Adrian Berlutti
We owe helpful inventions and solutions to gigantic problems to our creative thinking. Sometimes, as a creative person, you may feel your imagination is limited when faced with a problem or when trying to create a new work. Thankfully, there are many ways to expand your vision, and here are twenty of them.
Read Multiple Genres of Books
Many people easily agree that books are a great source for building an imaginative mind, but reading is not enough. You have to read widely. Your preferred genre has a lot, but there are more worlds to discover, and you may not get to enjoy them if you don’t stretch your reading boundaries.
Engage in Daily Freewriting
Freewriting is like brainstorming; it is just done on paper. Just as you allow your brain to roam when you brainstorm, that’s how you allow your pen—or fingers on your keypad—to flow freely. Forget about writing rules and just pour out your thoughts for about 15-30 minutes.
Practice Mindfulness Meditation
On the one hand, meditation helps you relax; on the other, it triggers your brain’s ability to remember and imagine things. Meditation is quite a simple exercise—breathing while pushing away unnecessary thoughts. While you do this, you can allow interesting thoughts and visions to flow.
Experiment With Art
Imagination is key in art. Thankfully, art comes in many forms, like painting, sculpting, and digital forms, so there is something for you no matter what art you prefer. Try something new. Attempt to create objects you’ve never created or dabble in a form of art you haven’t touched yet.
Play “What If”
“What if” scenarios might seem childish, but they’re great for building imagination. Ask yourself or your friends fun questions like, “What if we had three arms?” or ” What if animals could talk?” Think about them and hear your friends’ answers. You’ll learn new perspectives.
Immerse Yourself in Nature
Inspiration and creativity know no end with nature. The oceans, forests, sky, and hills can all help you develop a more imaginative mind. Spend time sitting by or walking in such natural features. For those who live in big cities, you should visit rural areas to experience nature.
Collaborate With Creative People
Creatives already have wild visions from which you can benefit. Don’t just admire their works; get closer to them. Collaborate with them. Doing so lets you tap into their minds and get new, unique, interesting perspectives, processes, and methods. So, surround yourself with such people.
Dream Journaling
Sometimes, dreams are so fantastical that they defy logic; hence, we tend to discard them as “just another dream.” What we don’t understand is that these are unique and possibly once-in-a-lifetime perspectives we are discarding. If we journal our dreams, we may find lovely hidden ideas.
Learn Something New
Things we know determine how imaginative we can be. That’s why it’s advisable to keep learning—not just what fits into the stuff we currently do but expanding to concepts that are strange to us. By trying our hands at new things and listening to or reading from professionals, we can become more creative.
Play Imaginative Games
Several games are based on your power to think. One of them is the world-famous Dungeons & Dragons. Play these games often. A good idea to keep engaging your mind is to start a game day with your friends so you can play it regularly and tap from their visions, too.
Practice Creative Problem-Solving
You probably already have ways to handle problems. For example, when a chair is old, you’ll throw it away and buy a new one. However, you can use these problematic situations to get creative. Think of a unique alternative instead, like repurposing instead of throwing.
Write Stories or Poems
Fictitious stories and poems often have worlds based on the writer’s imagination. Every time you make up a story, you build something that never existed, sometimes from the root. That’s your vision at work. It doesn’t matter if you’ve written one before; you can start now.
Attend Art Shows and Performances
You can also become more imaginative by watching the creativity of others. Performance, musical, and other artists often build their works from their visions. If you watch and listen to their works, you train your brain without knowing it.
Travel to New Places
When you travel to places you’ve never been to, you’ll see perspectives you’ve never experienced, no matter how little. It could be how they celebrate wins, build homes, raise children, solve problems, etc. Even if it’s a short trip, go and interact with people and ask questions.
Daydream
It’s time to stop seeing daydreaming as an unproductive activity and start seeing it as a way to stretch your vision. When you daydream, you have control over where you take your mind to. Daydreaming can go as far and wide as you want, and you can fantasize.
Improvise
If you forget something, try improvising instead of rushing to fix it. You can experiment with improvisation in cooking, painting, singing, or other activities. The end result might surprise you, and it’s perfectly fine not to know where it will lead.
Revisit Childhood Curiosities
Children are the champions of creative thinking, as they are more concerned with loving happily than following logic. Becoming a child again can help you with expanding your vision. Go back to the stuff you loved and did when you were much younger, like building Legos and sand castles.
Watch Imaginative Films
There are many movies, from cartoons to live-action, that aren’t based on reality but on the creativity of the creators. Dabbling in them isn’t a waste of precious time, as some would say, but a way to see what goes on in the minds of other creators.
Break Routines
While routines give us comfort, they stifle our creativity to some extent. But by shaking things up, we can fuel our imagination. Among the ways you can switch up your routine are rearranging your home, changing your regular meals, taking new routes to work, or adjusting your sleep time.
Revisit Historical Events
Not every idea has to be fresh; some can be inspired by events that happened long before you were born. Throughout history, humans have made smart moves and achieved lovely results. Read their stories, try to enter their minds, and you may be able to imagine more.
