Cultivating your creativity can turn every day into an adventure.
The rewards of a practice designed to boost your creativity go beyond the obvious pleasure of writing stories, making artworks, or sharing interesting ideas.
Creative thinking has been described as one of the most important skills for the future.
The Journal of Experimental Psychology claims that creativity is becoming even more valuable than technical skill as artificial intelligence (AI) outpaces human cognition.
But creativity can quickly vanish in the hurly-burly of everyday life, not to mention barriers like fear, time pressure, lack of discipline, and distraction.
For that reason, dedicating time to improving your creative thinking means you’ll also enjoy a host of other benefits.
These include boosting your problem-solving skills, increasing your cognitive flexibility, enhancing your emotional well-being, strengthening your confidence and communication skills, and deepening connections with others.
Can anyone be creative?
The short answer is yes. Absolutely.
The long answer is that you already are creative, whether you’re aware of it or not.
We’re all born with an innate drive to create, build, and leave our mark on the world.
But traditional education and other experiences serve to strip us of our natural creativity.
Writing in The Art of Creative Thinking: 89 Ways to See Things Differently, Rod Junkins says schools and society ‘rob us of our creative confidence’.
‘Although we are born with incredible imagination, intuition and intelligence, many people are trained not to use these powers, and as a result they wither,’ he says.
Creativity thus isn’t reserved just for artists, musicians, or writers.
It’s a skill, a practice, and a way of approaching life that anyone can develop.
You use creativity when you improvise a meal from random ingredients in your fridge, or find a workaround for a technology problem.
Creativity can be about producing art or having lightning bolt moments of inspiration.
But it’s also about making connections, generating possibilities, and finding novel solutions to the challenges you face.
Neuroscience research has revealed that creativity involves networks throughout the brain, not just one specific part.
When you engage in creative thinking, you’re using the same brain that handles logical reasoning, memory, and sensory processing.
The difference is in how you’re using it.
Creative thinking involves making unexpected connections between disparate ideas, suspending judgment to explore possibilities, and being willing to take mental risks.
The real question isn’t whether you can be creative, but whether you’re giving yourself permission and creating the conditions for your creativity to emerge.
14 Ways to Boost Your Creativity
There are many specific actions you can take to enhance your creative capacity.
Here are just 14 of them. You don’t need to do them all at once.
Try a few that appeal to you first up, experiment, and notice what makes a difference.
Remind yourself that you’re creative.
Most people battle the same invisible enemy – the inner voice that says, ‘I’m not creative’. Affirmations can help you rewrite the story you tell yourself. Check out the affirmation cards I’ve made to support your creativity. Or to learn more about how writers can use affirmations to silence the inner critic, click here.
Establish a morning pages practice.
Write three pages of stream-of-consciousness thoughts first thing each morning. Popularised by Julia Cameron, this exercise, clears mental clutter and often surfaces unexpected ideas. Don’t edit yourself or worry about quality. Just write.
Take a different route to work, school, or the gym.
Literally change your physical path through the world. Drive a different way to work, explore a new neighbourhood on foot, or take the scenic route whenever that’s an option. Novel sensory experiences create new neural pathways and shake you out of autopilot mode.
Consume a varied content diet.
Read outside your usual genres, listen to music that’s not your favourite thing, go to an art gallery that you wouldn’t usually visit, or watch documentaries about subjects you know nothing about. Creativity often comes from combining ideas from different domains, and you can’t combine what you haven’t encountered.
Practice constraint-based creation.
Give yourself arbitrary limitations and create within them. Write a story using only 100 words, cook a meal using only five ingredients, or design something using only geometric shapes. Constraints force you to think differently and often lead to more innovative solutions than unlimited options. To read more about working with constraints, read this.
Keep an idea capture system.
Whether it’s a notebook, a phone app, or voice memos, have a reliable way to capture ideas when they hit. Creative insights often come at inconvenient moments such is in the shower or on the Stairmaster and can be easily forgotten if you don’t record them immediately.
Schedule idle time.
Paradoxically, your brain does important creative work when you’re not actively trying to solve problems. So don’t feel guilty about taking time out to rest and relax. Build time into your schedule for walks, baths, daydreaming, or repetitive tasks (like folding the laundry, or hanging out clothes) that let your mind wander. Read more on the science of how rest makes you a better writer.
Collaborate with others.
Engage in conversations with like-minded creatives where you build on each other’s ideas without immediate judgment. The ‘yes, and’ principle from improvisational theatre can be powerful. When someone shares an idea, your first response should be to extend it rather than critique it.
Study something unrelated to your field.
Take a class in pottery if you’re an accountant, learn about astronomy if you’re a marketer. Cross-pollination between unrelated fields is a powerful source of innovation. Steve Jobs said, ‘Creativity is just connecting things.’ In other words, innovation rarely happens in a vacuum. Breakthroughs emerge when we forge unexpected connections between existing concepts, experiences, or domains that haven’t been previously linked.
Embrace beginner’s mind.
Approach familiar situations as if you’re seeing them for the first time. Ask ‘Why?’ as often as a curious child. Question assumptions you’ve been making. Beginner’s mind strips away assumptions and ingrained patterns that expertise has hidden. It allows you to ask ‘naïve’ questions that can lead to breakthrough insights others overlook.
Create a dedicated creative space.
Even if it’s just a corner of a room, designate a physical space for creative work. This environmental cue helps your brain shift into a more creative mode when you enter that space. Following a routine can also help to hasten a visit from the Muse. Writing rituals such as lighting a candle, or sharpening a pencil, can also help you maintain routine, structure and consistency.
Cultivate multiple projects.
Instead of focusing exclusively on one creative pursuit, maintain several projects at different stages. When you’re stuck on one, you can shift to another. Cultivating multiple projects creates a natural incubation period for ideas, in that when you step away from one project to work on another, your subconscious continues processing problems in the background, often leading to unexpected solutions when you return with fresh perspective.
Study creative process.
Talk to other creative people, or read about how famous writers, artists, musicians, and other creatives work. The idea isn’t to copy their methods wholesale, but to borrow and adapt techniques that resonate with you. There’s no single right way to be creative. However, learning from others expands the tools you have to draw upon.
Practice idea quantity over quality.
In brainstorming sessions, aim to generate as many ideas as possible without judging them. The 50th idea you generate might represent genuine gold, but you have to get past the other 49 ideas to get to it. This approach also removes the paralysing pressure of perfectionism. By giving yourself permission to generate ‘bad’ ideas freely, you bypass your internal critic, loosen your thinking and make novel connections possible.