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Enhance Your Creative Thinking Skills
Seven Tips for Developing Your Creative Thinking Skills
• Know yourself. When is your best time to be creative? How do you do your best thinking? Is it a desk, pen in hand? Or is it during daydreaming when you're away from your job or regular routine? Do ideas jump at you when driving on long trips? Or does stimulation come in social conversation? You need to understand your own personal cycle.
• Keep a notebook handy. To capture those creative ideas when they come, make it a habit to keep a notebook on you, near your places of work or relaxation, and by your bedside. A recording device is handy for creative thoughts that come when paper and pen aren't at hand. Many cell phones and digital cameras have the ability to record messages into them. Then you can transfer then later to a notebook you keep for your creative ideas.
Creative ideas can be elusive and transient. Commit them to writing as soon as they appear. Keep a notepad by your bedside in case you wake up with a great idea in the middle of the night.
• Delay criticism. Resist the urge to critique your new idea while mulling it over and writing it down. Nothing will inhibit the creative process more than being critical of a new idea when it first emerges. This doesn't mean that criticism, judgment and evaluation have no place in the generation of new ideas, but they should come into play only at the conclusion of the creative process when an objective assessment is called for.
• Be patient. Realize idea development does not always go smoothly. Sometimes many false starts and blind alleys mark the process. Sometimes nothing short of dogged persistence will succeed in clearing away obstacles to success. Recognize that the creative process generally goes through four cycles: Preparation - the conscious attempt to understand and deal with some personal need ; incubation - sleep on it, leave it for some other task; enlightenment or insight - break through to a new understanding; and discovery - energy to realize the creative idea - the validation or implementation stage.
• Note your successes. Record your conclusions or opinions on problems you have been thinking about. You may have spent hours, days, even weeks looking at a problem that you've reached a good conclusion on. Make note of it as the problem may recur in the same or a different form.
• Be aware. Make a conscious effort to note how others have solved problems. Keep clippings from newspapers, magazines, etc., things of interest with this information. Though the problem itself may not be similar to yours, the process or principle used in solving the problem may be applicable.
• Train your mind for problem solving. Set a quota for yourself. For example, commit to finding three ways to do something. When you get good at that, raise your quota to five, and so on. Before long, you will notice that when a problem presents itself, your mind will automatically run through many different ways of handling it.
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