Why Not Go on a Creative Date?
‘If you want to discover your creativity, and make more insightful decisions, then read this book.’ Professor Mark Williams, Emeritus Professor of Clinical Psychology, University of Oxford.
Exclusive extract from Mindfulness for Creativity: Adapt, Create and Thrive in a Frantic World
Understanding your own mind – and how it unwittingly ties itself in knots – is one of the central skills of mindfulness. This was traditionally done through meditation but there are other ways too. One if these is consciously breaking your ingrained habits of thinking and behaving. According to a study carried out at Duke University, most people spend around 45 percent of their time running through one or more of their habits1. If you think that’s bad, others estimate that it may be as high as 80 percent…. Clearly, that’s the antithesis of creativity.
Habits can can trap you in dull and unproductive states of mind and drive anxiety, stress and depression. But the converse is also true. Each time you break a habit you become a little more mindful – a little more conscious of the world around you. It helps you to reconnect with the world and all of its beauty. It helps you to see everything in a new light, to conjure up new ideas, and to develop the courage necessary to follow them wherever they should lead.
The Habit Releasers in my new book Mindfulness for Creativity will help you to break down the negative habits of thinking and behaving that force you into approaching problems – and the world – in the same old unproductive ways. They will help you to progressively ‘jump the tracks’ into new and more creative ways of thinking. They are generally interesting to do and require very little effort.
One of my favourite Habit Releasers is the Creative Date. This is simply a block of time for you to nurture your inner spirit or creative flame. As the years pass, it’s all too easy to forget the small things that used to make you happy and fed your soul. The pressures of life and work can erode life in myriad subtle ways. Think back to a time when you were half your current age. Were you more spontaneously creative? Were you ruled by serendipity? A creative date gives you the necessary time and space to rediscover this serendipity.
And what will you do? Anything at all. It can be a visit to a museum or art gallery or perhaps a trip to the cinema. You might like to go and see a car race, climb a mountain or swim in the sea. Or perhaps watch a sunrise or sunset, visit a castle, go to a music festival or learn how to be a fire-eater, a circus clown or how to ride a unicycle. Try to approach this Habit Releaser with a spirit of open-hearted playfulness. It’s not just children who learn best through play – we all do. If you’re short of ideas you can look at the Appendix 1 of Mindfulness for Creativity for inspiration. The essential aspect of a creative date is to simply do what you need to do to set your spirit free. So much of life is planned, ordered and hemmed in that it’s important to throw caution to the wind and trust to luck. And when you do so, you’ll find that your mind opens up to new possibilities – creative possibilities. Your senses will come alive once again and your spirit will be renewed.
Before you go any further, it’s important to allocate the time for your date now. If you don’t, it is likely to be squeezed out by other, seemingly more important, priorities. That’s the nature of the autopilot, it tends to reassert itself. It’s also important to defend this time against all comers. It’s your time to spend as you wish. It should be for you alone. Don’t feel the need to bring along friends, family members or your partner. If you feel guilty, gently remind yourself that this will be for everyone’s benefit in the long run because it will help rekindle your innate creativity and love of life, without which your life and theirs are greatly diminished.
If you wish, you can make the creative date a regular feature of your life.
You can download the first chapter of Mindfulness for Creativity: Adapt, Create and Thrive for free from here:
Or direct from the publishers HERE:
1 Neal, D. T., Wood, W. and Quinn, J. M. (2006), ‘Habits: a repeat performance’, Current Directions in Psychological Science, 15(4), pp. 198–202; Verplanken, B. and Wood, W. (2006), ‘Interventions to break and create consumer habits’, Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, 25(1), pp. 90–103.
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