Like I said in the above video, there are two types of creativity. “Big C” creativity results in great works of art and genius inventions, whereas “Little C” creativity results in everyday problem-solving and innovation. No matter which type you’re interested in developing, you can rest assured you have the seeds of it already inside you. All you need to do is cultivate them and help them grow. Here’s how:

Most of history’s great innovators built the invention, made the discovery or had the idea they became known for… by accident, after failing to do something completely unrelated. Wilson Greatbach had been trying to create a device to record heart rhythm and instead created the pacemaker. Alexander Flemming had been careless and untidy while investigating the properties of staphylococci when he discovered penicillin. Others in their place would have dismissed their mistakes and overlooked their creations, because they weren’t what they had been aiming for.

Technically speaking, they did something wrong. They failed. But what set these great people apart from the crowd was their curiosity, their willingness to set aside their embarrassment and pride, their openness to serendipity. They looked at the outcome of their failure with an open mind. They were creative enough to interpret the meaning of what had happened and to analyse their mistakes calmly and objectively.

A fluky mistake isn’t enough for a failure to become a success – you have to be able to understand the implications of that failure and how to make it work in your favour. You have to be flexible enough to adapt around that mistake and change your plans, so you can reach new and exciting results. These are the traits that distinguish inventors from their less creative counterparts.

If you beat yourself up at the slightest mistake, then you don’t allow yourself room to build on that mistake and make something better. If you insist on asking the wrong questions (“Why did this happen to me?” or “How could I have been so stupid?”) you will rob your brain of the truly useful answers it seeks. Answers like these are only found when you ask questions like “How can I make this better?” or “What do I need to do to make use of this outcome?”

Those of us who refuse to allow ourselves a moment of failure find it hard to bounce back from our hurt sense of importance when we fail. Our pride is crushed, and emotions like fear, shame and anger emerge to quench the pain. We let it shake our whole identity and this uses up a lot of the precious brain-power we could otherwise be using to our advantage. If we could just overcome our emotional reactions, our innate creativity could freely surface. This means that, if you want to be more creative and to express that creativity spontaneously and unreservedly, there are certain steps you need to take:

Like I said in my video, everyone is creative in one way or another. But those of us who convince ourselves that we don’t have what it takes tend to squash our creative potential without even realizing it. You can’t access what you don’t believe is there, so make sure you understand what to look for.

Basically this means you need to accept negative feelings of inadequacy and learn to overcome them. Developing mastery over emotions like embarrassment, frustration, disappointment, shame and pride will allow you to focus on how to make the most of a misstep rather than on how it makes you feel when you supposedly fail. The easiest way to learn this sort of emotional mastery is to systematically notice and decode your emotions using these tips. They will help you understand and control your emotional signals so you can use them to your advantage instead of letting them govern your behaviour.

Just remember that the most creative people use their strong emotions as fuel to create their most inspiring work. So when you fail, push yourself to use those emotional reactions to work on your passion even more intently. By expressing those emotions in a healthy way, you’re practising your creative muscles even more.

Write down three positive outcomes that occurred because of this failure. Keep your end goal in mind and your values close at hand, because the greatest masterpieces weren’t created quickly and easily. True genius takes years of trial and error, of effort and failure, so persistence is key. It’s what makes the difference between a dream and a successful goal. Think of how you would try to convince a close friend to stay strong, if it was their failure. Then apply that advice to yourself.

We all ask ourselves questions when things go wrong, whether out loud or internally. Most of us don’t even realize we’re doing it, and that’s an issue, because sometimes we ask questions that aren’t helpful, like “How could I have been so stupid?”. These questions just make us focus on the problem and do nothing to assist us with creative problem-solving. Instead, make your questions positive and forward-leaning, like “What can I learn from this? What is this trying to tell me? What can I do now?” There’s always hidden data in a failure, so dig it out by directing your questions towards the core of the lesson.

Most of the time when we face a challenge, our brain prefers to try solutions that have already been proven to work in the past. Only when those options fail do we try something new. But there are some solutions our brain might refuse to try, even when it’s exhausted all previous options: approaches that haven’t worked in the past, solutions suggested or attempted by someone we don’t respect.

Any time you have an idea and decide to suppress it, for whatever reason, that’s squashing your creativity and subconsciously training your brain to be less creative. It’s time to accept that you are prejudiced against certain ideas and to get over this hurdle by trying out what you’ve been avoiding.

As human beings, we like to make predictions based on past experiences. When faced with a problem, we compare it to previous issues we’ve faced or heard about and then convince ourselves we know how it’ll turn out. But this sometimes scares us away from taking risks, from being inquisitive and trying things out. If you stop predicting and just see how things go, it will always lead to a creative outcome. Don’t be scared. Just give it a go.

Try something you’re not good at, something you haven’t done before or something you’ve failed at in the past. This will make you more likely to innovate as your brain creates new neural pathways to navigate this uncharted territory. Stop trying to find the “right” answer and work with what you’ve got right now. Try new things, new activities, new solutions, new thought processes. Anything might trigger an insight. Try changing a habitual pattern, like taking a different route to work. Even little things like that can spark a creative insight.

Most creative thinkers exhibit an openness to their own inner life, which gives them a high tolerance for disorder and the ability to extract order from chaos. Slowing down and being mindful of your thoughts, emotions and actions gives your brain some down time. Imagine that your brain is like a computer: If you have it on all day for hours at a time, with multiple tabs open and several programs running at once, eventually it will crash. Your brain needs occasional breaks, if it’s going to function at its best. And the closest you can get to powering it down without sleeping is meditation. For detailed instructions on how to find the perfect style of meditation to suit your personality and representational system, click here.

If you’re not the meditation type, you can find other more practical tips and tricks on developing mindfulness here. Basically the main thing that matters is that, when you realize you’re going through a strong negative emotion that’s clouding your judgment, you experience it fully, accept why it’s there and don’t suppress it. Eventually this will help you become detached from the feelings, so you can function calmly even when things go wrong. Write down what you’re feeling when you notice it’s affecting your judgement and you’ll slowly start to notice the finer details of how your body reacts physiologically during each emotion. At the very least, take frequent breaks from whatever you’re doing to clear your mind and think better. Simply taking regular toilet breaks or going on a short walk every hour or so should do it.

Solitude ensures that no further input will be received, so your brain can work on what’s already in there. Watching TV and chatting with others online are activities that may seem relaxing, but they still stimulate the prefrontal cortex, not allowing it to switch off and reboot. We need it to power down, so it can regain some energy for later logical problems. While it’s switched off, other parts of your brain can turn on, like the parts involved in creative problem-solving.

Sometimes the best thing you can do to solve a problem creatively is to just stop thinking about it altogether and let your brain do its job behind the scenes. The spark of creativity usually strikes when an idea has undergone an incubation period. This is when the problem you’re trying to solve has been thoroughly investigated in all directions, resources have been accumulated and your mind has been given an opportunity to process the data unconsciously. The problem is most easily solved when no direct effort is exerted on it any more. If you allow your brain to calm down, to regain some clarity and recover its resources, it will reward you with an insight.

And the best way to let ideas incubate is to spend some time alone and let your thoughts wander. Allow your brain to go through uninhibited daydreaming and don’t filter the thoughts that arise. Don’t upset yourself trying to “think about nothing”. Just accept whatever shows up for you and let thoughts come and go however they want.

I know this one’s hard to hear, but the fact remains that a healthy mind can’t work at its best, if the body isn’t doing the same. If you want your brain to come up with creative masterpieces, you need to make sure you’re taking care of its vessel. Click here to learn what the ideal diet is for your body type. Click here to learn how to trick yourself into working out more and click here to make sure you’re not drinking too much or too little water. That last one also includes a few handy tips on how to sneak more water into your day. And as an extension of working out, I’m also going to add some information on how to spend more time outside. Because being in natural settings taps into all five senses, energizes the body and, most importantly, stimulates the imagination. For more information on this, click here.

Listening to music stimulates the part of our brain that controls motor actions, emotions and creativity. I’ve written a whole article (complete with its own video of course) about the benefits of music and which genre to listen to depending on what you want to accomplish. You can find it here, if you’re interested in using music to boost your productivity.

This tip is based on this idea that eye movements are connected directly to brain function. Moving the eyes back and forth facilitates interaction between the right and left hemispheres of the brain, which may boost creative thinking. So as silly as it feels and looks, simply practise looking straight up and down for a while, then side to side and then diagonally from left to right and vice versa. It’s even funny enough to make you smile, which according to this article has a whole host of other benefits to offer. So why not?

This is my favourite way to train my creative side. It’s a little game I like to play early every day during my morning routine: Open the dictionary to a random page, close your eyes and point to a random word. Then spend 10 minutes writing down everything that word makes you think of. Write freely and jot down anything and everything that comes to mind without judgment or pausing to think.

This is a technique called ‘free-writing’ or ‘free association’ and it stimulates your creative brain. When you’re done, go back over the notes and see which ideas are worth keeping. Maybe all, maybe some. But even if none are worth keeping, the point is that you’re training your brain to be more creative more often, so it doesn’t matter.

If you want to be a better writer, write more (keep a journal, free-write, etc.). If you want to be a painter, paint more. Study the works of other artists you admire and try your hand at imitating their work. Visit museums and galleries. If you want to be a musician, play and listen to music you enjoy, go to concerts. You can’t improve, if you don’t practise and that’s a fact. Even Van Gogh started drawing crappy stick figures when he first grabbed a pencil.

Pay attention to what you want to improve, add more of it into your life, make time for it and go out of your way to be surrounded by it. Read biographies of great scientists, business leaders, musicians, dancers, artists and scientists. You never know when something will spark an insight.

Try out these tips and if you’re still finding this advice hard to implement, ask for help in the comments below, send me a message, or book a FREE breakthrough session to see how I can help you through Skype.

You can find more Happiness Strategy videos on my YouTube channel, so subscribe to make sure you never miss an episode! I come out with a new one every single Sunday.

Until next time, remember: Happiness doesn’t require energy. It requires Strategy.