Everyone is creative to a certain extent. Creativity can be developed with practice and strengthened with constant use. If you improve things in small ways, you are engaging in small acts of creativity. If you make major breakthroughs, and improve parts of your life in extraordinary ways; you are demonstrating high levels of creativity. The amount of creativity you use in your life is largely up to you.
If creativity is improvement, in what areas do you want to use it? You want to use your inborn creativity to improve the parts of your life that are most important to you. You can use your creativity to improve your relationships, to increase your income and improve your business, and to assure yourself higher levels of health and happiness. You have opportunities to be creative from the time you get up in the morning to the time you go to bed at night. There are three basic qualities of creative genius:
1. Open-mindedness: Be flexible and adaptive in your thinking The more open you are to new ideas and possibilities, to new approaches and solutions, the more creatively you will function.
2. Single-minded concentration on one thing at a time: Practice focusing on single questions and single problems, avoid diffusing your mental energies by trying to do several things at once. Your job, in increasing your creativity and enhancing your intelligence, is to concentrate your powers where they can do the most good.
3. Systematic approach to problems: In his book, Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Peter Drucker makes the point that innovation must be a systematic process. It must be planned and organized, not random and haphazard.
A 10-STEP METHOD TO IMPROVING YOUR LEVELS OF CREATIVITY:
1. Change your language from negative to positive. Instead of using the word problem, use the word situation, challenge or opportunity. The more positive your language is, the more confident and optimistic you will be when approaching any difficulty. The more creative and insightful you will be in identifying solutions and breakthrough ideas.
2. Define your situation or difficulty clearly and in detail. What exactly is the challenge you are facing? What is causing you stress, anxiety and worry?
3. Ask, “What else is the problem?” Don’t be satisfied with a superficial answer. Look for the root cause of the problem rather than getting sidetracked by the symptom. Approach the problem from several different directions. In each case, by changing your definition of the problem, you change your possible approach to the solution. You expand your possibilities. You become more creative. You unlock more of your inner genius.
4. Ask, “What are my minimum boundary conditions?” What must the solution accomplish? What ingredients must the solution contain? What would your ideal solution to this problem look like? Define the parameters clearly.
5. Pick the best solution by comparing your various possible solutions against your problem, on the one hand, and your ideal solution, on the other. What is the best thing to do at this time under the circumstances?
6. Before you implement the decision, ask, “What’s the worst possible thing that can happen if this decision doesn’t work?”
7. Set measures on your decision. How will you know that you are making progress? How will you measure success?
8. Accept complete responsibility for implementing the decision. You might want to delegate responsibility for the implementation of the action steps to someone else. Many of the most creative ideas never materialize because no one is specifically assigned the responsibility of carrying out the decision.
9. Set a deadline. A decision without a deadline is a meaningless discussion. If it is a major decision and will take some time to implement, set a series of short-term deadlines and a schedule for reporting. If you have a one-year goal to increase your income, break down the goal into months, and then break down the months into weeks. Break down the weeks into days and the days into hours. With the deadlines and subdeadlines, you will know immediately if you are on track or if you are falling behind.
10. Take action. Get busy. The faster you move in the direction of your clearly defined goals, the more creative you will be. The more energy you will have. The more you will learn. And, the faster you will develop your capacity to achieve even more in the future. The future belongs to the creative minority who can not only think but also take action and put their ideas into effect.
You can solve any problem, overcome any obstacle, or achieve any goal that you can set for yourself by using your wonderful creative mind and then taking action consistently and persistently until you attain your objective. Success is a mark of a creative thinker, and when you use your ability to think creatively, your success can be unlimited.
Brian Tracy is the author of “The Psychology of Selling.” Special offer: To receive your free copy of “Crunch Time!”, visit www.briantracy.com and click on the Crunch Time! icon. He can be contacted at 858.481.2977.
