Authors: Sebastian Bailey
This would not be popular.
But if you came back with an earth-shatteringly brilliant and original idea, you would be heralded as a genius.
While the process of reaching into your unconscious mind may be uncomfortable for many people, and your boss or partner might not be too fond of your new sitting-under-a-tree habit, being able to use this very productive but underappreciated mode of thinking can be remarkably powerful—especially when your normal, quick, solution-oriented approach doesn’t seem to be generating any answers.
Where do you start? Here are three tools to open up your unconscious mind:
Einstein said that some of his best ideas occurred not just when he was staring into space but when he was taking a shower. Nobel Prize–winner Leó Szilárd revealed that the concept of a nuclear chain reaction came to him while he was waiting at a London traffic light. Mozart and Tchaikovsky both said that their most creative sequences emerged as spontaneous passages they could hear in their heads. You don’t have to be one of the world’s geniuses for ideas to arrive at unexpected moments. Watching TV in the middle of the night, walking the dog, or driving in rush-hour traffic might unleash your unconscious mind.
This first tool is based on a process called “incubation.” Basically, incubation is allowing your mind to mull over a problem while you’re doing something else. Scheduling incubation time for a problem-solving exercise can be a worthwhile investment. In fact, try to recall your best ideas. Most likely those ideas came to you outside of the office, when you were doing something mundane like buying groceries or taking a bike ride or riding the subway. When you frame a problem and then go about your daily business, other areas of your brain are activated and create connections that can help solve your problem.
In order to get the benefits of incubation, follow these principles:
1. Build in time to allow for incubation. Start thinking about the problem or challenge before you need an answer.
2. Don’t allow yourself to get frustrated or feel under pressure to get an answer. If you do try to force an answer, it is likely to be the wrong one, or at least a weaker version of what you could come up with.
3. Have faith in your unconscious mind. Let it process undisturbed and unhurried.
The most important thing about allowing your intelligent unconscious to shine is getting yourself into the right frame of mind, which means giving your intelligent unconscious the chance to work.
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Think of it this way: You put dinner in the oven and expect it to be cooked in half an hour. Or you plant a tree and assume that if you keep watering it, it will grow on its own. In a similar way, you need to leave a thought in your mind and trust that a creative idea will emerge without trying to force it. You can’t force your dinner to cook faster or a tree to grow more quickly.
Sure, you can go back to that thought every once in a while (like watering a plant), but if you constantly watch it, the growth will seemingly take an eternity.
Another way of dipping into your unconscious mind is sometimes called “reverie” or even “daydreaming.” In this state of thinking, you can generate great creative leaps, in which you make sense of concepts, link different thoughts together, and produce truly original ideas.
“Whenever I get a challenge from a client, I visit churches,” said the creative director from an ad agency. He found that wandering around these holy places was how his best ideas came to him. A CEO we spoke with from Arizona said that when he needs to daydream, he hikes up the side of a mountain. And Sarah, a boutique owner from California, told us that she swims laps in the pool at her gym. All of us will find different ways to stimulate the reverie state of mind. The question is, where will
you
find it?
Daydreaming is a state you surely recognize: that moment between wakefulness and slumber when you half dream, or when you peer out a window and your imagination takes you on a bizarre and quite unexpected journey. We are not talking about reminiscing about the past but about the kind of daydreaming in which you construct a new reality for yourself. You might imagine yourself as a pirate or an astronaut—you can distort or amend reality in such a way that a new situation occurs in your daydream, however freaky or strange that might be. Because you’re imagining being someone other than yourself, all kinds of new situations might appear. Let them appear. This is your creative mind at work.
So, how do you get yourself into this state of daydreaming? The answer is in visualization, or “unconscious imagining,” as it’s sometimes called.
There are three elements that will help you get into the kind of daydreaming that is likely to generate ideas:
The first step in this creative visualization process is to quiet your mind (in other words, stop consciously thinking). One way of achieving this is by focusing on your breathing. When you concentrate on your breathing, you can begin to let all your other thoughts disappear. Sure, it sounds a bit simple. However, when you focus on something so basic, your mind can begin to wander.
A special location is a visualized setting where you can relax and think clearly while feeling safe and comfortable. Your location can be real or imagined, like a beach, park, stream, cave, forest, or a place you have read about in a book, seen in a film, or simply created yourself.
A creative guide is a visualized guide whom you trust, value, and respect. It is someone who is wise and original. Again, the guide can be based on a real or an imaginary person. They can be a person, a character, an animal, or another type of being.
DAYDREAMING: LEARN THE PROCESS AND EXPERIENCE THE WONDER
The process of creative daydreaming requires you to use all your senses as much as possible to bring ideas to life. By using sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste, you make the experience much richer and more engaging. Let’s look at the process of daydreaming in step-by-step detail:
Step One | Breathe in deeply through your nose, filling both the top and bottom of your lungs. Breathe out easily through your mouth. Concentrate on the rhythm of your breaths; really focus on inhaling and exhaling, and nothing else. |
Step Two | Let your thoughts drift away. If a thought comes into your mind, imagine it as a cloud that will be blown away with your next breath. Don’t fight your thoughts; just let them drift in and then drift away again. |
Step Three | Imagine arriving at your special location. Use all your senses to visualize this place with as much detail as possible so you feel like you are really there. You should imagine how it smells, what sounds you can hear, and how calm and relaxed you feel. Spend a few moments enjoying the tranquillity of your special location and drifting into a deeper state of relaxation. |
Step Four | Now imagine you can see a figure moving toward you from the distance. As the figure gets closer, you see that it is your creative guide, who has come to help you with your objective. Imagine your guide arriving next to you, wherever you are, and you greeting them. You feel relaxed and inspired in the presence of your guide and are very happy to be in their company. |
Step Five | Imagine you are explaining your objective to your guide. You may want to explain this verbally or write it down to inform your guide—whatever you prefer. |
Step Six | Wait for a response, confident that your guide will help you come up with an original and innovative solution. |
Your guide may talk to you, give you an object, or even show you a scene. The symbol, object, or scene may be abstract or cryptic, and you may need to spend a few minutes deciphering the various symbols. Having thought about what the symbol or gesture may represent, you can then relate it back to your objective and see what it may mean. You mustn’t worry about your ideas being too strange or difficult to implement—part of the creative process is simply generating ideas.
People find that they come up with ideas they never would have reached using the more logical approaches to problem solving, or at least an initial thought that, with incubation, leads to a great idea. You might find it difficult to self-censor ideas when using this mode of thinking, which is a good thing. Censor-free, you’ll surely generate interesting and quirky ideas.
This process doesn’t work for everyone right away. It improves with practice; so if you enjoyed it, use it regularly. The more practiced you become at visualization, the more likely you are to generate useful, interesting, and creative ideas.
In 1965, Bob Dylan found himself writing the words to a song and “a long piece of vomit twenty pages long” is how he later described his outpourings. To begin with, there was no structure, no rhyme, no direction—just “an ill-formed mass of words,” in the opinion of one critic. But as Dylan went back to what he’d written, sifted through it, and started to edit and shape it, he knew he’d come up with something special. His “vomit” became the lyrics to “Like a Rolling Stone.” What Dylan did was something called stream-of-consciousness writing.
Stream-of-consciousness writing is like recording a stream of your consciousness. When you capture all your thoughts as they occur, it is difficult to self-evaluate or self-correct. In fact, as you capture your thoughts in real time, you are more likely to drift into new and unexpected places in your unconscious mind.
To do this type of writing, find a space where you are comfortable, making sure you have a pen and some paper. Then get into a relaxed state of mind (the previous daydreaming exercise will help you accomplish this).
Start writing as quickly as you can and without thinking. If the flow of writing is broken, then stop, go to a new line, and start writing again. If you want to, use a trigger word to get your sentences going. Be prepared for your ideas to come from a deeper, more intuitive place, and don’t be alarmed if they are odd—when you explore in this more extreme form of free association, you are more likely to produce ideas that are unusual and out of context; after all, that’s the point.
• Let go. No one is watching and no one will see what you’ve written. Let it rip.
• Write as fast as you can.
• Have a trigger word. If you dry up, don’t worry, but use your trigger word to get you going again.
• There should be some grammatical sense (rather than just a string of words), but it doesn’t need to be perfect or a work of literature.
• Use this writing as a starting point. It won’t give you “the answer,” but it may lead you to it.
• Review, amend, or adjust afterward, not as you’re writing.
In the 2000 film
Finding Forrester
, Sean Connery plays the character of a successful author who is teaching a young man how to write. He explains, “You write your first draft with your heart. You rewrite with your head.” Stream-of-consciousness writing is like writing with your heart.
People often find that the unconscious mind is a great place to start the creative process. Still, your ideas then need to be significantly refined, improved, discarded, or amended before they can be used. In other words, once your tortoise mind has come up with the ideas, it is time to switch to hare-brain mode to analyze them. For the first time in a long while you will be turning your daydreams into reality.
GIVE YOUR MIND A WORKOUT
1. Commit to one week of doing stream-of-consciousness writing five minutes every day.
2. Set a recurring time, pick a random word or image, and just start to write. Do this early in the day, when your mind isn’t bogged down, or right before you need to do something requiring a creative mind-set. Notice how you become more comfortable with the technique as the week progresses.
This chapter, and this book, include many different techniques for coming up with creative ideas. Typically it’s your tortoise mind that comes up with the ideas and your hare brain that analyzes them, but what would happen if you used your tortoise mind as a first stage of analysis? Using the skills you learned about incubation and daydreaming, take a recent solution to a thorny problem and practice a
what if
reflection.
A
what if
reflection involves imagining the outcome of a decision and seeing how you feel about it, how your body reacts.
1. First, find a quiet place free from distractions.
2. Take a moment in this place to consider the idea or solution you came up with, and think of other similar decisions you’ve had to make.
3. Then consider the solution or other choices that are available and play each out in your mind as if it is happening. Visualize the solution or outcome of the decision in detail.
4. As you mull over and visualize each potential outcome, notice how your body reacts. Your analytical mind is good at generating an idea of the future, but give your intuitive mind some time and space to provide a feeling about this outcome. Try different outcomes and see which one feels best.
5. Then ask yourself honest, probing questions about why certain outcomes don’t feel right and why other ones do feel right.
This is a good technique to use whenever you want to encourage your intuitive mind to speak up or you’re faced with a tricky situation and cannot decide which path to take.
M
ORNING COFFEE, viral YouTube videos, and a seemingly endless string of updates on Facebook have become a daily ritual. But something not so pleasant has also become a morning ritual: stress. A survey by the American Psychological Association suggests that stress levels have actually declined—but it’s not because Americans are feeling less stress. Instead, the survey suggests it’s because we’re getting used to it.
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