Creative thinking: developing creativity - free course from 4brain, training 30 days, date: December 1, 2023.

Creative thinking and creativity are useful and indispensable skills of a modern person. However, it is difficult to find good courses, trainings, schools, books or textbooks for developing and improving these skills. For these reasons, we have developed this course to develop creative thinking and imagination.

If you have read “99 Francs” or “Generation P”, watched the films of Tarkovsky or David Lynch, seen the paintings of Leonardo yes Vinci or Picasso, you must have wondered: how can people create so many new interesting ideas and amazing concepts? So if these creative professionals make you want to be like them, you'll find a lot of useful information in our course.

The more unconventional life is, the more interesting it is to live. We are often required to be creative; the ability to think outside the box makes us witty, resourceful, successful, enterprising, lucky and rich. The ability to be creative can be useful always and everywhere.

It is often said that creative thinking cannot be taught, but this is not entirely true.

Real works of art, as a rule, are created by adults who have achieved a certain skill in thinking and acting creatively. And if a person does not develop his creative potential, he is unlikely to achieve the ability to create, even if he showed any abilities in childhood.

This means there is something that creative people know and can do. They did not acquire this knowledge and skills genetically from their parents, but accumulated them throughout their lives. Let's try to find and unravel their secrets.

We would also like to note that if you want to understand the topic of developing creativity in more detail, we recommend taking our TRIZ on practice", where in 4 weeks you will evaluate your creative abilities and learn ways to develop them, learn to use creative and inventive algorithms.

This course is dedicated to the basic skills of developing creative thinking. However, it will be even better if you take this course first and then move on to the advanced level. So feel free to get down to business, and we will start with a description of what you have to study.

Goals and objectives of the course

In general, the topic of the development of creative thinking can be explored almost indefinitely, finding in it ever new facets and shades. Therefore, we will not try to find the “Holy Grail” for the sake of which everything was started, but we will point to several, to in our opinion, the most important goals worthy of painstaking work on the creative component of your mind.

So, developed creative thinking and imagination will allow you to:

1. Think outside the box. Thought patterns and clichés have long lost their relevance and only reduce a person’s effectiveness, no matter what it concerns. Developed creative thinking helps you find unexpected solutions to complex problems faster overcome difficulties, work more productively, achieve more, achieve results where the rest fold.
2. Achieve success. Starting a business, saving money, investing, negotiating, public speaking, making deals - you need creativity everywhere. approach, because it is he who makes a person head and shoulders above others, forms his reputation and authority, helps him become an indispensable member teams. However, creativity is useful even for a loader in a warehouse or an office manager in a small company.
3. Develop intelligence. Most truly creative people have high IQs. You become smarter and more erudite, your horizons expand and your knowledge base in your brain expands. new neural connections are formed, which, among other things, has a beneficial effect on health and even prolongs life.
4. Be interesting. Creative thinking makes a person an interesting interlocutor with whom you can talk on different topics and have an unusual time. A sense of humor, communication skills, and the ability to constructively resolve conflicts also develop. Creative people, like a magnet, differ favorably from ordinary people, attract others and win loyal friends.
5. Develop spiritually. Creativity is always going beyond boundaries, and that is why, completely influencing a person’s personality, it makes him spiritual, looking deeper into things, seeing more than others. It’s no wonder that many creative people live in harmony with themselves and the world, clearly understand their mission and purpose, do what they love and draw happiness from every day they live.

Whatever goals you set for yourself, be it purely pragmatic things such as advancing your career, obtaining a doctorate degree or developing your own business, or something “out of this world” this”, for example, searching for the meaning of life, creating unique objects of art or writing a novel, creative thinking everywhere will only play into your hands and allow you to get much closer to your dream faster.

However, before you begin to develop creative thinking and creativity, you need to understand what exactly they are. Therefore, we want to continue with a little conversation about the meaning put into these concepts.

What is creative thinking and creativity?

Explaining and describing what creative thinking is and what its features are is a rather difficult task. One of the few objective definitions of creativity/creative thinking was given by psychologist Oleg Konstantinovich Tikhomirov:

Creative thinking – one of the types of thinking, characterized by the creation of a subjectively new product and new formations in the very cognitive activity of its creation. These new formations relate to motivation, goals, assessments, meanings. Creative thinking is distinguished from the processes of applying ready-made knowledge and skills, called reproductive thinking.

This definition highlights the main characteristic of creative thinking - the presence of a result, something subjectively new that a person creates. At the same time, it is important to understand that creative thinking or creativity is precisely a WAY to think, a certain PROCESS that leads to the creation of something new.

Naturally, there are many methods for organizing your thinking so that you can get something new as a result. A number of studies and tests show that most methods can be adjusted to certain logical circuits, which form part of the lessons in our course. And in order to understand the characteristics of your creative thinking, we suggest you take a special psychological test.

On the other hand, creative thinking is associated not so much with logical schemes, but with developed associative thinking and human imagination. All this can be developed with the help of special exercises, which represent another important component of the course.

How to learn to think creatively?

As has already been said, there are many approaches to understanding creative thinking, and therefore there are many ways to teach such thinking. Among the popular approaches to analyzing creativity are:

1. the concept of lateral thinking;
2. theory of solving inventive problems;
3. synectics;
4. six hats method;
5. some other methods.

Most of these approaches have similar features, but if you try to do all of these methods at the same time, you can get confused.

Having analyzed many approaches to creativity, we came to the conclusion that the most universal theory is the concept lateral thinking by Edward De Bono (as well as its interpretation by Philip Kotler), which is aimed at understanding the logic of construction new ideas. It is the concept of lateral thinking that forms the basis of this course. It also used a number of important techniques for developing creative thinking from other theories to expand on de Bono's concept.

In addition, concepts that deserve special attention have been included in a separate lesson so that you can try different techniques for developing creative thinking. But let's not get ahead of ourselves, but talk about this in due time. For now, it’s enough to get acquainted with what awaits you in the lessons.

How to take the course?

As we said, in this course we tried to cover only basic information regarding the topic of developing creative thinking. And precisely for this reason, we strongly recommend not to miss a single lesson and study them in the order in which they are presented.

As for the actual classes, it all depends on your desire and availability of free time. But the best option would be if it takes you 1-2 days to study one lesson so that the information is absorbed properly. Also try to complete all tasks and exercises, because they directly affect the result. The more you practice, the more useful the practice will be.