Today’s post is by Susan Bagyura, a leadership coach and author of “The Visionary Leader.” She works with small-business owners, executives and entrepreneurs, showing them how to create the visionary leader mindset and inspire success from the top down.
We are all endowed with mental muscles and just as with all muscles, they must be exercised and developed or they atrophy.
Here are 4 tips to help unleash your creativity:
- Get out of your comfort zone! We tend to get stuck in habits and patterns like driving home the same way, talking to the same people, doing the same things day in and day out. There’s no inspiration in that. New ideas and thoughts come from seeing and doing things we haven’t seen or done before. Ignore what your mother taught you when you were a child and start talking to strangers. Shake up your life and have fun with it.
- Start asking lots of empowering questions. We are programmed to live our lives out of what we know, but many times the new ideas are in what we don’t know. This question alone helps draw to you the people, events or circumstances required in order to create something new. Drop the words “I can’t” completely from your vocabulary as they immediately shut down the creative faculty.
- Meditate daily. I know some people may groan reading this, but it’s true. We have to get quiet to receive new thoughts and ideas. How many great ideas have you gotten in the shower or taking a walk? Find a quiet spot, get comfortable and clear your mind. If it starts to drift, gently bring it back to focusing on your question of “how can I …? Double your sales; better serve your customers, retain your top staff; you name the question and then spend quiet time focusing on it. If you continue to do this, you will get very creative ideas.
- Mastermind with others. The best way to do this is to have on a board or paper a big T. At the top of the T on the left, write “Why we can’t”. On the right side of the T, write “How we can.” Put a big X completely filling the left side of the T and refuse to entertain any reasons why you can’t do something. As a group, just focus your minds on how you can do something. Write all the ideas down without judging. If someone slips out with words such as “that won’t work”, just say next and look for the next idea. This is a simple but very power technique which has brought many people amazing results.
Making some simple shifts will unleash your natural creativity and turn impossibilities into realities. Watch the magic happen.
Image credit, Acik, via iStock