How to Enhance Personal Creativity

culled from:wikihow.com

Creative thinking skills are closely aligned to the critical thinking skills. Both types of thinking will allow you to process information more effectively and productively. Creative thought is built upon a foundation of critical thought; if flawed or fuzzy thinking is the basis for creative efforts, these efforts will rarely be fruitful.

Steps

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Focus your energy. Creativity requires significant mental resources of energy. If your energy is scattered among many competing projects, you may not have enough energy focused at any one time and place to realize your creative potential. Highly creative people are able to focus their energy on their work. Sometimes they deliberately disengage themselves from other situations or responsibilities that might drain this energy. A kind of single mindedness seems to facilitate creativity.

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   Don't limit yourself. To a significant degree, how you think about your creative ability will determine its presence. If you generate self talk that insists that "I'm just not a creative person" or that creativity is the province of genius, then you are limiting your own ability to exercise your inborn creative talents. Everyone has the ability to be creative. It is true that some people have this ability in greater measure than others, just as some people can run faster than others. But just like running, with a little training, you'll be better able to realize the talent you do possess.
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   Avoid premature evaluation. Judging an idea at too early a stage in its development is much like closing a door on an infant who can't reach the doorknob it blocks further progress. New ideas need a chance to wander around for awhile, to learn to walk and develop their potential. All of us have had the experience of someone passing judgment on an idea of ours (e.g., "That's stupid ... or impractical ... or unrealistic ... or naive ... or too idealistic"). Such comments can stunt an idea's growth, whether it comes from others or from your own self talk. Give new ideas some room to grow!
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   Don't be afraid to make a mistake. Most of us are programmed to fear making a mistake. We take such an error as a reflection on our worth as a person or our basic capability. The fact is we all make mistakes and will do so until the day we die. Mistakes are a part of life, an important part. Learning often comes as a result of mistakes that provided an opportunity to understand something we may have previously overlooked. The more creative you are, the more likely you are to make mistakes. Creativity involves stretching the limits of the known into unknown territory. The key is to try to not make the same mistakes over and over again, and to learn something from the mistakes that you do make.
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   Expect the unexpected. Expectations can shape reality. There is a psychological principle called the "self fulfilling prophesy" that describes how the expectation that something will happen actually makes its occurrence more likely. For example, if you expect to be in a car accident, this will make you tense and over reactive and will inhibit your ability to avoid potential accident situations. In a similar manner, if you expect to confront novelty and potentiality, you will be more likely to run into it! The unexpected is grist for the mill of creativity; it disrupts the routine and established manner of doing things and presents the possibility of change.
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   Break out of established patterns. Are you a creature of habit? Do you go through the same routine every morning when you get out of bed? Do you brush your teeth in the exact same sequence every time? Do you eat the food on your plate in the same manner and sequence every time? Do you find yourself espousing the exact same opinions over and over again? All of us have a tendency to settle into a comfortable routine; our minds have this same tendency. Ralph Waldo Emerson encouraged us to "bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day" as a way of keeping our present lives from becoming a dull repetition of habit and history. If you want to enhance your creativity, it is important to disrupt your life and your thinking in constructive ways. Eat something that you've never eaten before. Read a book that justifies a point of view different than your own. Try a new opinion on for size. Try to look at things in a different light.
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   Verify your assumptions. Thinking is often limited by the assumptions it is based upon. If you are trying to design a new chair and assume that it must have four legs, this assumption will limit the scope of your design; it would eliminate a three legged chair, a five legged chair, a chair with no legs, and so forth. If you make certain assumptions about what you are capable of, you will be unduly limiting your career possibilities. Such assumptions are often hidden in our thinking, so taken for granted that we do not recognize their influence. Take the time to examine the basic parameters you draw around a problem and extend them if you can.
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   Try brainstorming. Brainstorming is a tried and true method of generating creative ideas. This process involves freely generating as many ideas as possible and totally holding any evaluation of them in reserve. No idea is too outlandish to suggest. All ideas are recorded without editing of any kind. Only once the "idea pool" is exhausted does the evaluation process take place; ideas are sorted into similar categories, combined, contrasted, defined, explored, and evaluated in terms of possible constraints. This process works best with a small group of people, taking advantage of a stimulating cross fertilization of ideas. You may want to try some career possibility brainstorming with a group of your friends or classmates.
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   Expand your associations. We tend to fall into patterns of uncreative thinking by unconsciously limiting how we associate things. If you think of college only as a means of obtaining a better job, you will be unduly limiting your educational possibilities. The college experience can also be associated with personal growth, social networking, mentoring by professors, exploration of different values, appreciation of differing cultures, expansion of artistic appreciation and expression, athletic development, leadership opportunities, development of a philosophy of life, spiritual practice, intimate relationships, scientific exploration, travel–you get the idea. Expand your associations and you will expand your experience; expand your experience and you will expand your knowledge and your life.
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   Look for order in chaos. Sometimes what appears to be chaos is actually order just waiting to happen When you began the process, career planning and decision making may have seemed like chaos to you; by now you probably have a sense that some order is possibly emerging. Chaos or disorder can be viewed as a puzzle with all the pieces mixed up. As you begin to see how things fit together, the puzzle will begin to make some sense. So don't let disorder scare you; begin by looking for the pieces that seem to go together and a pattern will often appear. As the patterns come together, the entire picture will eventually clear.
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    Look for chaos in order. All order harbors within itself an element of chaos. If the element of disorder within your life is ignored, it grows in darkness and may one day provide you with an unwelcome surprise. However, if you recognize this element of disorder, you can use it to enrich your life. For example, once you are settled into a given job, there will always be an element of dissatisfaction, something about your work that is troublesome or unpleasant. If you recognize this factor, you will have the opportunity to develop new skills to deal with it, to use your ingenuity to get someone else to do it, to develop an alternative more to your liking, or to otherwise exercise a creative solution to address the concern. On the other hand, if you try to ignore such a problem, it may fester and grow to poison your attitude about your work in general.
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    Utilize thinking stimulants. Different things stimulate creative openness for different people. Some people prefer silence and solitude; others want the stimulation that interaction with others can provide. Classical music suits some; hard rock or country music works for others. Some people are early morning creators while others do their best work late at night. Take the time to observe the conditions that seem to foster your most creative work. You can then consciously use these conditions to increase your creative susceptibility.
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    Don't be limited by compartmentalization. The most creative accomplishments, by definition, do not fit into pre established categories. The advent of the airplane created a whole new category of transportation; one that would not have developed within the categories of ground and sea transport. Similarly, the categories of occupations you have been working with will be different in ten or twenty years; whole new categories will have developed as new occupations are generated by future discoveries. Categories are important intellectual tools that organize thinking; but a lack of openness to new categories and concepts will unduly limit your creative ability.
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    Avoid premature conclusions. There is a natural movement toward closure in any problem solving process. If you want this process to be a creative one, it is important to forestall such closure. Creativity requires a certain amount of room to move. It is not a linear process of a given duration; creativity is more like wandering about. This principle is especially important when it comes to career choice. If you force yourself to a conclusion, you may be eliminating better possibilities that might have emerged, given a little more time and consideration. A time for a decision will come; don't rush the process.
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    Get silly every now and then. Humor is a powerful creative stimulus. If you insist on being dead serious about everything, your ideas are likely to be seriously dead. Creativity should be more like play than work. A playful attitude can open up new avenues of thinking and interacting with others, often leading to a kind of synergistic teamwork that fosters creativity and novelty.
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    Cultivate creative inspiration. As you explore your creative potential, you will discover the conditions that facilitate this potential. Different people find different strategies to enhance their creativity. Some people find that solitude or meditation enriches their imagination. Others stimulate creativity by exposing themselves to novel situations or unfamiliar surroundings, forcing themselves to deal with reality in a non-habitual manner. The creation of a stable environment might be important to some people, enabling them to focus their energy and attention on a creative endeavor. Music, art, and nature are often used as sources of inspiration. The point is to experiment with different conditions, environments, and states of mind. Pay close attention to how such variables affect your creative capacities. Over time, you will discover your own unique mixture of elements that enhance your creativity.
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    Strengthen your autonomy. Creativity is a product of individual minds. Although creativity may be stimulated by interaction with others, others can also threaten its expression. The ability to maintain a personal commitment to creative effort and to sustain such effort in the face of opposition and discouragement is a key characteristic of highly creative individuals. Successful creators stand by their vision even when it is not seen or appreciated by others around them. In The Fountainhead, one of Ayn Rand's characters (Howard Roark, an architect) speaks of this characteristic: "The basic need of the creator is independence. The [creative] mind cannot work under any form of compulsion . . . . The creators were . . . self sufficient, self motivated, self generated. A first cause, a fount of energy, a life force, a Prime Mover." Part of this independence is to be unafraid of being misunderstood by others. As Ralph Waldo Emerson reminds us: "Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood."