Creative thinking is a skill that we can learn and practice as we go about our daily routines. Every problem, stress or conflict is an opportunity to experiment with a new approach or attitude. Here are some tips for tapping into that inner resource:

1. Improv-It: Improvisation is the art of making things up on the spot, but making them up in the form of a game or specific instruction, like “tell us about your day like you’re the world’s most depressing newscaster.” Improvisational games stimulate creative energy by engaging the right brain’s novelty orientation within a set of rules that fuel the left brain’s search for order and organization. Some ways to do this in everyday life include: having a conversation with your children in which each person’s sentence must begin with the next letter of the alphabet, for example, “We can all play this game,” “But what if I can?” Quick?” “Come on, try it”, etc. At the next team meeting, have a conversation using only questions, or one where the next person has to use the last word of the person who just spoke.

2. Do the opposite. When iconic Seinfeld loser George Costanza attributes his misery to following his instincts and decides to do the opposite of his better judgment, he meets previously unattainable women and lands a job with the New York Yankees. York. When we choose to approach a situation from a completely different direction than the one that is ingrained and habitual, we experience a degree of uncertainty that activates the right side of the brain to search for a new and previously untried answer. While we may not realize perfect sitcom reversals of fortune by using this technique, we will gain psychological strength that will increase our ability to assess unfamiliar situations quickly and respond effectively.

3. Feel the love. Creativity is positively associated with joy and love and negatively with anger, fear, and anxiety. A 2006 study[i] showed that positive emotions literally expand our field of attention so that we perceive a greater variety of options and are less inhibited in trying them, part of a growing body of knowledge about the ways in which positive emotions promote a creative perspective on problems in life. life. .

4. Notice the synchronicities. True story: In 1981 I spent several months in Australia, where for a while I had no job, little money and few friends, so I spent a lot of time reading and writing in the library (because it was free). The journals of New Zealand short-story writer Katherine Mansfield became a source of strength in this time of great uncertainty, after I came across a quote attributed to her that spoke to my immediate situation: “Risk! Risk anything!” !” she wrote. “Don’t worry about the opinions of others, about those voices. Do the hardest thing in the world for yourself. Act for yourself. Face the truth.” Fast-forward to 2001. I write a one-woman show called Whistling In The Dark about that experience of walking into uncertainty, and while the show is playing in a club in Manhattan, I open the Sunday New York Times Book Review section and find a review . from a biography of Katherine Mansfield that had just come out. The title of the article? “Whistle in the dark.” Synchronicities are these types of events, occurring simultaneously in ways that are meaningful to us but not causally related. They connect us to intuition, the internal GPS that guides us to make the right choice even when the world around us doesn’t approve or understand it.

5. Go inside. Keeping the radio silent with the world around us for a period of time makes us more in tune with our inner world where knowledge, observations and ideas are formed. No texts, no twitters, no exceptions. Our field of consciousness, often fraught with the pressures and strains of getting things done, needs the opportunity to disengage from incoming messages and pressures so that less structured and seemingly random inspirations and intuitions can well forth. A busy schedule may take precedence over creating a little quiet, but even a trip to pick up the kids at soccer can be an opportunity if we turn off the radio, breathe slowly at red lights, and listen.

6. Act as if. Changing a role changes the frame through which we view a situation and opens up a range of new possible responses. New ways of acting follow new ways of thinking, but habits of mind are slow to change, and as the pace of life increases, we are likely to find ourselves in situations where we must act quickly. We can “rehearse” for this very real possibility in the course of daily life by choosing a different role than the one we usually take in a familiar situation. Talkative and outgoing in a group situation? Practice being the silent listener or the appreciative audience. If kids’ fights tend to make you want to referee or escalate the tension with more yelling, see it through the lens of a sportscaster who watches the action but distances himself from it.

7. Go with the resistance. Some people complain about things they would do nothing to change, and yet we give them our sincere attention and advice. Some people constantly, often insistently, offer advice that we neither ask for nor need. Add to that any other ingrained personality quirks, the kind that make us feel resentful and drained, and think about this: resistance is useless. We waste precious emotional energy and head space trying to change other people’s behavior, energy that we should be spending creating our lives and engaging with our passions. Give a perfunctory “thanks, I’ll think about that” to the advice giver, a perfunctory empathy to the complainer, and get on with something real.

8. Daydream. When stressful problems need to be addressed, it may seem natural to force ourselves to concentrate and focus on them until we solve them. But new research shows that potential solutions to the most complex problems we face are more likely to emerge into awareness when we let our minds wander. [ii]

9. Reframe the negativity. Creativity is a kind of psychological “muscle” that, like physical muscles, becomes more reliable and ready to take on things through training and repetition. We built it by relating it to adversity the way a bodybuilder relates to weights, by providing the resistance needed to tone and strengthen a specific set of muscles—that is, a dominant co-worker who will likely take credit for the hard work. Teamwork can be seen as a much-needed catalyst for growing our own self-assertion, an exhausting relationship, the encouragement to locate and express stronger personal boundaries. By reframing our response to negative people and situations that are out of our control to change, we remove their power to control us and become more resistant to the damaging effects of stress.

10. Being unhappy. A common theme that comes up in my training seminars and networking workshops is the disconnect many successful and talented people feel from their own passions, especially when their work life has no avenues for expression. One way to rediscover our inner drives is to notice which news articles and stories trigger a strong emotional reaction within us and follow through on those feelings. Ask “what is it about this that turns me on? What part of me is activated by knowing this is happening?” Our abandoned passions and gifts are right next to our discontents, so follow the feelings until inertia is no longer an option.

————————————————– ——————————

[i] G. Rowe, et al, “Positive affect increases the breadth of attentional selection,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2007 104: 383-388; published online ahead of print December 20, 2006, doi:10.1073/pnas.0605198104

[ii] K. Christoff, et al “Sampling Experience During fMRI Reveals Default Network and Executive System Contributions to the Wandering Mind” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, May 26, 2009 Vol. 106 no. 21 8719-8724

By Jude Treder-Wolff, LCSW, RMT, CGP