Do You Have the Creative Mindset to be An Anywhereist?

In the last three newsletters, we’ve talked about the mindset you need to create a successful Anywhereist life. You need to have:

• a minimalist mindset that helps you get rid of excess baggage (both physical and mental)
• a growth mindset, where you believe you can make incremental improvements to up your skill or mastery — it’s not just innate ability.

Today we’re going to take a deep dive into the next ingredient you’ll need (and you’ll need a whole lot of this).

Creative Mindset

Since you’re already thinking about ways to restructure your business and your life to make it portable, I’m assuming you’ve already got some creativity going for you. If not, or if you want to increase/improve it, there are techniques for doing just that.

To start, creativity requires a growth mindset.

In an article titled Growth and Creativity Mindsets, author Pronita Mehrotra writes:

But there is also growth mindset about creativity, or in other words, the belief that creativity is not innate and can be developed just like any other skill.

In other words, you’ve got to believe that you can develop your creativity. In fact, Mehrotra continues,

Growth mindset is especially important in creative work since such work often requires higher levels of perseverance.”

While some people seem to be innately more creative than others, anyone can learn to think more creatively, just as, through practice, you may have learned to play the piano as well as a classmate who seemed to have more talent at first.

In fact, there’s an entire method of teaching how to play a musical instrument based on this. Shinichi Suzuki, creator of The Suzuki Method, believed that

Musical ability is not an inborn talent but an ability which can be developed. Any child who is properly trained can develop musical ability, just as all children develop the ability to speak their mother tongue. The potential of every child is unlimited.”

Suzuki based his teaching method on the way children learn language, which is an extremely creative process.

Mehrotra suggests that there’s a creativity mindset which includes:

• Openness to experience
• Nonconformity
• Playfulness

To develop a creativity mindset, Danish-based creativity coach Katja Hunter suggests you:

• Make mistakes. On purpose. Really.
• Lead with curiosity.
• Choose the road less traveled.
• Say no to other people. A lot. Say yes to yourself.
• Allow yourself to feel afraid. Everyone’s afraid when trying something new. The trick is to identify and acknowledge it without letting it control you.
• Keep learning.
• Train yourself in divergent thinking by asking “what if.”
• Be playful, quirky, or just downright weird.

Read her entire article to get some real-life exercises to help you flex those creativity muscles.

Oh, and just in case you’re thinking to yourself, “I’m just not a creative person,” creativity researcher George Land did a large study over a period of years. His conclusion? “Non-creative behavior is learned.”

The corollary, of course, is that if children can learn how not to be creative, then adults can learn how to rekindle the creativity they once had as children.

“Why all this focus on different mindsets, Susanna? Why can’t you just point me in the direction of a profitable portable business, isn’t that what I really need?” I hear some of you asking.

The short answer is, if you can get rid of what’s weighing you down and holding you back, if you can develop a growth and creativity mindset, you’ll have the tools you need to work that out for yourself.

If you have a fixed mindset and I say to you, “you should do X,” your brain will come up with 99 reasons why that won’t work for you. If you have a growth mindset, you’ll look at those 99 obstacles and see that they’re surmountable — or that you can develop the skills to overcome them — and that maybe you’ll even have fun doing it.

And fun is important, maybe more than you realize.

For years I felt so overwhelmed by everything I had to do, as a working mother of five, that I forgot how to have fun. Even “fun” things I planned for the kids turned into work.

Albert Einstein described creativity as “intelligence having fun.” Fun, and play, are an integral part of creativity, so it’s important to rediscover your sense of fun as well.

Read: Creativity is Intelligence Having Fun

Tips & Tools

I’ve given you a whole lot of links above, so we don’t have our usual number of tips and tools this week.

Location

Here are two European locations that are now offering a digital nomad visa.

Read: Romania’s digital nomad visa might be the most accessible yet

Read: Digital nomads in Croatia can stay for a year without paying income tax

Are safety and security high on your priority list? Here’s a recent roundup of the 10 Safest Cities. . .

Read: The World’s Safest Cities have been revealed

Some of the links on this page may be affiliate links. That means, if you click and purchase, you pay exactly the same amount and I’ll earn a small commission. These fees help me to keep the free information flowing.

In Case You Missed It. . .

10 Awesome Reasons to Become an Anywhereist

My friend Michael Gibbs wrote this guest post, where he lays out 10 awesome reasons he wants to become an Anywhereist.

I’ve been extremely attracted to the idea of working from anywhere ever since I first heard about it. The freedom that comes with such a lifestyle really appeals to me. Now, it’s not merely an attractive idea, but I’ve decided to proactively pursue the life of an Anywhereist.

To be honest, I’ve never been interested in lounging on the beach with my laptop, an image often used to portray the life of a digital nomad. One, I have no interest in staring at a computer screen while surrounded by such a beautiful environment. Two, I wouldn’t want to chance the possibility of ruining my laptop by getting sand inside it. . .

. . . Working at the beach may be your ideal, but here are ten awesome reasons why I want to become an Anywhereist . . .

Read More. . .

Curious, which one is your favorite? Leave a comment or send a tweet to @TheAnywhereist and let me know. Can you guess what mine is?

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