Exercising Divergent Thinking
- The Many Uses Exercise: Pick an ordinary object, set a timer for 5 minutes and try to come up with as many alternative uses for a paperclip as you can.
- 10 New Ideas: Every day for a week, try to come up with 10 new ideas within a specific topic or category.
- Daily Headlines: Imagine that your day was a news story in the New York Times. What would the headline be?
- Articles on Trial: Challenge the conclusion of articles you read by coming up with one question you’d like to ask the author.
- Start to notice your automatic thoughts and generate alternatives to them.
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How to challenge assumptions
How to generate new ideas
How to break out of traditional thinking patterns
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Similar ideas to Exercising Divergent Thinking
Divergent Thinking
Divergent Thinking is a method of thinking that allows us to consider various solutions to a problem and discover new points of view. It is also known as thinking “outside of the box.”
How to use this: “I was able to do some divergent thinking after journaling this morning....
Divergent thinking can be practiced
- Mind mapping helps your brain work by association. Start in the centre and add notes, connecting branches together.
- Brainstorming. Generate as many ideas as possible.
- Free writing. Focus on the question and write without s...
Thinking or Doing
We have a ‘thinking’ system and a ‘doing’ system – and we’re generally only capable of using one at a time.
- Thinking requires Diverging(trying to come up with as many ideas as possible).
- Doing requires Converging (evaluating ideas and figure out which ones are best).
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