Jumpstart Your Creativity by Shawn Doyle and Steven Rowell, Steven Rowell Read Free Book Online Page B

your “most creative self.” If you are a parent, you will also hopefully realize the importance of helping your children maintain their creativity well beyond their tenth birthday.
    Here’s what we know today about creativity based on brain science, clinical studies, and practical experience throughout the world:
    â€¢ Creativity is not about IQ or intelligence (95 percent of the world’s population IQ is between 70 and 130).
    â€¢ Creativity is not a talent or special skill that a person either has or doesn’t have.
    â€¢ We all are born with the capability and the potential for creativity.
    â€¢ We are born as creative organisms.
    â€¢ “Serious play” is the combination of professional ideation with childlike playfulness that frees us up to be creative for better solutions and innovation.
    â€¢ Creativity is far too often dismissed as soft and fuzzy and labeled “unproductive time” by many in Western culture, especially in the workplace.
    Today our definition of creativity
is the process of creating ideas that have value
. Imagination,
on the other hand, is the process of bringing to our mind things that are not present to our senses
. Innovation
is the process of putting new ideas into practice, or the implementation of creative ideas
.
    Creativity is the ability to put yourself and others into a mindset, a way of functioning, which allows your natural creativity to function. In this chapter we are going to show you what must be in place and what you must do in order to enable your greatest creativity, your ability to play. We captured these steps as C.R.E.A.T.E:
    C ommit with Confidence and Courage
    R elease Expectations
    E mbrace Play
    A ccept
    T ake time
    E ngage
    Children have no inhibitions when it comes to almost anything, and especially creativity. Children are filled with the wonder of curiosity as a natural state of being. Children embrace their ability to play as a way of life for many reasons—they don’t know to do otherwise, they don’t judge and criticize the art of play, and children are not hung up likeadults are about creativity because they are not afraid to be wrong. Ask a kid, “Who wants to sing?” They all do! One of the biggest blocks to creativity adults experience is their fear of being wrong during the creative process.
    Beth Jarmin conducted a study of children and creativity by giving 1,600 five-year-olds a creativity assessment used to measure NASA engineers’ creativity. Ninety-eight percent of five-year-olds scored in the highly creative range. Tested again at ten years of age, only 32 percent scored in the highly creative range. By the age of fifteen, only 12 percent scored highly creative. Only 2 percent of adults score in the highly creative range.
    The good news is that we are all born with creativity. The bad news is, it gets worked out of us by our current education system, which is a tragedy. While we each may embrace creativity differently, especially in our adult lives, we are all born with creative curiosity, the wonder of possibility, and the openness to play for no other reason than to play.
    The great news is all things are not lost for you in terms of creativity. No matter where you are today, or where you believe you are in terms of your ability to be creative, or what your life history is with regard to creativity, there are simple yet powerful techniques and strategies you can use to be the creative person you were born to be.
    We know in order to maximize your creativity you must be able to reach an open mindset, which is very difficult today due to our daily information overload and task focus. Joyce Carol Oates, in the
Journal of Joyce Carol Oates 1973–1982
, wrote, “‘Keeping busy’ is the remedy for all the ills inAmerica. It’s also the means by which the creative impulse is destroyed.”
    Before we share these strategies with you, let’s first check in on one other