Growing Gills: How to Find Creative Focus When You’re Drowning in Your Daily Life

Dive deep and swim

Sustain the energy you feel when thinking of how awesome your projects could be.

Value your own creative work as highly as work you do for other people.

Build a reusable structure and process that will consistently get you to the finish line.

Blast through your stuck-ness.

Focus. Finish. Move on to the next project.

What they’re saying about Growing Gills

“Abel delivers a motivating productivity guide for people who have trouble finishing creative projects…[Her] plan of attack is as thorough and astute as the assessment questions, providing practical and detailed actions that target problematic habits.”

— Publisher’s Weekly

“Abel’s book is one you “do” instead of just passively reading. If you follow her exercises, you can clean out the cobwebs of your goals and processes and find the clarity to drop the nonessential and focus on the art you want to make more than anything else. With Growing Gills, readers pin down the specific obstacles that are preventing them from getting their work done, make clear-eyed choices about what they want to devote their attention to and build a system that will get them across the finish line.”

— Professional Artist Magazine

“[Abel’s] writing voice is very confident, very capable, very conversational, but not sloppy. You always feel like she’s in control of her voice. It doesn’t have to be that well-written because the advice is all very good, but it’s such a pleasure. I was really impressed.”

— Sonia Simone, Copyblogger.fm

“If you have creative work but have been unable to make it happen, I highly recommendGrowing Gills. It is practical and down to earth, and it is realistic. Whether you are blocked by illness, disability, job, money, fear, or family, this book will help you take an honest look at where you are, where you want to be, and chart a path between the two.”

— OccupyME.com

“[Growing Gills is] about prioritizing creative processes over all the other stuff that can get in the way of success, in pinpointing priorities in the creative life, in time management, and in taking the steps needed to bring big, beautiful projects to fruition.”

— beathomeintheworld.com

You’re a creative person.

Even if you have a hard time calling yourself a “writer” or an “artist” in public, making your creative work is core to who you are and how you see the world. You may be harboring a big, ambitious idea for a project. Possibly a lot of them.

And it’s killing you.

You lie awake thinking about it…and hating yourself for not doing more to make it real. And then in the morning you’re exhausted, and you can’t believe you “wasted” more time on this stupid idea. Who ever told you you were creative anyway? You try to shove your idea away, to forget it. But your creative work is what keeps you sane. You can’t not do this. So you live with guilt and anxiety all the time.

You’ve tried, oh how you’ve tried, to carve out the time and attention you need to devote to your creative work. You’ve made ambitious goals, you’ve written lists, you’ve scheduled calendars…you’ve installed shackles on your desk chair. But chaining yourself to your work only seems to make you more distractible and more miserable. (And those unsightly leg sores!)

Maybe you’ve even tried to borrow time-management tips from the business world. Get things done! Build seven habits! Eat that frog! But following business-minded productivity systems just doesn’t work for you. The issue isn’t simply getting “things” done, it’s allowing yourself to devote precious time and attention to the vital, self-generated creative work that builds toward your vision for the future.

The problem is, the life you’re living is already full. You’ve made a lot of promises, to yourself, your family, your friends, and your community, that you’ll be there for them. You probably have a job; you may have kids. You may well have many competing ideas for your creative work. Where, exactly, can you find that mythical Creative Focus Unicorn?

In Growing Gills, you’ll discover that the power is already within you to make your work.

The biggest obstacles to your getting your important creative work done lie in the unknowns you’re facing.

Growing Gills takes you step by step through the process of pinning down exactly what’s stopping you from finishing your beautiful, inventive, and potentially game-changing projects.

Using the power of conscious decision, you’ll build your own unique system for fitting creative work into your existing life, taking into consideration how you work best.

Like a custom-designed, powered exoskeleton, your personal system will bolster and support your creative practice day in and day out, so that you can grow up and grow old while continuing to make your creative work…without chucking out all the other connections to your family and the world that make your life rich and worth living.

GROWING GILLS: Breathe in the deep end.

What’s inside

INTRODUCTION

My mission with this book: For you to come to value your creative work as the oxygen that it is to you, and then to figure out how to make room for it in your real, messy, overfull life.

Part 1: SO, WHAT’S STOPPING YOU?

You want to be making creative work, and something is stopping you. Maybe a whole array of things is stopping you. Getting to where you feel in control of your creative work is a matter of figuring out what, exactly, those things are, and what you can do about it.

Part 2: BUILD YOUR CUSTOM-POWERED EXOSKELETON

You’re going to build your resilience and resistance to the temptation to procrastinate, and you’re going to make conscious choices about what in your real life you want to build up, and what you want to break down. In short: You will take control of your priorities and your decision-making, and you’ll align your activity more closely with how you really want to be spending your days.

Part 3: ALIGNING YOUR TODAY WITH YOUR TOMORROW

The tricky thing when it comes to systems is not building them, it’s actually using them. You’ll identify how you’ve worked best in the past, how you can apply that knowledge moving forward, and how to build flexibility and understanding of your multiple life roles into your creative system. You’ll implement creative routine into your life. And you’ll build in a robust review process that will consistently realign your daily activity with the lodestar of your larger creative and life goals. With these pieces built into your process, you’ll build trust with yourself and design a creative life that will sustain you indefinitely into the future.

PART 4: FALLING DOWN AND GETTING UP

I know from experience there are things that will stop you that have nothing to do with making lists. I wanted to make sure we talk about a few of those things in this last section, and to give you a few more tools to tackle some of the big issues we all face.

CONCLUSION

Building a flexible, balanced, joyful, sustaining creative practice is a craft, not instinct.

It takes time and thought. You can change who you are, and you don’t have to be resigned to how things are working in your life. But you do have to take action, not just think about it, in order to change anything. You act into thinking; you don’t think your way into acting. You can’t change anything until you’re actually in motion. And the only thing standing in the way of being in motion is inside your head.You know that just reading Growing Gills, without working through how you will implement changes in your creative life, will not give you the results you crave. But it’s tough to do this all on your own.

That’s why, included with your copy of Growing Gills, is the free downloadable Growing Gills Workbook.

With 23 activities and worksheets over 70 pages, the Workbook is a step-by-step guide to implementing your conscious decisions about how you will change your creative life.

Stop dreaming and start making with Growing Gills.

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