Exploring Your Creative Genius: Episode 7 Revisit
Trust your gut.
There are so many reasons I love exploring the creative powers of our subconscious. As captured in the radio episode, because I trusted my gut and acted on my first impression, I knew within five seconds that the woman I had just seen for the first time would become my wife. I have had a joy-filled marriage for almost 43 years with Marie Nordgren.
First impressions are powerful — they influence our subconscious’ anticipation and interpretation of what will follow — and research from Princeton shows they can also be quite accurate. They found that most people make a first impression of a person within seven seconds. Imagine all the calculations and comparisons and synthesizing and combining your subconscious is engaging in to deliver you that impression so very quickly. A similar research project measured how quickly college students make first impressions of a new professor and found that a five-second piece of video of the professor talking that one group of students watched resulted in the same personality/temperament profiling by students who watched a ten-minute video.
It makes sense, yeah, when you find that neuroscientists have estimated that in the moments your conscious brain processes 50 bits of information, your subconscious is processing 50 million bits—when I go back to check that incredible difference, I am reminded I have chosen one of the most conservative estimates to make this point, many neuroscientists estimate an even greater difference.
To get all that creative pattern recognition power working for you here’s some simple tips.
First a couple to cultivate your subconscious:
Be sensual. Spend as much time as you can off screens and in direct relationship with wonderful, diverse, unexpected, streams of sensual experiences that are fuel for your subconscious cognition. Sit in the dark and listen. Breathe in deeply. Let your fingers linger on the material or fur or texture that attracted you. Get deeply engaged in conversation. Be with nature, be with art. Not studying, just being present to it.
Read something you previously had no interest in and think about the new language or unfamiliar concepts.
And a couple of tips for sparking your creative subconscious to work for you:
You can’t decide between two attractive options or choices? Decide a Heads coin flip is choice A and Tails is choice B, then flip the coin. Whatever the outcome, you are served: If you are happy with the result your subconscious is telling you that’s what you want and if you are unhappy with the result then your subconscious might be saying you didn’t want this option so pick the other.
Take a walk. Your brain’s two hemispheres become synchronized, the pace of your walking relaxes it, and fresh ideas flow.
Take a drive. Or rather, since I don’t urge driving, when you see a trip coming up plan to get as much creative advantage as you can. Do a deep dive into the project or challenge you are working on the day before the drive, then distract yourself from it until the road does it’s thing, your subconscious gets active, and fresh ideas flow.
And every day, stare at green for 30 seconds.
“Exploring Your Creative Genius” takes an expansive view on what it means to be creative and entrepreneurial in an ongoing conversation led by Carl Nordgren — entrepreneur, novelist, and lifelong student with decades of experience growing his own creative capacity and assisting others to do the same in exciting new ways!
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