How to Fire up Your Creative Juices When You Prepare Your Presentation

Your creativity has her favourite places. Meet her there

Photo by Vinicius “amnx” Amano on Unsplash

Enthusiasm is one of the most powerful engines of success. When you do a thing, do it with all your might. Put your whole soul into it. Stamp it with your own personality. Be active, be energetic, be enthusiastic and faithful, and you will accomplish your object. Nothing great was ever achieved without enthusiasm.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Standing in front of a blank piece of paper that you prepare to fill up with content can generate challenging emotions.

You can have a mental block and say to yourself, “Oh, boy, tough job, how do I do this? what will I put on this paper?” Well, this is your left-brain hemisphere talking.

If you have trained your right hemisphere to participate, then in the same situation your thoughts are “Yeeey! What a great opportunity to have some fun!” Your palms tingle in anticipation of exploring that untouched territory of a fresh blank piece of paper freedom to express yourself.

When your creative juices are ‘on fire’, your content comes to life and is memorable.

Creativity is allowing your imagination freedom and applying it to give tangible results.

So, how we can stimulate our imagination to produce fantastic content for presentations?

If you want to build a boat, do not instruct the men to saw wood, stitch the sails, prepare the tools and organize the work, but make them long for setting sail and travel to distant lands.

Antoine De Saint-Exupéry

1. Pick the topic that speaks to you

Find a topic that arouses your imagination and makes ideas flow. Nurture your passion. Feed your curiosity and create ideas that excite you, and you can play with. Read and learn, and become immersed in bright and beautiful ideas.

2. Dive into the creative buzz of inspiring sources

Get into a creative buzz, immerse yourself in your chosen environment. Find inspiring sources.

Discuss your topic with a friend. Even conversations with inspiring people outside that topic can spark insights and trigger new associations in your mind. Follow those routes and bring them into exciting points in your presentation.

Break the monotony of the day by inviting interesting conversation or activities. When you are involved with something different, new and stimulating, you take your brain out of set patterns and stimulate its creative power.

3. Allow your heart to rule your mind.

“Don’t think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It’s self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can’t try to do things. You simply must do things.”

Ray Bradbury

Interrupt analytical thinking, allow yourself to feel the ideas. Allow creativity to take over your whole being!

Take a break from intellectual thinking. Take a shower. Walk the dog. Run. Dance. Do the dishes. Get some fresh air out in the park.

Discover your uniqueness!

I feel most alive and creative after a good run or energized by some weird dance movements on an uplifting beat song. But this is me. You have to find your creative flow.

Discover your own patterns and note them in a journal. Ask yourself:

When do you feel the most alive and have the most ingenious ideas?

What sort of activities trigger creativity inside you?

How do you get into the mindset of ‘anything is possible’.

4. Develop your superpower to create associations

“Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while.”

Steve Jobs

A basis for creativity is linking apparently unrelated ideas, concepts or thoughts, maybe using the old in new ways.

That’s why developing your eye for seeing associations is highly important.

But how?

Let’s play a little game of association.

Here is a pair of objects. Invent something by blending the two into a new one. Think of the similarities and the differences between the two objects and see what you can invent.

Ready? … Here we go:

First pair: bicycle and TV. What comes to your mind? Maybe a bicycle with a screen- a sort of GPS, maybe a TV on a bicycle stand.

Second pair: sport shoes and ribbon. What have you got? Maybe a special pair of shoes with one single attachable elastic ribbon -to exercise your leg muscles by doing bicycle moves with resistance? Or maybe a satin ribbon with sport shoes print?

Whatever you’ve got, it’s your original association and you created a new product by combining the two.

Generating creative ideas is like combining two products into one, different than we are used to. However, the products you use, are ideas. You let your mind play with ideas, transform them, knit them together and create something new. That’s how you put your mark, your original imprint in your presentation.

Analogies come from the power of free association, metaphors too. And they give a distinct flavor and a creative and emotional force to a presentation.

So, work with ideas, shape them like playing with play-dough and find pleasure in carving out something new!

5. Step outside the pattern

Reason can answer questions, but imagination has to ask them.

Ralph Gerard

Disrupt the usual way of thinking and common ideas. Create and present your personal affect.

How can you change the way people see the topic you are speaking about?

How can you put it in a new form?

What is your fresh, new, and original perspective?

How are you shaking things up?

What solid, dense, saturated ideas can you offer in your presentation? The master chefs reduce the sauce and increase the flavour. The artists simplify to find the essence. What is the essence, the compressed, significant and full of flavour ideas you offer?

You are the master of your creative idea’s laboratory. Enjoy it!

“Creativity is intelligence having fun.”

Albert Einstein.