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creative skills

THE CREATIVE DOLPHIN: DECIPHER YOUR BRAIN TYPE

Congratulations on taking the quiz and unlocking the C.O.D.E. to your unique brain type. You’ve taken the first step towards understanding how to leverage your strengths and develop strategies to overcome your biggest challenges. As a Creative Dolphin, you have incredible strengths you can use to overcome any challenge in your learning and life. 

If you haven’t taken the test yet, be sure to visit mybrainanimal.com to find out which brain animal represents you.

THE CREATIVE DOLPHIN

The Creative Dolphin is the visionary. You generate original ideas and find unique solutions to complex problems through out-of-the-box thinking and strong intuition. Imagination is your playground. You approach challenges with a fresh perspective, looking from all angles, even ones no one has considered. Impossible isn’t in your vocabulary. That doesn’t mean you’re trying to constantly reinvent the wheel. Instead, you enjoy building on what already exists, and either expanding their potential or taking a different approach. You thrive when you’re encouraged to offer new viewpoints and love brainstorming new ideas. At home, you breathe new life into Taco Tuesday and can craft a brand-new marketing campaign for a lagging product at work. You’re guaranteed to come up with an idea no one else has thought of. You shine in environments that embrace your creative spirit and can feel stifled in places that require you to conform to strict convention.

UTILIZE YOUR DOLPHIN STRENGTHS

As a creative, you have the ability to engage in creative endeavors to enhance innovative thinking. You can use your imagination to unlock new ideas and explore unique approaches to any problems you encounter. It may not seem like it, but activities like painting, writing, or brainstorming can be used to sharpen your problem-solving abilities as you learn to see things from a different perspective.

One way you can enhance your creative side is by creating a stimulating environment. Design your workspace in a way that promotes creativity by incorporating elements that inspire you. Things like mood boards, plants, pieces of art, photographs, or anything else that speaks to your creative side. And don’t forget the power of natural light.

Part of planning your day should incorporate time to recharge your creative well. Mindfulness exercises, such as journaling and meditation, help you tap into your intuition and gain insight into your thought process. Creativity can easily become blocked with too much pressure or stress, so you want to be sure to make time to decompress and relax.

You also excel at collaboration, though it’s easy to get lost inside your dreamscapes. Make sure you find time to regularly seek out others for feedback and brainstorming sessions. You may be reluctant to leave your world and interact with other people, but you’ll find that you end up feeling not just inspired, but energized from the collective ideas generated.

Dolphins Working with Others

Every animal type has their own strengths to contribute when working with others. The goal of a successful team is to use your strengths to complement others and contribute to a more effective and balanced group dynamic. Here are some specific strategies you can employ when working with other animal brain types.

It might feel strange to team up with the logical Owl, but you and the Owl complement each other’s strengths and offset your weaknesses remarkably well. You can introduce innovative ideas and solutions and the Owl can provide a structured framework to implement them. Owls love solving puzzles which means you can use their curiosity to bring any creative endeavor to life. Their analytical approach combined with your creativity and open-mindedness can create interesting answers for any problem you encounter.

Working with the agile Cheetah can feel like you’re on creative overdrive. No matter what you dream up, the Cheetah is ready to spring into action and make it happen. Their efficiency and adaptability can help you find strengths and pitfalls in new ideas and programs, giving you clear direction on how to focus your efforts for maximum productivity. You can help the Cheetah find new approaches to their set routines and practices, while they can help you get better at execution and momentum.

Dolphins and Elephants are natural partners. You both value collaboration, even though your motivations for connecting are different. The Elephant wants to ensure everyone’s voice is heard and this can be an advantage for you, since depending on the team structure, you dreamy and out-of-the-box ideas might be otherwise dismissed or can be difficult to get buy-in. At the same time, they can help make sure you get the feedback and creative input you need to help you overcome obstacles or roadblocks when it comes to creating and executing new plans.

Improve Your Dolphin Weaknesses

Every animal type has challenges you can work on to improve your performance. By focusing on personal growth, you can become self-aware enough to overcome these obstacles and become your best self.

Even though you can come up with exciting new approaches to outdated problems, you want to focus on and develop are your organizational skills. Creativity often happens in a whirlwind. It can be easy for you to lose track of time when working on a project—even getting lost in the project itself as you discard various elements in search of the right fit. Find a way to add structure to your day so you can stay focused and productive on all areas that matter, not just the one demanding all your attention in the moment.

Another way to help stay on track is to practice your analytical skills. It can be too easy to chase a shiny new idea, but sitting down and mapping the idea out can save you a lot of time, energy, and resources in the end. Rather than making progress only to start all over when you hit a dead-end, a little planning can hone your creative instincts into sharp tools that you can wield effectively. This will also help you learn how to prioritize your tasks and projects effectively. Understanding how to focus on the most important objectives first will ensure timely completion and lead to you getting more done in less time.

By focusing on these areas of improvement, you’ll learn how to analyze your tasks and organize your day so you can tackle every creative idea quickly and efficiently. This will give you a more balanced and effective approach to work, learning, and personal growth.

Better Dolphin Problem-solving and Decision-making

Each animal brain type has unique cognitive preferences that you can use to improve your problem-solving and decision-making abilities.

Your natural inclination for creativity and imagination means that you can generate innovative solutions to problems. Even if you’ve been told to think more conventionally, you should stay open to exploring unconventional ideas and approaches. Your out-of-the-box thinking can often yield answers no one else thought of and that makes you a valuable asset to any team.

Take your creative thinking one step further by looking for patterns and connections in every task. Learning how to assess and analyze while creating will strengthen your problem-solving abilities and help you master identifying patterns, trends, and connections between seemingly unrelated pieces of information.

This practice will also help you learn to consider the big picture from a holistic standpoint. Every problem has broader context and every decision has long-term implications. By taking a step back and not focusing on just the smaller problem at hand, you can learn to think on a larger scale and successfully avoid obstacles in the future.

CONCLUSION

As a Dolphin, you have incredible strengths and cognitive gifts. You can leverage these abilities to overcome challenges, improve your performance, and unlock your inner genius. Learn how to enhance your creative workspace, practice analyzing your priorities, and turn the world into a vision board so you can make anything possible.

Remember, these brain types are not strict categories, but a framework to help you explore and embrace your unique qualities. You may even find multiple brain types resonate with you. Everyone is a one-of-a-kind combination of traits and abilities. That’s why your brain type isn’t a limitation, but a foundation from which you can build and expand.

This information can help you tailor your learning approach, seek environments that complement your strengths, and surround yourself with individuals who can support and challenge you. When you embrace your strengths, cultivate your weaknesses, and embark on a journey of self-discovery and personal growth, you can unleash your truly limitless potential.

TAKE THE QUIZ

So, are you ready to uncover your brain type? Find out if you embody the agility of the Cheetah, the wisdom of the Owl, the creativity of the Dolphin, and the empathy of the Elephant. Take the quiz at mybrainanimal.com and unlock the power of your remarkable mind.

5 HABITS THAT KILL CREATIVITY

Do you think creativity is a skill you lack? Or do you associate creativity with certain people and you’re not one of them? In our fast-evolving world, creativity is a skill you cannot do without. And most people don’t lack the ability to create. They simply have habits that kill creativity.

The truth is, you were born with an infinite capacity for creativity. Look at any child and you’ll know this is true. But as you grow up, your environment grows more complex, and to cope with these threats, your brain forms habits and sets parameters within which you function almost on auto-pilot. 

If you want to reconnect with your creative side, here are five habits that kill creativity and what you can do to stop them.

How Creativity Works

According to neuroscience, creativity thrives on ‘divergent thinking’. In simpler terms, it’s the ability to connect seemingly unrelated things. Your neural network controls this activity, which is a combination of three brain networks — the default mode network, the executive control network, and the salience network. The default mode network provides your repository of ideas. Concentration, emotions, and decision making are some things that the executive network oversees. And the salience network identifies what information is important and what is not. These three work together to produce ‘creative thinking’, and the habits mentioned below hinder all three of them.

1. Over-rationalizing

Rational thinking is following the safest and most tried-and-tested pattern again and again to solve problems. Your rational mind is risk-averse to new ways of making connections. When you judge every single new idea with your default rational parameters, you stop taking risks and making new connections.

2. The Comfort Zone

This is when you let the default-mode take complete control. If you’ve been doing the same thing for a long time, your brain has fallen into a pattern. This means your salience network won’t present new information or your executive control network won’t weave it in with existing ideas. But this is mistaking a stupor for peace of mind. You’re not allowing your brain to perform creative functions, which are an essential part of its job. Getting too comfortable in one place actually numbs the creative part of your brain into inactivity and affects your brain health in the long term.

3. Fear of Failure

Failure is not a pleasant experience at all. It affects your mood and hormones negatively, which is why you avoid scenarios that can lead to failure. One of those scenarios is risk. But all creative enterprise contains a grain of risk. All new things are a leap into the darkness, however small. If you spend all of your energy avoiding failure, your brain stops generating and connecting new ideas. Focusing on failure is one of the habits that will kill creativity.

4. Information Overload

This is an all too common problem. There is too much information at your fingertips and too little time to analyze and digest it. When your brain becomes saturated with too much information, the salience network experiences immense pressure and cannot perform smoothly. This leads to indecision and overthinking, a sign of overworking the executive control network. Taking time off from a work situation is essential so that your brain has time to sort out the various info and discard the unimportant ones.

5. Not Sharing Ideas

Creativity thrives on collaboration. Letting other people’s voices into your mind offers fresh perspectives and a more diverse set of information points. This helps you look at problems differently. When you hide your ideas and work without outside input, you are missing out on important connections that another person with unique life experiences could identify more easily than you.

Conclusion

You are creative. Your brain has all the components to make creative thinking possible. Yet, it is often your brain that hinders creative growth because it relies too much on habits that kill creativity. It’s time to break the cycle. Kill these five habits and unleash your creative potential.

For more on how to unlock your creative side, watch this video: