How do you come up with new ideas? How do you find innovative solutions to a particular problem?

Inspiration rarely comes when you decide it does.

You’ve probably been motivated to think about your project, and the moment you open your notebook or a blank sheet of Word, nothing comes. Your page remains hopelessly empty and you end up closing it.

It’s a fact: new ideas don’t come when you want them to.

You’ve probably also noticed that certain times are more propitious for coming up with new ideas.

A particular environment stimulates you. Your good mood gives you wings and ideas come pouring in. Your current state of mind generates countless ideas.

But, if you wait patiently for that “right moment” to present itself, you agree that time passes and you run the risk of never coming up with new ideas.

If you can’t count on luck, then how can you adopt a more proactive attitude to finding new ideas and moving forward with your projects and life goals?

In this article, I’m going to show you how to be more creative. To do this, you need to set up long-term habits.

Then, I’ll suggest a practical exercise you can do every time you start a project and need to generate lots of ideas.

Follow the guide…

To find new ideas: build up a bank of ideas and images

To come up with new ideas, you first need to adopt an open-minded attitude to everything around you.

To do this, you need to break out of your usual way of thinking. Become an information bulimic on the theme or themes that interest you, as well as on related subjects.

Read (books, magazines, blogs, essays),
Watch videos,
Listen to podcasts,
Visit exhibitions,
Observe what’s going on around you,
etc…

Write down any ideas you find interesting or that surprise you. Store images, photos and videos too.

Enrich yourself with everything that others before you have done and produced.

All this material will form a powerful base that your brain will be able to recombine at will.

It’s not about copying what’s already been done.

As I recently mentioned in an article dedicated to mind mapping, the brain works by associating ideas.

Accumulating ideas will enable your brain to feed itself, to make connections between things you wouldn’t have immediately thought of, to compose, recompose and make links. The words and images you find will appeal to your imagination and trigger the emergence of new ideas.

The more you feed your brain with new elements, the more connections you’ll create that can generate creativity.

This permanent enrichment mechanism means you’ll always have new ideas, whatever the project you’re working on.

GENERATE AS MANY IDEAS AS POSSIBLE ON A SPECIFIC TOPIC
If you’d like to work on a specific topic and come up with as many new ideas as possible, I suggest the following practical exercise:

List everything you can think of on the topic you want to work on.

Don’t censor yourself, even if the ideas you come up with seem ridiculous. Let your imagination run wild.

Get away from preconceived ideas.

You can work with lists, or even better, you can use the mind mapping tool I mentioned a few weeks ago: I highly recommend it, as it allows you to combine words and images, and go even further in the process of finding ideas and creativity.

Personally, I use the free FreeMind software when I’m looking for new ideas.

To help you get far in this process, set yourself an ambitious target of 50, 100 or 200 ideas.

At first, the most obvious ideas will come to you, then little by little it will become harder to fill your quota.

But don’t be discouraged, because this is the most important stage of the exercise: you’ll be pushing your brain and imagination to the limit, and new, more innovative ideas will emerge.

In fact, it’s at this very moment that the best ideas appear before your very eyes.

HOW DO YOU ORGANIZE YOURSELF TO COME UP WITH NEW IDEAS?
You don’t have to brainstorm all at once. You can work on it for 30 minutes or an hour, and then pick it up again at another time.

Your brain will continue to think about it in the background, and you’ll naturally come up with new ideas unexpectedly!

In this case, make sure you always have something with you to write down your new ideas. Make a chart to display your goals.

Watch out, they’ll come when you least expect them. Once you’ve started the idea-gathering process, you’ll realize just how powerful your brain and creativity can be.

Play this game regularly, with a specific goal in mind.

This will give you plenty of ideas to draw on as you need them.

It’s up to you to come up with new ideas!

How do you come up with new ideas? How do you train your brain to be more creative? What are your “secret” tricks and techniques?