You can thrive with creativity, and having more aspects of creativity in your life will help you prosper in surprising ways. When you remember the times in your life when everything was flowing, do you feel like creativity was an active part of your life? As a musician, some of the happiest times of my life were when I was creating and performing music. I’m taking part in a ‘learn to paint’ program this week, and it has really helped me feel connected to a deeper part of myself. The course is with Jed Dorsey of TheLandscapeWorkshop.com. Jed is not an affiliate, I just wanted to tell you about this excellent free course he’s offered. Listen & Subscribe on: iTunes / Stitcher / Podbean / Overcast / Spotify Meditation can help you become more creative. I recently interviewed Jackson Kerchis – he’s passionate about helping people learn meditation and stick to it. The episode is called, How To Stick To Meditation; Jackson Kerchis. Jackson also wrote an excellent book on the topic with the same name, How To Stick To Meditation. I can say from experience that meditation has helped me feel more creative and I have definitely benefited from the increased creativity.There are five benefit to creativity I’d like to talk about today: 1/ Boost Happiness As a kid, I would spend hours playing the piano. I played from sheet music and made songs up. When I thought the song was ready for a performance, I’d play it for my dad, who was always eager to hear me play. He gave me great positive feedback as a result of my creativity. The definition of creativity varies, but most experts agree it has to do with the ability to come up with new ideas, new connections between ideas, and novel solutions to problems. You might be thinking, I’m not a musician, a dancer, or a poet. Experts say creativity lives within all of us, it’s just a matter of allowing it to come forward. In the book called, “The Creativity Cure”, author Dr. Carrie Barron says, “It really has to do with open-mindedness.” She says creativity applies to everything from making a meal to generating a business plan. It doesn’t matter what creativity looks like in your life. It could be cooking, skiing, singing, sketching or something else. Just remember that creativity will feed your soul and just help you feel happy. 2/ Creativity For Problem-Solving 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 everyday with things like cooking, cleaning, gardening, or organizing. Creativity can help with problem solving but it’s good to take step by step action. Use Osborn’s Creative Problem Solving technique Brainstorming in between the steps to get the biggest benefit. Here are the 7 steps: 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) I encourage you to combine your creativity with problem-solving to reach a win-win result. 3/ Creativity for Healthy Living Does it make sense to you that creative people live longer? I think creative people are happier, and I believe it makes sense that happier people live longer. I know in my case, I’m a lot happier when I’m doing creative activities compared to when I’m spending my time on what I would consider non-creative activities. The topic of creativity has come up a lot in my interviews on Mindfulness Mode, and just as an observation, I’ve noticed that health and creativity seem to be aligned. There are studies about this topic and a study from 2012 researched veteran men. The researchers, Turiano, Spiro and Mroczek, followed 1,349 veterans for over 10 years . They looked at their intellect and creativity. They rated their creativity based on these five words: creative, imaginative, artistic, innovative, and uncreative.The researchers identified creativity with the following phrase