You have all you need inside you right now to be a creative genius.
It’s only a matter of finding to let it out.
There are loads of lists of how to increase creativity. They are useful for increasing it if you actually do any of them.
But you don’t just want to increase your creativity, you want to unleash your genius.
When you are in the middle of your creative work, you rely on inner voices, instincts, previous experience when you really want to be creative. The more comfortable you are with drawing on those, the better you are at exercising your creativity.
What you need is to know what is that will help you break through barriers and limitations and open up possibility.
There aren’t any easy answers to that so far, which is often what we hope to find. Hacks, tricks, quick fixes, miracle cures, 6-minute abs, who wouldn’t want this stuff? It would make life a lot easier, but sadly this search ends here.
Working with your creativity needs to be a daily effort if you want to find your inner genius. You need both skill at your craft and imagination.
It’s hard to find those overnight, as you know. One course, one experience, one novel, one great article is not going to give you everything. What you want to know is how to expand your ability to have a new idea, to make a new creation, to solve a problem, to be connect, to self express, and to grow yourself on a continuous basis.
Your creativity can be found within you
One of the key characteristics of creative geniuses is that they have a great openness to their own inner life. They aren’t afraid to visit the darker sides of themselves and figure out their own inner workings. In other words, they know it’s from the mix within that creativity flows.
You only need to tap into your own inner resources to get there.
Prepare
The creative moment is where you make it up as you go, you draw from the inner well of experience to feed your intuition. What you are looking for is greater creativity on demand.
It’s an improvisation of the moment, and like those who do improv performance, you need to be prepared.
They practice, refine skills, build relationships with others. This all creates an inner soup they can draw on in the moment. Just like them, you are performing too in your own creative acts.
You need to fill your inner well with experience, knowledge, skills, perspectives, ideas and so on. The more you have inside, the more you have to power your creativity. Filling yourself up is an ongoing process every day of your life. Plenty of it is passive. You go out in the world and things happen to you. The other part is active. You decide what ideas, influences and experiences you have. Be sure to seek out the best! The greater effort you make the greater your inner well becomes.
Face your inner self
Look into the mirror of your soul. See who you really are, including your weaknesses, your mistakes, your regrets. We are afraid to face these inner workings, but they are sources of creativity.
If you have a weakness, then you need your creativity to explore that and find a way to condition that weakness into a strength. Most of us talk about our weaknesses as if they are static and unchangeable. That isn’t true. They are yours to play with and experiment with. If you take them on, they are your engines of growth. It takes great resourcefulness to deal with a weakness. As you take them on, watch what happens to your creativity.
Use your emotion
You are the creator of your emotion.
They come from your beliefs, thoughts and the meaning you attach to the world. It’s all inside you, the good, the bad, the ugly and the just plain weird.
How much of your own emotional states do you fully embrace and channel to your benefit?
You don’t have to become a sad person or an angry person to use these emotions to power your creativity. If you can hop between emotional states, you change what you feel like doing and how you express yourself. You can capture that in your art, for example, or your engineering project, mobile app, novel, or gourmet meal.
Emotions are your play things, they are the color of life. They are not something to fear, avoid or suppress. The creative realm is the place to safely express them. Have fun with them, use them, they each give you a different perspective as you create.
Re-examine yourself
Take another look at what you are and embrace all sides of yourself. You likely have inner conflicts within you as most of us do. They are your laziness versus your motivation, your chaos and order, your desire to give and to take. Embracing these opposite edges grows your creativity.
Find out your inner neuroses and use them to your advantage. If you have an obsession, then apply it to your creativity. It will open up new energy and discovery. You don’t have to be afraid of it, you don’t have to try to hide it, or be like everyone else.
Expand
You are always expanding.
Whatever you believe about yourself, whatever you are able to take in, and how you see the world and yourself can expand. Reaching your creative potential means expanding your self-concept which helps move you past your limitations. This is creative work too. It’s a constant trial and error to find the right ideas to grow.
What you tell yourself
For years I told myself I wasn’t creative and believed it. It was wrong, of course, I was creative in many ways, but it held me back from trying things I really wanted to do. I told myself I had no ideas, and so I rarely did. I felt blank inside. Breaking out of that mentality grew my creativity.
What we tell ourselves is what we become. If you want to be more creative, you have to tell yourself I am becoming more and more creative. You have to believe you are capable of increasing your creativity.
This is your work, it’s not something life will ever hand you. You get to be the master of your own creativity. Take the wheel and decide which direction you are going to go with it.
Exploring the limits
Ultimately, increasing your creativity, is exploring the boundaries of yourself. Most of us have a hard time with this. It’s risky, scary and uncomfortable because it requires facing pain, suffering and fear. We hold ourselves back from finding our true selves. We would rather be comfortable and eat ice cream, watch tv and compare our lives on social media.
I’ve done all this for ages. I hid in fear of myself, finding whatever I could to comfort me. I wasn’t taking responsibility for anything. I was letting other people and the events of life steer me. The only way I began to turn around my life was to take charge of my creativity. It changed everything.
Start exploring the truth about yourself and what you can do. This is the greatest way to find your creative genius because it requires you to constantly grow, which is a creative act.
In other words, your potential is something waiting for you to create. As you expand, it expands, so it’s always somewhere ahead of you. When you have given all you thought you had, there is always more in you.
