Making Your Creative Mark by Eric Maisel

Making Your Creative Mark by Eric Maisel is a book for people to use to help guide them on their creative or professional path. The advice contained helps the reader to follow through with their aspirations, and stop the negative self-talk that plagues many of us.

Book Description

“Writers, painters, singers, filmmakers, musicians, craftspeople, and actors confront daunting challenges every day. It is hard to produce new work, find success in the marketplace, manage relationships, and keep spirits up. Many doubt that solutions to these very real problems exist, but they do, and world-famous creativity coach Eric Maisel has compiled them in this book. You will learn how to:

• make sense of the challenges of your personality, the challenges inherent in creative work, and the challenges of culture and marketplace
• quiet your overactive mind 
• increase motivation and avoid blocks 
• engage in practices that create and reinforce meaning
• align self-talk with goals, avoiding negative loops that block creativity
• identify stressors and implement stress-management techniques designed specifically for artists
• maintain emotional intimacy and healthy relationships in the midst of the creative process
• claim your identity as an artist
• rekindle passion for your art and feed that flame during dark days and dry spells

Intended for professional artists and those aspiring toward professional status, this book offers the nuts and bolts of sticking to a successful and fulfilling life in the arts.” – Making Your Creative Mark

My Thoughts

Making Your Creative Mark is the type of self-help book that creative people need to give them a kick in the butt to accomplish their goals. This isn’t a book that helps you decide what you want to do in life or give you amazing ideas to go create something. This book does give you the self-confidence and motivation to turn what you already love doing, or are already doing, into something more.

The book is divided into nine “Keys” that help you with various aspects of creativity including: the mind, confidence, passion, freedom, stress, empathy, relationship, identity, and societal keys. The advice contained in each one is written to help creative people, but it can be used for everyone to accomplish their goals, too.

Eric Maisel helps you to become what you want to be, and do what you want to do. One of the big things you have to do for this to work though is to stop making excuses, and stop bad mouthing yourself mentally (or verbally). This can be hard at times because many of us (including myself) sometimes have that negative self-talk that is just not helpful with anything.

This is an excellent book to help push people in the right direction of their dreams. The advice can honestly be used by a wide variety of people or professions, and has some really good suggestions. I definitely recommend it.

* Thank you to the publisher of Making Your Creative Mark, New World Library, for providing me with a copy of this book for review. All opinions expressed are my own.