Creativity isn’t just something you’re born with – it’s a skill you can develop. Here’s how.

For a brand to survive and thrive in a competitive market, it must harness the power of creativity and innovation. When a brand stops innovating, it runs the risk of becoming trite and losing its unique appeal, thereby ceding market share to a more inventive competitor.

With this in mind, few of us know the right way to cultivate this creativity in our brands or in ourselves individually. Contrary to popular belief, creativity is not a rare gift bestowed upon a few “artistic” people. Instead, it needs to be considered a skill that anyone, including you, can improve and develop. All it takes is practice and a deeper understanding of how our brain and consciousness function.

As a meditation teacher and student of consciousness and leadership for over a decade, I have learned that fostering a culture of creativity in our corporations and societies must start at the individual level. Creativity can’t be forced or bought by using conventional logic and reason. Each of us plays a role in cultivating creativity, and this text will show you the right way to nurture this skill for business and personal growth.

What is creativity?

Creativity is the ability to generate or recognize ideas, patterns, or possibilities to provide novel results. Becoming more creative involves breaking away from our logical, linear pondering and embracing the non-linear nature of our consciousness, individually and collectively.

To higher reveal this non-linear nature of creativity, let’s look at the creative process in a 4-step linear sequence, starting with:

1. Base: We must first prepare our minds with the information, tools and skills with which we would like to be creative, often with a vision of the desired result.
2. Free Association: Once we have prepared our minds, the next step is to permit our ideas to incubate and connect freely with each other. This may involve intentionally contemplating our ideas and doing something completely unrelated, and then returning to the creative endeavor. We encourage you to enjoy positive entertainment!
3. Inspiration: Given that we have provided ourselves with sufficient mental preparation and our mind-set allows us to associate freely, we are going to inevitably find inside ourselves a spark of inspiration – an modern idea that can bring the desired result.
4. Execution: Finally, we test our ideas. If they miss the mark, we repeat step 1 or 2 to refine our ideas or desired results.

As mentioned in step 3, finding the spark of inspiration depends on how well we prepare our minds for the information and tools with which we would like to create, and our mind-set before entering the creative process. How we prepare our minds generally depends on individual creative effort, so the remainder of this text assumes that you are competent and expert in the external knowledge and tools needed to create an modern vision. Furthermore, we are going to explore the non-linear dynamics of our mental state and the right way to overcome the common barriers we encounter on our path to creation.

Our emotions have been measured and scaled

In my years of research on this topic, I got here across the work of Sir David R. Hawkins, M.D., a man who has spent a long time testing and calibrating conscious experiences and sharing his findings with the world. In short, he made the significant discovery that our emotional experiences produce electricity in our body, the power of which can be measured on a logarithmic scale.

Additionally, our negative emotions were measured at the low end of the scale, while our positive emotions were measured at the high end. While our emotions could seem crazy and irrational, there is a hidden order in our chaos that we can use to work on optimizing our lives to extend creativity and inspiration.

Moving from force to flow

Given that we are not in a situation of poverty or grief, discrepancy and shame, we are often the ones who get in our way. In a world where we regularly overwork ourselves and burn out to make something occur, we forget that finding alignment with inspiration requires letting go and allowing things to unfold and fall into place naturally. This hyperactive energy and the negative emotions that fuel it are common in today’s work culture and are counterproductive to true creativity.

Here are 4 suggestions I share with clients to assist them move from strength to flow:

1. Embrace stillness: Learn to sit down by yourself and do nothing. Creativity has less to do with lively motion and more to do with allowing your mind to spontaneously emerge.
2. Understand why: Modern neuroscience has shown us that living in accordance with our purpose engages the limbic brain, which regulates behavior, decision-making, motivation, emotion regulation, and processing. Conversely, focusing on our actions interacts with the neocortex, which is responsible for rational pondering and analytical processing. Alignment with the mission behind your work is due to this fact simpler than working for the sake of working.
3. Disconnect from your ego: When left unchecked, the ego leads us to live in a survival state. Driven by our primal emotions comparable to desire, anxiety, anger and pride, we create situations that perpetuate these states and block us from accessing true creativity in our lives. The key to detachment is to know our limiting beliefs about ourselves and the world and replace them with higher principles and values. I wrote the article below on how exactly to do this.
4. Be helpful: If your only goal is to take from the world relatively than contribute to it, you will remain in survival mode no matter your wealth and income. When we focus on understanding human nature and bringing the highest good to others, we naturally cultivate compassion, inspiration, and due to this fact creativity in our individual lives and the world around us.

As I discussed earlier, creativity is a skill that anyone can develop with deliberate practice and an open-minded approach. You can tap into your full creative potential by aligning your emotions, understanding your purpose, and giving your mind the freedom to explore. By applying these principles, I hope you will encourage innovation and achieve significant success in your personal and skilled lives.