Work In Colour - Work. Think. Live. In Colour
Sunday 19th April 2009 | No comments
Here are some of my favourite tips for maximising creative thinking...
Spend time each day accepting all stimuli, suspend filtration and question your best-loved routines. It is essential that we use established patterns of behaviour and filter out some of the stimuli that bombard us daily, but at the same time it is good to look at the world through fresh eyes sometimes. Go on creative adventures with yourself, do things you wouldn't normally do (like finger painting or cooking Thai food or staying up all night), be curious about the everyday, see your world as it might appear to an alien or a child.
Ask questions like, Why? Why not? What if? What else? What assumptions am I making? What if there were no constraints? How would a scientist, or the Dalai Lama, or a child, or my wisest friend deal with this issue? What are 3 ways to handle this?
Record your ideas, however farfetched or impractical they seem - keep a 'mad ideas' book and review it every now and then. You may be surprised at what it sparks...
Mindmap the issue - this is easily my overall favourite tool for generating ideas and planning projects. Mindmaps are a graphic tool that uses left and right brain, logical and holistic skills - bringing together words and pictures, numbers, linear and spatial elements to maximise the brain's capacity for thinking and planning. (If you aren't familiar with mindmapping, send an email and I will send you a handout on them.)
And above all,
Because our culture, school system and definitions of success all favour logical left-brained thinking, this is the style many people feel most comfortable with.
However, to be creative you need to be able to tap into right-brained thinking as well, and to vary your thinking style as the situation demands. You can absolutely train yourself to do this, but it is like any new habit - in the beginning you will need to prompt yourself for more creative ways of looking at things.
At the end of the day, creative thinking is a mindset rather than a list of techniques or something you only turn on for 10 minutes a day, but telling you to just 'be creative' is about as useful as saying to an anxious friend, 'don't worry, be happy' - unless you have some practical tools to work with, it is useless or even counterproductive.
So for the next week (and lifetime...) when you have a dilemma or opportunity, consciously make time to look at it using one or more of the techniques here.
Tags: ideas, creativity, tips
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