Divergent Thinking

This kind of exercise develops flexibility in your thinking skills, which will really help you solve problems more effectively.

http://www.homedit.com/28-decorative-and-creative-ideas-with-cups-for-mothers-day/

Divergent thinking requires you to come up with many solutions to a problem or many different ideas about a topic. Any ideas that you have are valid and anything you can imagine is acceptable. This kind of thinking requires you to be wildly and uninhibitedly imaginative. Forget about what is practical and appropriate, and especially what is known, and stretch your imagination.

http://morguefile.com/archive

Yes, you can imagine yourself in different situations (what if you were stranded on Mars or on an island after a plane crash, or what if you had to create a gift with what you have in your home instead of buying something or what if ...).

 As with divergent thinking exercises, the basic rules are:

• Work as quickly as possible and aim to finish in 10 minutes.
• The quantity of ideas is more important than quality.
• Do not analyse, criticise or judge your ideas. Just write them all down without analysing them.
• Write in shorthand rather than in full sentences so that you can work more quickly.
• Have fun!

As quickly as you can, write down all the different uses you can think of for:

a rake
a bookcase
a picture frame
a shirt
a spoon
a table

© SD Vahl, 2012
SD Vahl hereby asserts her right to be identified as the author of this work.
All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.

Associative Thinking

Here is a quick exercise for practising your creative thinking skills.

Imagine a multidimensional spider's web in the early morning covered with dew drops. And every dew drop contains the reflection of all the other dew drops. And, in each reflected dew drop, the reflections of all the other dew drops in that reflection. And so ad infinitum. That is the Buddhist conception of the universe in an image." –Alan Watts

Associative thinking is the same as free word association, except try now to be more conscious that what you are doing is accessing memories that are attached to a word or idea. Memory is simply all the information stored in your brain, like a huge library. When you are doing an associative thinking exercise you are looking for information in a specific section of the library.

Associative thinking requires you to look into your short-term and long-term memory for any thoughts, ideas, images, and so on that you associate with a given word, term or idea. What does it remind you of? Think of emotions, feelings, events, pictures, sounds, smells, sensations and memories, and what you have read, seen, experienced, thought and felt, in connection with the word or term or idea. Say to yourself: 'This word/idea/term reminds me of ...'.

The basic rules for doing this kind of exercise are:

1. You have to work as quickly as possible and aim to finish the exercise in 10 minutes. (The pressure of this goal forces you to switch to creative thinking.)
2. The quantity of ideas is more important than quality. (This goal forces your mind to switch off analytical, logical thinking and to simply accept whatever ideas you think of as valid.)
3. Do not analyse, criticise or judge your ideas. Just write them all down without analysing them. (Sometimes you have to uncover a lot of rubbish to discover one gem; sometimes you uncover a handful of gems ... enough to create a necklace made of precious gems!)
4. Write in shorthand rather than in full sentences so that you can work more quickly.
5. Have fun!

Choose a word from the list. As quickly as you can, write down everything that you associate with the word:

trees
paper
work
food
water
love
compassion
understanding
past
sometimes

If you want to do more association exercises, then take a book or magazine or newspaper, close your eyes and put your finger on the page. Use whichever your finger is pointing at as the primary word to use for an association exercises.

© SD Vahl, 2012

SD Vahl hereby asserts her right to be identified as the author of this work.

All rights reserved. No parts of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the written permission of the copyright holder.