Creative ideas – developing creativity in business

So you have an idea for a business, which is brilliant.

I am truly very excited for you, as this is the moment when your creativity knows no bounds. This is when your senses are most heightened and the constraints on what you can do have not yet reared their difficult and ugly heads.

Are you creative? Of course you are! Many people have simply forgotten how to capture their creative potential.

When you were a child, you would happily concentrate for hours on end, creating endless scenarios played out with the tools you had to hand: building blocks, dolls, cars, trains, dressing-up clothes and action heroes.

The creativity you had as a child was a powerful tool that you could call on to bring you happiness and that acted as comfort and support.

You still have this capacity for creative thought, but it may be buried deep down and the “toys” are different. You need to release your creativity and enjoy the benefits it brings you in business.

One trick is to exercise your brain and perhaps think a little more like a child. Do a simple crossword, paint a picture, sing a song, read some poetry, kick a ball about. Enjoy the freedom of letting go of your worries.

You may already have an idea for a business or just an inkling of one. Take this spark, get some quiet time and see if you can let your mind wander into unexpected places.

When you get good at this, the brain begins to reorganize your thoughts for you. Typically, the dream state is the mind’s way of allocating space and links to the thoughts and experiences you have been having throughout the day.

Dreams are often a strange collection of follow-on events because your brain is making subconscious connections.

Practice creativity and you can enable this process in your waking brain, making subconscious connections to solve complex problems without much effort. All it takes is a little practice.

Thomas Edison exercised his creativity by doing his thinking in a comfortable chair with a few ball bearings in his hand, draped over the armrest. If he fell asleep, the ball bearings would drop into a metal receptacle and the clattering would wake him up.

He believed that his most potent ideas came from the time between waking and sleeping, when his mind was able to set his thoughts free.

How many times have you fretted over a problem and then nodded off to sleep, only to find in the morning that the solution was there all along?

That’s your brain doing its work. Sometimes it’s better not to force a solution out but to coax it out with a little quiet time.

Your brain is a remarkable asset. If you want to solve a particular issue, then sleep on it.

An accomplished athlete, Jonathan Yates was keen to discover a way of keeping properly hydrated. In training for a gruelling marathon he was struck with an idea and invented a product to add to refilled water bottles. Santeau was founded in his back bedroom and four years later he sold the business. His product is now stocked in major supermarkets. Jon's first book 'All Time Essentials For Entrepreneurs' was published in 2009. http://www.freesources.co.uk