Chapter 17

Becoming More Creative

In This Chapter

Increasing your ability to be creative

Calling up ideas from deep within your mind

Finding a good idea quickly

Using highly creative visualizations

Getting past creative blocks

Creativity is the force that drives new music, art, and inventions; it seems to well up from deep within you and often suddenly spills out when you least expect it. Creativity is an elusive beast that you can’t tame and subjugate to your will, and thank goodness you can’t, because tamed creativity would probably end up rather bland and uninspiring.

Some people find that drawing on creativity is difficult, whereas others appear to have an ever-flowing abundance. Why is that? Where does creativity come from, and if you aren’t very creative, what can you do to become more so?

Creativity is all about: taking something and changing it into something new. But to be able to carry out this re-creation, you need to have a wide range of source material from which to draw, and therefore no substitute exists for reading all you can about the things you like, viewing as much art as you can (including paintings, photography, sculpture, and so on), listening to plenty of music, and generally immersing yourself in culture.

By soaking up the creative work of other people, you expand your outlook on the world and start the process of innovation stirring deep within you. And before long you find that you have no choice but to express that creativity in your own ways, perhaps through writing stories, poems, or songs, or maybe by creating computer programs or designing new gadgets. As long as you keep introducing yourself to other people’s work and ideas, your unconscious mind welcomes them in and enjoys them, and begins to mix and change them into new ideas and concepts. This process gives you the raw material to draw on.

To help bring your creativity to life, therefore, practise the techniques in this chapter to draw on the thoughts welling within you, and give birth to inspiration.

Coming Up with New Ideas

If you’ve immersed yourself in art and culture, read an abundance of books, and watched a myriad of movies, but you still seem unable to come up with fresh ideas, what can you do next? You need to find a way to unearth all the creativity that’s surely going on deep inside your mind. Like an oil company, you need to drill a well that releases your creative juices in a flood of usable ideas.

As the name suggests, creative visualization is clearly a great way to encourage creativity. Using the tools of your imagination itself, you can unlock all the wonderful ideas and imagery seething around in your unconscious mind (or as some would say, within your soul), and turn them into usable concepts in the form of works of art or music.

The more you practise the techniques and exercises in this chapter, the more you become spontaneously creative. You build the neural pathways required to keep absorbing, transforming, and mixing up new ideas you come across, and you can also quickly release your own new creations from your unconscious to your conscious mind.

Seeing yourself as a source of creativity

To start becoming more creative you need to believe that you are creative. In fact, you need to know for certain that you’re a great source of creativity. To help you become aware of this fact and start building the pathways that allow your creativity to flow, practise the following visualization:

1. Imagine that you’re an artist standing in a great hall in a museum of art.

All around you are bare, white walls, stunning marble pillars, and arched ceilings that soar several storeys high. You’re preparing for an exhibition of your work, which is wide and varied.

2. Raise your arms like an orchestral conductor, and from deep within you pull up gorgeous painting after painting.

They can be portraits, still lifes, abstracts, or anything at all, with each one materialising in its chosen place on the wall as you point to it.

3. Start to populate the great hall with your sculptures.

Again, bring them up quickly and easily: marble busts of people and animals, strange and hypnotic shapes, weird and wonderful structures. Some are monochrome, others shimmer all the colours of the rainbow as one by one you point to where they need to be located.

4. Now create some music for the exhibition visitors.

Feel it shoot out of your fingers like musical notes on a stave, and then dance around the room as if in a Disney animated film. The sound is the most touching music you can muster, full of fire and fury, yet subtle and moving – better than any film soundtrack.

5. Let your arms fall to your sides and walk around the exhibition, viewing all that you’ve just created.

See the sculptures and paintings from different viewpoints, and listen to how the music changes depending on the acoustics of the part of the hall you’re in. Wonder at how all this beauty has arisen from within you, and think to yourself, ‘Yes, this is what I want to show to the world’.

After performing this exercise you may feel quite surprised at the things you saw and heard, because everyone is creative but many people suppress it. However, in this exercise you release the blocks you normally place on your unconscious mind, which finding itself free, delivers a joyful abundance of creativity.

Take a moment to appreciate what your unconscious was able to do, thank it, and let it know that you’d really appreciate more (much more) of the same. Promise to do your best to keep feeding it with new ideas, sensations, sounds, and whatever else it desires.

Mixing and merging your ideas

Although coming up with anything entirely new is impossible, don’t let that hinder your creativity in any way.

For example, there are only a little over a hundred known elements in the universe, but they make up everything that exists by being combined in different ways. Hydrogen (an explosive gas) and oxygen (a corrosive gas) can be combined to become harmless water, and sodium (a highly reactive metal) and chlorine (a toxic substance often used for bleaching and sterilising) can be brought together to form common salt. In fact, looking even more closely, each element is simply a construction of protons, neutrons, and electrons, which means that just three fundamental building blocks are used to construct everything there is, has been, or ever will be!

By contemplating this you can realise how the limitations you may think apply to your circumstances are purely imaginary. If the universe can be built up from just three types of building block, what can you create with all the elements at your disposal?

Consider also music, which consists purely of vibrations. Faster vibrations create higher sounds, and slower vibrations make lower ones, but the underlying cause of a musical note is simply a single wave form. A stranger to music might at first think music would be rather plain and boring due to being constructed only of a simple wave. But the richness of music that surrounds us every day is a witness to what creativity can achieve with something as simple as a vibrating wave.

Or how about light? The human eye can see an infinite number of colours, but uses receptors of only three primary colours to do this. By combining red, green, and blue in varying ratios, you can create any other colour and shade from black all the way to white, and everything in between. What’s more, light is just a wave like sound, but it vibrates much faster. Again, one simple building block leads to infinite potential.

By drawing on the wealth of creativity of other people and from everything you see, hear, and feel, you can create something new; and even though it may comprise a bit of this and a touch of that, it’s new. If sufficiently different from anything that has gone before, you can even copyright or patent your work to protect it. Here’s an exercise that integrates these different types of building blocks together with creative visualization:

1. Visualize that you’re going to create something new.

It will combine a variety of elements.

2. First think of its physical nature.

Just like the building blocks of matter, bring together a few basic elements. Perhaps a liquid such as water or mercury, combined with something organic like wood or rope, and a solid like glass or stone. Just choose a few things you would like to work with.

3. Now think of its colours.

Imagine either a single colour or a combination of different colours that you would like to combine. Also choose whether to use dark or light shades, or both.

4. Think about the sound it makes.

Does it make a sound when you hit it, or scrape your fingernail against it, or wave it in the wind? If so hear that sound in your head. And if you want it to make more than one sound imagine how you’ll do this using the elements you chose to work with.

5. Now close your eyes and start to see the object forming in front of you.

Visualize the various elements coming together one at a time and forming a new whole. Look at the colours and reflections, and listen to any sound the creation makes. Smell it too and see what that’s like. And try playing with the device by moving it. If it’s small enough you can imagine manipulating it in your hands and feeling its fine textures.

When you practise this exercise don’t worry about the thing you create necessarily having to do anything or have a purpose. Just allow it to exist and be new. In my case I just imagined an hourglass shape looking like two brains instead of a pair of bulbs, in which a thick, orange liquid drips from one to the other (representing thoughts going from one mind to another) instead of sand. I also imagined it resting on a finely carved and lightly varnished wooden base. But the last time I practised this exercise the resulting creation was a xylophone made of coloured glass and wood (I like these two things at the moment).

If you’re an arty type of person, you may even like the thing you just created enough to paint it in real life, or perhaps create a sculpture of it or build it as a model, or even full scale. If so, do it. Realise that creative urge. Let this new thing become a reality. I intend to do so with some of the objects I have invented this way, and have already started the process by amassing a collection of materials I enjoy the look and feel of.

Following random thoughts

Free association – the following of random thoughts – is a well-known means of getting your creative juices flowing. The idea is not to impose a set idea; simply let your mind wander until you come up with something useful. When used inexpertly, this technique results in nothing more than daydreams, but if you bring creative visualization into the equation you increase your chances of coming up with the goods.

For the best results when using free association start off with a seed thought or idea, preferably one totally unrelated to the task at hand (to ensure that you begin with a fresh perspective).

1. Think of the first thing that comes into your mind.

It can be a squirrel, a kettle, or anything.

2. Hold that new thought in the front of your mind.

Examine it thoroughly.

3. Is it an object?

If so look at it, touch it, feel it, smell it, and listen to it.

4. Is it an idea, word, or anything else?

If so interact with the thought in any way you can.

5. Combine it with the subject about which you’re being creative.

Somehow find a way to merge the thing about which you are being creative with this new thought or object. Try fitting them together in many different ways and see what you can come up with that’s new.

For example, assume that you’re a designer and are trying to come up with a new design of a compact camera, and the thought you came up with was a banana. When you link the two together, you can imagine the inner fruit of a banana being like the zoom lens of a camera. Most people peel bananas in three strips, and so envision a safety shutter with three parts that fold in and out.

After going round a few times and writing down all your ideas as you have them, you may well surprise yourself by discovering the seeds of a great idea right in front of you.

Going on hunting expeditions through your mind

As Elmer Fudd in the Bugs Bunny cartoons is fond of saying, ‘Be vewy, vewy quiet, we’re hunting wabbits’. But here, rather than rabbits, you’re going to hunt for ideas. That’s right, put on your imaginary hunting hat, hang your binoculars around your neck, and prepare for a cerebral safari in which you’re going to discover just the idea you need:

1. Imagine that you’re driving a truck painted in camouflage colours, with your hunting hat on, navigating on a safari through your mind.

The scene looks very much like Africa or the Australian outback with wide open spaces interspersed with trees, bushes, and dense thickets, within which are lurking great ideas hiding from you. You drive past the undergrowth and greenery and spot glimpses of things that you can’t quite make out, but which seem interesting.

2. Keep going until you come across an idea.

You’re in a dense oasis of trees, with a waterhole in the middle, and standing there, right on the waterside, is a brilliant idea. You don’t know what it is but you’re going to collect it. You’re not the type of hunter that kills its prey; instead you leap out with a big canvas bag and quickly push the idea into it and drive back to camp.

3. Start thinking about the true nature of the idea.

What did it look like in the brief glimpse you caught? Did it make any noise? What was its shape? Did it have any meaning or relate to anything? Is it maybe a clue to another thing? What is that idea you have in the back of the truck.

4. Arrive back at the camp and prepare to open the sack.

Ideas in your mind don’t bite. They don’t hurt you and you don’t hurt them, and so let the idea out and see exactly what it is.

If you’re lucky, today was a good hunting expedition because you landed just the idea you wanted. If not, that’s still okay because your unconscious mind was with you all the way and keeps on searching for you until it finds the idea you’re looking for.

Riding the idea train

If you don’t travel much by train or bus, you’re really missing out on a treasure chest of potential seeds for good ideas. Flying on a plane simply can’t match it, because all you get to see (even with a window seat) are clouds, the horizon, and a slowly changing patchwork quilt far below. But on a train or a bus the scenery whizzes by rapidly, particularly in towns and cities, but also in the country.

1. Next time you take a bus or train ride and have some creative thinking to do, try to sit by the window.

With every new thing you see, word you read, unusual building you spot, or anything else that attracts your attention, think about it and how it relates to your current project.

2. Run the ideas together.

Mix and match them, turn them inside out and upside down.

3. Merge them with other ideas you’ve already had about the project.

Also invert them and see that brings a new perspective.

Using this technique you’ll get an endless supply of random thoughts you can use in much the same way as the exercise in the earlier ‘Following random thoughts’ section. And don’t forget, although you need to keep your full attention on the road when driving, you can also try this exercise when travelling as a passenger in a car.

Thinking on Your Feet

The thing with being creative is that you can’t simply call up a ready-made creation out of thin air, you have to construct it on the fly. So the answer is to have quick and easy access to your creativity resources so that, when pressed, you have the chance to draw on related concepts, mix them together, and maybe, just maybe, surprise yourself (and everyone else) with a really great idea. So to prepare for when you find yourself in a situation in which you have to think creatively on your feet, try some of the exercises in this section.

Turning an idea on its head

Sometimes all you need to do to an idea to change it into something different and usable is view it from another angle by, for example, turning it upside down.

In 1970, Spencer Silver, a chemist working in the 3M research laboratory, was trying to come up with an extra strong adhesive. One of the formulas he produced was noted for being even weaker than any 3M had previously manufactured, but being a good scientist he didn’t discard it and instead stored the formula with many other currently unusable discoveries and inventions.

A few years later, this policy paid off big time because another scientist at 3M, Arthur Fry, who enjoyed singing in his church’s choir, wanted to find a way to prevent all his bookmarks from falling out of his hymn book. Luckily Silvers’ formula was still stored away, so Fry applied some to his bookmarks and found that the glue was sufficiently strong to keep them in place, but weak enough to allow him to easily remove them again. And so 3M had a huge success with one of the most popular office products of all time: Post-it notes.

You can help to release your creativity by turning the weakness in an idea into a strength using the following exercise:

1. Visualize something that has an inherent weakness.

For example, take an incandescent light bulb, which gives off a lot of heat as a side effect of producing light, causing it to be much less efficient than a fluorescent or LED bulb.

2. Imagine a use to which you can put this weakness.

Heat can be useful. Is there a way you can harness it? Think about what you can use this heat for.

3. Imagine that you are short-sighted, have to type a lot, and your hands are often cold.

Instead of turning the central heating up, maybe you can place a gentle fan behind a desk lamp to blow its heat at your fingers, as well as lighting up your keyboard for greater visibility.

4. Or imagine that you’ve invented an ornament of glass containing coloured waxes and dyes that move about when heated.

By placing this above a light bulb not only can you add light to the ornament, you can also provide its heating power – and you’ll have (re-)invented the lava lamp.

5. Try to think of any other uses for the weakness (in this case excess heat).

Continue thinking of ideas until you begin to draw blanks.

By simply turning the product’s weakness on its head, and changing it into a strength, a great idea can be born. For example, in this age of digital books some artists are now taking old printed books and turning them into works of art by cutting out or reshaping sections. The weakness here is that the book is unwanted and might otherwise go for recycling, but instead it is turned into a thing of beauty.

Playing inverse snap

You know the card game in which players have a pack of cards face down and they take turns revealing cards, and the first one to shout ‘snap!’ when the cards match keeps the pile? Well, you can play the inverse of this game when you’re in a meeting or brainstorming session and need to come up with some quick ideas.

Every time someone else comes up with an idea, immediately think of the inverse of it and then consider what that means and how it may be applied. Come up not with that idea but with one it brings to mind – one that isn’t the exact inverse of the idea, but is a useful concept that adds to the discussion.

Don’t worry if you can’t think of an idea to add to the group discussion every time, but at least try to do so in your head, so that you have a collection of inverse and adapted ideas, probably all different to those your colleagues are creating. Now and then these notions may well help you to produce a great idea of your own. And, hey presto, you’re a valid member of the brainstorming team.

You can also play this game on your own as a visualization.

1. Imagine that you need to come up with a new idea for a dating service called Forever Together.

Now make a list of all the things you can think about that apply to such a service, such as, friendship, love, expression, attitude, character, forever, together, and so on.

2. Work through each of these ideas in turn, and think of its opposite.

For example, friendship may make you think of hatred. Maybe there’s a concept along the lines of ‘Go on, be a devil’, but that’s not really very strong, so try the next idea, love. Again that returns hate – too similar. How about expression? That makes you think of impression, and then you may associate that to the phrase ‘first impressions’. This looks a little meatier, so move on to the next step.

3. Now take the current concept and turn that on its head.

OK, then, the opposite of ‘first impressions’ may be ‘last impressions’. Hold on a minute, that’s not bad… ‘First impressions last’. This is starting to look like it has potential, so you can move on to the next step. Otherwise, if no other good idea occurs, return to step 2.

4. You now have something that’s really caught your attention, so work it through to possible completion.

The phrase ‘First impressions last’ may remind you a little of the L’Oréal slogan ‘Because you’re worth it’, so you put the two together to come up with ‘Forever Together – Because first impressions last’.

5. If you need further ideas, keep working through steps 2 to 4.

With any luck you’ll come up with a handful of ideas of which, hopefully, at least one may be just what you were looking for.

All right, maybe the phrase in this exercise (or one close to it) has been used before, but this exercise illustrates a powerful process you can use for coming up with creative ideas using opposites.

Getting Really Creative

In this section I present exercises that may seem somewhat left field, but then again, that’s the point. Only by thinking completely differently to the norm can you be innovative.

Imagining colour blindness (or the opposite)

Do you have perfect colour vision? If so, you’re lucky because approximately 8 per cent of men and 1 per cent of women are colour blind, which usually means they have difficulty distinguishing certain shades of red, brown, and green, although many different types of colour blindness exist, including being able to see only in shades of grey, like a black and white television.

1. Imagine that the colours you know are not fixed and can swap with each other.

For example, red can be purple, yellow can be blue, and so on.

2. Imagine that sounds and thoughts are colours.

If your project isn’t in any way related to colour, that doesn’t matter; simply imagine that shapes or sounds and so on are associated with colours. Indeed for some people with synaesthesia (in which senses can be processed by the wrong parts of the brain) they can be. For them certain words, numbers, musical notes, events, days of the week, and so on vividly create impressions of colour and shade (or other sensations).

3. Imagine things and shapes as colours too.

For example, square things are red, circular ones are blue, and so on.

4. Also mess with this situation by changing your type of colour vision.

If you are colour blind imagine having normal colour vision (perhaps reds and greens will be stronger and more vivid), otherwise imagine being colour blind (possibly confusing your reds, greens, and browns), and think what the world would look like.

5. Now reconstruct your project as a colourful modern abstract painting.

In the previous steps you turned each part of your project into a different colour; now paint with them to create a wonderful canvas.

6. Analyse your creation.

Now interpret your painting and see what it tells you or reveals about your project. You can help with this by turning colours back into thoughts, shapes, and objects, and so on.

Through this restructuring of the project, bringing all your senses together and integrating them into your colour awareness, you use your creativity in a number of different ways. Along the way it should help to release any hidden creative ideas floating just below your consciousness.

By using this technique your view of the world, your current project, and anything you think about becomes substantially different (almost alien, in fact), enabling you to see things that perhaps you previously missed, and come up with new ideas relating to them.

Reshaping ‘the box’

I avoid advising you to ‘think outside the box’ in this chapter because that’s now such an over-used concept that it’s no longer all that helpful. The analogy was a clever idea at first, but the time has come to amend the box to create new ways of being creative that really get you thinking. So re-shape that box!

Instead of thinking ‘outside the box’, change the box into something else. Maybe it’s a plain and simple cardboard box, but maybe it isn’t. Perhaps it’s a long cylinder like a garden hose, or a crystal ball, or a musical instrument.

If that doesn’t help with your visualization of new ideas, try taking things further. Maybe the box is a concept – a pure thought. Or perhaps it’s a frame of mind, an emotion, or even a scientific theory. What if the box was this universe itself and you had to think outside of that? How crazy would that be, and what would it be like?

So there’s still life in that old box yet, as long as you turn it into something else first.

Using synonym strings

One useful way to explore a concept is to use a thesaurus, which is like a dictionary of words except that it lists words of similar meaning next to each other. For example, the word creativity brings up all the following synonyms: artistry, cleverness, genius, imagination, imaginativeness, ingenuity, inspiration, inventiveness, originality, resourcefulness, talent, and vision. And the word artistry has these synonyms: ability, accomplishment, artfulness, brilliance, craftsmanship, creativity, finesse, flair, genius, mastery, proficiency, style, talent, taste, touch, virtuosity, and workmanship, and so on.

Using this concept, here’s an exercise you can use traverse a linked chain of ideas, until you find a new one you can use.

1. Find all the words that are similar to or relate to a word to do with your current project.

You can use a printed thesaurus or an online one (such as www.thesaurus.com). If neither is at hand, come up with synonyms in your mind. Whatever source you use, write down all the words.

2. Go through the words, using each one in turn as a new source word, and write down all the associated words you can find for that word.

Often the same words keep cropping up and you may find that drawing lines between the most common ones is useful (so that you can see whether a common theme exists).

3. Sit back and see whether the paper is telling you something.

Is a new thought or idea embedded somewhere in one of the words, or can you infer one from some of the connections you’ve made?

4. Soak in the contents of the sheet of paper.

Now close your eyes and try to visualize all the words on the paper turning into real things. The word car becomes a car, love becomes a beating heart, power becomes a little, buzzing nuclear power station, and so on.

5. Let all these animated things interact with one another.

The heart and car may combine to form a vehicle looking like Herbie from the Disney film The Love Bug, or the car and power station may merge to create a power source on wheels or a nuclear powered vehicle, and so on.

More often than not, something of value is lurking on that sheet of paper, even if only to lead you in a another direction of research. And occasionally you hit the jackpot and just the idea you want pops right off the page.

Surfing through your mind

These days, more information than you can ever consume in a thousand lifetimes is available at the touch of a button on the Internet. And, with hundreds of channels of digital television available, you’re used to surfing through it all looking for the good stuff that you like.

Well, you can use this surfing technique on the vast amount of data that you’ve sequestered away in your mind, and at about the same speed too – less than five seconds per channel:

1. Think about your current project for five seconds and then immediately visualize pressing the channel change button (or your imaginary web-surfing button) and think about something else.

You don’t know what that something else is yet, but as soon as you make the decision to flick channels it comes to you.

2. Keep on channel/website surfing just as you normally do until something of interest catches your mind’s eye.

Stop and spend a little time thinking about why it interests you, and try to get any information or ideas from it.

3. Repeat this process until you feel tired and then write down everything you find interesting.

In fact, as soon as you find a good channel or website, start taking notes so that you don’t later forget.

By forcing your imagination to instantly come up with something at each channel change you bypass the conscious filtering that you normally perform all the time, allowing your unconscious mind to send ideas straight into your head. This is similar to how hypnotised people are so quickly able to act in imaginary ways that they would be hesitant to do in normal life. It happens because the conscious mind is placed in a resting state by the hypnotist, allowing the unconscious mind to come to the surface.

Holding that thought

Here’s a visualization technique you can use that returns good results but which takes a little while, because it requires you to hold a single related idea in your mind all day long.

1. Start off thinking about your current project.

Choose an idea or subject area that’s related to it and which you think may be worth contemplating.

2. For the rest of the day, whenever you think about your project or anything else, consider how it relates to your idea of the day.

Ponder connections and differences, follow potential ideas, and dismiss ones that don’t work. You have a full day in which to examine both your project and your seed idea and you may well be amazed at what you can come up with.

First of all you have plenty of thoughts which after a while start to dry up. Then, generally by around midday, you find yourself out of new ideas, but that’s when you redouble your efforts and the good material comes, because you now have to get really creative to come up with anything new.

So stick with that seed thought and work on it as hard as possible, and each time a potential new idea springs to mind write it down.

3. At the end of the day or the start of the next day if you’re too tired, review your notes.

Remove any that seemed to get you nowhere so that you can focus on the better ideas, some of which may even be good seeds for another day’s contemplation.

This technique works best when you have a few key thoughts that you think may bear fruit. Work through one a day until you’ve examined them all and then put all your notes together and see how they relate to each other. Somewhere in there you may find a diamond in the rough.

Overcoming Creative Blocks

When you’ve tried everything you can (including all the techniques I outline in the earlier sections ‘Coming Up with New Ideas’, ‘Thinking on Your Feet’, and ‘Getting Really Creative’) and you’re still having trouble producing with the creativity you need, don’t give up just yet. Your unconscious mind is full of all manner of things you aren’t aware of, simply because it chooses not to let you know. This allows you to concentrate on using your consciousness for your day-to-day living, without getting bogged down in strange and dreamlike stuff that goes on in your unconscious mind.

But what if you want to access this unconscious material? What can you do if you’ve been wracking your brains for days, or maybe even weeks, and time’s running out and you really need to come up with the goods – such as a great new name for your latest product, a title for a book, or the perfect marketing angle for launching a new product?

The answer is to start talking more closely with your unconscious mind – the part of you that’s ever watchful and never sleeps. The unconscious doesn’t have a consciousness that can say things like, ‘I think therefore I am’. But it’s a major part of you and works hard at pleasing you. Like a loyal dog it loves you and is faithful to you, and does anything it can to please you. But unlike a pet, it is you. Check out Chapter 6 for more on understanding and using your unconscious mind.

Some people think of the unconscious mind like a soul and you often hear people say things like their ‘soul was moved’ by a stirring piece of music. And those uncontrollable feelings that well up within, seemingly from nowhere, come from your unconscious mind. In fact, it provides a wide range of thoughts, emotions, and feelings to you, from which your conscious mind picks and chooses what and how to act upon, using your powers of consciousness and reasoning.

Deep within your unconscious mind, though, things are seriously strange. And yet they’re totally familiar; just as familiar as a car turning into a hat in a dream. It makes perfect sense at the time – completely logical. But this place is the logic of the unconscious, which communicates using symbolism and emotions. And now you want to communicate with your unconscious to really come up with the creative idea you need. But you’re going to have to use its language of symbols, images, and emotions.

So the exercises in this section help you to encourage your unconscious mind to share anything it can with you that may be helpful in coming up with just the idea that you need, even if your unconscious isn’t sure whether that’s a good idea or not.

Climbing the mental mountain to see over the other side

The following exercise is intended to explain to your unconscious that you know that the ideas you’re looking for exist, and that you also know that your unconscious mind knows them, but that your unconscious doesn’t necessarily always know which are the right ideas, and which ones may not be that good. Therefore you want to let it know that (just for now) you don’t need your unconscious filtering everything for you, and that you don’t mind being given a brain blast, even if it would normally be overwhelming.

Remain confident that you’re happy to consider whatever ideas come forth, and that you take responsibility for dismissing the bad ones yourself. With this concept firmly in your mind, try following this exercise:

1. Imagine that you’re climbing a high mountain and at the end of your quest is the thing you desire to see, the one good idea.

Where you are, deep in the valley, it’s a little misty and you can’t see all that much. But in the valley beyond is a cornucopia of weird and wonderful things. It’s a magical valley and you’re not expecting to see conventional plants and trees. In fact, you don’t know what you’re going to see. You suspect that the valley contains a whole range of pictures, movies, smells, objects, sayings, and phrases, and it may be all a jumble. Some of it’s going to be amazing and some of it unpleasant. But that’s okay because you know that the good idea or ideas you’re seeking are going to stand out like a campfire at night.

2. Feel how close you’re getting.

You continue up the mountain path, which is now so steep that you sometimes have to grab onto rocks at the side of the path to help pull your body up. And every now and then you need to take a rest to catch your breath. But you’re near . . . you can sense it. The thing you desire is over the mountain and you’re going to see it soon. As you think this thought, acknowledge to your unconscious mind that opening up the valley of wonders for you to see is fine. You desire seeing the valley more than anything and your unconscious need hold nothing back.

3. Just as you reach the summit of the mountain, pause and gather your thoughts.

Feel calm, yet excited. Breathe deeply a couple of times and take those remaining steps over the top of the mountain and gaze down into the valley of weird and wonderful ideas.

What you see now is up to you; it can be anything at all. Or nothing. And what you see is going to be different each time you practise this exercise. But when it works, the thing you need (in this case a new idea) stands out from all the other things and you have that ‘Aha’ moment. If it doesn’t seem to work, it still has. You just don’t know it yet. That idea will come soon.

Flying over your mindscape like a bird

In the earlier section ‘Riding the idea train’, I suggest that a train or bus ride is a better way to find inspiration than a plane ride. But sometimes flying in a plane and looking over the landscape can be a rich source of creative ideas, especially when that landscape happens to be your unconscious mind:

1. Imagine that you’re the only passenger in a very special plane that flies over your mindscape.

The plane has the ability to fly through all the tucks and folds in your brain as if it’s flying over a flat surface, similar to travelling in a real plane.

2. Look down as you fly and see your emotions everywhere.

For example, love isn’t just located in one place. Perhaps it’s a reddish sort of pinky colour that appears in blobs with strands connecting lumps of it to each other, and surrounding other emotions and thoughts.

Your mindscape is different to everyone else’s and so you have to see it for yourself. For example, when you notice bright sparkly and frequently changing shapes that flit about, perhaps they’re dreams or dream fragments. The deep red lakes may be pools of desire, and the two-mile-high pointy spikes are surges of motivation. Be creative. Decide what your dreamscape looks like and map it to your personality.

3. Locate people you know and see where you find them.

Look into your memory for places you’ve been, things you like, enjoyable foods (and distasteful ones). Create a crazy world from your mind until you can fly over it and spot all the major landmarks.

4. Find your current project.

Is it in one place, or spread out over many? What colour and shape is it? Does it move? If so what does it do and where does it go? What is it connected to elsewhere in your mindscape. Try to understand everything you can about it.

Examine your project further and try to look for anything unusual, or any unexpected connections. If you find any, dig deeper. Somewhere in there you may uncover the seed of creativity the project needs.

I know that these visualizations are getting more and more abstract and can seem quite crazy. But this book is about creative visualization and this type of imagery is bread and butter to your unconscious mind. Feed it and it responds.

Being a fly on the wall in an idea factory

Here’s a visualization that’s very abstract but it may help retrieve that elusive creative idea from within you. The exercise assumes that the idea definitely exists and is waiting to be found, but you need to discover a way to retrieve it, using a little subterfuge:

1. Imagine a factory somewhere in the world in which ideas of all manner are generated.

Not just your average run-of-the-mill ideas. Oh no, these notions are genuine industrial-strength ideas that knock your socks off. In fact, they’re so good that the factory has a high level of security and unauthorised people can’t get in or out. But for you that’s no problem as you. . .

2. Transform yourself into the body of a fly and enter through an open window.

Inside you can see hundreds of different strange machines stamping and forming every idea you can think of (only the good ones though). You can hear a tremendous clanking and whirring with wonderful ideas being dropped onto conveyor belts, from where they’re whisked off to packing bays, neatly wrapped, and placed into boxes. Fly around the factory, looking, listening, and smelling, until you come across a machine making an idea that really interests you.

3. Steal the idea.

Check that no one’s looking, turn back into a human, and pick the idea up. Then, as the alarm bells start to ring, quickly change back into a fly. With the idea resized like you, take it and fly back out of the open window to safety.

As you fly away, remember that the factory is actually in a land inside your brain, and therefore a part of yourself, so you haven’t actually stolen anything, but you did come back with a great idea (of your own).

This exercise promotes the bringing forth of a great idea. You may not get a glimpse of what the idea is from the exercise, but over the next few days you may well find that your creativity levels are raised.

This chapter on creativity is the last one before the ‘Part of Tens’ sections, but creativity is the first thing you need in order to use creative visualization effectively. So now that you’ve learned all the techniques in this chapter you’re really set to go out and start, change, or improve whatever you set your heart on – with creative visualization the world is in your hands.