There’s a popular misconception surrounding the idea of creativity, many people holding the belief that it’s either something you are born with or you aren’t. Due to this misguided way of thinking, a large number of people miss the fact that creativity is a mindset, one that can be improved, for that matter, and miss out on the chance to be creative for years. Maybe even their entire life!

This article will explain what creativity is, ways you could be limiting it, and how to improve it.

Redefining creativity

As stated earlier, creativity is not something a person is born with, but in fact, a mindset. Creativity is defined as the tendency to generate or recognize ideas, alternatives, or possibilities that may be useful in solving problems, communicating with others, and entertaining others. You have to be willing to adopt a pattern of thinking that embraces new ideas, pushes for exploration, and takes a challenge as an opportunity to grow. Creativity comes when you are able to take multiple ideas and life experiences, drawing a connection between them in new and unique ways people haven’t thought of before. There are times when it may come across as easier for others, but what this really means is that they’ve had more opportunities and gathered more life experience, allowing them to make interesting and captivating connections over you. By no means am I trying to imply that it will be easy to do such, only that this means everyone has the ability to be creative, and boost their creativity. Yes, even you!

Things that can hold back creativity

Creativity can be limited or blocked completely due to your internal psychology in addition to the environment around you. A few of those ways may include:

• Fear: When a person seems to hold fear towards judgment or of failure, it tends to throw a wrench in their creative process. The prospect of other people judging their ideas or them failing at something, especially publicly, can lead to a person either avoiding challenges and risks or imposing heavy self-censorship on their work, possibly refusing to share their ideas in any capacity. Effectively stifling or outright putting a stop to indulgence in creative activities.
• Being in a chaotic environment: If a person is in an unstable or chaotic environment that has a lot of distractions, they will not be able to focus as their brain struggles to process and handle multiple tasks in a productive manner. Your brain will be focused on filtering out irrelevant information, putting less attention toward creative thought.
• Having fixed beliefs: People with fixed beliefs tend to think inside the box and stick to what’s familiar to them. They have a difficult time acknowledging differing ideas or accepting new information if it doesn’t align with what they already believe. This hinders their ability to think flexibly, something that is required for creative ideas to flow.
• Having a fixed routine: By keeping a fixed routine, you create a cycle of repetitiveness that doesn’t allow for you to experience anything new. Over time, you become resistant to change and hesitant to try out things that you are unfamiliar with. This impacts your ability to adopt new ideas, along with becoming less efficient in divergent and innovative thinking.

Ways you can grow your creativity

In order to boost your creativity, you are going to have to be willing to make some major life changes. Some of the changes you can make are:

• Letting go of perfectionism: While this may be extremely challenging, letting go of perfectionism is a must. There’s no other way around it. The obsession with perfecting one’s work, criticizing it for every minor problem, will only make you drop your projects early if you think they aren’t good enough, and can cause you to procrastinate your work altogether because what you create isn’t perfect. You have to accept that sometimes you are going to make things that you hate, that suck, so that you continue to create more. It happens to the best of us
• Diversifying your friend group: By befriending people who are different from yourself, you open your world up to perspectives and walks of life that may completely differ from your own. Setting yourself up for a range of varying viewpoints and approaches to situations you most likely would have never come up with by yourself. Also, by having a diverse friend group, you are less susceptible to hivemind mentalities, the constant influx of alternate ideas prompting you to come up with more creative approaches
• Trying out new things that interest you: Stepping out of your comfort zone to try out new hobbies helps in garnering more experiences for you to draw from. You put yourself in a position to combat existing ideas and let in newer, fresher ones. This can increase your problem-solving skills, enhance your adaptability, and enlarge your capacity for innovative thinking.
• Asking questions: If you take nothing else, take this. Question everything. Deepen your understanding of how things you’re curious about work, and then see if you can make it connect with something completely unrelated. This is the key to improving your creativity. By prompting yourself into deeper thinking, you can break away from surface-level observation and find things you may have otherwise missed.

Creativity was, is, and always will be something everybody has. It’s not about genetics, talent, or luck, but whether or not a person has the want, the drive to push in the face of adversity and struggle. To be willing to exhaust every approach available, until you reach a breakthrough that makes it all come full circle. You have to have faith, believe that you have the ability to come up with that project, that idea, that view, that reaches out and changes lives, and may this article provide you with that faith.

Thanks for reading!