Inspiration: Boost Your Creative Energy With These 8 Tips

Avoid comparing yourself to others. Find out what makes you unique, embrace your warts and all! Once you have made a list of thing that makes you stand out from the rest, use it as a bouncing board. For example, do you have a cultural background you can draw from? The language, the colors, the traditions, the clothing, the environment. You can weave it into your work so that it has a touch unique to you.

Contributor: Tina Bangel from tinabangel.com

One of the key ways to boost your creativity is to participate in a really simple, 5 days to a month challenge that helps foster and cultivate a creative aspect to your daily activities (eg a doodle a day for a month). That’s something you can do at work - when you take 5 mins to get your eyes off the screen, practice your doodle (or whichever challenge you might set yourself).

Contributor: Nicola Knobel from myinnercreative.com 

Set a timer for ten minutes and just start a project. This act tells inspiration you are ready. This intentional focus on creativity dramatically increases the creative output at work and at home.

Why set a timer for ten minutes? Because sometimes the feeling that you have to sit for hours to create is a mental block. If you give yourself permission to do it for just ten minutes, your mind relaxes and says, "sure I can do that". Most days I spend much more than ten minutes on what I'm creating. But if I sat down knowing I'd be there for hours, I wouldn't start.

Contributor: Susan Rose from gutsyhappiness.com

It's important to accept whatever creative voice is in your head and to ignore the voices that suggest it's not good enough, or not relevant, or a waste of time. Whatever the idea is, if it's compelling, get it down in some form that you have access to later. Any book can be edited, any song workshopped, and the final product of the seed you "rescue" is frequently going to make the initial effort of writing something down worth your while.

If there is no voice in your head, it may be that it's there and you don't hear it. Perhaps the voice is speaking and you've long ago written it off because people in your life told you to ignore it or suppress it. If that's the case, it's essential you find some way to learn how your inner voice speaks to you, through meditation, workshops, or even therapy.

Contributor: Adam Cole from acole.net

If you want to be inspired from the inside, get inspired from the outside. Figure out what excites you, be it some kind of music, cool buildings, or food, and follow whatever path you want as you learn about it. The freer your exploration of your passion, the more likely you are to resonate with it.

Contributor: Adam Cole from acole.net

If all else fails and you can't get "inspired," work anyway. One of the great secrets about creativity is that writing a book or a song doesn't feel like reading a book or listening to a song. You can create great things without ever being in some kind of state of bliss or creative "flow."

Contributor: Adam Cole from acole.net

One of my best tips is setting my alarm clock to wake up 1-2 hours earlier in the morning to make time to write. I'm often too tired after work and I find that my brain, and creativity, are sharpest before the day gets started.

Contributor: Emily Viall from egviall.com

A strategy I use is to take time to observe the world. I get inspiration from people, events, and places around me. When I find myself stuck in my own head, worrying about all of the things I need to get done, I remind myself to stop and be present.

I will listen intently to the sounds, what people are saying around me, smells, the way the light looks. I pay attention to all the small details for a few moments each day. Not only does it give me a moment to relax but I often find material in the real world that inspires me to write stories, even if it is only a small detail, like one line of dialogue I overhear someone say on the subway.

Contributor: Emily Viall from egviall.com