People often ask me for the secret to being more creative, whether it’s for their life or in business. Unfortunately, there’s no one magic formula for creativity that’s going to work for everyone. However, there is a key we can use to filter out which creativity techniques are going to bring us each success.
Has there been a time when you know you want something different, but you don’t know exactly what it is?
Or you want to solve a problem, but you know you won’t get a different result if you use the same approach you’ve always taken?
Basically, instead of boring and ordinary – you want different.
You want something extraordinary.
These are the same expectations that I bring to my own work.
For instance, as an entrepreneur, I grapple with how I define success for myself (there’s no performance review checklist that’s already been created for me by ‘the powers that be’).
So using a conventional, logical way of creating my definition of success, I’d sit down with my beverage of choice and list all the ways that I measure success and answer “How do I know that I’m successful?” But instead I decided to do this… Continue reading
Going on a mandala Play Adventure was rewarding in so many ways. I got to introduce more play and fun into my day. I got to express myself creatively. I learnt more about the creative process and what worked for me. But the biggest takeaway was learning about the importance of developing a creative habit or practice: doing something creative on a regular basis and making it a normal part of my everyday life.
In the first week of my mandala Play Adventure, I wrote about the practical tips that helped me make time to create my mandalas each day. In this blog, I want to share the secret behind making a creative habit.
So the 30 day mandala Play Adventure has come to an end. It has been challenging but it was definitely worth it. It’s been so rewarding, and I had so much fun! And I think that keeping a playful mindset was definitely a contributing factor.
At the start I wasn’t quite sure that I’d be able to colour the same mandala colouring page in 30 different ways. But I dived in to see where the adventure would take me. I ended up finishing with so many ideas still left inside of me. Who knows? I might have been able to create another 30 mandalas, or even more?
This unexpected flow of ideas has got me thinking about how we sometimes impose limits on our creativity through scarcity thinking. We can falsely hold onto our ideas, worried that if we use them (or share them) that there’ll be nothing left.
But our first ideas might not even be the best ones. In InGenius, Tina Seelig writes that people often fall into the trap of going with the first solution they find, rather than taking the time to work a little harder to come up with a more innovative response. (She refers to Tim Hurson’s ‘3rd third’ concept from Think Better to explain this further.) It’s as if our ideas come in waves or sets. The first set of ideas are pretty obvious (and if you want a quick fix then this might be fine). However, if you dig a bit deeper then you get a more interesting set of ideas. As you continue to push the boundaries and test the limits of your assumptions and what’s possible, then you’ll get progressively more innovative sets or waves of ideas (which may result in a more effective and/or far-reaching solution). For this reason, Seelig asks participants in brainstorming sessions to share their worst ideas up front. This way participants turn off their judgment and open their minds to lots more possibilities than if they only shared their initial, and most likely to be obvious, response to the issue.
You can see how this concept of idea waves plays out over the 30 days of my Mandala Play Adventure. For instance, I couldn’t have created the 3D lotus mandala from Day 12 on the first day.
As I wrote in my previous blog about inspiration, our ideas are not created in isolation from one another. So I prefer to think that by using or creating something from our one idea that we plant a seed for another idea to follow.
