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For many, balancing work and personal life at home has not been easy. Spending time boosting creativity may not be the priority, compared to a busy day of telecommuting, dealing with family or household chores. But we must not forget that the brain is one of the most important organs of the body and it also needs constant attention and training.
Being at home is a privilege that we cannot waste, and it must start with you to turn this situation in your favor. Having your personal space, the disposition, and the time, could be the perfect combination to develop new ideas or new projects to venture into
Take advantage of this time at home and exercise your creativity, EssayAssistant recommends you to try these 10 tips.
Observe everything around you in detail
Although it seems obvious, this is one of the most important messages to keep in mind if you want to maximize your creativity. Many times, being at home we see the things around us but we don’t pay attention to the inspiring potential they can have on us. Colors, combinations of shapes, textures, food, aromas, furniture, people, a conversation, everything serves as a source of inspiration. So don’t lose sight of anything and keep an open mind to everything around you.
Brainstorming crazy ideas
There are several ideation processes that you can consult, but the one in this article is one of the most dynamic and fun. When you start a creative process and you want to do it from scratch, but you don’t know how to do it. Think that all you need is a pencil and a piece of paper or any element you have to write, even digital. Make a list of ideas related to the topic you want to develop. Be as imaginative as you can, the ideas do not have to be similar to each other, nor have a connection. In fact, the more diverse and “crazy” they are, the better. They can be words or complete sentences. You will find that as you go through this list you will bring things out of your mind that you didn’t even know were there.
Break through your fears and follow your instinct
When an idea comes to you and you’re convinced it’s a good one, don’t let it go. Write it down on a piece of paper. Never mind the opinion of the people around you. If you are convinced that your idea can be carried out successfully (as crazy as it sounds), make it happen. Many of the best things in life start with ideas that people don’t initially believe in, so don’t leave your instinct behind because of the opinion of others.
Have a creative corner
When you’re doing any activity at home and you find images that you like and inspire you, keep it. From color palettes, phrases, interesting objects, fashion, fabrics, textures… it doesn’t matter what the image is, just find a corner for all of them. Lean on tools like Pinterest boards, if you’re a more digital person. Otherwise, if you consider yourself a physical and visual person, find a corkboard, a notebook, or a board where you can put them. Use images from magazines, newspapers, internet, no matter the source. The idea is that, if you have a moment of mental block, take a few minutes of your time to see them, so you will more easily resume your creative moment.
Don’t force or pressure yourself
When you have a day or a morning in which you feel thick, short of inspiration, or with little desire to do things, do not force yourself to perform creative processes. When you are in that moment of frustration or blockage, the best thing to do is to change your activity. Exercise, go grocery shopping, read a book, watch TV, etc. It will clear your mind and ideas will come to you naturally.
Practice, practice, practice
“Habit makes the monk”. And in the creative process, there is no exception. It is a dynamic that must be developed over time, because, even if you consider yourself a creative person, the mind requires training for you to achieve it naturally and effortlessly. You must commit yourself to exercise your brain in this area on a daily, if possible. This way, you will notice your progress in less time.
Get inspired by other ideas
Remember that for your creative process to be maximized, you can start with a source of inspiration. You can follow blogs, magazines, works of your favorite artists, Pinterest… as tools to achieve creativity. But you must know how to perfectly differentiate the dividing line between inspiration and plagiarism. Creativity is the result of many things that inspire you, but it cannot be the copy of inspiration. So be very careful when you make some references to unleash your creativity.
Disconnect your left hemisphere
A very useful exercise that will help you unblock your mind to come up with new creative ideas is to draw. Take a piece of paper and a pen. Lean it on a table, mark the center of the paper with the pen or pencil, take a real object as a reference and start drawing without lifting your hand from the paper. Before you start, turn your head to the right so you don’t see the drawing you are making. Even if the drawing is not a work of art, it will allow your mind to rest and disconnect. You will focus on the details of the actual object you are drawing and as a result, your reactions after the mental rest will be much more creative.
Change space if you get overwhelmed
This tip has a double function. In addition to helping you be more creative, it will help you be more productive. Changing your space to work at home will force your mind out of its comfort zone and out of its routine. You don’t need to have a very large space, change the position of the table, work from the dining room, put your desk in the living room. All these moves will make your brain adapt to a new environment and activate before the signals of change to get the creativity flowing.
Learn to do something new
The brain works best under pressure, but now during confinement, we may have over-relaxed and our mind has become accustomed to staying in a “calm state” which harms creativity levels. To get out of that comfort zone, dedicate 30 days to learning something new. It can be anything, if possible, try something artistic, and that requires skill. Juggling a ball, magic tricks, playing cards, drawing, cooking a simple dish like garlic mashed potatoes, or playing an instrument are some alternatives you can explore. If you’re tech-minded, you could try something like coding, video editing, or even building websites (if the latter sounds like fun to you, a good place to start for this might be this source of video tutorials to help teach you the basics). Even if you don’t master the discipline, the goal is to try to learn so that your brain is recharged with new ideas.
As you have seen throughout this article, developing creativity is a process that requires training and you should not lose the initiative to achieve it because you never know when one of your ideas can become a Best Seller or the next idea of a successful Startup. The important thing is that you keep practicing and exercising your mind to find that spark of genius.
