Confidence

Tips On How Design Thinking Positively Impacts Creativity

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Design Thinking positively impacts creativity. Design Thinking workshops empower business owners and staff in different ways to find new and creative solutions to problems. Let’s start by explaining what Design Thinking is.

What is Design Thinking

According to IDEO’s definition, Design Thinking is a human-centered, iterative approach for creative problem solving and innovation that draws from the designer’s toolkit to integrate what’s desirable from a human point of view, technologically feasible, and economically viable.

According to Wikipedia, Design Thinking is a term used to represent a set of cognitive, strategic, and practical processes by which design concepts such as proposals for products, buildings, machines, and communications are developed.

Design Thinking includes context analysis, problem-solving and framing, creativity and solution generating, creative thinking, sketching and drawing, modeling and prototyping, testing and evaluating. Basic features of Design Thinking include the abilities to:

  • Manage and resolve ill-defined or ‘wicked’ problems
  • Find and implement solution-focused strategies
  • Utilise abductive and productive reasoning
  • Use non-verbal, graphic or spatial modelling media like sketching and prototyping.

How can you impact creativity with Design Thinking?

First of all, Design Thinking will help you discover that all people are creative. Design Thinking will help you acknowledge the inside voice that says “you’re not creative”.

It is often said, almost 90% of people genuinely believe they don’t have a creative bone in their body. They also think that matters related to creativity or innovation are someone else’s job.

Therefore, Design Thinking will help you discover your abundant resources of creativity. With Design Thinking, you will design, create, test, experiment, connect with real people, and most importantly, stretch yourself to do things differently and embrace your very human traits of imagination, creativity, and curiosity. That leads to creative solutions to real-world problems.

One way to awaken the creativity within your team is through collaboration. Each team member can develop creative confidence and be comfortable in bringing their ideas to life. One of the ways is to understand the importance of and rebuild the human skills of creativity, curiosity, and imagination.

Design Thinking focuses highly on interaction and collaboration. It quickly builds skills like empathy, rapid prototyping, and iteration—igniting curiosity about the problems you need to solve and taking your creativity and imagination to the next level.

Over time as you build your creative confidence, you can nurture others and help them develop their creativity and enthusiasm to explore, develop and express their Design Thinking skill set.

Design Thinking Positively Impacts Creativity

Key benefits of Design Thinking

Design Thinking gives you a process to solve problems creatively. It’s a way of solving problems with a mix of rational, data and research, emotions, feelings, and intuition that data can’t measure. Design Thinking considers the user front and center, driving a completely different way of thinking rather than looking at everything through your perception and judgment.

Why are people fearful of being creative?  Simon’s creativity workshops address the number one problem teams face that obstructs their own Creative Ogre.  The inner voice promotes doubt and tells you how uncreative you are.

Creativity should flow in all aspects of someone’s life, not just at work. When you live a more creative and open personal life, you will apply that same approach to work. To truly fulfill your creative potential, learn how to use your creativity at all times in your personal life or career as constant use will positively shift your thinking.

The world’s leading brands such as Google, Samsung, Apple, and GE all use the Design Thinking process and are adopted by top universities such as Stanford, Harvard, MIT, and d.school.

The phases of Design Thinking

According to d.school, the five phases of Design Thinking are:

•          Empathise with users

•          Define the end-user needs, problems, and find insights

•          Challenge assumptions and creating ideas for innovative solutions

•          Prototype–transform your ideas into solutions

•          Test solutions

Conclusion

The core of Design Thinking is its ability to improve products or systems by analyzing and understanding how users interact with them through research, reiteration, and fine-tuning to meet the needs of your client or target audience.

Who is Simon Banks?

Simon Banks is not your ordinary keynote speaker. Simon is an international keynote speaker that has delivered over 1300 events across the globe. Simon speaks at and emcees conferences and events and facilitates many innovations and design programs, including innovation hackathons, visual storytelling programs, design sprints, and creativity and Design Thinking workshops.

Positive Words Research – How Design Thinking Positively Impacts Creativity

Self-Esteem: 4 Ways to be More Confident in Yourself Today

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Having confidence is important in helping you feel better about various aspects of your life. Maybe you want to be more confident in your professional life, crush goals, and get a promotion. Or maybe, you want to boost your self-esteem and see yourself in a more positive light. Either way, taking the steps to better yourself and build confidence can go hand-in-hand, and lucky for you, it doesn’t have to be difficult.

Here are four steps to build your self-confidence: 

1. Practice Positive Self Affirmations

Have you ever been in a situation where you’ve given yourself a pep talk in preparation for what’s to come? These pep talks, also known as self-affirmations, can be a great way to boost your confidence. They’re good for building confidence due to the fact that they get your head into a positive mindset. Additionally, studies have shown that practicing positive affirmations can ultimately reduce health deteriorating stress. By practicing self-affirmations often, you will begin to believe them, leading to the ability to make positive changes in your life.

To get you started, here are a few powerful affirmations that can help guide you on your journey to confidence:

  • I am my best source of motivation.
  • There is no obstacle that I can’t overcome.
  • Challenges are opportunities to learn and grow.
  • I am the best at what I do.
  • I am self-reliant, creative, and persistent in whatever I do.

If you need more suggestions on affirmations, you can say to yourself, don’t be afraid to create your own! You can also find plenty of positive words for any occasion, such as this one here. 

2. Implement a Self-care Routine

Self-care is essential to feel like your best self and can directly influence your confidence. There are many elements of what a self-care routine can look like, but the best part is that it’ll be unique to you. Be sure to incorporate activities that not only help you relax but also benefit you in other ways.

For example, ever heard the saying, “look good, feel good?” There may be some truth behind it! Taking the time to craft a skincare regimen can be just what you and your body needs. Your skin is the body’s outermost layer of protection, so it’s important to give it some TLC in return. If you’re troubled by skin concerns—such as acne—there are specific products and ingredients you should consider implementing into your routine. An acne cream with active ingredients such as tretinoin and niacinamide will be beneficial in clearing your skin as these ingredients not only work to combat blemishes and reduce the appearance of dark spots but also improve both the tone and texture of your skin.

Setting this time aside for yourself each morning and night will leave your skin glowing and your confidence increasing. Of course, a skincare routine isn’t the only way to practice some self-care. Other activities to try are reading, picking up a new hobby, or even getting some fresh air. Giving yourself quality time to nourish your body and relax will reflect in your day-to-day mood and overall confidence. 

3. Change Your Habits To Be More Confident

Changing some of your daily habits in both of your personal and professional life can help transform the way you feel. Maybe you find that you’re the type of person that hates to ask for help. Most of the time, we fear asking for help because we feel as though we’re supposed to have all of the answers and do not want to come off as weak or unknowledgeable. Interestingly enough, some of the most confident people are the ones who take the initiative to ask for help when they need it.

Another habit to be more aware of is your posture. While this may not be something you actively think about in your daily life, it can affect you more than you think. According to research completed by Amy Cuddy, your body language can directly change the chemistry in your brain. To practice better posture, consider power poses that open your body up instead of closing it. Improving your posture comes with a handful of benefits in addition to boosting your confidence, helping you in more ways than one!

Next, aim to strengthen your willpower. To do so, transform your thoughts into something more positive. For instance, flood your mind with thoughts of how much you want something, why you want it, how you’re going to get it, and what will happen once you achieve your goal. Focusing on your goals with a positive mindset and paired with your self-affirmations, you will be sure to help you build the confidence you need to achieve them. 

4. Learn Something New

Allowing yourself to learn a new skill or hobby can be just what you need to improve the way you view yourself—even if it means putting yourself into an uncomfortable situation. Working on something simple such as your communication or social skills can transform the way you view yourself. While, of course, self-confidence doesn’t directly make you better at what you do, it does prime you to take the steps and risks needed to achieve your goals. New skills can help guide you through conversation better, participate in knowledge transfer, and even make you a go-to person for a specific topic at hand. Ultimately, however you decide to begin your self-confidence journey is up to you, but a great place to start is with these four steps.

Self esteem

9 Powerful Ways to Boost Your Confidence And Be Successful

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The today quote from the Momentum Personal Dashboard installed on my Google Chrome is:

“If you never did, you should. These things are fun and fun is good.” Dr. Seuss

This quote speaks to me about being self-confident. You need to be confident to do and enjoy fun things.

According to the dictionary “Confidence is generally described as a state of being certain either that a hypothesis or prediction is correct or that a chosen course of action is the best or most effective. Self-confidence is having confidence in one’s self.”

I found this article about how to be confident: 5 Powerful Ways to Boost Your Confidence. It is written by a man, Peter Economy, but I think it applies also to us women. The article gives 5 pieces of advice.

The first 5 powerful ways to be more confident

  1. Stay away from negativity and bring on the positivity;
  2. Change your body language and image;
  3. Don’t accept failure and get rid of the negative voices in your head;
  4. Be prepared;
  5. For tough times, when all else fails: Create a great list.

Searching for more confidence resources on the internet, I found this video where Jessica Alba shares  5 tips for becoming a mogul… or a Lady Boss.

The next 4 powerful ways to be more confident

  1. Be Inspired;
  2. Be brave;
  3. Women Up or Man Up;
  4. Just Listen.

In total, there are 9 powerful ways to boost your confidence. In the video Jessica Alba speaks about 5 tips, but tip number 2 “BE PREPARED”, was already included above. We can say that “Preparation” influences a lot your level of being confident. This is why you need life experience so that you can be prepared. Be bold and live life.

Source of the image: 1

Positive Words Research – 9 Powerful Ways to Boost Your Confidence

confidence