Ten Tips To Help You And Your Child Train To Think Creatively

Ten Tips To Help You And Your Child Train To Think Creatively. Hello everyone, I hope you are well. In today’s post, I will be sharing a guest post from Chris Thomason, Author of ‘Freaky Thinking; Thinking that Delivers a striking difference. Chris will offer ten tips to help you build confidence in your ability to think creatively. Creative thinking is an essential skill that helps children develop into well-rounded, innovative adults. But it doesn’t always come naturally – learning to think creatively takes work and dedication. From engaging in various activities to teaching children how to look at problems differently, these tips can help them learn to think outside the box.

Ten Tips To Help You And Your Child Train To Think Creatively

Creative thinking isn’t an issue for small children. A loo roll tube is a trumpet, a false nose, or a pirate spyglass; save up enough of them, and they’re a game of Skittles. But at some point, the inside of a loo roll transitions to merely recycling. As life becomes, more severe and creative thinking can be trickier to tap into.

But you can help your children train to be creative thinkers their whole life, whether it’s coming up with a neat idea for a school project, a cool Halloween costume, a way to earn extra pocket money, or, when they’re older, how to shine in further education or be valued by an employer or even put together their own business. Here are a few tips (which will work for you, too) based on Freaky Thinking, a process that boosts a person’s preferred way of thinking to help the creative process become second nature.

Find A Repeatable Process

It would be brilliant if great thinking and new ideas happened – but they don’t. It would be best if you actively worked your imagination to force helpful, creative thoughts out. And to do this, you need a process that works well for you, is easily repeatable, and permits flexibility. Without a process, you only have a semi-random set of events, which makes it harder to monitor if you are being successful or not. Committing to finding that process is the first step.

Find Where You Think Best

Creative thinking can occur anywhere, anytime, but some places and times are better than others. One of the most challenging locations is at a desk or table with a notepad and pen in front of you. Research has proven that performing some undemanding tasks produces better thinking. This could be walking the dog, washing dishes, bathing, or showering. It needs to be a light activity that doesn’t occupy you completely. Try out different activities to find your sweet spot.

Find When You Think Best

Roald Dahl wrote for two hours in the morning and two hours in the afternoon, with a long lunch break. When writing Harry Potter, JK Rowling would write from 9 am to 3 pm. There are morning people, and there are evening people (and there was Franz Kafka, who would do his best writing from 11 pm through the night to 6 am). Finding the best time for you is vital to accessing your most creative thinking. There’s no point trying to do good thinking when you’re feeling tired (no matter how much you may admire Kafka). If you want to do powerful thinking, save it when you believe you are most creative.

Recognise That Your Optimal Time Is Precious

If you want to do your best thinking, try to combine your optimal time and place. If walking the dog is applicable in the morning rather than evening, volunteer to take the early shift. Book this peak-thinking time in your calendar daily as your self-development time. Re-organise, schedule, or negotiate as appropriate to ensure you can access your best creative thinking time/activity regularly.

Choose Where To Focus

It would be best to focus your thinking on the topic you want to address. This is called your killer question. This important, enduring question hasn’t yet been answered well enough and will deliver significant value for you. If a killer question is too big and over-encompassing to be tackled in one go, chunk it into parts and think about these individually. When you have ideas that address each part, integrate them to form overall solutions to your killer question.

Incubate Your Ideas For Later

Everyone will have experienced a situation where a small fact or detail can’t be recalled, like the song title or the name of someone you used to live next door to. Frequently, when we give up and forget about remembering the detail, after a time (could be minutes or hours), the answer suddenly comes to us unbidden. This is our subconscious mind working on our unresolved issues in the background.

A similar thing happens when you are working on a killer question. Your subconscious works on it even when you’re not actively thinking about the topic. Each time you return to the question or task, your subconscious has advanced your thinking by finding a new perspective to consider or reinterpreting an element. Each gap in your thinking encourages subconscious incubation – use this to affect your issue significantly (Roald Dahl’s long lunch breaks likely did more than fill his tummy).

Find Your Win Quicklies

Win Quicklies are ideas—or elements of your bigger idea—that can swiftly test or prove an exciting part of your solution. A quick win can prove that something much larger has the potential for success and value. It may be the case that several Win Quicklies are more beneficial than implementing one bigger, slower-moving project. But even when that’s not the case, nothing boosts our confidence more than seeing one of our ideas delivering value.

Remember How To Eat An Elephant – One Bite At A Time

In Mark Manson’s book Will, actor Will Smith credits his success as a Hollywood superstar to lessons from his father, who told him and his brother to build a long brick wall. His father said, “There is no wall. There are only bricks. Your job is to lay this brick perfectly. Then move on to the next brick. Then lay that brick perfectly. And then the next one. Don’t worry about the wall. Your only concern is one brick.” Your thinking exercises will be far more exciting than laying bricks, yet the same principle applies. Consistency of use will eventually build your wall of success. Just take it one brick at a time.

Boost Creative Confidence

Recipes for success can vary—different people need different ingredients—but a common component is a belief in our ability to attain a desired level of performance. Creative thinking is often referred to as creative confidence. The greater the creative confidence, the easier it is to learn and perform a new task, and the easier it is to persevere through to success. The more we apply our thinking process, the better results we achieve, which makes us more confident to pose more challenging, killer questions. This, in turn, requires us to apply the process more effectively, which helps us achieve better outcomes, so the cycle continues indefinitely.

Choose Excellence Situations

While athletes do continuous fitness training, they don’t try to break their personal best record daily. They only attempt this on specific, optimal occasions – a similar situation to our creative thinking. Decide which issues you face are worthy of additional thinking, effort and time to push out some exceptional new ideas. You can’t be excellent all the time, so choose the situations or occasions where you want to excel.

Applying creative thinking to everyday tasks can help you and your children open up new possibilities that may previously have seemed impossible. It’s all about getting out of the rut of “that’s how it’s always been done” and challenging yourselves to think differently. Take these ten tips on board, use them to inspire your ways, and watch your creativity blossom.

And if you want more advice on applying creative thinking, check out Chris Thomason’s new book, “Freaky Thinking“, available now! He reveals some revolutionary techniques and offers easy-to-follow hints and tips when training the mind to find new ideas – the perfect addition to any budding creative muse’s library! Click the link below to find out more. Think creatively and enter a world of possibility with these fantastic techniques at your fingertips!

I hope you enjoyed that.

Talk soon

About The Author

Chris Thomason is the author of Freaky Thinking, a process that helps individuals in organisations to think differently about important topics and issues. Chris founded Ingenious Growth, which helps organisations change their thinking to boost innovation, productivity, profits and, most importantly, staff satisfaction.

After buying a failing manufacturing company and turning it into one of the largest in its sector, Chris now teaches the innovative ways of thinking that lead to his business success. Chris authorises eight business books: The Idea Generator, Freaky Thinking, and Excellence in Freaky Thinking. Chris’s clients include UPS, Canon, O2, Vodafone, Roche Pharmaceuticals, Touchnote, Lloyds Bank, Toyota, HSBC, Scottish Widows, South African Airways, American Express, and many more.

Web: www.ingeniousgrowth.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/christhomason1/