How To Increase Your Creativity

 

Creativity is a essential part of collective human experience. With creativity humans create tools, technologies, methods and most importantly 'art', art in the shape of paintings, books and music that makes lives for everyone more liveable and worthwhile.

Simply put creativity is the process of making something with the help of one's imagination. That being said, a individual who's lacking this crucial component of life will experience life more dull, ambivalent and boring.

How to increase creativity, thus becomes the most important and impactful question that can be asked in today's world.

This blog is here to help with this, so that anyone can increase creativity in themselves.

1) Reward Curiosity

All humans by nature are curious, they thrive on curiosity. Perhaps it won't be false if someone had said that curiosity is the first door to creativity. Whenever you feel curious, don't hesitate to ask or do that said thing, it'll take you places that you've never imagined.

For example take a kid who's curious about painting but never has the courage to ask his/her parents about it, one the other hand if the child would've asked about it likely that the parent won't stop him.

Personally, best part of curiosity is that it takes my mind and body to unknown and exciting places. It's way to escape hustle and bustle of my mundane life.

2) Learn About Different Cultures

Since creativity is a abstract and subjective pursuit, it's helpful to learn new things and ideas from different cultures and societies around the world. Often these cultures and societies have developed different ways to help themselves their creative endeavours.

Study after study has found that knowing people from different cultures helps to boost creativity and skills that are related to creativity.

Internet is perhaps the greatest tool that we have in this regard, I've used Internet to meet and make freinds people all over the world.

3) Find Inspiration Around You

Inspiration is a precondition to creativity, you have to have something in your head to be creativity about, and here Inspiration comes in. To do this, start shaking up your routine, learn to focus more, spend more time with like minded people.

Personally, nature for me is the best and the biggest provider of Inspiration, so I will anyone who's seeking to find inspiration to spend sometime in the nature. What I've discovered is that nature gives stimulas to increase creativity in the brain, by making me feel awe.

You can get Inspiration by people around you, their stories and their creative endeavours. Taking inspiration is also a good way to increase motivation level.

4) Do It Right Away And Practice Practicality

Once you've got an idea, the worst thing you can do is to make it wait. Making idea wait will make it harder to remember once you need it, and even harder to replicate.

If you're busy, make sure you have always something to note on, that can be app on mobile phone or physical paper and pen.
If you're noting on mobile phone, make sure to do it in the form of reminder - so incase you forget you would be reminded at a later point.

To note down I prefer a hard pen and paper over mobile reminders - I typically write something that I know I'll need for a later use and paste it on walls of my room.

Second point is to think practically, by this I mean you should take into account your available time, resources like money and physical space and skill that will go into making a particular thing. If it doesn't feel like something that's particular, don't bother with it in the first place.

5) Visualize

Most creative individuals have great visual power of imagination. These individuals can visualize things that nobody has ever seen or even known about. Classic example of one such creative individual was 'Albert Einstein', who famously visualized Ray of beam travelling at the speed of light and himself travelling with it.

Visualisation is highly effective way of increasing creativity and enhancing imagination.

There are three things that are needed for visualisation: Passion, Simplicity and Inner Peace. Passion is necessary as it drives all other unnecessary things out of focus of the brain, simplicity makes brain de-cluttered and peace brings individual harmony of thought.

These attributes give the brain, much better clarity when it comes to descion making, helps in predicting future events and generally keeps one ahead of the curve. Apart from that this makes very good at problem solving, be it at individual level or are organisational level.

I've used this technique to increase creativity psychology, it helps my brain to better understand and contextualise problem at hand so that it can be solved in non traditional, unorthodox way.

6) Take Feedback With Positivity

There can be 100 ways to increase creativity out there on the internet but this one always hits the home. Taking feedback from your freinds, peers and individual with relevant knowledge can help you improve your work, skill and creative skills.

Feedback be it be postive or negative shows how we lack in certain way and how it can we overcome, but overtime it'll help our skills, boost our confidence levels and give you motivation. Don't take negative criticism on your heart and learn to ignore all the buzz that's around it.

Confidence and motivation will help you go along way when it comes to creative endeavours like paintings, writing, sculpturing.

The unintended consequences of taking  Feedback is that you become less and less insecure about your work - thus making it more and more accessible to postive public criticism.

For me, taking feedback has helped me to improve my writing skills, change software that I use, started proofreading, change the language that I normally use in my blogs and much more.

This has improved my writing skills by a quite margin and improvement can be seen and felt by reading my blogs. At the end, taking feedback will only make your life easier.

7) Exercises To Increase Creativity

Excercise is repeatedly shown to reduce stress and anxiety levels in individuals who do exercise regularly. Reduction in stress helps mind to focus on a single task that you are really passionate about.

This has knock on effect that it stops the brain from overthinking, which is again good for your mental health as well as to boost creativity.

There's no specific excercise that is tailor made for increasing one's creativity so doing any exercise with regularity would help you.
For me, walking has been that excercise. It has improved my mental health and thus given my postive attitude to start this blog.

8) Escape The Odinary

This mean that to escape your normal routine life behind and venture into unknown and exciting places.

Meeting new people, experiencing new things and new cultures can help with the creativity block.

It is said learning a new language opens up one brain more than most things. It opens up a minefield of ways of thinking.
Apart from language, this technique also includes book

Most advantageous aspect about thinkining this way is that is makes mind to think out of the box.

I'm not a native English speaker so learning and practising has opened my mind in thinking in ways that were previously not possible.

9) Make Time For Creativity

Not getting creative ideas can feel like bad, but it's reality for most. There's no need to feel bad for yourself or feel pity, it's just how the think work.

Take out a specific well defined time out of your daily routine and start working on your creativity skills like painting, music, writing or anything else you want to do that requires the use of creative faculty.
Taking out specific time helps brain to think when it need to and where you need to think on.

I have designated hour for creative pursuit that mainly include writing. I use technique of brainstorming to generate ideas and headings for this blog. Brainstorming can help you in all creative pursuit. There are numbers of other methods and techniques like mind mapping, lateral thinking, Five W's, and freethinking just to mention a few.

10) Have A Well Determind End

Having a well defined ending of a creative pursuit is as important as the planning and execution stages for any creative procedure. Having a well defined ending will help you to have a fucationing and comfortable work life.

This is a part of a planning stage and will help you keep result oriented from the start. This will help you have a postive outlook once you've completed a task and makes you more motivated for the next task. This method has made me avoid negative impacts of creative faculty like dead-end, stress or anxiety, loss of passion to name a few.

I've used this method myself and it has help me with things that have to do with efficiency and in a time that suprised me too.