3. |
Break Your Patterns |
It always amazes me how little people know about their company, coworkers, or the world around them. Many otherwise intelligent people become stuck in the rut of their daily lives, doing the same things each day, driving the same route to work, eating the same breakfast, and so on, rarely deviating from their patterns. In fact, we are all most likely to frequent the same five to ten restaurants, even though many communities have fifty or more.
We tend to eat the same five or six vegetables, even though there are more than ten times that to choose from. We drive the same roads to and from work, school, and home, hang out with the same friends, and engage in the same social events. We listen to the same music, watch the same TV shows, and on and on. It’s no wonder people are bored.
If you want to have a happier, more interesting life at work and at home, start breaking your patterns. An added benefit is that you will be stimulating your creativity as a result. By changing your everyday patterns and habitual processes, you will be creating new neural connections in your brain.
Simply changing your route to and from work will expose you to new visual and auditory stimuli. As you drive, ride, or walk a new route, you will see things you have never noticed before. This is why so many creative people, Steven Spielberg among them, go for long drives in their cars to stimulate ideas.
Do you take the same actions in your work or business each day? Most of us follow certain routines, and while there is nothing wrong with this, doing so can stifle our creativity and prevent us from major breakthroughs. What could you do to shake up your routine? Could you change some of your daily actions? For example, would changing the way you handle email enable you to take a new action or complete a more urgent task? I found myself answering my email first thing in the morning, as though the sender was sitting there at 6:00 AM, waiting for my answer. This habit prevented me from doing something more important.
Scheduling a specific time to answer my email has freed up my early-morning time for writing, the most important component of my work. Morning is the time I write best, since my mind is still clear and calm after my morning meditation and quiet time. Delaying email until later in the morning has also provided me with the opportunity to get back to my morning exercise, another task that is critical to my well-being.
When I go out to do errands by car, if possible I follow a different route to my destination each time. Over time, I have found this time to be one of my best opportunities for brainstorming ideas. I can capture any new ideas I have in the car by dictating them into my iPhone.
The more you can shake up your routines, the more you will stimulate your creative mind. If you want to try an interesting experiment, when you’re getting dressed in the morning put your pants on the opposite way from how you usually do it: if you usually place your right leg in first, this time put your left leg in first. Be sure to stand where you can sit quickly since this may well cause you to lose your balance — that is how strongly we are conditioned to our daily routines.
When you take a shower, wash your feet first instead of your face and notice how strange it feels. Take surface roads instead of the freeway next time you have to drive, and see how that feels.
The more you take advantage of opportunities to stimulate your mind, the more you will find new creative ideas popping into your head and the more likely you will be to produce breakthrough results.