Why you are more creative than you might think

Creativity is the process of having an idea. But how do we have ideas in the first place? What is the best way to express them? How do I decide if they are any good and how to make sense of them?

This article will show you the ultimate way to generating new ideas and releasing your creativity.

Listen to your inner voice.

One of the ground rules of creative thinking is that you are listening to your inner voice as the process of listening to the world and responding to it is a creative process. We have ideas by making connections between separate pieces of information and turning these into concepts or ‘maps’. In the world of today we are working with tried and tested maps that we use to continue operating at the surface level of life so that we get predictability.

There is a ‘deep level’ of life which is your subconscious and the place where ideas are formed. Everyone has a capacity to be creative because you can choose to notice what you are experiencing from the external world and use your imagination in order to make new connections and invent different maps. Your subconscious does this naturally and the most common experience is dreaming when all sorts of often very odd ideas and fantasies are constructed.

Our brain as idea-generating machine

This same process occurs in your conscious life and people who are labelled creative are the ones who take the time or learn to pay attention to this ‘inner voice’ and listen for ideas.

Our brains are incredibly active pattern making, therefore idea generating, machines. When you are in a meeting the conversation is running at a rate of 100 -120 words a minute which is a typical rate of speaking. As only one person is speaking at a time, (well mainly anyway!), then the rest of the meeting must be listening, either to the speaker or they are in a daydream listening to themselves.

The brain works at a rate of 1200 words a minute so in a typical meeting, while someone is speaking there is a fantastic opportunity to listen to your inner voice and acknowledge what it is telling you, maybe by writing down the odd words, phrases and images that come to mind.

You may have noticed that despite planning to ‘pay attention’ to the speaker often you will find you have quickly drifted off into your own thoughts prompted by something the speaker said. Research suggests our capacity to fully pay attention only lasts for 5-10 seconds, no matter how interested we are in the content.

Learn from children

This process of ‘listening to your inner voice for ideas’ is a natural activity known to all children who were kept in detention after class or had the chalk or board rubber thrown at them. This is why children are so good at playing games and making up imaginary worlds. They use their natural talent to listen to their inner thoughts and turn them into a ‘reality’, a game.

We all did this as children and the education system squashed this capability in many cases by teaching us to listen to understand in order to learn knowledge. We demonstrated our skill with this by passing exams and becoming experts in various fields. This is a learned way of working that is important for surviving in the world of today.

In order to relearn how to become good at creative problem solving in the world of tomorrow celebrate your natural capacity to ‘not pay attention’ and become childlike again. (Not childish)

Some real-life examples

Float glass is manufactured by floating molten glass on molten tin, a process that transformed the manufacture, quality, reliability and cost of glass. It was invented by a chap who was washing up one day and being rather bored began to play at making patterns with the grease on the surface of the water. Something spoke to him, his inner voice, and he recognised that this is what glass should look like. He experimented and the absurdity is that if you float molten glass on water you simply get a mess, a rather explosive one, but he followed his inner voice and curiosity and it led him to finally develop a major new manufacturing process.

The Human Genome programme began in a large pharmaceutical company with a group of research scientists who were pretending to be in the world of the wild-west, playing cowboys and Indians basically. You will read about how you can harness, no pun intended, this process later. One of them began to talk about the way the waggon wheels in old cowboy movies looked as though they were turning backwards. Someone listened to their inner voice and began to explore the notion of splitting materials into constituent parts. This led to a new technology stream within the firm that in later years developed into the Human Genome programme.

When you are in a creative problem solving meeting it is vital that you listen to your inner voice and record what it says to you. Often what it says makes no sense but it is a thought from your sub-conscious that has arisen for a reason. Often you are looking for a metaphor or analogy to explore. Sometimes the meaning is obvious, the ‘eureka’ moment, and more often it is not and you have to work with it. To start with, you should focus on learning to hear your inner voice, trust it and write down whatever it tells you.

If you’d like to delve deeper into this topic then “Creative Problem Solving” written by Jonne Ceserani is the right book for you. Download it!