Creative thinking - You're in luck! You see the world differently than others!

When faced with a problem, do you strive to find as many solutions as possible? Do you use familiar things in everyday life for purposes other than their intended purpose? Do you have any artists, musicians or poets in your family? Do you often have crazy, unusual, and unlike anything thoughts come into your head? Can you act spontaneously, spontaneously, without much thought? Do you often imagine animals or objects instead of your friends?

Once you answer these questions, consider yourself to have passed a rapid test of creative thinking. If in most cases the answer is “yes”, then you have it; if “no”, it’s time to start developing it. What is it, why does modern man need it, and can it be somehow improved?

What it is

Creativity, or creative thinking, is an activity that results in a person creating something completely new. To do this, he uses not only initial data, but also associations, experience, personal perception, imagination, and internal sensations. The result is an absolutely unique product.

It is studied in the psychology of creativity - a separate section devoted to the study of the creation of everything new by man in science, art, technology, everyday life and everyday life. It also examines creative potential - how it is formed and developed. This data is actively used in other areas:

• cultural-historical psychology;
• existential;
• humanistic;
• cognitive;
• psychoanalysis;
• activity approach;
• Gestalt therapy.

The potential of creative thinking is used not only in psychology. They are also interested in other sciences: philosophy, sociology, political science, pedagogy, computer science. Today, one of the recruitment criteria for many large companies is creativity. It is necessary not only for artists, film directors, poets and musicians. Many modern professions also require the ability to create something completely new and unique. These are designers, stylists, copywriters, marketers, advertisers, etc.

What does it take to develop creativity?

Regularity

If you constantly practice developing a skill, the result will not be long in coming. According to research by Harvard scientists, 85% of creative success depends on the level of skill. Creative thinking is the same skill. And for its development, it is recommended to exercise at least once a week, but it is better to do it daily.

Like strengthening muscles, building creativity will take time and effort. It is necessary for the development of creativity to become a habit and become an integral part of life.

Determination

When a person wants something very badly, he usually makes every effort to achieve it. Sometimes it works the first time, sometimes it takes many more tries. But each of them is invaluable experience in developing and achieving your goals.

The main thing is to never give up and never doubt yourself!

Leaving your comfort zone

Finding non-standard solutions to everyday routine tasks will help in the development of creative thinking. You can discover unknown paths for yourself by taking a new route each time you return home from work. Or choose only those cafes that you have never been to before. Order dishes that you have never tried.

Meet unusual people, absorb interesting ideas. Even minor changes in your usual lifestyle lead to changes in thinking.

Accepting your individuality

There are no ideal people; everyone has strengths and weaknesses. Creativity is based on the ability to profitably use one's advantages and compensate for disadvantages.

Each person is an individual with unique abilities. You just need to open them within yourself. It is important to always be yourself, remember your talents, dreams and goals, and not succumb to the pressure of other people's expectations.

Creation

Being creative will be a faithful assistant in the development of creativity. Drawing, playing musical instruments, writing stories and poems, an unusual approach to cooking - it can be anything. Once you introduce creativity into your life, new ideas will begin to appear in your head like a snowball.

Cognitive sphere

Creative thinking is closely related to all human cognitive abilities.

Memory

People capable of creativity have specific types of memory. Musicians - auditory, artists - visual, choreographers - motor, tasters - gustatory, sculptors - tactile, etc. And absolutely all of them have figurative and associative memory. Ordinary people, when solving a problem, use only the original material. Creative people draw on all their past experience for this, which, it would seem, is completely unrelated to the problem. Psychologists call this “high memory availability.”

Attention and concentration

Creative people are often considered distracted and unfocused. In most cases this is true. They are simply too busy with their personal perception of the environment and are not motivated to simultaneously be interested in something else. For example, at a meeting they may not listen at all to the boss’s report on summing up the results for the past quarter. At this moment, they imagine a wise eagle owl in his place (associations are triggered) or they transfer him to the shore of the azure sea and make him an animator (desired instead of actual). But when they are passionate about the creative process, they can work for hours without being distracted by anything. Neither extraneous sounds nor hunger can disturb them. Psychologists call this complete immersion and involvement.

Perception

Creative people perceive the world differently than everyone else. They are able to see in everyday things and phenomena something that pushes the boundaries of what is familiar and permissible. Only for them, Malevich’s “Black Square” is pure art in all its beauty. They are the ones who come up with household life hacks: cleaning the soles of shoes with a toothbrush, collecting mercury from the floor with tape and growing seedlings in eggshells.

Imagination

Creative thinking is impossible without imagination. Of all the cognitive abilities, they have the most visible connection. Only through the reproduction of images and associations in the mind is a person able to create something new, creative, unusual, unlike anything else.

Intelligence

There is no single answer yet as to how intelligence and creative thinking are interconnected. Many talented people who created priceless masterpieces of art had an IQ below average. But there are also those for whom it has gone off scale. The situation is exactly the same on the other side: people with high intelligence do not always have creative potential. This is especially noticeable at school. Excellent students, as a rule, are not good at music, drawing, and applied activities. But there are exceptions when a child is talented in literally everything, demonstrating high performance in both criteria.

Many tend to explain this by the convergence and divergence of thought processes. The table will clearly demonstrate what it is.

It turns out that creative thinking is the basis of the thinking of the divergent, and not the convergent.

What is creative thinking and creativity?

Explaining and describing what creative thinking is and what its features are is a rather difficult task. One of the few objective definitions of creativity/creative thinking was given by psychologist Oleg Konstantinovich Tikhomirov:

Creative thinking is one of the types of thinking characterized by the creation of a subjectively new product and new formations in the very cognitive activity of its creation. These new formations relate to motivation, goals, assessments, meanings. Creative thinking is distinguished from the processes of applying ready-made knowledge and skills, called reproductive thinking.

This definition highlights the main characteristic of creative thinking - the presence of a result, something subjectively new that a person creates. At the same time, it is important to understand that creative thinking or creativity is precisely a WAY to think, a certain PROCESS that leads to the creation of something new.

Naturally, there are many methods for organizing your thinking so that you can get something new as a result. A number of studies and tests show that most methods can be adjusted to certain logical circuits, which form part of the lessons in our course. And in order to understand the characteristics of your creative thinking, we suggest you take a special psychological test.

Signs

Psychologists identify the following signs of creative thinking:

• speed of generating ideas;
• flexibility - generating an endless stream of ideas;
• originality - the uniqueness of ideas, their dissimilarity from others;
• detailing - important small details are added during the work process;
• emotional involvement in the problem being solved (as practice shows, an unmotivated person capable of creativity will not even begin to consider it);
• multifunctionality - the ability to do several things at once without compromising their quality;
• completeness - every idea and image acquires logical completeness.

Consequences of creative thinking and activity
Representatives of Gestalt psychology painted the following portrait of a person who is distinguished by a creative way of thinking (they call him a “creator”):

• is not limited by anything either in thoughts or in action;
• not blinded by habits;
• never repeats anything, especially after someone;
• does not act mechanically;
• does not take a one-sided, partial position;
• is unable to concentrate on what is not interesting to him;
• does not perceive the world and other people by their external standards and parameters, but always tries to look inside;
• not rational, not calculating, not indifferent and not indifferent.

Psychologists have even determined how the character traits of people with a creative mind manifest themselves:

• go against the standards of society;
• have a strong personality;
• very sensitive and vulnerable;
• underestimate their abilities too much;
• Even in adulthood, they remain children at heart.

So people who are inclined to creativity can most often be noticed without even conducting any additional research - their character will reveal them in any society.

Exercises to develop creativity qualities

For a more convenient understanding of the material, we will divide the list of recommendations and games into blocks, so that, if such are your intentions, you can move on to developing a specific skill, bypassing the others.

Productivity Tips

You can increase your productivity by following these tips:

• Set clear goals
• Constantly track the results of your actions
• Conduct your activities in a properly organized space
• Manage your time wisely
• Always do the important things first
• Remember that 20% of actions produce 80% of results, and vice versa
• Fill your free time with useful activities
• Do your planning
• Improve your professional skills
• Give yourself enough rest

Productivity games include Mafia (a verbal role-playing game), Poker (a famous card game), Monopoly (one of the most popular economic games) and others. In addition, developing productivity is closely related to your associative thinking.

Association chains

This game is aimed at developing associative thinking.

First, you will be asked to complete ten chains of 3 words with your association. Try to come up with an association that is very well connected with the proposed words, but with no others.

After completing the chains, you need to find the extra elements in the previously constructed chains. Click "Start" to start the game.

Statistics Full screen

Recommendations for developing flexible thinking

The following tips will help you make your thinking more flexible:

• Give up any stereotypes and patterns that limit your thinking
• Regularly review your own beliefs, attitudes and principles
• Don't dwell on past defeats, victories and achieved results.
• Read more diverse literature
• Apply different behavioral strategies in everyday life
• Use special techniques to activate thinking (for example, this one)
• Strive to gain new experiences, emotions and impressions
• Learn from mistakes
• Expand your horizons
• Learn to look at things and problems from different angles

Games that develop flexibility of thinking include various puzzles (for example, this one), puzzles, crosswords, logic and psychological games, etc.

Recommendations for developing originality of thinking

You can influence your thinking, making it original and different from the thinking of other people, by resorting to the following tips:

• Get rid of any prejudices in your mind
• Develop your creativity and creativity
• Strive to constantly learn new information
• Work on your productivity (apply the recommendations above)
• Develop associative thinking
• Chat with interesting and unusual people
• Always look for several options for solving problems and resolving situations
• Systematically solve special problems involving lateral thinking
• Study biographies and autobiographies of famous people
• Apply the Brainstorming method in your activities

Games that develop originality of thinking include games like “Write the Words”, “Doodles”, “Danetki”, as well as all kinds of charades, puzzles, puzzles, labyrinths, etc.

Recommendations for developing complex problem solving skills

As for developing the skill of solving complex problems, here we can give the following recommendations:

• Don’t ask the question: “Can I?” - instead ask yourself: “Do I want to? How can I solve the problem?
• Look for the positive aspects of every problem that comes your way.
• See problems as opportunities to develop and grow personally.
• Dig deeper - look for the essence of the problem
• Be open to new opportunities, even the most extraordinary ones
• Develop creativity and creative thinking
• Solve problems as they arise, one by one, prioritizing
• Cultivate a positive outlook
• Lead a healthy lifestyle
• If you don't know what to do, just go to bed

Among the games that allow a person to develop his problem-solving skills, there are economic, psychological, intellectual and any other games that are as close to reality as possible. Feel free to try “Monopoly”, “Imaginarium”, “Activity”, “Millionaire”, etc.

In conclusion, I would just like to add that with the help of the information presented in this lesson, you can not only develop your creative thinking, but also improve many of your other personal qualities, which will undoubtedly be useful to you in your life and work.

Age characteristics

Preschoolers

Children with creative thinking can be distinguished from the general crowd even in kindergarten. They don’t like to perform synchronous, identical movements with everyone else (for example, during morning exercises) and come up with their own. In the game, they take the initiative because they are simply bursting with ideas on how best to distribute roles and what to place where. However, other guys often don’t understand them, because they think in original images. Instead of eating an apple for an afternoon snack, they nibble it in such a way as to make some kind of figure.

However, it is not always possible to recognize the creative potential in a little person. They are often secretive, because they are too focused on their inner world and images. Drawing with a plot helps to identify the levels of creative thinking of preschoolers.

Typically, tests to determine the level of creative thinking are carried out in preschool children (5-6 years old), so that the data obtained can be used in the future - when studying at school.

Primary School

From grades 1 to 4, the creative thinking of younger schoolchildren is characterized by the following features:

• quickly solving educational problems (using non-standard methods);
• identifying potential in a specific area (music, literature, drawing, modeling);
• unusual judgments, your own view of the familiar world;
• refusal to perform template tasks according to the sample;
• inattention in class.

The main task of teachers and parents at this stage is to recognize the child’s creative potential and direct all efforts to its development. If the moment is missed in elementary school, these abilities may remain unrealized in the future. As psychologists say, this is where humanity loses the most great artists, musicians and poets.

In elementary school, it is also important to separate the “wheat from the chaff.” At this age, many children play out their fantasy and substitution of concepts occurs. Inspired by the tales of their talented child, parents begin to see in him a great writer who in the future will become an unsurpassed science fiction writer. In fact, these are fictions, most often based on computer games and films. There is no creativity or anything unique there. In psychology, imagination (closely related to creative thinking) and fantasy are completely different concepts.

Middle and senior management

In the middle and senior levels, creativity becomes much clearer. Teenagers are already capable of self-determination without the guidance of adults. Those whose creativity is off the scale occupy positions of leaders of various school and youth associations. The generation of unusual ideas, non-standard ways of solving problems and pressing tasks make them the center of everyone's attention. Others begin to express themselves in some narrow specialization - they become real stars of the local theater group or art studio.

At this age stage there are dangers. Closer to the age of 13, on the threshold of the teenage crisis, creative thinking can play a disservice. In an attempt to prove to everyone their adulthood and independence and due to youthful maximalism, such children begin to too clearly and ardently demonstrate their vision of the world - different from others. All this is accompanied by aggression and daring behavior. The support of parents who can direct all this in the right direction is of great importance here.

Creative thinking techniques

Let's start with the simplest ones and end with entire systems. Go!

Brainstorm

You all know what it is. But how often has this method been used in practice?

The essence: one or more people sit down and begin to generate ideas - absolutely everything that comes to mind. No “this is not for our company” and “what kind of nonsense did you come up with?” not accepted. At the second stage, ideas are analyzed and the best ones are selected, which will subsequently be brought to life.

Example: you come up with a name for an online store. Or you are solving an important problem: how to attract more clients. Or are you thinking about how to ensure that your employees work to their full potential. Read more about the 10 main rules of brainstorming in our article.

Ten ideas a day

It's simple: you set yourself the task of coming up with exactly 10 ideas a day (more is possible). It doesn't matter what topic they are on. It doesn't matter how original they turn out to be.

The essence of the method: to unleash creative potential, to make the brain work. This needs to be repeated every day until it becomes a habit. We advise you to write it down: firstly, this way you will accumulate a baggage of thoughts, and secondly, you will later be surprised at how weak and lifeless the first ideas were compared to those that you will generate after some time.

Example: Take the area of ​​business in which you work. What would you invent in it, what would you improve? What would they do if they became a monopolist and could dictate their own rules?

Changing habits

At first glance, a simple task, which, however, greatly reveals creative potential.

The bottom line: if you watched the movie “Always Say Yes!” - you will understand what we are talking about. The main thing is not to refuse the new opportunities that life presents, and to change your habits on your own - both everyday and more global ones.

Example: take a different route to work, take a vacation in February rather than August, read not entertainment magazines, but the secrets of success of great businessmen. Order seafood instead of beef. Don’t do everything yourself, but delegate authority to employees. And so on.

Non-standard application

Making lists is a great help in developing creative thinking. But the lists should not be simple.

The point: look for non-standard uses of standard things. It all depends on your imagination!

Example: take any object (computer mouse, diary, glass of water) and write down the areas of its application. Have you written? Great. Now think about how else you can use this item. The more unusual the idea, the better.

Analysis of current information

A great way to track trends in the world and draw conclusions.

The bottom line: we all live in a world of constant information flow. We do not perceive ordinary information - emails, spam, advertising, manifestations of mass culture - it goes in the background to real life. But in vain! It is worth studying it and drawing appropriate conclusions.

Example: study emails that are usually sent to spam. Yes, not just one or several, but those that came in the last month. What do they have in common? Surely new trends are emerging that you can also use in your work. Read the newspapers, draw conclusions about the regional and global economy. What opportunities does this hold for your business? Listen to songs on the radio while driving to work. What is fashionable now, what interests people? Try each situation to life, use situational marketing to the fullest to promote your business.

Association method

One of the simplest methods that gives impetus to out-of-the-box thinking.

The bottom line: it's simple - use associations to any word or subject . Or to the situation in general.

Example: what occupies and worries you most now? For example, an employee makes mistakes - something needs to be done about it. Now take each word from this phrase and select a dozen associations for it. For example, an employee is a slave, an assistant, a bottomless hole into which the salary goes, a lazy person, a kind soul... and so on. Do this with each word, and then, one by one, substitute the resulting associations into the original phrase. Swap words, combine them into the most unexpected options. Twist the phrase this way and that - an associative insight should come.

Walt Disney's Creativity Strategy

This strategy helped the famous cartoonist achieve success. It will help you too.

The point: consider each situation from the point of view of seemingly different people: a dreamer, a realist and a strict critic.

Example: you want to introduce a new product to your range, but you don’t know how the target audience will react. Your inner dreamer paints an ideal picture: what will happen if everything comes together? A realist thinks constructively, estimates the time frame for achieving a dream and points out possible risks and prospects. The critic always doubts: what if something goes wrong? With the joint efforts of this trio, you calculate the situation and think through a plan.

Random word

It looks like an association, but not quite like that.

The essence: you identify a problem that needs to be solved urgently, open the book and point your finger at the first word that comes up . The farther in meaning it is from the original problem, the better. Your task is to connect this word and the situation.

Example: you are faced with a question: how to reduce advertising costs and achieve greater sales efficiency. The word “memory” came across in the book. The mind creates associations: you need to understand how the consumer remembers advertising information - the first time or the tenth. It is logical that this information needs to be made simpler and more accessible - so that it is remembered the first time. Another association is “memory of ancestors.” It is human nature to buy what his parents and close people approved of. You can play on this by building an advertising campaign on family traditions, continuity, and connections between generations. And there can be many such associations to one random word.

Freewriting

Freewriting, or free writing, is a method used not only by writers and journalists . It is suitable for anyone who knows how to write and set a kitchen timer. What does the last one have to do with it? Let's explain now.

The point: you sit down and start writing everything you think about a specific situation or problem that is bothering you. Absolutely everything - without editing, erasing or crossing out. You think “uh, what did I want to say?” and other nonsense - just write it. If you like, this is a kind of stream of consciousness that reflects your true attitude to the problem/situation.

The second stage is to re-read everything you wrote and highlight the most important thoughts . You will recognize them for sure - remember what exactly in the freewriting process inspired you, made you think, after which you began to write with great inspiration. If you write by hand, note that even the handwriting on such thoughts becomes different - more confident and sweeping. When you highlight the main thoughts, develop them further, complement them, deepen them.

There is one more point: you need to write within a certain period of time . Set a stopwatch, an alarm clock, or, as the author of the technique, Mark Levy, advises, a kitchen timer and time 10 minutes. All. Write.

Example: you need to make a decision: whether to continue working with this supplier or look for another. It torments you, you think about it all day long. Sit down and write. In this situation, you can apply several freewriting methods. For example, give yourself a tip. Write the phrase “If I refuse the services of the supplier tomorrow, then...” - and continue. Another option. State all the facts that are available today. The pros and cons of a solution, the pros and cons of another solution, the market situation, the dollar exchange rate, the opinions of others, the actions of competitors in a similar situation - everything you know. And another way: start a mental dialogue with a person (any person: even your partner, even Vladimir Putin) and explain to him your positions. Let him argue, give arguments - answer. By the end of the dialogue, you will see for yourself which choice you are leaning towards.

Six thinking hats

This technique can be classified as both pumping up thinking and creative.

The bottom line: every problem, every situation can be divided into six hats. This is necessary in order to organize everything in your head, and is suitable for solving difficult problems.

Each of the six hats addresses a different aspect of thinking. The blue hat is the management hat. This block discusses organizational issues and ways to achieve goals. White hat - only the facts you have. Accordingly, by the method of elimination it is possible to determine the facts that are missing. Emotions and feelings lie in a red hat. Risks and dangers are in black. Opportunities and advantages are in yellow (here one involuntarily recalls SWOT analysis). And finally, non-standard ideas, all kinds of creativity - in green.

Example: a certain situation is given. For example, you are faced with a choice: raise prices for goods or leave everything as it is. So go through all the hats: first decide what final goal you want to achieve, then collect all the facts into one: that competitors raised prices a long time ago, there is inflation in the country and you have not changed your pricing policy at all for the last five years. What do you feel about this - relief, confidence, fear that sales will decrease and customers will leave? And if they really leave, how possible is such a risk? What if they don’t leave, but accept new prices and stay with you? And so on.

Lateral thinking

This term means “lateral”, “directed to the side” thinking, designed to look at a problem or situation from a completely new angle.

The point: replace the usual understanding of the situation with something completely different, which has not been used by anyone before.

Example: Bayer produced aspirin. The scope of application is clear: painkiller. The company's creative minds went further and came up with the following: it turns out that regular aspirin can reduce the risk of heart attacks - which means it can be sold to a completely new target audience. Which is what was done. Another example: cheese producers decided to take the product's properties to a new dimension and created a sweet cheese on sticks, similar to candy. The result is that a new target audience has been added - children and their parents, which was not previously considered at all.

Agree, quite simple techniques? Absolutely every entrepreneur can use them to solve business problems. As the author of the book “Rice Storm” Michael Mikalko wrote, there is only one difference between creative and non-creative people. The former are confident in their creativity, while the latter think that this is not about them. Once you allow yourself to generate new ideas, you will soon not recognize yourself. Allow yourself this! Good luck with your promotion!

Torrens test

One of the most popular diagnostic tools for determining the level of creative thinking is the Torrance test. It is strongly not recommended to do it yourself. This is a specific psychodiagnostic tool that requires a professional approach, especially when interpreting the results. Therefore, it is better to seek help from a specialized specialist. The development presented below is for informational purposes only.

Author: Alice Paul Torrance (1915-2003) - American psychologist.

Full name: “P. Torrance Test of Creative Thinking.”

Diagnosed age: preschool, 6-7 years. There are more complicated versions of the test, which can be carried out between 8 and 20 years.

The main task: to determine the level of creativity.

Test conditions:

1. You cannot change a single word in the test, add or remove any pictures.
2. Strictly adhere to the time limit allotted for completing tasks - no more than 45 minutes, including explanations and reading instructions.
3. Before conducting the test, you need to create a calm, favorable atmosphere.
4. Among preschoolers, the test is carried out individually.
5. Adults should explain in detail to children all incomprehensible points.

Pictures for the test:

Verbal thinking

Fine creative thinking

Verbal-sound creative thinking

Interpretation of results

Each task is assessed according to the following criteria:

The test results are processed exclusively by a professional psychologist who has undergone special training. On their basis, a conclusion is drawn about the general level of development of creative thinking in a child, as well as the degree of formation of its verbal, visual and verbal-sound subtypes.

Features of the development of creative thinking

The modern world makes high demands, and in order to be in demand and successful, you need to become indispensable, creatively applying knowledge, skills and abilities and trying to act as efficiently as possible. Creative understanding of the world helps us actively explore it and contributes to the progress of both the individual and society as a whole.

The development of creative thinking is influenced by internal and external motivations. The lower the level of internal motivation, the stronger the influence of external motivation.

The level of internal motivation depends on many factors, including the self-esteem of the individual, the stability of his emotional state, and the learned value-orientation principles. External motivation is largely related to pedagogical influence.

If we summarize the experience of psychologists and teachers who have devoted themselves to the development of creative potential, we can highlight some features of the development of creative thinking, from which a number of useful tips follow:

• Do not suppress your child’s intuition, because intuition is the first stage of the creative act. Receiving reproach for an assumption or guess that he cannot justify logically, the student (child) withdraws into himself and is no longer ready to move on to the second stage of the creative act - testing intuition with logic. What to do? Encourage the use of intuition and suggest further logical analysis of the proposed hypothesis.
• Maintain your child's self-confidence and increase his self-esteem. Only those who believe in themselves will achieve success. Of course, inflated self-esteem is the other extreme, which interferes with the improvement of professional skills and negatively affects the development of intelligence.
• Use positive emotions in the learning and development process: they stimulate and reinforce the desire to think creatively. Negative emotions also work, but in exactly the opposite way: they suppress creative thinking.
• Develop the desire to independently choose goals and ways to solve emerging problems. The ability to act independently and take responsibility contributes to creativity. On the contrary, a person who is accustomed to shifting responsibility loses the ability to think and act creatively.

• Encourage the expression and justification of thoughts that go against the majority opinion. This is necessary in order to avoid conformist thinking, which kills creative thinking. What to do? If a child shows too high a level of conformism, a situation can be artificially created in which, by thoughtlessly agreeing with the opinion of the majority, he finds himself in an awkward situation. True, this situation should not humiliate or offend, therefore, pedagogical tact is required.
• Encourage imagination, develop imagination. Do not reproach the dreamer for lying, because even in adolescence, children do not always completely separate the figment of imagination and the real situation.
• Teach children to find and formulate contradictions. Please note that, first of all, a contradiction is not an error that needs to be corrected, but a starting point for new hypotheses and questions.
• Try to solve open-type problems more often and with pleasure, that is, those in which there is no single correct answer that could be guessed or found. Try to generate hypotheses: this activity increases the flexibility of thinking, increases its fluency and originality.
• Encourage in yourself and your children the desire to be yourself, maintain your individuality, listen to yourself, and defend your opinion. Respect the individuality in yourself and in others.
• Expand your circle of interests, try to look at the problem from the outside, through the eyes of another person, putting aside your own attitudes and guidelines.

How to develop creative thinking

Psychologists say that this is quite possible. The main thing is to have high motivation (understand why it is needed) and practice regularly, and not from time to time.

Conditions

Before raising your creative potential, you need to know the conditions for its development. To get results, you will have to create a favorable situation.

What is required to develop creativity in yourself:

• bright individuality: you need to discern in yourself someone who is different from the rest and can demonstrate this to the world through views, judgments, clothes, intellect;
• constant research into everything interesting that comes your way: analysis of the current situation, conclusions from what happened, comparison of two dissimilar concepts - the brain must constantly work;
• problematization: everything that happens in life contains a problem - you need to learn to see it, isolate it and successfully solve it.

So, before you start developing your creativity, create the necessary conditions for this, otherwise you may not see results.

Methods

Psychology suggests using the following methods to activate creative thinking:

• emotional involvement in the problem;
• visualization;
• metaphorization;
• humor, irony, sarcasm;
• analogies (direct and personal, symbolic and fantastic);
• mental maps;
• bisociation;
• method of mental provocation;
• rhetorical questions;
• brainstorm.

These methods form the basis of almost all exercises.