How To Improve Your Creativity – Scientifically Proven Ways

Myron Scholes, winner of Nobel prize in Economics, and professor emeritus at Stanford Graduate School of Business, attributes his creativity to time spent not working. In this, how to improve your creativity and become more successful, hinges on striking the right balance between focus and concentration, and making time to not concentrate, and engage in a broad array of activities like playing golf or walking. Upshot to, you increase your capacity to connect dots in brilliant ways and develop innovative solutions to problems.

Rest Is Crucial For Creative Thinking

To continue with, purposefully letting the mind wander and daydream tends to draw in new ideas.¹ Buttressing further, you incline to do better if you work first on an easy task that promotes mind-wandering and then go back to the challenging task. Rest is crucial for creative thinking. When we engage in relaxed mind-wandering and keep aside the “to-do” list, when we engage in idle pastimes, when we give ourselves the space to be quiet and still, when we find some time to have some fun, we become more imaginative and visionary.

Contrary to, obsessive seven-days-a-week constant focus on a problem dampens your chances of discovering a great creative insight or idea. Truth to note with, cultivating the flexibility to shift between focus and leisure, in rotation, according to circumstances, promotes creativity. In plain, a wandering open mind unconstrained by logic facilitates creative insights and inventions.

How To Access Your Potential For Creativity, How To Improve Your Creativity, Spotlights

1. Are You Diversifying With Mindless Tasks?

Inserting fifteen minute periods of more mindless and less-focused activity like taking a shower or going for a quick walk, in between time spent assimilating information and working on a task, broadens your attention. When your attention broadens, it becomes easier for your mind to make more creative connections between ideas. From this, it pays to organise your work day schedule in way that alternates highly focused demanding tasks with more mindless ones.²

What is more, how to improve your creativity, starts opening up, as you aim to fill at least some part of your day, with less intellectually demanding activities, activities that allow you to partially focus your attention. For a white collar worker, such activities can spotlight as data entry into a spreadsheet or a similar task that gets you into a rhythm and routine where you are only partly focused. Surfing Facebook or reading a magazine are not in this category since they require a great deal of concentration.

2. How Are You Broadening Your Intellectual And Experiential Horizon?

Putting ourselves in new experiences that disrupt our usual way of life and open us to different perspectives, makes us more mentally flexible or creative. Such experiences include studying abroad for a student, reading widely outside your academic or professional field. This attitude enables you to creatively apply principles from other disciplines.

Taken together, apply some diversification, not complete diversification or overconcentration. Adjunct to, there features a ten percent increased likelihood that someone will solve a problem if his or her expertise is completely outside the problem’s field.³

3. When Last Did You Make Time For Stillness And Silence

Stillness and silence feature as another form of diversifying. Instead of being in motion, rushing from one place to another, we are still. Pico Iyer, bestselling novelist and journalist for the New York Times magazine, credits stillness and introspection, for boosts in his creativity. According to him, stillness moves him. He believes that the depth of his writing correlates with the depth of his stillness.⁴

Further with, silence removes us from the bustle of society, priming us to think outside the box. Ways that lead us back to stillness, spotlight as meditation, hikes, sailing, Internet sabbath, breathing exercises, walking. Oftentimes, creating stillness around a problem, opens us to new perspectives and enables us to understand how unconnected things fit together. How to improve your creativity savours of this. Again, observing some quiet time undisturbed by other stimulation, information or distraction, promotes the creative process. As a result, we come up with new ways of thinking about and doing things.

4. What Are You Doing To Invite Fun And Happiness Back Into Your Life

A lightness of personality, a quick smile, an easy sense of humour, a childlike quality and a playfulness about your curiosity and enthusiasm, all reflect fun. Having fun enables us to access our innate creativity. Filling idle time with fun, playful activities and games, helps us to feel happy, forget our worries, and be in the moment. Playful activities stimulate positive emotions that lead to greater insights and better problem solving. Feeling good increases our ability to pay attention to a wider range of experiences. As a result, we see the big picture, instead of getting bogged down in the details.

Of the same piece with, Google’s Zurich office boasts of a fireman’s pole that gets you from floor to floor, instead of walking places. Joy and fun make you more creative. Creativity invites more joy into your life.

How to improve your creativity centers on self-care and fun activities that open you to greater creative insights. The heightened levels of well-being derived from alternating between focused work and less-intellectually demanding activities, diversifying your activities, finding time for silence and play, contributes to your creativity and success.

Notes

1. Interview with Scott Barry Kaufman, February 5, 2014, in the “Happiness Track,” Emma Seppala, 56.

2. Kimberly D. Elsbach and Andrew B Hargadon, “Enhancing Creativity Through ‘Mindless’ Work: A Framework of Workday Design,” Organization Science 17, no 4 (2006): 470–83

3. Emma Seppala, Ph.D, “The Happiness Track” (New York:HarperOne), 61.

4. Ibid., 62.