Reinvigorate Your Professional Creativity and Watch Your Business Thrive

As children, most all of us were creative to some extent. Usually, this creativity was driven not by a desire to be an “artist,” but rather to explore the unknown and embrace new, exciting, experiences.

Moving through life, we often find this creativity peak and wane – going up and down – at different times. When creativity is high, things seem to just “happen” easier for us and when it’s low, we can definitely feel stagnant.

In the early stages of entrepreneurship, creativity is frequently flowing like a faucet—maybe even like a firehouse. Ideas are plentiful and pretty much everything revolves around making these ideas come to life. It’s a time when it seems as if you’re on top of your game and as a result, even if you face challenges, somehow things just manage to “click.”

Inevitably, however, that creativity will seem to begin to dry up—maybe even just switch off and stop. It might happen in an instant, or it might seem to just trickle away a little bit at a time. Often, this is when our business — and perhaps, we ourselves — will come to a major crossroads. We either find a way to reignite our creativity, moving past that point and continuing to grow and thrive, or we wither away and maybe, call it quits.

Many business owners commonly report a lack of creativity — or evaporated creativity — as one of the biggest hurdles they face. It poses a problem not just in elevating their business, but even running their business on a day-to-day basis.

When creativity seems to be dwindling or gone, then, is there anything we can do to get back on track?

Yes! Of course, there is. Creativity is not just something we either are or are not born with, it can be a learned skill. With attention and practice, creativity can not only be reborn, it can be truly reinvigorated to be bigger and better than ever.

Here is one simple way to re-spark your creativity quickly and easily… With any problem, ask yourself, “What else is possible?”

Problems in our business can be paralyzing. They can cause us stress and they can cause us to second-guess ourselves and sometimes, not only our ability to solve the problem, but our general ability to run our business. After all, if we were doing the right things, problems wouldn’t happen, right?

WRONG.

Problems might be one of the best growth opportunities we will experience in our business.  And trying to solve problems might just be one of the best ways to spark creativity again!

When faced with that, “What else is possible?” question, follow up that big question with these additional questions to get the creative juices flowing:

1. What is this problem trying to show or teach me?
2. Why is this a “problem?”
3. What created this problem?
4. What negative impacts or effects do I expect from this problem?
5. What possible good can come from experiencing this problem?
6. What additional resources can I tap into to help me solve this problem?
7. Is there anything I could do differently in the future to make sure this problem doesn’t happen again?

Interestingly, it’s not having the “right” answers that will help to spark your creativity again. Experts report it’s the very act of asking yourself questions and stretching outside your standard operating procedure — to look for answers that require more thought than the routine you go through each day — that helps to get the creative juices flowing.

And while it’s impossible to say we’ll even arrive at the “right” answers all the time, or even some of the time, we might find that just going through the process opens up new possibilities we hadn’t previously considered. When that happens, we start thinking in terms of “potentialities” instead of “roadblocks.” And maybe, that “problem” that started us down this road of introspection, becomes not quite so troublesome after all? In fact, we may very likely see that it might have just been a blessing in disguise.