Rain, Rain, Go Away

I desperately need to get outside and do some photography... But hurricane Alex and other weather systems have had us in the rain for going on 4 straight days now. This is a picture outside my back door. I have a lot of cabin fever, but worst of all is that I can't accomplish the business tasks that I want, and really need to do.

It isn't easy for me to be derailed like this. Yes, there are many other crafting/business things I could work on - like cleaning my craft room, organizing my soap supplies, sorting through jewelry findings, etc. But the photography thing would still be nagging at me.

As soon as I finish this short blog for the day, I need to refocus on something productive. What do you do when your day doesn't cooperate with your crafing/business goals?

What is Creativity?

What has been around as long as humans? What exists in all cultures? What can be demonstrated by young and old, educated and uneducated, rich and poor? What is known and recognized by most everyone, yet is so hard to define?

CREATIVITY!

This is one definition offered by E. Paul Torrence, the "father of creativity":

"Creativity is a process of becoming sensitive to problems, gaps in knowledge, missing elements, disharmonies, and so on; identifying the difficulty; searching for solutions; making guesses or formulating hypotheses about the deficiencies; testing and retesting and possibly modifying and retesting again! And finally, communicating the results."

We all have more ideas floating around in our minds than we use. Creative thinking, which is innate to some and has to be learned by others, will help us use these ideas and come up with new and better ideas. The more you practive creative thinking, the more the mind will become creative... Some people look at a different situation and say, "It cannot be done." With creative thinking, you will find very few things are impossible.

My next blog installments on creativity will review the skills needed for creative thinking: fluency, flexibility, elaboration, and evaluation.

Until next time, think about how you can become more creative with your craft!