Does your life ever feel like those little Russian dolls? You’ve probably seen those glossy, brightly-painted wooden dolls that upon opening, reveal another doll just like the previous one, and on and on they go. These dolls are kind of symbolic of the typical American’s work week; waking up, making coffee, standing head slumped over in a hot shower, grabbing lunch/lunch money, starting up the car, making the same right and left turns, seeing the same cars/faces at the same intersections, listening to the same radio programs, all the way to your well-worn task chair in your well-worn workspace.

As a creative individual, it’s been a lifelong quest to break out of this grind, finding ways to excavate life’s mine shafts to unearth the good, glittery stuff (creativity). I’m sure there are millions of ways artists and innovators have been so moved to create “newness” on a daily basis, and I’m going to share a few exercises I’ve used to get back the creative mojo, as well as a few methods that other creative folk have used as well.

Here are a few:

• Switch hands: One morning a week, try doing everything you normally do in the morning with the opposite hand. This exercise was born out of a severe finger injury in college, but in switching hands for an extended period of time, it forced me to actually think about how to accomplish some tasks I normally gave zero thought to. I strongly recommend allowing an additional 10-15 minutes in the morning to accommodate for your new-handedness.

• Shop like a man/woman: Go to the mall and find the LAST place you would normally spend your money. Universally for men OR women, this typically involves stores that are highly skewed to the opposite gender (think gaming/sporting goods stores or brightly-lit shoe stores selling tiny zapatos with chop-stick thin heels). Upon your return, I’d be VERY interested to hear  your observations…

• Sit don’t surf: Flick on the radio and find a station that you wouldn’t normally listen to. It might be a different music genre or a talk show that doesn’t share your views. Musician David Byrne (renowned solo artist and Talking Heads lead), describes a moment where he was scanning the airwaves and heard a radio personality performing an exorcism on a woman they said had a “Jezebel spirit” in her. Byrne was so entranced, he recorded a song with the same name…with an eerily similar intro.

• Suspend Logic: Pablo Picasso is famously quoted as having said “The chief enemy of creativity is good sense.” Tremendous things happen when we open our minds to what could be vs. what is today. Has a potential proposal or idea crossed your desk that you’ve repeatedly brushed off? Try switching your point of view, finding reasons why that idea/proposal would work and how far it might go with your backing. Just think, it took the better part of a century for manufacturers to put wheels on suitcases, yet what a combination that turned out to be!!

Whether you try one or a couple of these exercises, please share your experience. Have one not mentioned here? Share that one, too.

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