What is creativity?
Creativity is an act of faith and an art of discovery. It is the ability of a person to create something that is new to the world based upon an innovation.
Example: When an apple fell on the head of Newton he formulated laws of motion which are the basis of many present day calculations. When Sir Thomas Alva Edison analyzed the need of light to fight with dark in the night, this analysis guided him in the invention of the electric bulb.
To some extent, creativity lies in every person whether he is a famous scientist or lower grade employee.
Creativity lies in depth of your soul in form of innovative ideas which either gets buried in corners of your heart with the passage of time or you do not get support from society.
So, the need only is to give life to your innovation.
Let yourself come out of you. Forget about restrictions of society, existing past trends and gain faith in you.
You can learn to be more creative by observing and following highly creative people through reading their biographies.
Give shape to your thoughts and bring your thoughts into life. Don’t be protractive in giving life to your innovation.
Creative people have a strong desire to express themselves and sometimes they need to fight to secure their rights.
What are the qualities of creative people?
The answer to this question is that between a simple man and highly creative people the difference lies in mind, attitude and perception.
The main characteristics where creativity of a person can be judged are:
Unconventional
Creative people are not conventional. They need not stick to society norms and standards. They believe only in what they feel is right. They can bring an end to existing conventions.
Example: Galileo made a revolt against the existing beliefs in his times and proved that the earth revolves round the sun. And his work of that time is the basis of many calculations of the present era.
Individualistic
Creative people do not believe in superstition and have a strong desire to uncover the truth.
Inventive
Creative people are highly intelligent and are constantly coming up with innovative ideas. They are always in search of what is missing in the world and what could be done more to make life better.
Driven
Creative people are driven by their vision. They have a strong desire to convert their vision into their achievements.
Vision
Creative people are visionary. Their vision lies in their heart and soul. And their priority is always towards their vision.
Intuitive
Creative people are highly intuitive. The work they have to do originate in their soul. They listen to their soul and let their soul guide them in their life.
Before thinking about how to be more creative, there are some real barriers that some people seem to have when wanting to enhance creativity.
Think if any of these things are applicable to you and your life:
1. Lack of time.
This is not as major as you may think. Linking thoughts and ideas only take seconds. It can happen anytime, anywhere.
Provided you are in the right state and pay attention to your own experience.
Creativity is more about the quality of the time you have and being receptive to yourself, though this does take some time.
2. Fear of being judged.
Individuals were often scared of expressing ideas. Creativity results in unusual ideas and perhaps even being different in some way.
They can be thought of as strange, odd or challenging. Fear of being considered weird, stupid or just different often kills creativity.
3. Lack of self-esteem.
When you do something creative, you go beyond the bounds of what has been safe and familiar in the past, to yourself and maybe even others.
When you are not sure about yourself, being different in any way can feel risky or make you feel vulnerable. The danger is that you give up your new insight to just blend in. Smash out of those shackles!
4. Fear of failure.
This inhibits anyone. If you are making a new connection in your brain there can be no inherent “right” or “wrong” about it.
Failure can only have two meanings really. First, that it didn’t work in the way you wanted it to. Second, someone else did not like it.
But so what!
Creativity is not reserved for genius only. Einstein was brilliant but he is not necessarily the best model of creativity for us.
You do not need specialist expertise to be creative. The fruits of your creativity may manifest in many, many differing ways.
If at any time you doubt your ability to be creative, remind yourself that several times every night you create an entirely new dream, which you script, act in and watch, which involves all your senses and has effects that can last long after they are over.
This creation is so very effortless most people don’t even recognize it as such.
How to be more creative?
How does one actually go about getting more creative?
Here are some ideas:
1. Find the right frame of mind.
Explore what states you associate with being creative. Discover properly what it is that triggers and maintains you being creative.
What’s your best time of day? What’s the best environment? Do you need to be alone or with others or alone in the midst of others? Do you need sounds or silence or background sounds?
Build a profile of your creativity state, then make time and space for it on a regular basis instead of waiting for some divine intervention and for it to just happen on its own.
2. Cultivate dreaming.
Pay attention to your experience of life and attention to your existing creativity rather than dismissing daydreams and dreams.
Don’t allow yourself to waste what you may already be discovering by ignoring it.
3. Ask yourself “What if?” and “What else?” and “How else?”
Always go beyond what you first thought, find more and more different ideas.
Keep on asking of the possibilities no matter how strange they may be.
Inquire relevant or even irrelevant questions. You may never know where the answers will lead you.
4. When and/or if you hit a problem, pretend your usual solution is not available.
This can work in many different ways. If your PC crashes today, how else might you do your work? If you usually argue face to face, what would happen if you wrote your feelings down instead?
Some solutions may be no better than the ones you’re used to. Others may offer you brilliant new opportunities. Do something different.
5. See how many different results you can get with the same ingredients.
Perhaps, many of you know that there is a cookbook called “Recipes 1-2-3” by Rozanne Gold, in which every recipe is made out of only three ingredients.
Some recipes use the same three ingredients but different processes or quantities come up with different results.
You can have some great fun by taking an everyday object and imagine or think about how many other uses it can have, you can even think about how to combine them with other objects.
6. Think of different ways to do the familiar.
Change the order in which you do things, use different things, use your less favored hand; as soon as you break the routine, move from a state where you are on auto-pilot to one where you are alive and alert.
You exercise unfamiliar brain connections and help build new links in your brain. A glorious feeling!
7. Look out for the difference that makes the difference.
When you encounter something that strikes you as different, ask yourself what it is about it that is so different or new or unusual. Where does the key difference actually lie?
Search for the uniqueness or exceptionality. What is the ‘it’ factor that makes it stand out?
Disney Creativity
The Disney creativity strategy is for developing your dreams and giving them the best possible chance of becoming reality.
It is named after Walt Disney, who often took on three different roles when his team was developing an idea; the dreamer, the realist, and the critic.
Robert Dilts, an NLP pioneer, modeled and developed this strategy as an NLP tools.
The strategy separates out these three vital roles involved in the process of translating creative ideas into reality so that they can be explored separately for maximum clarity and effect.
You can also play all three roles yourself with your own wants, needs, and goals.
However, the usual way to use it is to allocate three roles to different people (realist, dreamer, and critic) to assess plans or tasks.
Ask someone to act as the dreamer and tell you all the possibilities of the idea.
Ask someone else to examine exactly what would be involved in putting it into practice (realist), and someone to take a hard look at it and really evaluate its strengths and weaknesses (critic).
You may want to rotate the roles. If doing it on your own, be sure to keep the roles very separate and write them down.
You can even use this in a meeting broken down into three stages and each role as a separate stage. Get everyone brainstorming and being creative first.
Then, get them thinking about what would actually have to happen in practical terms. Then, get them critically evaluating the possibilities.
Creative Solutions with ‘What If?’
For the most creative solutions, you need to get your mind looking in new directions.
One of the most systematic ways to do this is with a list of words, primarily adjectives, to create “what if?” scenarios.
The process starts with the question, “what if it was…” and then you insert a word from the list.
“It” in the question is the problem you’re working on, or the current solution or situation.
Let’s explain the process with an example or two.
Example one: You have an unpleasant co-worker. You aren’t sure how to deal with him, so you ask about the problem, “What if it was…” and insert from the list “smaller.”
How could you make the problem smaller? Spend less time with that person? Get reassigned?
“What if it was… fun?” makes you wonder if being annoying yourself might keep the other person away from you.
“Closer” makes you wonder if this person might be nicer to you if they knew you better.
You continue down the list and work with each word a bit to get new ideas, which you will look at more analytically later.
Example two: Your house is too crowded because you’re running your business in it. You ask, “What if it was…” and insert the word list, “smaller.”
Your house is already too small, but could the business be smaller?
The word “divided” might give you the idea to keep the business in just one part of the house.
Since most words on the list won’t help, you can go through the irrelevant ones quickly. But don’t automatically dismiss them without a few seconds of consideration.
“What if it was hopeless?” may seem like a useless question, or it may make you realize that you just can’t keep the business in the house any longer.
Moving into a rented office might be the most profitable as your creative solutions.
The Creative Solutions Word List
Feel free to create your own list of words. You’ll want to use adjectives, descriptive phrases, and any words that can change your perspective.
Here is a short list to get you started:
What if it was… larger, smaller, farther away, closer, sooner, later, easier, more difficult, higher, fat, rich, short, black, certain, hopeless, newer, boring, casual, subtracted from, cheaper, common, divided, more interesting, extravagant, subtle, or fun?
Just as with most problem-solving techniques, it’s important to allow the ideas to flow without judging them initially.
You don’t want to stifle the creative process. Take notes, and then evaluate your ideas later, when you have a page full of creative solutions.
Have some fun being creative and doing things differently to generate more creativity. It feels wonderful!
And if you have found that your progress to success or the outcomes you desire has been blocked or gone stagnant, then think about being more creative in how and what you are doing.
Creative Thinking Techniques
Do you want to have a mind of a creative inventor? Start redesigning everything you see.
Imagine better cars, faster ways to serve food, or better light bulbs. If you do this every day for three weeks, it will become a habit.
Do you want to be the person who always has something interesting to say? Train yourself to look at things from other perspectives.
What would the president say about this? How would a Martian view it?
What’s the opposite perspective? The point isn’t to ask others silly questions, but to ask yourself, to see what interesting ideas you can get.
Do these until it is a habit and you’ll always have something interesting to add to a conversation.
Want systematic creativity in poetry?
Put a word on each of 40 cards: 10 nouns, 10 verbs, 10 adjectives, and 10 random words.
Shuffle, deal out four cards and write a 4-line poem using one of the words in each line. Your mind will find a poetic use of any word if you use this method often.
Hopefully, the examples, ideas, and strategies presented above would help you to be more creative. There is no formula or particular technique to be creative.
Since you are unique and different from the rest, you have your own way of doing things and making things work for you. You have your own way to be creative!
