The exercises given below are elementary. They don’t take much time. Still, they help very well to improve creative thinking. Here they are:
Exercise 1. When driving a car, riding a bus or going on foot, read store signs backwards. Sometimes, it will even make you laugh, just try! For example, you will read “Juice Blends” as “Sdnelb Eciuj”.
Exercise 2. If you have nothing to do and have a book at hand, open the book and read sentences bottom-up. As a result, a character of a novel may, for instance, do everything in reverse order. First, he leaves his house in the morning, then he takes breakfast in the kitchen, brushes his teeth, gets up, and only then hears the alarm clock ring.
Exercise 3. Invent exotic given names, masculine (for example, Penigestior) and feminine (for instance, Malaruktigara).
Exercise 4. Draw. If you are bad at drawing – so much the better! Draw something nonexistent, for example, a nonexistent animal. Invent a nonexistent name for what you have drawn.
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| Picture from viecouture.com |
Exercise 5. Take a pen or a pencil in your left hand (or in the right one if you are left-handed) and write something. You can even try to take a pen with your toes. You can both write and draw.
Exercise 6. Make up word combinations with words that don’t normally occur together – for instance, “sweet salt” or “true lies”.
Exercise 7. Take any word and try to imagine that it is an acronym. Try to decipher this acronym. For example: MILK – My Iguana Loves Kissing.
Exercise 8. Devise 20 (the number is approximate) ways to use a chair. Those ways shouldn’t be trite like “one can sit on it” – instead, invent something fresh and unusual. For instance, one can use a chair as a gymnastic apparatus, or make a cat house out of it.
Exercise 9. Stimulate your ingenuity using the technique of “forced combinations”. Think how to combine two or more things to obtain something interesting or useful. For example, a book can be combined with a portable multimedia player to obtain an e-book reader.
The above creativity exercises are intended to make you think outside the box. Doing them, you will gradually stop thinking stereotypically and thus become more creative. Devote to them 15-20 minutes a day.
In addition to the exercises, you can also keep an idea journal. No matter how silly your ideas may seem, write all of them down. It will boost your creative thinking even more.
And now, just as I promised at the beginning of the post, I’d like to recommend you a tool that will help you increase your creativity with no effort at all. This tool is a computer program that allows you, through suggestion, to change your personality the way you want. Using this program, one can become not only more creative, but also more productive, more attentive, more sociable, more confident, etc. FOLLOW THIS LINK TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THIS UNIQUE TOOL.
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