Throughout this course, I have had many opportunities to use and develop my creativity and explore different ways in which it can be used. Though throughout this I have also encountered various barriers and blocks to my creativity, to overcome this I employed the use of some creative tools and techniques. At the beginning of the course, I did a test to get a value for my creativity and scored 70.13 on the website(Aulive, n.d.), after 5 weeks I have re-done the test to see if it's improved. The results of the second test can be seen below, the results show my creativity has improved, this could be due to several factors like being able to have a creative mindset, finding a creative space, overcoming blocks to creativity and using creative tools to boost my creativeness.

Barriers to Creativity:

During the creative process barriers and blocks are normally encountered to prevent or slow the creative process, the main ones being self-management, motivation, mood and current knowledge (Blomberg, Kallio, Pohjanpää 2017). I have encountered some of these and found them difficult to overcome in some instances, the biggest one for me at the beginning is that I didn't have a creative mindset and wasn't in a creative mood. To resolve the issue of not being in a creative mood I would employ creative techniques to help me and find a creative space, which helped to spark an idea or development to pass the mental block in my creativity.

Creative Tools:

As mentioned creative tools are useful for getting over blocks and barriers during the creative process, they can also help to boost creativeness to encourage different perspectives and ideas. some of these being things like brainstorming and SCAMPER which is "idea-spurring questions to suggest some addition to, or modification of, something that already exists." (Knowledge Solutions:311–314). This has helped me to take different views on a problem or quickly come up with new and varied ideas or developments for a problem I had encountered.

Creative Spaces:

Finding a creative space can help me get into a creative mood, which can make a big difference in how creative and efficient I can be. An example of this for myself is normally finding a quiet time at night to get into a creative and productive mood and having this space allows me to have more potential than a loud environment surrounded by people.

Summary:

My creativity has improved over the past weeks due to things such as employing creative tools finding a place where I can focus and by exploring ways to overcome blocks and barriers. I will continue to learn and develop this skill into the future, in the hopes of aiding my future endeavours.