You may feel like you’re running out of ideas, even though your day is already full of problems to solve. Often, the blockage does not come from a lack of talent, but from the labels we put on everything: “stable job”, “serious couple”, “I’m not creative”. Once the word is settled, the brain stops looking at the details.
An American author says that she thought she was very creative, since she wrote songs on tour. But her life was summed up in a single sentence: “I am a musician”. Burn-out, depression, career stopped short. It was by understanding that creativity is a creative state of mind, not just an artistic gift, that she began to reinvent her life. And then everything changed.
First shift in creative mentality: everything comes apart
First key change: deconstruction. When someone tells you “it’s a forest”, you no longer see the trees. Same thing with a permanent position or a romantic relationship: we see a block, not the pieces that make it up. A job, for example, is a mixture of missions, hours, salary, location, atmosphere, margin of freedom… so many movable bricks.
A little exercise: take a situation that you describe as “that’s how it is”. List all its bricks on a page. Circle in one color what is truly non-negotiable (paying the rent, maintaining health) and in another what can change. This simple gesture opens the door to more psychological flexibility and breaks the feeling of being stuck.
Second change in creative mindset: moving to “what if…?”
Once the bricks are visible, the second shift is imagination. She begins with two very simple questions: “Why do we do it like this?” and “What if we tried differently?”. This requires accepting uncertainty, remaining somewhat in the dark with no immediate answers, a skill directly linked to creative thinking and leadership.
To feed this muscle, science shows that a little daydreaming helps the brain connect distant ideas. Set aside a few minutes each day for a “what if…” journal: three crazy but concrete hypotheses about your work or your personal life. Add a weekly meeting in a different creative environment (library, café, park, exhibition) to break out of automatisms.
Third creative mindset shift: think less, test more
Last shift: moving from “I’m thinking about it” to taking action. With a fixed mindset (“I’m not creative”), we wait for the perfect big idea and do nothing. The creative mindset favors low-risk micro-experiments: proposing an unexpected option in a meeting, testing a different format on a project, changing a detail in a daily routine. Obstacles become fuel for readjustment, not evidence of failure. As Adrienne Rich wrote, quoted by Psychology Today: “Until we can understand the assumptions in which we are drenched we cannot know ourselves.” (Until we understand the assumptions we are immersed in, we cannot know ourselves.) Each small test makes these assumptions visible, then modifiable, and builds true creative resilience.