The Power of Creative Intelligence: 10 ways to tap into your creative genius

4. Do you like many different kinds of music? YES/NO

5. Do you remember with pleasure, highlights of your life, including special times spent with friends, great sporting moments, outstanding holidays, any significant ‘disasters’ or triumphs in your life? YES/NO

6. Did you ask lots of questions when you were a child? YES/NO

7. Do you still ask lots of questions? YES/NO

8. Do you sometimes wonder at the complexity or beauty of things, and wish you could figure out how it works/was made/came about/came into your life? YES/NO

9. Do you have sexual fantasies? YES/NO

10. Do you have newspapers, magazines or books in your home that you have promised yourself you would read, but for which you have not yet managed to find the time? YES/NO

11. Are there other things in your life you have promised yourself you would do or accomplish, to which you have not yet got around? YES/NO

12. Are you moved or excited by superlative performances in the fields of music, sports, acting or the arts? YES/NO

13. Would you say ‘yes’, if I could wave a magic wand and suddenly:

make you a fit, flexible and superb dancer, able to ‘wow ’em’ at any dance function? YES/NO

gave you a voice equal to your favourite singer, able to sing virtually any song to your own satisfaction and to the pleasure and amazement of others? YES/NO

make you a competent artist, able to rattle off cartoons and sketches, landscapes and portraits, and able to sculpt so well that Michelangelo himself might consider you a worthy student? YES/NO

make you a great story and joke-teller, able to mesmerize and enchant people with your tales, and able to reduce them all to helpless laughter with your brilliant jokes? YES/NO

14 Are you alive?!! YES/NO

If you answered ‘YES’ to more than half these questions, then you are, by definition, Creative.

Just how creative will be revealed as you continue your journey through The Power of Creative Intelligence. But to give you some indication, let’s look at a couple of the questions that may have seemed a bit strange:

Do you have newspapers, magazines or books in your home that you have promised yourself you would read, but for which you have not yet managed to find the time?Over 95 per cent of people answer ‘YES’ to this question, thinking that it means that they are merely very good at procrastinating! They are – but they are also very creative! Think about it. Every day, for weeks, months or years, their brains have been creating the most fantastic excuses for not getting down to reading. It is irrelevant that their creativity is directed towards not doing something – it is still exceptional creativity, and is such a limitless power-source that it can sometimes go on for a lifetime!

Which brings us to the question:

Are you alive?This may seem somewhat obvious, but the question conceals a deep and meaningful truth. Every day of your life, if you are to survive that day, your amazing brain has to create tens of thousands of thoughts, actions and solutions to problems that, if it did not, would end your time on this earth. The mere fact that you are alive proves that you are abundantly creative.

Increasing and releasing the gigantic Creative Intelligence you possess is simply a matter of understanding how it works and how to develop it. This little book will show you how.

what is creative intelligence?

Your Creative Intelligence is your ability to come up with new ideas, to solve problems in original ways, and to stand head and shoulders above the crowd in terms of your imagination, your behaviour, and in your productivity.

Your Creative Intelligence includes a number of factors, all of which can be taught and developed so that you can increase your creativity. The Power of Creative Intelligence will introduce you to each one of these factors in turn, and will show you how to develop and enhance them. These factors include:

1 The Left/Right Brain. The ability to use, in conjunction with each other, the different skills of the left and right sides of your brain.

2 Note-making/Mind-Mapping®. The ability to ‘make your thoughts visible’ by getting them out of your head and on to paper, so that you can explore them more fully.

3 Fluency. The speed with which you can rattle off new ideas. Fluency is the measure of your creative productivity.

4 Flexibility. Your ability to produce different kinds of ideas, and to shift from one approach to another using a rich variety of strategies, constitutes your creative flexibility. Flexibility includes your ability to see things from different angles, to consider things from other points of view, to take old concepts and rearrange them in new ways, and to reverse pre-existing ideas. It also includes your ability to use all your senses when creating new ideas.

5 Originality. Originality is one of the essences of Creative Intelligence and creative thinking. It represents your ability to produce ideas that are yours alone – that are unusual, unique and ‘eccentric’ (i.e., ‘away from the centre’).

6 Expanding on Ideas. The good creative thinker takes a central idea and builds on it in all directions, developing, expanding, embroidering and generally elaborating the original thought.

7 Association. The creative thinker makes use of the fact that the human brain is a giant ‘Association Machine’. Having some intuitive knowledge of how this Association Machine works (and you will have some very explicit knowledge, having read this book!), creative thinkers are able to tap into this infinite resource to improve all aspects of their Creativity.

an overview of the power of creative intelligence

The Power of Creative Intelligence is designed to take you on a Grand Tour of Creativity, showing you how you can expand and increase the power of your Creative Thinking at each stage of your journey. The following chapters contain potted case histories and stories of individuals who have exemplified the qualities being discussed. There is also a Creativity Workout in each chapter, where you can try your hand at specific exercises designed to make you smarter. Each exercise, while developing the specific Creative Intelligence skill area for which it is designed, will (thanks to the way the brain is an infinitely expanding and inter-connecting association machine!) simultaneously develop the mental muscles of your other Creative Intelligence skill areas.

The chapters also explain how you can use Mind-Maps

to develop your Creative Intelligence, and give examples of those ultimate creativity-enhancing thinking tools, which I have spent my life developing. There are also many other diagrams and illustrations that use the principles of Creativity to help you improve yours.

Here is an overview of the rest of the book.

Chapter 2 – Using Your Magical Left and Right Brains

In this chapter I will take you on a supersonic flight over the past 50 years of research into this fascinating aspect of Creativity. You will discover new insights into the nature of Creative Intelligence, and will learn how to use these insights to develop dramatically your creative thinking.

Chapter 3 – Infinite Creativity – Mapping Your Mind with Mind-Maps

This chapter introduces you to the ultimate Creative Thinking tool, the Mind-Map

. I will show you how to become a master-user of what has been termed the ‘Swiss army knife for the brain’.

Chapter 4 – You the Creative Artist

Who said that you can’t draw? You can!

Here I will explore with you the reasons why over 99 per cent of people will claim that they can’t draw, and why they are mistaken. I will then introduce you to the two ultimate art teachers: Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Each of them worked out his own superbly simple and successful creativity methods that you can use to find the artist within you. You will also discover that, so far in your life, you have created millions of masterpieces of which you have been unaware!

Chapter 5 – You the Creative Musician

As with art, most people assume that they are not ‘musical’ and more than 95 per cent of us are convinced that we cannot sing a song in tune. As with art, this is not true.

In this chapter, I will explain to you why these false beliefs exist, how you can overcome them and how to release the naturally creative musician within you. You will discover that you have been singing well for most of your life, and that there are some extremely encouraging lessons you can learn from the birds!

Chapter 6 – Creative Productivity – The Power of Volume and Speed

Your creative productivity – the number or fluency of ideas you can generate in a given time – is a major factor in Creative Intelligence. In this chapter I will show you how you can increase your own productivity by following the methods used by the great creative geniuses.

Chapter 7 – Creative Flexibility and Originality