Over time I feel like I advocated change more than anyone else. It moves things, creates constant adapting through movement, and that in my experience leads only to growth and success. But a thing that is often overlooked is what change does in the sense of moving things on the short term.
Our first intrinsic interest seams to always target emotions. How come? You see, most of us are used to experiencing the same emotions, and in this repetitive cycle even one small change is one change too many.
Our comfort zone is not present only in the sense of being and doing, it’s also shaped in the sense of feeling. And knowing that creativity is tightly connected with emotions, feelings, a new pattern of thinking should be constituted. Thus creativity is inherently connected with change.
What does creativity need in order to exist?
We understand the creative process in the lines of having original ideas that also have value. Be that in creating necessities, aesthetics, everything else for that matter. And the thing that many of us overlook is that creativity happens, more often than not, by interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things.
We think about the world in all the ways we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically… We think in abstract terms, we think in movement. And according to Sir Ken Robinson, education expert, creativity happens on the premises of interaction between the ways in which we experience the world.
Hence, we need to experience in order to be creative. We need to spark the interaction, and not just in the sense of being and doing, but also in the sense of feeling. It is how we feel that shapes our creativity after the interaction takes place.
And often times making the same interaction in terms of how we experience the world happens to deplete our creativity and we are faced with creative inflation. Thus changing things, interacting in a different way is as promising of a thing as any when our creativity is concerned. Or the lack of it, that is.
Change doesn’t need to be radical
When we hear the word change, it’s like an instant defense mechanism is activated. We have a set picture of how things are ought to be, and it simply not pertains change the way we think of it.
But change is not necessarily connected with drastically shifting things under our feet. It can also be gradual, or it even doesn’t have to apply on things we do or believe, but rather how we interact with them.
There is also a systematic approach that you can pay attention to. A checklist, if you will, that will going to affect your creative energy. And it is a simple one to follow.
The basic premise is that you need to experience a wide variety of activities, throughout each week, as to unlock your creative potential. And these activities doesn’t necessarily have to represent something complex or demanding. Trivial is just fine.
You can read a book, or make a habit to deliberately follow a TV show, or schedule reservations in different restaurants… You can go to a theater nearby, or attend an event, or even pick up the habit of running. The more versatile your week, the more you’ll be feeding your creative energy.
I journal quite often, and looking at my writings a year back there is a clear indicator that some activities were more energizing than others. For example, whenever I’m reviewing a new workout program the novel experience elevates my creative output. The same happened to a friend of mine who we invited to write a lengthy review on another video workout series. After completing the PIYO review, she told me that writing was always a challenging task, but all of the sudden words were flowing for pages at a time. So definitely make a habit of working out, or tinkering with side projects. Remember, id doesn’t have to be complex!
When you move your body, interact with the world, and explore new venues, the brain works surprisingly better.
Every person can be creative
Evaluating the statements above for what they are, I came up with a more revolutionary view on creativity. If it is sparked by feelings and interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing and experiencing the world, it can then be artificially created. Artificially however only in the sense of being created deliberately rather than all by itself, but restricted in the sense of needing to be let go to develop organically.
In short, this means that the circumstances in which creativity develops can be created and managed artificially, only to the extent of giving grounds for the creative process to occur. And here is where the change aspect actually applies.
We change the circumstances, the way they interact with each other, the way in which we interact with them. And the response is creativity being allowed to organically grow. Creativity is a response of our change in the manner in which we interact with all the disciplinary ways in which we experience the world.
Not that complicated really.
So, in correlation with this, creativity can occur everywhere and with every individual. The thing is that every one of us reacts differently on various combinations of the ways in which we experience the world. Some may need to think more in abstract terms, some may be likely to need movement among other things.
And only by interaction between these experiences, or a change in them, that is, we can spark or even guide the birth of the creative process.
So how to create the circumstances for developing creativity?
Go out and you are getting more creative; start thinking and you are getting more creative; change your routine and you will spark your creativity. It’s change that gets you moving. Change and challenging the status quo.
For instance when I go out with my bike, I can return home with ideas to write ten articles both in the lifestyle and internet marketing niche. It’s my thing, you see. I move, let my mind wonder, think and try to relate things with one another. What comes on the other end is creativity.
Sometimes this works, sometimes it doesn’t. The thing is that the more you change things in the sense of how they correlate and how you interact with them, the bigger your chances of evoking creativity and kick start the creative process from squat.
Look for things and question them, question even what you already take as granted. Start doing things differently, start thinking anew. Change your routine of doing things. You will know what it is that provokes the creative process as soon as you stumble across it.
What encourages creativity for some may not just do the same for you as well. You have to discover the wiring for yourself. The creative process is different with anyone and we all have it. It’s a given. The only thing is to find out how to nurture it.