Finding your life too dreary? Thinking of exploring some new spurt of ideas to make it more vivacious and interesting? Or intend to conceive an outstanding idea to amaze others? Different people will have different scopes of creativity. Some may be creative in art and design, some may be creative in work management, some may be creative in music composition, some may be creative in speech, etc. Generally, creative people acquire the ability to create, use or show new methods and ideas. How can we improve our creativity?
1) Believe You Can Be Creative
If you have ever come across the term -the ‘law of attraction’, then you will know you need to have ‘the belief that you can be creative’ before ‘you can be creative’. There is a quote by Napoleon Hill, ‘whatever the mind can conceive and believe, it can achieve.’ If you don’t believe that you can be creative, your creativity will never be aroused. Most creative people were not born to be ingenious, but they know to explore different approaches which are prone to creative thinking.
2) Be Observant
If you want to improve your creativity, you need to be observant, be sensitive of subtle details that happen around us, such as a variety of new sights, ideas, conversations, tastes, lifestyles of people, etc. You may be someone who likes to stay at home and surf internet. Yes, I do agree that we can obtain some creative ideas by surfing internet. But sometimes, fresh ideas can come to you spontaneously if you can spend more time to enjoy and physically feel the nuance of the things around you. For example, just imagine yourself to be a shoe designer, if you want to design shoes which are comfortable, fashionable and yet creative, definitely you need to observe and ‘feel’ the design intention during your research. You may need to go window shopping at some shoes boutiques or departmental stores to test wearing different types of shoes and capture the real idea of ‘comfortable’. You may observe the styles of shoes that people are normally wearing nowadays and think out of the box on how you can make your design different and yet trendy. If you never ‘feel’ in the process of searching inspiration, you will be standing at the losing side.
3) Relax Yourself
Tired mind is equal to low productivity. If you are always exhausted, your fabrication of creativity will plummet. By freeing up your mental logjam, you may consider relaxing yourself by going for a movie, reading a book, mingling with friends, daydreaming, surfing internet, buying yourself a new CD, or even taking a trip to explore a new culture!
There was one time I was asked by the Toastmasters Club’s president to assist in getting a meeting theme. For your information, there are different meeting themes in the Toastmasters meetings. When a particular meeting theme is determined, we are advisable to conduct the meeting with relation to the meeting theme. For example, if the meeting theme is ‘Time is Precious’, so the topics discussed during the meeting will normally hover around that theme. When I was asked to think of the theme for the coming meeting, I really didn’t have any idea in my mind. But I chose to let my mind wandered for a short while by watching a Korean drama called ‘Beethoven Virus’. From this music related drama, I got the cue of making the meeting theme as ‘Sing Your Talk’, with the objective of advocating the idea of making our talk or speech as sweet as singing.
There is an important remark I would like to emphasize here. Never expect to acquire the ideas you want during your relaxing process. If you do have such expectation, your creativity may not be able to unleash as you have pressured your inner being unconsciously. Shortly speaking, relaxing yourself means you plan to entirely loosen up yourself only. Whatever inspiration comes to you naturally in the relaxing process is an additional bonus for you.
4) Socialize
People bring new ideas, perspectives, questions and experiences to the problems that you are attempting to puzzle out in your own work. Some ideas came from friends when they ramble out some words that trigger our creativity. Most of the time, creative ideas will spark with the combination of new inspirations from different people. It is like the essence combining the best in everyone.
In the socializing process, you may observe three scenarios. Firstly, fresh concepts come directly from someone in the discussing group. Secondly, enlightening ideas arise after stimulating by the words or sentences spoken by someone in the discussing group. Thirdly, innovative concepts have been further enhanced to become superb ideas after some inputs from the discussing group.
When I mention about socializing, I do not refer to virtual friends that stay online only. I will highly recommend face to face social network. First and foremost, it will be more real. In addition, sometimes new ideas can be induced by observing the body language of others too. For instance, you may be able to figure out the feasibility of a chair design from the way a person sitting on that chair.
When you mingle with friends, don’t be shy to share with them those ideas which you think are rather zany and hard to be accepted by people. If something that everyone thinks is pretty normal and easy to be accepted, then this idea is no longer considered as ‘creative’ or ‘innovative’. But if you are talking about a creative business idea, you may have to make sure the people you share with are reliable, if not your idea may be stolen and adopted by other people before you manage to implement it.
5) Have the Habit of Taking Notes
The emergence of inspiration can be pretty fleeting. You are advisable to have the habit of carrying a small notebook and pen with you to jot down whenever new or useful ideas strike. Don’t force yourself too much. Creative ideas do not come at anytime you want it to appear. It may take time from your observation. I like to sketch some pictures or scribble some words in a small notebook on whatever new streams of inspiration that arise. In fact, I used to put a notebook at my bedside too, so whatever inspiration knocks before I fall asleep, I can quickly jot it down.
6) Brainstorming
According to Wikipedia, brainstorming is a creativity technique designed to generate a large number of ideas for the solution of a problem. Your notebook will become a central repository of ideas from various sources. When you reach the time of using it, you may browse through your notebook and write down whatever keywords you have in your notebook on a blank paper, in order to go through the brainstorming process.
In your brainstorming process, you can draw a big circle in the middle of your paper. For example, you are searching for new ideas for your dish in your restaurant. Then you may locate words like ‘new dish ideas’ in the middle of the paper, then you can use line to connect it to another circle which represents your new idea diverged from your main idea and so on. After you have escalated all your ideas on the paper, your sketch may look something like the spider web on the paper. Besides this method, you may also simply sketch a plain dish on your paper, and try to imagine how the dish would be if…….then you fill in the blank. Shortly speaking, you are wondering about adding, deleting or changing an aspect of what has already been done.
In this process, you are also advisable to let your ideas flow first without prejudices. Even some ‘seemed-to-be’ extraneous ideas are allowed to be put on your brainstorming chart. The key idea here is ‘no need to be right’. You need to suspend judgment and dispel skeptical thoughts. If not, you may be missing a lot of possible sources of new idea stimulus.
7) Build Curiosity
In order to harness natural curiosity to improve creativity, you have to ask questions. Some people often see problems or obstacles in life as unacceptable parts of life. Creative people recognize problems as a natural and normal part of life and have the impetus to overcome them instead of being bogged down. They will normally embrace the ‘5W and 1H’ method by asking why, what, when, where, who and how, and provide the possible solutions which may seldom be applied by others. For example, when you are thinking of a creative way to market your product, you may craft some questions as below:
1) How can I attract others to use my product? Why other products are less distinctive than mine?
2) What are the benefits of my product to my potential customers? What are the possible reasons they refuse to use my products? What are the other things that have the same traits as my product which I can use in my advertisement? For instance, I have ever viewed a rather creative advertisement that illustrates the stability of the car, whereby two butterflies can ‘kiss’ each other on top of the car when the car is moving.
3) When do people normally use my product? Daytime or night time? Peak hours or leisure hours?
4) Where can I promote my product? Normally other people promote the same kind of product at the departmental stores, can I promote my product at the bus stop, toilets, cinema, schools, etc?
5) Who will benefit tremendously after using my product? Normally other companies will highly recommend such product to adults, is there a possibility I can promote it to teenagers?
6) How can I make the marketing process more attractive? People are normally attracted to money. Can I throw some $1 banknotes that attach with the promotional flyers on the floor (since you are going to spend money for your promotion)?
From the questioning and answering process, you will more likely to channel back to your brainstorming process, but this method will be more organized and give you a sense of direction in your creativity training process.
8) Have the Beginner’s Mindset
Besides, in the process above, you are also encouraged to have a beginner’s mindset after you have contemplated to no avail. You may invite input from people who know little about the problem. This may be able to steer you to breakthrough ideas. Always remember, untapped markets are normally unearthed by those people who can think outside the box and are not shackled down to a limited scope of thinking. By thinking out of the box, even a notoriously bad idea can be transformed into an astonishing one.
These are the 8 methods I normally apply to stimulate my creative thinking, I profoundly believe they can work on you too! Hope you enjoy the reading!
