Creative thinking can be stimulated by two things; intensely desired goals and pressing problems. Your creative capacities need something to home in on and your job is to provide it.

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1. A Continual Stimulus For Ideas

Intensely desired goals, clearly defined with detailed plans for their accomplishment act as a continual stimulus for ideas to achieve them.

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2. Visualize Your Goals

To trigger your imagination, write out a clear description of your ideal end result or stretch goal. Be clear about the goal, be  flexible about the process. Think about it, visualize it as realized over and over. Project your mind forward to the picture of the realized goal and then look back to the present.

3. Define Your Goals Clearly

Think on paper. Make a plan and then work on the plan, updating it, changing it, adding to it as you think of new ways to work toward the goal. The more clearly defined and keenly desired your goals, the more of your natural creativity will be released for goal attainment.

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4. The Proper Approach To Problems

The second stimulant to creativity is pressing problems. The key to idea generation when you face a problem is to approach the problem confidently, expectantly, with the attitude that there exists a logical, practical solution just waiting to be found. The most creative people have a relaxed attitude of confident expectancy that causes their minds to function in original and imaginative ways.

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5. Diagnose Your Problems Accurately

Define your problems clearly in writing. Accurate diagnosis is half the cure. Sometimes you will find that you are dealing with a "cluster problem," one that is made up of several smaller problems. Your job is to sort them out and then go to work on each one separately.

6. Break Up The Clusters

In many cluster problems, there is a core issue surrounded by a lot of symptoms. Creative thinking requires that you separate the core issue, and then focus on resolving that before worrying about the smaller problems.

Action Exercises

Here are two things you can do to stimulate your creativity.

1. Be absolutely clear about your goal. Write it down and make a plan to achieve it. Think of different ways you could accomplish it.

2. Define your problems clearly and then make a list of all the possible solutions to your problem. Take action on at least one idea immediately.