Believe us when we tell you that mental creative blocks are real. You cannot help but feel stumped, staring at the blank page or canvas in front of you, not knowing where to begin.
The good thing is that there are exercises that can help with boosting your creativity.
What is a Creative Block?
A creative block refers to the inability to come up with original ideas where the gears in your mind just stop turning, and fresh thoughts or ideas might completely elude you. These occurrences have no timeline, as these can last a day, a week, or even a year.
Yes – you read this right – a creative block can even last months and years when you are stuck and struggling with creativity. You cannot just hope to come out of it without doing some sort of creative exercises that you can do to boost your creativity.
The following exercises can help.
Schedule Creative Free Time
One of the most challenging times to be creative is when you are given a deadline to come up with a brilliant idea. When your mind is worried about how little time it has, it can become increasingly challenging to come up with brilliant creative ideas.
Instead of sitting around, waiting, and then being dealt a deadline to come up with a creative ad – that you then fail to deliver – you will want to set aside a time in your daily or weekly schedule where you do nothing but some creative thinking.
During this free time, there is no pressure and no expectations. Essentially, it is just you and your thoughts. You might want to think of creativity as a plant that is not going to grow in a closed box of tight deadlines and other restrictions, as it needs space, time, and other treatments to flourish regularly.
So, find some half hour in your day, every day, where you can do some creative thinking. If you have some more free time, you might want to do yourself a favor and join one of the best creative writing classes where you can learn everything you need to improve your creative and descriptive writing.
Set Deadlines
Now, this is the exact opposite of what we said earlier; the reason is that some people work better under pressure, and their creative gears turn faster when they see an approaching deadline. For instance, think of the scenario where you are giving yourself ten minutes to come up with as many captions for an Instagram post as possible.
You might as well give yourself an hour to come up with designs for an approaching marketing project. The thing is that while deadlines can restrict some of us – the same deadlines can also push us to work harder, in effect, pushing through that mental block.
Of course, it all comes down to finding out what works best for you.
Quantity vs. Quality
When it comes to productivity, quantity vs. quality can take you very far. For instance, instead of searching for that one perfect book title or social media caption in your mind, you will want to start with at least thirty different titles or captions and write them all down.
You can always narrow them down later and choose the one title or caption that resonates with you the most. Follow this simple creativity rule for every project that you might require. All you need to do is to write one idea down, and before you know it, a second idea will pop into your mind, and then a third. It wouldn’t be wrong to state that creativity is a domino effect, which means that once you get the ball rolling, there is no stopping you.
So, here is what you will want to do: instead of focusing on nailing down the one perfect idea on your first try, you will want to brain dump and let all of your ideas spill on the paper. Also, you will want to switch up your routine, as it can be the perfect flint to spark some new ideas.
You might want to go for a walk, as the best ideas can come up when you are outside in nature. If you are driving home, you might want to take a different route and listen to some music to seek inspiration.
Transform Yourself into an Idea Machine
Did you know that the greatest ideas lie outside of your comfort zone? In order to be creative, you might have to step outside of your comfort zone. Think about this in terms of the following: if your goal is to become smarter and increase your vocabulary, you might want to read more books. However, if you don’t like to read, then you are in for tough luck, which is why you shouldn’t limit yourself in how you are going to help boost your creative outlook.
Sometimes, you need to stretch your comfort zone and step outside the comfort box in order to let your creativity grow. One idea that has proven to work is to turn yourself into an idea machine. The underlying mechanism is as simple as this: every day, you need to come up with at least ten original ideas.
On a random day, it might be ten fun Halloween costumes, and the next day, you might want to come up with ten “what-if” plot twists where you write down instances that could have changed entire movies or book plots “if” they had occurred. While some of these ideas might be a bit abstract, you can also go professional and think of ten new inventions or ten new business ideas that no one has thought of yet.
The goal of this creativity exercise is to simply jot down ten new ideas, which can be any ideas, every new day. By doing so, you will allow your creativity to expand in ways that you had never imagined before because you are thinking out of the box in making new connections.
Besides, this unique creativity exercise is extremely fun, and you can challenge your co-workers or employees to do the same.
