David Kelley: How to build your creative confidence

 How to build your creative confidence...
"Creativity is the last remaining competitive advantage for businesses today" - Todd Sampson

7 Easy Ways to Stimulate and Get That Creative Juice Flowing

Creativity - if only it were a pill we can take every time we are in dire need of it. But it isn't and it can be frustrating when our brains are as blank as the white sheet in front of us after an hour of waiting for an idea to pop up.

There are a number of things that stifle creative juices from flowing and doing things to stimulate creativity is just as important as avoiding things that stifle it. However, be assured of one thing, you can be creative if you will set your mind free to innovate, be it solutions, inventions, or artistic creations. The key is not to force your mind but to liberate it.

So here are 7 ways you can try to stimulate creativity by liberating yourself to think freely.

#1 Break the Routine

Routines are good because they help us do things faster in an organised fashion, but routines can stifle creativity. Like when you go to the same restaurant everyday, don't bother to look at the menu, and order the same thing. If you want to get your mental juices flowing, break out of your routine once in a while. There are a trillion ways to do this.

Go out of your office and bring your laptop to the park. Take a different route to work. Put on your clothes on with a different sequence. Wear a color you don't like. Eat something you've never tasted. Or go on vacation to a place you've never been.

Think of something out of the box or out of your comfort zone. The point is to allow yourself to see things in a different way, to realise possibilities, and to discover something refreshing.

What routines can you break this week? Have fun and creative in breaking them.

#2 Chill Out and Relax Your Brain

Do you keep a small notebook in your pocket? One comes handy when bright ideas pop up during the weirdest times of the day. Don't you just love how they come when you least expect them? When your mind is at ease and your subconscious is free to fly, you are most receptive to creative ideas. Doing things that relax our brain helps our imagination fly.

Feeling stuck up? Listen to good music. Music stimulates the part of our brain in charge of our emotions and creativity. Feeling choked inside your office, take a walk along a river or somewhere where there's water. The view and sound of water is known to having a soothing and relaxing effect.

#3 Exercise and Recreate

Feeling pressured? Play an enjoyable game or go on a 20-minute high intensity workout. Physical activity loosens up our body and our minds as well. There's actually a study that shows a positive correlation between regular exercise and creative performance.

Another great creativity booster is laughter. It is not only the best medicine for sickness, it is also a great prescription for creativity block because it helps get rid of stress, which in turn stifles creativity.

#4 Change Your Perspective

Much creativity and insights can be gained not only from others' creative ideas but also from simple people we meet every day. By looking through other people's eyes, we gain new perspective on things.

When was the last time you had a meaningful chat with a child or an elderly person? Was your attention called to something you would never have noticed in a thousand years? Getting to know people from different walks of life is a treasure chest for inspiration. Have a meaningful conversation with one person per day. Or simply listen to the people you meet along the way, and try to find something you can takeaway from your conversations.

Then there's also social media and the Internet where you can test an idea... get a conversation running... just by posting a mind-boggling question or even a survey as your status, tweet, or blog entry. Or go ask a select few through a closed Facebook group.

And as you go along, try to challenge old ways of thinking. Always keep yourself open to other people's perspective.

#5 Try a Fun Mental Exercise

Imagine you were tasked to lead a sales team to market air-cooling units in Alaska, how will you sell them? Think of something impossible to do and brainstorm how to make that thing possible. Think of as many uses as you can for human hair, or a pencil, a water tumbler, etc. Mental exercises like these train our brains to think out of the box. It is also a great team building activity.

#6 Surround Yourself with Inspiration

Some have a creativity room while others have an inspiration wall. The idea is to collect items and photos of things that inspire you and help stir up your imagination. If you are more auditory than visual, perhaps you can have a creativity playlist that gets your creative juices flowing.

Best of all, surround yourself with people who inspire you. There is something about hanging out with people who are on fire and driven with a passion for life. This is why choosing a mentor (or mentors) is important. Do you listen to tutorial CDs and read books by people who are successful in the field you have chosen? People with similar passions have the power to inspire and get your stirred up, and the wealth of experience this mentor or coach shares can trigger a wealth of ideas and strategies applicable to your journey.

Remember there are countless webinars available for free, and so are "mastery" groups you can join. Find one and get encouragement, inspiration, and lessons from determined people like you who are also serious about pursuing their dreams.

#7 Let It Flow

After you're done preparing for your brainstorming session or whatever it is you need creativity for, the next step is to be candid with your ideas and list them all down. If you think creative geniuses always get it the first time, or the fifth time, you're badly mistaken. The most potent creative sparks come from a long list of ideas that are either too boring or too silly. If you are writing something, start writing freestyle. Don't think of grammar, syntax, artistry, or what have you. Just write anything that flows out of your hand. The secret to finding an explosive idea is a willingness to explore and keep exploring.

Images are courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net

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Metaphorical Thinking

Using Comparisons to Express Ideas and Solve Problems

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© iStockphoto/alexs

"Time is money." How often have heard that statement? Probably many times and in various contexts. By thinking about time as money, you can create some powerful images. Time wasted is money down the drain. Time well spent is an investment. The seconds are ticking away.

A direct comparison between two unrelated or indirectly linked things is called a metaphor. And as we see in the example of "time is money", metaphors can create strong images that can be used to great effect in everyday communications and thinking. The manager who stands up in front of his team and says, "We need to finish this work quickly", creates considerably less impact that the manager who opens his comments using the metaphor: "As we all know, time is money."

The English language is littered with metaphors, and this is testimony to the their power.

So metaphors can be used to improve communications: They can add impact or can help you explain a difficult concept by association with a more familiar one. Metaphorical thinking can also be used to help solve problems: Use and extend metaphors to generate new ideas for solutions.

Metaphor tips 
The simple metaphor format is "A is B", as in "time is money". Metaphors can also be indirect or implicit: "That's a half-baked idea". This metaphor compares ideas with part-cooked food – without mentioning the food!

And, by the way, metaphors sometimes get mistaken for "similes". A simile makes a comparison too, but uses the word 'like', as in "time is like money"; "the idea is like half-baked food". Similes often sound more powerful than metaphors, even if the idea is the same.

Explaining Complex Ideas

By associating an unfamiliar idea with one that is commonplace, you can spark better understanding of complex ideas. Let's say you want to explain the concept of the business cycle. You could use lots of words, definitions, and drone on for five or ten minutes leaving the audience bored and confused. Then you could use graphs and diagrams, to help improve understanding and interest.

Or, you could explain using a metaphor: The business cycle is a pendulum, swinging back and forth from peaks of prosperity, down through economic troughs, and back up again.

The metaphor captures the essence of the business cycle – the listener immediately relates to the continuous back and forth movement. The vivid image helps people understand and also remember the idea. So, simply and in just a few words, everyone suddenly "gets it": To use another metaphor, the light bulb suddenly goes on.

Creating Impact

Metaphors are great for creating impact and making something memorable. So making use of them is a technique often used in marketing and advertising. But it's just as effective for making impact in your presentations, speeches and even in everyday discussions.

With metaphors, you help people get the idea quickly and efficiently. Here's a marketing example: In a pitch to sell a vacuum cleaner, you could go on and on about how great the new cleaner is and why people should buy it. But, see how much more impact can you create with metaphors: "This vacuum cleaner is so powerful, it can suck the light out of a black hole". The vivid image helps your product and pitch stand out, and so can help you make that sale.

Tip:
Make sure your metaphors are understandable to your audience. If there's any risk that your metaphors will sound like jargon, think again. The secret is to use a metaphor that instantly rings true with your audience.

Communication

1. Identify what you are trying to communicate.
2. Determine the essence of the message.
3. Think of other instances in life where that same characteristic, idea, emotion, state, etc. applies.
4. There may be many metaphors for the situation you are describing – choose the one that will best relate to your audience.

Thinking Outside the Box

When you use a metaphor to link two ideas together, you are combining elements that have little or no logical connection. By breaking the rules of logic in this way, metaphors can open up the creative side of the brain – the part that is stimulated by images, ideas, and concepts. So metaphorical thinking can help you with creative problem solving: To use another famous metaphor, it helps you "think outside the box".

Take the problem of how to cut production costs. You could attack the problem logically, and research new technologies or analyze inefficiencies in the production process. You might come up with some cost saving, but will you hit the jackpot?

Problem solving often starts with brainstorming and bouncing ideas back and forth with your team. Brainstorming is great for getting the creative juices flowing; it can open up a floodgate of ideas (. more metaphors!) However, people may still be constrained by the images they have of the current problem, or by their preconceived notions about the potential solutions.

When using metaphors for solving problems, you link the problem to something seemingly unrelated. Doing this allows your brain to see the issue from a completely different perspective – one that you may not even have known existed. If the problem is how to cut production costs, you could use the metaphor of someone wanting to lose weight. The next step is to generate solution to the problem of losing weight rather than the problem of shedding production costs. As you identify various solutions to the metaphorical problem, you can then relate these back to the real problem. Chances are, you will come up with something creative ideas for solutions.

Here are the steps for using metaphorical problem solving, using our product costs example:

1. First identify the metaphor for your problem or challenge.
2. There's no "right metaphor" – the ideas can be as unrelated as you like. If the problem involves increasing something, make sure the metaphor relates to an increase as well, otherwise it can become too difficult to visualize.
3. Increase sales > Build larger muscles
   Decrease recruitment costs > Lower the price of bread
   Attract more investors > Harvest more corn
4. So here's the metaphor of our example:
5. Problem: Cut production costs
   Metaphor: Lose weight
2. Now it's time to generate solution ideas for the metaphorical problem, in this case, losing weight. Brainstorming is a good way to facilitate this.
   
   • Count calories
   • Exercise
   • Monitor food intake
   • Limit intake of certain food categories
   • Fill up on low calorie foods
   • Drink lots of water
   • Join a slimming club
3. Then, the next step is to see how the solution ideas for the metaphorical problem might relate back to the real problem:

Solution ideas for the metaphorical problem	Solutions ideas relating back to the real problem
Count calories	Control expenditure on inputs
Exercise to burn calories	Use up all of their inputs (recycle, remanufacture, etc.)
Monitor food intake	Control inputs
Limit intake of certain food categories	Save costs by carefully choosing certain suppliers
Fill up on low calorie food	Find low cost substitutes
Drink lots of water	Flush out duplicate processes
Join a slimming club	Share ideas and support with other similar departments

Tip:
Don't get too hung up on how well the metaphorical solution ideas map back. Metaphors that map too well can stifle the creativity you are trying to generate! The whole idea is to generate solutions ideas that you may not have otherwise thought of, so just let the ideas flow without too much scrutiny.

4. Use the solution ideas you have generated for the metaphorical problem to find a workable solution to the real problem.

Key Points

Metaphors are powerful shortcuts to instant and memorable understanding. They evoke vivid images and allow us to "see" things from a new perspective, and so are useful tools for creative problem solving. Use metaphorical thinking to help explain complex ideas, create impact in your presentations, and think outside the box.

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