Discover powerful creativity strategies that spark fresh ideas and bold solutions, let’s learn from Anthony D. Fredericks, today.
How to recharge your creative batteries.
Key points
- There are several unique strategies that will change your mind and your thinking.
- Creativity often involves reframing or refocusing.
- The best creative ideas are often the simplest.
Are your mental batteries on “low power mode?” Are you up against a challenge with no discernable answer? If so, then it’s time to refresh your innovative spirit. Here are four strategies that will dramatically increase your “Creativity Quotient.”
Read More Here: 7 Gratitude Journaling Ideas That’ll Actually Make You Feel Good Inside
4 Creativity Strategies To Change Your Mind
1. Six Words. Describe your life in just six words. No more, no less. Write about your oldest child using just six words. Express affection for your partner using just six words. Describe your most current project at work with just six words. Explain your philosophy of life in just six words.
By confining your thinking to just six words you are creating an artificial barrier that forces you to think a little differently, a little more creatively. Your goal is to explain a concept, an idea, a person, or an assignment (to a stranger in an elevator, for example) in just six words. Define your current project in just six words — you’ll begin to see it with new eyes.
2. Break Your Habits. We often get into routines or habitual ways of doing things. We eat the same cereal for breakfast every morning. We drive the same route to work every day. We go to the same resort every summer. We socialize with the same people. We buy the same brand of running shoes every year.
We read books by the same author over and over. The more routines we have in our lives, the more difficult it is to think about doing things any other way. Break some of those routines, change some of those habits, and you’ll start generating new ideas simply because you are looking at the world in new ways.
Take a new route to work. Eat something exotic for breakfast. Go camping instead of staying at a chain hotel on your next vacation. Join a different gym. Style your hair differently. Go out to dinner at a Nepalese or Ethiopian restaurant. Do something new/different each day, and your mind will also generate new/different ideas.
3. Don’t Finish. Here’s a mental trick that will get your creative neurons fired up and spinning in a hundred different directions. When you’re working on a project, stop in the middle (for example, the middle of a paragraph in that novel you’re writing or the middle of a brush stroke of a painting you’re working on). Save your work and attend to other chores and duties. The next day, when you return to the project, you’ll undoubtedly discover that your mind has, subconsciously, been preparing all kinds of possible extensions of the unfinished work.
In short, it has been sparking some new ideas. In essence, when something is left incomplete, you give your brain creative license to try to resolve or finish the project. You are not starting with a “blank slate” (e.g. blank computer screen, blank canvas), rather you are stimulating your thought processes to finish the unfinished. The human brain wants things completed (a school of psychology known as “gestalt”) and will do anything it can to be sure they are finished. So, when writing a report, stop in mid-sentence and finish up the next day.
When building a birdhouse with your son, stop in the middle of cutting a board, finish up the next day. When writing a message to your lover, stop in the middle of a paragraph and finish it off the next day. Leave things unfinished (and pick them up later) and you’ll fire up some critical brain cells…cells that will generate all sorts of creative responses.
4. Journey Through New Fields. We frequently get comfortable…way too comfortable…in our chosen occupations. Architects see the world through the lens of a drafting table. Plumbers see the world as a leaky pipe. Teachers see the world as a classroom. Lawyers see the world as a courtroom.
Move away from your “comfort zone” and look at the world with a new (and refreshing) lens. If you’re an artist, watch a carpenter at work. If you’re a dentist, read a book about archeology. If you’re a computer programmer, visit a children’s museum. If you’re a seamstress, talk with a physical therapist.
Read More Here: Building Good Habits: 10 Simple Things To Start Today
If you’re a writer, have a cup of coffee with a blues guitarist. Like most people, you’ll see the world a little differently and you’ll also be able to generate new ideas a little more easily. New lenses give you new vision. Change your outlook and you’ll change your perspective.
All things considered; Albert Einstein probably said it best: “Creativity is intelligence having fun.”
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