To develop your own creativity, you need to get a sense of your individual creative rhythm. This takes practice and a high degree of self-awareness. The good news is that once you have practiced, the process gets easier.

In this session, you will examine tips for increasing your creativity. You will also complete an activity to reinforce this concept.

Know Yourself

Working in a group can help you with your own creativity, but it is essential to get to know your own creative rhythm. Understanding your creative groove comes with having a high degree of self-awareness. You need to pay attention to instances when you felt particularly creative. Ask yourself questions like:

• What sparked my creative thinking?
• Where was I when I did my creative thinking? What was my environment?
• What time of day did I think the best?
• What strategies or tools did I use to aid my thinking?
• What challenges did I have when trying to generate creative solutions?
• How long could I sit and think before needing to take a break?

Asking yourself questions to increase your self-awareness can help increase your creative thinking potential.

Tips for Increasing Your Individual Creativity

Practice. Another key element to developing your creative rhythm is practice. High levels of creativity can come naturally to some people, but most of us have to work at it. Giving yourself plenty of time and opportunity to flex your creative muscle will help you increase your creative potential.

Give yourself some distance. When looking to increase your creativity, you need to understand that your creative level can be situation or context dependent. Have you ever helped a friend generate ideas on how to solve their problems? Don’t you sometimes find it easier to offer solutions to their problems rather than figuring out solutions for your own? Sometimes when we are too close or emotionally involved in a situation, we find it hard to see our options.

With this in mind, a way to work on increasing your creativity is to put distance between yourself and the problem you are looking to solve. Looking at the problem you are facing with a bit of psychological distance can help to decrease stress and increase focus. A strategy for increasing distance is to look at the issue from someone else’s perspective. Ask yourself questions like: “How would my spouse look at this issue?” or “How would Donald Trump solve this problem?” Creating distance between yourself and the problem can help give you the psychological edge you need to develop insight.

Give yourself time. You can also increase your creativity by giving yourself enough time to be creative. Too often, we are working under tight deadlines. Without a sufficient amount of time to think and percolate ideas, we tend to panic. Panic does nothing for creativity. In fact, it makes you react instead of acting with clarity, purpose, and direction.

A good technique to help take your focus off time might be to pretend you are on a desert island. You are going nowhere and you have all the time in the world! Adopting this mindset can help you focus on the creative process rather than other factors.

Organize your life. Another tip to increase your own creative potential is to organize your life so your energy is being spent in the right places. Here is an example to illustrate this point.

Every day, you come home from work and put your keys down in the first spot you see. You go about your routine and need to step out for a moment. You spend ten to 15 minutes searching for your keys. You think “Where did I put them?” and, “Could they be under here?” You repeat this process hundreds, maybe even thousands of times throughout your life. By thinking about the same pointless issue, you are zapping your creative energy. Focus your thoughts on new, fresh, and useful topics rather than the mundane.

Educate yourself. Increase your own creativity by educating yourself on the creative process of other people. Choose someone you find particularly creative and would like to emulate. Let’s use Steve Jobs (the founder of Apple computers) as an example.

Ask the following questions to gain insight into the person’s creative process.

• Why do you feel Steve Jobs is creative?
• How was Steve Jobs creative? What did he do?
• What was his attitude toward creativity?

Investigating the creative process of a mentor can help you enhance your own individual creativity. Pick the approaches you would like to try and be aware of the effect these new approaches have on your level of creativity.