Quirky Reads: Change Your Mind – 57 Ways to Unlock Your Creative Self by Rod Judkins

Rachie's Musings on: Change Your Mind – 57 Ways to Unlock Your Creative Self by Rod Judkins


I was wandering through an art gallery gift shop with friends and whilst my friends were soaking in the artsy stuff for sale, I zoned in on this little beauty.

 I initially bought it thinking ‘Great, maybe I’ll get some tips on how to become a bit more creative, cause I really wasn’t born one of those gifted people who can just are creative’

The first page gave me a much needed kick up the bum and bluntly explained to me that some of the greatest creative minds are just ordinary people with ordinary lives who have used creativity to become a bit less ordinary.    The rest of the book dispenses techniques and advice, through habits we can teach ourselves in order to tap into this much feared thing called creativity.

I used to think creativity was something you either had or didn’t have, you were born to be creative or you weren’t,  you had a talent through which to express it or you didn’t.  Reading this book helped me to see that having that mind-set is exactly what stops me from being creative.

I now try to have the mind-set that if I think my ideas are going to be crap and unimaginative, they will be because I’ve conditioned myself to think in an unimaginative and crap way, but if I tell myself my ideas might be interesting, there is a chance they just might be.

Since reading the book, I’ve noticed a bit of a shift in the way I think, I don’t tell myself that my ideas are going to be crap any more, I try to tell myself that I’m going to come up with an idea that makes perfectly good sense to me and run with it, if it doesn’t work out, come up with another idea.

A nice read that really helped to alter the depreciating way that I think about myself and my abilities at times and make some positive changes.