How to boost your creativity

This time of year it’s cold, many are still working from home in the same four walls, we’re overwhelmed by big goals and a fair few of us haven’t had a beer or a burger since 2021 if you’re participating Veganuary or Dry January.

We’re bored, we’re ratty and our creativity might be taking a dip right about now.

Even if you don’t consider yourself a creative ‘type’, any role in business requires creativity. Creativity can be finding new solutions to existing problems, entering new channels, new approaches and finding efficiencies.

SO how do we get out the creativity hole you might find yourself and your lack of imagination in? Here are my 5 top hacks to get those creative juices flowing as freely as the approvals from Molly Mae’s PR team.

Change your environment:

Working from the same room with the same view and the same pictures on the wall gave me only a limited amount of ideas and inspiration. Take your butt to a coffee shop, the ambient noise could be great for focus.

A co-working space is a great option, many have day passes or communal areas where you can choose a different seat every damn day if you please.

If you’re confined to home or work can you change desks, work from a different room, area or even redecorate your own home workspace? Plants, paint or pictures?

Come up with 30 ideas:

If you’re working through a specific problem, come up with 30 ideas. They don’t have to be good, they could be really really terrible but they’re ideas none the less. Here’s my brainstorm on ideas for keeping my goals. Take a guess which 4 I didn’t actually implement.

Get bored:

Seriously, let yourself get bored. We’re often constantly bombarding our mind with stimulation giving us little if any time to come up with ideas ourselves. Why do you think some of your greatest plans come to you in the shower or minding your own business doing sweet nothing? If the idea of meditation bores you to death, do that. Or just let yourself daydream for a while.

Another tactic before you want to come up with an idea is to write 101010 down at least half a page of your notebook. The monotony will be painful but clear your mind of pretty much all else for you to then sit and dwell on your problem to come up with a creative solution.

Read:

Reading opens your mind to knowledge, ideas, worlds and points of view you would never come across in your own day to day life. Fiction is perfect for escapism and new ideas, The Midnight Library by Matt Haig being my favourite recent fiction read for opening my mind to possibilities of different existences. Non-fiction books are full of lessons and ideas, David Goggin’s ‘Can’t Hurt Me’ was my favourite of 2021.

‘I don’t have time to read’ ok ok some people might but do you have a commute? Do you cook? Drive? Clean? Walk? Run? You can listen to an audiobook whilst doing any of that.

Learn from others:

Surrounding yourself with people different to yourself in background, opinions and values means surrounding yourself with people with different ideas and approaches to yourself. Sign up to that really niche book club, talk to the scary developer in your office that hides in the corner, broaden your network and horizons.

Get creative in other areas:

Creativity in one aspect of your life can open your mind to ideas in another. Grab some paints, a pen, type out a blog, get on Canva and make an invite or even a meme.

In lockdown I did online life drawing classes (yes, real naked people on zoom and it wasn’t even Omegle), did a cross stitch with profanity and peonies on, wrote my friends some lockdown poems and got very creative with home workout equipment. This definitely spilled out into getting into the habit of finding different ways to approach my work and business.