It is often challenging to find new ways to become more creative at your job, and you will certainly need help to do it. Fortunately, Joel Zeff is around to guide you and your team to untapped reservoirs of significant creativity.
Finding ways to be more creative at work allows managers and employees to have more fun and be more productive. Joel Zeff offers some ways in which people can find enjoyment and fulfillment while thinking outside of the traditional boundaries of work-thought. The following are just a handful of the tips that will help you on your way to fun, productive brainstorming and positive thinking:
1. Choose a leader during the creative process. Someone has to keep everyone on track, or you will spend the entire session talking about television shows about attractive detectives solving crimes; attractive doctors saving lives; or attractive detectives and doctors solving crimes, saving lives and romancing each other.
2. Notate everything. Yes, it is a pain to write every idea down. If you don’t, you will forget. We always forget. Take notes, audiotape or videotape the session.
3. Change your location. You don’t always have to meet in the conference room for a brainstorming session. Creativity wants variety. Take a walk to another floor in the building, go outside and sit on a bench or stand around the parking lot. Go to a nearby museum, store, mall, coffee shop or park to brainstorm. Use your surroundings to inspire and motivate you to create.
4. Create fast brainstorming sessions. Do not linger. Nobody looks forward to spending an hour in the conference room to brainstorm. The longer sessions create bad creative habits. Instead, use quick energy bursts. There is no time for ego, politics, analyzing, or grandstanding. There is only enough time to create ideas and build on each other’s ideas. Use that positive energy to focus and produce ideas. Shorter idea sessions will create more ideas.
5. Relax, and create ideas each day. Take five minutes each day by yourself and think. Don't think about anything in particular. Just think. Take a walk around your building. Go sit on a bench. Leave your cell phone and Blackberry on your desk. Now, just think. Each time you do this you will have an idea. Sometimes it will be a little idea. Sometimes it will be a big idea.
6. Stop creating rules where rules do not exist. If someone says, “This is the way we have always done it,” run away in horror. You are not safe. He or she is a creative zombie and may infect you.
7. Eliminate some of your fears (the fear of failure, the fear of making a mistake, the fear of looking foolish) and your creative energy will increase. Nobody is keeping score. Every great idea in the history of the world was foolish or stupid. How many people walked by Orville and Wilbur Wright’s workshop to tell them they were fools?
11. Don’t worry about who gets the credit. One of the biggest obstacles to the creative process is ego. Successful teams understand it takes many people, groups, and organizations for an idea to become a reality. Spend more time figuring out how to make the idea work rather than who gets the credit.
12. Build on each other’s ideas. The most successful creativity sessions are when everyone is participating, contributing thoughts and building on ideas. Be open to each other’s ideas. When everyone has ownership and responsibility for an idea, the energy will fuel success.
If you are looking for ways to become more creative and could use a solid dose of team-oriented inspiration, look no further than the motivational, affirming words of Joel Zeff. You can visit Joel online or his blog to learn more about his valuable tips on ways to become more creative in a team-oriented environment.
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