How to Enhance Your Creativity
 

Before thinking about how to be more creative, let's look at some of the many reasons people fail in their attempts to enhance creativity in their work and their lives. Ask yourself if you are using any of any of these things to bar the way to more creativity in your life.

Lack of time. Lack of long periods of uninterrupted "creative time" is not as major as you may think. Linking thoughts and ideas only takes seconds. It can happen anytime, anywhere. Your creative state of mine is more important than raw time, and given the right attitude, you will create within the time that you have available. Author John Grisham used to tell the media that he wrote his first book, A Time to Kill, on legal pads while in court, between court appearances, and after finishing his day as a working lawyer. Are you wasting valuable creative time by waiting for just the right time? Pay attention to your own experience.

Fear of being judged. This is a biggie, the biggest. Most successful creative people will tell you that they NEVER lose the fear of failure; they just move on in spite of it, or through it. True creativity often comes from doing something that everyone else is not doing. This uniqueness causes almost certain judgment by others. Fear of being considered weird, stupid or too different will kill creativity, dead. Taken to the extreme, fear of judgment will paralyze you in anything that you decide to create. You may not love people's freedom to judge you, but you won't create without it. If you try to do so, and no one criticizes you, you probably are not being very creative!

Lack of self-esteem. When you do something creative, you go beyond the bounds of what has been safe and familiar in the past, to yourself and maybe even others. When you are not sure about yourself, being different in any way can feel risky or make you feel vulnerable. The danger is that you give up your new insight to just blend in. Smash those shackles of low self-esteem!

Fear of failure. This inhibits us. If you are making a new connection in your brain there can be no inherent "right" or "wrong" about it. Failure can only have two meanings really; firstly, that it didn't work in the way you wanted it to. Secondly, Someone else did not like it. But so what?! Many creators will tell you that success is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration. This saying is old as the hills, and still true.

Fear of success. This one tends to slip past everyone. Who in his or her right mind is afraid of success? Well, the truth is...many people, including those who may be wildly successful. What is "fear of success" all about? Fear that success is temporary. Fear that other will hate us for being successful. Fear that people will only love us as long as we are success. The "fear of failure" is easily understood, but the "fear of success" puts us at a loss to explain what the problem is, and yet, it can be just as effectively paralyzing when it comes to finding success for the first time, or going to the next level in the endeavor(s) in which we have already been successful.

Creativity is not reserved for genius only. Einstein was brilliant and a recognized genius, but anyone who has read his life story knows that the road to success for even Einstein was not one smooth route from one achievement to another.

Creativity may manifest in many, many differing ways in your life. Your job is to open your life, your heart and your mind to it own sweet natural creativity.

If at any time you doubt your ability to be creative, remind yourself that several times every night you create an entirely new dream, which you script, act in and watch, which involves all your senses and has effects that can last long after they are over. This creation is so very effortless most people don't even recognise it as such.

So, How Do You Become More Creative?

Let us count the ways:

1. Find the time and the right frame of mind. Explore what states you associate with being creative. Discover what it is that triggers and maintains your creative juices. What's your best time of day? The best environment? Do you need to be alone, with others, or alone in the midst of others? Think about it! It matters. Do you need silence or background noise? Build a profile of your creativity state, then make time and space for it on a regular basis instead of waiting for some divine creative intervention.

2. Cultivate the habit of dreaming. Pay attention to your life experiences and allow yourself to dream, day and night. Pay attention to your dreams. Creative people are habitual dreamers. The problem is not how to find creative thoughts but how to sort them out once they bombard you from every crevice of your life. People new to the creative process are often stunned and the quantity and quality of new ideas coming to them, daily, hourly, in vivid and coherent detail. Learn to let these dreams run, then use them, creatively.

3. Ask yourself "What if?" and "What else?" and "How else?" As the habit of dreaming becomes part of your life, the first thoughts are often gratifying and seductive. The next part of the creative discipline, so to speak, is to ask yourself those next questions: what if, what else, and how else could I look this idea? Go beyond those delectable first thoughts and create more and more different ideas.

4. Whenyou hit a problem, pretend your usual solution is not available. This can work in many different ways. If your PC crashes today, how else might you do your work? If you usually argue face to face, what would happen if you wrote your feelings down instead? Some solutions may be no better than the ones you're used to: others may offer you brilliant new opportunities. Do something different.

5. See how many different results you can get with the same ingredients. Successful corporations and artists alike use this tool. Being creative is not just about new ideas, it may be about new treatments of old ideas.

6. Break routines. Routines bring order and sanity into our lives. Artists and all creative types are often unfairly tagged as "unstable" because the cultivate the habit, or at least the image, of unpredictability, sometimes chaos. Chaotic lives are not required for creativity. In fact it may be argued that some of the most revered artists were very disciplined and conservative outside of their art. Read the life stories of William Shakespeare, Pablo Picasso, Beethoven, and others. These were not crazy rock-stars with smashed guitars. These were working artists, and who can argue their success?

Have fun being creative. Do things differently to generate more creativity. Creativity feels wonderful no matter what the source, or end result, or area of creativity. A creative can be pianist or a painter, a business planner or bartender. If you have found that your progress to success or the outcomes you desire has been blocked or gone stagnant from lack of creative, then think about what you need to do to be more creative, then do it.