Attitudes that Affect the Creative Spirit

By Jonathan Halls

Attitudes that foster Creativity

Numerous attitudes affect your creative spirit.  When you come across a problem, think about your mindset.  Make sure you've adopted a creative fame or mind and you will find it easier to generate all sorts of exciting possibilities.

The main mindsets include:

Curiosity
Always ask, why? This is about never accepting something because, “that’s the way it has always been done.” This combines both imagination and critical thinking skills. 

Curiosity is a skill most of us are born with.  Just watch the way a child learns.  She or he always wants to know whyBut are trained out of as we grow from childhood into maturity.

Challenge
This mindset means you are always challenging the assumptions behind an idea. Why and how can it be done better?

Positive Discontent
This is about always asking, how can I make this better? It’s not about being grumpy and dissatisfied.

Believe any problem can be solved
People who believe a problem can be fixed usually find a way to fix it. Edison for example tried more than 1000 different methods to invent the lightbulb.

Suspension of judgement and criticism
This is an important part of believing that anything is possible. This means when you see an idea, rather than quickly rejecting it because it doesn’t fit into your own mindset, asking yourself, I wonder if in fact this could work?

Attitudes that block Creativity

Just as certain attitudes promote creativity, some attitudes actually block it. You may have experienced these attitudes from other people when you came up with a good idea. These attitudes are often taught to people as they grow up. This can be either in very strict educational settings or within dysfunctional families.

These attitudes include:

Prejudice
We become set in our own ideas so fail to accept other new ideas.

Functional Fixation
We see objects through the name we have given them. For example, we see a mobile or cell phone simply as a phone. Not as a potential GPS device.

Learned Helplessness
Some people simply don’t believe they can do something better. Or they see an idea but believe it’s impossible because they don’t think they’re creative enough. This is dangerously easy to learn just as easy as learned optimism, a concept created by Martin Seligman.