Personal path in the profession

It so happened that in my life I simultaneously successfully develop in two directions – as a practicing psychologist and a screenwriter / film director.

As a screenwriter, at some point I encountered a creative block – while working on the script of my feature film, I realized that I did not know where to go next with the story of the film. I felt that something was missing in the script, but I could not understand what exactly. This was the beginning of my search for answers to the question: how to act if everything seems to be fine in the script, but at the same time something is missing.

At first, I turned to script consultants for help, specialists who read the script and make notes in it.

Then, in a personal meeting (or via Skype), they give feedback on what, in their opinion, needs to be done to improve the script. Consultations of such foreign specialists are quite expensive – about 400 dollars for one consultation. I applied to several, but never got what I wanted.

At the consultation, such specialists only told me well-known truths that are written in any textbook on screenwriting, and I, as a person who has been working in the industry for more than ten years, already knew this.

The problem is that the script consultants only worked on the script, not including me as the writer in the process. They consulted the script itself, without including me in this relationship.

Since I myself am a counseling psychologist, the next stage of my search was consultations with psychologists. But then I ran into the opposite problem – psychologists worked only with me, completely ignoring my script.

Working with a psychologist is always an interesting process, full of discoveries about yourself, but it was still not what I was looking for. Psychologists did not know and did not know how to work both with the author and with his work at the same time, helping the author to find new depth and shades of his own work. In other words, the psychologists failed in this quest too.

The next item was Western creative coaches. I went through several creative coaching trainings myself and consulted with a coach at the same time. Worked with America’s top creative coach, Eric Meisel. It was already closer to what I was looking for, but I still lacked something in this work. A Western creative coach is more of a supportive consulting specialist, but it is not his task to help the author take the work to another level.

With these specialists, I lacked depth, lacked some kind of space in which I could discover something new about my script. a space where a specialist does not give me answers, but creates the ground in which something that already exists in me will be revealed.

And then I myself began to study the literature on the psychology of the creative process, read studies on the work of the brain in the context of creativity. I immersed myself in various theories of creativity – psychoanalytic, analytical, humanistic, gestalt theory of creativity, and from all this my own vision was formed.

I began to apply the acquired knowledge in my creative process and soon completed the writing of the very script, which had previously been difficult. Then she shot a feature film based on it, which, despite the micro-budget and the lack of any support and producers, received a premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, and then was shown in cinemas in the largest cities of France. So I realized that the system I created for working with creativity works.

My colleagues from the creative world, having learned that I also work as a psychologist and use this knowledge in my work, began to contact me for advice – exactly the kind of advice that I once looked for myself: where the work goes and with a creative project, and with the author. They could not get such consultations either from a simple psychologist or from a specialist in creativity – they were looking for the same thing that I was looking for once.

In parallel with this, psychologists who wanted to unleash their creativity in order to broadcast their advisory services through blogs and writing articles began to contact me.

I could no longer take on new clients, and when I was asked to refer them to someone, I had no one to recommend.

There were no specialists around who knew both the psychology and the nuances of the creative process. At some point, I was not enough for all the consultations alone, and I saw the need for specialists who work the way I do.

In the same period, I came across the Atlas of Professions, and among the new professions it included just such a specialist – the Coach of creative states – this is a mind fitness specialist who knows how to bring people of creative professions into a “flow state” and other states characterized by increased creativity . And that was the point where the puzzle came together. That’s how I came up with the idea of ​​creating the Creative Mental State Trainer course, where I pass on to students my system of knowledge about working with the creative process.

Prospects for the profession Some time ago, the main quality in society was IQ – intelligence based on logical thinking. Then people began to understand the importance of another component of intelligence – emotional EQ, now the importance of creative thinking CQ (Creative Intelligence) comes to the fore – the ability to think outside the box, outside the templates. And the need to develop a creative type of intelligence will only grow, which means that the need for specialists to help develop this way of thinking will also grow.