Three Keys To Increasing Your Daily Creativity

Creativity. When you hear the word you may think of famous artists and grandiose ideas, but creativity is also what we need on a daily basis to run our businesses and advance our careers. To reach your goals, your day-to-day work requires better solutions than simply business as usual. If you want to stand out and be a top performer, then upping your creativity is important.

So how do we get more and better ideas? How can we enhance our creativity? There are many possible answers to that but here are three areas with which to narrow it down: 1) Percolation 2) Openness and 3) Focus.

1) Percolation – yes, like one of those old coffee pots, ideas need time to simmer, to bubble up and to refine themselves in your conscious and subconscious mind. And while sometimes lightning strikes in an instant, it usually doesn’t happen when you’ve put yourself in a time crunch.

So when possible, give yourself even a few minutes of ‘think tank’ time to mull over a challenge or issue. Get it rolling around in your noggin and then go away and do whatever else you must do. Don’t put it off and tell yourself you’ll ‘sit down’ later and really think about it. If you start the wheels in motion now, you’ll be much further ahead when you do finally sit down to address it. The mind has a funny way of working on stuff behind your back, so use it.

2) Openness – also having been an actor in my life, I’ve drawn a great lesson from studying Improv. One of the key tenets of Improv is that you must accept and ‘say yes to’ whatever is given to you in the moment from another actor. For example if Actor A says to Actor B, “Why did you steal my wife?” Actor B cannot deny that he stole Actor A’s wife, but instead must go with it as if he did steal A’s wife and then build on it from there.

When it comes to creativity this is a great example to remember. Be open and accept what comes into your mind; let yourself take off on wild tangents and see where they meander. Embrace thoughts that may seem off the wall at first – go with them to see where they lead rather than censoring and immediately tossing these thoughts aside.

3) Focus – with this I mean having the time to actually address a challenge, by itself and on your own, without interruption. (Of course brainstorming with others can be great but that’s for another post.) Focus is best gained and maintained through lack of interruption. I’m sure most of you have had days at the office where you couldn’t get anything done because of the constant barrage of interruptions from meetings, email, phone calls and office drop-ins. The fact is that most of us can’t get work done at work! How’s that for insanity? We go to work to get work done and yet can’t get it done because of too much interference!

While some meetings are necessary, I’d be willing to bet that you could cancel 75% of them and replace them with a quick conversation or email – so do it. If a meeting is scheduled for an hour then people will talk to fill the hour. Don’t get sidetracked from creating ideas and solving challenges. You teach others how to treat you so if you make a habit of turning off your email and silencing your phone for key periods of time, plus getting back to others based on your schedule, they will come to respect that about you. Then you can focus on doing great, creative work that will make you stand out and take you where you want to go.

I’d love to hear your comments on ways you’ve found to enhance your creativity so go ahead and let me know below.

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