How to improve Creativity & Innovation Skills?

Many of us might have already noticed that, there is lot of fuzz about these words i.e. innovation & creativity on hub and it is continuously going on as one of the most discussed or spoken words around hub. This reminded me of my experience with "Creativity & Innovation" course that i took in my master's level education at University of Memphis [Memphis, TN].

I would like to bring few points about how we were taught to build or improve our creativity & innovation levels in personality through some activities. Before that, i would like to make a point clear that it is a practice that helps you to improve your creativity & innovation abilities. It is not something like, you get by birth or only few people possess by nature. Unfortunately, the busy & routine way of practical life style will not help you to improve these skills. We always expect a change outwardly without anything changing internally; that is irony & never going to happen.

Coming back about how to build creativity & innovation skills:

Never let your brain to work in auto mode. What does this mean? What happens with brain is that; as it gets habituated to do an action in same way again and again, after few instances you don't have to give any directions to it, it just does that action without getting any signals from you like robot. You might have observed the phenomena in practical, where your mind is somewhere but you still do your actions in a right way without any errors. It is like you are not doing with presence of mind but you do right action in a right way. When you retain your presence of mind, then you realize that you were doing that work correctly but as if you were not conscious about it.

The point here is, never do an action same way again and again. That way we are letting our brains to jump in to auto mode & giving no opportunity to think but act blindly. We always have to restrict our brain in going to auto-mode.

In order to this, we always have to change the way of doing things & try doing things differently in a regular fashion. We were taught that, if you are right handed, then try left hand writing. If you come daily to school in some routine way of direction, then we were asked to change our way of directions frequently. Like this, we kept on changing something that is routine in our life style which indirectly making our brains not to turn itself in to auto-mode for the reason after couple of instances by which it gets habituated to easily jump in to auto-mode. Once brain gets in to auto-mode, it is easy for it. It will not think any more. To let it think & work for us, we have to make sure it work without going in to auto-mode for which we need these kind of practices that let brain to restrict in getting habituated to work blindly.

So try doing things differently. Let not your brain go in auto-mode. Let your frequently changing of doing things differently stop your brain falling lazy. That way it builds creativity & innovation skills in you.

- Ravi [R]