Creative Thinking Creative

Thinking The following transcript is based on material in Skills for Success: The Personal Development Handbook, by Stella Cottrell. Creative thinking can benefit any aspect of life, including academic study or our working day. All too often, we act as if creativity were the preserve of a special breed of people – great artists, musicians, designers and inventors. However, you don’t need to be good at drawing or painting or music in order to be creative. Because of this misperception, we can tend to underestimate our own capacity for creativity and the wide range of situations to which we could apply creative thought. In this audio, we’ll talk about practical ways that you can develop and enhance your creative capacity. What do we mean by creative thinking? Creativity is about applying the imagination to finding a solution. This could be a solution to an artistic problem, but it could just as easily refer to finding an answer to a routine work issue, resolving problems in your life, friendships or relationships, or completing study assignments. The creative aspect is in finding the solution, rather than in simply applying a pre-given formula. If you devise your own solutions, find your answers, you are thinking creatively. Sometimes, a great idea can seem to drop from nowhere. When this happens, it is easy to feel that we are very imaginative and clever, especially if the wonderful idea came to us quickly. More typically, a creative outcome is the result of a series of processes, the application of strategies, and bringing the right attitude to the task – and these may not always feel very creative at the time. Creative thought thrives in certain conditions, so to foster creative thinking, it is worth taking steps to put those conditions into place. Certain types of creative
© Stella Cottrell (2003), Skills for Success Palgrave Macmillan Ltd.

thinking take place when we are very relaxed, with time to spare, when we are only half focused on the issue, perhaps