Creativity Coaching – A short introduction

Posted on April 23, 2020 by Marta Mandolini, One of Thousands of Life Coaches on Noomii.

What is Creativity Coaching?

Coaching is a process where a trained professional accompanies a client to the achievement of a desired goal, through conversations and thought provoking activities. As defined in the APA American Psychology Association dictionary, Creativity is the mental processes leading to a new invention, solution, or synthesis in any area. A creative solution may use preexisting elements (e.g., objects, ideas) but creates a new relationship between them. Products of creative thinking include, for example, new machines, social ideas, scientific theories, and artistic works.

The coaching process is itself creative: thanks to powerful questions and dynamic activities it generates new insights, original and personal ways the client decides to solve his/her issues and activates a flow of possibilities.

However, Creativity Coaching is more specific. Sometimes it is called “Coaching for creative clients”, but I prefer to call it Creative coaching only, since everyone can benefit from it, not only creative clients, and also because we all can use creative thinking and create something original, for ourselves and the others, but not many people would define themselves as creative, unfortunately.

By creativity coaching I mean on one side the activity of a coach helping a client with all aspects of creative life (including the psychological and practical problems that arise as he /she tries to create) and on the other side also helping clients achieving a (no necessarily creative) personal /professional goal using some creative activities as a tool.

Who can benefit from Creativity Coaching?

In my experience, I would say, that creativity coaching is oriented:
-to all those people that want to achieve a creative goal (writing a book, paint a collection of watercolours, open a theatre club..).
-to all those people who want to find meaning and passion in their life, express themselves, feel that something is missing in their daily life but don’t know what and how to realise it.
-those who wants to improve their personal and professional life, and feel they would benefit of a creative approach in coaching, using art, music, theatre, literature, music as tools.

Clients may be individuals, groups or teams, general public and companies can receive beneficial results from creativity coaching, without the need to be expert, in art, or any specific creative domain.
It could be a retail company which wants to offer a creative coaching to its employees to improve communication and productivity; an actor struggling with performance anxiety; an artist who procrastinates and cannot meet deadlines; a bank officer which would love to write a book but he is afraid and shelves the project but feel frustrated and dissatisfied with life; a couple suffering of empty nest which need to re-design existence and create a new equilibrium, etc …

Who is a Creativity Coach?

A Creativity Coach is a Coach, which may be not necessarily expert in all creative domains but is able to support the clients throughout the creative process, because viscerally understands the meaning of creating, the issues related to it, and may have a proper training on the use of creative and artistic techniques in case he/she decides to use them as a tool in a regular coaching process. A Creativity Coach is usually a professional who also engages in his personal life with the creative and artistic flow, and should have a proper training in psychology-coaching to be able to be focused and present the during the sessions, so to not interfere with the client’s creative growth.

Creative Coaching is not training, is not mentoring, is not psychotherapy, but it needs to incorporate the knowledge of a trainer, the expertise of a mentor, the sensitive ethical professionality of a psychotherapist and the daring intuition of the avant-guarde artist.