Tools For Creative Thinking

Creative thinking is a skill we can learn and exercise as we go through our daily routines. Each issue, anxiety, or conflict is a chance to experiment with a fresh approach or attitude. Here are some tips for tapping that internal source:

1. Improv-It: Improvisation is the art of earning up things on the spot, but which makes them up within the form of a game or specific schooling, like"tell us about your day as if you are the planet's most gloomy newscaster." Improv games stimulate imaginative power by engaging the right-brain's orientation to novelty within a set of principles that supply the left mind's search for order and organization. Some methods to do this in daily life include: have a conversation with your kids where every individual's sentence must begin with the next letter of the bible, e.g."We all can play this match,""But what should I can not think that fast?" "Come on, just try," etc.. At the following job team meeting, have a dialogue with only queries, or one at which the next person must use the previous word of the person who just spoke.

2. Do the opposite. When Seinfeld's iconic loser George Costanza attributes his distress to getting followed his instincts and decides to do the opposite of his very own judgment, he meets previously unattainable women and lands a job with the New York Yankees. When we decide to approach a situation in a very different direction than what is ingrained and habitual we encounter a degree of doubt that activates the right-brain to search for a new and previously untried response. While we may not realize sitcom-perfect reversals of fortune through utilization of the technique, we will be gaining a mental strength that increases our capacity to size up unfamiliar situations quickly and respond effectively.

3. Feel the love. A 2006 study [I] revealed that positive emotions literally expand our field of attention so that we perceive a larger array of choices and are less inhibited about trying them out, part of a developing body of understanding of how positive emotions promote a more creative outlook on the issues of life.

4. Observe synchronicities. True story: In 1981 I spent several months in Australia, in which for awhile I had no job, little money and few friends so spent a lot of time studying and writing in the library (since it was free). The writings of New Zealand short story writer Katherine Mansfield became a source of strength at that time of great uncertainty, once I stumbled upon a quote attributed to her who talked to my immediate scenario:"Risk! Risk anything!" She wrote. Do the hardest thing on earth for you. Act for yourself. Face the facts." I compose a one-woman show titled Whistling In The Dark relating to this experience of stepping into uncertainty, and though the show is running at a bar in Manhattan I start the Sunday New York Times Book Review section and find a review of a Katherine Mansfield biography that had come out. The article's name? "Whistling In The Dark." Synchronicities are these kinds of events, co-occurring in ways that have significance to us but are not causally related. They link us to intuition, the inner GPS that guides to select rightly even when the world around us doesn't understand or accept.

5. Go Within. Maintaining radio silence with all the world around us for a time period makes us more conducive to our inner world where observations, insights and thoughts form. No texts, no twitters, no exceptions. Our field of consciousness - generally packed with all the pressures and pressures of getting things done - needs a opportunity to disconnect from incoming messages and pressures so that the structured, apparently arbitrary inspirations and intuitions can bubble up. A hectic schedule might take precedence over breaking a bit of silent, but a drive to pick up the kids at soccer can be an opportunity if we turn off the radio, then breathe at the red lights, and then listen.

6. Act as though. Changing a role alters the frame through which we view a situation and opens up a range of new potential responses. New ways of acting follow new methods of believing, but mental habits take time to change, and since the speed of life escalates we're likely to encounter situations where we need to take action quickly. We can"rehearse" with this very real potential in the course of daiy life by choosing a different function than we generally take in a comfortable situation. Talkative and outgoing in a group situation? Practice being the quiet singer or appreciative audience. If the children' fighting tends to trigger a desire to referee or increase the tension with more yelling, view it through the lense of a sportscaster observing the action but detached from it.

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