Self-Care for Creative Artists: 10 Reasons to Care About It

1. To feel more comfortable in performance situations: Performance anxiety usually stems from a variety of causes: physical, mental, and emotional. Maintaining your overall health and well-being, including keeping your stress at a manageable level, controlling your negative thinking tendencies, and getting the emotional support you need, will allay some of this anxiety before you go on stage.

2. To connect more and isolate less: Other creative artists can provide inspiration, understanding and support. Observing your communication and social habits can help you deepen these relationships and allow them to enrich your life.

3. To have enough energy for everything you want to do: healthy clothes will give you a new spark of energy and a clear mind.

4. Relax. Relaxing, letting go, and gaining some perspective on the creative process can help you relax and let what needs to be expressed come naturally.

5. Using your physical environment to become more creative: Paying more attention to your physical environment and how it affects your creativity and well-being can have endless rewards, once you take the steps to create your ideal environment.

6. Find time for what is important: learn to say “no” to the things that consume your time and energy, so you can say “yes” to yourself and your art.

7. To deepen your creative experience: Self-awareness and personal growth will add depth to your creative expression.

8. To stop sabotaging your own efforts: Increased awareness of the choices you’re making will help shed light on your hidden, destructive patterns of self-sabotage.

9. To disempower your inner critic: Learning to recognize, listen to, and then dismiss the voice of the inner critic will boost your confidence and give you back a sense of empowerment.

10. In order to have easier access to your muse, whether speaking to you as your own higher self, a higher power greater than yourself, or through someone else’s music, art, or words, it is sometimes necessary “set the stage” for these important conversations Why have your muse compete with your inner critic, your busy schedule, your late-night flings, or the many other users of your time and energy?

(c) Copyright 2005, Genuine Coaching Services.