Suddenly, creativity is big. While your chances of making millions as the next Andy Warhol or Taylor Swift are probably slim, you could well earn more these days by tapping into your creative powers—and, experts say, you'll be happier, too. Numerous Fortune 500 companies, including Hewlett-Packard and Sears, have hired creativity consultants to help boost innovation. The number of business schools offering creativity classes has doubled in the past five years. "It's not enough to just be good at analytical evaluation," argues Yoram Wind, a professor of marketing who teaches a creativity course at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. And creative activity can relieve stress and enhance your mood, according to Harvard psychologist Shelley Carson, author of Your Creative Brain. Brain researchers theorize that coming up with something novel that's also useful—their definition of creativity—so fully engages attention that the brain doesn't have any resources left to devote to stress.
What does it take to produce something truly original? The notion that creativity is the province of right-brain, left-handed artsy types is outdated, says Daniel Goleman, a psychologist and author of Emotional Intelligence. "The creative brain state accesses a whole range of connections throughout the brain," he says. In fact, the latest research suggests that less than a second before the proverbial light bulb switches on, a spike in gamma brain waves appears to bind cells in several regions of the brain into a new neural network.
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But fresh insights don't usually just spring forth. Whether you're mulling the next iPad or a solution to world hunger or just an artful way to rearrange your living room furniture, the creative process "is less about talent and more of a broad-based style of thinking that we all can learn," says Carson. The key is to approach it as a step-by-step process similar to proving a mathematical theorem. Leave out a step, and that stroke of genius may be elusive.
Step 1: Absorb. Before you can come up with a brilliant idea, you need to openly receive information from the world around you, Carson says, and examine what's happening in your field of interest without judging it. Consider that the best novelists are the most avid readers, and that IBM invited computer hackers to speak to company executives about software innovations. "A fresh perspective can be very powerful," says Wind; it can enable you to examine all sides of a problem. And listening in a receptive and nonjudgmental way generates low-frequency alpha waves in the brain, allowing information stored in areas that perceive and freely associate to rise into conscious awareness and inspire a creative insight. You can train yourself to be more open to new ideas, Carson contends, by paying attention to what's happening in the moment, a practice called mindfulness. Set aside five minutes to simply experience the world around you: the colors, the sounds, the temperature, the sun's reflection, the approaching darkness.
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Step 2: Envision. Tapping into rich mental imagery, a practice that kids and daydreamers excel at, also inspired Einstein, who determined that the speed of light was constant by visualizing a light beam racing down a railway track and passing, at the same speed, a woman on a moving train and a man standing still on the platform. Carson recommends giving your visualization skills a workout for five minutes a day. Close your eyes and imagine you're taking a video tour of your bedroom. Enter the room and turn to the left, seeing the wall adjacent to your doorway in your mind's eye. Examine any furniture, windows, or drapes against this wall. Do the same for the three other walls. Next, look at the bed. Is it made? Are there clothes strewn on the floor? Then take a tour of your closet.
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Japanese imaging researchers have found that when the "envision brainset" is properly activated, a network connecting the reasoning center in the brain's right hemisphere to the center in the left hemisphere dedicated to processing information from the senses has a burst of heightened activity. Visualizing often works best after an intense bout of physical activity, a time when your brain is ready for a snooze and when daydreams normally occur, Carson says.
Step 3: Connect. After fully researching all the possibilities, encourage connections to happen by thinking about something else. "Distract yourself by taking a walk or reading a book," advises Goleman. "Trying to force an insight can stifle it." Mozart claimed he came up with his ideas for symphonies while taking carriage rides after a long repast. Getting outdoors into nature is a great way to distract the mind, suggests Carson. "Defocusing" lowers activity in the prefrontal cortex, where decisions are made and dangerous risks avoided, while heightening activity in the right temporal lobe. "This area of the brain understands the language of the unconscious, the logic of dreams, myths, art," says Goleman. "It helps put your ideas together in a novel organization."
Step 4: Reason. Now you're ready to enter what Carson calls the "reason mindset," and think in realistic and practical terms about what will work instead of how you'd like it to work. "It's the perfect place to take a fanciful idea, to flesh it out and make it practical," Carson writes in her book. People who doubt their creativity often get tripped up here by jumping ahead to "evaluation" (see Step 5), allowing self-doubts to shoot their ideas down. Carson recommends giving yourself verbal commands like "don't go there" to stop such thoughts, or using the visual image of a stop sign to push the thoughts away.
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Step 5: Evaluate. It's at this point in the creative process that a thoughtful and critical judging of your idea becomes necessary; "the evaluate brainset is where you want to be when you're deciding which idea or solution to implement," says Carson. She admits to being "a horrible evaluator" herself, however. "I'm an absorber," she says. "I come up with a lot of ideas, then they just sit there or dissolve from my memory the way my dreams dissolve." (She now carries a notebook and pen or a digital voice recorder to record her ideas for later pondering.) Practice using your evaluate mindset by making lists of your 10 favorite books, movies, restaurants, acquaintances, or memories, say, and ranking them in order of your preference.
Step 6: Dive in. After you've figured out how to implement your idea, completely immerse yourself in arriving at the goal. Ideally, says Carson, you'll enter a brain activation state that Claremont Graduate University psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has described as "flow," in which you lose all sense of time and self as you engage fully and spontaneously in responding to the challenge. To train your brain to get more easily into this mindset, spend time doing activities you really enjoy, and think of ways to make other tasks more fun and challenging. Can you load the dishwasher in under two minutes? Can you write that E-mail in less than 30 seconds? Or, as you dust your furniture, purposefully think back with pleasure to how you acquired each piece. Lastly, it often helps to raise your standards. Take pride in the oil change you're performing on your car—and do a little detailing while you're at it.
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