a)plan coaching

What Is Creative Coaching? A Resource to Unlock Your Best Ideas

Creative coaching is one of the most powerful resources for individuals seeking more from their creative endeavors. Although many creatives have not traditionally considered coaching as a go-to resource, its popularity is rising, and for good reason.

Coaching meets you where you are now—not where you’re supposed to be or where you think you’re supposed to be—and helps you manifest your best self. If you seek to unlock, identify, and develop your strongest ideas, creative coaching is one of the best investments you can make today.

What Is Creative Coaching?

Creative coaching empowers individuals to maximize their potential while limiting their roadblocks. A coach works with his or her clients to help them unlock their best selves, both generally and creatively.

As with any type of coaching, there often exists a focal point. You might be familiar with accountability coaching, confidence coaching, success coaching, diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging coaching (DEIB coaching), and more. All of these coaching “genres” aim to serve clients in specific ways.

Creative coaching is a unique because not every coach has experience with creatives or working in a creative industry themself. This is an important distinction that separates this type of coaching from, say, accountability coaching. Any well-rounded coach can act as an accountability partner for their clients. Fewer can directly relate to the experiences shared by creatives.

In other words, not everyone understands the life a creative person leads. A creative coach understands what it means to live in your “zone of genius” or to reach a “flow state.” They know firsthand the highs and lows that come with creative work and the fundamental elements of the creative experience.

What Makes Coaching So Effective?

You can’t just switch your creative brain on and off: creatives know that better than anyone. Think about the anecdotes you’ve shared regarding your most groundbreaking moments–those “lightning in a bottle” moments that creatives may attribute more to luck than process. Creatives often believe that creativity cannot be forced.

While creativity may not respond to coercion, coaching helps you find inspiration on a more regular and systematic basis. If you speak with any coach in this field, they will acknowledge that, yes, some creativity depends on being in the right place at the right time and in the right frame of mind. That same coach will also tell you that creativity can be managed and optimized. Developing a working process for managing and optimizing creativity is exactly what happens through coaching.

This perspective makes the experience highly effective. A coach works with you from the starting assumption that creativity can be unlocked with a higher degree of certainty and frequency through intentional actions. Creativity coaching teaches you how to unlock those pathways and practice those actions on a regular basis.

Understanding The Role of a Creative Coach

Creative coaching guides you through the process of becoming more aware and intentional in your habits and routines. That applies to all areas of your life. In relation to creativity, your coach helps you unpack any areas of life influencing your creative potential. The result: you strategize ways to spend more time in your “zone of genius” or “flow state” where you can maximize fulfillment and creative output.

At a)plan coaching, building on what already works is a core part of our process. Before anything else, your coach will learn your creative process, what makes you tick, what causes roadblocks, what gives you confidence, and more. Building on that information, your coach helps you create action plans to maximize the good and manage the challenges.

The power of a)plan’s approach stems from our commitment to coaching the whole person. Whole-person coaching particularly benefits creatives like yourself, for whom creativity is tied to nearly every other aspect of life. Through our approach, your creative coach will help you unpack areas of your life that you might not have even considered to be related to creativity. 

By going deep to get the full picture, your coach maximizes their ability to create a complete view of all things that influence your creative process. As a result, you’ll gain a richer understanding of yourself as a person–including your creative side, of course.

Who Would Want to Hire a Creativity Coach?

Anyone who works in a creative field or has innovative ambitions may benefit from a creativity coach. That goes for parents, executives, young adults, entrepreneurs, managers, retirees, and more. Creativity coaching can lead to powerful breakthroughs, regardless of your profession or life circumstances. While there is great value in career coaching for creatives, by no means must you consider yourself a “professional” in this space in order to gain value.

Common use cases or reasons to hire a creativity coach include:

  • Resolving a creative hiatus (e.g., writer’s block)
  • Building confidence in your creative abilities
  • Accessing your creative “zone of genius” more often
  • Regaining inspiration
  • Shifting your career to a more creative role or field
  • Maintaining the momentum of a creative streak
  • Shifting from one creative domain to another (e.g., the songwriter who wants to adapt and redirect their creativity toward entrepreneurship)

The beauty of coaching is that it meets you wherever you are in life. You could be down on your creative luck or enjoying the most inspiration of your life. Whatever your situation, it doesn’t change the proven, consistent approach used by a)plan coaches: What’s working? What’s challenging? Where do you want to go? How are we going to get there?

Top Creative Coaches at a)plan

At a)plan, we take pride in our diverse roster of nearly 50 coaches, including experts who have led successful careers in the arts, architecture, and design fields. This commitment to diversity has led us to some of the best creativity coaches who have been there before–and they have both the battle scars and the trophies to prove it.

Extensive experience equips a)plan’s top creativity coaches with the skill and knowledge to help clients maximize their potential, something they do every day. Whether you’re searching for a career coach for creatives or someone to help you unlock your personal creativity, finding the perfect coach for you is critical for success. That’s why a)plan is so careful to build a diverse roster of coaches: to ensure everyone has access to the right coach for them.

To work with one of our top creative coaches like Lauren, Lance, or Susannah, click the button below to let us know more about your situation and what brings you to coaching at this moment in your life.

I’m passionate about coaching and creativity. Those two focuses can impact eachother in powerful ways when used together.

Lauren Lambrecht

Creative Coach

I help my clients fire up their innate creativity to forge new pathways that might have been unimaginable before.

Lance Gries

Creative Coach

I was a film producer for 25 years. Before becoming a coach, my career taught me how to get things done in creative spaces.

Susannah Ludwig

Creative Coach


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