Tapping into creativity to maximize business potential comes easy to many entrepreneurs, business owners and executives, but sometimes creativity needs a catalyst to help you unlock its potential. One great creativity catalyst is your own business coach or mentor. They can help you tap into your creative self and offer suggestions from their experience, allowing you to generate ideas and new insights to help develop your business to achieve further success.
We all have some degree of creativity, and you can see this in our successes with arts, such as writing, painting, music or dancing, and in social interactions. We also use creativity strongly in business strategic thinking, market anticipation and operational decision-making. Creativity is business competency and is increasingly being recognized as an immensely important attribute for success.
Very creative people may be born, but for the rest of us, we are creative to a greater or lesser extent. Many people find it difficult to tap into their creative space despite possessing the talent. This is why many business people seek help to realise their potential to think and act creatively. Such high impact coaching can help you to scale your business and achieve your desirable output effectively.
How a Business Coach Can Help
Business coaches and mentors are practiced and experienced creative thinkers who have facilitated many business people in the creative process. They use their own imaginative and creative thinking to help build highly successful businesses and establish successful corporate careers.
A business coach or mentor offers you confidential support and encouragement while sharing their own experiences and utilizing creative thinking. This can help you to unlock your own creativity by:
- Encouraging you to be constructively creative by challenging your critical thinking to explore different frameworks for thinking, develop new concepts and ideas, and research aspects of an opportunity or problem needing to be solved.
- Urging you to invite other opinions from within and outside of the business and to share ideas generated through discussion, brainstorming or other activities. The better facilitated your thinking, the better your business ideas and creative input will be.
- Encouraging you to assess ideas, and once agreed, to act quickly on ideas or find a solution to a problem. In this process, you and your people need to think about ideas and problems and agree on the action that will be taken, with a timeline and who is responsible for e
- Acting on a creative thinking idea on impulse can be a dangerous route to take. Use your business coach or mentor to help you wrap around approaches to assessing ideas before you try and implement them. Brainstorming with your business coach will allow your ideas to flow freely, helping you to generate more ideas for inspiration or problem-solving. This will also help you gain the knack for continuing idea generation, enabling you to progress to a new level of thinking where you can be practical while avoiding negativity, particularly when reviewing and assessing business ideas.
With the help of a business coach or mentor, you can better review your ideas to establish which are best to implement and avoid the risky tendency in believing an idea will or won’t work before it’s critically assessed. This will improve the creative process and encourage more ideas while also providing business implementation benefits.
Keeping Yourself Fit Helps You Be More Creative
You need to keep fit to be more creative. This can be achieved through running, working out in the gym, team sports, racket sports, golf, skiing or snowboarding, dancing, swimming, hiking, sailing, fishing, or even going on good walks with the dog. Exercise not only makes us healthier but helps to increase the blood supply to our brains, which enables better thinking and lets ideas flow more freely. Also, exercise stimulates the release of positive organic chemicals in our brains, such as dopamine, that facilitate creativity and make us feel more positive generally.
Your business coach or business mentor will challenge and support you to find creative ways to solve problems, one of which is tapping into your creative abilities.
Understand the Benefits of Creativity to Your Business
In order to appreciate creativity and the benefits it can bring to your business, you need to understand it. Creativity is one of the competencies packaged in the ‘soft skill’ basket, along with adaptability, collaboration, communication, time management and persuasion. Some people embrace these skills naturally, while others need more coaching in order to adapt to and utilise creativity. Creativity is about making connections around ideas, as well as coming up with something new or unique. You might see creativity as a time slot in your diary with your business coach or mentor to generate ideas and consider problems that need solving. You may also consider a longer-term strategy or market competition strategy in that creative process.
Effective leaders must be proficient in creative processes to maximize their use and development of this creativity asset to the business. Whilst creativity is currently accepted as a top business competency in the soft skills area, the other skills are also essential for maximizing business success.
A business coach or mentor can further assist you in emphasizing how structures, skills and processes can be adapted and used, both in the thought process and the delivery of business ideas and solutions to problems.
Communication of ideas within the business is crucial. This includes direct communication with all staff of new ideas and solutions, as well as communication to get support for ideas and their subsequent implementation, with persuasion being a critical form of communication.
In Australia and around the world, creativity and innovation are becoming more recognized as highly valued skills, with substantial investments in training programs being made. Workshops on creativity is being delivered to all levels of people, from corporate leaders and business owners through to management teams and staff.
Business coaching is highly recognized as a valuable business resource to help facilitate creativity, providing you with support for creativity as part of a business mentoring or coaching approach aimed to help you improve your business’ performance. A business coach can help you develop and deliver on your competitive strategic advantage for ultimate profitability and assist you in unlocking you create business talents.
