Let’s have this candid conversation and put it to rest. You see, the key to living a fulfilling and creative life begins with nurturing your creativity. And since creativity is often not a matter of nature that comes by magic, its realization is often a process. It, therefore, means that you will have to adopt ways to develop your brain’s creativity and intuitive awareness.
What’s creativity, and what does it mean to you? Well, creativity is about imagination, motivation, and inspiration. It gives you an upper hand in solving issues, expressing yourself, unleashing your potential, and keeping connected and in touch with the surrounding environment.
Look, unlocking your creativity not only involves arming yourself with the ideal internal tools but also putting yourself in the perfect environment where you can flourish.
“How do I increase my imagination at work?” That could be the question in your lips if you want to nurture and use your creativity! Well, this article contains all you need.
Simple Activities to Nurture Your Creativity
Keep a Journal or an Idea File
Let’s bet that every quite often, your mind harbors creative thoughts. These thoughts are impossible to remember if you don’t jot them down somewhere. Yet, nurturing your creativity begins with having a detailed stream of thoughts.
The best way to remember them is to keep an idea file or journal consistently. Ensure that you write down your feelings, emotions, thoughts, dreams, and ambitions every day. You will find this fantastic and arguably the best way to let your creativity flow.
Set the Ideal Mood for Creativity
One of the most frustrating moments is when you experience a complete lack of ideas to solve an issue or inability to come up with the right plans. An ideal way to boost your creativity in such cases is to set an excellent creative mood. You can do this by finding value in the things you love.
What inspires your creativity? If total silence works for you, then try it out. For many other people, music or comedy will do. Even more, taking an utterly mission-less walk will do the trick.
Play or Enjoy Nature
Well, this may seem surprising. But as you probably know, Alan Cohen wrote, “There’s virtue in work, and there’s virtue in rest. Use both and overlook neither.” Doesn’t that sound exciting?
This is not only about you but also an ideal way of how to nurture your child’s creativity. Do you know the say about all work without play? Indeed, the body and mind need to calm down and start again.
You can take time engaging in outdoor activities such as biking or hiking. If the weather isn’t conducive or you aren’t a fan of outdoor activities, try indoor activities like yoga. Try out little things that energize you.
Read More and Learn Something New
Yes, the highest achievers when it comes to creativity are avid readers. This is because reading is undoubtedly one of the perfect ways of exercising your brain and develop multidirectional creative ideas. However, you should be mindful about getting stuck in a particular genre or reading in one pattern. Give yourself a challenge by reading through a limitless range of genres and topics.
Again, while learning something new may often be just for fun, it helps you to boost your creativity at work. Try your hand at attending cooking lessons, music lessons, learning a new language, and dancing lessons, to mention a few. Do all that you can to expose yourself to different ideas and activities.
Unplug
One of the problems you are most likely to land into is trying to fast track your journey to creativity. Be careful not to fall into that trap. You probably don’t know that procrastination can boost your creativity. Yes, it does.
Occasionally, the more you think, the more complicated things get. The best ideas sometimes come when you are not wracking your head to find one.
Your next big idea could come when you are in the shower, and your mind is out and about. Or, it could be when you are driving, traveling, shopping, or watching comedy on the television, and your mind seems to be entirely out of touch with your work.
Sleep Well
How many hours of sleep do you need in a day? Look, there’s a trend that insomnia will most often take over when you have a big creativity project in mind. Be careful not to go that direction and enjoy your sleep as much as you can.
A night of good sleep helps the mind to be sharper and function at full capacity. Moreover, a good sleep makes your imagination open to a variety of creative opportunities.
Scroll Through a Social Media Channel of Choice
Social media has a lot of merits and demerits. One of the primary advantages of social media is that you can boost your creativity online. Whether you prefer Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, or any other channel, you will find people who can inspire you to nurture and express your creativity. You can also follow or create popular inspirational hashtags.
Begin Afresh
The best thing to do when things are not working is to start over. Forget the challenges and successes in your current mission and restart the whole thing with a blank slate. The easiest way to unleash your creativity with this tip is to break everything down is with the “thinking hats.”
The differently colored hats help you to figure out everything in a different way. While “wearing” all the six hats are always ideal in meeting and conference situations, the white, black, and green will help you boost and use your creativity.
According to Edward de Bono, the white hat focuses on real data and facts, black hat focuses on the possible adverse outcomes, while the green hat ignites your creativity. The essence of this method is to try and look at things differently.
Work to Improve
Setbacks and failures are part of the process. So, use them to improve yourself and your work rather than succumbing to them. Again, people will critique your work. When this happens, you need to know that it is your work that they are critiquing and not you. Use the feedback to improve your work.
Everyone wants to show creativity. However, how do you show creativity at work? You see, there’s the need to play around with your creative ideas without worrying about any impending disasters or failure. Reward yourself every time you achieve your objectives.
Be Patient
As we stated in the introduction, creativity is not an act of nature. It is a process to nurture. There’s undoubtedly no magic. Therefore, you should not expect instant results. The best thing you’d do to nurture your creativity to its full potential is to remain patient and follow the due process to the end.
Barriers to Creativity
The above section talks about how you can most likely nurture your creativity to its full potential. However, what are some of the barriers to creativity? Find out!
1. Lack of Direction
Comrades, lack of direction starts with a lack of clear goals. There’s a need to write down well-illustrated goals and objectives. Moreover, there is a need for a clear plan of action alongside each component.
The trick is that your innovative mind fires to life the moment you become clear about what you intend to achieve. Insights and creative ideas come to your mind and spur you forward.
2. Fear
There are many forms of concerns that may hinder you from achieving your goals. The two primary types include the fear of expressing your creativity as well as the fear of people’s judgments and criticism. The trick is to avoid being afraid of failure and the fear of rejection.
3. Failure to Adapt or Improve
Homeostasis is the deep subconscious desire that compels a person to remain consistent with their actions. Fear creeps in, whereby you don’t want to say or do something contrary to what you already said or did in the past. Such a tendency leads one to a comfort zone that they never want to leave.
4. Lack of Proactivity
Passivity is another barrier to creativity and innovation. Your mind needs continuous stimulation with new ideas, information, and concepts. Passive and automatic thinking lets your thinking to lose the creative touch. Allow your imagination to get out of the routine!
5. Restrictive Routines
Setting unique ways of performing tasks is not a bad idea. In fact, it is admirable and enhances a flawless flow of life. However, restrictive routines limit the range of possible responses and solutions to specific issues. They also restrict your approach to a problem or your overall view of the problem. Thus, strict adherence to rules, regulations, strategies, and routines leads to a bureaucratic mind, which is a barrier to creativity and innovation.
Unleash Your Creativity
As it stands currently, it is almost impossible to progress without creativity and innovation. But you don’t need to fret about that. The article outlines the top tips that will help you nurture your creativity. The same model applies to parents and mentors who want to improve the creativity of their children. Moreover, there is a provision of a list of factors that form barriers to creativity.
