By Bayo Ogunmupe
Creative thinking skills are vital to your success in life. The average manager spends more than 50 percent of his time solving problems. Without creative thinking skills you will be relegated to poverty in life. But creativity is a skill you can learn from book reading, the Creative Problem Solving Institute, a yearly seminar of the State University of New York at Buffalo and its International Centre for Studies in Creativity. In addition, there is a direct relationship between the quantity of new ideas you generate in your work and the level of success that you achieve. An insight can be sufficient to change the direction of your career or your company.
Indeed, everything you ever will be comes as a result of the way you use your mind. An improvement in the quality of your thinking will improve the quality of your life. Creativity is the natural characteristic of positive people with high self esteem. There are three factors that determine your creativity. The first is your past experiences. Here, you generate ideas to foster personal or family progress.
The second factor that determines your creativity is your current situation in life. The third factor is your self image. Do you see yourself as being highly creative? Many studies indicate that 95 percent of people demonstrate the potential to perform at high levels of creativity. The work of Howard Gardner at Harvard University confirm that there are several different ways of thinking and that each person is a potential genius in at least one area. This means the key to unlocking your creativity is to begin thinking of yourself as a highly creative person.
The way to increase your creativity is to imagine that you are already a creative genius. Imagine that you are so creative that there is no problem in the world that you cannot solve. Creativity is like pouring yourself a cup of coffee with sugar in it. You then put the cup to your lips; but the coffee still tasting plain and unsweetened. The obvious answer is to stir the coffee in the cup and mix the sugar so that it permeates throughout the drink.
Your creativity is very much the same. It needs to be stirred up so that it dissolves and the sugar spreads inside the cup of coffee. The factor that stirs up creativity in you is as follows. An intensely desired goal, the greater the clarity of what you really want, the more positive and excited you are about achieving that goal, the more creative you will be. The more you want something, the likely it is that you will find creative ways to accomplish it. A most powerful way to trigger creativity is for you to test your assumptions continually.
In a 2013 study of the chief executives of the 500 fastest growing companies, the researchers discovered that the predominant quality of the executives was an incredible level of optimism regarding their companies and products. This attitude of optimism can be developed in two ways, one, by thinking and talking about your desires and how to get them most of the time. These optimists see their world as being full of opportunities and are always asking how to achieve those goals.
Two, optimists look for the good in every person or situation. They believe that within any problem there is a solution. They never use the word problem. Instead, they neutralize its negativity by calling the difficulty a situation or challenge. Where a problem conjures up fear and loss, the word situation is neutral.
The best word of all is opportunity. When you begin to look for the opportunity in a problem, you will be astonished at how many opportunities you would have missed if you were bogged down in what initially appeared to be a problem. To be able to solve problems creatively, resolve today to become a complete optimist. Think and talk only about the things you want and how to get them. Look for the good in every situation. Seek the valuable lesson in every difficulty and continually feed your mind with positive mental proteins in the form of books, audios and conversations. That is how to acquire the skills of creative problem solving.
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