New habits that help improve your creative confidence.

Hey guys I am back, with some more life experiences being a design thinking & creativity practitioner. Today I am going to share with you the secret sauce of how I keep up my creativity quotient by changing a few simple rules in my life.

While some science says that if you practice something for 21 days it becomes a part of your habits repository. I have different story to share, I was grappling with a question” How can I make creativity as my habit”. Sleeping with challenge every night and in quest of finding my answer, a day while I was on my regular morning walk I found my 1st answer.

Un-habit is the new habit.

I saw a man walking on the road and then he suddenly started walking reverse. After a few minutes he started walking sideways and so on. I found this interesting and creative, so I asked him about his different styles of walking. He replied that walking is very monotonous but he has to walk daily due to health compulsions, so he tries new ways of walking everyday to make it interesting. That’s it I had my first answers we face similar situation in our lives, ie. We have to go to work daily even if we find it monotonous. So to keep it interesting we should be breaking our professional & personal habits. I started practicing this and made it a point to break on habit every day. “Taking different routes to get to work OR different modes of transport OR sitting on different seats OR rearranging the display of my desk etc. Today I see it works, it brings freshness in my life and helps me be more creative and be more open to change.

Be random

A lot of times my friends and colleagues tell me that I am very random in my conversations. I used to always struggle to understand what they mean by me ‘being random’. I slowly understood that they felt that whenever they were discussing something serious or any topic I used to come out with some topic OR idea or comment which may not be related to the topic at all and would give a new direction to the discussion OR may be derail the discussion. They found this behavior repeated and started calling me random. On some analysis I figured out that I needed fresh ideas to be discussed frequently and at regular intervals. If that’s what we call being random, then being random helps boost the creative quotient of an individual.

Puke out till you blank out

I used to face a situation regularly at work i.e. whenever I was working on a challenge

that needed a fresh outlook, I used to feel mentally choked. The baggage of experience and the environmental factors around me did not allow any new ideas to come out. This used to end up in frustrations and stress. To overcome this I started practicing the “Puke out till you blank out” method to empty my brain and create space for fresh ideas. In this method I took a set of blank post-its and wrote whatever came to mind till the time I felt blank. Once I was blank, I threw all the post-its a side and approached the challenge again. This time with a very different result and wilder ideas. Sometimes it becomes extremely important to break the ‘river thinking’ syndrome and what is a better than emptying our brain and clean it and then start filling it again.

Create a personal canvas

As any normal human being I go through a lot of emotional fluctuations and for me, my emotional high brings out my creative high. But the challenge I faced was, post the emotional phase I rarely remembered the creative ideas that came to me during that phase. A practice I introduced to myself to handle this situation is “to create a personal canvas” which is to put my thoughts and ideas on my canvas, when I am in that emotional high state. This has not only helped me remember the ideas but also helped me grow them during the canvasing stage.

Experience the end of being regularly

A question a lot of people have been asking me is how can they naturally become more empathetic, as empathy is at the heart of being creative. I always tell them that for being more empathetic you need to be more close to humanity and its being. An excellent way that I practice since a few years is “experiencing the end of being” and a simple way I have embraced is, to be a part of the funerals and last rights of the people in my social circle. This has not only help me stay more grounded but also get closer to humanity. As I always say that we continuously need to remind ourselves “we came from ashes and will go into ashes”.

Get surrounded with inspiration

All my childhood, my mom used to tell me that “A man is defined by the company he carries” and I used to ignore her comfortably, thinking she is too possessive about me. Its now that I realize how right was she and how wrong was I. On studying about human behavior and cupkhy I understood that we being social animals have being designed to be in herds

i.e. we live together, we laugh together, we are sad together, we yawn together etc. which means that our surrounding impact us strongly. Imagine a time when inspite of nothing you were in a good mood OR may be you have gone for a movie and you felt like laughing inspite of you not understanding ding the joke. While you may have felt foolish then but it was due to Your surroundings being sad or laughing. The same way if you need to be more creative, surround yourself with creativity i. e. creative people, creative work, inspiring video / art / workups / thoughts / ideas etc. This has helped me to be in the creative mindset and I am sure this can help everyone.