Realize creativity and intuition are similar.

First, know how they’re connected. Creativity and intuition are not synonymous, but they are next door neighbors. For that matter, intuition, far from being scary, is as normal as your neighbor next door. Intuition feeds creation. Creativity fuels your intuition. So why not let them be friends?

Intuition and Creativity are:

• Experiential. They are active not passive. We experience them just like we do real life. They allow us to be hands-on, and they guide us from  concept to reality, our reality.
• Sensory. We use our senses to tap into our intuition. The more senses we involve when we create–drawing, writing, designing, or singing–the better our end product. If you’re stuck, stimulate your sense of smell with your favorite scent. Or stimulate your memory with photographs.  Or listen to a song.
• Dependent on time and space.  Ever notice when you demand yourself to finish a project, you balk? That’s called resistance. We resist what we don’t yet understand, or what we don’t yet have the answer for. If we ease up on resisting and allow our intuition in, which takes time and space, we arrive at a solution much faster. So get your mind off your project, go someplace else, and allow.
• Signals. They alert you to notice detail and connection.  Intuition allows us to see the connections between things. Creativity takes those connections and makes sense of them.  The key is to trust the signals and follow them, then act, create. We can do so through collaboration or mind mapping or even day dreaming.
• Instant problem solvers. Have you ever read an article or report you wrote and thought: “Wow! That’s really good. I don’t even remember writing it”? Even the most gifted artists notice some connections once they’re finished and see their work. Often, answers and solutions seem like they come from somewhere other than you.  That’s because you’ve made a new connection or tapped into a part of your consciousness that isn’t being used daily. (And of course, some of us believe it might be a divine source of consciousness).

This process isn’t just for those destined for museum walls and Top 5 publishers. Intuition and creativity are for the rest of us. It’s for athletes and students and entrepreneurs. It’s part of our make-up. Intuition allows an animal to know it’s being pursued. It lets a person know another is a friend at first sight. It’s also the food for imagination, which stimulates creativity.

The more you allow yourself to imagine, the stronger your skill at envisioning becomes. The more adept that skill becomes, the more present you’ll become, the more you’ll relax into your work. It’s like receiving a signal. “Ground Control to Major Tom.”

Why? Intuition sets the stage to free our creative thought. Creativity is a personal process, and no formula can force it. It’s  spontaneous. But that doesn’t mean you can’t encourage it.

You can prepare for intuition.

You have to notice it, acknowledge it, and invite it in.  Here are 5 ways to do just that.

1. Take a lesson from a child. I wrote two books during my toddlers’ naps. They stimulated my intuition and catalyzed me to remember what it was like to have a child’s view of the world, all curiosity and wonder. You can access this child’s mind, too, just by having fun.
2. Take time to allow flow in. Give yourself permission to relax. Again, creativity on demand is not best. You may have to meet that deadline, but a walk may help you get the project in early. We seldom can access intuition and imagination if we’re beating up on ourselves, punishing our bodies by sitting, or forcing something to happen.
3. Stop judging yourself. Your intuition is impartial. So get those not-good-enough gremlins off your shoulder!
4. Separate the creative act from the analytical mind.  If there’s one piece of advice you walk away with from this article it’s this: Your brain does not create by itself. It creates through a neurological sequence of electrical firings, which do not work in the same way when you are backtracking and editing every other sentence. Or tearing up a canvas every time you put a color down. Or pressing delete on a speech before you get to the end of the first page. Create first. Revise after.
5. Stay open and observant.  Some of the best work I’ve ever done professionally has been the result of noticing detail and connecting new ideas. I wrote an annual report called, “We’re all in this together,” several years before Obama began his presidential campaign with that slogan. I came up with that line because I was observing what people around me were going through. They felt disconnected and disempowered after 9/11. Yet the truth was that when we worked together, we got through it.

Calm curiosity is key.

We’re unlikely to create if we’re not curious. Since school trains us to learn facts and forget them as soon as we pass a test, it’s easy to lose curiosity over time. If we lose our our curious mind, we lose our creative edge.  We have to retrain our brain to notice subtleties, and then allow time for them to settle in us, which is rare in this “too-much-screen-time” era. Our intuition isn’t on a screen, although film can inspire it. It’s within us. We won’t find it through worry or busy-ness. We’ll find it through intuition.

Only your intuition knows for sure.  But she’s always there. You just have to knock.

P.S. Photo is mine (Kathryn Ramsperger) It is one of the first books ever printed in a museum in Byblos, Lebanon, the setting of my first novel.