Creativity is a valuable skill that can benefit children in many ways, from problem-solving to self-expression. However, as life becomes more serious and structured, it can be difficult for kids to tap into their imaginative side. So how can you encourage your child to think creatively?
In this article, we’ll explore some tips on how to encourage your child to think creatively, based on the process of Freaky Thinking. Developed by author and business consultant Chris Thomason, this process can help children (and adults) boost their creative thinking and make it second nature. From finding the best time and place to focus on a topic to recognizing the power of incubation, these tips will help your child develop their creativity and confidence for a lifetime of learning and success.
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Unfortunately, one day your child will no longer see a pirate spyglass or a trumpet when they hold the inside of a loo roll – they’ll just see recycling. As life becomes more serious, creative thinking can be trickier to tap into.
But you can help your child train to be a creative thinker their whole life. Here are a few tips to encourage your child to think creatively (which will also work for you) based on Freaky Thinking, a process that boosts a person’s preferred way of thinking to help the creative process become second nature.
Find the best where
Creative thinking can take place anywhere, at any time, but some places and times are better than others. One of the most challenging locations is at a desk or table with a notepad and pen in front of us. Research has proven that performing some kind of undemanding task produces better thinking. This could be walking the dog, taking a bath or shower, even doing chores about the house such as washing dishes, dusting, vacuuming, cleaning windows (good luck convincing your kids with that one though). It needs to be a light activity that doesn’t occupy us completely. Trying out different activities will help find your child’s personal sweet spot.
Find the best when
Roald Dahl wrote for two hours in the morning, and two hours in the afternoon, with a very, very long lunch break in between. But when writing Harry Potter, JK Rowling would write from 9am to 3pm. There are morning people and there are evening people. Finding the best time for us is key to accessing our most creative thinking. There’s no point in your child trying to do good thinking when they’re feeling tired.
Recognise that your optimal time is precious
If you want to do your best thinking, try to combine the optimal time and place. If it’s in the morning rather than in the evening, and walking the dog is a useful activity, then volunteering to take the early shift is best. Re-organising, scheduling, or negotiating as appropriate ensures regular access to our best creative thinking time/activity.
Choose where to focus
We need to have a focus for our thinking on the topic we want to address. This is called our killer question. This is an important, enduring question that hasn’t yet been answered well enough, and which will deliver significant value for us. If a killer question is too big and over-encompassing to be tackled in one go, chunk it down into component parts, and think about these individually (the how to eat an elephant strategy – one bite at a time). When ideas form that address each part, integrate them together to form overall solutions to the killer question.
Incubate ideas for later
It is a common experience that when not able to recall a small fact (like the title of a song or the name of someone we used to live next door to) when we give up and forget about remembering the detail, after a time (could be minutes or hours), the answer suddenly comes to us unbidden. This is our subconscious mind working on our unresolved issue in the background.
A similar thing happens when we are working on a killer question. Even when we are not actively thinking about the topic, our subconscious is working on it for us. Each time we come back to the question or task, our subconscious has advanced our thinking by finding a new perspective to consider, or reinterpreting an element of it in some way. Each gap in our thinking encourages subconscious incubation – Roald Dahl’s long lunch breaks likely did more than fill his tummy.
Find the Win Quicklies
Win Quicklies are ideas—or elements of our bigger idea—that can swiftly test or prove an interesting part of our solution. A win quickly can be a useful proof that something much larger has the potential for success and value. It may be the case that a number of Win Quicklies are actually more beneficial that implementing one bigger, slower-moving project. But even when that’s not the case, nothing boosts our confidence more than seeing one of our ideas delivering value.
Boost creative confidence
Recipes for success can vary—different people need different ingredients—but a common component is a belief in our ability to attain a desired level of performance, and in relation to creative thinking, this is often referred to as creative confidence. The greater the creative confidence, the easier it is to learn and perform a new task, and the easier it is to persevere through to success. The more we apply our thinking process, the better results we achieve, which makes us more confident to pose harder killer questions. This, in turn, requires us to apply the process more-effectively which helps us achieve better outcomes, and so the cycle goes on indefinitely.
Let us know if you try out these tips to encourage your child to think creatively in a comment below!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chris Thomason is the author of Freaky Thinking, a process that helps individuals in organisations to think differently about important topics and issues. Chris is founder of Ingenious Growth which helps organisations change their thinking to boost innovation, productivity, profits and most importantly, staff satisfaction. After buying a failing manufacturing company and turning it into one of the largest in its sector, Chris now teaches the innovative ways of thinking that lead to his business success. Chris is author of eight business books including The Idea Generator, Freaky Thinking, and Excellence in Freaky Thinking. Chris’s clients include UPS, Canon, O2, Vodafone, Roche Pharmaceuticals, Touchnote, Lloyds Bank, Toyota, HSBC, Scottish Widows, South African Airways, American Express, and many more.
