Focusing on your own creativity can lead to greater professional success and more personal fulfillment. The Expo Group Level5’s EVP of Creative Michael McCauley presented these stories at the TSNN Awards Executive Conference to help simplify where a soul in search of creativity should focus.
When you reach an optimal creative “flow” state, the ideas come naturally. Here’s how McCauley suggests you get in that flow state.
1. Obey Your Hunches: Learn the power of these hunches, where they come from and how to maximize them. There is great mystery in hunches and more going on than you might think.
2. Build Cathedrals: Think higher by assigning greater meaning to the work.
3. Seek Your Daily Inspiration: Engage the heart to jumpstart the mind.
4. Get into Flow State: Techniques to turn off the left-brain to let the idea generating right-brain flow.
5. Be OK with Intangibles: It’s ok not to know all the answers or solve all the problems in one attempt. By simply talking around the issues/challenges, the right brain is quietly working overtime and will ultimately get there—if you let it.
6. It’s Not an Accident: Great ideas happen for a reason, you just don’t know it yet.
7. Creativity is Currency: In the age of AI, enhancing personal creativity is one of the key marketable skills in a future with more and more artificial intelligence permeating home and work life.
8. No Naysayers: Keep the know-it-all attitudes OUT of brainstorming.
9. Brainstorming CAN work, but most often DOES NOT. Why it does not work and how to optimize brainstorming!
10. BE PRESENT! Stop being a slave to your mobile device, engage, open heart and mind to others…the ideas are all around you, don’t miss them by being consumed by your device.
Everyone loves a good quote! Tweet some of these to serve as witness to your creative quest.
“Key to creativity…immerse yourself in your subject matter, love, honor and above all, obey your hunches.” –Leo Burnett
“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds.” —Albert Einstein
“ Strong minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, weak minds discuss people.” –Socrates
“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious.” –Albert Einstein
“Ideas are like fish. If you want to catch little fish, you can stay in the shallow water. But if you want to catch the big fish, you’ve got to go deeper. Down deep, the fish are more powerful and more pure. They’re huge and abstract. And they’re very beautiful.” –David Lynch
“If the idea does not scare you…it’s probably not that good.” –Lee Clow
“Make an empty space in any corner of your mind, and creativity will instantly fill it.” –Dee Hock
“The comfort zone is the great enemy to creativity; moving beyond it necessitates intuition, which in turn configures new perspectives and conquers fears.” –Dan Stevens
If you missed the presentation, check out these titles for inspiration.
Social Physics – How Good Ideas Spread by Alex Pentland
Flow: The Pyschology of Optimal Experience by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil
Shop Class as Soulcraft by Matthew B. Crawford
Inside the Box by Drew Boyd and Jacob Goldenberg
Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink
Michael McCauley is a 20-year industry veteran, Michael has led creative teams on unique projects for national television, cross-channel media and in the world live entertainment programs. On the communications front, Michael has been the driving force behind major creative programs for some of today’s most high-profile brands including: Target, VW, Intel, American Express, 3M, CBS Television and IBM.