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An article on using your own resources and strengths in order to come up with creative ideas and initiatives. This simple technique will allow you to map interesting routes for personal creativity and development. Includes a detailed explanation and the author’s personal example.

At about the same time I started to think about building an Internet website, I considered my personal strengths and resources. It occurred to me that it might be a good idea to make a list of all the things I have in my life, as well as the things I have learned and skills I can use. This could help me come up with new directions for my personal development. After I’ve started writing these things down, I decided to call it “Power Maps” as they outline my sources of power, and could also show me ways to turn my strengths into more powerful actions. In this brief article I will try to demonstrate how I do this, hoping you can do the same. I use my own Power Map as an example, so you also get a chance to know me better…
I began by writing down the major categories of things I do and am related to. Here is what I came up with:

• Family & Friends
• Places I know
• My Studies & Work
• Languages
• My Hobbies & Pastimes

Try to make your own list now. It doesn’t have to be similar to the one I made or even have the same logic or structure. Just try to think of the major things that make up the person that you are.
Next, I added more details to each major category – ending up with many of the things I consider to be my sources of power and knowledge. This is what it looked like by now:

• Family & Friends
  • My wife
  • My children
  • My mother, sisters & brother
  • My friends
• Places I know
  • Israel
  • Europe
  • South America
    • Argentina
    • Chile
    • Peru
    • Bolivia
    • Brazil
  • South East Asia
    • India
    • Nepal
    • Thailand
• My Studies & Work
  • Human Resources
  • Management skills training
  • Thinking, Innovation & Creativity
  • Philosophy
  • Computers
    • Web programming
    • Database planning
    • Online & computer games
  • Myself as an employee
• Languages
  • Hebrew
  • English
  • Spanish
• My Hobbies and Pastimes
  • Capoeira
  • Diving
  • Board games

Seeing all that I have in my favor, I already started to feel stronger!
If you want to get the same feeling – take a few minutes to list many of your own sources of power.

Turning power maps into creative action

Now it was time to start thinking how I could turn all those resources into something I could make or contribute. In other words – come up with new and useful things I could do with all I have. What I came up with was consisted of things I did before and could do better or on a larger scale; things I haven’t done before but believed I could do; and some other creative ideas that just came up.
In order to distinguish these action ideas from the resources I already listed, I use an undeline for the action items. I am sharing some of these with you:

• Family & Friends
  • My wife
    • Help your wife pursue her dream
  • My children
    • Write children’s books
  • My mother, sisters & brother
  • My friends
• Places I know
  • Israel
    • Knowing what it’s all about
  • Europe
  • South America
    • Argentina
    • Chile
    • Peru
    • Bolivia
    • Brazil
  • South East Asia
    • India
    • Nepal
    • Thailand
• My Studies & Work
  • Human Resources
  • Management skills training
    • Tools for planning
    • Small Business Handbook
  • Thinking, Innovation & Creativity
    • Improved Memory Techniques
    • Building a Personal Thinking Center
  • Philosophy
  • Computers
    • Web programming
    • Database planning
    • Online & computer games
      • Principles of development
      • Review best games on the web
  • Myself as an employee
• Languages
  • Hebrew
  • English
    • Translation tips
  • Spanish
    • Learning tips
• My Hobbies and Pastimes
  • Capoeira
  • Diving
  • Board games
    • Playing tips
    • Designing & Inventing

Now I had something I could work with. There were other things on the list – this is just to show you the general idea. I am sure that if you try to complete your own Power Map now – you’d have many action ideas.

Bringing it all together

With such a detailed Power Map, you can start looking for practical ways to harness all that power to interesting development possibilities. The strongest creative ideas would be those that combine as many strengths and action items as possible. Consider the creative ideas website I have built (see resource box below) – it combines my power at: English, Internet, Creativity, Management training, and more.

I truly hope this can help you become stronger, more creative, and ultimately happier.

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The most durable organizations are those that produce a succession of ideas and innovations that either improve on existing processes or create wonderful new products. This article will show you 7 ways to do it.

If you’re running or managing a business and want it to be around for a long time, you need to spend a good part of your time innovating. That’s because, in a fast-moving world, where people expect things to get better and better, and cheaper and cheaper, innovation is your route to getting ahead of your competition.

Here are 7 ways to put new life blood into your organization through innovation.

1. Create An Innovative Climate. Goran Ekvall of Lund University in Sweden has defined three conditions needed for a climate of innovation. They are: trust, dynamism, and humour. One of Ekvall’s case studies was a Swedish newspaper where the team working on the women’s section consistently outperformed all the other teams. The reason? Quite simply, this group trusted one another, had a high level of energy and shared a common sense of humour.

2. Develop Washing-Up Creativity. According to the Roffey Park Management Institute, most flashes of inspiration come to people when they are away from work and not forcing their conscious brains to find solutions to their problems. For some, ideas come while mowing the lawn or taking the dog for a walk or playing golf or waiting on a railway station. For Isaac Newton, it was an apple on the head while sitting in the garden. For Archimedes, it was in the bath. For others it’s while doing the dishes; that’s why Roffey Park calls these flashes of insight: “washing-up creativity”.

3. Make New Connections. Making new connections between existing features of your product or service is a popular way to innovate. Akio Morita, chairman of Sony, said that he invented the Walkman because he wanted to listen to music while walking between shots on his golf course. His team simply put together two seemingly incompatible products: a tape recorder and a transistor radio.

4. Find Out What People Need. Necessity is a great spur to innovation. Take, for example, writing paper. The Chinese had already made paper from rags around the year 100 BC but because there was no need for it, nothing came of it. When it did reach Europe in the Middle Ages when writing was all the rage, the supply of rags and worn-out fabric soon dried up. That’s when a French naturalist made the discovery that wasps made their nests by chewing wood into a mash that dried in thin layers. Within 100 years, all paper was made using the idea of wood pulp.

5. Test, Test, Test. Product testing is the way most inventors and organizations go about innovation. It may not be the quickest route to success, but it is often the surest. Jonas Salk, for example, discovered the polio vaccine by spending most of his time testing and testing and continually finding out what didn’t work. Thomas Edison, the inventor of the filament light bulb, recorded 1300 experiments that were complete failures. But he was able to keep going because, as he said, he knew 1300 ways that it wasn’t going to work.

6. Adopt and Adapt. One relatively easy approach to innovation is to notice how others deal with problems and then adapt their solutions to your own. It’s known as “adapt and adopt”. It’s what watchmakers Swatch did when they realized that the more reliable their watches became, the less people needed to replace them. Their solution? Borrow an idea from the world of fashion and collections by turning their watches into desirable fashion accessories. Now people buy Swatch watches not just to tell the time but because it’s cool to do so.

7. Take Lessons From Nature. If you really want to be inventive, you can’t beat nature. The world of nature gives us an endless supply of prototypes to use in our own world. Take Velcro, for example. Velcro was patented by Georges de Mestral in 1950 after he returned from a hunting trip covered in tiny burrs that had attached themselves to his clothing by tiny overlapping hooks. De Mestral quickly realized that here was an ideal technique to fasten material together. A whole new way of doing things was suddenly invented.

The history of the world is the history of innovation. Thomas Kuhn called each acceptance of a new innovation a “paradigm shift”. For once a new innovation becomes accepted, the world has changed for ever and can never go back to the way it was.

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Creative people have long been known to challenge the status quo at work and school. Why is this the case? Is there something inherently rebellious about being a creative person? According to the author the answer is yes, although this doesn’t always need to lead to conflict. This can be turned around for the better if people are better educated. Find out how in this article.

Studies on creative people have consistently demonstrated that creativity is associated with openness to new ideas, risk-taking, and being inner-directed. Do these traits put creative people at odds with the culture and people around them? The answer is sometimes yes and sometimes no.

Say for example that Jeremy is a creative child that performs below average in school. He may be seen as a poor student by teachers and parents for “daydreaming” and doing poorly on objective tests. His latent skills as a right- brain thinker might be underappreciated and underdeveloped.

Or consider the case of Alycia, a high school teacher who works in a constrictive environment. She is eager to try new teaching techniques but finds that her colleagues are traditional in their approach and even hostile to her ideas. What can she do?

There is little doubt that creative people will struggle in environments that are overly structured and they will feel frustrated with tasks that are not challenging. This helps explain why creative children often have trouble in school, their right-brain minds wandering while their left-brain teachers are trying to force them to memorize information that these creative children instinctively see as irrelevant or trivial to understanding the “big picture” in life.

Things often get worse for creative people when they enter the workforce. If they haven’t chosen their occupation carefully they may wind up in a job that is not well suited for their particular talents and gifts. Unfortunately, they may find this out the hard way by being bored and frustrated at work.

But the job itself may not be the problem. It may also be the social milieu of the workplace. Every workplace has its own personality which organically evolves and changes over time. Some workplaces value new ideas and risk- taking, an environment that will be very stimulating for a creative, risk-taker. Other environments are rigid and traditional, which will be frustrating and could lead to conflict and dissatisfaction.

Social psychologists have noted that some work groups suffer from groupthink, which is the tendency for some groups to feel superior to others and to downplay any evidence to the contrary. These groups value conformity and resist new ideas. An innovator will feel isolated and rejected by co- workers who support this type of environment.

These co-workers often adopt an unspoken code regarding people who are different or stand out from the crowd. They send overt and covert messages of rejection to a creative co-worker who proposes new ideas. These signals include ignoring a person’s comments or providing perfunctory, hollow praise or worse punishments such as threats and ridicule for proposing ideas that threaten the perceived integrity of the group.

Many people at work become comfortable with their daily routines and over time they defend these routines as something akin to being sacred. These kinds of people often bow to the timeworn expression: “If it ain’t broken, don’t fix it,” but they over apply this attitude and to them nothing is ever really “broken” and to suggest otherwise is to threaten the comfort of their work routines. These people might respond in a venomous manner to creative and risk-taking co-workers who threaten their “comfort zone” by proposing new ways of doing things.

All of this suggests that creative people will often be at odds with people around them and frustrated by work environments and organizational structures that are rigid and unbending. This is partially due to the fact that creative people are attracted to novelty and new ideas and ways of doing things, and their creative minds are often generating alternatives to accepted practices.

The accumulated effects of these frustrations at school, work, or whatever the setting, may lead some creative people to adopt a rebellious attitude regarding rules and authority. When this happens the result may be frustration and conflict on all sides where a downward spiral results from interpersonal conflict and disagreement. This frustration may lead to a career change or disciplinary action in the workplace, an unfortunate byproduct of creative people not being successfully integrated into the workplace community.

These negative manifestations of rebellion can be avoided only when organizations and individuals are made aware of the interpersonal dynamics that distinguish different personality types from each other. One way to do so that is popular today is for co-workers to take the Myers-Briggs Personality Inventory and to discuss the results with each other. While this test is not necessarily rigorous in terms of accepted statistical measures of reliability or validity, it serves the greater purpose of opening the door to discussing interpersonal response styles and to respect each other for these differences.

Workplace diversity is typically defined in sociological terms by placing people in black-and-white categories, for example gender, race, and age. Meanwhile, other important personality and interpersonal differences, such as creativity, rarely get the same amount of attention. And yet the creativity dimension is one of the most important because creativity and risk-taking are crucial traits for organizational health and survival.

In order to avoid the traps of blind rebellion and open conflict, organizations must do a better job of identifying creative employees and in fact nurturing creativity and respect for creativity in all their employees. This is not to suggest that common group practices such as “brainstorming” are necessarily a good way to nurture creativity. Creative people are often different from other co-workers in several ways that include interpersonal differences, inner- directedness, and work habits. These differences in style as well as substance need to be addressed in an open and comfortable manner.

Creative people must also be taught to understand themselves and to appreciate that they have needs that can only be met in certain ways. They may prosper as artists, entrepreneurs, or in other professions that encourage openness, risk-taking, and eccentricity. This means that our educational system must be more responsive to the needs of creative children and must offer ways for creative children to learn that fits their learning styles.

When schools and workplaces are better educated about creativity and are in a better position to integrate creative people into the community, then individuals and society will benefit. And youngsters like Jeremy will be more likely to reach their full potential and adults like Alycia will be able to enhance their work environment by contributing unique and challenging ideas.

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Learn about how to overcome the barriers that hinder creativity and then learn some fundamental keys in how to be more creative as well as learning about the amazing Disney Creativity Strategy based on Walt Disney’s creative abilities.

Before thinking about how to be more creative, let me begin point out some real barriers that some people seem to have when wanting to enhance creativity, have a think if any of these things are applicable to you and your life;

1. Lack of time. This is not as major as you may think. Linking thoughts and ideas only takes seconds. It can happen anytime, anywhere. Provided you are in the right state and pay attention to your own experience.

Creativity in my opinion is more about the quality of the time you have and being receptive to yourself. Though this does take some time.

2. Fear of being judged. When I worked for a national newspaper and we had brainstorming sessions, individuals were often scared of expressing ideas. Creativity results in unusual ideas and perhaps even being different in some way. They can be thought of as strange, odd or challenging. Fear of being considered weird, stupid or just different often kills creativity. If I feared people thinking any of those things about me, I would not bother getting out of bed in the mornings; I love the fact that people think I am all of those things!!

3. Lack of self-esteem. When you do something creative, you go beyond the bounds of what has been safe and familiar in the past, to yourself and maybe even others. When you are not sure about yourself, being different in any way can feel risky or make you feel vulnerable. The danger is that you give up your new insight to just blend in. Smash out of those shackles!

4. Fear of failure. This inhibits us. If you are making a new connection in your brain there can be no inherent “right” or “wrong” about it. Failure can only have two meanings really; firstly, that it didn’t work in the way you wanted it to. Secondly, Someone else did not like it. But so what??!! I have to tell you all that I get many comments on how I generate so many successful projects and am often asked how I do it. I always point out that these projects are actually only about 10% of what I have imagined. The other 90% didn’t work or didn’t get out of my brain.

Creativity is not reserved for genius only. Einstein was brilliant but he is not necessarily the best model of creativity for us. You do not need specialist expertise to be creative. The fruits of your creativity may manifest in many, many differing ways, in fact I expect so.

If at any time you doubt your ability to be creative, remind yourself that several times every night you create an entirely new dream, which you script, act in and watch, which involves all your senses and has effects that can last long after they are over. This creation is so very effortless most people don’t even recognise it as such.

How to be more creative.

Ok, so how does one actually go about getting more creative. Let me give you some ideas;

1. Find the right frame of mind. Explore what states you associate with being creative. Discover properly what it is that triggers and maintains you being creative. What’s your best time of day? The best environment? Do you need to be alone or with others or alone in the midst of others? Do you need sounds or silence or background sounds? Build a profile of your creativity state, then make time and space for it on a regular basis instead of waiting for some divine intervention and for it to just happen on its own.

2. Cultivate dreaming. Pay attention to your experience of life and attention to your existing creativity rather than dismissing day-dreams and dreams. Don’t allow yourself to waste what you may already be discovering by ignoring it.

3. Ask yourself “What if?” and “What else?” and “How else?” Always go beyond what you fist thought, find more and more different ideas.

4. When and/or if you hit a problem, pretend your usual solution is not available. This can work in many different ways. If your PC crashes today, how else might you do your work? If you usually argue face to face, what would happen if you wrote your feelings down instead? Some solutions may be no better than the ones you’re used to: others may offer you brilliant new opportunities. Do something different. I wrote about that idea in an earlier article entitled Do something Different, go check it out.

5. See how many different results you can get with the same ingredients. I am sure many of you know that there is a cookbook called “Recipes 1-2-3″ by Rozanne Gold, in which every recipe is made out of only three ingredients.

Some recipes use the same three ingredients but different processes or quantities come up with different results.

You can have some great fun by taking an every day object and imagine or think about how many other uses it can have, you can even think about how to combine them with other objects.

6. Think of different ways to do the familiar. Change the order in which you do things, use different things, use your less favoured hand; as soon as we break routine, we move from a state where we are on auto-pilot to one where we are alive and alert. You exercise unfamiliar brain connections and help build new links in your brain. A glorious feeling!

7. Look out for the difference that makes the difference. When you encounter something that strikes you as different, ask yourself what it is about it that is so different or new or unusual. Where does the key difference actually lie?

I want to mention a strategy that is well talked about in NLP circles and that I have used for many years and that is the Disney Creativity Strategy.

The Disney creativity strategy is for developing your dreams and giving them the best possible chance of becoming reality. It is named after Walt Disney, who often took on three different roles when his team was developing an idea; the dreamer, the realist and the critic. Robert Dilts, an NLP pioneer, modelled and developed this strategy as an NLP tools. Some of Robert’s articles that he kindly donated can be found at my website.

The strategy separates out these three vital roles involved in the process of translating creative ideas into reality so that they can be explored separately for maximum clarity and effect.

Many companies have specialists in each of the three fields and I have done consultancy work with companies myself whereby I have asked different team members to take on one of the roles. You can also play all three roles yourself as I often do in coaching or business consultancy, with your own wants, needs and goals.

However, the usual way to use it is to allocate three roles to different people (realist, dreamer and critic) to assess plans or tasks. Ask someone to act as the dreamer and tell you all the possibilities of the idea. Ask someone else to examine exactly what would be involved in putting it into practice (realist), and someone to take a hard look at it and really evaluate its strengths and weaknesses (critic). You may want to rotate the roles. If doing it on your own, be sure to keep the roles very separate and write them down. I do this with lots of my own ideas and with changes I want to make in my life.

You can even use this in a meeting broken down into three stages; Each role as a separate stage. Get everyone brainstorming and being creative first; then get them thinking about what would actually have to happen in practical terms; then get them critically evaluating the possibilities.

I suggest that you have some fun being creative and doing things differently to generate more creativity. It feels wonderful and if you have found that your progress to success or the outcomes you desire has been blocked or gone stagnant, then think about being more creative in how and what you are doing.

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Faber-Castell Creativity For Kids Enchanted Fairy Garden $18.19 With a little creative magic you can grow your own enchanted fairy world. This garden set includes a flower-shaped gardening dish, enchanted flower house, tiny gemstone treasures, flowers, butterflies, paint with brush along with soil and seeds that grow like magic. Finish off your garden with a friendly fairy, a sparkling garden path and teeny tiny toadstools....

Creativity For Kids It's My Life Scrapbook Kit $13.12 Make a scrapbook all about your life. Use the tools, tips and techniques included to creatively preserve your photographs and personal paraphernalia.Includes:Hard cover, spiral bound, 12-page scrapbook album with picture frame cover (pages are 8.75" square)Ten sheets of patterned paper including embossed and diamond-dust designsOver 50 vellum stickersEasy-to-use photo-cropping stencilScallop-edged...

Kidkraft Firehouse Bookcase $89.88 The Firehouse Bookcase is the perfect storage accessory for every little firefighters room. Finished with authentic firehouse details there is plenty of room for storing of books, toys and other knick knacks. Appropriate for ages 3 to 8 years old. Features: Six separate compartments for storage Hidden compartment with a garage door A yellow bell to alert the always-ready firefighters Cutout windo...

Speak $7.96 Based on the novel by laurie halse anderson this follows a high school freshman who expresses herself in art to go beyond the date rape & the silence from her parents classmates & others. Studio: Paramount Home Video Release Date: 09/19/2006 Starring: Kristen Stewart Elizabeth Perkins Run time: 93 minutes Rating: Pg13...

Hans Christian Andersen $7.40 The Danish author fascinates the children of Copenhagen with his stories as they are brought to life with dancing and music.Genre: MusicalsRating: NRRelease Date: 6-MAR-2001Media Type: DVD...

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How can we teach our children creative thinking? How can we teach them the habit of thinking “outside the box”?

In my opinion, creativity is the real genius. Intelligent children learn fast, and apply their knowledge in everyday life situations. But – inventing something new, creating something original, that is real genius. I always admire originality, whether it is original artwork, an original story, or an invention that can make life easier for many people.

How can we teach our children creative thinking? How can we teach them the habit of thinking “outside the box”?

Here are a few easy and fun suggestions for activities that will go a long way toward developing this very valuable skill of creative thinking in your child. Slight adjustments may be needed for your child’s age and skill.

1.  Play the following game: one person starts telling a story. He stops after a few sentences, and the next player continues his story. There is no limit to the number of players. It is a great idea to record the story, so that it can be distributed to the participants later, for the enjoyment of everyone. This is a very fun activity that trains your child (and you too, if you are participating) to think creatively.

2.  Prepare a series of pictures. The pictures can be taken from a book, from several books, from newspapers – or even downloaded from the Internet and printed on a home printer. Put the pictures next to each other, and let your child tell a story, using those pictures. You can take turns, your child and you, developing the story based on the pictures. This game can have several variations: put the pictures face down on the table, then turn them over one by one, to continue the story. Gradually increase the speed of turning the pictures over, so that the story teller has to come up with the story continuation faster and faster. When you are done with a set of pictures, just change the order, and see if your child can come up with a different story, based on the new order.

3.  Prepare a series of words written on cards. Play the same game – tell a story using these words. You can use the same variations as above.

4.  Play a piece of classical music, and let your child tell you what kind of mood does this music create, what kind of story does this music tell?

5.  Play a piece of music, and have your child paint a picture that shows the mood this music creates, or tells the story this music is telling.

6.  When your child comes up with a story in one of the previous activities, ask your child to change the story in order to change the mood. For example, if the story is sad – can he change the story to be happy? Can he change it to be a mystery? Can he change it to be a comedy, or a funny story?

7.  When reading a book with your child, always ask open ended and thought provoking questions like: How would you handle this situation? What could the character do differently? How do you think did the character feel?

8.  Print several pictures on paper. (You can use cardboard if you’d like to make the pieces more durable). Cut each picture into 9 parts (or more, if you want to make this game more complex). Now let your child put the pictures back together. After putting all pieces back together into the original pictures, you can mix the pieces, so that your child can create new pictures, combining pieces from different pictures. Start with two pictures mixed together,and advance to more and more pictures. Start with bigger pieces, cutting the picture into 4 parts only, and advance to smaller and smaller pieces, cutting the picture into more and more pieces. Also, use more and more complicated pictures, that include more details.

9.  Play “pretend” games with your child often, or use “role playing” with your child. When you read a story, ask your child to play the role of his favorite character.

10. When your child has friends visiting, have them come up with a short play and perform it for the parents. This is always a fun activity for the children, and it also keeps them very busy.

11. Encourage your child to paint a picture of an object. Then have him paint it in different colors. For example, ask your child to paint or draw a bunch of fruit. Then have him change the colors of all the fruit. Have a red banana, yellow apple and so forth.

12. Choose a day a week, and have all family members do their routine activities in a different way. For example, brush their teeth in a different way than usual. Take a different way to school. Sing instead of talking. Get up earlier, and and play a new game. Walk backwards… Be creative, and encourage your child to be creative too.

13. Don’t ever discourage your child from using his imagination. If your child tells an imaginary story, always praise him and acknowledge the creativity. If your child comes up with an original answer to a question, even if the answer is incorrect, acknowledge creative thinking.

14. Keep your eyes open for any signs of creativity and originality. Always praise and encourage these traits.

Have fun, and enjoy! To your child’s creativity!

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