January is International Creativity Month

mindmappro

6 January 2022

If you’re ready for a boost to your creativity then you’re in luck, because January is International Creativity Month.

Created by Randall Munson, the purpose of International Creativity Month is to find time to explore creative ways to re-energize yourself and your colleagues, family and friends. This can include creatively improving communications skills, arranging group thinking sessions or setting creative challenges.

Randall Munson says that we were created creative, giving the example of how creative young children are: “A center for creative learning studied the creativity of children and found that during the first five years 90% of children are highly creative. The next two years, ages six and seven, the percentage of highly creative children dropped to 10%. By age eight or nine, the percentage of highly creative children fell to only 2% and stayed about that level from that time on,” said Randall.

Setting up the International Creativity Month was an opportunity to inspire people to unleash the creativity that they were created with.

Celebrating International Creativity Month could be as simple as acknowledging the importance of creativity for developing new ideas, which filters across many different sectors. However, the most beneficial way to celebrate is to use this month to explore what your own creativity could produce.

Go to …

Harnessing your creativity
Just get started
Take a break
Move around
Find inspiration in your environment
Avoid digital distractions
Don’t be afraid of mistakes
Be free
Find your flow
Capture your ideas
Share your creativity

Harnessing your creativity

Creativity is defined as the use of imagination or original ideas to create something, but you may be wondering how to harness your imagination to come up with those ideas.

We’ve prepared some tips for generating original, fresh ideas and capturing them as soon as they come to light.

Just get started

The best way to ignite your creativity is to get started in whichever direction is easiest. Stop thinking, forget about processes and procedures and unleash your stream of thoughts.

Whether that’s adding some words to a mind map to see where it takes you or painting some brush strokes on a canvas, many people are able to inspire themselves by simply getting started.

If you struggle with finding inspiration, you could even start collecting images or terms that you think could help fuel your creativity at a later date.

Take a break

When you feel ready to, take a break. Creative thoughts come to us when we are relaxed. Neuroscientists have argued that creativity can take place better when our minds are at rest and it has been proven that our brains are more active in times of leisure.

Move around

Going for a walk can stimulate creative thinking. Many famous, successful business people have been well known for walking meetings, including Mark Zuckerberg and the late Steve Jobs.

Movement can be particularly effective for stimulating those first few creative thoughts, so next time you feel far away from bright ideas, walking might just take you a few steps closer.

Find inspiration in your environment

Environmental factors can have a huge impact on an individual’s creativity and productivity. Finding the right environment for you may be a trial and error process, because a particular noise, lighting or color could stimulate creativity for some people, whilst sabotaging it for others.

Even changes to the vibrancy or shade of one color can have an affect on us, so it’s worth trying different environments to find your creative sweet spot.

However, the fast-paced world that we live in has more distractions than we can digest, so there’s another important point to come.

Avoid digital distractions

We love the digital space, and whilst we embrace the capabilities of the hyper-connected modern world, it is important to also recognise its drawbacks.

Although the Internet is fantastic for inspiration and problem solving, digital distractions are often the reason that procrastination triumphs over productivity.

Don’t be afraid of mistakes

When exploring your creativity, it’s a good idea to improvise and keeping moving forward. Don’t edit and don’t worry, free yourself from perfection. You can amend and refine any ideas you want to develop at a later stage.

Be free

Vincent van Gogh famously said, “I dream my painting and I paint my dream,” and losing yourself in your creativity is not bad advice.

At Mind Map Pro, we believe that you can achieve increased focus by freeing your mind. It may sound counter-intuitive, but until you give it a try, you won’t see the benefits of freeing your mind and unleashing your creative potential.

Find your flow

Try to find your creative flow. Spending a few minutes exploring new ideas in a totally free-flowing way could ignite your passion and before you know it, you’ll be effortlessly creative.

Mind mapping is a great way to practice this because it supports lateral thinking, helping you to solve problems through an indirect and creative approach.

Capture your ideas

Your best ideas could come to you at any moment. Using Mind Map Pro from a computer, tablet or mobile, you can capture these ideas and harness your creativity in a mind map.

You’ll find that certain ideas can seem to grow almost by themselves and seeing this happen visually in a mind map can be very powerful.

Share your creativity

If you use Mind Map Pro to help you celebrate International Creativity Month, invite a friend to your mind map or share it on social media and tag us on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.

New to Mind Map Pro? Read this to learn how to use the icon panel to create your mind map.

Mind Mapping Frequently
Asked
Questions

What are the benefits of mind maps?

Although mind maps can be used for many purposes, the most common use case is for presentations. Mind maps are easy to create, which means it doesn't take much time to create one. Mind mapping is also a great tool for brainstorming because it makes complex ideas easier to understand. It also improves your presenting because it helps you think about how you want to present your ideas on the screen and in text form simultaneously. It also boosts your creativity because it helps you think outside of the box when creating or presenting content and helps you see new ways of thinking that can be implemented into future projects or presentations

Mind Mapping Frequently Asked Questions

This is a question commonly asked by students and teachers. To help you out, here are some tips on how to create a good mind map.

1. Choose the right topic: It is important to find the right topic before creating your mind map because it will be difficult if you start with an incorrect topic. You should also make sure that your idea is not too broad because it may not fit into your mind map properly.
2. Do not try to cover too much ground in one go: You should create sub-headings in order to divide your ideas into smaller chunks and make it easier for the reader to digest what they are reading about.
3. Make sure that you have a good structure: A well-structured mind map will help readers understand what you want them to know

Are Mind Maps Are Better Than Text Notes?

Mind maps are seeing a surge in popularity with students and professionals alike. This is because traditional note taking can be difficult to interpret by others, whereas a mind map provides a visual representation of the interconnected ideas making it easy to understand.

There are many benefits of mind maps over text notes, including:

- Mind maps help you remember more because they're more visual
- Mind maps make it easier to find related ideas because they're organized by theme or color
- They're better for collaborative brainstorming sessions because you can see all the different points of view in one place

How do I turn my mind map into an academic essay?

Writing an essay is a daunting task for many students, especially those who are not used to writing. It can be difficult to know what topics are appropriate for your paper and how they should be structured.
The best way to approach this is by brainstorming ideas and then turning them into an outline. The following steps will help you turn your mind map into a fully structured essay:
- Brainstorm the main topic of your paper and subtopics that you want to cover. All sub-topics will stem from the main idea in the center of the mind map.
- Brainstorm various possible thesis statements that could support the main topic of your paper, as well as examples of supporting evidence from the brainstormed topics.
- Create an outline with all the main points covered in each section of your paper.

How to Use Mind Maps in Your Business and Marketing Strategy?

Mind maps are a great way for businesses to see the big picture and understand how all the different parts of the strategy fit together. Let's use the example of a business selling window treatments to see how we might present this information in a mind map. The window treatment business has three different strategies: advertising, selling materials, and selling services. The company might want to present these strategies as separate ways of making money in the mind map so that it can see what each strategy is doing for the business. The company might also want to place a chart with revenue for each strategy on the left of the mind map and then show how these revenue streams connect on the right.The idea is that by looking at the whole picture, you can see how all of your different strategies are connected and what they're doing for your business. There are many more mind map examples for business, including; Brainstorm Marketing Strategy, Marketing Strategy, Target Market Analysis, Market Research, Competitor Analysis, SWOT etc.

How Do You Integrate Mind Map Pro into Your Content Creation Process?

The best way to integrate Mind Map Pro into your content creation process is by using them as the main tool for exploring ideas and taking notes. This allows you to better organize and study your notes later on, which can then be used for content creation. You can also use Mind Maps as an outline for content creation, and as a general guide for how you want your content to flow and look like.

Mind maps are often used in the world of academia and business to help think through a subject. However, they can also be used as a general guide for how you want your content to flow and look like. They're an easy way to get started on an article or blog post, as well as a great way to map out what you want your audience to know about an issue or topic.

Who Invented The Mind Mapping Technique?

Tony Buzan is a British author and psychologist who is best known for his mind mapping technique. He used it to help people organize thoughts, ideas, and memories. Tony Buzan was born in London on the 8th of October in 1925 and studied at Oxford University. He later became a lecturer at the University of Surrey before returning to Oxford as an assistant lecturer in psychology.

In 1967, he published his book "The Mind Mapping Book", which helped popularize the mind mapping technique. He also wrote many other books on various topics such as "The New Mind Map Book", "The Active Mind", "How To Think Better" and "Think Better".