Creativity Is Your Key To Living A Wealthy Life

Everything you have ever imagined for yourself – good, bad, indifferent and darn right mind bogglingly outrageous – is possible. 

That’s not up for debate BUT whether you actually get to experience all those things is another matter.

The biggest barrier standing between you and your rich, juicy, wealthy life is… well it’s you actually.

The part of you that is fixated on the HOW and keeps dredging up the same old way you KNOW you have to follow to get debt free, to have the home you want, to be a property investor, to grow your business, to experience that amazing adventure … you fill in the blanks of all the things you want to experience, have and achieve in your life.

As you go over the same old “how” solution using your rational conscious mind, all the reasons why it can’t happen come flooding up from your subconscious reminding you of all the things that are missing in your HOW solution. 

The time, the skills, the connections and resources you don’t have – stopping you in your tracks and causing you frustration at best and far worse – you believing your dreams are not possible for you.

The problem is we are used to our mundane way of thinking about solutions. 

Psychologists call this “functional fixedness.” 

We see only the obvious way of looking at a problem—the same comfortable way we always think about it – even when the lack of a solution isn’t comfortable at all. 

We have all heard the saying “Doing the same thing and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity” we laugh and point fingers – ha, ha – we chuckle and think to ourselves – “Luckily I’m not like that” and promptly go back to the fixed thought railway tracks we are stuck on, continue with our fixedness and wondering why we are not experiencing the things we say we really want.

Another barrier to finding great solutions is self-censorship, that inner voice of judgment that confines our creative spirit within the boundaries of what we deem and believe is acceptable.

It’s the voice that whispers to you…

…“They’ll think I’m foolish,” 

…“I have to drive this car, live in this house, send my kids to that school, have a job, do it this way or else …” 

Or without even letting the idea evolve that voice jumps in with “That will never work.”

We have to learn to recognise this voice of judgment as a small irrelevant part of us that believes it’s keeping us safe, and have the courage to thank it for its contribution whilst sending it to the back seat with a large bag of candy to distract it and protect us from its destructive advice.

What this “functional fixedness” and “destructive judgment” does is suppress the most important wealth creation characteristic there is. Creativity.

After years of delving into the characteristics of people who create and live amazingly rich, fulfilled lives no matter what their background was, I believe – no – I know, that this is the most important characteristic you can nurture within yourself.

Actively go out and get creative. 

Develop your creative muscles like your life depends on it. 

Your rich, juicy life does depend on it. 

Contrary to popular belief, creativity, like being great with money, is a learned skill and there are literally hundreds of ways you can expand this part of you.

Here are just a few ideas to start with to get your creative juices flowing.

Shake Things Up

So often we go through our days on auto pilot. 

What we see every day becomes ordinary to us. 

People, sights, sounds, and smells seem to disappear from our awareness, killing our creativity and shutting ourselves off from the stream of possibility and opportunity that is streaming past us every second.

To a certain degree, we like situations and people to be predictable; 

We enjoy the habitual and tend to avoid surprises. 

But there is a downside to routine: We can easily become fixed in our ways of seeing and being. 

Our expectation of how things are supposed to be replaces our capacity to perceive opportunity. 

This can range from not seeing the new colour or cut of your partner’s hair to not seeing a new approach to your work or a fresh way to have the things you desire with the resources already at your fingertips.

One way of dealing with this numbing effect of routine and ritual is to invent a brand-new pattern, a fresh way of seeing the commonplace that will ignite new solutions for you to create the life you really want.

Each day, do one thing different from your normal routine. 

You might go to bed at a new time, if you normally shower – have a bath, sit in a different chair, tune into a different radio station, listen to a genre of music you don’t think you’ll like, take a new route to work or school. Eat something you’ve never tried before or which you have always said you don’t like but haven’t tried for years. Change the order in which you do your daily activities.

The more resistance you feel to an idea you come up with the greater the probability is it will add vooma (oomph) to your creativity. 

Strike up a conversation with a particularly difficult person—maybe someone you actively avoid—and treat this person in a completely new way. 

The more the person rubs you the wrong way or irritates you and the more entrenched the routine is, the more likely you are to shake up your habitual ways of seeing things and experience floods of awesome new creativity to fuel your life.

The key is not to think about HOW to change things or be creative or how the specific action will make you creative – just friggin do it. 

Make these changes for no other reason than just for the sake of it.

Get Your Child Like Goggles On

See the everyday with fresh eyes and reignite the wonder of the ordinary.

Every day for one week pick a new ordinary taken-for-granted “thing” in your life each day and consciously notice it.

Begin with something as basic as water. The idea is to notice the number of times a day you come in contact with it, the extraordinary number of ways it appears in your life: from a hot shower, to the clouds building on the horizon, to the drool dripping from the dogs jowls as they leave the water bowl, to the delicate beads of dew settled on the leaves outside your window, to the water feature tickling in the distance, to the warm beverage that soothes your soul, to the ice cubes clinking in your glass. 

Think of all the things water contributes to, the things that need water to happen – from the water slide at a theme park, to a steam engine.

This technique of taking things out of their ordinary context and creating a new pattern for them is a way of making the familiar strange and opening them to a fresh and creative approach.

Put a Net Up To Capture The Twilight Zone

Brain specialists tell us that the brain-wave pattern of a preadolescent child in the waking state is rich in theta waves. These waves are much rarer in adults, occurring most frequently during the hypnagogic state—a twilight zone bordering on sleep, where dreams and reality mix.

I often joke that my muse very irritatingly comes to me just as I am falling asleep. Exasperatingly, she comes charging in just as I am drifting off into my night time wonderland, flooding me with amazing ideas and thoughts when I’ve got no inclination to grab a notebook and capture all these juicy snippets.

These dreamlike moments as we fall asleep are comparable to a child’s wildly creative wakeful consciousness where they naturally embrace the zany and the bizarre, the silly and the terrifying – open to fresh perceptions, infinite possibility and wild ideas.

With puberty, the child’s brain changes to resemble an adult’s. 

The theta brain waves and the wildly creative flair of the child begin to fade. But all is not lost, we can find ways to tap the richness of theta states and all the wealth they bring. 

Thomas Edison found a way to put the hypnagogic state to work. 

He would doze off in a chair with his arms and hands draped over the armrests holding a ball bearing in each hand. Below each hand on the floor were two pie plates and when he drifted into the state between waking and sleeping, his hands would naturally relax and the ball bearings would drop on the plate waking him up with a load clank. Immediately, Edison would make notes on any ideas that had come to him in this magical state.

I’ve had a notepad next to my bed for a while now, but more often than not, as I’m drifting off I say “oh I’ll remember that in the morning” but I don’t. 

So, I’ve committed to putting Edison’s technique to the test and have started an afternoon creative snooze session with my notepad right next to my chair, a dog treat in each hand and a drooling dog ready to pounce as my hands relax.

Are you up for giving it a go?

Giving Your Conscious Mind a Simple Repetitive Task

Distracting your conscious mind is rather important to let your creative unconscious have some air time. 

You can do this in a multitude of ways but it needs to be something that doesn’t burn all your mind power.

You can do this through vigorous exercise or taking a walk or the most effective method I have found is concentrating on some simple, repetitive task. 

I was recently helping to do the flowers for a wedding and needed to create forty seven identical table decorations which involved stuffing flowers into a floral oasis in the same pattern over and over again. I sat on the floor with all the goodies around me and stuffed away. It was marvelous. 

Meditating, stretching, playing an instrument, drawing and doodling, dancing, baking—these are other ways that people have of surrendering to their own creativity.

Let Go To Let In

When people reflect on those times when they have been most fully creative and expressive, they often describe it as a “letting-go” experience. 

It is at that point that creativity occurs.

Letting go can also release and unblock your creative juices. Here are two ways to help move you let go:

1. Letting go physically 

Sit in a chair with your hands resting comfortably on your legs. 

Tense your legs and keep them tense as you successively tense your pelvis, rib cage, shoulders, neck, and jaw.

Hold all of that tense for a moment.

Now relax. You have just let go. How did it feel?

2. Letting go mentally

Imagine that something you mentally carry around with you—a strong emotion, belief, or thought that blocks your way—is actually represented by something you are wearing.

It can be a shoe, watch, ring, or necktie.

Imagine that this mental block is contained entirely within the article you are wearing. The thought and the article have now fused into one.

Now, take it off!

Observe what you are experiencing as you let go of this mental obstacle.

Drop me a mail on [email protected] and let me know which of these techniques you are going to use to boost your freedom journey, how your creative mission is coming along, how increasing your creativity has made your life richer and the solutions you have come up with to create your rich, juicy life with your reinvigorated creative skills.

Huge Love,

Ann