Nurture Your Soul With Creativity is the topic of today’s show. Think back to the happiest times of your life. Does there seem to be any connection for you between your most creative times and your happiest times? For me, as a musician, I’ve had some of the happiest times of my life creating music, or teaching music to others and helping them learn to be creative.I personally think that meditation can help you become more creative. I recently interviewed Tom Cronin – he’s passionate about reducing stress and chaos in people’s lives. We didn’t talk specifically about creativity, but I know Tom is high on the creative scale.Tom Cronin is the founder of The Stillness Project, a global movement to inspire one billion people to sit in stillness, daily. Tom has written a number of books, including his recent publication, The Portal: How Meditation Can Save The World. Saving the world requires us as humans to be more creative than we’ve been in the past. I published Tom's episode a few days ago and you can hear it at www.mindfulnessmode.com/653. It’s called, “How Meditation Can Save The World”. Listen & Subscribe on: iTunes / Stitcher / Podbean / Overcast / Spotify I’ve done some research on this topic of creativity and I’ve come up with five conclusions I’d like to talk about today. I’m curious to hear what you think about creativity. Send me an email at bruce@mindfulnessmode.comHere are five ways creativity can improve our lives: 1/ Creativity Helps You Solve Problems Creativity is a skill that can be learned. You don't need to be an artist or musician to be creative, you can use your creativity in everyday tasks like cooking, cleaning, gardening, or organizing. Use Osborn’s Creative Problem Solving technique with brainstorming in between the steps as follows: Clarify and identify the problem – Pretend that the problem is not that important Research the problem Formulate creative challenges Generate ideas Combine and evaluate the ideas Draw up an action plan Do it! (implement the ideas) Complex problem solving requires some step-by-step action. You have to think about it and use your knowledge and experience to come up with solutions. Your work experience can help you a lot and the knowledge you have gained in your education. From there, bring your emotion into play by allowing your mind to go to a story or incident that happened in your life where your emotions were triggered. Allow yourself to use empathy and imagination as you relax and let your mind go wherever it chooses. A formula you might want to use would be: imagination + creativity + empathy + innovation = Problem Solving 2/ Creative People Are More Successful Look around you. Think of the people you know. Do the more creative people seem to be more successful in your circles? Well, in my opinion, creative peioke tend to be more passionate about their work and I think that leads to more discoveries, more advancement, and more great relationships at work. Creative ppl tend to ask the question ‘What if” frequently, allowing their mind to explore possibilities. From what I’ve read about Elon Musk, I think he used his ‘what if’ mentality to ask himself what would happen if he created a company that would make commercial space flight possible? His companies are built around what could happen if creativity was the key factor. Creativity reminds me of a quote by Pablo Picasso. He’s known for saying, “Every child is an artist, the problem is staying an artist when you grow up”. It’s important for adults to continue to massage their creativity so we don’t become too left brain dependent and forget about the thrill we get from life when we allow our creativity to play an active role. 3/ Creative People Have Better Relationships Creative people have better relationships for several reasons. For one, they are often more motivated compared to less creative people. Creative people tend to be more relaxed and easy-going and that quality means they are drawn to people lo