Dare To take Risks in your Career

So how does the working individual develop the fundamental skills of creative thinking in one's chosen career? And is risk taking a skill?

SEIZE ALL CAREER OPPORTUNITIES
"It is not enough to have a good mind; the main thing is to use it," said French philosopher Rene Descartes. One of the most fundamental skills of creativity is the ability to see an opportunity and seize it. Every day, you are faced with countless opportunities to develop your creative thinking skills. Such opportunities present themselves while you are at home with the kids, going to work, at the workplace, at board meetings, out to lunch, or hanging out in the pubs with your friends.

The problem you face is not so much a lack of activities or events to stimulate your creative senses. There is, in fact, no shortage of encounters in your career for you to develop your creativity. The real challenge is for you to recognise these moments as opportunities for creative output.

CHALLENGE ASSUMPTIONS IN YOUR WORKPLACE
Many inventions were created by people who were willing to challenge assumptions that existed during their time. People tend to see only what they think to see. Every time you look at something that is in your world, you make your own assumptions about the reality before you. People base their lives and decisions on the assumptions they make.

If you accept those assumptions as real and concrete, you will live by them. However, the moment someone chooses to challenge those same assumptions as "unreal", he or she may be on the road to discovering something new and different.

Challenging assumptions is an important component of creativity because it forces you to look beyond what is already accepted or is obvious. It can lead to the kind of perceptual breakthroughs you are looking for in the problems before you.

Often, your assumptions about things are so entrenched that it never crosses your mind to challenge them. These assumptions are apparently so established that you no longer question their validity, even though time has passed and things have changed.

But many of life's problems are tainted with false assumptions and they prevent you from thinking something new and different. They stifle your creativity and the result is pretty much the same set of tried and tested solutions. No new and novel possibilities.

RISK TAKING
Taking risks is part and parcel of being a creative thinker. If you are not willing to take risks (and these can include calculated risks) and experience failure, then you cannot expect to be a great creative thinker. No one truly succeeds without failing first. And no one truly becomes a creative genius without having to "risk his ideas".

However, if you really want to experience major leaps in your creativity, then you will have to learn to take risks. You will fail but failure is good: it accelerates the learning process by generating new information; science has shown that our brain literally rewires itself each time we make a mistake. Our brain learns through a series of trials and errors.

TO MOVE UP IN YOUR CAREER,LOOK AT PROBLEMS FROM A NEW PERSPECTIVE
No new ideas will evolve from old perspectives. To create a new product, you must be able to visualise that new product. But you cannot do this if you keep looking at your problem from the same perspective. You have to look at your problems from a new perspective in order to gain new insights. By changing your perspect shifting to a new one, you will be ab expand your mental horizon and ca| something you were previously unal see. Only by seeing something new, you be able to think up new ideas ai create something new.

THINK AMBIGUOUSLY
The ability to think ambiguously is a great boon to yielding creative insights. The same ability is being exhibited every someone indulges in wordplay or humour.

People who can think ambiguously are known to be fluid and flexible thinkers. A tinge of ambiguous thinking during the idea-generation stage of the creativity process has the power to bring out a genius of an idea.

However, the main problem in many societies is that people generally prefer things that are clear and unambiguous. They do not like to associate themselves with things that are vague and have than one meaning. As a result, they become rather rigid in the way they think, preferring to be involved in only things that have clear and specific parameters, outcome: Predictability.

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