Professional and Personal Devlopment

Personal, Professional and Career Development Creativity Exercises for Personal Development

5 a day

Suitability: Fluency Originality Curiosity Producing Ideas Use for: Groups One-to-One Objective: To reinforce the habit of producing creative ideas and considering creative approaches to familiar problems. Timings: 10 to 20 minutes a day Materials: The news, newspapers, the internet and the general environment around us to serve as stimuli (optional).

The aim of the exercise is for you to set time aside each day, asking yourself 5 interesting questions a day. The 5 a day exercise is well-suited to set as a challenge for personal development.

The purpose of this exercise is to reinforce the habit of asking questions and considering options. This exercise will work most effectively if you try not to evaluate your ideas, and be open to unusual questions. Some suggestions would be to ask 5 a day about… • Things you do not know about • Places you would like to visit and why • Famous people you would like to have had a conversation with and why • Things you accept without questioning • Things that make you very happy • Things that make you very annoyed or angry • Find five reports of the same story in the newspaper or on the internet and consider the similarities and differences. • What are the next 5 a day topics I should think of? • What are the next 5 a day topics I should think of?

Instructions

The topics for the 5 a day are not important but it is essential that the topics are of personal interest and that you make the time for consideration. It is important that you learn to follow your natural curiosity and ask your own questions when adopting the 5 a day exercise.

Discussion points Debriefing

• As you practiced the 5 a day exercise more, did you find it easier to think freely? • Were some topics easier to think about than others?

• We often consider creative thinking and idea generation to be an innate capacity. Some people have a...