How to Improve Your Creative Thinking

Creative thinking is all about finding new ways of solving certain issues and dealing with specific situations. In today's modern world where artificial intelligence is being utilised in most industries, it's more crucial than ever for people to boost their creative skills and have more dominance over these machines.

While some people might be more predisposed to thinking creatively compared to others, creative thinking is a skill that can be practised and improved upon. Here are some tips on how to improve your creative thinking.

1. Try Lateral Thinking

In most cases, people use logical thinking in solving problems in a more straightforward way. But lateral thinking requires thinking "outside the box" when it comes to solving certain problems. It requires looking at things from a different perspective to search for answers that are not immediately apparent. A perfect example of this is breaking down the steps involved in serving food in a restaurant and then analysing each step to determine if a better and more efficient process can be made.

Improving your lateral thinking skills can be somewhat challenging since this skill comes naturally to most people. However, like everything else, lateral thinking can be learned, and practice makes perfect.

Mind mapping is one of those strategies that you can use to improve your lateral thinking skills. Mind maps will require you to write down your ideas on paper and then taking a step back to gather your thoughts. Since mind maps serve as visual aids, they would require your brain to adjust the thought process, which can help you to unexpectedly find answers.

2. Try Deliberate Creativity

Deliberate creativity requires using thinking techniques to spur new ideas. This is achieved by wearing a variety of "thinking hats" to address issues from different angles. These thinking hats refer to "white hat" and "black hat". White hat thinking requires looking at facts while black hat thinking focuses on the drawbacks.

Some people are naturally deliberate creative. These are the types of people who are proficient at research, solving problems, investigation, and experiment. Deliberate Creativity is in the brain’s prefrontal cortex, which is located at the front portion of the brain. People who are deliberately creative would spend most of their time conducting tests to develop new solutions to certain problems.

Taking up a creative thinking course for personal and professional creative development to learn the best creative thinking techniques is the best way to improve your deliberate creativity. These courses are designed to help you intentionally achieve impressive creative feats. If you want to gain a deep understanding of how creativity works, then this program is right for you. It will teach you how to move past myths and misconceptions and apply a practical strategy in solving all sorts of problems.

3. Try Blue-Sky Thinking

Blue sky thinking is a type of creative brainstorming. This will usually involve a group of people who will look at an opportunity with a fresh perspective. With blue-sky thinking, the sky is the limit. During the ideas generation session, anyone can come up with as many ideas as possible and no ideas will be rejected.

To come up with ideas for the session, participants should ask themselves questions that would break down the boundaries of conventional thought and will pave the way to new ways of thinking. For instance, "If I'm the richest person on Earth, how will I be able to sell this product?" or "How will this product look if it's a mythical creature?" These questions might not make any sense, but that's the whole point of blue-sky thinking. It's designed to free your mind in order to come up with unexpected solutions.

By involving novel elements in your train of thought, your decayed ideas could evolve into something more exciting, and probably even game changing. Even if the thought process involved in blue-sky thinking is a bit mad, the results can turn out to be very real.  

4. Diversity of Thinking

Diversity of thinking refers to the idea that the more diverse the people in a group the more the higher the volume of different ideas. One of the most important ingredients involved in creative thinking is diversity. It's a given fact that diverse teams are more capable of producing creative results compared to teams where the members belong to the same background.

Studies show that one way to improve your creativity is to live in another country. By moving to a new place with a culture different to yours, you will be able to learn new ways of doing things, which helps to boost your ability to think creatively. In short, diversifying your life is a great way to improve your creative thinking skills.

Creativity refers to a mental process where two or more pieces of information will come together in your mind to come up with a new and useful idea. Creative thinking might sound simple enough. However, our minds tend to organize information in a more structured manner. Such structure is needed to process and manage all the data stored in our minds.

So, if you're looking for solutions to a problem, your brain must work with the available information that is related to the problem. But if you want to be more creative with your thinking, you must diversify your thoughts and encourage your mind to search for information that is also associated with some other concepts.

If you wanted to come up with more creative ideas in solving a problem, you must diversify your thinking. The easiest way to do this is to refer to a dictionary or any book. Choose any random word and try to come up with ideas out of that word. This will force your mind to think diversely and to look for solutions in your mental nooks and crannies. A more modern approach to doing this is by searching that random word in Google. Then open the fourth link that will appear on the search results and see if you can come up with an idea out of that page.

 

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