The second one of Robert Sternberg‘s subtypes: creative intelligence. This form of intelligence is all about generating new ideas and coming up with unconventional solutions. In Howard Gardner‘s Intelligence Type, creative intelligence might connect to the artistic types such as musical or visual-spatial intelligence. This subtype is also referred to as experiential intelligence.
Let’s have a look at these individuals’ strengths and weaknesses. Are you creatively intelligent?
Strengths:
The creative mind of this intelligence subtype allows them to think outside the box. This is a key trait, enabling them to consider any option and connect seemingly unrelated topics to find solutions. Creativity has no limits.
This way of thinking is also the reason these individuals sometimes come up with original or unconventional solutions. They let go of the idea that something can only be used to fulfill its originally intended purpose and reconsider options to utilize every tool they have.
Creatively intelligent individuals are innovative. You might have guessed with the two prior aspects, but their strong problem-solving skills allow them to think and create innovations useful to improve our lives.
Areas for Improvement:
Creativity, as it can be connected to ignoring limitations, can also lead to decreased structure. How could these be connected? Remember what we said about our environment reflecting our mind? A creative mind can be chaotic, full of possibilities and potential, so that can reflect in difficulties with structure.
When your mind constantly produces new ideas and longs for creative exploration, working on projects that require a lot of focus and time can become uninteresting. Most often, it’s the creative process of coming up with ideas that seems much more exciting than the actual execution, leading to inconsistency and trouble in finishing projects.
Have you recognized yourself? Congratulations on being a creatively intelligent individual! To help you move forward and understand yourself better, we’ll now give you some tips on how to refine your strengths and start your improvement work.
Refining Strengths:
Brainstorming regularly can become a useful tool for you to refine your creative mind. When engaging in brainstorming, you train your associative mind. Connecting knowledge and tools, generating ideas, whatever you come up with can possibly be applied or used in another situation as well. You might also find a specific way to structure your thoughts or ideas, and discover different prompts you can use for brainstorming in future projects – note them down!
Association is your best friend. So, here is another way to train your ability to associate information besides brainstorming: association is the connection of things based on similarities or maybe personal experiences. So, to train this skill, you essentially need to train your ability to identify such similarities.
If you combine something naturally, start to identify the characteristics that led you to connect the two. If you can’t think of anything, pick something in your room and identify its features: how does it look? What is it used for? Etc. Maybe you’ll start seeing similarities to something you know right away; if not, don’t worry. Analyze a variety of things that might not be related at first, and maybe you’ll realize a connection between items you wouldn’t have expected.
You don’t need to limit yourself to things; analyze people, emotions, drawings, colors, whatever it is you feel like looking deeper into.
Engage in creative arts. Drawing, sculpting, or any other form you can think of. Explore ways to unleash and use your creativity. Arts can be a great valve for you to understand what’s going on in your mind. Also, they present an effective way to translate your ideas into something others (and maybe you yourself) can understand. Embrace your creativity in the freedom of arts.
Lastly, explore novel ideas! Whether they’re your own or those of others, exploring ideas can spark your inspiration and creativity as well. Work with other creative individuals and create an environment where you can freely unfold.
To truly embrace your intelligence, you need to learn to take risks, and you need to learn to overcome failure. Nothing works out right away, and many of your ideas will fail, but your ability to adapt, analyze, and connect will allow you to always find another solution, one that exceeds the first one!
Improvement Work:
Learn to refine and polish your creative ideas. Coming up with something is exciting and fun, but truly looking into your idea and identifying possible difficulties is just as important in real-life situations. If you don’t learn how to successfully implement your ideas into real-life settings, you’ll struggle with using your intelligence type effectively.
Finish what you began! Whether you got overwhelmed by unstructuredness or struggled with assigning a realistic amount of time to work on your project, improve on what holds you back. Maybe start with smaller projects or split them into manageable chunks to prevent you from giving up. Smaller steps allow you to have multiple ‘finish lines’ in between, or smaller achievements throughout – this is a great way to keep motivation up. (We’ve discussed that in previous posts if you’re interested)
Learn to structure your work progress. Before you try to come up with an idea, make sure you truly understand the problem at hand. Create a structure that looks somewhat like: identifying and analyzing the problem, associating and solution development, idea testing and refining. This is a classic scheme for creative problem-solving; there are many posts online about this technique.
Now that we’ve learned more about your skills, let’s look at some jobs and hobbies you might enjoy.
Jobs:
Jobs suiting this intelligence type span the areas of arts. You could enjoy being a designer or artist, an inventor or entrepreneur. Many jobs require creative, forward-driven thinking.
Hobbies:
Hobbies you might enjoy could be painting or writing, listening to or creating music, creative problem-solving, and many more. Explore your creative nature through engaging in hobbies that satisfy you.
Lastly, to fully understand the impact of creative intelligence, we’ll take a look at its effect in everyday, social, and personal settings.
Everyday Relevance:
In everyday life, you as a creatively intelligent individual, are able to adapt to new situations and unexpected events more easily. As you challenge life’s limitations, arising problems are just as another way to explore the unknown and come up with creative solutions. This allows you to stay calm and collected during difficulties.
Creativity can show in many ways. It can be useful as described during tough times, or it can enhance the world we live in. What does that mean? Designing, composing, crafting, artwork, creativity can manifest physically and beautify our surroundings.
A creative solution can be characterized by a combination of typical and abstract elements to solve a problem. This limitless approach leads to a feeling of freedom and empowerment.
Societal and Personal Impact:
To society, you’re an innovator, a role model embodying the power to solve any problem. Freedom, future, feelings – put these up somewhere, because to society, you are master of these things. People see you as someone brave, someone that’s not afraid to push boundaries and explore honesty and self-expression.
Personally, creative intelligence encourages your adaptability. This is an extremely useful trait, able to be applied in any of life’s endless scenarios. It is important in experiencing life to its fullest as it can provide positivity during challenges. Adapting is your way to explore a situation’s every perspective and angle, and therefore find the good parts about it.
A creative prodigy with the ability to blur the boundaries between reality and fiction, with the ability to live tomorrow and take others with you.
You can enhance everyday life through innovations, you can heal through arts, and you can inspire through your mindset.