Tag: creativity

Creative Solutions – NLP and Creativity

Posted on by

Looking for solutions? Expand your creative skills on this 4 week course and save time, money and effort in the process

Creativity is the most prized ability in business today because new ideas can save you time, money and effort.

creativeDespite its great value, few people know how to become more creative, because many people think that creativity is an inborn skill. They couldn’t be more wrong.

Creativity is something we can all have, whether we realise it or not. It is a skill, an attitude and an outlook – all of which you can learn, perfect and train. For example, why do artistic people go to art college? They’re learning skills that will help them to better express their creativity.

There are two parts of the creative skill:

  • coming up with interesting ideas, new perspectives, or solutions to problems.
  • expressing those ideas in a meaningful and accessible way.

This training course focuses on the first part of creativity, which is arguably the more valuable one. Ask a painter how to paint or ask a writer how to craft a story and they will have plenty of practical advice to share. However, ask them – or any creative person – how they come up with their ideas and they will struggle to give you a practical answer.

They’re much more likely to tell you that ideas ‘just come to them’ or seem to ‘pop into their heads’. And that doesn’t give you anything you can use to duplicate the process.

Fortunately, there are ways of accessing that information. There is a structure to creativity, drawn from careful study of creative thinkers – a highly practical way of becoming more creative.

In this course, you will learn several simple ways to enhance your personal creativity.

Learn practical ways to:

  • Tap into your deepest creative resources
  • Synthesize new ideas and applications from existing ones
  • Use your resources to improve on past solutions
  • Take ideas from other areas and creatively “re-purpose” them

Through a series of simple exercises, you will learn four fundamental processes and begin to make creativity a part of who you are.

Go here to book your place and access the material straight away.

Unlock Your Personal Creativity

Posted on by

Do you think you are a creative person?

If not, I want you to think again. Your personal creativity is probably locked up in how you define ‘creativity’. That’s not a simple case of semantics though. It’s about how you define yourself and the things you can do.

For example, are you creating a life for yourself? Or making a family? Do you have unusual ideas, make things or solve life’s little problems as you go through your day?

You might be wondering whether any of those things are really creative.

Creativity is often confused with originality – in fiction, there are really only 8 stories. However, writing is still considered to be creative. So creativity doesn’t need to be making something original.

Creativity is often confused with artistry – as though only painters, writers, sculptors and musicians could be creative. Engineers and artchitects make beautiful things, which are definitely creative, but rarely considered artistic.

Perhaps it’s time to admit that you are creative and let that aspect of you come to life.

Different Thinking – Part 1

Posted on by

It’s interesting how much you can gain from just a slight change in perspective.

The innovators are those who have better insights than their peers, ranging from slight improvements to game-changing realisations.

As an NLPer and therefore a modeler, I’m always curious where excellence comes from. Now, I know there are some extraordinary elements in each of us, but this is not what I’m talking about here.

I’m talking about a very small number of people who are in a league of their own when it comes to innovation and creativity. How do they think in ways that make them so different from the rest of us?

Careful analysis reveals three crucial factors:

1. they ask better questions

Has anyone ever asked you a question that seemed so obvious, so simple that you wondered why you had never thought to ask it yourself?

This is a prime characteristic of true creativity. We tend to find answers by asking ourselves questions, yet there is a crucial flaw in this method.

Questions tend to apply limits to where we can look for answers.

How does this happen? Think about it for a minute and you’ll realise that every question creates a kind of focus. This is useful and necessary, yet everything outside that focus tends to become blurry and somehow less significant. To illustrate, compare these two questions:

  • where is this broken?
  • how can I fix this?

The difference may seem subtle, yet the results will vary slightly. Now compare these:

  • how can I fix this?
  • how can I improve this?

The difference between the two questions is equally subtle, yet the result of each will vary immensely. “How can I improve this?” is simply a better question because the scope it creates for the solution allows a more useful result.

Start thinking about the questions you ask yourself every day and experiment with better alternatives.

End of part 1 – any questions or comments?