Who is creative? We all are…. There is no such thing as "being more creative"; you already are a creative being. Since you were born you were a creative being who in childhood used your imagination to creatively play and generate fantasies and ideas through associations and patterns. However how many people say "I'm not creative" or you have perhaps said it yourself?
In life your thoughts will shape your reality and therefore your beliefs form the bedrock for your life – so guess what? If you think you are not creative you won’t be and your mind will be locked in the perception prison for all eternity!
‘A recent survey of Fortune 500 CEO’s asked what they looked for when hiring employees and promoting managers. A whopping 100 percent of the CEO’s mentioned creativity as one of the primary characteristics. In fact, almost 60 percent of the CEOs surveyed ranked creativity higher than intelligence. This is in stark contrast to the fact that only six percent think they are doing well when it comes to creativity.’
It’s scary how quickly our creativity disappears. A child’s creativity decreases 90 percent from age five to seven. By the time we reach 40, our creativity is at rock bottom - a mere two percent of what we once had. Want it back?
Looking at the picture how many faces do you see?
From the picture above the more faces you see the more observant you are but to see the faces you need to use the same imagination you used as a child to make all kinds of faces and objects when looking at the clouds in the sky! In fact how many faces would you have seen if the question was not how many faces could you see but just what could you see!
Creative thinking is an innate talent that you were born with and a set of skills that can be learned.
How easy is it as a child to play and make up games, characters, people and places without limitation and constraint. An expensive gift can appear wasted to a parent as the child finds wonderful things to do with the box or wrapping! We all have that imagination in us however we have become conditioned to conform to a world of logical thinking and playing safe. Besides who wants to be known as the whacko with the crazy ideas.
Think about this…
If you have always done what you have always done you will always get what you have always got – fact; and isn’t it a form of insanity to keep doing the same things and expect to get different results. Yet how many people and organisations do just that! We stay in our comfort zones and wait for life to happen. Overtime we have all been conditioned to use logical thinking which searches for the right answer as oppose to thinking laterally and creative.
If you don’t become creative and become the architect of change then that creative change will eventually find you and you will become the enslaved worker who has to make the change instead of shaping it.
Free your mind….
What happened to you then? Well when we started school the greater rewards were often bestowed from teachers and parents for the more logical activities such as maths and spelling. The adage of "What gets rewarded gets repeated" applies, so as we grow older, the majority of us unconsciously develop our logic thinking, leaving our creative abilities under-utilised. Plus to be creative and challenge the status quo we have to swim up stream against the current and stand out and be different.
Somewhere between the beginning and the end of our formal education, we have developed ways of finding the ‘right’ answer, and have lost the creative impetus to go beyond other possible right answers. We are trapped by the perception prison to find the right answer and by our conditioning through life.
Applying logic means thinking in a straight line (i.e. what comes next in the process, how does this fit with that, etc.). It involves using facts, figures and known theories to justify a decision, or indeed prove a new theory or solve a problem.
Let’s do an example…
What is the answer to the following riddle?
How do you drop an egg five feet without breaking its shell?
Right now your mind is trying to find the right answer because that is how your mind is programmed – within the perception prison you need to find the right answer from your past conditioning. Although your mind will be coming up with many ideas you will be judging each one of them and discarding each idea as either not right or not logical. If you were to come up with as many answers to the riddle without having to be right how creative could you be?
Another example: What is the first word that comes in to your mind when you hear the word machine?
Sowing, robot, factory....any word that you instantly associate with machine will come into your mind based on your past conditioning.
How many answers could you think of for the riddle above without limitations?
Free your mind from searching for the right answer and start thinking laterally and you are starting to think creatively….but what is your mind telling you, those ideas are not the right answer and they are not realistic answers.
You have to go beyond this and down the rabbit hole – free your mind however I’m guessing if you don’t know the answer it is starting to drive you mad so for those who need the right answer you drop the raw egg from 6 feet and at 5 feet the egg shell will not be broken. But the point here is that if you always seek the right answer and seek logic then you are missing out on creativity and innovation. In fact if you can only ever think in black and white then think about all the colours you are missing. Think in colours.
The dictionary definition of creativity
Fecundity & fruitfulness - the intellectual productivity of a creative imagination
Invention, innovation, conception, design - the creation of something in the mind
Cleverness, ingenious, ingenuity, inventiveness - the power of creative imagination
Divergent thinking, Out of the box thinking - that moves away in diverging directions so as to involve a variety of aspects and which sometimes lead to novel ideas and solutions; associated with creativity
The Wikipedia definition
‘Creativity is a mental and social process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations of the creative mind between existing ideas or concepts. Creativity is fueled by the process of either conscious or unconscious insight. An alternative conception of creativeness is that it is simply the act of making something new. From a scientific point of view, the products of creative thought (sometimes referred to as divergent thought) are usually considered to have both originality and appropriateness. Although intuitively a simple phenomenon, it is in fact quite complex. It has been studied from the perspectives of behavioural psychology, social psychology, psychometrics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, philosophy, history, economics, design research, business, and management, among others. The studies have covered everyday creativity, exceptional creativity and even artificial creativity. Unlike many phenomena in science, there is no single, authoritative perspective or definition of creativity. And unlike many phenomena in psychology, there is no standardized measurement technique.
Creativity has been attributed variously to divine intervention, cognitive processes, the social environment, personality traits, and chance ("accident", "serendipity"). It has been associated with genius, mental illness and humour. Some say it is a trait we are born with; others say it can be taught with the application of simple techniques. Creativity has also been viewed as a beneficence of a muse or Muses. Although popularly associated with art and literature, it is also an essential part of innovation and invention and is important in professions such as business, economics, architecture, industrial design, graphic design, advertising, music, science and engineering. Despite, or perhaps because of, the ambiguity and multi-dimensional nature of creativity, entire industries have been spawned from the pursuit of creative ideas and the development of creativity techniques.
Leonardo Da Vinci is well known for his creative works.
Creativity has been associated with right or forehead brain activity or even specifically with lateral thinking. Some students of creativity have emphasized an element of chance in the creative process. Linus Pauling, asked at a public lecture how one creates scientific theories, replied that one must endeavor to come up with many ideas — then discard the useless ones. Another adequate definition of creativity is that it is an "assumptions-breaking process." Creative ideas are often generated when one discards preconceived assumptions and attempts a new approach or method that might seem to others unthinkable.’
It is moving past pre-conceived assumptions to free your mind.
There are countless creativity techniques that you can use – here is a link that is only a beginning to thinking differently for you and more creatively.
http://www.mycoted.com/Category:Creativity_Techniques
Creativity is the link to Psychological Intelligence because your thoughts create reality and they shape who you are. You can re-condition your mind to chose who you want to be when you want to be at any given time. The choice really is yours....
Free your mind of the perception prison.
‘In life, attitude breeds attitude and behaviour breeds behaviour. We attract people, situations and events in line with our dominant thoughts into our life. Positive thoughts and actions will make positive things happen. Our thoughts shape our life and most illnesses are psychosomatic illnesses brought on by negative thoughts and emotions linked to holding on within the danger zone of the change transition.
This means we have a choice in life to shape our own fate. We could choose to be negative, pessimistic and bitter about life but where will that get us? Yes it is hard to be positive and optimistic all of the time but we have the opportunity to shape our own character by shaping our thoughts and realising our feelings. It is character building that makes the difference, not small changes to our personality or behaviour. We can’t act like we love life if we don’t really believe it in our subconscious. Well we could, but deep down our feelings within our subconscious would produce the final outcome…..
…… What we need on a feeling level is a definite Yes to life and our self. This with a passion and belief in whom we are, what we are trying to achieve and where we want to go opens up the sky to a sun shining with glorious possibilities and opportunities.
This means that you have a choice in life to be all that we are; you alone can decide to be positive or negative. By being positive and having a positive attitude it gives us the right frame of mind to shape our own future. However being positive is not enough in itself; to make positive changes in our life we need to act upon our feelings. The elegance and simplicity of the positive mind provides a kind of autogenic conditioning that gives us the inspiration to make dramatic structural changes in our life. By saying Yes to life we are also saying yes to our self.’
The Master….'And my next point, a normal mirror always gives you a perfect reflection although you might not like what you see.'
'Although what we see in the mirror is always back to front so we never really see ourselves in the mirror like others see us.'
'How true, however, the reflection is perfect so why do we not see ourselves like that?'
'I see myself as a condition of my circumstances in comparison to society and in the past I have counted the value of my life against what other people have.'
'And what does it matter what other people have or possess if you don't have or possess yourself?'
'Master to have myself I therefore need to know myself.'
'Yes the point is how do we see ourselves or in this case what we can find out that other people know about us. Like with the mirror we see only what we expect to see or want to see, so how self-aware are we as individuals and as a collective society. What do I mean by self awareness?'
'To be self aware would be to have insight in to who I am as a person and the effect I have on other people and my surroundings.'
'If psychological intelligence is realizing we can choose to be who we want to be when we want to be at any given time the next step is having self awareness to realize who we are now so we can make the changes and re-condition the landscape of our mind. In so doing it is essential to understand the impact we will have on other people and our surroundings in making those changes.'
'How do we make those changes?'
'By being true to oneself and the vision of who or how one wants to be, however it is important to remember the mirror as it grasps nothing, it expects nothing yet it reflects everything.'
'So we become our natural self?'
'Yes and in so doing one acts without effort.'
'So where do we start?'
'If one takes the time to consider their ideal self which is the 'Super You' which is the natural you because quite simply if you ask yourself what would the Super You do in this situation you will always get the most honest, consistent, genuine response. You will be acting with integrity towards yourself and to others.'
'So my highest hope is my ideal self but once I become my ideal self what next?'
'The ideal self is not an end goal but a way of life - a self one creates Everyday. Let's rest here my young apprentice before we move to the next plain where lies the river of life and the test of taking. For now let's simply be.'
In life your thoughts will shape your reality and therefore your beliefs form the bedrock for your life – so guess what? If you think you are not creative you won’t be and your mind will be locked in the perception prison for all eternity!
‘A recent survey of Fortune 500 CEO’s asked what they looked for when hiring employees and promoting managers. A whopping 100 percent of the CEO’s mentioned creativity as one of the primary characteristics. In fact, almost 60 percent of the CEOs surveyed ranked creativity higher than intelligence. This is in stark contrast to the fact that only six percent think they are doing well when it comes to creativity.’
It’s scary how quickly our creativity disappears. A child’s creativity decreases 90 percent from age five to seven. By the time we reach 40, our creativity is at rock bottom - a mere two percent of what we once had. Want it back?
Looking at the picture how many faces do you see?
From the picture above the more faces you see the more observant you are but to see the faces you need to use the same imagination you used as a child to make all kinds of faces and objects when looking at the clouds in the sky! In fact how many faces would you have seen if the question was not how many faces could you see but just what could you see!
Creative thinking is an innate talent that you were born with and a set of skills that can be learned.
How easy is it as a child to play and make up games, characters, people and places without limitation and constraint. An expensive gift can appear wasted to a parent as the child finds wonderful things to do with the box or wrapping! We all have that imagination in us however we have become conditioned to conform to a world of logical thinking and playing safe. Besides who wants to be known as the whacko with the crazy ideas.
Think about this…
If you have always done what you have always done you will always get what you have always got – fact; and isn’t it a form of insanity to keep doing the same things and expect to get different results. Yet how many people and organisations do just that! We stay in our comfort zones and wait for life to happen. Overtime we have all been conditioned to use logical thinking which searches for the right answer as oppose to thinking laterally and creative.
If you don’t become creative and become the architect of change then that creative change will eventually find you and you will become the enslaved worker who has to make the change instead of shaping it.
Free your mind….
What happened to you then? Well when we started school the greater rewards were often bestowed from teachers and parents for the more logical activities such as maths and spelling. The adage of "What gets rewarded gets repeated" applies, so as we grow older, the majority of us unconsciously develop our logic thinking, leaving our creative abilities under-utilised. Plus to be creative and challenge the status quo we have to swim up stream against the current and stand out and be different.
Somewhere between the beginning and the end of our formal education, we have developed ways of finding the ‘right’ answer, and have lost the creative impetus to go beyond other possible right answers. We are trapped by the perception prison to find the right answer and by our conditioning through life.
Applying logic means thinking in a straight line (i.e. what comes next in the process, how does this fit with that, etc.). It involves using facts, figures and known theories to justify a decision, or indeed prove a new theory or solve a problem.
Let’s do an example…
What is the answer to the following riddle?
How do you drop an egg five feet without breaking its shell?
Right now your mind is trying to find the right answer because that is how your mind is programmed – within the perception prison you need to find the right answer from your past conditioning. Although your mind will be coming up with many ideas you will be judging each one of them and discarding each idea as either not right or not logical. If you were to come up with as many answers to the riddle without having to be right how creative could you be?
Another example: What is the first word that comes in to your mind when you hear the word machine?
Sowing, robot, factory....any word that you instantly associate with machine will come into your mind based on your past conditioning.
How many answers could you think of for the riddle above without limitations?
Free your mind from searching for the right answer and start thinking laterally and you are starting to think creatively….but what is your mind telling you, those ideas are not the right answer and they are not realistic answers.
You have to go beyond this and down the rabbit hole – free your mind however I’m guessing if you don’t know the answer it is starting to drive you mad so for those who need the right answer you drop the raw egg from 6 feet and at 5 feet the egg shell will not be broken. But the point here is that if you always seek the right answer and seek logic then you are missing out on creativity and innovation. In fact if you can only ever think in black and white then think about all the colours you are missing. Think in colours.
The dictionary definition of creativity
- Having the ability or power to create: Human beings are creative animals.
- Productive; creating.
- Characterized by originality and expressiveness; imaginative: creative writing.
- One who displays productive originality: the creative’s in the advertising department.
Fecundity & fruitfulness - the intellectual productivity of a creative imagination
Invention, innovation, conception, design - the creation of something in the mind
Cleverness, ingenious, ingenuity, inventiveness - the power of creative imagination
Divergent thinking, Out of the box thinking - that moves away in diverging directions so as to involve a variety of aspects and which sometimes lead to novel ideas and solutions; associated with creativity
The Wikipedia definition
‘Creativity is a mental and social process involving the generation of new ideas or concepts, or new associations of the creative mind between existing ideas or concepts. Creativity is fueled by the process of either conscious or unconscious insight. An alternative conception of creativeness is that it is simply the act of making something new. From a scientific point of view, the products of creative thought (sometimes referred to as divergent thought) are usually considered to have both originality and appropriateness. Although intuitively a simple phenomenon, it is in fact quite complex. It has been studied from the perspectives of behavioural psychology, social psychology, psychometrics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, philosophy, history, economics, design research, business, and management, among others. The studies have covered everyday creativity, exceptional creativity and even artificial creativity. Unlike many phenomena in science, there is no single, authoritative perspective or definition of creativity. And unlike many phenomena in psychology, there is no standardized measurement technique.
Creativity has been attributed variously to divine intervention, cognitive processes, the social environment, personality traits, and chance ("accident", "serendipity"). It has been associated with genius, mental illness and humour. Some say it is a trait we are born with; others say it can be taught with the application of simple techniques. Creativity has also been viewed as a beneficence of a muse or Muses. Although popularly associated with art and literature, it is also an essential part of innovation and invention and is important in professions such as business, economics, architecture, industrial design, graphic design, advertising, music, science and engineering. Despite, or perhaps because of, the ambiguity and multi-dimensional nature of creativity, entire industries have been spawned from the pursuit of creative ideas and the development of creativity techniques.
Leonardo Da Vinci is well known for his creative works.
Creativity has been associated with right or forehead brain activity or even specifically with lateral thinking. Some students of creativity have emphasized an element of chance in the creative process. Linus Pauling, asked at a public lecture how one creates scientific theories, replied that one must endeavor to come up with many ideas — then discard the useless ones. Another adequate definition of creativity is that it is an "assumptions-breaking process." Creative ideas are often generated when one discards preconceived assumptions and attempts a new approach or method that might seem to others unthinkable.’
It is moving past pre-conceived assumptions to free your mind.
There are countless creativity techniques that you can use – here is a link that is only a beginning to thinking differently for you and more creatively.
http://www.mycoted.com/Category:Creativity_Techniques
Creativity is the link to Psychological Intelligence because your thoughts create reality and they shape who you are. You can re-condition your mind to chose who you want to be when you want to be at any given time. The choice really is yours....
Free your mind of the perception prison.
‘In life, attitude breeds attitude and behaviour breeds behaviour. We attract people, situations and events in line with our dominant thoughts into our life. Positive thoughts and actions will make positive things happen. Our thoughts shape our life and most illnesses are psychosomatic illnesses brought on by negative thoughts and emotions linked to holding on within the danger zone of the change transition.
This means we have a choice in life to shape our own fate. We could choose to be negative, pessimistic and bitter about life but where will that get us? Yes it is hard to be positive and optimistic all of the time but we have the opportunity to shape our own character by shaping our thoughts and realising our feelings. It is character building that makes the difference, not small changes to our personality or behaviour. We can’t act like we love life if we don’t really believe it in our subconscious. Well we could, but deep down our feelings within our subconscious would produce the final outcome…..
…… What we need on a feeling level is a definite Yes to life and our self. This with a passion and belief in whom we are, what we are trying to achieve and where we want to go opens up the sky to a sun shining with glorious possibilities and opportunities.
This means that you have a choice in life to be all that we are; you alone can decide to be positive or negative. By being positive and having a positive attitude it gives us the right frame of mind to shape our own future. However being positive is not enough in itself; to make positive changes in our life we need to act upon our feelings. The elegance and simplicity of the positive mind provides a kind of autogenic conditioning that gives us the inspiration to make dramatic structural changes in our life. By saying Yes to life we are also saying yes to our self.’
The Master….'And my next point, a normal mirror always gives you a perfect reflection although you might not like what you see.'
'Although what we see in the mirror is always back to front so we never really see ourselves in the mirror like others see us.'
'How true, however, the reflection is perfect so why do we not see ourselves like that?'
'I see myself as a condition of my circumstances in comparison to society and in the past I have counted the value of my life against what other people have.'
'And what does it matter what other people have or possess if you don't have or possess yourself?'
'Master to have myself I therefore need to know myself.'
'Yes the point is how do we see ourselves or in this case what we can find out that other people know about us. Like with the mirror we see only what we expect to see or want to see, so how self-aware are we as individuals and as a collective society. What do I mean by self awareness?'
'To be self aware would be to have insight in to who I am as a person and the effect I have on other people and my surroundings.'
'If psychological intelligence is realizing we can choose to be who we want to be when we want to be at any given time the next step is having self awareness to realize who we are now so we can make the changes and re-condition the landscape of our mind. In so doing it is essential to understand the impact we will have on other people and our surroundings in making those changes.'
'How do we make those changes?'
'By being true to oneself and the vision of who or how one wants to be, however it is important to remember the mirror as it grasps nothing, it expects nothing yet it reflects everything.'
'So we become our natural self?'
'Yes and in so doing one acts without effort.'
'So where do we start?'
'If one takes the time to consider their ideal self which is the 'Super You' which is the natural you because quite simply if you ask yourself what would the Super You do in this situation you will always get the most honest, consistent, genuine response. You will be acting with integrity towards yourself and to others.'
'So my highest hope is my ideal self but once I become my ideal self what next?'
'The ideal self is not an end goal but a way of life - a self one creates Everyday. Let's rest here my young apprentice before we move to the next plain where lies the river of life and the test of taking. For now let's simply be.'
Welcome to the world of subterranean landscape…..be your personal best today.
'Expect the unexpected or you won’t find it'
'Expect the unexpected or you won’t find it'
-Heraclitus
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