How To Increase Your Creativity (3 Must-Try Strategies) – Improve Your Creativity
There are some things you can do to be more creative in order to make your business solutions more innovative and your life more interesting. First you need to understand what creativity is.
What is creativity?
A lot of people think you are either born with creativity or you are born an analytical and logical person. I have to disagree with that because every book of psychology and everything else I have ever read has taught me this is a skill, like a muscle, you need to continually develop.
When I stopped doing videos for a couple weeks, I came back and could not come up with topics anymore like I had used to. Creativity really is a muscle you need to keep practicing with and if you do not you are going to see the negative effects of it. If you do keep developing it however, there is no ceiling to what you can do and how creative you can get.
What are some techniques I have found throughout the years by reading, implementing and running businesses that allowed me, and people I teach, to become more creative?
Get Enough Sleep
If I do not get enough sleep I cannot be creative because my thoughts feel foggy and I feel like all the roads in my head are being blocked. If I personally do not get eight hours of sleep it kills my creativity, though some people work the opposite. Either I need a lot of adrenaline or I need a lot of sleep.
Procrastination
Procrastination can be bad and good. If you procrastinate a little bit you are actually getting stuck with the idea or process in your head for a long period of time. If you do this too much you can have a lot of stress, though if you do this with one or two things at a time, scientific research shows your brain starts coming up with more solutions.
A study was done that said people who procrastinate on a project a little bit, compared to people who did not procrastinate at all, came up with more creative solutions because they did not just settle on the first idea they came up with.
Every time I do public speaking I tend to prepare last minute. I think about the speaking event for a long time but I do not obsess over it for an excessive amount of time. In the final hours before I speak I come up with a speech that works much better than what I would have come up with if I prepared and rewrote the speech a lot before its presentation.
Visualization
The third tip is to start visualizing what you are going to be doing creatively for the next day. For myself, I noticed that when I think about stuff before bed then I often wake up with the solution. It sounds ridiculous but I suppose that your subconscious helps come up with a solution while you are sleeping. The trick is to think about the fun and creative things you are doing the next day. Professional athletes do this all the time to get the same effects the next day – we can do the same kind of creative work as entrepreneurs.
Getting enough sleep, slightly procrastinating and visualization are all things that can help increase creativity if they are used properly. These three techniques enable me to improve my creativity and I encourage you to think about what you personally need to work on to develop your creativity muscle.
