Leadership and innovation coach Tanja Yardley offers a few tips to jumpstart creative thinking—most importantly, relax, be curious, and have fun. Learn more about how our brains use creative thinking here.
Episode Transcript:
Here are some tips for cultivating creative thinking: It’s really important when you’re trying to imagine conceptual and contextual things, and thinking about the future that doesn’t yet exist. One of the most important factors is that you do your creative work when you’re feeling relaxed and open. Typically, this relaxed and less alert time falls in the afternoon or sometimes in the early evening hours. You want to make sure that you are calm, relaxed, centered, before you start into that work. The other thing that’s important to know is you want to open your auditory focus, so it’s okay to actually play upbeat music in the background. Mood actually plays a big role in creativity—if you’re feeling grumpy or tired or cranky or frustrated, it actually shuts down the parts of your brain that do creative thinking. So, trying to put yourself in a good mood ahead of time can really make a huge difference.
The other thing you want to consider is opening your visual field. Research shows that when you’re in a big space, it actually stimulates more big-picture thinking. While you’re doing creative work, you want to laugh, smile, play, experiment, move your body, and generally just relax and have fun. The other thing that helps to stimulate creative thinking is picking something to be curious about. Once you find something that you’re naturally curious about then you ask yourself, “What else am I curious about? What else, what else, what else?” And sometimes they might be completely disparate things from one another. But the fun part is that you then look for associations between those things—how do they intersect, what do they have in common, who can I talk to about them, and start stacking and stacking and stacking those curiosities on top of each other until you get into a nice creative flow.
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