Creative leadership: The Artist’s Way

Over 12 weeks, we will systematically cover the key topics that make up Julia Cameron’s journey through The Artist’s Way.

• Synchronicity: Leap and the net will appear
• The power of the tribe: Group working, accountability and excitement
• Recovery beyond creativity: Connecting with our memories, dreams and fears
• Considering the idea that everyone is an artist
• Learning to see creativity as play
• Focus on creativity as a process over the end result as a product
• Allowing time for ideas to grow and be born
• Embracing change
• How you do anything is how you do everything
• Empowerment in the face of challenges

The Artist's Way group coaching course takes place over Zoom and is broken up into 12 weekly sessions:

1. Recovering a sense of safety

This week will get you started on your creative comeback. You may experience a mix of elation and defiance, hope and scepticism. The readings, tasks, and exercises will help you establish a sense of safety and enable you to express your creativity with less trepidation.

2. Recovering a sense of identity

A primary goal this week is to assist you in establishing your personal identity. You may feel compelled to draw new boundaries and explore new territories. These tasks are designed to support and guide you in doing this.

3. Recovering a sense of power

This week you will be required to experiment – consciously – with spiritual open-mindedness. You may experience sharp bursts of anger, joy, and grief, as well as new levels of energy. Your existing limitations are losing their hold on you, allowing you to fulfil your potential.

4. Recovering a sense of integrity

You may be forced to confront the notion of redefining yourself this week. The assignments are intended to hurl you into productive self-reflection and self-awareness integration. It is likely to be both challenging and exhilarating.

5. Recovering a sense of possibility

You are being asked this week to examine the consequences of remaining stuck. You will explore how restricting the positive things you receive limits your options. You will examine the cost of choosing to appear good over choosing to be real. You may consider making radical alterations, to stop ruling out your development by making others responsible for your limitations.

6. Recovering a sense of abundance

Your primary creative block this week is money. You will be encouraged to reflect on how your ideas about God, money, and creative abundance are restricting your current quality of life. Counting – a block-busting tool for clarity and proper resource allocation – will be introduced to you.

7. Recovering a sense of connection

This week we focus on developing the right attitudes to foster creativity. Both your receptive and active abilities are emphasised. The essays, exercises, and assignments seek to unearth areas of genuine creative interest as you connect with your personal angels.

8. Recovering a sense of strength

This week, you will investigate how you limit your creativity with time. You will look at how you can alter your current life in an immediate and practical way. You will explore how your early conditioning may have led you to settle for much less than you wanted creatively.

9. Recovering a sense of compassion

This week we will focus on overcoming inner barriers to creativity. We will examine the difficulties that have inhibited our creative efforts in the past, and we will discover how to deal with them. We will learn how to heal the shame of our past creative failures and nurture compassion for the frightened artist child seeking creative success. We will learn how to deconstruct emotional barriers and enable future risk-taking.

10. Recovering a sense of self-protection

This week we will discover how to avoid getting derailed on our creative journey. Because creativity is a spiritual matter, many of the dangers are spiritual. These tasks focus on identifying the detrimental patterns we habitually cling to, so we can free ourselves to flow creatively.

11. Recovering a sense of autonomy

This week we examine how to ensure our artistic self-reliance. We look at how we can bolster our creative power by accepting and nurturing ourselves as artists. We look at how success must be managed to preserve our freedom.

12. Recovering a sense of faith

In the final week of the course, we address the spiritual heart of creativity, which is inherently mysterious. Because creativity requires receptivity and profound trust, which we have developed through our work in this course, we set our creative goals and examine last-minute sabotage. We reaffirm our commitment to the tools.

Participants in The Artist’s Way course are encouraged to read the book and commit to daily practices such as journalling between sessions.