The First Step to Increasing Your Creativity

Would you like to enhance your creativity? Before you answer yes or no, think about what that word means to you.

If you associate creativity with artistic expression, and you happen to be a middle-manager in a corporation, you may think increased creativity is not really necessary to your life. But creativity is something far, far broader than artistic expression.

Your idea of a creative person might be someone who lives in a loft, painting gigantic canvases all day long. Or perhaps a writer at her computer, working on a long novel. Or a musician, actor, or singer performing on stage to an audience.

These are all people actively pursuing artistic expression and they can all rightly be said to be creative people, even if no one else enjoys their art.

But what about an entrepreneur who has an idea for a new product, who forms a company to produce and distribute it, eventually employing hundreds of people? Is this not creative?

What about a research scientist toiling in a lab, developing new compounds in an effort to cure disease? Is this creative? What about a single mother who manages to come up with healthy delicious meals on a tiny budget? Is that creativity?

To one person, creativity can mean gluing seashells to a picture frame. To another, creativity might mean solving a grand unified theory in physics. To someone else it might mean coming up with an ingenious new way to speed up a factory assembly line.

When we define creativity only in terms of artistic expression, we miss a lot of other potential applications for creative thinking.

An artist painting a picture or a writer working on a novel has something in common with the researcher in the lab, and the entrepreneur, and the person gluing seashells to picture frames. They are all working on problems and devising solutions that didn't exist before.

These people are using their minds to imagine fresh ways of doing something.

They are combining existing ideas or materials in unexpected ways, creating something different from what has gone before. It may be a new idea, a new look, a new product, or technique. Creativity can be exciting, fun, personally fulfilling, and even financially lucrative. It can also be frustrating, challenging and scary.

Can we improve our ability to be creative? Yes. In fact, learning to be more creative can be quite enjoyable and easy to do. There are many techniques that have been developed to improve creative and artistic ability, as well as to improve creative problem solving.

Some techniques that have been shown to enhance creativity include brainstorming, self hypnosis, guided imagery, and various forms of meditation.

What all creativity enhancement techniques have in common is they aim to bypass the inner judge or critic in our head.

Most of us have an inner voice that is running a constant commentary on everything we think and do. This inner voice may barely be noticed most of the time, yet it has a great impact on what we can accomplish in our life. In many of us this voice is usually critical of our efforts, and no matter what we do it's never good enough to please our inner critic.

As we attempt to come up with new ideas our inner voice may be saying, "This idea is stupid." Or it might tell us, "I should never be mediocre or average, I must be brilliant and perfect all the time. If I can't be totally brilliant and innovative right from the start, I am a failure and it's better not to even try".

Sometimes we may not be aware of an inner dialogue, but we may picture images of ourselves failing, or we may have sensations of fear and embarrassment that stop us from pursuing new ideas or new actions.

Why is it important to bypass or shut off our inner critic when we want to be creative? In most of us, the inner critic is quite harsh and is never pleased with anything we do. None of our ideas are good enough. All our ideas are stupid and bound to fail.

What effect does this constant running dialogue in our heads have on us? Our inner critic is trying to make us perfect, but it usually has the opposite effect. If our inner judgmental dialogue is mostly negative, our creative abilities will suffer.

Instead of enabling us to come up with better ideas, it is far more likely that the negative inner dialogue will cause our ability to come up with new ideas to dry up completely. The creative part of us will feel inadequate and embarrassed and shut down.

Young children are inherently creative. They have not yet learned the official uses of objects around them so they experiment to see how they can be used. They are very willing to try new combinations. They don't have a concept of failure. The younger they are, the less they have set ideas in their mind of how things are supposed to be.

When young children sing or dance or tell a little story they are not yet competing with some imagined standard of excellence they are supposed to match. To them, everything is an exploration.

As we get older we often become more conformist and afraid to do things that are different from the established norms. We assimilate the prevailing standards and customs around us, often accompanied by an inner voice that constantly tells us whether what we are doing is acceptable or not.

Your inner critic isn't being evil when it criticizes you, or when it tells you your ideas are not very good. Your critic is actually trying to protect you from being ashamed or embarrassed by the potentially negative comments and reactions of other people to your ideas.

The problem is that the inner critical voice can become so automatic that it will criticize your ideas before you even formulate them. It just starts to spew forth its negative assessments before you have a chance to develop and realistically evaluate your ideas.

Eventually, under the constant barrage of inner criticism, your creative side may shut down in fear and discouragement. In some people this shut down of creativity can become permanent. Even people who are very bright and very talented can suffer because of the messages from their internal critical voice, telling them that nothing they do or think is good enough.

The critical, judgmental, analytical function of the brain is not the part that knows how to generate creative ideas. Furthermore, the brainwaves that you generate when you are being rational and analytical are quite different than the brainwaves that go with maximum creativity.

Even if you have the most kindly inner critic in the world, you still need to bypass the judgmental part of yourself when you want to be creative.

When you really need to be creative, tell your inner critic to go out for a walk!

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