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1. Aim high and learn new skills every day
If you really want to be a more creative thinker, cultivate your curiosity and learn something new every day. Whether it’s a skill or a fact or a new idea, just make sure you’re learning every day. Once daily learning has become a habit, you’ll find a new confidence and a growing curiosity about the world.
2. Learn to connect
Creatives are highly skilled at joining what may seem like random dots. They see patterns where other folks just see a mess. And what they create as a result is fresh and unique and will stand out from the crowd.
Stepping outside your comfort zone or your area of expertise also helps you get a different perspective on things and find innovative solutions to problems.
3. Be open to potential solutions
Creative minds can see potential solutions to even the knottiest problems. When you bring your imagination to the task and are not bound by what already exists, you are free to blue sky all sorts of ideas.
This is where techniques like brainstorming and mind-mapping can help free up your imagination. It doesn’t matter how crazy the thoughts are, put them all down and see what emerges.
4. Protect your creative space
The blue sky stage of creativity can be a vulnerable time. The last thing you need is someone coming along with a pail of cold water and dousing your good ideas with criticism or skepticism.
Keep that creative phase quarantined, and just map out all your ideas without editing or critiquing or showing them to anyone else. Plenty of time to refine and shape your project later!
5. Keep an open mind
The key to preserving and enhancing your creativity is to stay open to different perspectives. Creativity is flexible and adaptive. If one thing doesn’t work, try another. Be open to new ideas and approaches and stay curious about the world and why people do things differently.
Some of the most successful creatives are like magpies, collecting new ideas and strategies, and seeing how they apply to their own work.
5 Habits of Highly Creative People
Are you living up to your creative potential? Have you thought about how encouraging your creativity could help boost your skills? People with highly creative minds commonly have more energy, are skilled at problem-solving, and have high productivity. Here are seven habits of highly creative people to kickstart your own creativity and help you reach your creative potential.
Meditation and Your Brain
The simple act of regular meditation frees up the parts of your brain that deal with memory, focus, and cognitive ability. Research has shown that the act of meditating stimulates the high-frequency brain waves that signal attention and perception—all qualities associated with creativity.
The Creative Brain
You probably know that your brain is a complex machine. It has built up capacity over millions of years, but not all the historical layers are as useful as they were when humans were hanging out in caves, alert for the sound of saber-tooth tigers.
The ‘newest’ part of your brain is the neocortex. That’s where the creative stuff happens: Envisioning, problem-solving, creative thinking, and strategizing. Great and useful for the modern world, right?
But there are older parts of your brain that deal with survival (the reptile brain) and emotions (the limbic system) that can prevent the neocortex from getting on with its job. If you’re stuck in fight or flight mode due to lots of stress, or if you’re emotionally out of balance, those parts of the brain dominate and don’t allow your neocortex to get a look in. And that makes sense because if you are confronted with immediate danger, you need all your survival instincts working. But this response is no longer so useful in the twenty-first century. Basically, if you’re stressed out and unhappy, your brain figures you don’t have the luxury to get creative.
Meditation as a Circuit Breaker
Modern life has a way of keeping you permanently wired, with your reptile brain and your limbic system constantly overstimulated. Research has shown that mindfulness meditation is not just calming during your meditation session, it can reduce the hypervigilance of your reptile brain, even out your emotions and stimulate your neocortex. Mediation helps get you out of rigid thinking modes and allows you to start thinking in more creative and innovative ways. Cue better visioning, problem-solving, and strategizing.
Meditation calms down your entire neural system and makes sure the neocortex gets all the resources it needs to get your creativity flowing.
How Meditation Stimulates Creativity
It might surprise you to hear that meditation can kickstart your creative process. After all, meditation is about getting chilled, right? Well, yes, meditation is often recommended for calming the mind and reducing your stress level, but it also has a physical effect on your brain. But how does this help creativity?
1. Aim high and learn new skills every day
If you really want to be a more creative thinker, cultivate your curiosity and learn something new every day. Whether it’s a skill or a fact or a new idea, just make sure you’re learning every day. Once daily learning has become a habit, you’ll find a new confidence and a growing curiosity about the world.
2. Learn to connect
Creatives are highly skilled at joining what may seem like random dots. They see patterns where other folks just see a mess. And what they create as a result is fresh and unique and will stand out from the crowd.
Stepping outside your comfort zone or your area of expertise also helps you get a different perspective on things and find innovative solutions to problems.
3. Be open to potential solutions
Creative minds can see potential solutions to even the knottiest problems. When you bring your imagination to the task and are not bound by what already exists, you are free to blue sky all sorts of ideas.
This is where techniques like brainstorming and mind-mapping can help free up your imagination. It doesn’t matter how crazy the thoughts are, put them all down and see what emerges.
4. Protect your creative space
The blue sky stage of creativity can be a vulnerable time. The last thing you need is someone coming along with a pail of cold water and dousing your good ideas with criticism or skepticism.
Keep that creative phase quarantined, and just map out all your ideas without editing or critiquing or showing them to anyone else. Plenty of time to refine and shape your project later!
5. Keep an open mind
The key to preserving and enhancing your creativity is to stay open to different perspectives. Creativity is flexible and adaptive. If one thing doesn’t work, try another. Be open to new ideas and approaches and stay curious about the world and why people do things differently.
Some of the most successful creatives are like magpies, collecting new ideas and strategies, and seeing how they apply to their own work.
5 Habits of Highly Creative People
Are you living up to your creative potential? Have you thought about how encouraging your creativity could help boost your skills? People with highly creative minds commonly have more energy, are skilled at problem-solving, and have high productivity. Here are seven habits of highly creative people to kickstart your own creativity and help you reach your creative potential.
Understanding the Creative Process
To understand how mindfulness can boost your creativity, it helps to look at the creative process. It can be a delicate synchronization of four steps:
Information gathering and idea stimulation. This is the blue-sky stage where you research and fire off as many ideas as you can. Your brain needs to be in free-roaming mode here, with your cognitive control network stood down to let you get on with it!
Incubation. Once you have as many thoughts and ideas down on paper as you can, your brain can get on processing and mulling over options for the next stage.
Stage three is inspiration. That Eureka moment when you make connections and get creative insights.
The final stage is the verification or testing phase when your critical brain can analyze and evaluate.
Different parts of your brain dominate different stages of the creative process. Stage one relies on divergent thinking, which is freewheeling and non-critical. The incubation stage is taken care of by the brain’s memory organization area. The inspiration is controlled by your brain’s salience network, which is basically an early warning system for great ideas and making good choices. The verification stage is where you can allow the cognitive control network to get analyzing and critiquing.
But it’s essential to keep these phases in sequence and in balance. If any of these stages get side-lined, say if your Inner Critic jumps in at Stage one or two, your creative process is in danger of falling apart.
The Role of Mindfulness
Mindfulness can help with each stage of the creative process. It boosts divergent thinking necessary for brainstorming, it calms distracting thoughts allowing the incubation of all your brilliant ideas. Mindfulness also strengthens the salience network, so that bright spark of creative insight doesn’t get lost in the crowd. Finally, mindfulness promotes cognitive function, helping you analyze and evaluate your project during the final phase of the creative process.
As well as assisting with the mechanics of the creative process, mindfulness meditation will help you develop self-compassion and non-judgment. Because not all creative projects work out, and that’s okay. Mindfulness will help you develop insight into your own creative process and how you can reach your creative potential.
How to Use Mindfulness to Boost Creativity
You’ve probably heard about mindfulness, and maybe you even have a regular mindfulness practice. But did you know that mindfulness is useful not just for keeping you calm and focused, it can stimulate your creativity and open up your thinking? If you’re interested in reaching your creative potential, here’s how mindfulness can give you a boost.
1. Creative people are focused
Highly creative people usually have high levels of energy and stay focused on their project for long periods. Even when they are out of the studio or away from the computer, their minds are still thinking about their creative work.
2. They hold onto a sense of wonder
Creative people are often brilliant, but they don’t think they know everything. Just the opposite, they retain a sense of wonder and curiosity about the world.
3. Creative people work hard
The stereotype of the writer or artist spending their time propping up a bar doesn’t hold up. Artists usually work long hours on a project, and they don’t stick to a nine to five schedule. Creatives are persistent and determined and totally focused on their work.
4. Creatives are not loners
Research suggests that creative people often combine the best of extroversion and introversion. While most people tend to favor one or the other of these personality types, creative people combine elements of both. They find ideas and inspiration in their social interactions and then retreat to the studio to work their creative magic.
5. They are open and sensitive
Creatives tend to be very empathic and sensitive. They are open to all the possibilities of the world and find inspiration everywhere. Sensitivity is necessary to be able to create artistically but can be a double-edged sword, leaving the artist vulnerable to criticism and rejection.
6. Creatives are not bound by assigned gender roles
Research has shown that creative people tend to resist traditional rigid gender roles and stereotypes. They are open to the male and female characteristics of their personalities and draw on the strengths of both.
7. Creatives can daydream and be realistic
The traditional picture of the daydreaming artist isn’t necessarily reflective of the creative mind. Creativity is grounded in imagination and daydreaming, seeing the possibilities and wondering ‘what if?’ But creative people are also very practical, and the next stage is testing the ‘what if’ idea to see if it works.
Creative thinking is essential for innovative problem solving that works in the real world.
7 Character Traits of Creative People
Have you ever wondered what drives creative people? What makes them different? Creativity can challenge you, give you energy, and allow you to reach your full potential. And the good news is that your own innate creativity can be encouraged and developed if you choose to. Here are seven characteristics of creative people that you can incorporate in your own life.
Use mind maps when you are looking to be more creative. These are great tools to make connections to related phrases and concepts. It isn’t for everyone, but give it a try.