The million-dollar question:
How to enhance my creativity? Surely more than once you have asked yourself this question and now more than ever, that the world is becoming very complex.
What is it that makes one person more creative than another? If creativity is something innate in us, why are there people who find it easier to have ideas?
The main premise of these people who have good ideas is that they see themselves as people who have good ideas. As simple as that.
Attitude is everything. Act like a person who has good ideas and I assure you that your mind will be more predisposed. Beware! It is not only worth thinking that you are creative. But as we said,
thinking and believing that one is creative already gives you more opportunities than a person who does not believe it. How to start being a creative person? The first thing is to believe it and the second to exercise. For this we give you the following exercises and routines so that you can start to enhance your creativity:
- Ranking the ideas, every day the number
- Focus mode. Learn to watch
- Routine Kills
- Read everything you can
- My Benchmarking
- Bank for the brain
- Capture Ideas
- Make Lists
Ranking the ideas, every day the number You have to train your creativity every day, to force and squeeze your mind; it is necessary to exercise it.
The idea ranking exercise is to propose every day
to generate at least 5 ideas about a problem you want to solve. That is, every day force yourself to record 5 ideas about the problem you have in mind. After a few weeks, you will have an enormous amount of “material”.
Why is this exercise good?
Because once the first days are over, your ideas will run out, the ones you had as standard … but by forcing you to think 5 more the next day your mind begins to stress and look for life, at that moment is when we begin to explore new paths. In summary, thinking every day of ideas and reaching a quota, exercises your head to be continually thinking of solutions.
Focus mode. Learn to watch We are so visually saturated that we already see without looking. And this is very bad for creativity.
To train this ability to see, we must pay attention to the smallest things, this helps us to find the extraordinary in the mundane.
How to cultivate the look? Just pay attention
Do this exercise. Observe from your window, from where you are sitting, a scene that you have nearby and
try to be attentive for 10-12 minutes without interruptions; even set an alarm so as not to be distracted … Try it, you will see how the results surprise you and you see things that at first glance had passed you.
Routine Kills The routine is not bad, it is a way for our brain to put the automatic pilot and thus not waste glucose (this is not scientific, but we cannot think of a better explanation of why we love the routine so much).
To combat mental laziness we must be aware of what are our most common habits in our life and simply change them. This change from waist to brain suddenly overstimulates you.
Do this exercise,
write down in a notebook what are your most common and ingrained habits. When you have it, go one by one and break them. For example:
- If you drink beer, switch to wine.
- If you usually eat an apple at noon, eat another fruit.
- If on the way to your work you take a path, look for an alternative one.
- If you watch action movies, try love movies (break Netflix’s algorithm at once)
- If you read right-wing newspapers, read left-wing and viceversa.)
- If you are used to taking a nap, don’t do it…
In short, taking the last example, if you are used to something try to break it, your creativity will thank you.
Read everything you can Pictures stimulate creativity but words enhance it.
Although we are immersed in the most visual era in history, reading is a slowly digestible nutrient that creates content in our heads.
If we had to make a metaphor, the images would be sugars and the reading would be carbohydrates.
Read everything you can, the more the better. It is important to have two types of readings.
A. The reference readings: those books that are on your bedside table, those that we never tire of rereading. Make notes, thoughts, go back to chapters that inspire you.
B. Random readings of any kind: be they books, papers, or even catalogs of various subjects. This type of reading is to wean your brain to a type of content.
My Benchmarking We are used to seeing trend reports, research summaries, marketing reports… These are very valuable reading elements, but the most interesting and creative thing you can do is think: How did the people who wrote those reports reach those conclusions?
For this, we propose the following exercise.
Make reports on the content that reaches you and draw your conclusions. You will be surprised! For example:
- When you travel, read the local newspapers. What do they focus on?
- Look at the advertising that comes to you, let your mailbox fill up for a while … What conclusions do you draw?
- Go to social networks and see what content the “X” sector publishes. What is repeated? What are you talking about?
We have thousands of impacts every day, if you know how to organize them you will surely find patterns and from there you will be able to detect opportunities.
Bank for the brain Give free rein to the collector in you, accumulate and collect everything you can about the interesting things that happen in front of you.
You have two ways:
A. Analog format: collect clippings, notes, photographs in albums or boxes … but remember that this system is finite (unless you live in a mansion)
B. Digital format: there are several platforms and programs for those of us who do not have a mansion, which help you organize and store digital content almost infinitely.
We recommend the digital format since this format offers you more options to later find the info and play with it. It does not mean that the analog format is worse, but what we said before, the biggest problem is storage and always having that info at hand.
Whatever format you decide, the most important thing about an information bank is how you organize it, that is, how you label your content to quickly find what you are looking for.
Example: “Label information by sectors, technologies, types of company, offers…” By tagging your information, you can quickly find what you need and have it as encouragement. For example, imagine that we need new ideas to invent a new bathroom concept; Well, you would go to your bank and under the label “new technologies” you would try to find information that would inspire you.
Remember,
the key here is how you order your information, only you know why you order it that way. Do not limit yourself to organizing your information as “normal” but create labels that are also interesting for you. For example, what if you organize your info by “business opportunity”?
Creating a brain bank at first is a difficult task, but beyond saving the information that interests you, the act of being attentive to what is interesting for you helps you to be a much more observant person. Give this exercise a try, be constant and you will quickly see results.
Capture ideas Every day we have thoughts, sometimes interesting, sometimes not. While you are showering or walking, your head may “click” with a thought or reflection that deserves to be recorded. The bad thing about those “mental clicks” is that they quickly disappear if you don’t catch them in some way; just as they came they will go. We recommend fighting against that short-term memory, noting, and saving all those thoughts.
This might look like the Bank for the Brain, explained above, but no.
Capturing ideas is not recording information that you find,
what we want here is for you to record thoughts, reflections that arise… they are things that come out in your head, from within, you have not found them out there.
Highly creative people always carry a notebook with them, because they value their thoughts so much that they deserve to be recorded.
Therefore, it is always recommended to always carry a small notebook with you. We have discussed a notebook but, what else do you always have attached to your hand? Your cellphone. A smartphone is also a powerful tool for recording thoughts. You decide which format you feel most comfortable with and which one inspires you the most.
Make lists To create more fluid and flexible thinking, you must consciously work on a problem. One powerful technique is making lists.
Why make lists? Because this simple custom helps us to force and generate ideas in a conscious and focused way.
Exercising with lists helps us to get the ideas that we have inside in our heads and once empty, the list helps us to want to get more ideas by forcing our perspective and our point of view. The lists help flexibility, to see beyond the first ideas that we all know, they help us visually to want to fill in more ideas, almost competing against ourselves; in this way we will arrive at unconventional ideas.
Conclusion Remember, all these exercises have to be trained, it may be difficult at first to have ideas but as you practice, the more disciplined your head is and it will be easier for you to have new ideas with which to enhance your creativity.
At
Thinkers Co. we are specialists in training people with these exercises and, most importantly, in how to land them in the day-to-day business. If you want more information,
get in touch with us and we will inform you of how we work creativity to get the maximum potential.
