Building Resilience & Toughness in Creative Practice

Performance Coach Steve Magness on Doing the Hard Work

“I need a little doubt.” —Steve Magness

Preview: Episode 73 The science and psychology of doing the hard work of creativity

Writing a book can be hard. Getting it out into the world can be even harder. In this very practical and fun episode, we speak with Steve Magness, a world-renowned expert on performance. Magness is the author of Do Hard Things: Why We Get Resilience Wrong and The Surprising Science of Real Toughness, and we talk with him about the many performance aspects that inform creative process: developing a quiet ego, accepting what you are capable of, learning to see the self as a creative (when you don’t think of yourself that way), fostering confidence, owning the voices in your head, and the importance of boredom.

Magness is also coauthor of Peak Performance. The Passion Paradox, and the author of The Science of Running. Magness has served as an executive coach and a consultant on mental skills development for professional sports teams, including some of the top teams in the NBA. Steve’s writing has appeared in Outside, Runner’s World, Forbes, Sports Illustrated, Men's Health, and a variety of other outlets. He earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Houston and a graduate degree from George Mason University. He currently lives in Houston, Texas with his wife Hillary. Once upon a time, he ran a mile in 4:01 in high school, at the time the 6th fastest high school mile in US history.

Steve on Twitter https://twitter.com/stevemagness

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What We’re Reading and Listening to:

Rosemerry:

• Sooo … I love baroque music, and I am particularly drawn to this video of Anaïs Chen playing Bach’s Adagio. It is somehow both very ornate and very transparent.

• Speaking of meeting the hard stuff—this poem in One Art on joy in the midst of difficulty by Pauli Dutton thrills me. What things seem to be and what they really are can be so far apart.

• And when it comes to paradox, this poem by Mark Nepo really says it all.

Christie:

• I was deeply saddened to learn that Hilda Bastian’s son had died, but I am oh so glad that she is using her substantial research skills to investigate the science of grief. Turns out, a lot of what we’ve been told about grief is wrong. (The title of her piece is, “There Are No ‘Five Stages’ of Grief.”) If you have an experience to share or a questions you wish she could look into, she is collecting these.

• I just returned from a conference on intellectual humility at the Greater Good Science Center, and I really like this piece the GGSC published about how cultivating intellectual humility may help us have more productive ideological debates.

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Cine Poem on Meeting Resistance & Accepting What You are Capable Of

film by Suzan Beraza, poem by Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer

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A Note About Paid Subscriptions:

First, we want to thank ALL our subscribers! We are so grateful you join us in this conversation about what it is to engage with yourself, the world and others in a creative way. And a BIG thank you to our paid subscribers. You make this podcast possible. Starting this month, only our paid subscribers will receive our bonus episodes as a thank you for their financial support.

This week, we converse with Steve Magness about how falling one second short of a four-minute mile helped his creative practice, the danger of comparing your first draft to someone else’s polished project, and how success can fool you into chasing the wrong things. If you are not yet a paid subscriber, you can go now to our website, EmergingForm.substack.com or by clicking the button below. Thank you!

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Two Questions:

(share your answers with us here on Substack or in our FB group)

1. What’s the hardest creative project you’ve done?

2. What role does doubt play in your creative practice?

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