Creativity is often perceived as a mysterious, enigmatic process. It is seen as mystical or magical, something that happens if you are lucky or somehow favored by the Muses. Most people seem to think creativity is a talent given only to a privileged few and that they are not among the chosen.

That is simply not true.

We are all creative. And while some of us may naturally be more creative than others, all of us can learn to be more creative than we are right now. Just like any other skill, we can increase our creativity through training and encouragement. It all begins with understanding the types of thinking involved in creativity (which we discussed in the introduction) and how they apply to the different stages of the creative process.

So let’s explore the stages of the creative process.

The first stage of the creative process is the spark. The spark is what gets the process started, not unlike the spark that lights a fire.

The spark provides the motivation and the energy for the rest of the process; it is the foundation and the starting point. The spark can also be looked at a seed, a seed from which everything else will grow.

The spark involves both problem solving (finding a solution to an existing problem) and problem finding (seeking out and discovering problems that have gone unnoticed).

Both types of thinking are involved in generating the spark. The analytical mode is involved in recognizing existing problems as well as in formulating and asking questions to ferret out hidden ones. The intuitive mode also works on both problem solving and problem finding, but it picks up on subtler problems and questions that the analytical mode might miss. The intuitive mind also excels at finding and recognizing the patterns which can help precipitate the spark.

Asking questions is essential in all phases of creativity, but it is especially important during the spark phase. The more questions we ask, the more insights and ideas we will be able to generate.

Being curious and open to things around you greatly increases your chances of finding problems and solutions. New insights can be triggered by things directly related to your field or topic as well as things that are unrelated. Often the stimulus to an idea is some unexplained detail or a puzzling incongruity. Those odd little peculiarities that go unnoticed by others can provide open minds with seeds for innovation and discovery. One of the classic examples of this is Alexander Fleming’s discovery of penicillin.

So pay attention, ask questions, be curious and watch the sparks fly!

Collecting involves immersing yourself in your subject and accumulating thoughts, ideas, images, materials, data and words - anything that may be directly related or seemingly unrelated to your project.

Ideas are basically new combinations of elements, so the more elements (thoughts, ideas, images, material, data and words) you have to work with, the more likely you are to come up with a combination that works. Thomas Edison said, “To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.” The collecting stage is where you collect the pile of junk.

Both the quantity and quality of elements are important: the more stuff you have to work with, the more ideas you will be able to generate and the more unusual and unique that stuff is, the more creative those ideas will be. Think of a kaleidoscope which, when turned, reveals new patterns and relationships. The more pieces of glass you have in the kaleidoscope and the more different they are, the greater the chance you will find a new and beautiful combination.

Collecting occurs on two levels: a broad, general level that is occurring all the time (if your eyes, ears and mind are open) and a narrow, specific focus that you use when researching a particular problem or project.

The two types of exploring are complementary and feed into and off of each other. Exploring on a regular basis insures that there is always a good pile of junk on hand to work with - even before the start of a project. Creative people are the ultimate recyclers; to a creative person, everything is potentially useful. Focused exploring helps concentrate your thoughts on specifics and details.

Both analytical and intuitive thinking play roles in the collecting stage; analytical thinking is used more during project-specific research while intuitive thinking is more suited to ongoing gathering and absorption.

Being open and receptive is a crucial skill in the collecting stage, just as it is during the spark stage at the beginning of the creative process. Open your eyes, open your ears, open your mind. Look, listen, read everything you can. Become a sponge and soak up everything. Feed your mind all the time with all sorts of interesting stuff. You never know when some little half-forgotten piece of something will be just what you need.

After you have collected enough ideas, images and other materials to saturate your brain, you then start tinkering around with them, seeing if you can make new ideas, images or things. You think about your idea, play with it in your mind and connect it with the things you have been collecting (as well as connecting those things with each other). You examine things from all sides, shift your perspective to get different views, take things apart and put them back together but in new ways. Carl Jung was referring to the tinkering stage (whether he knew it or not) when he said, “The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.”

Tinkering primarily involves analytical thinking; you are, for the most part, messing about with ideas and concepts consciously. Underneath the conscious mind, however, the intuitive mind is making connections and noticing patterns that the conscious mind is not able to see.

It is important to keep your mind open and receptive during this stage. In order to do so, you must overcome two challenges: routine thinking (thinking about things in the same way all the time) and self-censorship (judging thoughts and ideas before they even see the light of day). Doing things differently and doing different things can help overcome the first challenge. The second challenge is often more difficult; it involves recognizing self-censorship and challenging its negative advice. One way to keep this negative voice of judgment at bay is emphasize the play aspect of the process by telling yourself that you are “just fooling around.”

You continue playing with concepts (or images or words), rearranging and combining them, but eventually you realize you cannot seem to generate the idea or solution you are seeking. At this point, you give up in frustration, or at least your conscious mind does, and you are ready to enter the next stage – the pregnant pause.

During the pregnant pause (a.k.a. incubation) the mind, full of the necessary raw materials, continues to work on the problem underground. The pregnant pause can be compared to the growth of a plant's roots; you may not see much progress, but you know that something is happening underground.

The intuitive mind is the best suited for the incubation stage; it does not censor or judge, which sets ideas free to combine in fresh, original ways. The unconscious mind is a vast storehouse of information that includes many things the conscious mind is unaware of, including deep feelings and sensory imagery. The unconscious it excels at finding patterns within and making connections between different bits of information. And the unconscious mind “knows” in a different way; it doesn't always speak in words, but instead with a sense of rightness, a hunch, a gut feeling that we intuitively know is correct.

The pregnant pause requires that we detach from the problem; rest, relaxation, reverie, exercise or working on an unrelated project are common activities during this stage. Each person has his or her favorite way for creating the mental environment necessary to induce and maintain the incubation phase. Some take long walks or hot baths; others find shaving, listening to music or driving in the country to be helpful.

Activities that get our conscious mind out of the way, either by occupying it with simple tasks or by somehow hushing it, free the unconscious to do its work. Unfortunately, our culture does not support the type of downtime the unconscious needs to do its best work. As Paul McCready, the inventor of the Gossamer Condor (the world’s first successful human-powered aircraft) said in The Creative Spirit: “The only big ideas I've ever had have come from daydreaming, but modern life seems intent on keeping people from daydreaming.” In order to be creative then, we must find – or make - the time to daydream, the time necessary for incubating our ideas.

There is no point in pausing unless you have already done the collecting and tinkering work which provides the raw material for the unconscious mind to work on; pausing without having gathered materials and messed about with them is simply sloth. Acceptance of the work involved in the early stages of creativity as well as the inevitability of frustration are both necessary in order to continue on with the creative process.

After a period of resting in the pregnant pause, there come the Aha! moment. All of a sudden an idea comes to you as if from out of nowhere! Wow! There it is! The perfect image/solution/theme/word/color/name/idea!

The Aha! is the breakthrough stage of creativity that gets all the attention and the glory. Somehow from all the mass of stuff you have collected and tinkered with a new something is born. The Aha! is the “click” or “flash” of inspiration that culminates all the hard work (and hard rest) that came before. The light comes on and everything is clear and illuminated. You smack your head and say, “YES! That’s it!”

The classic example of the Aha! moment is that of the Greek scientist and philosopher Archimedes, who discovered the principles of density and buoyancy while soaking in his bath. In his excitement (so the story goes), he forget to dress before he went running through the streets crying “Eureka!” (“I have found it”). (The moral of this story should be obvious to those who are often inspired in the tub: it’s always best to keep a towel nearby.)

The Aha! stage relies solely on intuitive thinking and as such, there is no conscious effort we can expend to “make” it happen, other than that which we put into the previous stages (without which, it is unlikely to occur). The Aha! is almost always the briefest stage of the creative process; while the other stages can take days or months or even years, the Aha! occurs in an instant. The idea appears suddenly and spontaneously, and is often accompanied by feelings of certainty and elation and a sudden compulsion to dance wildly about the room.

Act, the final stage of the creative process, involves translating your insight into a product or action, making it into something useful and valuable to yourself and others.

When you act, you evaluate, edit, market and (everyone's favorite) deal with criticism. You determine if the idea actually solves the problem, if it satisfies the need expressed at the beginning of the project. You take your idea into the real world; you run the tests, prove the theorem, draw up the blueprints, create the prototypes, polish the prose and send it off to a publisher. You present the cruise idea to your spouse, the strategic plan to your boss, the new product to consumers. Acting means making your idea real.

Analytical thinking predominates in this stage; evaluation requires its logical, objective type of processing. Intuitive thinking also plays a part, particularly in interactions involving presenting and selling your idea to others.

The final stage of creativity is vital to the success of any project. Lots of people have ideas, but it is only those with the necessary courage, confidence and perseverance that bring their ideas into the world where they can make a difference.