We often hear the term creativity, and we often ponder: how to be more creative? What can we do? However, this doesn’t stop there.
Creativity can also be referred to as the way of turning imaginative ideas into reality. It is a fantastic ability to perceive things into fresh, innovative ideas and formulate solutions from the hidden pattern. That’s why unlocking this would become an excellent skill.
How to Be More Creative: A Quick Glance
The Cambridge dictionary defines creativity as “the ability to produce original and unusual ideas or make something new and imaginative.” Creativity is composed of two parts: thinking and producing.
To be creative, you don’t just have to be imaginative. You have to act and turn your imagination into amazing ideas. Creativity requires insights, information, commitment, and passion. This also brings our awareness to a new level making us more productive and inspired to develop more breakthroughs.
Creativity and Innovation in the Workplace
You might be wondering whether or not creativity can contribute to the workplace and business. For sure, it can! Creativity ignites the fire to create innovative ideas that can benefit the organization. It fuels the enthusiasm to take risks and come up with exceptional solutions to challenging situations.
Massive success can be attained when creativity and innovation work together. Since change is the process of implementing significant and newly improved ideas and strategies that produce value for the business and society, the results would be more amazing when all these are infused with creativity.
Creativity plays an integral part of innovation
There will be no successful innovation without creativity. When innovation and creativity combine, the result is the creation of value. With all that being said, it’s just proper to state that creativity is vital in creating future success.
To enhance creativity, you should first know its foundation and strive to explore, experiment with, question, and imagine.
To produce innovative ideas, you must consider five primary behaviours to help the brain stimulate the process of discovering. These behaviours include associating, questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting.
The famous online entrepreneur and owner of The Virgin Company, Sir Richard Branson, has a mantra which goes like ‘Always Be Connecting the Dots.’ He wants to promote the power of creativity and have his employees develop their skills by generating more creative ideas.
Creativity also plays an essential factor to stand out from the competition. Every business must have an idea about the strategies of other companies in the same niche. That will give you an insight into how you can be more creative than them. From there, you can create more, think more, and excel more.
Factors That Can Hinder Your Creativity
Everyone can be creative, but not everyone can do something to take action to make use of their creativity. Besides, some factors can hinder our creativity. They include the following:
#1 Lack of clear goals
Your success journey can be vague when you lack direction or fail to set clear goals and objectives. When your mind is overwhelmed with worries, confusion, and hesitancy, you will not start sparkling with new insights. There will be limited room for your creative skills.
#2 Being Afraid of Criticisms and Rejections
A lot of people are too afraid to hear criticisms or rejections. Often, these lead them to stop striving to get better, thus not making progress in their careers.
We all need to learn how to handle rejections and criticisms. This is because they can always be there; they can happen anytime. When we let negative objections and rejections define who we are, we will get stuck on a particular point of our lives, leaving us stagnant and feeling less capable of doing things.
#3 Not Doing Something to Adapt to the Situations
We all know that the world is changing and full of innovations. Do not settle to be in your ‘comfort zone.’ When you get stuck, then opportunities will stop, too. You will not be able to showcase more of what you can do, and your creative thoughts can’t be used to create massive success.
#4 Letting our mind loses vitality and energy
When you choose to become passive and become less motivated to achieve things, it is most likely that your creative thinking will be affected. When you lose the motivation to think of new ideas, then creativity will no longer be practical.
When someone’s thinking has its usual ‘routine,’ he/she is more likely to miss the innovating trends that can help accomplish goals. Each of us needs to know other things, meet new people, create fresh ideas, and implement new strategies.
It is challenging to become more creative without getting outside the box and learning more. Train your mind to discover more so it can get more energy and vitality. This will help develop innovative ideas and implement those to become sources of success.
#5 We keep rationalizing and hesitant to try something new
Constantly rationalizing decisions will not always help in improving performance. You need to be creative when it comes to decision-making and creating strategies. It will help in making effective decisions in work and personal life.
Tips on How to Be More Creative: Unlocking Your Creative Spur
The best way to utilize the power of creativity is to unlock it. It may sound impossible, but anyone can do it – as long as it is done correctly. So, here are some tips that can help unlock creativity for your great success:
#1 Get enough sleep
You might have also experienced at some point in your life wherein some specific problems seemed to be very difficult to solve at night but get resolved in the morning after a good sleep.
Of course, there is a scientific explanation for that. Sleep helps the mind and body rest and create more energy to solve problems, issues, etc. People become more creative because sleep lets the brain restructure ideas and information and turn them into something valuable.
#2 Allow yourself to daydream and never get bored doing it
Did you know that you can compile amazing ideas from daydreaming? Sitting down and letting yourself imagine things can help you create beautiful ideas and eventually turn them into big plans.
So, do not stop yourself from daydreaming. Let your mind wander in your spare time. Allow it to explore more about things that can be perceived within the real world.
You will then find yourself to be having unusual thoughts and ideas. You will become more creative and also more inspired to eventually make the dreams a significant reality. Daydreaming can unleash what ideas are not yet discovered.
The plans you get from this habit can be applied to the workplace, creating a new career, coming up with a new invention, proposing a new project, or making something that can be life-changing to anyone.
#3 Keep a journal and write your thoughts down
Many successful people – influencers, celebrities, motivational speakers, coaches, etc.- have mentioned that writing down your thoughts can help unleash their creative dreams.
That is why most of them have journals where they write some passages, essays, and short sentiments. They also jot down the ideas that come to their mind, revisit them, and turn them into amazing projects.
Journalizing helps people ‘extract’ those creative thoughts from their minds, write them down, and produce them into valuable results. The more often you write, the more ideas you can compile. Besides, you can revisit what you have written anytime you want. This will help you refresh your mind and even come up with a breakthrough idea.
#4 Keep working
There are many ways to keep your mind and yourself busy. How about working on your hobbies? If you enjoy painting or love creating crafts for recycled materials, then spend some time on it. This will make your mind and hands busy and give your heart a happy feeling.
There’s one interesting fact that can support this. Famous and best-selling authors such as Joe Hill, J.K. Rowling, Neil Gaiman, Joyce Carol Oates, and Clive Barker prefer to write their manuscripts longhand.
Does that sound too overwhelming for you? Yes, that may be correct, but the point here is that they choose to have their minds and hands busy working on their writings. In that way, they could make their minds and bodies still energized and full of zest.
#5 Take Showers
Intrigued how taking a shower can help unlock the creativity within you? Of course, it is because taking a shower is relaxing – perfect for letting amazing ideas come to your mind. Here’s a secret you will be interested to know. Some writers have revealed that they wrote while they are soaked in their tubs.
Taking a shower contributes to a wonderful sense of creativity. It’s a technique done in isolation, without all the distractions, making it for your mind to unlock hidden possibilities. While taking a shower or a bath, you can use a waterproof cell phone to note down any great and smart ideas that you can become relevant in the future.
#6 Take a walk outside and acquire inspiration from what you see around
Nature can be one of the best sources to unlock creativity inside you, especially if you’re too often confined in a closed space. It is essential to get out and take a walk outside as you will find new ideas when exposed to Nature’s wonders. Watching the beauty of nature can boost your creativity. Not only that, but it can also aid in reducing stress, promote physical health, and increase happiness.
#7 Live with gratitude
When you are grateful to people around you, your heart and mind will stay motivated to work more creatively. A thankful heart will be more open for fantastic ideas, just like how an eager account will create well-crafted decisions.
When you feel grateful, you can think of what can be done or produced from even the smallest thing. Sometimes, the most significant idea comes from the most little happenings and simplest things. Creating a masterpiece from something you never expect to have value is a manifestation that you can unlock your creativity.
Conclusion
Life Is a pool of incredible opportunities so learning how to be more creative is essential for our happiness. We are in a beautiful place bounded by horizons full of creative insights waiting to be unfolded.
There will be hindrances, distractions, and mistakes that may come into our way. However, as long as we are motivated and keep ourselves ready, the result will be worth it. The challenge to unlock your creative potential is up to you.
Each one of us is creative, has some known or hidden talent. However, some people never explore their inner creativity of gifts because they might have had a rough start in life, or there wasn’t anyone who encouraged their creative spurt when they were children. If you have a passion for something or feel creatively drawn to different activities, you should not waste any time.
Your mind and body redirect your focus to something that unleashes inside you, so let it out. Whether you enjoy drawing, painting, sculpting, singing, writing, whatever it is, you should explore it and unleash it.
If you’re afraid to follow your passion due to possible criticism, you shouldn’t let that stop you. No matter what you do in life, creative-wise or not, someone somewhere may dislike or disagree with you, so playing it safe to spare your feelings is no way to live.
Follow the tips in this article and unleash the creative artist within!
