Kick-start Your Creative Thinking Process
Creative thinking is the process of coming up with new or modified ideas. Most ideas are in fact modifications of something else that exists within your knowledge base. By using imagination, intellect and existing knowledge you can form in your mind a new thought or idea. This is part of your intellectual personality and can be applied to everyday situations. 
(Photo Credit Jef Safi) Your creative thinking ability is built around three human thought processing functions: - Strategy: How you organize and plan your thought processes. Evaluation of thoughts and ideas and future plans based on any given situation or problem.
- Knowledge base: Your acquired information on a group of subjects and problem domains. You draw on this information in order to be able to solve problems or add new thinking to situations.
- Motivation and your attitude: Such factors are often driven by your personality, energy levels, perseverance and your self-confidence which in turn are acquired from a lifetime of experiences and interactions. Motivation and attitude affects the decisions and direction that you take in order to get to a desired result.
Creative thinking is driven by convergent thinking and divergent thinking and every decision that you make in a typical day involves these two components. As humans we are creative but sometimes we fail to fully utilize this skill. Creative thinking reduces stress and can make you more successful. To kick start your creative thinking thought processes... - StartThinking Outside The Box.
- Observe what others do and ask lots of questions as to why they do something in a particular way.
- Read widely - including non-familiar subject areas.
- Look to resolve problems in uniques ways and after first considering how others have solved similar problems.
- Add some colors that inspire creativity to your personal workspace. Being surrounded by colors that elicit positive emotions can be an important catalyst towards creative thinking.
- Look beyond your local environment and see what others are doing.
- Take responsibility for you own personal creative skills development - thanks to the Internet vast amounts of information are readilly available to all.
- View Some Creativity Quotes.
- Have fun - coming up with new and creative ideas to problems can be a fun and enjoyable experience.
- Be passionate - every idea has many reasons why it wont work, if you have passion you will find many ways to offset those reasons.
- Turn things upside down - thinking of how things would behave when turned back to front can often bring new ideas to your problems. When concorde was invented they had a problem in that the pilots couldn't view past the nose. A first idea was to turn the cockpit literally upside down and have the viewing window below the nose - eventually though they came up with a more practical solution i.e. allowing the nose to turn at an angle.
- Look at some of the existing creativity symbols or have a go at designing your own symbol of creativity.
- Be curious - ask questions that others haven't.
- Learn how to use Edward De Bono’s Six Thinking Hats technique.
- Take some inspiration from the one of the most prolific inventors the world has ever seen Thomas Alva Edison.
- Don't restrict creativity to brainstorming sessions only - always ask yourself if things could be done a better way.
- Be flexible and open to new possibilities. Push beyond routine by trying new approaches to familiar daily tasks.
- Be willing to question all assumptions.
- Be aware of the barriers to creativity.
- Start applyingeveryday creativity to your life.
- Adopt a creative personality.
- Realize that you don’t have to be a genius to come up with great ideas and so take steps now to start improving your creativity.
- Start drawing… If you don’t feel your artistic talents are strong enough for this then
click here
for an excellent creative art site. The site offers a wide range of tutorial courses and video on pencil art, including how to do particular studies such as portraits, wildlife, nudes and landscapes.
- Teach creativity to others by giving a creativity lecture.
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