What Cannes Lions Can Teach You About Staying Inspired at Work

 

Being creative is hard, especially when it’s your job. Coming up with entirely new ideas every day is mentally taxing when you aren’t in a flow state, and it can leave you wondering if you were ever creative at all. 

Earlier this year, I took the “Creative Thinking” course by Cannes Lions to find better ways to keep my gears turning. This six-lesson course explores the challenges of being creative and shares proven techniques for sparking inspiration. The course also includes interactive prompts that help hold you accountable for your creative goals. After hours of learning, here’s what Cannes Lions taught me. 

The Challenge of Being Creative 

The first thing I learned is that it’s normal to see creativity as a challenge. The course emphasized that it’s not meant to be easy.  What really shifted my perspective, though, was realizing there’s no single “right” way to be creative. We are all different, and that is what makes our thoughts valuable.  

During my first year as a copywriter, I struggled with finding my own process for fueling creative ideas. I mistook playing it safe with professionalism early on. Eventually, I found that taking breaks, changing environments and recognizing creative ruts help me overcome mental blocks. Cannes Lions speaks to this as a system reset that allows ideas to start flowing again. 

Creating Space for Creativity 

If your mind and environment are cluttered, your ideas will be too. We all have bad days, and sometimes you need to lean on your environment to stay inspired. While there’s no “right” way to organize your workspace, a messy desk can mirror your thought process. Overall, a drab workspace can provide fewer sources of inspiration, stunting creativity. 

Creativity also thrives when you give your mind room to wander. 

Cannes Lions suggests exercise for generating ideas because it gives you uninterrupted thinking time away from digital distractions. From a scientific sense, exercise improves brain function by increasing oxygen and glucose supply. 

So, if my coworkers see me taking a lap around the office, I’m just thinking. 

How to Get in a Creative Flow

Cannes Lions tells us to embrace the unpredictability of getting creative, because you never know where you’ll land. Establishing consistency outside of work can help you get used to cutting your creative switch on. Mark Wahlberg credits his success to a strict daily routine that starts at 4 AM and ends at 8 PM. While this is an extreme measure, I’ve found that reading a book before bed helps me wake up with more ideas. 

Don’t be ashamed to use established ideas as a starting point. Successful creators often build on the work and influence of predecessors. For creators and communicators, the research phase of a project is one way we draw on ideas. 

Creativity requires both freedom and limits to flourish. There’s an interesting paradoxical relationship between deadlines and endless delays. There’s a name for this phenomenon: Parkinson’s Law. When you have less time to deliver, you become exponentially more creative. 

5 Practical Ways to Spark New Ideas 

 The course covered a wide range of techniques, but here are five favorites that have helped me generate fiercely creative and fiercely strategic work this year. 

1. Draw inspiration: Study, read and listen to creators you admire. For me, that’s Conductor Williams (Music Producer) and our Senior Copywriter Elizabeth!  

2. Think in reverse: Instead of asking how to attract customers, ask how to drive them away, then avoid those actions. This is known as the inversion method. 

3. Have a laugh: Find ways to incorporate humor in your day. A simple meme or a layered joke can enhance creative thinking.  

4. Mind map: Draw a “tree trunk” at the center of a large piece of paper and then add “branches” of terms that relate to it. From there, include “twigs” and “leaves” of ideas that build on each branch. 

5. Try a remix: Like David Bowie, who famously cut up newspaper articles to spark new lyrics, look for ways to rearrange or reimagine existing ideas to create something fresh. 

What Cannes Taught Me About Creativity 

Cannes Lions provides great insights for all of us to become better thinkers and communicators. My biggest takeaway from the course is that when it comes to creativity, nothing is off the table for generating ideas. So, next time you’re in a creative block, give yourself permission to try something unexpected. If you’re looking for fresh ways to inspire creative thinking on your team or in your campaigns, connect with Jackson Spalding’s Creative team. We’d love to help bring your next big idea to life.