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Want to Invigorate Your Career? Increase Your Creativity Quotient! by josie

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Cultivating your creativity can give you a competitive edge and help you think outside of the box at work.

Amy Feldman, a C.P.A. and financial officer living in Southborough, MA, never thought of herself as a creative person. But one day, she saw quilts made by a friend from college (that would be me!) and was drawn in by the colors.

“I remember thinking that I could make a quilt because it involved math, logic and patterns,” Feldman says. “I didn’t think about the creative aspect to it — the need to coordinate colors and patterns, or the potential to create my own designs. That was too intimidating to me.”

Turns out, Feldman loved the challenge of mastering quilting techniques and moving out of her comfort zone. Ten years later, she’s made 30 quilts and discovered a creative passion. What’s more, she finds that her hobby has helped her to be more creative on the job. “I look for more innovative solutions now than I did before I started quilting,” she says. “Pushing myself creatively in my leisure time has given me the confidence to look for new solutions at work and to voice ideas I might not have articulated before. I’ve learned how essential experimentation and right-brain skills are — and even that they’re part of my toolbox, which I never considered before.”

On the job front, creativity is often touted as an essential trait of the successful employee, not to mention the successful company — the obvious example being Steve Jobs and his innovations at Apple, one of the most profitable companies in the U.S. “There’s no question that the ability to mix left-brain analytical, logical skills with right-brain creative skills is more important than ever in today’s business world where employers are looking for people who can come up with out-of-the box solutions to business problems,” says Connie Thanasoulis-Cerrachio, co-founder of  SixFigureStart, a New York City-based success coaching firm.  “Well-honed creative skills definitely give you a competitive edge.”

To boost your creative power, check out “A Beginner’s Guide to the Creative Life”  in the current issue of VIVmag and see the tips below:

Surround yourself with blue and green colors to create. In an experiment performed by researchers at the University of British Columbia and published in Science, college students underwent cognitive tests while exposed to a red, blue or neutral computer screen color. When the results were tallied, the researchers found students were more likely to find unique ways to use bricks or design a child’s toy when exposed to the blue screen than the other colors. (Red enhanced performance in detail-oriented tasks.) Likewise, a German study found that exposure to the color green prompted more imaginative ideas.

Make time to daydream. According to University of California, Santa Barbara, psychologist Jonathan Schooler, Ph.D., the best creative insights often come when you’re not trying to be innovative, but rather when you’re at rest or engaging in simple tasks. Schooler has also found that people who frequently daydream are more creative than those who don’t. His studies focus on how people problem-solve by finding hidden relationships between seemingly disparate concepts. “People who daydream and let their minds wander are better at that than those who don’t,” he says. They may not be thinking specifically about the problem while their minds are wandering, but they may be making unconscious associations that lead to bigger and better ideas. (So that’s why I always have the best ideas in the shower!)

Push beyond brainstorming. “Brainstorming may produce a lot of ideas, but it can also kill ideas because people fall prey to ‘groupthink’ or social anxiety,” reports Schooler. During group problem-solving, extroverts can also hog all the action, he says, because they thrive on interaction. Meanwhile, introverts, who are more inner-directed and easily overwhelmed, may remain silent.

Bryan W. Mattimore, author of Idea Stormers: How to Lead and Inspire Creative Breakthroughs (Jossey-Bass, 2012), recommends “brainwriting” instead of “brainstorming” to encourage people to ignore social barriers and build on other people’s ideas. (Idea generation often requires taking ideas out of context so you can see new solutions, he says.) The technique involves giving a blank sheet of paper to each person at a meeting, have him or her write down an idea and then pass the paper along to the next person to add to the idea — and even better, stimulate new concepts and solutions. “In brainwriting, everyone gets equal time to ‘speak’ in a nonthreatening way: with their pen,” explains Mattimore. “It’s a pure and fairly concise form of creative democracy.”

Photo credit: Gail Hadani

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