10 tips to develop your learning and creativity
During childhood, we are given gifts such as books to paint, plasticine, books, Legos, bicycles, memory games, among others. Everything so that we can develop our creativity and our cognitive skills such as memory, motor skills, attention, perception and executive skills. We reach teenagers and most of them receive clothes, clothes and more clothes. The point I wanted to talk about today that contributed to our success and happiness is to remain eternal learners.
In the month of December, I introduced the first area of the game of life. In the game of life, there are 8 areas that I focus on in my Health Coaching Program. Learning and creativity is the second area that I come to talk to you about.
“Once you stop learning, you start dying.” Albert Einstein
Being a lifelong learner
What is it?
Lifelong learning is the “ongoing, voluntary, and self-motivated” pursuit of knowledge for either personal or professional reasons. Commission of the European Communities: “Adult learning: It is never too late to learn”. COM(2006) 614 final. Brussels, 23.10.2006.
Why is it important?
According to the European Commission report, constant learning increases competitiveness and individual employability, but also for social inclusion, active citizenship and personal development. This means that people who seek to learn continually new things are more successful in their career, and happier because they are more integrated into society and because you are more satisfied with yourself internally.
It is important for an individual’s competitiveness and employability, but also enhances social inclusion, active citizenship, and personal development. Commission of the European Communities: “Adult learning: It is never too late to learn”. COM(2006) 614 final. Brussels, 23.10.2006.
To continue learning, you have to believe that you can do it, you have to believe that we are not born with a fixed intelligence, but that it is expansive if we feed it in the right way.
Carol S. Dweck, concluded in a study that generally, growth-minded people experience greater well-being because their perception of failure and challenges has decreased anxiety.
According to the theory, students with a fixed mindset believe their talents are innate gifts, and tend to attach more importance to validating their ability and avoiding challenges because high levels of effort and setbacks are seen as signaling low ability. On the contrary, students with a growth mindset consider the ability to be malleable, and will strive to develop it by setting challenging learning goals. They consider effort an inherent part of the learning process and setbacks to be fruitful experiences to assimilate. Therefore, students with a growth mindset may outperform their fixed mindset peers because they expend efforts to reach their full potential instead of remaining in their comfort zone. Students with a growth mindset may also experience heightened well-being since their positive conception of failure and potentially decrease anxiety (Dweck and Yeager, 2019).
In this report, you can read that on average, students with an open mind for learning (people who disagree that intelligence is something in us that cannot change) do better in the areas of reading, maths and science. For this same group, the study also showed that they had a lower level of fear and greater satisfaction with life.
Several studies have concluded that people with a learning mindset are more successful in their careers and experience a higher level of well-being.
My experience
From an early age, I was a person who thought I wasn’t smart. I compared myself with my two brothers, where one got great grades because he studied, and the other didn’t study much but also managed to get good grades. He saw me as the one who studied but never managed to get good grades. This made him believe for a long time that he was not born intelligent and would have to live with it. I don’t know exactly when I clicked to change this perspective. I believe it was a set of factors that over the last 5 years mainly made me start to change my fixed mentality and move towards one of growth.
The fact that I managed to be one of the best students in my course at college, made me begin to realize that I was capable. Starting to train CrossFit made me show that I could be strong (I wasn’t even close to the strongest in training, but it was much more than myself from the previous year). My boyfriend helped me to break the association between failure and something negative, showing me that it is simply part of the process. Mindset: the new psychology of success led me to reflect on the potential we create when we change the way we think about ourselves.
Believing that I didn’t have to be born with the aptitude for blog posts, YouTube videos or social media marketing decrease de level of fear of failure and to be more compassionate when it happens. If I hadn’t changed my childhood mindset, I wouldn’t have given myself the opportunity to be a health coach.
10 Tips and Exercises to Foster Learning and Creativity
- Think of something in your house that bothers you. Use this as an opportunity to put your creativity, innovation, and improvement to the test and spend 15 minutes thinking about how you could solve or minimize this. For example: You can rearrange the furniture, you can put small boxes in the drawers to improve the organization, you can clean and throw away or give away things you no longer use, etc.
- Reflect on any problem you have and think about possible solutions, write at least 10 options, even if you encounter some problems with these solutions. Allow yourself to write solutions that may at first seem ridiculous.
- Give yourself 90 seconds to think of the maximum number of possible uses for clips or napkins or salt. Share this exercise with your friends and challenge them to do the same. You can share your number on Instagram with #desafiocreatividade.
4. When you are in a conversation where you have a different perspective than the other person, force yourself to put yourself in the other person’s shoes and think from their perspective.
5. After reading a book or watching a series, film, documentary or podcast, reflect on it. What did you learn, and how could you apply it in your life? What concerns could be partially or fully resolved? You can use the Notion template I created for those who subscribe on the site.
6. Give yourself time to be bored. Watch this video about the benefits of being bored.
7. Make time to reflect on your life, for example through daily or weekly journaling. You can use the Notion template or the pdf version I created for those who subscribe on the site.
8. Several studies have already proven that meditation can increase neuroplasticity, which is the connection between neurons. This increased connection helps connect dots that might otherwise appear to be unrelated, which can lead to new solutions.
9. You can participate in activities such as exit games to solve practical challenges, thus encouraging creativity.
10. Define and plan goals. This helps you to understand what you value in your life and why, and to think about how you can achieve what you want. You can do this alone, with a friend, or with a coach.
Some of these exercises are to be done in 15 minutes and the benefits can be immediate, but they will not make you an eternal learner, they will help you to want to be one. Other tips are for a long-term focus and therefore what you gain from them will also be long-term, and these are the ones that will help you create a more internal and lasting change.
Coach Corner
What does learning and creativity mean to you?
Do you consider yourself a creative person?
What kind of expression and creative activities do you invest time in your life?
What kind of learning activities in personal development or in some other area of interest do you spend time?
Which benefits in your life do you see with these activities?
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