4 Exercises to Encourage the Flow of Creative Ideas
Most people think it's impossible to make themselves more creative. It seems that the creative geniuses we know have shown a great deal of potential from a young age. Plus, we all have "innate" gifted friends in painting, music, or coding.
However, it is just false to believe that creativity is something we are born with. There are individuals who are more creative than others in some fields. However, creativity never happens by accident; it is always the result of careful effort and hard work.
If you're an advertising official, you probably aren't interested in trying to be a great musician. But you are interested in finding ways to promote more flexible creative thinking, whether in yourself or your team. Luckily for you, there are several ways to promote creative thinking, and they are easy, simple, and usually free. All you have to do is try them.
Top 4 exercises to encourage the flow of creative ideas:
1. Go out for a walk:
This exercise is considered one of the traditional exercises for enhancing creativity. But it is a very effective exercise. For starters, going for a walk greatly reduces anxiety in the short term. Most people find that their ability to think is constantly clouded by their ever-growing to-do list, emails piling up, or the constant ringing of the phone. Therefore, a brisk walk helps eliminate these sources of stress and allows you to focus on the task at hand.
Walking has a much stronger effect on creativity. A study by psychologists at Stanford University found that walking directly contributed to increased creative thinking, and interestingly, it's walking itself — not just being outside — that boosts inspiration.
Study participants who were either walking at the time or had just finished walking performed significantly better at creating new comparisons than those who were just sitting in the same environment. However, walking outside seemed to produce the greatest improvement in all groups tested.
2. Keep your hands busy:
There's a reason why so many successful people keep games and puzzles on their desks. When you face a difficult problem and lose the ability to find a solution, doing something with your own hands is often a good idea.
The most obvious reason for this success is distraction. It is really difficult to withdraw from having a difficult problem, but when you occupy yourself or your hands with something, you don't want to throw yourself into something quite mentally stressful; you just need something relatively psychedelic and simple to allow your brain to recover. Yet there's a stronger reason why keeping your hands busy is helpful, which is the idea of perception embodied in psychology (although it's far from being new).
The basic idea is that we don't just think with our minds but also with our own hands; our knowledge processes are embodied in our physical movements. This is otherwise true; doing something complicated with your hands, such as playing with a Rubik's cube, squeezing a ball, or messing with a dice, stimulates different parts of your brain and may effectively change your mindset.
3. Listen to music:
Of all the ways to get creative ideas flowing, listening to music is perhaps the most effective. Music has been used by artists as an inspirational tool since the dawn of time, and yet it is not just a myth or metaphor. Listening to music opens up different pathways in the brain and allows for more flexible, creative thinking.
As this article explains, music training can have a profound impact on the physical structure of the brain. More specifically, young people who underwent music training had stronger connections between the right and left halves of the brain than people who did not. We have always known that creativity is born when we link widespread concepts in new ways, as better connections between the analytical and creative aspects of the brain can make you a more creative person.
4. Throw a ball back and forth:
This exercise already offers a magical effect. Companies that set aside time for their employees to relax and unwind rely on a person-to-person ball-throwing exercise to break the deadlock and routine. Throwing a ball raises a sense of camaraderie, makes people feel more connected, and distracts you from everything else, even if you're stuck solving a difficult problem for three hours. Taking a relatively simple and amazing break from a problem often allows you to come back to face your problems from a completely different angle, and taking that break with other people will improve your mood as well as create the kind of environment in which collaboration can be fostered. At the very least, it will keep your hands busy, which, shall we say, is a great way to boost creative thinking.