whole idea that everything had to be also this voyeuristic experience for other people, and turning that channel off has helped me tremendously.
Eric Maisel:
Sure, and I think historically, artists were caught on the horns of the dilemma about whether to show work early or not show work early. I think a lot of artists have always fallen into the camp of wanting to keep their work private until it was really ready to be shown.
Miriam Schulman:
For me, it’s not that. It’s not that I have a fear of judgment before it’s finished. It was just kind of the idea that I don’t have to add this additional pressure of a performance of my art in addition to creating my art.
Eric Maisel:
Yeah. Let me circle around this idea. So, in working with blockage and resistance, which of course are issues for lots of creative folks, that they’re not getting their work done, I will often reframe it as a certain kind of performance anxiety, that what’s going on, the thing they’re calling a block, is facing the blank page or the blank canvas and feeling like it’s a performance, and therefore, performance anxiety wells up. Even though there’s no audience, performance anxiety wells up. If you can get your mind in line, there, thinking a thought that serves you is “This isn’t a performance. I’m not performing.” And that helps rid one of the performance anxiety that naturally wells up if you think you are performing.
I think it’s a useful reframe for blocked or resistant artists to think through if in fact they’re experiencing performance anxiety, because if they are, then there are anxiety management tools to bring to bear on that. And suddenly, when you were blocked, you didn’t know what to do; now you know you need an anxiety management tool, maybe some simple breathing thing, some simple cognitive thing, some simple somatic thing. But there are things then to try… As soon as you’ve named the thing as anxiety, then there are things to try to reduce your experience of anxiety.
Miriam Schulman:
I think that’s really helpful. Now, just changing the archetype to the author archetype, so, as Eric knows, I am working… And my listeners know, because I’ve been talking about it, I am working on a book, and Eric was kind enough to introduce me to his publisher, and I wrote the introduction letter to her, and uh-oh, now she’s interested. So, it’s like, uh-oh, now I have to actually work on that proposal. I’m trying to create from the place of, one, it’s a practice, but two, that idea of playfulness, and the third thing, and this may go with what you’re saying about releasing and performance anxiety, but you may actually have a different name for this, trying to create the idea that when I sit down, I only have to create what I would call, I think Anne Lamott named this first, the shitty first draft. Whatever I’m producing doesn’t have to be…
Eric Maisel:
Let me play with that, because of course, many people know that metaphor, but I would go a lot further than that. It’s not just a shitty first draft, it’s we may do shitty book after shitty book. Nobody wants to hear that, but that’s the reality of process, that only a percentage of our things work.
Miriam Schulman:
Yeah.
Eric Maisel:
That’s the reality of process. And as I say, no one wants to hear that, but that’s the most mature place to get to, is that over time, we produce a body of work, but we may do many things that never go onto our bookshelf. They’re not good enough, they weren’t really available to us, et cetera. So that sounds disappointing, but it’s the truth of the matter, and when we really buy that truth of the matter, then we can just show up and not attach to outcomes. And that’s really the secret, is to show up and not attach to outcomes, not even think about it as drafts versus finished products. There’s no guarantee whatsoever, so we can just relax.
Miriam Schulman:
The book we don’t write can always be perfect.
Eric Maisel:
How many of Bob Dylan’s million songs are great? 36, 48? Whatever the number is, it’s a percentage of the whole. Pundits will say Beethoven’s first, third, fifth, seventh, and ninth symphonies are better than his second, fourth, sixth, and eighth, but you can’t do nine with out eight, you can’t do eight without seven. You can’t skip the things that don’t work. So you want to let go of the whole perfectionistic bit, because you can’t skip the things that don’t work. That’s every non-working artist’s dream, is to be able to skip the things that don’t work. Every working artist just does things, throws out things that don’t work.
Give you a good example of this, and I’ve forgotten the fellow’s name, but the fellow who wrote Memoir of a Geisha, if that’s exactly the right title, spent two years writing it in the third person: “The geisha does this, the geisha does that.” Two years, rereads it, dead as a doornail, nothing there. Most writers will bash themselves at that moment, right? They’re going to beat themselves up about spending two years on it and having no talent, and “Why did I think I could do it,” and what have you. What did he do? He said, “Well, let me try it in the first person now. Let me spend another two years on this and see what happens. Let me see what happens.” And so, he then produced something that people like. But most writers would not have had that experience of ending up with something they liked; they would have bashed themselves and maybe even stopped writing. Tons of writers stop writing after spending two years on a book that doesn’t work.
This is all by way of saying the same thing sort of over and over again, and that is to show up without… You can have ambitions for the work, desires, wishes, goals, hopes, you can have all of that, but you have to simultaneously detach. Very similar to the idea of solemnity and playfulness, there’s a pair here, there’s an attachment and detachment going on simultaneously. It’s a certain kind of dance. Without attachment, I don’t think we have any motivational juice. But if we’re attaching to something like the idea of perfectibility, then we’re going to get stuck by the second day.
Miriam Schulman:
Yeah, and to bring it back to the world of painting, I see that a lot with my students, and I tell them that they’re holding themselves to a higher standard than van Gogh or Monet, who destroyed many of their artworks throughout their lifetime. Van Gogh would paint over the same canvas three times. It’s not because he didn’t have money; his rich brother was always sending him money and canvases. Monet also destroyed a lot of his artwork that he deemed unworthy. So when we go to the museums and we see a van Gogh and we see a Monet, we’re seeing the best of the best, the artwork that made it there. And then there’s a lot of artwork that they did not destroy but is not in those higher collections, that maybe the museum has in storage somewhere, or is in a lesser collection.
So, when we want all our art to be masterpieces and things not to work out, that’s holding yourself to a standard that, like you said, even Beethoven, not everything he created…
Eric Maisel:
It’s a very simple model, and that’s to think of ourselves as experimenters. I think that’s the right model, that we’re experimenters. I think Edison went through a thousand filaments before he landed on tungsten. That’s a lot of filaments, that’s a lot of mistakes to make, that’s a lot of failures, a lot of things that didn’t work out. And that’s the experience of every inventor, every scientist: You run an experiment. If you think of your book as running an experiment, well, that means that you don’t know the outcome. And I think that’s a lovely archetype, the archetype of the experimenter, as opposed to the archetype of the what, the perfectionist or the master, the expert. We’re not masters of our work; we’re just laborers in the field of imagination experimenting. If the thing works out, have a good Scotch, and if the thing doesn’t work out, have the good Scotch anyway.
Miriam Schulman:
I want to get back to some of the lessons that you share in the book, and this one in particular, I know this question I’m going to ask is going to resonate with my rebels out there, the artists who, you know, they feel that any kind of structure hampers their creativity. So, if they’re doing the same thing every day, how do they keep that engaging and interesting for themselves?
Eric Maisel:
The proof’s in the pudding. If you write your novels by writing one day every three months, if that works for you, then forget about daily practice. But it has to be working for you. Most people will discover that writing for one day every three months is not working for them. So that’s the acid test. The reason to do it every day is that you’re going to discover that that’s the way the work gets done. But it’s about the proof is in the pudding. Again, this is not abstract matters, these are practical ways to get the work done.
As to whether each day is the same, it’s not. It’s just simply not. One day, you’re taking dictation because you were sleep-thinking about a conversation between Mary and John, and suddenly a thousand words are there, and you get down those thousand words, and you’re done in like 36 minutes, and you’re happy. And the next day, nothing’s there, and you’re just sitting there, and you’re annoyed with yourself, and you hate life, et cetera, et cetera. And then the next day, it’s a different moment in the course of your book, and you actually can’t write the book, you have to curate it, you have to step back and figure out what your book’s… Every day is different for a creative person. The basic idea that you’re showing up every day does not equate to your doing the same thing every day, not at all.
Miriam Schulman:
Eric, can you share with us specifically what your daily practice looks like?
Eric Maisel:
Sure. My daily practice is about a six-hour thing, a 5:00 a.m. to 11:00 a.m. thing. That’s kind of sacrosanct. It usually starts out with working on the book that I’m working on. My inner lingo, I work on chunks. I want to get a chunk done every day. Most nonfiction book chapters are about 4,000 or 5,000 words, and they’re often made up of four or five sections, so that’s easily divisible; a chunk of a chapter’s about a thousand words, so I try to get a thousand words done each day on the book I’m working on. And if you think about it, if you just do the math, that’s a draft of a book every two or three months, which is how books materialize that quickly.
Nowadays, I’m doing so many different kinds of blog post gigs. I do three blog posts a week for The Good Men Project and many other things. And they are also in that thousand word range, so on a given day, it might not be a chunk of a book chapter, it might be a blog post. But essentially, it’s getting to the writing first thing.
There’s another truth to this, and I really don’t want to even say it, I want to keep it a secret, because I don’t want to give anyone permission to look at their email, but kind of we have to look at our email first thing nowadays to put out fires and see what’s going on. I wish that people didn’t go to their email first, but I think that we do. So, actually, I go to my email first, but I do it in a glancing way. I’m really only looking to see if there’s anything I must pay attention to. I can’t really avoid that, because there may be something I must pay attention to, but I try to get through that as quickly as possible and get to the real work as quickly as possible.
Miriam Schulman:
So, 5:00 a.m., okay, and forgive me for asking these types of questions: Do you have breakfast?
Eric Maisel:
No. No, I get right to the work. The coffee’s made, the coffee comes on at 4:58. And no, I get directly to the work. I have breakfast probably about 8:00. If I can get in two or three hours of real work, I feel like that’s a real work day. I think anybody who is in any creative field understands the mythology of working eight hours or 12 hours, Picasso working 48 straight hours. That’s not real for most people. If we put in a solid two hours or a solid three hours, we will feel like we’ve gotten a lot of work done, and we’ll get a lot of work accomplished. So, after my first significant chunk of working time, 5:00 to 8:00 or so, then I’ve earned breakfast.
Miriam Schulman:
I like that. For me personally, I’ve found that I have trouble sustaining my intensity, which is another element you talk about in the book, for more than two hours. I’m talking about my painting. So, usually my painting sessions aren’t more than two hours. What really has helped me, the idea of penciling it in. What’s really helped me is when I write down an appointment with myself for my creativity, whether that’s my writing or for my art. What’s made me feel good is when I keep my commitments to myself.
Eric Maisel:
Yup.
Miriam Schulman:
That feels so good to me. And when I don’t keep my commitments to myself is really when I fall into despair.
Eric Maisel:
Yup, and I advise folks to set up reasonable commitments, to not go from not having painted in six months to now saying, “I’m going to paint three hours a day.” It’s probably unreasonable. When I work with a new client and I ask a new client, once I’ve gotten an agreement from the client that she now wants to create a daily practice of some sort, and I ask her, “How much time do you want to devote each day to X?” Whether it’s writing or painting or whatever. And this is strange but true, that almost always, she’s going to say 20 minutes, because she doesn’t want to disappoint herself. She knows that if she picks some big number like nine hours, or some absurd number, she’s not going to get to it. And she’s disappointed herself in the past enough times to know that she doesn’t want to do it this way, so she’s setting up a very modest thing, which I applaud.
If you can get to your work for 20 minutes, A, you’ll probably stay for an hour, but B, you’re going to feel successful. If you spend the whole week actually getting to your work, whatever your work is, for 20 minutes each day for that week, that’s a week different from any week you’ve spent previously in a long time. That’s a successful week. And we understand that the next week, you’re going to naturally ask of yourself, “Can it be 40 minutes? Is that possible?” And you’re probably going to find an equilibrium around 30 minutes. You can almost mathematically work out how each human being progresses towards the amount of time we really want to spend, which is hours. It’s hard to get from not having worked to spending hours on your work. There’s some intermediate steps typically necessary.
Miriam Schulman:
And you believe the consistency is more important, doing these sprints every day is better than doing a marathon, weekly marathon or a monthly marathon. Is that correct? Would you agree with that?
Eric Maisel:
I’m not going to go with better here, I’m going to go with proof is in the pudding. If your way is to not work for three days and then stay up for 48 hours and produce a novel every six weeks, whatever, if that’s your way, more power to you. I just don’t think that works, but it’s not about better or worse, it’s what works for you. I think this is what works for most people.
Miriam Schulman:
What are some other challenges we haven’t hit upon that we might face having a daily practice?
Eric Maisel:
I think the progress one was an interesting one, the idea of making sure that you don’t think that you need to be making progress. Think always it’s the thinking thoughts that serve you is the biggest challenge. Most people are regularly not thinking thoughts that serve them. It’s not just about being distracted by thoughts or negative self-talk; it’s by saying things like “I’m tired” or “I’m busy.” Because there are so many grains of truth in those thoughts, we let ourselves off the hook, and we don’t work. We have to realize how tricky we are, how our inner language is supporting our desire to not work, and how we have to see through that, and how we have to append big buts, big B-U-Ts, like “I’m tired, but I can paint for 20 minutes,” or “I’m busy, but I can write for 20 minutes.” We’re the only one in a position to append that “but” to that phrase and get ourselves working.
So, the cognitive piece is a big one. I think maybe the ceremonial piece is another big one, and that is, the way to get to the work often requires some ceremony. Why? Because all day long, we’re supposed to be getting things right. That’s natural. Pick up our kids at 3:00, drive on the correct side of the road, mow the lawn, one right thing after another. And then somehow, a time is supposed to come where we have real permission to make mistakes and messes. It’s not that easy to go from one mind to the other. In fact, it’s very hard to go from one mind to the other: our normal, everyday mind where we’re supposed to get things right, and then this other mind where suddenly, we have all of this freedom.
So, I think that requires a ceremony. One ceremony that I like is, and I’m here gesturing, making a little bridge, making a little “five seconds on the inhale, five seconds on the exhale” package where we drop a useful thought into a deep breath and use that as the ceremonial bridge. I think a good useful thought is “I’m completely” on the inhale, “stopping” on the exhale, that idea of stopping. And here, I don’t mean just the stopping of rushiness, but the stopping of our need to get things right. We have to get rid of that need to get things right. So, a very simple ceremonial bridge is just taking a few deep breaths and thinking, “I’m completely stopping” a few times.
So, I think the ceremonial bridge part, the cognitive part, and then the anxiety management part, because there’s a lot of anxiety that threads through the creative process. You alluded to one of those reasons, in that it’s a decision-making process, and making decisions provokes anxiety. Since it’s a decision-making process, there’s going to be anxiety threading through there until the end of time, so we need some portable… It doesn’t matter if you’re wonderfully calm in the morning during your meditation practice; you need to be actually calm as you’re painting or as you’re writing, so you need a portable anxiety management skill that you can use to reduce your experience of anxiety right in the moment.
Miriam Schulman:
I want to highlight a couple of things you said. To share my own ritual for painting, it’s always putting on my apron. There’s something about putting on the apron that, yes, now I’m really starting. I don’t have one yet for writing, but one thing that does help is putting on my writing music. That helps.
Eric Maisel:
For me, it’s picking my coffee cup. I have a selection of coffee cups from cities around the world: a Paris cup, a Berlin cup, a Prague cup, a this cup. Being in front of those cups as I pour my morning coffee, I’m sort of on the international bohemian highway, sort of joining all creators from all past, future creators. There’s something very deep for me about the simple gesture of choosing Berlin today, or Paris today, or New York today, or San Francisco today. So, that’s my ceremonial start to the day.
Miriam Schulman:
That’s wonderful, Eric. Okay, I think this is a good place to wrap up, but I do invite you to go listen to the other interview Eric and I did on his other book, Mastering Creative Anxiety. I think there was a lot of lessons in that interview, as well as his book. I’ll include links to both of those in the show notes, and of course, check out all his other 48 books not listed. I’m not going to list them all.
All right, so we’re going to include links to those books in the show notes, which is going to be found at schulmanart.com/114. Don’t forget, if you liked this episode, please check out the Artist Incubator Mastermind. It’s my private coaching program for professional and emerging artists who want to take their current art business to the next level. It is by application only. You can apply by going to schulmanart.com/biz, that’s B-I-Z, and if your application qualifies you, you’ll get my eyes on your art business, and we’ll chat about the steps you need to take to reach your goals.
Alrighty, Eric, do you have any last words for my listeners before we call this podcast complete?
Eric Maisel:
Just the straightforward, practical idea that getting to your real work first thing each day really makes a difference in the way you experience each day. Kind of idea that goes in one ear and out the other, but I just want to underline it because most people are not getting to their real work first thing each day, and it’s a huge change to make.
Miriam Schulman:
I should’ve asked this earlier, but what if people have multiple life purposes? Isn’t that something you talk about in your book?
Eric Maisel:
Absolutely. First, we have to identify our life purpose choices. That’s A; most people have never done that, and most people are still stuck on the idea of there is a purpose to life, as opposed to the better idea that there are life purpose choices to make. So you make your list of life purpose choices, and you make it as a real list, something that you can look at, and then spend half a minute each morning looking at your list and making decisions about which of your life purpose choices you intend to get to on that day. Painting may be one of them, but maybe this is the day that you have that hard conversation with your son about his drinking, or you have an activist hour. Each day, to my mind, there’s a certain kind of negotiation around our life purposes where we mindfully apply all of our inner resources to deciding which of our life purposes we’ll get to today.
Miriam Schulman:
Okay. Now we can wrap up. Be sure you check out Eric’s book, The Power of Daily Practice. And if you enjoyed this conversation, please leave me a review. It’s so easy to do that. Just go to schulmanart.com/review-podcast. I’d love to hear from you. Pop your Instagram handle at the end of the review, and I’ll even give you a shout-out over on my IG stories. All right, guys, thanks so much for being with me here today. I’ll see you, same time, same place next week. Make it a great one.
Thank you for listening to The Inspiration Place Podcast. Connect with us on Facebook at facebook.com/schulmanart, on Instagram at @schulmanart, and of course, on schulmanart.com.
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