What? You think you could do better? Well, that wouldn’t be terribly hard to do, so don’t go patting yourself on the back just yet!

Being more creative is something many of us want to do. The first thing to point out is that being creative doesn’t require any special skills. You don’t have to be able to draw. You don’t even have to be able to write well. If necessary, you can be the idea person and someone else can draw or write your ideas. (That’s called outsourcing, you know.) But, any skills you have can assist you in being more creative and, the more skills you have, the greater your opportunities for creativity.

A good imagination is also very, very important. It is perhaps the most important thing of all. Hopefully, your schooling and/or career haven’t completely killed your imagination. And, if it has, don’t worry. Imagination can never be completely killed, so you can regain it if it has been lost.

One way of being more creative is simply doing different things. If you drive to work, take an alternative route. That gets your brain shaken up a bit, in that you really have to think about what you’re doing and where you’re going. You’re not just robotically repeating your normal drive to work. There are new places to turn, new things to see, new potholes to be aware of. Likewise, if you walk or ride a bike to work, you can also go a different way. That kind of thing gets your brain going, which helps overall. Plus, you’ll have new visual sensations. You may see a tree you wouldn’t normally see. You might think, hey, that tree looks like hands reaching up to touch the sky. Or, perhaps you’ll see a new billboard and think, wouldn’t it be funny if…

Part of being creative is making connections that people normally wouldn’t or seeing something more in things that others overlook. For example, many people would see an Assassin Bug and simply think (or say), eek, a bug! But, when I saw one, I thought of what you can learn from the assassin bug.

Some people would listen to Chamillionaire’s “Ridin’” and think, hey, that’s a good song. But, Weird Al listened to the song and thought, hey, white and nerdy!

Similarly, another way to be more creative is simply by thinking about alternative ways of doing things. For example, if you just finished reading a book, and it wasn’t that good, think about how you could have done it better. Many people will just stop at the “this book is no good” point and hope the next book is better. So, taking the next step and actually considering how it could have been better puts you a step ahead of the crowd. While eating dinner, consider how you would eat if you didn’t have a fork (or chopsticks). Would you eat with your hands? Would you eat with your knife? And, why? If you weren’t concerned about appearances, you might just grab your food in your hands and eat it. But, if you view eating with your hands as something akin to living like a wild animal, you might consider an approach that is more “civilized.” In that case, you might eat with your knife in an attempt to preserve some modicum of “civilized” behavior.

Now, if you’re a fiction writer, thinking of those things in this last exercise can help you develop authentic characters with real motivations behind their actions. But, if you’re not a fiction writer, you might be thinking about how such an exercise would be useful to you. If you’re in advertising and selling silverware, you might be able to use such a characterization in your ads. If you’re not using XYZ Silverware, you might as well be eating with your hands! You could try to give the impression that your product is so much better than anyone else’s that, if people use anyone else’s, they might as well just grab and tear their food with their hands and teeth!

And, even if you’re neither of those things, just the exercise of thinking in different ways will get your brain thinking of different ways in other activities as well, and that will be of benefit to you in whatever your line of work.

Finally, another way to be more creative is to go outside. Whether you live in the city, the suburbs or a rural area, there is almost always something going on outside. From construction work to wild animals playing, there is something happening. You may need to look closer, at the world of insects, or farther away, at the bustle of the city streets. Seeing people, animals and other forms of life going about their lives can almost always shed some insight or provide some spark of an idea that can lead to an increase in your creativity.

And, it’s not always a specific thing that will light the creative spark. It may just be the act of letting your brain wander (and wonder!) that leads to creative imaginings that may have little to do with your current surroundings!

So, get out there and do different things and see if that doesn’t fire up a creative spark for you!

Mind you, these are just a few of the ways that you can be more creative. You’ll find more in my forthcoming “How to Train Your Mind” course. Visit the site to sign up for my mailing list and be notified when it’s available.

This entry was posted on Sunday, May 3rd, 2009 at 3:36 pm and is filed under Brain Power. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
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