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Tip 25 – Use your creativity to build success
Are you looking for more ideas? Are you waiting for a flash of inspiration? Are you frustrated by lack of results? Creativity is often seen as being only about a single moment of insight or inspiration when the answer comes to us. However there is much more to the creative process. Looking, waiting and frustration can just be part of what needs to happen.
Creativity has many many perspectives. Here is one from Roger Evans and Peter Russell. In their book The Creative Manager they described a model with five main stages as follows:
1. Preparation
Preparation is concerned with analysing the task, gathering data, looking for patterns, trying out ideas and questioning assumptions. It’s where we bring to light everything we already know about the situation and gather all the resources we can. Sometimes this will be enough to solve the problem but often it won’t be and then we will start to feel increasingly frustrated.
2. Frustration
It is easy to experience this frustration as a sign of failure and lack of ability. But in fact it indicates precisely the opposite. It is a signal that our habitual ways of thinking about the problem are breaking down and that creativity is becoming possible. To be creative, by definition we need to get beyond our current beliefs and mind sets, to explore new territories and to bring what is outside of our consciousness into our awareness. Since our rational mind wants to stay with what it knows, it tries to hold us back from moving into the unknown, the only place we can be creative! This frustration is actually the feeling from our conscious mind, recognising that it doesn't know the answer and beginning to let go control to our unconscious mind.
3. Incubation
Incubation is the time when we give up trying, when we put our conscious problem solving on hold and handover to the unconscious mind and wait. We do this by sleeping on the problem, by doing the washing up, by staring out of the train window, by having a bath or just by getting on with something else that needs to be done. Taking a walk in the countryside or digging the garden are some alternatives.
4. Insight
Having done all the groundwork, we then wait for the moment of Insight the ‘ahaaa’ moment when we give birth to a new idea, see things in a new way, or create new possibilities. Whilst the insight often appears to have come from nowhere, the creative person knows that it actually occurs as a result of everything that has happened before.
5. Working Out
To have an insight is one thing; to turn it into form is quite another. The final stage involves testing the insights and turning them into something tangible.
A coach can help you with this process, after all: ‘two heads are better than one’.
Click here to arrange an introductory session to find out more.
