Charm FX

If you are feeling off your game or you’ve lost your edge it’s likely an issue of creativity. When you don’t see solutions or strategies or processes in the circumstances you’re confronted with, you need to exercise your ability to see situations and resources from more perspectives than the tried and true. When the tried and true don’t work, you need creativity!

Some focus on attitude or tell you to think outside the box, but when you’re stuck that’s precisely what you’re having trouble doing. The following are practical, actionable suggestions I try to incorporate as often as possible into my day.

• Work on puzzles when you have “dead time”…on the train or bus, eating, bathroom or other “in between” time.  Puzzles force you to consider multiple possibilities.  Try puzzles you aren’t necessarily good at too.  If it’s hard for you, it’s better for your brain and encourages plasticity in your thinking.  I wouldn’t try puzzles you simply can’t do, but ones that you may have to work at.  You want to have the reward of progressing and solving at least some part of it to help you reinforce the skills you’re exercising.
• Take a break. Nothing inhibits creativity more than stress so if you’ve gotten yourself stressed out, take a walk or meditate or sit down and have a cup of tea or something.  Exercise is a good way to take a break because it also challenges your body which encourages blood flow to your brain.
• Change your routines. Routines are often good things and we fall into them to make regular responsibilities more manageable.  Having said that, it’s also easy to depend on them too much.  If you find yourself not reconsidering circumstances or missing opportunities it might be worth just taking a different route to work or school, changing the time of day you go to the grocery store or library.  You may be surprised by who you meet or what changes when you go about your business by a different route.
• Try keeping a journal by your bedside for recording thoughts just before or after sleep.  This doesn’t work for everyone, but some have their best thinking before they go to bed or after they wake.  Without writing things down these thoughts can get lost.  Also, putting things on paper before you go to bed may help you sleep a bit better by getting them off your mind until you wake up.
• Some of us aren’t very social.  Some are extremely social. If you’re trying to enhance your creative insight you may need to try the opposite of what’s comfortable for you.  If you’re typically very social you may be getting distracted by the amount of time you’re spending socializing so give yourself some time alone.  If you’re not usually a very social person, maybe it’s time to put yourself in more social situations by joining a class or exercise group or just finding something you’re interested in doing regularly where there are a larger number of people.
• Clean up your personal space. Have you permitted a lot of clutter to dominate your living space?  If “things” have accumulated over the years, for whatever reason, and they’re impacting how you navigate your space, it’s time to make some decisions and clear it out.  Sometimes this is psychologically something that unburdens us and is enough to give us “room” to think in broader terms.
• Experiment! When you have a new project don’t simply try what you know will work.  Give yourself a few options and explore the pros and cons of all of them.  Try pieces of all of them to see if what actually results may produce a better result than your initial response.

Other practices include:

• keeping a notebook with you at all times.
• keep fragments of interesting items you’ve come across nearby on a window sill or desk top.  Things like stones or feathers or plants, broken bits of pottery or anything that strikes you as visually, texturally or even audibly interesting offer you a difference from your regular environment.

There are plenty of ways to stimulate your creativity and problem solving abilities.  Many have to do with forcing yourself to do things differently or to learn new things.

Please add your own suggestions in the comments below.

Related posts:

1. Creativity requires an inventory