Creative Thinking For Your Business

15 Feb Creative Thinking For Your Business

Posted at 15:06h in Business, Content Creation, Intelligent Thinking, Leadership, mental health for entrepreneurs, Running a business, Visbility by Scarlet Thinking 0 Comments

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Building Creative Thinking For Your Business

Creative thinking for your business is a large part of raising visibility and building your profile. it’s also pretty important for running and building most businesses in general. However, when you’re feeling less that 100%, or just preoccupied with fielding off the stresses that are heading your way, it can take a real effort to step into that right mindset for building your profile. Here are some ideas that may help to keep that creativity flowing:

Deal with what’s going on

It may be that you are dealing with other life or business issues that are affecting your concentration and focus. It is hard to make decisions and think clearly if you are struggling with high levels of anxiety or depression. Seeing a therapist or coach like myself, can help you work on these. I teach my clients very effective techniques to bring down emotional arousal levels which can then free up much more of their thinking mind. Contact me here to book a chat or just book in a session here.

Keeping Creative

The first thing you’ll need to do, and this in itself can be a challenge, is to make time to schedule in some creative brainstorming sessions on a regular basis. You will find that the effort is worth it: spending a few hours playing around with different angles and ideas can really create a lot of material for future use. Literally put these into your diary or calendar, and decide whether they are best done alone, or with other people – or you can shake things up and alternate.

Google Alerts

You’re probably familar with the keywords for your business or industry. The idea behind using Google Alerts is to set up a system whereby you have a multitude of “pings” coming into your inbox that let you know when an article, news item or blog has been written on your keywords. Following up with these links, you can then go to the relevant websites to check them out.

If appropriate you can use them to:

Inspire blog or social media posts
Tweet about them
Use them as jumping off spots for articles
Approach the journalists who have written the piece
Stay informed on trends

Creating a Virtual Board

There are two ways that you can use this one. The first is to create a panel of readers, connections, other business owners or friends that you can meet with on a regular basis (and this might only be once a year) and use them as a focus group. You could do this as a mutual thing, with you giving feedback on their businesses, or pay them.

But, you’ll be able to ask them all the questions you’ve always wanted to ask…what do they think of the colour/the delivery/what would they like to see/what would they consider innovative?

Another way to use this is to think about people in your industry you’d like to connect with. This is not because they’d be able to help your business, but because they are inspiring and knowing them will give you a shortcut into what’s going on. You can use LinkedIn to find people like this. It could be authors, experts, journalists who write about a particular topic or even a competitor!

The trick to creating something here is to keep it focused on the subject in hand, a Special Interest Group if you like. Send your chosen people personal invitations that show that you’ve thought about why they might like to get involved, and make it sound interesting (they too will be networking with other people in the subject area).

You could start off with something as simple as a group meet up for dinner and take things from there. People will join, and people will drop out, but if you can get this off the ground I guarantee you will find it lively and compelling.

Checking Out the Competition

Look at your peers. Where are they posting? Do they have good reach and engagement? If so, why? Can you take their approach further, or come at things from a different angle? What have they done to get where they are? I wouldn’t worry about those competitors who might be smaller than you. For the purpose of this exercise, concentrate on the ones that you aspire to passing!

Change of Environment

Make sure that you do your brainstorming in a different environment to the ones you work in. It doesn’t matter if it’s a local coffee shop, the zoo or your local Library, you need to get out of your office or home. Think about what energises you. I love the buzz of busy cafes…the sound of the coffee machine, steamy windows, and people talking about stuff that doesn’t concern me and yet creates a great background nose and feeling of buzzy energy. For you, it might be that you need to get outside and tune into nature.

Artist’s Date

Julia Cameron, in her book, The Artist’s Way, talks about the Artist’s Date. This is a weekly date with yourself to do something different. It could be a day at the museum, a walk in the country, or a visit to a market. Whilst finding any time to devote to ourselves, yet alone a whole day, is difficult for many, I believe that the general idea of doing something different, is one that we can use to help us stay creative. It keeps us energised and open to new experiences and sensations and that that can only help creativity.

Deadlines

I find that nothing brings on creativity so much as forcing yourself to meet a deadline. I went to a recent conference where one of the speakers talked about writing his blog posts and told us how he reached a whopping four hundred and fifty articles on his blog in a short amount of time whilst working full time. His method was that he would use the travelling time between home and London and back to put together a number of short 350 word articles, and post them as a batch (spacing out the publishing dates) once a week. His record was seven in one journey. How’s that for using time creatively? He used this method to work on his own webiste, but you could equally use them on LinkedIn or even putting them together for a book.