January 14, 2023

How NOT to Loose Creativity in Yourself, at Home, and at Work!

January 14, 2023

Do you feel like a technical robot that takes care of other people’s urgent and vital tasks? Is your calendar filled with other people’s agendas and none of your own? Do you feel your job as a leader is telling people what to do? As a manager, is meeting deadlines your primary concern? As an employee, do you hate your job because it is monotonously boring? Is creativity at home supercharged with TV watching and gadget addiction? Well, have no worries, here are some practical solutions to give a try.

Endeavor to get out of your entrenched thoughts. You might think everything happens to you because of others’ fault. My boss sets the deadlines. My wife does not control the kids or the dogs. My employees are lazy and wait for me to give them answers to all their work problems. My agenda is very important because I am a very senior person in the organization, and all eyes are on me. And, to add icing to the cake, my colleagues suck at technical stuff, and I am the only one that can bail them out. Let us call this thinking process or behavior “a little victim mentality!” To get out of it so that you are not a victim, you have to supercharge yourself with the power and energy to accept that you are the one who is in control of your fate and can change everything and everyone around you. No one else can change the world around you but you. You are what you think all day long. Remember that creativity is not a mysterious process that comes from people working on their own or simply googling. Change your thoughts, change your life (Dr. Wayne Dyer).

Identify your unique offering to life and work. What ideas do you have that can blossom in your life and the organization? What is your ideal job? Most companies today are going through tough financial challenges and have less money to spend on training individuals or let alone keeping them employed. Is your resume ready to conquer the next awesome gig, or are you waiting for a stale exit package to head to Hawaii for a month and come back depressed? Whatever you choose, think; it is up to you to come up with different ways and means to deliver new ideas and unique ways to grow and position yourself in every area of your life. Have you done a SWOT analysis of yourself? What are your strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats? As an executive coach, I endeavor to do a SWOT analysis with my clients, especially those who perceive they have lost creativity at work and in life. What the clients discover after the exercise is that they are endowed with so much creativity, which propels them to move on to more significant work or transition into new roles. Empower yourself to develop new ideas at work and encourage others to have similar thoughts.

Don’t sandwich or wait for a team-building day or event to get creative. Most organizations wait for team-building opportunities to develop ideas of how the organization can be managed or governed better. For example, in the saddest team-building cases, executives wait for a face-to-face meeting to brainstorm ideas about how the department should be run, what to stop, what to continue, what to start doing, or even how to change the names of previous ideas to newly named ideas.

Creativity should be encouraged in every stage of a project, in one-to-one conversations, be part of a meeting agenda, or be revisited weekly by the team. Furthermore, rewarding creativity will encourage continuous creativity in the workplace. Creativity should be part of every company’s scorecard. Consequently, the goal is to change our mindset about creativity because no idea is lame or worthless. Each idea is unique and can be valuable at a different time if not used under the present circumstances.

Please share your ideas about what you are doing to encourage creativity at work or in life.

Please email me at: [email protected] to schedule a 30-minute consultation. You will be more than happy you did!