The ability to exercise your creativity is even more important for you than you probably think. Why? First, your creativity tremendously contributes to your self-actualization, which is essential for you to feel satisfied with your life and be happy. Second, it is exceedingly important for being successful in building relationships and earning money.
Taking creative approach contributes to your emotional state the similar way as the spice contributes to the taste of a course stimulating the appetite. If you generate ideas and fulfill them, your life becomes more and more interesting and exciting. This does not mean that you must generate a waste amount of ideas to feel excited and call yourself “creative”; quite the contrary, you should rather be able to generate from time to time really good ideas. If you generate too many ideas and are unable to prioritize, select and fulfill them properly, you will finally feel exhausted and discontented. There are some important factors that should be taken into account to avoid this danger. Please read the five practical guidelines below and ask yourself: “How often do I follow them in my life?”.
Liberate yourself from the overstrain. A stress is not only the bitterest enemy of your creativity, it is also a violent destroyer of your nervous system. There are simple efficient ways to reduce stress or even entirely get rid of it. First, plan your time regularly. You should avoid emergency jobs to the maximum extent under your control. Schedule your jobs for at least 2-3 days and make reminders in order not to forget to do things in a timely fashion. Second, you should store all your important information in a convenient form, always accessible for retrieval. The inability to quickly find required info causes stress. If you need a phone number, address, date of a meeting, or the latest result of a negotiation, you must be able to quickly find it. You should better make from time to time a few efforts to accurately write down your information, than to make later on incredibly huge efforts to search for the lost information. Remember, there is much more free space for brilliant ideas in a calm mind than in overstrained one.
Seize opportunities. Do simple jobs immediately as they arrive. Do you have to make a note for tomorrow? Write it down right now, or you will inevitably miss the deadline and will have to do an emergency job under time pressure. Is an idea flashing in your mind? Write it down right now, or you will forget it at once and forever being distracted by so many things you have to do. Do not lose the golden opportunity to generate a brilliant idea.
Concentrate your attention. Do not think about several things at a time, focus yourself exactly on the work being done. Try to reduce the number of distractions, or their impact on you at least. In order to do so, it is very essential to be able to quickly write down any incoming information securing it to be easily found later. If you can do that in an unobtrusive way, you will not get distracted and you will keep your mind focused in most cases. A good concentration is important for you to feel comfortable at work and it forms the solid background for ideas creation.
Spare your resources. Do not make too much effort to immediately turn a newly arrived idea into a ready to implement solution. When an idea is flashing in your mind, simply write it down. When you have time, read and think about it; then forget it for a while to revert back later. Repeat that process over and over again until you could finally decide whether the idea is good or bad. Do not worry about the fact that you are not deliberating on your idea; at this stage of the idea development this does your subconscious. By forgetting an idea for a while you get a good chance to see it several times with a fresh look and evaluate it objectively. Moreover, and that is extremely important, by doing so you avoid wasting your personal resources on implementation of premature ideas and stop working on fuzzy goals.
Use your computer.