Seven Tips To Get You Unstuck, Unblocked, Newly Focused, And Passionate About Your Creative Project Or Process

You know that you are a creative person. After all, you run a business. You have the ability to do innovative work and to make new connections between ideas, which is the key dynamic of the creative process. Yet, sometimes our creativity stalls, plays tricks on us, or appears to have vanished completely. It is at these moments we need to reconnect with our inspirational powers to stimulate our ability to invent something new and useful. The following tips are meant to arouse your natural creative gifts so that you can surmount the challenges on your creative quest and develop that novel product or service.

1) Keep a daily excitement list about why you are committed to your creative project. What fascinates you and intrigues you about the topic? Why is it compelling to you personally? How does it matter to the company or the larger world?

2) Visualize your end result and make a collage of images that support your vision (cut pictures out of magazines or collect relevant items) and then post this collage where you can ponder it regularly. Let the visual images help you to be as specific as possible in identifying the essence of what you want to invent.

3) Take a field trip relating to your project to explore a particular facet of it. One of my clients was fascinated by gorillas, for some unknown reason, and I advised her to go to the zoo for a day, even without a clue about what she was looking for. While sitting with the gorillas, they reminded her of the power of nonverbal communication–the missing ingredient in her training program.

4) Start off your creative sessions with inspiring music, selected to reflect the mood of the project you are working on. Music creates a natural high and your creative muse loves it! Listen to the same music to begin your creative time each day, as it sets the project into motion–almost like putting you into a trance.

5) Think of your project as the experiment that it is and write up three hypotheses. Then, try them on as templates with your content. Often, even the most outlandish ideas can reap new perspectives and clever twists.

6) Go to a toy store and but a toy that reminds you of your project or process. Spend some time playing with the toy and write down all the metaphors that you discover. A stuffed giant caterpillar once guided me to organize a product into interlocking but flexible sections, similar to the body of a caterpillar.

7) Send your inner critic on vacation and learn to suspend all negative judgments in your thinking. Give yourself the freedom to make mistakes and take positive risks with your work. .If you were fearless about your work, what “out on a limb strategies” would you try next? Trial and error will bring you to creative success!