Everyone’s saying that in order to be creative, you have to have an idea. Creativity flows from your ideas, they say. But is this really absolute? How about if you honestly don’t have any idea about the matter at all. Are you doomed? Or is not having an idea helpful to make you more creative?

Yes. Amazingly, not having an idea may just be the reason for your creative juices to start pumping up. Whenever you face a challenge, your mind starts to think about a possible solution. The gap between the problem and the desired solution creates a certain tension that motivates your mind to start generating more ideas to solve the problem or address the challenge. It’s during this gap when the most creative ideas start to surface.

So how do you deal with the tension and how do you create enough tension to help you generate the most creative ideas for your next project?

• Don’t settle for one answer. You know well that there’s no single way to solve something. Continue to generate more ideas. Keep on asking those open questions so that the creative tension will continue to generate more creative ideas for you. Not only will holding on to creative tension generate more ideas for you, it will also make you comfortable in dealing with the tension. For most of us, we feel uneasy. But when you are used to the creative tension, you’ll be able to handle it better over time

• Formulate open ended questions. Don’t ask questions like, “Do we have a problem?” Of course, you’ll answer yes or no? “Can this be solved?” Doesn’t make you want to go out and do something worthwhile, right? I don’t want to go and give you a quick lecture on the difference between closed and open questions. But just in case. Closed questions are answerable by either “Yes” or “No”.

• The moment you articulate a certain goal or problem, you almost immediately feel the anxiety of not having the solution to the problem. You want to solve it, put an end to the problem, but you still don’t have the idea on how to do it.

• Set a deadline. Most people feel the creative tension when they are under time pressure. First there’s the feeling of anxiety which then transitions to actually generating ideas to solve the problem within the set deadline.

• Your mind will always look for an answer to any question that relates to the problem at hand. Use helpful questions and phrases. Starting your questions with the word “How” always does the trick because the word “How” encourages the human brain to generate ideas to create something.

Your thoughts

What about you? How do you handle times when you don’t have any idea to solve a particular problem? Are you used to dealing with creative tension? What do you like to add?

Let us all know in the comments!