We all want to be more creative. Being creative is something that is considered to be very important because it can help us in all aspects of our life. Whether we are writers or business people, creativity can help us in our personal professions. Creativity allows us to solve problems and to come up with answers that are usually considered to be ‘outside the box’. In this article I would like to focus on creative problem-solving and to give you a technique that can help you in this area.

As I’ve told you in other articles true creativity is a subconscious affair. What I mean by this is that it is seldom the case that we come to a conclusion by adding one plus one, it is nearly always the case that our creative inspirations come to us in a flash. These creative insights are usually discovered through personal contemplation, by following our instincts and our inner feelings. This is the case because it is the subconscious part of our mind that has the power and the broadview necessary to be able to come up with conclusions and ideas that are far too complex for the conscious mind.

Any genius that you have ever heard of was quite likely, admittedly or not, a person that had a deep connection with his or her subconscious mind in one way or another. The trick to creative problem-solving then becomes; how do I access this subconscious creative genius?

I’m going to suggest a very fun and interesting technique here that you can use to solve everyday problems. It requires little effort and can give you answers to problems quickly which is something that many other techniques, that try to access subconscious knowledge, can’t do.

There is one thing that you will need in order to use this method; what I want you to do is to go out and get yourself a little booklet of ‘word scrambles’. These are usually little booklets that have a whole jumble of letters and you must find a word or a bunch of words within this jumble. You could get one of these little booklets for a very cheap amount, I doubt that you would be spending more than five dollars if you’re willing to look around in the bargain section of any book or magazine store. I want you to also get yourself a pen and some scrap paper.

Once you have your jumble book and your pen with scrap paper, what I want you to do is to find a nice quiet area where you can relax and focus on the problem that you wish to solve. Find a nice relaxing chair and open up your jumble book to a jumble. Have your pen or pencil ready so that you can begin to do the jumble that is before you.

Once you’re ready in this fashion what I want you to do is to concentrate on the difficult question that you have to solve. Focus on this question, the one that you wish your subconscious to help you with. Contemplate it for a little bit and if you like you can also state your question out loud. For example you could be working on your personal budget; you could contemplate for a while what this means to you, really desiring a solution to this problem. Once you have focus like this for a while you can ask yourself out loud the question, “how can I reduce my budget without losing the luxuries that I love?”

Right after you have done this begin to work on the jumble. Working on the jumble in this way will allow you to consciously forget about your problem and the question that you just asked yourself. It is therefore imperative that you focus as much as you can on the jumble that you are doing, forgetting about the question and letting go of any worry that you might have. Now you could work on this jumble for a while or perhaps you only need to discover just a few words in the jumble. What you want to do next is to grab the scrap paper that is beside you and without thinking too hard about it write down any ideas that you get about that initial problem. Personally I would say that you should just try and finish half the jumble and then write as I stated above on your scrap paper. It is possible that as you are doing your jumble, you will get flashes, insights and answers. If you get a flash of insight, stop with the jumble and write it down and see what else comes up.

The trick is to not get yourself to involved with the problem again or to start worrying about any particular consequence from the problem. You want to very lightly shift over to your scrap paper and write down any creative ideas in a natural fashion.

If you spend enough time on the jumble and you allow your conscious mind to let go of its tenacious hold on your problem, you will be incredibly surprised by some of the creative solutions that you can come up with using this method. Once you get very good with this method and you begin to understand the kind of feelings that the jumble gives you, it is possible that you might not even need the jumble for future problems. The jumble is there to just distract your conscious mind so that your subconscious can work better in an unrestricted fashion.

Once you understand these feelings and have a basic idea of how this technique works, it is possible that you can come up with your own ways to create this detachment without the jumble. Da Vinci for example used to love to look at stains wherever he found them. In this way he was able to do the same thing that the jumble does for you. Try this technique, you will be surprised by its results. Experiment and try your own methods once you get the hang of it. By giving your subconscious mind greater free reign, in this way allowing your creative genius to come forth, you will be able to solve many of the problems that you thought were beyond you.