Becoming more creative as a person, a skill that is going to become more and more vital to our survival in the workplace, seems to hinge around us exercising and developing our right brain functions.
Most of us are right-handed and neurology has shown that our right handedness is closely connected to our left brain hemisphere. Our left brain circuitry commands our verbal communications, analytical functions and logic. This makes sense as our left hemisphere thinks and our right hand acts (as well as our mouth).
Your right brain taps into creativity
In contrast we do not use our left hand, which is connected with our right brain hemisphere, that often. This is where our intuition lies, our emotions, feelings and creativity. It was no surprise to me that many of our most famous artisans such as Da Vinci and Beethoven were left handed. For the rest of us this means that our creative hemisphere is more or less dormant but abundant with untapped creative resources.
For generations left handedness was educated out of people. Society and education did not like people who were out of the ‘norm’ and tried to correct left handedness by forcing people to use their right hand thereby strengthening the neural pathways in the brain’s left hemisphere whilst weakening the pathways in the right. Not all together a great success but none the less on some it was effective and, even today, right handedness is considered usual. Thus, our right brain may, for many, have gone to sleep!
If you are left handed then I am guessing, you are a fairly creative person already and if you are ambidextrous then you must have the best of both worlds. The trick for us right handed people is to spark off the right side of our brain to unleash the creative pathways that are undiscovered and under used.
Unlock your right brain potential
I am predominantly right handed. After the crash though my right hand took the brunt of the burning and I have been left with hardly any feeling in it. I can no longer trust my right hand to enact what I ask of it without watching it carefully and telling it precisely what I expect it to do.
Luckily, the body being such a wonderful mechanism, I began to gradually default into using my left hand, which does have feeling, a lot more. I trust my left hand because of the sensory feedback I get and I allow it to take the lead role when enacting my mental commands. Perhaps it was this that has helped me to discover and utilise my creativity more?
Apparently, this can be replicated to great effect. Research suggests that if you practice and teach yourself to write left handed this opens the avenues into your right brain and begins to lie down the new pathways that unlock the flow of creativity. 5 minutes per day is enough though as you get more proficient you may want to extend the time.
How simple does that sound! Will it work? Well, I’m going to give it a go each day for the month of October and I’ll report back as to how or what difference I notice. In the meantime why not give it a go? Using your right brain and being more creative can’t be a bad thing and will definitely be a positive for the future.