If you had a hard time with the exercise above it is because your left and right-brain are in conflict. Your left insists on saying the word, while your right struggles to say the color. In the United States, we have been raised to live in our left-brains. With school curriculums focusing highly on logical thinking, analysis, and accuracy and less on arts, imagination, and synthesis, how can we bounce over to the right? Recently, I’ve been hearing a lot about this and I’ve learned some tricks, the following have worked for me, and they’re fun!

1. Drive, clean, work out. I’m not trying to sound like a life coach, but it turns out driving, showering, washing dishes, mopping, exercising, knitting, all those tasks we do on autopilot, put us in our right-brains. Keeping our left-brains occupied, allows our right-brains to roam free. It is because of this that sometimes we find ourselves at our destination, hardly remembering the commute, or why the most brilliant song lyrics come out of shower time… well at least for me. This is my favorite technique because you are being productive while working on being creative. No sitting and staring, waiting for inspiration to spring out of thin air! Plus, if it doesn’t work, at least the dishes are done.

2. Turn off the music. It may seem counterintuitive being that music is artistic, creative and moving but listening to music actually brings us out of our right-brains. Because it spawns sense memories, putting us into a mood, effectively limiting the clean creative air. However, if your creativity is calls on you being in a “mood” and you are not, a good sad or happy song might put you there.

3. Call out colors. A fun game you can play if you can’t get out of the office or don’t feel like going for a drive or cleaning. Look around the room and try to name every color you see as fast as you can.

4. Draw something without looking at the paper. Focusing only on the object try and draw the entire thing without looking. This is a neat game and can be very frustrating, with your left-brain constantly nagging you to look at the paper. This article has a clear way of explaining this exercise in detail. Another way to do this is to turn an image or photo upside down and draw it, without flipping it over.

5. Office basketball. Now we all love this one, and I’m sure we’ve all done it. Toss out your trash, really, toss it. Thinking spatially forces us to use our right-brains. Figuring out the distance from here to the wastebasket instantly does the trick. To explain this, think about when you are backing your car out of a parking spot, if you’re talking to someone in the car you usually stop mid-sentence, focusing on the task at hand. Talking, is a left-brain function, you have to stop because you need to work in your right-brain. So whenever you are feeling uninspired, summon Kobe and shoot some trash hoops!

With all of these, remember to have a pen and paper near by so none of those great ideas go to waste. No side of your brain is worse then the other. We need the left as much as the right, but in our society our right needs some exercise. If you ever need a little boost to get you in the RIGHT mindset for creativity, try some of these tricks! And the next time you notice yourself having some truly wonderful ideas, take note of what you are doing and what you were doing just before, keep that in your creative toolbox.

To find out what side of your brain you use more go here or try this test!