Creativity Block-buster

The PD can help break through blocks to the creative process caused by an inability to find any more ways to perceive an issue or situation. It also primes the creative pump by providing an abstract image onto which to project associations and symbolic understanding.

The creative process can get blocked, for a variety of reasons.

Sometimes it’s a function of difficulty breaking out of habitual patterns of perception – we get too used to thinking of things in certain ways, and can’t easily move to an alternate perspective.

Or it may be that the logical, analyzing left-brain processes take over and begin pronouncing judgments on our ideas as they arise, finding ways to discredit them before they’ve been fully explored.

The Projective Differential (PD) can help break through habitual thought patterns. It can also provide a way to engage the right-brain processing without the disruptive influence of the left-brain before its analysis and judgment are needed.

The use of abstract images in a forced-choice situation where there’s no time for the left-brain to do any analysis before responding requires the right-brain processes to get involved directly in the PD image decisions. The intuitive response to the images provides fertile ground for exploring the associations between the working topics and the images, priming the creative pump to help you see things in new ways. Engaging the issues at a level involving symbolic perception, deep feeling, and associations with the abstract is a powerful way to break out of normal patterns of thinking about the issues.

Much of how we perceive and know, and process information happens below the surface of awareness, and without tools to tap into those levels, we must wait until that information somehow gets triggered and brought into awareness on its own. The PD is just such a tool, providing a way into those levels, acting as a trigger to surface those unconscious perceptions and understanding that might otherwise remain hidden.

Check out What can it do? to find out specific ways the PD can aid in the creative process.