Last week's creativity boosting challenge was to try something I read about in a magazine, to act out creative expressions to free your creative thinking.
The article suggested acting out expressions such as "thinking outside the box" and "on the other hand". In the name of experimentation, I duly acted out both these expressions.
Then my problem was that I had to come up with other creative expressions to mime. To be honest, I'm not sure that the actual act of giving the expressions a physical action made me feel more creative, but I certainly had to stretch my mind a bit to come up with other expressions.
I ended up using "in touch with my inner child" (I held a photo of myself as a child between my hands), "free-thinking" (I mimed giving away my thoughts), "free-wheeling" (laid back on the floor and spun my legs in the air bicycle style).
Truthfully, acting out these expressions just made me giggle. I suppose having a giggle at oneself is not a bad thing and it probably put me in a more positive mood which I'm sure leads to more creativity.
Speaking of more positive thoughts, that leads me to this week's creativity inducing challenge.
This week's challenge: Read aloud a series of statements which progressively become more and more positive about your creativity at the beginning of each day.
I read an article in the Daily Mail about the effect of reading progressively positive statements and how they could lift your mood and outlook. In the article entitled the 10 Second Life Coach (click the link to read the article yourself) participants were asked to read a serious of cards out loud. The cards started out with statements like "Today is neither better nor worse than any other day."
The following card to be read aloud was: "I do feel pretty good today, though."
The people in the study progressed through 60 cards, with the statements becoming increasingly positive.
The "control group" read simple factual statements such as, ‘Saturn is sometimes obscured by the Sun and isn’t visible from Earth’, and, ‘The Orient Express travels between Paris and Istanbul’.
By the end of the study, the participants who had read the increasingly positive statements had rated themselves as being in a wonderful mood but those who had read the factual statements were described as having a mood that had "flat-lined".
I wonder if the statements were not just about mood but about creativity, would it have a similar effect?
So this week I'm going to try saying 10 progressively positive statements about creativity. The first two statements are based on the study while the others I've made up.
1. Today I don't feel any more creative or any less than any other day.
2. I do feel pretty creative today though.
3. I have a good feeling about my creativity today.
4. Nothing is stopping me from being creative.
5. I have some wonderful ideas and I am in the mood to be creative.
6. With how I am feeling, I think I could make something great.
7. I will make time today to take advantage of how creative I'm feeling.
8. I am feeling at my most creative.
9. I am positive that today is going to be a fabulously creative day.
10. I am a creative genius.
I'm going to print out those statements and read them aloud to myself everyday this week and at the end of the week I'll take a stock of my creativity stores.
Did you try acting out creative expressions this week? Would you ever do something like that or do you think it is too silly? Will you try read the progressively more positive statements about creativity this week?
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