This course puts powerful creative solutions within reach – even if you don’t think you’re creative

Are you tired of being stuck in your career? Is your thinking stuck in a rut? Do you wish you had the mojo to go after your biggest dreams? The ignite* Brainstorming Kit from Brainsparker is a remarkable e-course and toolset that can help you tackle these and other creative challenges head-on, enabling you to become a game-changer in your work.

According to a recent study by LinkedIn, creativity is the number one job skill needed for work today. But where can you develop that skill? Sources like Udemy and LinkedIn Training contain short online training modules of varying length and quality, but they only give you a fragmented view of this critical topic. Remember, when anyone can publish training online, that’s both a good and a bad thing.

If you want the real deal – a comprehensive yet concise, high-quality course that will help you to turbo-boost your creativity today – I highly recommend the ignite* Brainstorming Kit.

The structure of ignite*

The centerpiece of The ignite* Brainstorming Kit is a well-designed, 4-hour e-course contains 8 video lessons that provide a comprehensive overview of creative problem-solving. It’s organized around the company’s well thought-out and practical S.P.A.R.K. model:

• Introducing the S.P.A.R.K. model
• S = Stimulate your imagination
• P = Play with your perspective
• A = Challenge your assumptions
• R = Overcome resistance
• K = Cultivate your inner knowing
• Taking action
• Resources and downloads

It also includes these elements:

• A downloadable playbook to capture your ideas and insights as you work through the course.
• Practical tools & techniques that you can apply immediately to real challenges at work and in life.
• Powerful coaching questions that probe below the surface, help you apply what you’ve learned and get you, and others, thinking differently.

The presenter of the ignite* course is Brainsparker founder & CEO Gabriella Goddard. She is a highly experienced executive and leadership coach, speaker and published author who specializes in creative thinking and innovation. She has over 16 years of experience in developing leaders and managers from global multinational companies, as well as entrepreneurs and game-changers. In other words, she’s an excellent teacher.

Creative insights aplenty

I’ve been studying and writing about creativity for over 20 years. Translation? It’s hard for me to find new insights and inspirations. I’m pleased to report that the ignite* course was a breath of fresh air for me, containing numerous “A-has!”

For example, I’ve always limited my thinking about random prompts to words. But in module 2, Stimulate Your Imagination, Goddard kicks off those blinders by suggesting that images (Instagram as a source of random stimuli? Yes, please!), sounds, questions and objects can also be random stimuli. She also presents a series of thoughtful questions that will help you apply your chosen stimuli to your current challenge, and walks you through brief examples that employ random words, objects and images, and the ideas they trigger.

Goddard does an excellent job of unpacking each technique she presents, not only explaining what it is and how it can be used. She also provides specific prompts and examples to help you better understand and apply it. To her credit, she doesn’t just present these brainstorming techniques as abstract constructs. She instructs students to have a specific business challenge in mind, to which they can apply the technique at hand.

The P of the SPARK model represents playing with your perspectives. She describes that as “pushing beliefs and boundaries away from the way things are, and that will reveal gaps and untapped possibilities.” I love that! This module teaches you how to mentally project yourself and your challenge into the past, present and future to uncover creative insights. Goddard also covers “personas” – the approach of thinking about your challenge as someone else would. This could be a customer, a competitor or someone famous from history, such as Einstein or Leonardo da Vinci. That’s one of my favorite ideation techniques!

Don’t overlook the need to cultivate your creative instincts

Module 6, Cultivate Your Inner Knowing, is also quite fascinating. It’s not focused on some psychological mumbo-jumbo, but something much more practical: Learning to cultivate and trust your creative instincts, and listening and observing at a deeper, more intuitive level. Goddard teaches you how to optimize your creative energy, so you can reach a “flow” state more easily. This level of mindfulness isn’t something I’ve really spent much time thinking about, so I found it to be really intriguing and valuable.

Once again, Goddard focuses not on the theory, but on asking you to recall times when you felt each type of mental energy, how it made you feel and what it means from a creative standpoint. Being more mindful of what your brain is trying to tell you is surprisingly important to leveling up your creative thinking skills!

2 bonus e-courses add even more value

When you invest in ignite*, you get access to two additional e-courses:

• brainstorm* explores the principles of divergent thinking, where brainstorming comes from, how you can use it to solve any problem, how to set ground rules for success and how to run highly effective group brainstorming sessions.
• mindmap* explores the topic of mind mapping, what they are, where they come from, why use them and how to use them, especially as a tool for brainstorming and expanding your creativity.

In all, you get access to over 4 hours of video training, all downloadable playbooks and templates and links to recommended resources, video clips and articles for a full year.

Conclusion

The problem with a lot of training, online or otherwise, is that it tries to stuff your head full of knowledge – which is quickly forgotten. Instead, Goddard takes a much more savvy approach in ignite* that is perfectly aligned with how the brain absorbs, applies and retains information. She employs a thoughtful approach of teaching, examples and exercises designed to stretch your thinking in new directions. They will literally “re-wire” your brain to approach creative challenges in much more fluent ways.

The bottom line

Should you invest in this training program? I can say without any reservations, definitely yes.

Goddard has obviously given a lot of deep thought into ignite*. She has created a course that is cohesive, coherent and captivating. It contains a wealth of great information and advice, organized and presented in a way that you can put it to use and benefit from it immediately. She not only knows her subject thoroughly, but she is also eminently skilled at teaching it.

If you want to develop ideas that are innovative, disruptive and improve things for the better, then you need to think differently. The ignite* Brainstorming Kit is the best tool I’ve seen that can help you do that!

P.S. If you order the ignite* Brainstorming Kit within the next 7 days (by March 11, 2019), I will give you 2 FREE BONUSES:

• My popular eGuide, Eureka! How to Use Evernote to Generate, Incubate, Evaluate & Activate Your Best Ideas plus a set of templates to help you implement the system it describes (a $39 value).
• My e-book that reveals how to use your smartphone as a powerful creativity tool (a $29 value).

Just send me an email with your order receipt (to chuck at chuckfrey dot com), and I’ll send you a message with the download links to these exclusive resources!