On My Mind: Exercise Your Creative Muscle

I’ve slowly begun to ease back into exercising. After a period of illness, it’s always hard to get back into the saddle and it’ll take even longer to get back to the point that you were at before. Getting started is just the beginning. Keeping up with exercise is the hard part, but it’ll bring you something amazing.

Creativity is the same. It’s a muscle you can train. And I want to help you do that with a few exercises and sharing my view on creativity.

Train that creative muscle

In my opinion, creativity is more than a skill. It’s is a muscle you can train. We’re born a creative person and slowly we forget how to trigger that. Unless we keep practising. In a previous post, I made the well of creativity analogy and I talked about exercises you can do to gain your creativity back. These exercises will help you to train your creative muscle.

There are daily and monthly challenges everywhere in any medium you want. Photography, painting, writing, drawing plants, writing dialogue, practice calligraphy of certain words. You just have to know where to find these challenges. Most of these challenges have their own hashtags and you can follow them easily by saving them in a Twitter search or follow them on Instagram.

Visualisation

It’s not a matter of writing or drawing every day, but to practice your creativity. Even with normal exercise, the visualisation can be just as powerful or even more powerful than doing the activity. Creativity doesn’t have to be the same as practising art. Doing a thousand lines or lettering the letter A is not exercising your creativity and you don’t need tools to work on your creativity but your brain.

Daydreaming is a perfect example of visualizing creativity. Do you still daydream? Are you an active daydreamer or does it just happen? Sometimes I want to force it and try to think of what-if situations, but only about things that are outside of myself and my life. What if a child finds a pen that makes his stories come true? What if a dog befriends a dragon? What if you combine a cat and a dog? How would they behave?

Finding creativity in your daily life

One of the books I wish I read when I had a day job was Creative Confidence. David and Tom Kelley talk about being a professional and use creativity in a work environment, whichever role you had. They’ve worked with people in dozens of different positions, from desk jobs to CEOs to marketing employees to factory workers. Every single one of these can be more creative in their job and they will help you find that.

There are other ways to stay creative besides at work. Find a hobby or start a bullet journal to express yourself. Try out making your own craft beer and create your unique flavour. Do mental exercises and create fabulous animals or impossible cakes. Brainstorm ideas and look for the answers at the edges of what you know. And maybe step outside of that box. Combine two unlikely things and imagine what’s needed to make it work.

What do you do to exercise your creative muscle? Where can we find it? Leave your links in the comments and we’ll stop by!