Supercharge your Creative Thinking
charles tincknell
Director of Business Solutions | Elevating Performance Through People, Process, & Creativity
Creativity Enablers No 40. Supercharge your Creative Thinking
A bumper-packed Special 40th Edition of the Creativity Newsletter. Probably best served with a cup of tea or coffee.
This is not a scroll through because at the end of this newsletter, you will -
WOW
Starting out.
1 Finding your Creative Mindset
????????A - Open Mind and Closed mind.
Being more open-minded is a key skill that can be learned and improved. Every closed-minded person believes they are open-minded. However, wanting to be open-minded is vastly different to allowing yourself to be open-minded.
Learn about being Open-minded.
https://www.indeed.com/career-advice/career-development/open-minded
????????B - Curiosity and Focus
Curiosity is an enabler of creativity. It supplies the raw materials to build ideas and connections around as well as replenish your knowledge stocks.?It keeps you up-to-date and relevant.?Some people are naturally curious and others less so.?Remember, we were all curious as young children, if it has slipped away, we just need to re-find it and the delights that curiosity brings.
Things to do more of - Look up, look out, schedule reading time, schedule learning time and in conversations be interested, not interesting.
Focus is also a key skill to learn.?Focus increases the return on investment you get on the effort you put into an activity. Focus gives you a guide as to how wide and how deep to go into things and when. Focus and concentration go hand in hand: they help channel your curiosity.
Things to do more of – Have an objective, have a goal, and know what you want to achieve and by when.
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2 Developing Creative Power.
????????A - Positivity and attitude
Positivity is a state of mind and creative thinking thrives on it. Getting into and maintaining a positive state of mind is a skill you can learn. Irrespective of wanting to be more creative having a positive state of mind is a valuable life skill. Positive people lead happier lives. You need to identify what drags you down and lifts you up, so you can minimise the former and maximise the latter. You need to learn to spot the signs and situations, so when you need to be creative positivity and attitude will power you along.
Actively practice reframing. Actively look for positive situations and people and likewise avoid knowingly negative spaces.
????????B - Energy and motivation
Creativity is energy intensive so needs constant topping up. Life and creativity are hard when you are lacking in energy, so learn about your providers and depletes of energy. Energy come in various forms, all of which need regular feeding. Physical, Mental, Emotional, Spiritual, and Social Energies.
Motivation comes in all shapes and sizes, understand your intrinsic and extrinsic motivators. Using creative thinking to achieve your motivating life objectives is life-changing.?The better you understand your motivators and how to use an open mindset, curiosity, and positive thinking to get what you want out of life.
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3 Understanding Creative Thinking
????????A - Styles, thinking preferences
Understanding yourself as an individual and how you think.?You cannot change who you are or your personality, but you can change how you understand yourself and how you work, think and learn.?These are your strengths and weaknesses and how you and those around you tick.
Take some of the many online tests and start to understand yourself better and those around you.
PM - Personality types.
There is no special or specific Creative personality type. We all have our personalities, so understanding yours and others around you, will enable you to have better conversations. No one is an island and understanding yourself better and your team will help creativity thrive.
Take the Newcastle personality test online and reflect on your strengths and weaknesses.
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Making Creativity work for you.
4 The Creative Process
A - Creative Inputs, processes, outputs and outcomes
Successful creative thinking delivers outcomes that are new and so good you react when you experience them. They make you go WOW. You are capable of achieving these outcomes and with practice, they will become easier to achieve regularly. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses, involving others and applying a process will deliver WOW outcomes for you and your team. Knowing how to gather the right inputs, and applying a process that delivers the outputs you need that will result in a WOW outcome will soon become your superpower. The biggest challenge is imagining and capturing what a WOW outcome looks like, but it is also the most enjoyable part of the process.
Have a play with this model and apply it to something real that is important to you and think what WOW would look like and work back from there.
B - Flowing Knowledge, Inspiration and evaluation
At the core of the creative process are knowledge, inspiration and evaluation.?Sometimes you will have everything you need within yourself at other times you may need the help of others. Practice and become better at gathering knowledge logically and sequentially. Put steps in place to find inspiration and remove blockers. Learn how to evaluate ideas and concepts to ensure they deliver the outputs you need to get WOW outcomes.
Get a WOW outcome in mind and then go for a walk a run or find a quiet space – wherever you can think freely. See how it goes.
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5 Creative Resources
A - The creative environment, time and investment.
A creative environment makes it much easier to be creative. Creativity needs a safe space to thrive. Creative Safety is different for different people and at different times. ?The biggest barrier to Creativity is usually time and space followed by the level of investment. Thinking is free, but these are not. Understand the resources you need and be able to make a compelling sell to outcompete other calls on either your or the organisation’s limited resources.
Actively enable and plan to put yourself in a place or situation where you can allow yourself to stop and just think. Giving yourself this space and time is the best enabler for creative thinking by a mile.
B - Strategy and Tactics
Strategy and tactics are about providing clarity of direction. The scale and defining what and why from the doings.?The doings (tactics) are the how, when and where. Learn to develop a strategy that defines the direction and endpoint.?You will then be able to understand how to apply creativity and create tactics/actions to get you to your destination and most importantly a plan.
Learn to understand the difference between strategy and tactics. Broadly your strategy should remain firm but your tactics to make it happen can change. Learning to think strategically and tactically is worth investing in, they are sought-after skills.
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?6 Managing Creativity
A - Delivering aims and objectives
Creativity is a wild animal; it is unpredictable and likely to fly off in any or all directions once unleashed.?Focusing on clear aims and objectives will make it work for you to progress in these specific areas. In most organisations, you will find the aims and objectives in the Strategic Plan. If not there, check websites and their Annual Report and Accounts. As an individual, you need personal aims and objectives to progress towards your life goals. Incorporate these in your Personal Development Plan or Objectives for the year.
Creativity must have a clear direction as to what are you trying to achieve and why, then apply creativity to how to make it happen.
B - Leadership, Risk Management and courage
Creative thinking and both the innovation and change that flow from it all involve risk. Leadership often want Creativity but actually when presented with creative solutions don’t want to take the associated risks. Understand the importance of leadership to creativity, how to manage risks and the key part courage has in the process. Knowing how to look at risk clearly will inform your life decisions and the choices you make both at home and work. Understanding the risk of doing and not doing is the difference between success and failure. Courage, of course, is also key – we know the right answer but don’t dare do it.
Every successful person in the world understands these three things, inside out, upside down and back to front. Just the act of thinking about them will make a meaningful difference.
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Getting others on board and making it happen.
A key part of being creative is getting others on board.
7 Creative communication
A - Know, Understand, Feel and Do
Being creative is one thing but it will be greatly diminished if you cannot communicate what it is all about effectively.?There is a simple approach to this that works every time. Every communication must have these four elements to work. Know, understand, feel and do.
Have a go and apply these four things to your next communication, in either the digital world or face-to-face. The quality of your communication will be better.
B - Communication channels and styles
There are lots of ways to communicate and many overlap; they also have their strengths and weaknesses. Learn to understand which to select for each situation and the level of detail needed to transmit the message to specific audiences.?Technology is enabling diverse types of communication to be produced at speed and low cost. Creativity in adopting these will greatly improve your communication effectiveness.
15 Options – face-to-face, podcast, letter, Text, notice, handwritten note, Teams call, phone, models, diagrams, email, booklet, flyer, postcard, report.?Choose 2 you don’t normally use and communicate using them – see how it goes.
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8 Creativity tools and techniques
A - Individual Tools
Using the right tools for you to support your creative thinking is a key skill to learn. They are your personal preferences, so a little bit of experimentation will help you find the right answer for you. Some people find Journaling, daily start and end meetings and weekly reviews useful others do not. See the link below for other tools.
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B - The Team tools
There are 100s of Management and Teamworking tools many of which can be adapted towards Creativity.
Here is a link to my A to Z of Creative Thinking tools, have a play.
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Living a more creative life.
Now the basics of creative thinking are in place, the process and some tools you need to lock it in and then build for the future.
9 Maintaining your creative journey.
????????A - Habits and Journals
Creativity is a muscle you need to exercise so it grows and expands, you do this through habits and routines. A great creative routine is getting into the habit of writing a journal. Naturally, writing makes you more creative. It does not matter what you write, capturing random thoughts, capturing them and then creating coherent sentences is a creative process.
All the things in the preceding 8 sections need to gently become habits in your ways of working and slowly your way of thinking.
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????????B - Capability, competence and confidence
As you practice and think about creativity you will improve your capability and competence in being creative.?Before long, you will be producing creative ideas and solutions to everyday situations and issues as a matter of course. Eventually, the quality of your thinking will be noticed by yourself and others. This is where the imposter syndrome can strike, and you realise actually how little you know and understand. You will need to kick on and own your creative space.
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10 Improving your creativity.
????????A - Reflection and Learning
Reflecting on what you already know and adding more by learning are two of life’s great pleasures.?By becoming a creator, you are certainly moving up Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The definition of self-actualization can generally be thought of as the full realization of one's creative, intellectual, and social potential through the internal drive.
Take time to learn how to reflect and explore some of the many different ways and routes to learning.
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????????B - Networking and collaborating
Networking and collaboration are the meat and gravy to expanding your intellectual and social capital.?Meeting people either virtually or in person and discussing ideas, and concepts while gaining new insights will keep your creativity levels powered up. Learn to understand, even if you are an introvert, how to network effectively.
Here is my advice on networking.
https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/charles-tincknell_creativity-and-networking-i-have-a-love-hate-activity-6993136040521650176-Ne20?utm_source=share&utm_medium=member_desktop
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SUMMARY
Having read all the 10 sections above here is the CTA.
Now - Plan your journey to becoming increasingly better at creative thinking in future. You have all the ingredients laid out for you. If you don’t know where to start, just list out 1-10 and the headings then put a single thing you could do in each area.
Make a start and turn the passive activity of reading newsletters and turn it into an active part of your daily living and doing.