How to be More Creative and Enhance Your Creativity

Before we talk about how to be more creative, let's talk about some real problems that people seem to have when they want to be more creative. See if any of these apply to you and your life.

1. Not enough time. It's not as big of a deal as you might think. It only takes a few seconds to connect thoughts and ideas. It could happen at any time or place. As long as you are in the right mood and pay attention to what you are going through.

I think creativity is more about how you spend your time and how open you are to yourself. Even though it does take a while.

1. Being afraid to fail. This holds us back. There can't be anything inherently "right" or "wrong" about making a new connection in your brain. Failure can really only mean two things. The first is that it didn't work out the way you wanted. Secondly, Someone else did not like it. So what?! I have to tell you all that I get a lot of comments and questions about how I come up with so many successful projects. I always make sure to say that these projects are only about 10% of what I had in mind. The other 90% didn't work or wouldn't leave my head.
2. Not wanting to be judged. When I worked at a national newspaper and we had brainstorming sessions, people were often afraid to say what they thought. When you're creative, you come up with new ideas and maybe even do things in a different way. People might think of them as strange, odd, or hard. Creativity is often killed by the fear of being called weird, stupid, or just different. If I thought people would think any of those things about me, I wouldn't get out of bed in the mornings. I love that people think I am all of those things!
3. A low sense of self-worth. When you do something creative, you go beyond what has been safe and easy for you and maybe even for other people in the past. When you don't know who you are, being different in any way can make you feel risky or weak. The risk is that you'll give up your new ideas in order to fit in. Break free of those chains!

Creativity is not something that only geniuses can do. Einstein was smart, but he isn't always the best example of creativity for us to look at. You don't have to be an expert at something to be creative. Your creativity may show up in a lot of different ways, and I expect that to be the case.

If you ever doubt your ability to be creative, just remember that every night you create a new dream that you write, act in, and watch. These dreams involve all of your senses and can have effects that last long after they end. This idea is so simple that most people don't even realise it's a new one.

How to come up with more ideas.

Ok, but how do you actually become more creative? Let me give you some ideas;

1. Ask yourself "What if?" "What else?" and "How else?" Always try to think of more ideas than what you first thought of.
2. Get in the right mindset. Explore the places you think of when you think of being creative. Find out what makes you creative and what keeps you creative. What time of day do you like best? The best environment? Do you need to be alone, with other people, or alone among other people? Do you want sounds, silence, or sounds in the background? Build a profile of your creative state, and then make time and space for it on a regular basis. Don't wait for divine intervention or for it to just happen on its own.
3. Cultivate dreaming. Instead of ignoring dreams and daydreams, focus on what you already know and how creative you already are. Don't throw away what you might already be learning by ignoring it.
4. If you run into a problem, act like the solution you usually use isn't available. There are many ways this could work. How would you do your work if your PC broke down today? What would happen if you wrote down how you felt instead of arguing face-to-face? Some solutions might not be any better than what you're used to, while others might give you great new chances. Try something else. I wrote about this idea in a piece called Do Something Different, which you should go read.
5. See how many different results you can get from the same ingredients. I'm sure a lot of you know about "Recipes 1-2-3" by Rozanne Gold. Every recipe in that book is made with only three ingredients.

Some recipes use the same three ingredients, but the results are different because of how they are mixed or how much they are used.

You can have a lot of fun by taking something you use every day and thinking about all the other things you can do with it. You can even think about how to use it with other things.

1. Keep an eye out for the small things that make a big difference. When you see something that seems different, try to figure out what makes it so different, new, or unusual. Where does the most important difference lie?
2. Think of new ways to do things you already know how to do. Change the order in which you do things, use different things, or do something with your less-preferred hand. When we break our routines, we go from being on autopilot to being awake and aware. You use connections in your brain that you don't use often and help build new ones. A wonderful feeling!

The Disney Creativity Strategy is a technique that is often talked about in NLP circles and that I have used for many years.

The Disney creativity strategy is a way to make your dreams stronger and give them the best chance of coming true. It is named after Walt Disney, who was often the dreamer, the realist, and the critic when his team was working on an idea. Robert Dilts, one of the first people to use NLP, used this strategy as a model and made it into an NLP tool. Some of the articles that Robert was kind enough to give to me can be found on my website.

The strategy breaks up these three important parts of turning creative ideas into real things so that they can be looked at separately for the most clarity and impact.

Many companies have specialists in each of the three fields and I have done consultancy work with companies myself whereby I have asked different team members to take on one of the roles. You can also play all three roles yourself as I often do in coaching or business consultancy, with your own wants, needs and goals.

However, the usual way to use it is to allocate three roles to different people (realist, dreamer and critic) to assess plans or tasks. Ask someone to act as the dreamer and tell you all the possibilities of the idea. Ask someone else to look at what it would take to put it into action (a realist) and to really look at its pros and cons (critic). You might want to switch places. If you are doing it by yourself, make sure the roles are clear and written down. I do this with a lot of my own ideas and changes I want to make in my life.

You can even use this in a three-stage meeting, where each role is its own stage. First, get everyone to think of ideas and be creative. Then, get them to think about what would have to happen in real life. Finally, get them to think critically about the options.

I think you should have fun being creative and trying new things to come up with more ideas. It feels great, and if you're having trouble getting where you want to go or getting the results you want, you might want to try being more creative in what and how you do things.