How to develop creativity skills

Many people don’t think of creativity as a skill. But, it is, and you can develop it. Some people will separate creativity from thinking, but others believe it is the same concept. After all, you need to use your brain to be creative.

Therefore, thinking is involved.

When you sharpen your creative skills, you expand your opportunities in most aspects of your life. At work, you will be called upon to come up with new ideas that your company use to create products or sell services. In your personal life, you may help your kids when they are stuck on coming up with ideas for their projects. You can probably come up with a host of places where creativity comes in handy.

Companies like creativity, but only to a certain point. Managers may pretend as though they want creative people. But, often that requires setting them loose in an environment that allows them to come up with new ideas. That gives the managers less control over their people, and many won’t like that proposition. While some managers allow for this, most will not. They become a constraint on the creative process.

If you run your own business, then you can let your creativity run wild. Of course, even here, you need to strike a balance between coming up with ideas and getting work done. Your ideas are meaningless unless put into action. It’s great to have new ideas, but you have to put them in the pipeline to let them take off.

Part of the creative process is to come up with bad ideas. That sounds counterintuitive, and the thinking behind it is not to deliberately come up with bad ideas. But, you should allow them to occur. It’s better to have hundreds of ideas which could yield a few great ideas than it is to try and think the best ideas out of thin air.

Brainstorming sessions nurture the concept of allowing for bad ideas to occur. The first stage of a brainstorming session has a rule that the participants are not allowed to criticize any presented idea. The moderator must be vigilant with this rule. After the first session is complete, the group then revisits each idea, and the critiquing may begin. Usually, at the end of the session, the group is left with a few ideas that are right for their situation.

There are no hard and fast rules for what makes someone creative.

Mostly, you draw your inspiration from others and rework a new angle into the process.

Find out more about our Creative Thinking Skills Masterclass here