Personal Development: 5 Playfully Crazy Tips That Can Unleash Your Creative Potential and Boost Your Creativity

Do you ever feel like you’re stuck on autopilot and not tapping into your creative side? You’re so entrenched in your daily routine that hours and hours can pass without ever fully engaging your brain in a more expanded way. Being stuck on autopilot can be helpful and gets the job done - when the job is boring and repetitive, but what happens when you need to be creative? Getting those creative juices flowing when you're stuck in a repetitive rut can be difficult. You need to create a looser environment with no distractions to allow yourself to slip into creative flow. Yep, if you want to get your creative juices flowing you need to loosen the tight grip of your schedule and your thinking by shaking up your routine. Here are 5 playfully crazy tips to get your creative juices flowing. MAKE SEEMINGLY RANDOM CONNECTIONS Play connect the dots. Start by picking 3 random things and try to connect them by any means possible. This opens you up to not rejecting ideas that come into your mind because they seem like they don’t fit. If you listen to people tell the story of how their creations came to be, they will be full of anecdotes, intuitive pangs and strange happenings that only seem connected in hindsight. A great example of this is Jad Abumrad talking about gut churn and the process of creating Radiolab. The trick is to pay attention and to not discount anything that crosses your path and realize that these dots are leading down a path that will make sense in the future. You will be able to see how the dots connected and moved you toward your creation. Not discounting each step in the process is so important. In my experience, things that I thought were mistakes or ridiculous led me to the idea or creative “aha”. BE AT ONE WITH YOUR CREATION If you’re drawing, painting or writing about a tree for example, you need to feel the strength of its roots, the rich vibrant color of its leaves, its sway in the wind, the roughness of its bark, the smoothness of its leaf, the view from its height, the outreaching of its branches… You’re not simply drawing the tree: you are trying to express the tree. You are trying to communicate the tree to the world. Give it a voice. No, I’m not a tree hugger but when creating I can be found embodying the character, object and energy of that which I am creating. Be at one with every detail: the physical qualities, emotions, feelings, roles, perspective, worldview, limitations, language, history and experiences. Chances are you’re stuck in your own perspective. Creativity gives us the opportunity to get out of our limited view and actually sink into the creation. Ultimately becoming at one with it.