Creativity. It's a word that fills some people with shivers of anxiety. "I'm just not creative," they say, when asked to contribute to a brainstorming session or to come up with ideas for how to improve workplace processes. It's as though they believe the myth that some people are born creative and others are not.

Yet as anyone who has spent time watching children at play can tell you, we all have the ability to be creative--to create novel things or ideas or combine existing things in novel ways. When we were kids, all of us were able to pretend to be a basketball player taking a last-second shot in the seventh game of the NBA Finals, or a ballerina dancing in front of an audience of kings and queens; all of us were able to transform a hub cap into a flying saucer, or a twig into a gun, using just our imaginations.

By the time many people reach adulthood, though, they haven't exercised that ability in a long time. They've lost the sense of freedom and possibility that most kids take for granted. They've simply forgotten how to play. Years of schooling emphasizing rote memorization, pressures to conform, and the emphasis in professional life on metrics and deadlines all conspire to drum the creative ability out of us. Over time we start to believe creativity is the province of the writer, artist, and musician, and "regular folks" don't have the capacity for creative thought or action.

One woman's path
Consider Allyson Quibell, a marketing and public-relations professional in the travel industry, and self-described "non-creative." Two years ago, she was in a rut. In the office, she was doing the same kind of work over and over. With the exception of a weekly yoga class, her weeknights had become mind-numbingly repetitive: come home, warm up some dinner, watch a little TV, go to sleep. It was time for a change.

"I wanted to challenge myself more," she says. "My life was missing the kind of charge you get from creative endeavors."

She began seeking out opportunities to be more creative. She joined a knitting club and took dance lessons and cooking classes. She bought a new camera and looked for interesting places to capture on film. At work, rather than just sticking to the duties in her formal job description, she began volunteering for projects in areas where she had little expertise.

Quibell's efforts to be more creative have paid off. In the kitchen, she now makes up her own recipes when she's not tweaking recipes she used to follow to the letter. Instead of celebrating friends' birthdays with store-bought gifts, today she's more likely to knit a hat or scarf as a gift, and instead of using store-bought greeting cards, she uses photos she's taken to make her own. ("People love that personal touch," she says.)

Her transformation at work has been equally impressive. Where she used to just follow standard operating procedure in how she shared information with her company's sales team, for instance, she now pushes for new communication processes that save her company a significant number of man-hours each year. And whereas she used to pitch story ideas about her company directly to magazine and newspaper editors--the traditional focus for her company's PR department--she decided to focus on pitching freelance writers with connections to editors at those publications, leading to more and better press placements for her company, and an increase in trip bookings.

"To an editor, a press release is just a sales pitch, something to toss in the trash. A writer who gets excited about a story will have the perseverance and passion to get the story into print," she says. "It took thinking outside the box for me to see that."

Steps to greater creativity
So how does one go about becoming more creative? Here are a few ideas.

• Realize that you're already a creative person. Look for examples of creativity in your life, such as your ability to figure out a new route home when traffic is bad or improve on old recipes.
  
  
• Pursue learning. The great creative leaps in any field are made by experts in that field. If you want to bring more creativity to your work, take classes, read incessantly, and stay on top of developments in your field. Einstein was a creative genius, but it wasn't until he knew everything there was to know about Newtonian physics that he was able to develop his theories of relativity. You can increase your creativity if you're willing to work at it.
  
  
• Question assumptions. Back in the early 20th century, plenty of people assumed that the automobile would never supplant the horse as a means of transportation. "Selling books over the Internet?" people said in the early 1990s. "It'll never work!" Henry Ford and Jeff Bezos, of course, laughed all the way to the bank. The lesson: To be truly creative, you can't accept accepted wisdom.
  
  
• Challenge yourself. By going outside your comfort zone, you expose yourself to new points of view and put yourself in a position to see the world in new ways. To stretch yourself, take classes and read in areas you know little about. "Try on" others' ways of seeing the world. Think about how your competitors see your organization, for example, and how you would go about trying to outperform your organization were you in their shoes. Even little things like brushing your teeth with your "off" hand can force you to look at things differently.
  
  
• Don't be afraid of taking risks. To be creative, you need to feel free to fail. Indeed, most people we think of as creative have tons of ideas. Most of those ideas end up in the wastepaper basket. Some of them--the great ideas--end up as hugely successful products, or blockbuster movies, or scientific theories that change the way we think of the world. Those great ideas couldn't have happened without all the failed ideas that preceded them.
  
  
• Devote time to creativity. Voice mail, e-mail, meetings--if you let it, work can consume every waking minute your life. The experts agree that to be creative, you need to carve out time to think creatively. And you can't be creative on a timetable; creative effort suffers from time pressures.
  
  
• Capture your ideas. What good is a great idea if, five minutes after you've had it, it's slipped your mind already? Carry a notepad with you so you can capture any ideas you have, wherever and whenever that might be. Or leave yourself a voice mail or an e-mail.
  
  
• Interact with others. When Quibell started knitting and going to dance and cooking lessons, she wasn't just learning new skills--she was meeting and learning from new people. Whether you're formally collaborating or just sharing information informally, exchanging thoughts and information with others exposes you to new points of view, which can inspire new thinking or help you hone your existing ideas. At work, this can mean doing things like participating in cross-functional teams and taking part in professional conferences.
  
  
• Get a good night's sleep. People think better when they're well rested. If you want to be more creative, get the proper amount of sleep.

If the propensity for daydreaming is a sign of creativity, Eric Wilinski may be the most creative person on earth.