Creativity is crucial for business success through business development, innovation and growth. It’s also a fundamental part of what it means to be human. And yet we often neglect it through our fast paced, information overloaded ways of living.
In business it’s easy to fall into the trap of believing that we have to be busy doing stuff all the time. We fill every hour with “busyness” and we work long hours. We set high expectations of our teams with Key Performance Indicators and sales targets. We have To-Do lists that can never be completed. We don’t take time out to get creative.
When we work in this way over time, without balance, we will inevitably become stressed, burnt out and exhausted. We may ultimately develop mental and physical illness and grind to a halt.
If we add to this the time outside of work that we sit glued to our phone or other devices, it’s not surprising that we’re losing our inclination to be creative.
As children we are instinctively creative through play. It’s how we learn and develop new skills. But then, as we grow older, we develop the belief that play is frivolous and only for kids. We don’t have time for it.
I often hear people say that they aren’t creative. Perhaps we adopt a belief that we are not creative because of a time when someone mocked our attempt to draw or make a pot or whatever activity we were engrossed in as a child. The humiliation we felt when we were made fun of created a belief in our minds that we are not creative. And so we shun creativity, at great cost.
Prolonged exposure to working solely with the left-hand side of our brain – the side that deals with logic, language, numbers and reasoning – without activities associated with the right-hand side of the brain means that we are losing our ability to be creative.
The impact of too much left brain thinking for business is that we stop innovating, we repeat the same old ways of doing things without progressing, we fall behind the competition, customers get bored and move on, and we become outdated.
Conversely, right hand brain activities are things like feelings, visualisation, imagination, arts, intuition and rhythm. It’s where our creativity happens, and the proverbial light bulb moments appear. We need to be spending more time engaging with our creative brains.
Designers, artists and others who work in the creative sectors work creatively every day and they know that space and down time are vital for ideas generation. But some sectors – professional services for example – don’t take time proactively to get creative every day due to pressures of deadlines and the assumption that creativity is not for them.
Instead of always doing, we need to allow ourselves time to get creative to stimulate the right-hand side of the brain. It’s easy to think that doodling a pencil sketch idly on paper is a waste of time when that to-do list needs tackling, but it’s when we are engaged in such activities that the light bulb comes on and we create new possibilities for our business.
In his book, ‘Too Fast To Think’, businessman Chris Lewis interviews many successful entrepreneurs who ascribe their success to taking time proactively every day to do something creative, whether that’s listening to classical music, horse riding, or reading, to name a few creative activities.
There are endless ways to get creative and engage more with the right-hand side of our brain.
To encourage activation of the right-hand side of the brain for business success, I’ve designed four business wellbeing retreats for 2023. The first is “The Get Creative Retreat” which will be held on the North Yorkshire coast from 25th – 27th January.
This 2-day event will create a space for people to get away from the daily grind of business. Changing our environment is often sufficient to get us thinking differently and allow fresh ideas to emerge.
During the retreat, there will be a range of creative activities and workshops to choose from. They’ve been especially designed to enable participants to tap into their creativity and get fresh ideas and inspiration for business success. It will be a wonderful opportunity to get 2023 off to a brilliant start. For more information go to https://rosjones.co.uk/services/retreats/
