
“You use a glass mirror to see your face. You use works of art to see your soul.” — George Bernard Shaw
Creative flow often feels as if we have been living inside ourselves for a while. When it’s over, it’s a feeling of awaking from a dream state.
Creative thinking is a pathway of thought that leads to better outcomes. We can’t harness creativity in a jar, like a mad scientist, or bottle it and sell it, but we can practise creativity.
The benefits can be astounding, and do help us to move along the road of life in a successful way — when the alternative may have been a static state of going in circles for months, or years on end.
When we notice that our thoughts and actions tend towards circular thinking, always that same old feeling, same thoughts, and ideas, over and over, it’s normally because we have become obsessed with ourselves. We are not looking at life in a balanced way. What’s inside, must connect with what’s outside — we live in a material world that is driven by great ideas.
“A penny for your thoughts”, is an old saying, the price for thoughts is about the same market value as it was in 1785 — a penny. Thoughts must lead to actionable insights.
Great thoughts, that we all are capable of having, must be driven by determination, tenacity, and persistent behaviours.
Insight allows a deeper look into the ideas we have, and tells us that it’s worth investigating.
We can form and shape our ideas with creative thinking into potential outcomes. These outcomes benefit and enhance our standard of living in social and business life, in love and war, and can set us on new paths that lead to better experiences.
Today, in this ever changing world environment, the creative thought process is recognised as a valuable tool. We are constantly faced with disruption in businesses, new ideas that often peter-out. Like a cat on a hot tin roof we must think quickly and land on our feet.
Goal setting is no longer a clear-cut path to success. We must use creative thinking to embrace new ideas, examine them, make new connections and accept or reject the connection, then with a half baked idea step deeper into the dimly lit future of new possible connections until our thoughts are formulated into actionable ideas; whether it be in the world of a creative pursuit or business, creativity is a powerful tool of the mind.
Check other People’s Shoes
Often, when we want to solve a problem, we automatically put ourselves into the shoes of another person. We want to know how it might look and feel for another human being. This helps us to determine whether we are on the right track to solving a problem.
This is a natural way of creating a new perspective that offers new angles of thought on a subject.
Creating a new position of thought, or taking up a different stance to the problem is often used by good coaches. A good coach will already know that the conversation between client and coach must take place in a new thought-environment.
Either through conversational skills, or techniques offered to the client, the coach will work to create this new perspective as a platform to think from. We can do this for ourselves, it takes practice to become effective, but once mastered to a habit, it can become a new resource for problem-solving.
A strong and new perspective is linked to your ability to visualize or shift your main centre of thinking to a new position.
Putting yourself in a new position to think about problems, allows you to see differently. There’s a lot happening in the mind when we seriously approach a problem.
The need to solve problems, to overcome an obstacle, to break-through to a better way of doing things, ignites a barrel load of brain cells that when touched through new thoughts, flash like lightning.
It’s a matter of becoming aware of what’s happening inside. Then, we can begin to connect with what’s outside in the material world. Creative thought is the bridge between what we see and perceive in the world, and what resources are lighting up inside ourselves.
We need creativity to find the connections and meld them together.
Sometimes, it can seem like we are trying to catch lightning. But as we move determinedly forwards in life, we build a positive pressure that creates a clearer vision of who we are, and what we want to achieve.
Perceptions that we enhance by taking a new perspective give us the opportunity to reframe ideas into more manageable and understandable chunks of information. We begin to understand why, and then how becomes a problem to solve through the creative process. The force of why, will overcome the obstacle of how.
The best creative thinking happens when we latch onto an idea, and begin to run with it; we don’t realise it, but we start to work in the state of flow. It’s only afterwards that we have that feeling of having experienced life as if in a dream.
We’ve been somewhere else, really, but somewhere else in our minds. A place that only creative thinking can take us to.
We neglect many resources in our minds, but when we take creative thinking seriously, and use it as a go-to tool for problem-solving, we become more adept in handling the tool. This leads to better, and better results. Proof through evidence of change, and the positive outcome desired.
Creative thinking as a tool puts us into a state of altered awareness; we visit neglected parts of the brain and utilize those parts, we cause them to wake up, build new pathways and connections so that they function with other thought processes. The brain can be renewed, freshened up, and just that alone will make you feel energized and ready to face the day with more determination and tenacity than previously. That can be repeated each day.
Those old characters of determination, persistence, and tenacity in a human beingness are still your choice of indispensable tool. There is no passive getting of things in this world.
Pennies and pounds, dollar and cents, are all regulated by a complex economic system that keeps the money where the action is, while the passives keep sleeping. Vision drives us on.
There must be effort, effective effort stems from knowledge about our why, which shows us the doorways to the how to reach our goal.
With a better way to formulate ideas through creative thought processes, we can develop a better vision for ourselves. There is no quitting when the body and mind, connected with solid ideas, is driven by the energies that come from a deeper state of thought.