Exploring Your Creative Genius: Episode 68
The show this past week kicked off a series of tips and exercises for growing your creatively entrepreneurial capacities. I started us off with the 30 Day CAP and my strong recommendation that you give it a try. This is a wonderful creative refresh and at the same time a powerful accelerant to your creative growth.
It’s simple and it’s fun.
For 30 consecutive days you:
- Do something you’ve never done before, or
- Do something you do frequently but in an opposite or radically different fashion.
An example of A: I have never brushed my teeth while showering so today I will.
An example of B: I brush my teeth right handed. Today I will brush them left handed.
With a bit of thought, as these examples show, accomplishing a 30 Day CAP can be integrated into your daily routine so it doesn’t take extra time.
Research indicates that completing a 30 Day CAP can improve your Divergent Discovery capacity — the ability to identify lots of solutions for a problem, lots of options for an opportunity — by nearly 80% and your Convergent Creation talents — taking the best pieces from your ideas and shaping them into something new — improves by 20%.
What you’re doing is kicking the status quo in the butt just a little bit every day and soon you’ve loosened its shackles so that new ideas and perspectiveS emerge.
More examples: I have never stood in line at a coffee shop and turned and introduced myself to the person behind me. That’s column A. Tonight I will sleep with my head at the foot of the bed. That’s column B.
Tip: Planning the first three or four days of activities seems to serve many. Then being more spontaneous as the 30 Day CAP continues is fun for most. And bring some whimsy to your approach!
More examples: Some folks declare a digital sabbath, column A. Some folks eat supper for breakfast and breakfast for supper for a day, column B.
To be clear: The new behavior of the day is for that day only and need not be repeated as part of the 30 Day CAP; each day is a new activity.
Don’t be overly bothered if you aren’t sure in which category a behavior fits — is eating dinner off a plate while standing up column A or B? You know when it’s different.
“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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