For a brand to survive and thrive in a competitive market, it must leverage its power Creativity and innovation. When a brand stops innovating, it risks becoming mainstream and losing its unique appeal, handing over market share to a more imaginative competitor.

That said, few of us know how to cultivate this creativity in our brands or in ourselves individually. Contrary to popular belief, creativity is not a rare gift bestowed upon a select few “artisan” individuals. Instead, it should be considered a SKILLS that anyone, including you, can improve and develop. All it takes is practice and a deeper understanding of how our brains and consciousness work.

As a meditation teacher and student of mindfulness and leadership for over a decade, I've learned that fostering a culture of creativity in our businesses and societies must begin at the individual level. Creativity cannot be forced or bought using conventional logic and reason. Each of us plays a role in cultivating creativity, and this article will guide you on how to nurture this skill for business and personal development.

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What is creativity?

Creativity is the ability to generate or recognize ideas, patterns or possibilities to bring about new results. Becoming more creative means breaking away from our logical, linear thinking and embracing the non-linear nature of our consciousness, individually and collectively.

To further demonstrate this non-linear nature of creativity, let's explore the creative process in a four-step linear sequence starting with:

1. Start filling: First we need to feed our mind with the information, tools and skills with which we want to become creative, usually with a vision of our desired outcome.
2. Free Join: Once we start brainstorming, the next step is to let our ideas incubate and connect freely with each other. This may involve deliberately pondering our ideas and doing something completely unrelated, returning to the creative endeavor later. Embracing positive distractions is encouraged!
3. Inspiration: As we have done enough mental preparation and our state of mind allows us to associate freely, we will inevitably find ourselves with the spark of inspiration – a new idea to bring about the result we want.
4. Execution: Finally, we test our ideas. If they miss the point, we repeat step 1 or 2 to refine our ideas or desired outcomes.

As mentioned in step 3, finding our spark of inspiration depends on how well we feed our mind with the information and tools we want to create with, and our state of mind before moving into the creative process. How we carry out our minds generally depends on individual creative effort, so for the remainder of this article, we assume that you are competent and skilled with the knowledge and external tools necessary for an innovative vision. Additionally, we will explore the non-linear dynamics of our state of mind and how we can overcome the common barriers we encounter on our path to creation.

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Our emotions measured and scaled

In my years of research on this topic, I came across the works of Sir David R. Hawkins, MD PhD, a man who spent decades testing and calibrating conscious experiences and sharing his findings with the world. In short, he made the significant discovery that our emotional experiences produce electrical energy in our bodies, and the strength of said energy can be measured on a logarithmic scale.

Furthermore, our negative emotions were measured at the lower end of the scale, while our positive emotions were at the higher end. As crazy and irrational as our emotions may seem, a hidden order can be found in our disorder and we can work to optimize our lives for increased creativity and inspiration.

Movement from force to flow

Given that we are not in destitute situations or in the throes of grief, inequality, and shame, we are usually the ones holding us back. In a world where we often rush and hyperactively burn ourselves out to make things happen, we forget that finding alignment with inspiration involves letting go and allowing things to unfold and fall into place naturally. This hyperactive energy and the negative emotions that fuel it are prevalent in today's work culture and are counterproductive to being truly creative.

Below are four tips I share with clients to help them move from strength to flow:

1. Embrace the stillness: Learn to sit down with yourself and do nothing. Creativity is less about being active and more about allowing your mind to spontaneously reveal itself.
2. Understand why: Modern neuroscience has shown us that living our purpose engages the limbic brain, which regulates behavior, decision-making, motivation, emotional regulation, and processing. In contrast, focusing on our actions interacts with the neocortex, which is responsible for rational thought and analytical processing. Aligning with the mission behind your work is thus more powerful than working for work's sake.
3. Detach from your ego: When unchecked, ego it makes us live in a survival mode. Driven by our primal emotions of desire, anxiety, anger, and pride, we create situations that perpetuate these states and prevent us from accessing true creativity in our lives. The key to detachment is understanding our limiting beliefs about ourselves and the world and replacing them with higher principles and values. I wrote the following article on how to do just that.
4. To be in service: If your only goal is to take from the world and not contribute to it, you will remain in survival mode, regardless of your wealth or income. When we focus on understanding human nature and bringing about the highest good for others, we naturally cultivate compassion, inspiration, and thus creativity in our individual lives and in the world around us.

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As I've mentioned before, creativity is a skill that anyone can develop with deliberate practice and an open mind. You can tap into your full creative potential by connecting with your emotions, realizing your purpose, and giving your mind the freedom to explore. Using these principles, I hope you will inspire innovation and achieve meaningful success in your personal and professional life.