Creativity

How to be more creative

October 22, 2022Rabea

In the fast pace of life many of us lose our creativity or start doing the same two things that we deem as creative. The depth and variety of creativity is lacking in most of our lives. Here are a couple tips for how to be more creative again.

Do what you loved as a kid

Children have the biggest amount of creativity, because they don’t yet know the boundaries of what is possible and what isn’t. That’s why you should absolutely think about what you loved doing as a child, either once or regularly. We usually remind the things we loved doing the best, so this should not be too hard. Maybe you really liked drawing with no prompt or fingerpaint. Maybe you really like playing with your mom’s make up products or tried to design clothes. Also think about what you liked doing and seeing in nature. Many of us forget how much inspiration and creativity a forest or meadow can bring into our lives.

Create something similar to what you usually do

Do you already like drawing random doodles with your ballpoint pen? Maybe you should try making a mixed media painting out of one of your doodles by adding watercolor or alcohol markers. Maybe you really like baking chocolate cupcakes and should try to make your own recipe or a cake that has a lot of details. Think about what you already do and how you can create an outside of the box version of it. Getting out of that routine will usually give you a boost to do new creative things more often because they feel rewarding.

Pick up a new creative hobby

Whether you’ve been wanting to try something new or not, you should really start that new creative hobby. Have you seen a lot of gouache paintings recently that you wanted to recreate? Get a small set of paints and start trying to use it more often. Or maybe you’ve been wanting to learn how to dance or sing. Find a group or teacher for the things you struggle with committing to, but don’t be too rigid with your routines either. Creativity should balance you out just as much as it challenges you.

See what you can take from a different medium

Especially in the age of online short-form video content you might see inspiring visuals that you should try drawing. One of my favorite examples for this is sketching people’s progression of movement in dance videos. It can be as easy as trying to paint a sunset with acrylic paints or as hard as challenging yourself to get better at proportions of the human body. Another idea if you are a visual thinker is reading poems rich with metaphors and descriptions and painting something to them.

Change your routine

This tip is not spoken about enough. A lot of our creativity is lost to being in a dul routine that we’re not trying to break out of. Often this is because it takes so much energy to break out of a routine, but if it’s done right it will give you some form of energy back. For some people that is energy through social connection and for others it is just being in a new environment. Both instances can be heavily inspiring to our creative side. Maybe you should try doing some of your admin work in the local library or have a weekend picnic. Even if it doesn’t give you all the creativity you want, it will certainly give you energy for something. That can be work, conversations or creating new systems in your life.

Make creativity a daily habit

This one is also a tip many don’t take to heart as much as they should. You don’t need to spend one hour daily on being creative, because that might be unsustainable. What you can do is adjust your daily creative output to your energy levels. Personally, I’ve had the pact with myself for 3 years to write something every day. That could be a journal entry, a blog post, a social media caption, a short fictional text or a summary of something I’ve learned. Because of this variety I rarely had a day where I didn’t write something and my English has gotten amazing during that time. The same can be applied to drawing, nutrition, movement and many more creative things.

So these are some of my tips for how to be more creative. These have all helped me to stay creative and made me feel less guilty for task switching between creative activities. Don’t put yourself too much into a box unless that box is a system you can fall back on when in doubt.

I have written more about getting out of an actual creative rut in a little eBook for my email subscribers. It’s filled with ideas and prompts to get out of that silent mental space. Go check it out: