Embrace Your Creativity

This month’s post is a follow-up to last month’s post on Awaken the Creative in YOU – Part One, Why? and talks about the HOW. I’ve always been a bit of an original… a little bit ‘edgy’. But I’ve been trained and conditioned to streamline my thinking so that I can better communicate and understand what others mean.

This thinking inside-the-box is very efficient and useful – a standard to which most of us conform. But there are times when we need to embrace that creativity within us – times when breaking out of that box actually helps yourself and others think, speak and do things differently, in a way which would be embraced by all. Below are some tips for Embracing the Creative in YOU – Part Two, How?

1. Accept that there are times to think ‘inside the box’, and times to think ‘outside the box’. Manage your creative releases accordingly.
2. If you’ve been rewarded for thinking inside the box, it’s often hard to think outside that box. Try rewarding yourself (and others) for thinking, speaking and acting differently within specific contexts.
3. Bring people from different backgrounds together on a common project and watch the magic unfold. How are they more similar than they thought and more different than they thought? What new idea, concept, occurrence took place when you combined them?
4. Combine two different processes or solutions in solving a complex problem.
5. Leverage a success from one circumstance and apply it to a completely different scenario, which might actually make sense.
6. Combine elements of ‘wrong’ solutions might bring you closer to one that’s ‘right’.
7. Bask in the people, processes, circumstances etc., which make you feel uncomfortable. Consider them learning opportunities – a chance to stretch and grow in new ways.
8. Recall some early memories of judgments for those who aren’t following the rules, and how others respond to them. This ‘over-socialization‘ is likely impacting your creative edge. Choose to stretch your own boundaries if it would give you an edge.
9. Shift your own perception about the creative people who have touched you in your life. The less you judge them for being ‘different’, the more welcome you will be to the parts of you who also want to be ‘different’ – in a good way.
10. Embrace that creative spark in yourself. It’s not just for people who ‘live on the edge’.

Have fun with it, while you’re also solving problems with it!

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