Unleash your business creativity – 1 of 4
ADOPT A CREATIVE ATTITUDE
Seeing new business opportunities ahead of everyone else requires creative thinking, and creative thinking calls for first adopting a mental attitude favorable to creativity. Here are a few tips to help you get started.
Establish a positive mindset
Begin by simply saying to yourself, “I am creative.” Affirming your own creative ability in this simplest of ways can dramatically reduce self-doubt and establish the positive mindset that’s essential to developing a creative attitude.
Relax
Being physically tense or mentally stressed is a crippling liability in almost anything you do, especially creative thought. Ideas must be allowed to emerge; they cannot be forced. To be creative, stay loose.
Suspend judgment until later
Criticism and evaluation inhibit creative thinking. Save these until after you’ve finished the ideation part of the exercise. Judging your ideas as you conceive them weakens your creative efforts.
Open up your awareness and perceptions
The creative attitude embodies a questioning, searching state of mind. You enter ‘creative space’ with a question. Become sensitive to problems and their implications - let yourself discover and explore new or unfamiliar ways to analyze situations and break them down into their parts.
Respect your creative rhythms and intuitions
Each of us has certain times of the day, week, month, or even year when our minds are sharpest. Each of us recognizes that we instinctually know more than we think we know. Remember too that certain creative activities can require some time for us to warm up to. Tune your creative processes to these cycles and allow for this natural ebb and flow in your creative efforts.
Give yourself permission to be creative
Consciously give yourself permission to be crazy, playful, and outrageous for a while. A creative attitude requires spontaneity: let yourself go. Remember that ’silliness’ is a good sign you might be thinking creatively.
[To continue reading about how to overcome Emotional, Perceptual, and Cultural blocks to creativity, read part 2, part 3, and part 4 of the series.]