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07/14/2025

Harness Your Emotions to Fuel Creativity

A researcher provides tips on how to maximize your creativity

Fast Company recently interviewed Dr. Zorana Ivcevic Pringle, a senior researcher at the Yale Center for Emotional Intelligence, on what it means to lead a creative life. In this essay, she shares one of her top tips for fueling creativity.

Creativity is the powerhouse that differentiates good organizations from great ones. It goes beyond generating ideas. It is about the long process of developing ideas for more effective performance and the process of building abstract notions into concrete products.

Creativity is full of emotions—the reputational risk of not knowing how an idea will be received by stakeholders, the frustration of dealing with constraints and obstacles, conflict about directions to take, and elation when you finally develop a product. Successful creativity does not depend on the kinds of emotions experienced. Rather, it depends on your ability to harness the power of emotions and manage them when they get in the way of progress. In my book, The Creativity Choice: The Science of Making Decisions To Turn Ideas Into Action, I write about  how to use emotional intelligence to manage the creative process, regardless of industry or job role.

Please select this link to read the complete article from Fast Company.

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