How do you discover your creative talents? Here are 10 steps you can take to nurture your signature abilities and interests. Realizing your instinctive creative expression can be a deeply satisfying journey and a way of developing your inner self. Uncensored creative expression often leads to feeling a greater sense of balance, happiness and fulfillment.
The 10 Steps to Greater Creativity
- Think about a medium – like painting, writing, film-making, music, drawing, quilting, dancing, jewelry-making, photography or any other art or craft – that you have thought of pursuing, but life always seemed to get in the way. If necessary, invest in enough materials to complete one project.
- Visualize being able to express yourself imaginatively before beginning your session – like warming up before a workout.
- Reshape your inner voice around your interests. For example, rather than listing all the reasons you don’t have time or cannot possibly add another project, carve out 15 minutes each day to devote to your creative endeavor. Commit to doing this for at least six weeks.
- Conceive and repeat an affirmation (a simple positive phrase) about your ability to successfully express yourself in your chosen creative medium. For example “I can draw, write, paint…” “I have talents and abilities that I am going to express.” “I am an artist.”
- Incorporate mind-mapping into your project. This technique involves the use of notes, icons, images, and keywords to map ideas and relationships between them, rather than more typical outlines. This allows you to plan your creative project using free association rather than an outline, which is more about linear thinking. It helps you to see the layout of your project more clearly than by merely imagining or writing down your thoughts.
- Join a group of like-minded artists or crafts people for support and collaboration. Working with others interested in a particular artistic form adds to the creativity pool and also offers the benefit of building relationships around a common interest.
- Observe and study other creative and talented people in your chosen medium for ideas, perspective and inspiration.
- Exercise your creative mind by using your brain frequently in a variety of ways. Cross-train your brain by experimenting with other imaginative avenues. Learning other tangentially related art forms can add dimension to your own artistic expressiveness. For example, a photographer might try painting or a jewelry maker might try sculpture.
- Creativity is a journey that can continue to evolve throughout the life cycle. Building some creative time into your everyday life can be rejuvenating, exhilarating and can improve productivity in other more demanding parts of your life.
- Notice when your efforts begin to flow and feel more like fun or play rather than the work of learning something new. Allow yourself to unleash your creative juices without censorship. Find ways to reward yourself for your accomplishments.
What creative undertaking would you like to explore?
