How to boost your creativity?
Creativity is the most dynamic and free form type of self-expression. Being creative is the best way for a developing young mind to understand and reflect upon feelings and experiences. Creativity can also be treated like a muscle. It must be stretched, challenged, and occasionally pushed past its comfort zone.
The experiences children have during their early years of life can significantly enhance the development of their creativity and learning abilities. If generating good ideas is part of your job, you know it’s stressful when it feels as if you’ve hit a wall and there’s nothing fresh in your brain.
Why is creativity important?
Creativity is a way of living life that embraces originality and makes unique connections between seemingly disparate ideas. Creativity is about living life as a journey into seeing and communicating the extra-ordinariness of the simplest, most every day acts.
We often think about creativity as making something, but in fact, the root meaning of the word means ‘to grow’. When we are creative, we feel as if the world and all that is in it is vibrantly alive.
How to boost your creativity?
- Set the Right Mood
Sometimes we tend to forget we are human beings. We expect everyone to deliver as if they were machines. The fact is when you are leading a creative thing, setting up the right mood is important and it also has a tremendous influence in the outcome.
Unless you value complete silence, music can be the thing to give your mood, and your creativity, a boost.
2. Ask for advice or feedback
It doesn’t matter if you hire the most talented creative minds in the world, at some point you’ll have to give them feedback, and that’s where things can get dicey.
Giving great feedback is an art in itself, but giving great feedback on creative work is really hard to do.
Bad feedback can poison a project faster than almost anything else. The feedback you gove and the way you give it matters.
A fresh outside perspective, or three, or five, maybe just what you need.
3. Find inspiration
Inspiration can be found anywhere,
- Takedown notes
- Go for a short walk
- Listen to music
- Read novels
It’s important to read with intention, and choosing a novel is better than reading blogs and short stories on the Internet.
When you find inspiration, you’ve only started the process. Make sure that you put the habits and work ethic in place to see those inspirations all the way through to completion.
4. Be curious
Curiosity is a fundamental building block of creativity. It is the driving force that fuels periods of difficult skill acquisition and inspires the deep thinking required to come up with unique ideas. People are most curious when they feel safe and are playfully engaged with a topic they find moving or intensely interesting. Yet, workplaces are often stripped of fun and curiosity. They are ready to punish any and all failures.
The curiosity impulse builds upon their prior knowledge, constantly drawing them to undiscovered gaps and new details, which fuels even more questioning.
5. Relax
Higher levels of dopamine in the brain lead to greater levels of creativity, which is why relaxing activities like showering can increase creativity. Relaxing activities provide us with a break and give us a fresh perspective, especially when we are fixated on a certain issue or ineffective solution.
Relaxation doesn’t mean putting your feet up at the end of a long day. It involves performing mentally engaging tasks that offer a break from the routine or mundane, and it can mean different things to different people. For many, long walks or being in nature is relaxing and restorative, as is holidaying or engaging in leisure or play.
