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How To Redirect Your Thoughts to Reveal New Possibilities

Activity: Do a Duchamp

Learning Goal: To help learners develop creative thinking skills. To help them develop divergent thinking, confidence in their creative abilities, a bias to action, and brainstorming skills.

Possibility is about the ability to see something in your imagination or in your heart and materialize it in real life. Unbeknownst to us, our imagination is limited by what we already know. Your brain is a repository of all your prior experience — it’s mapped with all your cumulative emotional, cognitive, and motor experience to at least age twenty-five. This means your memories define how you perceive, process, and act. This is how we make sense of things, which is why we are typically uncomfortable in unfamiliar situations that don’t make sense—they are disorienting and disturbing and disrupt the brain’s sacred trinity of comfort, certainty, and safety. But being tied down to the familiar keeps you from seeing new possibilities.

This activity will help you practice letting go of what you know so that you can see new possibilities.

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