How to increase your Creativity Quotient

Your Creativity Quotient is a measure of your creative intelligence. Can you increase your creative intelligence? Yes!  Here are three short videos with some helpful advice from experts on how to be more creative. 

How burnout makes us less creative | Rahaf Harfoush

The Way We Work, a TED series (5:05 mins) 

It’s understandable that you want to be productive – we all do! But digital anthropologist Rahaf Harfoush says that putting too much pressure on yourself to perform can actually have the opposite of your desired effect.

“We’ve been so obsessed with doing more that we’ve missed the most important thing.”

3 key ideas

• Our idea of productivity is strongly founded in industrial era thinking when output was measured in terms of widgets produced. The knowledge work era has much more abstract outputs like solving problems and strategising.
• Our self-worth is wrapped up in productivity and we have made it into an endurance sport. True productivity requires a balance of working and resting time to allow our creative minds to work
• How do we fix this? There is no quick fix.
  1. You need ask yourself some tough questions; Who do you hold up as an example of success? Where did your ideas of work ethic come from? How much of who you are is linked to what you do?
  2. Take your natural energy rhythms into account. Plan your days, weeks and even seasons according to the times you have the most energy.

Give yourself permission to be creative, Ethan Hawke

TED (9:17 mins)

Actor, writer and director, Ethan Hawke, reflects on stories that shaped his life and explains how being brave enough to discover and express who you really are will help your own healing as well as connection with other people. invites you to discover your own unabashed creativity.

“You have to express yourself. And to express yourself you have to know yourself.”

4 tips from Ethan on being more creative:

• Be willing to play the fool , to feel foolish sometimes. Don’t be too worried what people think of you.
• Don't read the book that you should read, read the book you want to read.
• Don't listen to the music that you used to like. Take some time to listen to some new music.
• Take some time to talk to somebody that you don't normally talk to.

"There is no path till you walk it."

Natalie Nixon, Author, The Creativity Leap, chats with #GaryVee 

#MarketingForTheNow (14:30 mins)

Dr. Natalie Nixon is a keynote speaker, consultant, and strategy, foresight, and innovation expert. She chats with Gary Vaynerchuk about her story and how she helps people to unlock their creativity in order to thrive in the new world of work.

“Creativity toggles between wonder and rigour to solve problems.”

Key ideas: 

• Creativity enables us to hold many paradoxical things in tension: wonder and rigour, exhilaration and terror. Creativity thrives in ambiguitity Black and
  Creativity is our added value as a human. Do whatever ups your creativity quotient.
• Redesign your relationship with time. Stop and reorient yourself. Create better boundaries between you and your clients.
• Become a clumsy student of something. This increases your humility and your sense your humour about yourself. We need to be more curious and better at improvising. This all transfers over into our work.

I hope you enjoy these videos as much as I did. 

Which tips are you going to put into practice?

Message me to let me know on:

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:o)