You are creative, you may just not realize

Earlier this week I attended a very interesting and insightful conference my colleague organized.

It wasn’t big, only 5 other people attended besides me, but all the more personal and I really enjoyed the 4 hours I spent there. Not to mention the amount of stuff I learned about creativity, problem-solving and horizons it can help open both in your private and professional lives.

Let me share a few tips my colleague shared with us at the conference.

But I am not creative…

How often have you heard someone say this? Very often. But it’s not the case. Everyone’s creative. We just don’t often realize it.

Creativity has 3 basic rules:

• Have an end goal. Be clear on what you want the final outcome to be.
• Have rules in place, such as how many hours can you devote daily to be able to reach your desired goal.
• Have processes in place on how you’ll creatively reach your desired goal.

Every problem can be solved

• Always write your problems down

This will serve as a reminder that you have to devote time and energy to solving it and not put it off till later. Because later often becomes never.

• Remember that every problem has a solution

If you can’t find a solution yourself, find a group of people (your friends, relatives or colleagues at work) and ask them for advice. They may not be able to solve your problem, but they will offer other points of view and ideas on potentially helping you solve your problem.

• Generate ideas to solve your problem

First write 10 potential solutions down, then another 5, then another 5. You will be surprised how many ideas you can come up with even though you thought you’ve exhausted your idea reservoir. If you continue long enough, you will come up with 100 ideas how to solve your problem. And you thought you were not creative?

• Try moving the responsibility

Imagine someone tells you to write down another 5 potential solutions to your problem, but this time, you can give your problem to someone else who will solve it for you. Again, you had written another 5 solutions. These are your ideas, not someone else’s. The mere fact, you imagined that you moved the responsibility for your problem to someone else, makes your brain switch on the creative glad yet again.

• Find your inner peace

If you are under stress, you cannot fully concentrate on anything really, let alone solving problems. Try to find activities (a walk in the forest, knitting, reading, writing, watching tv, going to the gym, meditation) that help put your mind at ease and let you fully concentrate on things that require your undivided attention.

• Crunch the numbers

With every problem you come across, write it down and then write a number next to it indicating a percentage how badly you want to solve it. If it is less than 70%, it is not something you should be dealing with immediately. If the number is higher than 70 %, try to get this problem solved as soon as possible.

These were the 6 points that stood out the most for me during the seminar. I sure will be applying them to my professional life and I hope this article will encourage you to try some of the techniques as well. Anything that helps solve problems faster is worth trying, right?