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Every creative project and every invention ever brought into being began with a single idea. Without ideas we have no raw material to work with, no starting point, and no hope of being creative.

By using an Ideas Journal you can help yourself have a steady stream of new creative ideas, and the more you use one, the easier it becomes. Here’s how to get started.

First get yourself a journal. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy or expensive. Just a plain notebook would be fine, and make it something small enough to carry with you wherever you go, because that’s just what you’re going to be doing.

The way you organise your journal is up to you. I would recommend starting off by not trying to organise it at all. Just start at the top of the first page with your first idea and then write them in a list one by one underneath.

Once you’ve become more familiar and comfortable using your Ideas Journal you can then experiment with different ways of organising or sorting your ideas as they come to you. But again don’t so anything overly complicated and disrupt the flow of ideas coming. It’s far better to have all your ideas captured then work with them later, than let dozens slip through your fingers, lost forever, because you couldn’t work out the best way to organise them as they arrived.

An important aside here:

The reason you don’t think you have enough creative ideas is actually not that you don’t have enough creative ideas.

We each have a creative mind that whirrs and churns constantly making new connections and associations, and ideas spring freely from these.

It only SEEMS like you don’t ever have enough good ideas because you don’t capture them.

How often has an idea come to you in the shower for example, and you’ve thought “oh that’s an interesting idea, I’ll remember that for later.” Then later comes and goes, as does much later, as does so much later you don’t even remember having the shower, let alone the idea you had in the shower!

And so another idea is lost forever into the ether.

But what if you had captured it in your Ideas Journal, as soon as you’d got out of the shower? Then you could have quite easily returned to it in the future and it would be preserved in all its exciting nascent glory.

This is the basic principle of using an Ideas Journal. It works much better than you memory ever can!

What you’ll find very soon is that the more you use your journal, the more ideas you’ll have. Think of this analogy of stars in the sky: You know when you first go out outside on a clear night, and see one or two stars? Then the more you look, the more stars appear, as if their being born before your eyes! A minute later the sky is full of thousands of stars.

Now when the sun comes up, where do all the stars go to? The answer is they don’t go anywhere! They’re still there, you just can’t see them because of the brightness of the sun. It’s exactly the same with your creative ideas. Once you start using a journal to capture them, the more will appear, and very soon it will feel like you’re laying on your back on a starry night counting more stars (more ideas) than you ever thought there were in the sky.

So, get yourself a journal, take it wherever you go and start recording those ideas in your head just bursting to get out and be used!

Ready to be more creative? Then sign up to “Create Create!” – Creativity Coach Dan Goodwin’s free twice monthly ezine – today, and get your free copy of the “Explode Your Creativity!” Action Workbook. Just head over to http://www.coachcreative.com