Exercising your mind

Creativity can either be born in you or you can work at it. I always thought that there are either creative people or uncreative people. I always felt that I was one of those uncreative people. This can be challenging, especially when I am in a profession and trying to work my way up in a profession that needs a lot of creativity. So why did I choose this? I like the field that I am in. Even though I never felt too creative, I enjoyed what I was learning and looked forward to being a part of it.

I have learned that creativity can also be learned, its simply called exercising your mind. During the three day seminar I just attended, our instructor would start the class, as well as after every break with a contest. We were paired up with one other person and he asked up various trivia questions from a game called mind trap. An example of a question was this.... Forward I'm heavy, backward I'm not... What am I? I'll let you think about this for a minute....
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Give up yet? The answer is a TON... Forward its heavy backwards its N-O-T. My partner and I (also the two newest and youngest members of the group!!) did not ever win a prize in this game. At the beginning of the seminar no one was getting any of the questions right. By the end, people were getting more and more questions right. The point of this game was not to simply entertain us in the middle of our intense workshop, but to simply exercise our minds. These types of questions forces you to "think outside of the box." The more and more you work on activities like this, the more you creative you will become. I also learned another technique of creativity from someone who was an artist. I was talking to her one day and I said, i wish I was creative like that. She told me different things that they would do in her art classes to practice creativity. One was they were told to come up with some type of object, for example and apple. They were then told to draw and apple 100 different way.... for example it could be a picture of a simple apple, apple of your eye, apple tree... etc. The point of this exercise is that within those 100 drawings that you made there should be at least one original idea.

My new goal, is to work on these types of exercises. I think that it will not only help with my creativity, but like I said, it will help me to learn how to "think outside of the box" so that when a problem arises I will be able to think on my feet and act quickly. I'm hoping that with all of these new techniques that I have learned, that I actually apply them to my job so that I can improve.