How mindfulness cultivates creativity and innovation

According to Canadian psychologist and researcher Dr. Scott Bishop, mindfulness consists of two primary features:

• The regulation of attention to maintain focus on your immediate experience.
• Approaching the phenomena of our experiences with curiosity, openness, and acceptance.

As it happens, that describes the fertile soil for creativity and, by extension, innovation.

You can’t have innovation without creativity. And creativity, by its nature, is an internal process; you have to understand what’s happening inside yourself in order to be sustainably, reliably creative. In other words, mindfulness enables creativity and innovation.

Creating the conditions for creativity

While you can’t force creativity to happen, you can be rigorous and systematic about how you create the right conditions to generate that process.

One way to develop the discipline of curiosity is to become more deliberate about training yourself to directly participate in your experiences – otherwise known as…