7 Ways to Push Your Creativity Levels to the Max!

How do you challenge yourself to greater creativity?  What do you do to push yourself, not just to achieve more but to master your business/art/relationships/self? In an effort to push my creative levels, I decided to sit down and write out 7 ways to push your creative levels to the max. I decided to do this without any prior googling (research) or in any particular order of importance. Here goes:

1. Challenge Yourself. Do something you have never done before. Take a new class in an area drastically different then what you are used to. 

2. Limit Yourself. I do this when I paint. I try to limit myself to just a few colors or bits of ephemera in my collages. Otherwise, I get overwhelmed and eventually blocked. If you do #1, do it in a set about of time, be it one hour, one week, one month, etc.

3. Don't think. This doesn't mean don't use your brain but we can over analyze everything. Do what I am doing with this 7 things exercise and just be spontaneous. You might be surprised how much you really do know.

4. Break the rules. If you try to be creative and color inside the lines you might get stuck and/or be completely bored. New discoveries come when you do what is not supposed to be done. 

5. Stick to the rules. OK, this goes against #4 but I can break my own rule not to follow the rules by following them can't I? This is similar to #2 where you limit yourself. Instead of limiting your resources, pick the a few rules in a certain areas and apply new ideas to them. 

6. Be random. Explore new thoughts in diverse fields and apply them to your field or area of interest. I like to go to a magazine rack and pick a few random magazines and read random articles to see what this can spark for me. You can do this online with sites like popurl.com and alltop.com.

7. Be disciplined. The best thinkers on creativity seem to advocate that you do whatever it is you do every day! Start early. Work at a specific time everyday. This technique seems easier when you don't insist on an outcome. This always stymies me. Trust the process and let your creativity flow but allow it do so on a schedule too. 

As I sat down to write these 7 ways to push your creativity levels to the maximum, I was a bit worried I would get stuck halfway through. I didn't. Whew. Actually, I could have written more or broken up various points into smaller chunks and so on. Put my goal was 7 so here they are. Share with me your thoughts or additional creativity maximizers by clicking the comment link or sending me a tweet at http://www.twitter.com/thirstyfishinfo

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Is your brain operating at its creative best?

Image via Wikipedia

This article sounds like the old left brain/right brain discussion that has been around for a long time. I guess it is still of interest to everyone in trying to increase personal and professional performance. Take a look at the book for more in-depth exercises and creativity tools.

clipped from www.problogger.net At a recent conference, Harvard psychologist Shelley Carson spoke on harnessing your brain state for optimum creativity. Carson is an expert on creativity research and the author of Your Creative Brain: Seven Steps to Maximize Imagination, Productivity, and Innovation in Your Life (aff). The Deliberate Pathway The deliberate pathway handles problem solving, planning, reasoning. You use this pathway when you’re actively focused on a problem or task. For those interested in brain anatomy, this pathway primarily uses the prefrontal cortex, the most frontal portion the brain. The Spontaneous Pathway The spontaneous pathway, on the other hand, comes into play during idea incubation, immersion, and free association. You’re in this brain state when you defocus your attention: when you’re sleeping, in the shower, in a boring meeting, etc. The spontaneous pathway uses posterior portions of the brain.

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Why do we dream at night?

Have you ever had an important meeting scheduled for the next day and you spent the night before dreaming anxious dreams. This happened to me a while back and it certainly isn't out of the ordinary (I hope). As the research below describes, we dream to process the events of our day and the day to follow. It is the brains way of sorting what should be kept and what should be gotten rid of. Read on for a great synopsis about our dream life.

clipped from scienceblogs.com While we're fast asleep, the mind is sifting through the helter-skelter of the day, trying to figure out what we need to remember and what we can afford to forget. Unfortunately for me, there's increasing evidence that our dreams are not neural babble, but are instead layered with significance and substance. The narratives that seem so incomprehensible -- why was I running through the airport in my underwear? -- are actually careful distillations of experience, a regurgitation of all the new ideas and insights we encounter during the day. the mind is sifting through the helter-skelter of the day, trying to figure out what we need to remember and what we can afford to forget. In recent years, scientists have discovered that R.E.M. sleep isn't just essential for the formation of long-term memories: it might also be an essential component of creativity.

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Is life really a game? Not if your emotions have a say!

Image by AndyWilson via Flickr

One of my fav reads is "The Frontal Cortex". Today's post is by Johan Lehrer. He is a contributing editor at Wired. He's also written for The New Yorker, Seed, Nature, and the New York Times and is a contributor to Radiolab. He's the author of Proust Was A Neuroscientist. His new book is How We Decide. He takes a look at our common assumption that life is a "game" or more specifically the application of "game theory." Many marketers and business folks use this metaphor to describe themselves and the fields they are in. But is it a true understanding about competition and performance? Yes and No says Lehrer. Games have rules and rules are rational. Our emotions over rule the rules causing a strict application of games to work and life to be inadequate. Read on...

clipped from thirstyfishinfo.amplify.com One of the lingering questions in decision science is the extent to which game theory - an abstract theory about how people can maximize their outcomes in simple interactions - is actually valid. It's a lovely idea, but does it actually describe human nature? As usual, the answer depends. With few exceptions, lab tests of game theory find that real human beings sharply deviate from the predictions of game theory. We don't maximize gain, often because of misperceptions about risk. But people have actually performed better in the field. Wouldn't natural selection want to endow us with a mind capable of maximizing competitive outcomes? One possibility is that failing at game theory is the price we pay for having emotions. an inexplicable feeling - a judgment of risk we can't justify - interferes with the rational calculation emotions might lead us to do many silly and stupid thing also amazingly effective tools when it comes to quickly evaluating the world Amplify'd fromscienceblogs.com

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