5 Simple Ways to Unleash Your Creative Potential

A few tips to keep your creative juices flowing at all times.

Creativity is an integral part of every innovator. It doesn’t matter whether you’re an Artist, Engineer, Physician or a Lawyer. Creativity lies in in the art of doing things and is not restricted to specific people alone. In this post, I’m going to share a few techniques that will help you sustain great levels of creativity to keep your innovations levels high in whatever it is that you’re doing.

Innovation time in your daily schedule

The way people work today has drastically changed, shaping up dynamic workplaces that promote active collaboration amongst individuals. This creates a challenge to everyone for having their own time to innovate. When there are too many interruptions during a day, it becomes hard to be creative for a sustained period of time. To solve this, have a specific period during the day, where you are able to get into your zone of thoughts and engage in a flow state to help boost the creativity process. Having the time to focus is the first step to unblock yourself, and is a crucial step if your work involves a lot of deliberate creativity.

Pause and Play

Maybe there is a hard deadline. Maybe you feel you’re so close to the solution. But when things aren’t moving, learn to stop. Pushing too much on something when you’re brain feels drained is most likely going to end up sending you in circles. Take a short break, or stop for the day. Give your brain some rest and time to recoup. Do your best not to think about the problem while you’re away. Otherwise, its as good as continuing to work on it. Come back and give it another shot and you’re most likely to cross the hurdle quickly. Remember, its the forgetting about the problem momentarily that helps solve it. This pattern is very well known, but the art of it lies in learning when to pause and play.

Sometimes, it’s also interesting how the brain snaps a quick solution to the problem, while you’ve actually decided to pause. This is called spontaneous creativity which can be cognitive or emotional in nature, depending on what triggers it.

Sound matters

The brain is constantly processing information through the different sensory inputs in the human body. When you’re forcing yourself into a creative thought process, you’re trying to get your brain to engage in deliberate creative activity. This works best when the sensory inputs don’t pick up signals that will cause distractions to this creative thought process, which might in turn lead to creative blocks. Therefore, sound really matters.

For most people, music helps focus. Thinking about it, if picking up signals can become distractions, how does it actually help focus? The brain can actually perform only one activity at a given time. When there are a lot of signals in the music that the brain has to process, such as lyrics, loud patterns, etc. this ends up creating distractions. However, when there is more ambient or pleasant music or patterns that don’t demand too much processing from the brain, they eventually get ignored (treated more like the environment around you) and become ambient to the thought process itself. This way, it helps to cut out everything else that’s happening around and creates a sense of amplification in the focus for the creative thought process. If you like music, there are many apps that provide music to focus on work or study. There are some apps like Noizio, which help simluate a particular environment that helps your brain induce a flow state.

For a few people, music actually becomes a distraction, no matter how it is. If that’s the case, ensure there isn’t to much noise around you, or just plug in a pair of headsets that cancel out the ambient noise around you.

Zero stress is unproductive too

Ever seen the creativity graph? This is a nice depiction in one of Austin Kleon’s book.

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Notice how creativity is actually quite low when there is almost zero stress or extremely high stress. Its actually true that when there is no stress at all, the motivation to keep imagining is so high that it takes one quite far away from the practicality of the thought process. Work towards having a fine balance of the commitments you make and see how it creates a kind of velocity for your creative thought process. Eventually it’ll help you get the sense of how much is too much and that will help you stay away from creative blocks.

Have time to reflect

The brain is a unique part of the body. It is a vital organ that has to function for a purpose and some of those purposes are to keep itself healthy and sane. Many artists like to move to a different physical space sometimes to ponder over their recent work and in search for inspiration. It’s not just artists, but it tends to help anyone who involves themselves in a creative process over a period of time. When you do something repetitively, the brain is so engaged with that approach and finds it hard to look at it from “out of the box”. Since it has the responsibility of challenging itself, we have to help it disengage when required. After a long haul, taking a break and doing something very different that helps the brain to disengage. During this period, the mind automatically ponders over the recent activities, which tends to create realizations that are useful to self correct our approaches.