“But I wanted the sun to be red and the color from the sun to cover the mountains,” I indignantly told Sister Marie.

“I’m sorry, honey, the sun is yellow and you can’t color outside the lines,” she replied.

In trying to win the approval of my teacher, a controlling nun who saw the world as black and white and full of “shoulds,” I learned to leave my creative thoughts at the school yard fence. It was obvious they “weren’t allowed.”

Almost every adult has a story of when a teacher stifled his or her childhood creativity. In fact, those educational techniques have left such an incredible impact that research shows that our creativity drops exponentially in grade school. By the time we are adults, very little is left.
That was acceptable in the industrial age when employees had “jobs”—occupations that included a clear description of how they were supposed to act at exactly the right time. 

Those “jobs” are a thing of the past. They have been replaced by professions where people are expected to be spontaneous, create what isn’t there, and rise to whatever the occasion calls for. 

That poses the $6 million-dollar question—How do you become creative when those grade school teachers beat it out of you? Here are a few ideas:

·          Brainstorm: Create a time to gather several people together. The ideal number for maximum synergy is five. Instruct the group to provide as many ideas as possible about the problem you are trying to solve—ask them to stretch and include the outrageous. Tell them that no idea is to be judged or criticized at that time. After you have numerous ideas, decide which ones have potential and how can you combine, build on, or fine-tune those ideas to make them plausible.
 

·          Mind Map: Grade school taught us how to make lists and outlines. Unfortunately, the mind doesn’t work that way. The mind works like a pinball machine—one idea bounces off the last. Listing ideas in a linear fashion doesn’t allow for the ball to bounce—and creativity is therefore stifled. 

Mind mapping has been proven to cut planning time from 20 hours to 1½ hours. It’s a simple process: just put an idea in a circle in the middle of a page and then as ideas come, draw a spoke off the circle with two or three words that sum up that concept.

The ideas coming from that spoke are written on another spoke that’s attached to the spoke from where the idea comes from. Other central thoughts receive their own spoke coming from the one in the middle of the page. You can jump from spoke to spoke, adding new ones and tying them together as they relate to each other. The look resembles a bicycle wheel decorated for a parade. The beauty of this process is that it allows free thoughts to flow. Use it for planning projects, planning a writing project, or to stimulate the brain and spark your creativity.
 

·          Consciously put your subconscious to work: People often say that they have their best ideas in the shower or while shaving. This is not an anomaly. Research shows that the subconscious does its best problem-solving work when the conscious mind is doing something that is non-taxing. To activate your subconscious, walk for 30 minutes or write the problem down before you go to bed and let your subconscious work on it through the night.

Maybe Sister Marie has since seen a red sun. I know I have—and I’ve been coloring outside the lines ever since.