Creativity & Visual Thinking: Love is Powerful!

Do you know what love feels like?
 

Does it make your heart skip several beats? Does it make you feel nervous? Excited? Content? Happy? Calm?
 

Love feels different for everyone - we each have our own love language. It’s our goal to identify how we respond and react to love.
 

In order to do so, we must become more familiar with ourselves.
 

This doesn’t just apply to romantic relationships. This applies to all aspects of our lives - our jobs, our friends, ourselves, as well as our significant others.


It’s important to fall in love with our lives, or at least certain aspects of them, as our lives are too short for mediocracy.  Our lives are too short for mediocre careers, hobbies and relationships.


We must not settle for something that doesn’t stir our heart. We must try and live our lives in accordance with our passions.
 

In order to find love, we must know what we’re passionate about.
 

This all takes takes time, experience, and even failure. We must not be afraid of encountering new experiences, as every new and unfamiliar experience is valuable in helping us learn more about ourselves.
 

How are you going to learn more about yourself and your love language? What experiences do you want to have this year? What areas do you want to grow in?

Learn more about Visual Thinking

Creativity & Visual Thinking: Go for Quantity!

Creativity demands quantity. Creativity comes from being exposed to a lot of different stimuli. It comes from having a lot of different experiences. It’s being able to draw from each of these experiences, and the unique reservoir associated with it. When we have a lot of different experiences, we can continue to build upon new and old ideas with the wisdom we’ve gained.

In order to come up with a great idea, we need to have large quantity of ideas to pick and choose from, and experiment with. It’s easy to pick the first ideas that come to our mind, and it’s oftentimes the case that we stop after the first few ideas and fail to go further. 

We need to open our minds to more ideas. We can’t stop at our first ideas. Our first ideas are typically generic, and already thought of before. The more ideas we come up with, and the more we suspend our judgement, the more novel our ideas are. We must stretch our minds to think further, and to suspend any judgement. 

This is particularly helpful with brainstorming - of trying to come up with a good idea, whether for a work project or a personal project. 

The creative mind is the mind that doesn’t stop at the first idea.

Visual thinking is a simple way to increase the amount of knowledge that sticks in your brain. And the more knowledge you have, the more building block you have to create with.

Contact me to bring the power of visuals to your next meeting, events, or project.

Visual Thinking & Creatvity: Make the common new

We look at letters every day. Online. Text messages. Street signs. Starbuck's coffee cups. Letters are everywhere.
When we see things all the time, we often stop really looking at them. Common things can become invisible.

When that happens, it's a great time to get creative with them. That causes you to look at things in a new way. Explore them from a bunch of different perspectives. Really look at them. See them in a new light. That's where a lot of new ideas are often found — sitting there right in front of us, in plain sight!

Visual Thinking & Drawing: Label It!

There's a huge difference between drawing to create great art and drawing to think or communicate better. But there's a lot of overlap, too.

Some of those overlaps have to do with the way the brain works. Like when it comes to labels and titles of things. Your brain likes to keep things neat and tidy, so it matches up new information with something similar it's already seen. That helps your brain to keep track of things better.

When abstract things are labeled, your brain has a better idea what to do with them. Take the drawing above. Right now, it's untitled. It's ambiguous. But what if I told you it's a picture of 2 chairs? Then your brain immediately sees the chairs. But if it was titled something like "My Sleeping Cat" or "Flowers at Sunset", your brain would wonder why. The image looks nothing like those things, so your brain will search the image for clues, trying to believe it really is a picture of a cat or flowers.

So when drawing to think or communicate, labels can be very helpful. If you draw something that doesn't quite look like what you were trying to draw, just label it. Then there's no doubt people will know exactly what it is.

The picture above was created in a college drawing class. It's an abstract representation of two chairs.