Creativity is one of the soft skills that is often bandied about as if you could just buy it off the shelf or achieve it from attending an online course. Well, obviously not. Everyone is innately creative with the ability to solve problems in different ways, but you do need to set up the right conditions. To stimulate your creative juices, try to enter the “flow” state regularly to clear your mind so you can join the dots in more diverse ways.
What is the flow state?
According to Wikipedia, Jeanne Nakamura and Mihály Csíkszentmihályi identify the following six factors as encompassing an experience of flow:
🔷 Intense and focused concentration on the present moment
🔷 Merging of action and awareness
🔷 A loss of reflective self-consciousness
🔷 A sense of personal control or agency over the situation or activity
🔷 A distortion of temporal experience, as one’s subjective experience of time is altered
🔷 Experience of the activity as intrinsically rewarding, also referred to as autotelic experience
From my experience, there are multiple ways to achieve flow (none of them involve doomscrolling on social media):
✅ Doing a hobby (writing, cooking, drawing, building model sets)
✅ Doing housework
✅ Playing music (I find that playing simple scales can calm me down)
✅ Low-intensity, long-duration exercise.
I do all of the above, but I practise the last one most frequently. Today, the morning weather was so nice and breezy in Singapore that I decided to stay in the flow state and extend my 6km jog to 8km. I switched off the podcast and just focused on listening to my breathing and keeping an easy pace. Before I knew it, I had burned almost an hour of time and nearly 500 calories.
You do have to be well-conditioned before you attempt any exercise, so take it easy. In the meantime, ask yourself what you can do today to remove distractions and enter your flow state.
