4 Counterintuitive Ways to Unlock Your Creativity

Creativity is the hub of your power. As a woman running a business, your creativity is even more important than the average person’s. This is where your innovation, your vision, and your inspiration come from. Creativity is what takes your business from an idea to a thriving Mecca, solving problems on a grand scale. But in order to do that you need regular practice for accessing your creativity.

Focus on the End Goal

The reason why creativity is so powerful is because it’s simultaneously a receiving and a giving energy. Creativity inspires ideas, and those ideas inspire action in one quick experience that allows you to move forward in new ways. Here are the counterintuitive ways to unlock your creativity and create a practice that will allow you to tap in when you need to.

Clarity is a beautiful thing. It’s what directs our actions and it’s what keeps our emotional state centered. Before you can take the first step, you have to know where you’re going so you can reverse engineer the steps to take. Directing your effort in this way creates momentum.

When your vision is too open, your energy travels in multiple directions, instead of being harnessed for one purpose. Understanding the end goal gives structure and direction to your energy, allowing it to expand in that one direction. Sometimes we can view structure as constrictive, but the truth is, structure increases the amplitude of our power.

For example, a flashlight is a broad beam of light. It can illuminate a wider area, but the light is softer, hazier, and is only clear for a couple of steps ahead. But a laser is a focused beam of light that can literally travel to the moon because of its focus, direction, and power. When you focus on the end goal, you turn your efforts into a formidable laser instead of a semi-useful flashlight.

Play

Play is one of our greatest assets as women, getting in touch with our inner child and expressing ourselves in ways that unlock and unleash our imaginations. However, as we enter phases of our lives that require more responsibility and more effort, we can lose touch with this precious part of ourselves, despite it often being the key to getting exactly what we want.

Men in business are a good example of how to enact and initiate play for creativity. If you’ve ever paid attention to a group of men, sitting at an event, on the golf course, or just having a poker night at home, you’d notice that they engage in a lot of play. Sometimes it looks like making jokes, not taking things too seriously, and (even sometimes) being obnoxious. But the truth is, they’re engaging in a sort of play that lights them up and lightens their load. This is a powerful practice for women in business.

By finding the types of play that relieve your stress, ignite your happiness, and get you in touch with your core expression, you unlock access to your creativity and the limitless possibilities for your own expansion. Play can come in many forms, such as painting, singing, dancing, board games, or anything else that makes you laugh and or relax.

When you prioritize your play, your creativity has room to breathe and expand into more parts of your life.

Love

If you’ve been in business for any length of time, then you’ve probably had the experience of losing touch with it. Whether you fell out of love with the work, felt burnt out from working too much, or attempted to stuff yourself into a cookie-cutter mold that didn’t quite fit in order to be successful, the result is the same—disconnection from what you loved about your business.

Love is a critical component to business. It’s what carries you through the hard times and commits you deeply to your success. But just like any relationship, love requires tending. When you are tapped into the love of your business, it’s easier to access your creativity and overcome the obstacles you face.

At least once a week, consciously revisit and acknowledge what you love about your business. It doesn’t matter what ignites that love within you for your business. What matters is connecting to it in a meaningful way every week. This simple practice, when done consistently, not only helps you to weather the storms, but it also helps you to enrich the successes along the way.

Flow activities

Flow activities are powerful because they honor your natural inner process. These are the activities that get you into flow state. For some, this can look like meditation, nature walks, or other nervous system-regulating activities. For others, this can look a lot like play.

Play has a tendency to activate flow state. By prioritizing play, you can simultaneously activate your flow state. By infusing intentional play or flow state activities into your daily experience, you can increase your creativity and relieve stress.

When working in the business, it can be easy to get caught up in the mundane tasks that make the business run. However, it was your creative state that launched the business and gave you incredible ideas to act on. By relieving the pressure through these kinds of activities and practices, you keep yourself in that creative space.