5 Ways to Boost Your Creative Power

For entrepreneurs, creativity is not simply a luxury. It’s an essential survival skill. Common entrepreneurial pitfalls include:

• Trying to do everything on your own
• Difficulty developing strategies or deciding where to focus your energy
• Neglecting to invest in yourself
• Falling in love with a venture and pursuing it without proper development

The key to avoiding these traps is understanding how you approach a challenge. The latest creativity research finds we all use our creativity in different ways, but follow a common problem-solving process. Once you understand the creative process, you can intentionally apply it, boosting your creativity and efficiency while strengthening your initiatives. It boils down to these four stages:

• Clarify the situation: We explore the issue at hand, find all relevant data that will help us make sense of it and figure out the most effective path to take to resolve it.
• Generate ideas: We come up with and select the best new ideas for making a change that best addresses the situation.
• Develop solutions: We tinker with those ideas till they are perfect, then break and rebuild them, and then polish them till they shine.
• Implement the solution: We put ideas into action by: gaining acceptance of the solution, helping people manage change and adapting solutions as needed.

This process can happen very quickly or deliberately, and in or out of sequence. It can be done in groups or independently. These simple strategies for using the creative process can help keep you on track toward breakthrough success.

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Chris Grivas is co-author, with Gerard Puccio, of The Innovative Team: Unleashing Creative Potential for Breakthrough Results (Wiley, 2012).