TRAINING THE MIND

When a baby is born, the parent and every one around the growing baby tend to directly or indirectly tame the baby into an adult, but once the child becomes an adult, almost everyone expects the adult to take care of him or herself. But most adults are surprisingly deteriorating in self development. This article from mind tools online learning course is an awakening call to all that the mind and brain are trainable and at any age as well.

Illustration
Training the mind
Develop your thinking skills
The best tool for thriving in a constantly changing environment is a mind that is open, flexible, and capable of generating innovative solutions. The strategies, exercises, and tips in this article will expand your thinking and heighten your creative prowess. Learn to view uncertain situations as opportunities to be grasped, and discover how to benefit from the thinking skills of those you most admire.
Tips
-Break free from your mental limitations
Learn how the brain works as an organising and connecting tool, and how your brain can become more effective at storing and relating information as a precursor to creativity and innovation.
-Awaken your feeling mind
Recent research suggests that the mind is the seat of emotions as well as thoughts. Find out how positive and negative emotions can impact your ability to think and innovate.
-Find opportunity in uncertainty
Incubation — the downtime that fosters creative problem solving — is an important aspect of innovation and invention. Learn how to make your brain take a vacation so you can take advantage of serendipity and chance.
-Collaborate to innovate
Forget the largely mythical notion of the lone creative genius. Learn how to enhance your creativity and ability for innovative thinking by interacting with others who may be very different from you.
Debunking myths about innovative thinking
Everything that ever was, is, or will be starts with someone thinking of a new idea (what we call “creativity”) and then taking the action to make that thought a reality (“innovation”). But how does creativity and innovation happen? The first step to broadening mental horizons is to get into a positive mindset. Let us start out by addressing some of the misconceptions around what it takes to be a creative, innovative individual. Which of these myths have you bought into?
-Creative individuals are born, not made
Incorrect. Once upon a time we believed that the intelligence and mental agility that support creativity and innovation were “fixed.” That is, you were pretty much stuck with the brain you were born with. Neuroscientists have since discovered that the brain is immensely flexible or “plastic.” Indeed, the process of learning something new (involving thinking and experiencing in new and broader ways) actually changes the brain’s physical structure.
Those structural changes, in turn, enhance the brain’s ability to organise information in a way that makes it easier to be creative. Check out the work of Dr. Edward de Bono, Prof. Reuven Feuerstein, and Professor Howard Gardner on Google or Wikipedia to find out more about this fascinating topic.
-Innovation comes from the work of a lone, creative genius.
Not true. US inventor Thomas Edison may be credited with more patents and inventions than just about any other person in history. But perhaps you weren’t aware that he ran what is often considered to be the first research and development laboratory. Or that his success was actually attributable to the combined efforts of many, unsung staff members?
For every Bill Gates or Steven Spielberg there is a Steve Balmer or Kathleen Kennedy working alongside (often behind the scenes), contributing to bring their creative efforts to the world. Even your favorite TV show employs a team of writers rather than just one special individual!
-Creativity only thrives without confines or constraints
Wrong again. Ever heard those famous words, “Houston, we have a problem.”? Check out the DVD of Apollo 13 and marvel at the problem-solving genius of the space mission crew and ground control staff when faced with the seemingly impossible task of getting the craft and its human cargo safely back to earth rather than continue its trajectory to the moon. Many would argue that it is the drive to overcome limitations (such as was the case in this famous example) that fuels true creativity.
“Creativity arises out of the tension between spontaneity and limitations.” Rollo May, existential psychologist.
Mind 101: The Mental Filing Cabinet
“Learning and innovation go hand in hand. The arrogance of success is to think that what you did yesterday will be sufficient for tomorrow.” – William Pollard, The ServiceMaster Company
This section introduces you to the latest understanding on how the brain works as an organising tool, or mental filing cabinet, and its amazing ability to cross-reference information that lies at the heart of creative thinking.
-Increase Your Experience
Making a commitment to seek fresh experiences (such as every month learning a new skill, reading a different genre of books, or subscribing to a magazine you would not normally read) not only makes you a more interesting person, it also enhances your creative potential.
How? An active brain is continually restructuring itself, becoming increasingly complex and efficient as new neural pathways are created, strengthened, and interconnected. This matrix of mental super-highways means that you are more easily able to link new information to what is already stored in memory — the basis of learning.
Like the most efficient filing system you can possibly imagine, your mind cross-references stored knowledge at astounding speed. Those “aha” moments typical of creative thinking are the result of your mind making connections between the knowledge you are learning and what you have already stored. Increase that store of knowledge through many, varied experiences and you will increase your potential of “aha” bursts of creative inspiration.
-Doing and Reflecting
Psychologist David Kolb’s four-stage model breaks down experiential learning into things that we do (the stages of “concrete experience” and “active experimentation”) and what we think about (“reflective observations” and “abstract conceptualisation”).
The exercises contained in these lessons represent the “doing” piece and will stimulate your mind with new content to connect! By learning more about yourself as well as the world around you, you are taking important steps to becoming more innovative. Just relax! Your mind does this for you automatically. All you have to do is provide it with fresh stimuli.
Become a divergent thinker
We tend to describe creative individuals as thinking “outside of the box.” Psychologists call this “divergent thinking.” The good news is that anyone can learn to think this way, with practice.
Open-Mindedness:
Generating new ideas requires a different kind of thinking than finding the “right answer” to a mathematical problem. Unfortunately, the ways we are typically educated, and the requirements of standardised testing, tend to over-emphasise the latter, which psychologists have termed “convergent thinking.”
Science, mathematics, and technology are all areas where convergent thinking tends to be appropriate. But what about topics for which there is no single, “correct” response? For that you need to tap into “divergent” thinking.
For example, let us imagine someone hands you a brick. In Math class you are asked to take the brick’s measurements in order to compute its mass. Obviously your answer is either correct or incorrect, using convergent thinking in the process.
But in your creative writing class, as an exercise in divergent thinking, you are asked to come up with many different uses for a brick as you can think of in fifteen minutes. There is no right and wrong answer to this challenge, but the longer your list the more creative you are likely to be!
The more you practice divergent thinking, the greater your capacity to think of new ideas. Here is an exercise to get you started: Take a fresh look at everyday objects. Challenge yourself to come up with novel uses for a pen, a shoe, a bar of soap, or a rope.
In a journal article outlining different tests for creative abilities, E.P. Torrance, asked readers to imagine that humans had six fingers on each hand instead of five. His question: What would be some of the repercussions or implications of that change?
Time yourself and see how many ideas you can come up with in three minutes.