Tips on How to Enhance your Creativity

“Creativity doesn’t wait for that perfect moment. It fashions its own perfect moments out of ordinary ones.”

– Bruce Garrabrandt

In a previous creativity post, I shared ways you inhibit your creativity. Now it’s time to look at ways you can enhance your creativity.

1. Deconstruction/Reconstruction

Creative thinking can be both constructive and sometimes destructive. You have to break out of patterns, routines, and rules, establish ideas, and systems, to discover or create something new. To change, you have to destruct first. Then you can reconstruct. 

“Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun.”

– Mary Lou Cook

Many times, one falls into habits and routines. Your mind becomes lazy and out of shape, as you fall under the seduction of repetition. You follow set patterns and rules without noticing what is going around you. 

“Creativity involves breaking out of expected patterns in order to look at things in a different way.”

– Edward de Bono

Observe how you do things and try doing them differently. 

2. Soft Thinking 

It emphasizes the following concepts: metaphors, dreaming, humor, ambiguity, play, approximation, heuristics, pleasure, process, fantasy, paradox, diffusion, hunches, generalization, analogy, etc. Soft thinking finds similarities and connections among things and processes. It is how the right hemisphere of the brain solves problems.

3. Imagining

Imagination is the ability to see or visualize a problem from different perspectives. The open-minded attitude of an artist typifies the method of thinking you use in the imaginative phase when you are generating ideas

Picasso said once: “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist after growing up.” 

“The creative adult is the child who survived.”

– Ursula Leguin

The “what if” technique is an easy way to get your imagination going. 

There are two steps to enhancing your imagination: 

First, ask “what if” and then finish the question with some contrary-to-fact idea, condition or situation. 

Secondly, answer the “what if” question. The provocative answers you find can show directions for new ideas, but you have to formulate many “what if” questions. 

4. Play

Play is a natural medium for creative expression. To play means to engage in recreation, to move or function freely within prescribed limits, to act in a dramatic production, to engage in a game; All these activities can enhance your creativity. 

Play involves the language of imagination, the emotions, the senses, the inner self, active participation, the freedom to invent and imitate. It allows for the ventilation and release of negative energy. It encourages creative, growth-oriented self-expression and communication. 

Play is a creative process and a safe way for people to try out, explore, experiment, and fumble about with ways of learning. Recreation provides an opportunity to develop the imagination, think independently, cooperate and communicate, healthfully release emotions, experience freedom of choice. There is evidence that playing increases: problem-solving skills and abilities, creativity and creative thinking skills, and social skills. 

5. Exploration

A creative thinker needs raw materials such as knowledge, experiences, concepts, facts, feelings, from which new ideas originate. Becoming an explorer involves searching for ideas outside your specialty, to look about or through without being systematic and to pay attention to unusual patterns. Use as many different senses as possible and look out for anything that might be of interest.

6. Learn from Failure 

If you are not failing now and then, it is a sign that you are not trying anything very innovative. Failure does not mean that you are incompetent because you did not get it right or do it well the first time. If you do fail, you learn what does not work, and the failure allows you to try a new approach.

7. Collaboration

Effective collaboration involves the use of the strengths of the individual members in the problem-solving process. It is a purposeful interaction, formed to solve a problem, to create or discover something or to change something. 

Collaboration is essential because we cannot “do it all” by ourselves. During collaboration, individuals learn to identify their strengths and talents as well as increase self-esteem by sharing and achieving common goals.

8. Everyday creativity

All human beings are creative; your creativity can be enhanced or discouraged in many ways. Any time you are confronted with situations for which you have not already learned and practised a response; some degree or kind of creativity is needed.

Creative thinking is much more than using our fantasy to produce innovative ideas. Creative thinking can become a lifestyle, a personality trait, a way of looking at the world; of interacting with others and a way of living and growing. 

Living creatively means developing your talents, tapping your unused potentials and becoming what you are capable of becoming through self-discovery and self-discipline. Then life becomes art. The richest fuel for ideation is the first-hand experience. You can develop your creative abilities by innovatively approaching everyday problems. 

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