How To Have and Develop your Best Creative Ideas

Awareness.  We can’t simply sit down, open our arms and say “Right, I’m ready, shower me with creative ideas. Oh and I don’t want any waste, make sure I only get the very finest ideas that I’m guaranteed to be able to develop into something amazing...”

Having ideas begins with increasing your awareness of your surroundings and realising that with the right outlook and openness, you’ll see that ideas are abundant. The best way is to focus on your senses, because it’s your senses that you experience the world through.

A great way to start is to visit places you’ve not been before, where there will be fresh stimulation. Then focus on each of your senses of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch in turn. Notice what’s coming to you through each of these senses and jot them down in a notebook. The more you practice this, the easier it will be to see how the inspiration for ideas is all around you, waiting to be discovered.

Capture.  Once you’ve increased your awareness, and begin to see ideas in your everyday surroundings, it’s time to capture them. It doesn’t matter how many wonderful ideas you have, if each time you think: “Wow, what a brilliant idea, I’ll remember this and work on it later”, then forget it completely 5 minutes later. Ever happened to you? Me too!

The solution is to have methods in place to capture those ideas, as soon as they hit you. Use whatever works best for you. Some people prefer to have an ideas journal and write and sketch ideas down. Others use a voice recorder and speak about their ideas. Others use a camera to take pictures to remind them. Or of course you can use a combination of all three.

Once you’ve started capturing your ideas, whichever format you use, you’ll see something interesting happen. The more ideas you have and record, the more ideas will come in their place. It’s almost as if the ideas you welcome in to your journal, voice recorder or camera send a subliminal message back to the rest of the undiscovered ideas in your mind, saying “come on in, the water’s lovely!”. So to speak.

Choosing.  So you’ve noticed more ideas all around you, and realise that the more ideas you capture, the more ideas arrive. Excellent! So now it’s time for the third piece of the puzzle. How to choose which creative ideas to develop, amongst all those you’ve had, and how to develop them.

The classic mistake most of us make is to record our ideas in the order that they come to us, then revisit them and expect to be able to develop every single idea we’ve captured, in the exact same order we’ve captured them. So we go to page one, line one of our ideas journal and try to begin.

The problem is, some ideas will be more interesting and exciting than others. And you’ll never have enough time in your lifetime to develop all the ideas you have. Read that last sentence again, it’ll save you a lot of disappointment and angst. The answer? Scan through your ideas and pick those that leap out at you, those that inspire you and scream out to be developed. Pick one of those, put the rest of your ideas away for another time, and give that one idea your full focus and creativity.