4 Ways to Tap into Your Creative Potential
Creative minds also encounter their fair share of challenges.
Writers, for example, can find themselves bogged down by a writer’s block. Similarly, a spate of creative block, fear and doubt can be a big challenge for painters, photographers, designers, and all other types of creatives.
If you are a highly creative person, and you think and come up with innovative creative works every day, you might wonder why challenges like these happen and how you can combat them.
Tapping deeper into your creative potential may be the key.
How to Tap into Your Creative Potential and Rise Above Challenges
Want to know how you can tap into your creative potential and rise above creative challenges?
Here are some ideas:
1. Challenge your creativity with novelties
If you do the same routine day after day, it should come as no surprise that your creativity sometimes runs dry. You are practically using the same neural pathways to come up with similar things.
What you can do to tap deeper into your creative potential once more is to challenge yourself with new things. It is advisable to pick something else that might feel like the total opposite of what you usually do. For example, if you spend most of your time indoors, taking your knowledge and sources for creativity from a computer, you can decide to spend some time outside drawing inspiration from nature and the people out there in the real world going about their business.
So, find something to do outside your home. It may even be a simple idea like shopping for a particular product outside of your normal sphere. This might challenge your mind in different ways than what you are used to when creating.
2. Develop your logical brain
Many times, people tend to think that creativity has everything to do with being extremely artistic and non-linear, and that logic doesn’t have a place in the mental processes of highly creative individuals. But nothing could be further from the truth.
Genuinely creative minds put a lot of work into the development of a logical way of thinking. They strive to connect the dots between various facts and the creative work they produce.
None of the technological advances surrounding us today would have been possible without some creative minds seeing the connections between factual reality A and factual reality B.
Learn to think logically and develop your logic skills, like planning and sound reasoning. It’ll help you to form better thoughts, ideas, opinions, plans of action that ultimately make you a better creative.
3. Read about new things every day
Keeping a broad perspective is something that you can’t easily do if you remain stuck in one discipline, the one that holds your interest at the moment.
A good idea is to read widely, about new things and places that have nothing in common with what you are working on to broaden your perspective, knowledge and worldview.
This way, you will give your creative mind a bit of rest, while at the same time feeding it with new information it can use to connect the dots and enhance your creativity and creative output.
4. Don’t waste your creativity on stuff that doesn’t work
As a creative person, you probably have tons of ideas popping up in your mind every other time. That, in itself, can be a blessing and a curse at the same time.
Because not every idea is gold, you should apply your logical thinking processes to sieve and set apart the ideas that are not viable at this time from those that have a real chance to see the light of day. Separate the wheat from the chaff, so to speak.
It may be difficult abandoning many of the ideas popping in your mind, and you may feel like you are killing your darlings or “babies,” as author Steven King calls them, but it is a necessary habit.
Imagine your creative mind as a beautiful garden where you must protect the strong plants growing there from being invaded by weeds. Only when you are proactive and deliberate in protecting your garden will you truly make your creative mind thrive and produce to its fullest potential.
