Tap the Creative Inside You

Imagination is the source of creativity. It's a place where unlimited possibilities reside. It's where pure energy lives.

People are innately imaginative and creative. However, most people are simply not conscious of their imaginative and creative selves.

Creativity is the cognitive process of developing a novel idea or concept.

Teresa M. Amabile, a creativity expert, argues that creativity is not a quality of a person. Rather, it is a quality of ideas, behaviors or products.

According to her, creativity has 3 basic ingredients:

1. Domain-Relevant Skills - These are skills associated with expertise in a relevant field (e.g., artistic ability, technical ability, talent, etc.).

2. Creativity-Relevant Skills - These skills include a cognitive style or method of thinking oriented towards exploring new directions, approaches that can be used to generate new ideas, and a work style conducive to developing creative ideas.

3. Task Motivation - Recent evidence suggests that a genuine interest in a task for its own sake, rather than for achieving external rewards such as money, enhances creativity.

So how can you develop your creativity? Here are 2 ways:

1. Provocative Operation, coined by Edward de Bono - This involves disrupting your thought patterns. It works with the premise that the more you are used to something, the less stimulating it is for your thinking.

Application: Insert "interruptions" into your day. This can be writing in a different room or area, reading magazines you wouldn't normally read, tuning in to a different radio or television station, cooking and eating something different.

2. Forced Analogy - This method forces you to compare a concept, idea or problem with something else that it has little or nothing in common with. The results are new insights.

Application: Compare an emotion (e.g., elation, excitement, anxiety) with a tangible object (e.g., pen, chair, door). How is anxiety like a door?

When you need to tap the creative inside you, use these 2 techniques. Tap into your imagination and you enable yourself to create new things, come up with ideas you have never thought of before. Tap into your imagination and you awaken your creativity.

About The Author

Copyright © 2003-2004 Shery Ma Belle Arrieta-Russ

Shery is the creator of WriteSparks! - a software that generates over 10 *million* Story Sparkers for Writers. Download WriteSparks! Lite for free - http://writesparks.com

More Resources

Unable to open RSS Feed $XMLfilename with error HTTP ERROR: 404, exiting

More Creativity Information:

Related Articles

Be Creative to Get Money
Creativity alone can make you money and no matter what anyone tells you or what you think, anyone can be creative. Creativity is like a skill that needs to be developed.
Creativity Isnt Just About Art It Is About Healing
Go on, pick up a pen, hold it in your hand and ask, " What can you do for me?"What do you hear? If you listen with your heart you may hear " I can show you a world within that only you and I can explore! Let's start writing and see what we can find."As you travel deeper within you will start to find a world of emotion and thoughts that you never imagined you had, whether you are delving into those dark corners of pain or dancing into the lightness of your being.
Five Steps to Higher Creativity: Engaging the Human Spirit
Unleash Your Creativity! Creativity has often been the misunderstood child of the genius family. This misunderstanding has brought along with it a tainted picture of what creativity is, what function it serves, and where it comes from.
Dancing On Your Brain: The Cha-Cha Effect
My grandmother used to say that the secret to living a good life is maintaining a flexible spine and a flexible mind. Whether we're talking about joints or brains, there's just no room for rigidity.
Turning Obstacles Into Blessings
"Your capacity to be creatively alive in virtually all life circumstances will depend in large part upon the kind of attitude you choose for yourself."- Dr.
I Want To Create...
What would you like to create? A peaceful life, a successful life, a good life, a sculpture, a piece of art, a book? What is it that you would like to create? Whatever you want you can achieve it. All you have to do is follow your natural compass.
Creativity Management - Don't Write, Rewrite
Creativity can be defined as problem identification and idea generation whilst innovation can be defined as idea selection, development and commercialisation.There are other useful definitions in this field, for example, creativity can be defined as consisting of a number of ideas, a number of diverse ideas and a number of novel ideas.
Mindfulness and Creativity: The Wow of Wonder
You are so creative.Don't deny it.
Are You Creative?
Have you ever heard the saying, "The harder I work, the luckier I get?" Guess what? That's the way it is with creative inspiration too.Don't Wait For Creative InspirationGraham Green, the famous English writer, attributes much of his success to a simple habit: He forced himself to write at least 500 words daily, whether he felt like it or not.
Creativity And You
95 percent of what we know about the brain, we have learned in the last 20 years. So, your beliefs about creativity were probably shaped by faulty information.
7 Techniques to Supercharge your Creativity and Solve your Problems
Do you ever encounter problems, challenges or obstacles in your business? If you answered 'no,' then you can stop reading and continue to rake in the fortune you must be making. For the rest of us, the answer of course is 'yes.
Sharing Our Creative Work with Others
In my "Roadblocks to Creativity" e-course, I ask the question:"What's your first thought if someone hesitates before giving you their opinion about your creative project?"One artist wrote: "When some one hesitates before giving their opinion of my work, I think it is going to be negative; I recently showed some work to my boss and her criticism was so harsh that I now won't show her anything, but the worse part is--it made me even more conscious of showing my work to others as well. She was going through some hard stuff at the time, so my timing was way off.
Unlock Your Creative Secret Weapon
It seems like this week a ton of people have been asking me how they can become more creative. I even had one client jokingly accuse me of being in cahoots with the Devil in trade for my creativity.
Connect with Your Inner Artist
In the "Roadblocks to Creativity" e-course, we look at the 7 most common things that block our creative expression. So, if we're "blocked" when we're facing those things, what are we like when we're free of them?Well, certainly we're connected to our "Inner Artist".
Why Creative Visualization Works
Experience has shown that creative visualization works. It is quite possible to prove that circumstances and events follow thoughts.
9 Ways to Live Creatively
Creativity - according to Webster's it means having the ability or power to create; characterized by originality and expressiveness; imaginative. Ok that sounds great, wouldn't we all like to be more creative every day? Sometimes the hardest part to trying something new is the first step.
Inspiration, Creativity, and Channeling - Opening Ourselves to Greatness
Channeling is much easier to do than most people suspect. As a matter of fact we have all seen people channeling and you have probably done it yourself many times, even though you may have been unaware of it or didn't know what to call it.
Take Time To Think
I recently saw a program on television wherein the participants discussed the degree to which present day computer technology has contributed to our economy, well-being and our ability to communicate. They pointed out the many ways that this technology was already obsolete and that further refinements will impact our future in ways we dare not imagine.
Are You Inventive Enough to be an Inventor? Some Guidelines to Invention Success!
Inventors make a ton of money when the invention is needed and when the process is done properly. There are different types of inventions.
What is Creativity?
Here in England September represents the end of Summer and the beginning of Autumn as well as the start of the new school year and the start of many new initiatives in business, life and lots more besides.When anyone is looking to make any kind of change in their life, often the approach they take needs to become attractive or appealing in order for them to maintain it and often it may not remain attractive or appealing for as long as we like.
>