“To be creative means to be in love with life. You can be creative only if you love life enough that you want to enhance its beauty, you want to bring a little more music to it, a little more poetry to it, a little more dance to it.” Osho

I have heard individuals saying that they were not born with a creative bone in them. And that the conviction hunts them that they are not creative ones. We think that we are not creative and so we never thought of cultivating our creative potential. Eventually, we just say that we are not creative without giving it a second thought. It is not a matter of choice that if we are creative or not. But since everyone has a particular potential of doing something different, it’s only the choice of finding the creativity that lies within you, hiding from your self due to fearful thoughts that have been underlying in your mind from the start.

Creativity is exploring ideas or thoughts which are new or different from previous thoughts and ideas in some way. These ideas and thoughts are expressed in multiple ways. It can be through drawing or sketching, either through singing or music. Thus, everyone has their criteria for creativity. Twyla Tharp, an American dancer, a choreographer, and an author, said: “Before you can think out of the box, you have to start with a box”. So creativity often comes when you take an idea from original content, and you transform it into something else. So right now, right here, question yourself if you want to be creative, then how creative are you!

“You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” Maya Angelou

Here are several ways by which you can unleash your hidden creativity and get it to use!

Slow-Motion Multitasking

Slow-Motion Multitasking might feel like a counter-intuitive idea. What it means is that having many multiple projects on the go at the same time. You go back and forth on each project depending upon your mood or as the situation demands. So why does the Slow-Motion Multitasking approach seems counter-intuitive? Because we are used to everything in one go and maybe that is out of desperation. But we want to do everything in a hurry and at once. Slow-Motion multitasking in creative people is ubiquitous.

Slow-Motion Multitasking is quite an essential step in unleashing your creativity as it forces your mind some free space to think out of the box. Let’s say if you are stuck in doing particular work, or you might be playing cross-words puzzle, and you can’t figure out the missing word, and you had spent most of your time figuring it out. Imagine that feeling of being frustrated and stressed out. The reason you cannot figure the answer is that the wrong answer is stuck inside your mind.

The solution is that go and do something else. Switch contents, switch the topics. Your mind will be able to breathe in different spaces, and eventually, you will get the right answer. So, you better start using this technique.

Observe What’s Around You

Observing your surroundings, your environment is a vital key for opening up your mind. It’s an excellent opportunity to see and absorb the feeling in yourself to concentrate on small details, the curves, and the edges of beautiful nature around you. And eventually, your imagination would be dwelling into wonders of the world and thus creating them into reality. Observation and mindfulness are related to each other in which you are fully conscious and aware of what you see and how you see it. And that is what lead Newton to think out of the box about questioning on what he observed.

Stop Being Busy

A lot of us are busy doing things in life, but at that high speed in which we are going, we have lost our creativity. So bring a pause to your life, and by that, I don’t mean literally but metaphorically speaking. You need to take a little gap, and creativity comes when you are bored. Your mind would eventually start searching or finding the things in which you would feel happy.

“Without passion, all the skill in the world won’t lift you above craft. Without skill, all the passion in the world will leave you eager but floundering. Combining the two is the essence of the creative life.” said Twyla Tharp in her book, The Creative Habit.

Make a Map of Ideas

How do we keep all these ideas straight in our minds? We can understand this by setting up the example of Twyla Tharp. She says, “You have to be all things. Why exclude? You have to be everything.”

Tharp’s method of preventing all of these different projects from becoming a mess is a simple one. She gives a cardboard box to each of the projects and writes the name of the project. She throws whatever source of inspiration she thinks will be useful in developing creativity like DVDs, magazine cuttings, books, theater programs, and physical objects and anything and says, “the box means I never have to worry about forgetting. One of the biggest fears for a creative person is that some brilliant idea will get lost because you didn’t write it down and put it in a safe place. I don’t worry about that because I know where to find it.”

This example was to explain that write down whatever idea comes to your mind, write everything that comes to your brain to boost your creativity so that your brain gets in the flow of creative mechanisms.

Bring Forth Your Ideas

Once you have found the idea, implement it. Place it in front of the public. Don’t hesitate to put your ideas forward because the criticism upon your ideas would make your creativity even better. You might term creativity to a friendly tone word as “Suggestions.”

It will help you grow more and would open your locked parts of mind and would enable you to see through different perspectives. Don’t worry about the limited resources you have. You just need your passion within your creativity.

As Twyla said, “Remember this the next time you moan about the hand you’re dealt: No matter how limited your resources, they’re enough to get you started. Time, for example, is our most limited resource, but it is not the enemy of creativity that we think it is. The ticking clock is our friend if it gets us moving with urgency and passion. Give me a writer who thinks he has all the time in the world, and I’ll show you a writer who never delivers.” in her book.