How can you rediscover your Creative Self? You need to master ten factors on your way to becoming a creative leader. Two weeks ago, we introduced the first five focus areas to you in this column: (1) Being courageous and a believer. (2) Silencing your ego and being yourself. (3) Thinking positive. (4) Redeveloping a curious beginner’s mind. (5) Being passionate. Today, we continue the journey toward reconnecting you with the highly creative individual that slumbers inside you and can’t wait to be reawakened by you.
6. Become a balanced whole-brain thinker!
School and university education strongly emphasizes cognitive processes that are associated with the left hemisphere of our brain, such as rationalization, analysis, logic, planning and calculation. In contrast, our education systems do little to foster right-brain thinking activities such as generating original ideas, engaging our fantasy and imagination, or listening to our intuition. What is the result of our imbalanced mono-brain education? Most business people are superb logical analysts and are rather poor creative thinkers.
Do you know the principle of Yin and Yang? This key philosophical concept of the Chinese culture symbolizes the balance in all of creation: Sun and moon, male and female, day and night, summer and winter, and of course: left-brain thinking and right-brain thinking. Make an effort to regain the vital Yin-Yang balance in your brain. Become a whole-brain thinker by training your creative thinking abilities to complement your well-honed analytical thinking skills. Take creativity training with an experienced creativity coach to quickly make up for what you missed in school. Regularly try your hand at Creative Puzzles and Mind-Teasers that you can find on the Internet and in some books and magazines. In addition, exercise your right brain by experimenting with creativity techniques to get ideas for a tough business nut that you have to crack.
7. Turn into a T-Shaped Person!
“All experts are blind. Expertise means you become blind to everything else. You know more and more about less and less, and then one day you arrive at the ultimate goal of knowing all about nothing,” noted Osho. Over the past two centuries, we have developed into an expert culture that favors specialists over generalists. Don’t get me wrong: You need to have great depth and expertise in at least one domain of specialization. But being an expert in one area is not good enough if you want to become a creative leader. You need to complement your expertise with a breadth of knowledge in many other areas.
Leonardo da Vinci confided: “Everything is connected to everything else.” He knew that breakthrough ideas are often found in the intersection between different concepts, ideas or knowledge disciplines. Consequently, da Vinci was not only an artist. He also was an inventor, a military engineer, and a scientist. Let da Vinci’s famous sketch of the Vitruvian Man be a role model of what you should become: a “T-shaped person” with deep expertise in at least one area of specialization and with broad general knowledge and skills in many other areas.
8. Cultivate Multi-sensory Perceptions and Present Moment Awareness!
Leonardo da Vinci also knew about the importance of perceiving your environment with all of your five senses. “The five senses are the ministers of the soul… Yet, the average human looks without seeing, listens without hearing, moves without physical awareness, inhales without awareness of odor or fragrance, and talks without thinking,” he observed. Geniuses such as da Vinci, Mozart or Einstein fostered living in a stimulus-rich environment. In consequence, all were synesthetic. They could take in an impression with one sense and then connect the stimulus to an impression relating to another sense (e.g., “this sound tastes like lemon”). Synesthesia is built on the principle of combining different sensory impressions and stimuli. And noticing and combining different stimuli may similarly lead you to a novel idea.
So adopt this genius strategy, cultivate present moment awareness and sharpen your five senses: your visual (seeing), auditory (hearing), kinesthetic (feeling or touching), olfactory (smelling) and your gustatory (tasting) sense. A fun way to start is to have a wine-tasting evening with your friends or business partners. But make sure that you and your guests truly savor the wine with all your five senses. One final word: Don’t forget to sharpen your sixth sense, too: a well-developed intuition (or gut-feeling) is priceless when it comes to making tough business decisions.
9. Develop flexibility and tolerance for ambiguity, paradox and uncertainty!
Imagine a tall, mighty oak tree that tops all surrounding trees in a forest. Now also envision a tiny bush of bamboo. Which of the two is stronger? The correct answer is: It depends — on whether we face a stable or unstable environment. On a sunny day, the solid oak tree is surely stronger than the tiny bamboo. However, in the eye of a heavy thunderstorm, the oak tree might break, while the bamboo flexibly bends with the wind.
Business in the new millennium is rather unstable and turbulent, too. A once mighty business can quickly break apart under the pressures of an increasingly competitive, fast-changing business environment if its leaders and managers insist on their established points of view and rigidly hold on to their habitual ways of doing things. So make an effort to fight your habits. Become more flexible and proactively approach change. Develop a tolerance for ambiguity, uncertainty and paradoxes. Remember the oak tree and the bamboo: the more flexible you are, the more power you have in times of change.
10. Harmonize doing and being!
Breakthrough ideas often come as sudden flashes of insight after a thinker has worked hard on a tough problem for some time and then takes a time-out to relax. Such breaks from constant doing and conscious thinking give your subconscious time to incubate on the problem. Archimedes had his famous “Eureka!” moment while taking a bath. Isaac Newton relaxed under an apple tree when a falling apple he observed delivered him the missing pieces for the theory of gravity. Alexander Fleming made the breakthrough discovery of penicillin after returning to his laboratory from a vacation. Personally, I experienced two powerful “Eureka!” moments in critical situations of my life. In both cases, I saw the sudden flash of insight — literally speaking — after I forced myself to take a break although I was under severe time pressure. Lesson: Work hard but at the same time make sure that you regularly stop doing and give yourself some time to relax and BE. But: Letting go may require huge courage. And that is why you have to start your ten-step journey to rediscover your creative self with step number one.
© Dr. Detlef Reis 2007. This article was published in parallel in the Bangkok Post under the same title on 11 October 2007.