The Lazy Way To Creative Thinking

Be a bit Taoist when you are presented with a creative challenge. Pause, wait and allow the message of the challenge to be fully absorbed. You need to listen fully and with attention, allowing the challenge to take shape before you. You need to yield to it. Don't be in a rush to get your thinking cap on, to shout out your great answers so that you can impress others and show off that you are the creative "ideas person" in the group.

Creative thinking occurs on many levels and while your instant impressions are often extremely valuable and may hold the thread of an answer, most of us miss them. Those fleeting insights are just that... fleeting, gone within a moment, and then what follows immediately afterwards is... the obvious, the trite, the unimaginative.

No, you want to be a bit lazy. Relax into your ideas. Let your deeper mental processes go to work on the challenge while you go quiet and restful. Ruminate like a big rusty colored cat sitting on the fence in the sunshine, paws tucked under.

Be the sounding board for other members of your brainstorming group. Listen. Let them express their ideas fully. Be wary of "pretending to listen" while actually going over your own ideas in your head.

Be infinite -- absorbant -- quiet -- still -- reflective.

You can do something completely unrelated -- or even take a nap -- and then when you've given it some time, some lazy spacey time in which the creative challenge just gets to exist and "float" in your awareness, then you can get focussed and allow your ideas to formulate and be harvested into your idea journal.

This is the lazy way to creative thinking.

Wily