Know The Fundamental Skills Of Creative Thinking

It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it.” - Descartes

Technically speaking, the best way to boost your creativity is to boost the communication flow between your two brain hemispheres: your left and right brains.

Apparently during the creative process, our left and right brains are focused on the problem, exchanging information to and fro in a form of a “partnership.”

Highly creative people are known to have an easy and unobstructed flow of information between their left and right brains. They know how to increase the stimulation to their brain and expose it to lots of experiential stimulation, stretching and expanding its creative prowess by bringing it to new uncharted waters.

After all, they understand that every learning experience is a mental one. And the more mentally stimulating and experiential an activity is, the more they learn.

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Seizing The Opportunity
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One of the most fundamental skills of creativity is the ability to see an opportunity and seize it.

Every day, we are faced with countless opportunities to develop our creative thinking skills. Such opportunities present themselves while we are at home with the kids, going to work, at the workplace, at board meetings, out to lunch, or hanging out in the pubs with our friends.

The problem we face is not so much a lack of activities or events to stimulate our creative senses. There is in fact no shortage of encounters for us to develop our creativity. The real challenge is for us to recognize these moments as opportunities for seizing and for creative outburst.

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Challenging Assumptions
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Many inventions were the result of people who were willing to challenge assumptions that existed during their time.

People tend to see only what they think to see. Every time we look at something that is in our world, we make our own assumptions about the reality before us. We based our lives and decisions on those assumptions we make. If we accept those assumptions as real and concrete, we will live by them. However, the moment someone chooses to challenge those same assumptions as “unreal”, he or she may be on the road to discovering something new and different.

Challenging assumptions is an important component of creativity because it forces us to look beyond what is already accepted or is obvious. It can lead to the kind of perceptual breakthroughs we are looking for in the problems before us.

Oftentimes our assumptions of things are so entrenched that it never crosses our minds to challenge them. These assumptions are apparently so established that we no longer question their validity, even though time has passed and things have changed. We are so used to them that we simply accept them as they are.

But many of our life‚s problems are tainted with false assumptions and they prevent us from thinking something new and different. They stifle our creativity and the result is the more or less the same set of tried solutions. No new and novel possibilities.

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Taking Risks
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Taking risks is part and parcel of being a creative thinker.

If you’re not willing to take risks (and these can include calculated risks) and experience failure, then you cannot expect to be a great creative thinker. No one truly succeeds without failing first. And no one truly becomes a creative genius without having to “risk his ideas.”

However, if you really want to experience major leaps in your creativity, then you’ll have to learn to take risks. You’ll fail but failure is good: it accelerates the learning process by generating new information and science has shown that our brain literally rewires itself each time we make a mistake. Our brain learns through a series of trials and errors.

Looking At Problems From A New Perspective

No new ideas will evolve from old perspectives. To create a new product, you must be able to visualize that new product. But you cannot do this if you keep looking at your problem from the same perspective.

You got to look at your problems from a new perspective in order to gain new insights. By changing your perspective and shifting to a new one, you will be able to expand your mental horizon and capture something you were previously unable to see. Only by seeing something new, will you be able to think up new ideas and create something new.

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Thinking Ambiguously
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The ability to think ambiguously is a great boon to yielding creative insights.

This same ability is being exhibited every time someone indulges in wordplay or humor.

People who can think ambiguously are known to be fluid and flexible thinkers. A tinge of ambiguous thinking during the idea generation stage of the creative process has the power to bring out a genius of an idea!

However, the main problem in our society is that people generally prefer things that are clear and unambiguous. They don’t like to associate themselves with things that are vague and have more than one meaning. As a result, we become rather rigid in the way we think, preferring to be involved in only things that have clear and specific parameters. The outcome: predictability.