10 Tips to Boost Your Creativity

AUTHOR OFFERS PRESCRIPTION ON HOW TO BE MORE CREATIVE IN HIS NEW BOOK

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CHICAGO, IL - Aha! 10 Ways to Free Your Creative Spirit and Find Your Great Ideas, is useful for everyone - from students to housewives to businessmen who would like to make their lives more interesting by learning how to be more creative. For example, the book teaches employees how to make their work environments (where they spend most of their day) more inspiring to motivate them. The book instructs the reader how to generate new concepts for businesses, products, designs, even lifestyle, and how businesses can ingeniously seize market share.

Providing keys for innovative problem solving in business, communities, artistic endeavors and even the world at large, Aha! is the ideal manual for those ready to bound, rather than merely climb the corporate ladder.

"Brainstorming may produce the worst ideas," contends Ayan, who reveals some of his best ideas in the new book, a fast-paced, entertaining guide to help everyone become more creative. Ayan's credentials are impressive. He has applied Aha! strategies to launch two innovative, multi-million dollar businesses and has ignited imaginations at AT&T, Kimberly-Clark, NASA, Price Waterhouse, Sprint and other clients.

"Creativity is cultivated, not inborn. Few people realize they can learn to be more creative," says Ayan, president and founder of Create It! Inc., the Chicago, Illinois-based creative consulting firm. "But applying a few simple techniques will readily change that, no matter your age or position. You can possess the tools that will effortlessly generate new ideas and help you see creative challenges from a fresh vantage point."

Those techniques are clearly described in Aha! replete with fun and challenging mini-workshops to help propel the reader toward becoming more creative.

Ayan's 10 strategies encompass a broad spectrum of activities: connecting with people, creative travel, keeping a journal, reading, the arts, technology, enriching your environment. Each is designed to free the reader from habitual thinking patterns and help expand his or her creative C.O.R.E. (Curiosity, Openness, Risk tolerance and Energy).

"These C.O.R.E. elements are the heart of your creative spirit," Ayan maintains. "They are inherent in all of us and each can be expanded to establish an environment in which connections and breakthroughs, those serendipitous collisions of time, place and events that gestate into ideas can most readily occur."

As a brief introduction to some of his strategies, Ayan outlines 10 tips to help you begin developing your creativity:

Know that you are creative, even if you have doubts now. Flex your mind muscles daily. Recognize that you have a creative CORE that defines the level of creative freedom we allow ourselves. This CORE often is reduced by self-imposed rules or boundaries that keep us from reaching our creative potential.
Live Life for Inspiration. Many great ideas come about because of your ability to make new and novel connections. Numerous sources fuel your inspiration and enhance your ability to see those connections. Creative people are usually those who expose themselves to a life of great diversity; they have more sources of inspiration.
Build a creative network of people you can trust to help you improve and execute your ideas. Creative power often comes from learning to explore and execute your ideas through or with others. In return, you similarly help them.
Capture your ideas immediately. Use whatever system works best for you, but get your ideas down on paper as quickly as possible. If you don't capture an idea within 10 minutes it is likely to be lost forever.
Fashion a creative environment which stimulates your thinking. It could be a separate room or a particular spot in your office or home, or just a creativity tool box of thinking toys that help put you in a creative mood.
Learn to have fun. Humor leads from the "ha ha" to the "aha!" It allows us to think in a more relaxed mode, necessary for the brain to incubate and generate new ideas. Allow time to have fun, even with the most serious tasks.
Read, travel and explore. Each activity engages your mind and allows your natural curiosity to expand beyond its basic confines. By allowing your mind to expand through reading, traveling and exploring, you add to your life-software information that will help you see imaginative correlations and make novel connections in the future.
Learn to listen and tap your ultraconscious. Your mind has tremendous ability to deliver great ideas to your doorstep. Many people do not know how to listen to their inner minds, and there are many routes, including meditation, to developing that skill.
Tap into the arts. Most turn away early in life, feeling they were not artistic. But delving even superficially is great therapy that frees the mind to depart from the norm, reaching new heights. The arts gives you another route to connect to things.
Tap into the power of technology to help you discover new worlds and explore new ideas and directions. We have access to the greatest information source ever, the Internet. No society has ever had that available to them.

Ayan is passionate about "the need for everyone, in every walk of life, in every organization, to free their creative spirit, not motivated only by profit but also for a more fulfilling life. Learning to be creative, exercising that creativity and seeing those new ideas manifest in the world is profoundly rewarding. In turn, the experience stimulates creativity even more."

As to brainstorming, Ayan argues that "it focuses on problems rather than solutions. To generate true, original thinking, the mind must be stimulated by input, concepts, information that are not a part of the problem." Nevertheless, Ayan praises brainstorming as "a powerful corporate strategy that taps into important characteristics of group dynamics, if it is properly structured and follows a specific four-step sequence defined in Aha!"

Ayan was an executive with Donnelly Marketing, Chicago, then a division of Dun & Bradstreet, when he launched FastData. When the operation was sold and licensed for nearly $50 million dollars.

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