Small business retailers need to work relentlessly to find ideas of their own, ideas suited to their unique situation, big ideas and small ideas, ideas for new traffic, products and services.
Owning a business lays this obligation to be perpetually creative, perpetually innovating, on you.
Coming up with fresh ideas can be a challenge. Sometimes, retailers and retail managers experience a block, like writer’s block. Here are suggestions for ways to clear this blockage.
- Try a sensory deprivation tank. These are very popular now. The world outside is shut out. It’s weird at first. Your brain soon adjusts and you … relax.
- Cook a complex meal that you have never cooked before.
- Bake a cake you have never cooked before.
- If you don’t do jigsaws, do a jigsaw.
- If you don’t make models, make a model.
- If you don’t like ballet, go to the ballet.
- If you don’t like opera, go to the opera.
- Book in and take singing lessons.
- Turn your mobile phone off and go and see a movie from your favourite genre.
- Go to a music concert for a group you love. Let your hair down. Sing along at the top of your lungs.
- Go to a comedy show. Laugh out loud.
- Go for a walk in the forest. A long walk. Touch nature. Sit a while and soak it all in.
- Go and sit in front of water, preferably an ocean and look out to the horizon.
- Lie on your back at night time and look up to the stars. Think about out there and the bigger universe.
- Shut yourself in a dark room and put on your favourite music and sing along.
- Try yoga, even if you have never done it before.
- Light some incense, put on some relaxing music and meditate inwardly, shutting out the world.
- Have a therapeutic massage.
- Exercise at the gym, run or swim. Work up a sweat and get lost in exercise.
- Read a novel from cover to cover without interruption. Choose a work of fiction you are more likely to get lost in.
- Do yard work, things you have been putting off for a long time.
- Go for a long drive, away from work and home. Get to somewhere you have never been before.
- Have a romantic dinner with your partner at a place where you have never been before.
- Take an unexpected day off and treat yourself to guilty pleasures.
- Buy some lunch and sit outside your retail store, across the mall or across the road and eat.
- Write a fictional short story.
These ideas are about you getting lost in experiences which are unrelated to your business and unrelated to what you are used to.
By getting lost, ideas have a better opportunity of surfacing, solutions have a better opportunity of making their way out.
Scheduling time to nurture yourself with ideas like those noted above could help you become more productive and creating for the business.
While the activities should be enjoyable, the business stands to benefit from greater creativity and more focused mental energy.
Have fun and let the great ideas roll!
