Good day, Purposeful Hearts! Did you have a fun week of connecting and combining ideas while you accessed your Connect brain set? If so, you found the sweet spot for brainstorming ideas! If instead you found yourself lamenting the fact that you’re “not the creative type” or you’re too “scheduled and practical” to be creative, then I have a surprise for you.
There is a place for practical in the world of creative thinking! It’s called the Reason brain set, and it loves to offer a solid defense or rationale for our ideas, plans, and strategies. Last week, we talked about what could be called the opposite of Reason, the Connect brain set. While Connect loves divergent thinking, the Reason brain set loves to generate the right answer at the right time and for the right motives. The Reason brain set is comfortable, orderly, sequential, and transparent as it helps you pull together information from your working memory, your logic, and your resources.
One of the primary differences between the Reason brain set and the other creative mindsets is that it stays in the prefrontal cortex of your brain, allowing you to stay in conscious control of the thought process. (Compare this with when you’re daydreaming, and you allow your thoughts to wander while you’re in a de-focused state of attention.) The Reason brain set also differs in that it serves us well in our everyday problem-solving efforts. It really is a practical tool that we often take for granted!
One potentially detrimental side effect of the Reason brain set is that it can focus our thoughts too heavily on the rules we’re “supposed” to follow, which can limit our ability to think freely and ignore constraints for the sake of creative adventure. Be careful that you’re not shutting down your own free spirit by overemphasizing the “should” and “have to” and “obligation” areas of your life.
I have a challenge for you this week as you explore the role of Reason in your life. Take a few minutes to write down all of the “rules” you keep for yourself on a daily and weekly basis. Do any of these rules stifle your creativity? Are any of them unnecessarily limiting? What would happen if you didn’t have one or more of these rules anymore? An exercise like this is simply intended to get you to challenge your own assumptions and make sure that the reasons you act as you do are still serving you (and others) well, especially when it comes to creativity!
See you next week for the Envision brain set!
Carson, S. (2012). Your Creative Brain: Seven Steps to Maximize Imagination, Productivity, and Innovation in Your Life. Jossey-Bass.
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