5 effective tools for developing creativity

Many people take special tests on the Internet to find out which hemisphere of the brain is dominant in them, left or right, a tendency towards logic or creativity prevails. You can be sure for a long time that you love one thing and cannot bear the other, that you are talented in one area, but you will not achieve anything in another. You yourself once decided and since then you consider it an unshakable truth.

"And what is it, - you ask, - who is worse from this?" The short answer is you. You have limited yourself, put yourself in a cage of stereotypes that gives you a sense of comfort. But it is also a barrier between you and the new, bright, interesting - your creativity, for which creative thinking is responsible. It's time to stop hiding your uniqueness, start developing it.

Creative thinking is needed for everyone who wants to:

stop being just a performer and copy others;
see non-standard solutions where logic gives up;
develop the ability to create new things, while operating with everyday concepts;
come to productivity and personal success.

The desire for patterned behavior and habitual actions leads to inertia of thinking, and this is the main enemy of creativity. It is customary to arm against enemies, and here are five effective methods.

Associative thinking

Associative thinking is called the thinking of geniuses. A distinctive feature of such thinking is the ability to generalize not on the basis of logic and analysis, but through finding commonality among objects and processes.

Finding associations helps:

activates both hemispheres of the brain;
raises knowledge from different spheres of life to the surface of memory;
helps to create new semantic connections;
leads to the birth of original ideas.

How to develop. Look around you, choose any two objects and come up with associative links between them. The more unusual and absurd these connections are, the better. Get creative with this assignment, no banality.

Example. Now I am sitting at the table, so my words are "notebook" and "pen". The first thing that comes to mind: "I took a pen and wrote in a notebook." But this is not what we need, and therefore we think further and get: “The pen jumped on the table, the notebook flew open, and the pen hit the tap on its pages. Morse understood - he will call this discovery by his name. " Now try you.

Observation

The genius Leonardo da Vinci considered vision to be the main tool in man's understanding of nature. According to the artist, knowledge arose as a result of observing a phenomenon and its subsequent drawing.

Observation is the key to understanding the world, which:

increases the activity of cognitive activity;
engages in interaction with the environment;
helps to examine the world in detail, to see its regularities, to better understand the interconnection of its processes.

The habit of recording observations helps the development of the skill and can manifest itself in various forms: taking notes, retelling, drawing, photographing.

How to develop. Consider an object that you are familiar with, as if you are seeing it for the first time (like a child), in the smallest detail. Pay attention to the texture, shades, try to find something in it that you have not noticed before.

Example. Examination of grapefruit led me to the conclusion "So this is what you are, peel!" and sketching citrus from memory while waiting for the evening train. As you understand, after such an exercise, the grapefruit itself is no longer needed for this.

Ability to see the implicit properties of objects

We continue to fight against stereotyped behavior and move away from cliches and stereotypes in thinking. This time we use the method of breaking the template, that is, we perform an unexpected action that can break the logic of habitual thinking and lead to new ideas.

How to develop. To create such a shift in perception, we make a statement about the object of our attention, which in some way will change the object itself or its characteristics. Remember, in childhood, several stools and a chair turned into a train with carriages, and flower buds and pods became ladies and gentlemen at the ball? Here is a similar principle.

Example. Let's take a brick as an object. What are its implicit properties? With its help, you can draw a perpendicular line, because the brick has right angles. And they can also draw on the asphalt - we did that when we were kids. You can support the door with a brick so that it does not close. Two bricks are almost ready-made gates for playing football in the yard. It's your turn to continue.

Imagination

Einstein argued that logic will take you from point A to point B, and imagination will take you anywhere. When you start working on this skill, you will find that overcoming the blockage of imagination does a lot:

gives wings of freedom;
pushes the boundaries of knowledge;
gives an opportunity to look at the problem in a new way;
stimulates progress.

How to develop. Start the phrase like this: "What would happen if …" - and end with any subject and predicate. Give a detailed answer to the created question, spending no more than three minutes.

Example. "What would happen if our country was led by the wizard Goodwin?" or "What would have happened if chicken legs had grown at my house?" From the skill of answering abstract questions, move on to questions in which there is an objective problem for you: "What would happen if [your problem] broke up into 100 pieces?"

A sense of humor, the ability to see contradictions and ambiguities

This skill will help you see the world more voluminously, overcome the inertia of thinking. But it's also important that humor is a social glue. With it, you can interest and win over people. It was not for nothing that Turgenev noticed that "nothing is more tiring than a sad mind." The ability to look at the world around with a smile will give you and those around you cheerfulness and positiveness.

How to develop. To train the ability to find ambiguities, choose a couple of homonyms and make sentences with them where they are used in the same sense. And then try to reveal a homonym with a second meaning in the context of a new sentence. Example: "A parrot of sparrows from a blowgun, if you want" - "A parrot of Sparrows lived in the conductor's apartment and did not know how to use a gun."

With contradictions, it's even easier, but no less interesting. Take two mutually exclusive concepts and combine them in one sentence. Example: "Our individual approach to everyone is the same!"

The father of modern psychology, William James, argued that a person is able to change his life by changing only his point of view. Regular revisions of your beliefs will help you to see that the world is changing, and with it you are changing. You will feel different after these exercises. If not immediately, then over time you will have different thoughts, new feelings, and after them non-standard ideas will come.

But even a hundred years ago, the prevailing opinion was that it is impossible to learn to be a creative person, you need to be born. Now psychologists are convinced that it is possible to release creative thinking through the development of imagination in almost any person. You already know exactly how to overcome internal barriers and develop the corresponding abilities. Good luck!