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Goodbye Fear, Hello Muse – Why You Should Externalize Your Creative Struggle

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To your left is The Fear. This is what The Fear tells you every day:

“You’re not good enough.”

“They’ll laugh at you.”

“You’ve already done your best work.”

“You haven’t got the right tools.”

“It’s not perfect, go back and change it.”

To your right is The Muse.

She gives you ideas. But she is flighty, unpredictable and often arrives at inopportune moments. She also startles easily and deserts you at the drop of a hat. But give her enough space and she will repay you with more ideas than you’ll ever need.

Thanks to Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk on the idea of an external genius and my current favourite book Steven Pressfield’s “The War Of Art” who names his fear “Resistance”, recently I’ve experimented with externalizing my daily creative struggle.

It’s been so helpful that I had to share it with you. It’ll take a lot of pressure off your shoulders. Here’s why.

By personifying your inspiration and fear and making yourself the battleground, you’re removing the link between your work and your self-worth.

Beating yourself up for not doing enough good work is the best way of playing into The Fear’s hands and the quickest way to make The Muse run for the hills.

It’s also FUN! Let’s face it, the daily grind of creating anything can be a mundane business, and viewing your work as a struggle between the forces of darkness and light makes it a deliciously exciting prospect.

It’s certainly got me coming back for more.

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Filed Under: Featured Post Tagged With: Elizabeth Gilbert, inspiration, steven pressfield, TED, the war of art

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Claude VonStroke (Dirty Bird, USA)

Mike Monday’s process has helped me enormously. I have two record labels, a heavy touring schedule, a wife and two children, and a music production career all running in tandem. There are times when it seems unmanageable and i get lost in a downward spiral that limits my effectiveness as a leader and my ability to be creative in the studio.

Whenever i have a session with Mike we talk it all out and a sense of calm comes over me. i get back to basics and work out all the things in my head that need to get worked out. His process is both calming and therapeutic.

I would also like to add that the additional fact that Mike is a music producer himself and a veteran DJ lends itself to an extra level of trust. I don’t think i would take advice or listen to someone in the same way who was from outside the music industry. In an nutshell I find Mike Monday’s process to be an extremely valuable way to organize and free my chaotic brain to do what it is supposed to be doing.

Johnson Peterson (Yolanda Be Cool)

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“What your course has done for me has been remarkable and I really feel so grateful to you…

Radical is a good word for it! The most unexpected thing I’ve found about the course is the impact it has had on other areas of my life – I was quite surprised about that…

These are definitely transferable skills we are learning here!”

– Janelle Palmer (Tutukaka Coast, New Zealand)

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Vernon McCarthy (Wellington, New Zealand)

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Managing to get a average of two hours every day producing. This is a huge turn around for me and am loving it. It hasn’t been easy though but I have kept at it.

And much of it has been due to the help and inspiration from yourself, the group and me now actually putting in the work. The online community is such a good thing. Everytime I have gone to have a look I have found something relevant to my thoughts and that has helped me.”

Joe Roberts (London, UK)

“Mike has helped me to start living the truism that it’s not what you use to make music, it’s your ideas.

Those ideas only mean anything when you start putting them down though and that’s what this course has already helped me to start do regularly.

I’ve made more headway in two weeks than I’d managed in a couple of years on my own starting projects, then giving up and starting something new but never seeing them through till completion.”

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