Ideas are the lifeblood of our lives. Within them are your heart and passion, your energy and hopes and dreams all wrapped up in little mini visions. We need them for our businesses, our lives and relationships, and we need them to figure out how to solve all the challenges the pop up in our paths.
Ideas make our world spin, they add excitement, pleasure, fun and stir up our passions to apply to something meaningful in our lives. We need it to be able to find beauty in the world around us.
How can we get more?
Endless ideas sound great! I want that, and I am sure you do too. 🙂 I believe it is within our reach.
Creativity is a muscle, you have heard. That’s a useful metaphor, although I prefer calling it a feeling. It isn’t limited the way a muscle is, and there is the implication that you need to cause your self pain to make it grow. If you think of it as a feeling, then how do you get more? You cultivate it! We don’t usually say we have limited capacity for joy or gratitude, but if you want to feel those every day, you have to spend some time focusing your mind and body on those emotions.
The same with creativity. It can be done! Set your sites on 10x’s bigger creativity.
Getting ideas is mostly a matter of training yourself.
So what is the practical application of this?
You need to work on it daily. It really works if you apply yourself. You get a few ideas, and these will lead to new ideas, and so on. You will find yourself using those odd moments when you aren’t doing much for thinking of new ideas rather than just popping a screen in front of your face. Imagine in your mind the ideas raining down on you or popping up every where you turn. They are there. Focus on that vision with all your emotion and feel the ideas coming to you in great waves, waiting for you to just pluck them up.
Make it a ritual
You know your rituals create the life you have right now. Isn’t coming up with new ideas worth a few minutes of your day? Chances are you already are. How many times in a day, do you say or think, I have an idea! I bet it’s at least a few times a day.
Many creative geniuses keep idea notebooks, perhaps you already do. They’re great for keeping track of ideas and thoughts that zip by. I usually forget them if I don’t write them down. (and it’s actually a lot of fun to review your notebooks later!!)
This idea is a variation on the idea journal that helps organize your ideas and the areas you are searching for new answers and thoughts.
Grab a notebook. Big or small, any notebook will work. And a pen you enjoy using always helps too!
On each page write a question for something you need some ideas in. But make the questions good! No bad questions, put a positive spin on stuff!! If you don’t know what to do, say how do I do xyz and have fun doing it. Or show love to others, or expand my creativity.
Start getting ideas and write them down!
The beauty of this system is that you can keep your idea lists running, and add whenever lightning strikes. Keep on writing questions as you think of new things you would like answers to.
Spend 5-10 minutes every day, or more if you get into it. Set a goal to write down at least ten ideas, and a at least a couple new questions.
Push yourself to develop your questions so they are specific. It will help your ideas be more specific to solutions that you may wish to act on.
Have some fun with it! Write down all your wacky, crazy ideas! Make a few doodles along the way. This is definitely a personal project, so inject yourself into every bit of it!
