How to Think Outside the Box and Improve Your Work Performance
With a 7.8 billion world population and 41.000 listed companies in the world, competition between employees as well as companies in the world is rising significantly every year. Almost every company worldwide conducts much research to find innovations or keep growing their company’s unique branding.
Hence, nowadays, employees with the ability to think outside the box are needed by numerous companies.
Think outside the box is necessary to approach problems in new and innovative ways; comprehend them differently; design and develop products; as well as build unique characters for both your personal or company’s brand.
However, think outside the box isn’t easy. For example, as a copywriter or content writer, sometimes we could get a thing called “writer block.” It is a condition where we feel stuck and struggle to make a fresh new copy or content. Not only writers, other kinds of positions such as business developer and product developer can also get the same struggle to bring new strategies or ideas. We need efforts to push our thinking up to and beyond its limit all the time.
It’s okay to feel stuck and struggling so hard to bring fresh and unique ideas to the table.
Now, let’s read these tips to think outside the box to help you solve your struggles, awaken your creativity, as well as skyrocket your work performance!
Simplify Your Thoughts and Ideas
You may need to avoid thinking too much to think outside the box. It’s hard to break away from what’s already inside your mind when you’re trapped in a complex labyrinth of thoughts and ideas. It’s better to take a step back and look at your thoughts and ideas clearly by simplifying them.
Ask Yourself “Why” and “What”
Ask yourself “why” and “what” you’re doing when you’re trying to think outside the box. Instead of stressing about how to appeal to a customer or client, ask yourself why they should purchase your product or service (or why you would). What is the purpose of this? Why should anyone be interested? What makes your product or service exceptional? Why does a client or customer choose you?
Similarly, if you’re writing a book and need some inspiration for titles, consider why you wrote it or why someone would want to read it.
Try to put yourself in your readers/customers/clients’ shoes if you’re trying to find innovative ways to sell your works, products, or services.
Discuss with Friends or Colleagues
Thinking outside the box can often be as simple as thinking outside your mind. Consider talking to friends or colleagues about a problem you’re having or an idea you’ve developed. What they say and how they respond may spark new ideas for you, and they may also have advice that will help you move forward.
Practice Meditation
While meditation is referred to as “calming the mind,” the fact is that our minds are always roaming, and all meditation does is make you realize it. In meditation, you’re supposed to notice the thoughts that come to mind without attaching yourself to them or judging them. We have ideas the whole day, but we don’t always try to meditate on them.
Get Enough Rest
It’s a fact that you can’t think creatively when you’re tired. Sometimes what you need is a good night’s sleep. Taking the rest you need to refresh and recharge your mind may be everything you need to wake up with a renewed perspective and a clear mind. The mind works in wonderful ways, but it needs enough rest to function properly.
Write a Journal
Writing in a journal will greatly aid in opening up your mind and get the flow of your creative ideas. Give yourself a trigger to help you come up with out-of-the-box ideas. If you’re trying to think outside the box about future business ideas, you could start by writing a journal about life experiences that have been particularly satisfying to you.
Write a Poem
Although most problem-solving focuses on our analytical centers, the poem beautifully bridges the difference between our more practical left-brain thought processes and our more imaginative right-brain thought processes.
Consider writing a poem about the issue you’re concentrating on, even if it might feel ridiculous (getting comfortable with feeling ridiculous could be another way to think outside the box).
Your poem doesn’t have to suggest a solution. The plan is to separate your mind from your brain’s logical centers and into a more imaginative part of the brain.
Draw a Sketch
Drawing a sketch is much more right-brained, and such as writing a poem, will help you loosen your logical left-brain on an issue. Visualizing an issue often stimulates other ways of thought that we don’t usually use, giving you an additional boost of creativity, intuition, and innovation.
Study Other Industries
Try to read magazines, books, or blogs about any industry other than your own to gain insight into how things work in other sectors. Many of the issues that people in other industries face are similar to yours, but they’ve adapted very different approaches to coping with them. Alternatively, you can discover new ties between your own industry and the new one, connections that could serve as the framework for potential creative collaborations in the future.
Learn a New Languages
Learn a new language will broaden your access to more knowledge, experiences, as well as new perspectives. Some sources of information such as books, journals, or blogs are written only in certain languages, and it may not your native language. By learning a new language, you may be able to read those previously “locked” knowledge. Learn a new language will also open doors to new places with new experiences, new friends, and new cultures to learn. Those new things you get by learning a new language will provide you with new perspectives and new ways to solve problems. Therefore, learning a new language is beneficial to encourage you to think outside the box.
Anyway, you can take courses on LingoTalk to learn new languages! LingoTalk provides you many language options (English, Korean, French, Japanese, Mandarin, German, Spanish, Arabic, Indonesian, and Thai) online with affordable prices, expert tutors, and a flexible schedule. Register here to start learning!
Are You Ready to Bring the Best of You by Thinking Outside the Box?
Let’s cultivate the ability to look at things differently from the way we typically look at things by practicing the tips above. Well, apply them, in reality, may not as easy as read them. But, if you practice them regularly, the skills you develop will come in handy the next time you face new problems.
Good luck!
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