The importance of imagination in shaping your child’s future is something that should not be underestimated. Cultivating your children’s imagination can give them many benefits that will always be at their disposal.

When imagining scenarios of other worlds children are unhindered and unrestricted by limitations of any kind allowing them to go beyond normal boundaries and come up with their own unique and very personal experiences.

Imagination plays a very important role in each child’s development. Being able to place themselves in varying scenarios or changing possible outcomes helps them with coping. Research has shown that kids with well developed imaginations deal with stressful situations better and are also able to cope with and adjust to change more easily.

Children that have well developed imaginations are far more likely to be able to come up with creative solutions or think outside the square.

This allows them to play cooperatively, interact well with others and to develop life skills that will extend into all areas of their future due to their well developed social skills.

Cultivation of your child’s’ imagination can have benefits in the following areas:

In our modern careers being able to come up with creative solutions and be a creative thinker is often very important and well rewarded. Children that may find themselves at the mercy of their emotions can master these feelings by imagining better outcomes. Imagination helps children to deal with upheaval or difficult situations more easily. Role playing can allow the chance to develop skills that help to improve learning and success. They will be better problem solvers and innovators. They are allowed the opportunity to practice life skills and enrich their vocabulary. Playing cooperatively sets the foundation for good social skills and the ability to express your ideas and motivate others is developed from an early age.

Imagination does indeed play an important part in the success in life that we will achieve so it is important that we allow time for imaginative play and creative thinking.

Things that discourage our children’s imagination include Television, movies and internet gaming because as scenarios and different worlds have already been created there is no need for the child to be creatively imaginative.

Also over scheduling of activities including lessons and tutoring can be detrimental as children need the time to be children as well. They need to imagine, to create and to let their minds roam free – creating whatever they can imagine without any criteria specifying what is possible or what is not.

Just think how different our world would be today if aviation pioneers just said: “Oh well we could do it if it wasn’t for this damn gravity,” “Better go back to chopping wood for the fire.”

Children need time to be kids, they need to play, to dream, to get lost in their own little worlds unmediated by those whose imagination has begun to get lost in a myriad of everyday activities.

This capacity is completely natural for children, as it was once for all of us. Where possible become involved with their imaginative play and ask questions about the scenes they are creating.

Always let them take the lead however and never force them to share something that they may not be comfortable to share because imagination is something that is completely unique to every individual.

Allow yourself to go back to your own childhood and enjoy feeling free from the restrictions we impose on ourselves, given our own unique view of reality.

Imagination also offers the chance to create dreams and goals and when we have done this we can pave a pathway to achieving these goals. Imagination is the first step in the sequence of success.

A life without imagination would be dull, colourless and boring, so take the time to cultivate not only your child’s imagination – but your own as well.

Imagination Games

The number of ways in which you can unlock and stimulate our children’s imagination is really only limited by your own imagination and the games and situations you can come up with to engage your children.
Try the following imagination games that are suggested below and enjoy the fun times and unexpected results they may bring.

Animal Parade
Pick different animals for your children to imitate. Get them to act like these animals with gestures and body language, noises and actions.
Where there are multiple children involved, get them to make the whole exercise into a parade.
Just sit back and enjoy the laughter, noise and craziness that ensues.

Designing my future
Give your child the opportunity to design or come up with ideas for what sort of clothes that they would like to wear.
Get them to draw pictures or make a collage from images they
find in magazines.
They may be the sort of thing they would like their favourite
superhero to wear.
Get them to invent their own super hero and ask them
questions such as:
What sort of special powers would your favourite superhero have?
What makes your favourite superhero so great, and why are they better than other superheroes?
What would your favourite superhero do when faced with
certain situations?

Never get board
Get your children to come up with their own board game along with instructions and a set of rules.
Give them appropriate art materials and find dice and any other necessary pieces to make their own idea come to life.
Sit down with them and play their new board game and where any problems with rules or how to play the game arise help them to come up with constructive solutions on their own to make things work as they would like them to.

Impromptu theater
Get your children and their friends where possible to make up their own play.
If necessary suggest subject matter for the play and find things like costumes or cardboard boxes that they can use.
Get them to make tickets and organise seating to watch their play.
Maybe if you feel like it give them some money for the tickets and allow them to keep it for their efforts in organising and putting on the play.

This not only encourages imagination and hard work but shows them how to be entrepreneurial making their own money with creative ideas.

What’s your story?
Pick a subject and some characters for your children and ask them to come up with a story that involves these characters.
Ask them to present or tell the story to you which means they practise public speaking without even being aware of it.
Get them to describe in as much detail as possible any sights, sounds, smells or sensations of taste or touch that may be involved in the story. This gives them practice at using sensory-rich language which is much more interesting to listen to due to its descriptive nature and its ability to spark the imagination.

Budding Rock Stars
Use cardboard and string and other props. Ask your children to make their own instruments and put on their own musical performance.
Get them to do a performance for you with these pretend instruments and play them a familiar song to perform to.
If you really wish to challenge their imagination get them to come up with their own lyrics and write these down on a song sheet.
Again you can ask them to make tickets or a program for the performance that they will put on for you.

Dance Like No-one is watching
Put on music that your children like and are familiar with and get them to dance and move in a way they think their favourite T.V. Identity, superhero or animal may dance.

What if?
Something you can do at any time and in any situation to stimulate the imagination of your child is to ask “what if questions.”
For example:
What if you could live anywhere you wanted to?
Get them to describe the scene to you including all aspects of why it would be so great to live there.
What sort of house would you have?
Would it be by the ocean or near the mountains or in the city?
What would you do each day when you where there?

What do you want to be when you grow up?
Ask your child what they dream of becoming when they grow up.
Now get them to show how they will act and what they will say when they are in their dream career.
For example:
Ask how will you act, walk and talk when you are an astronaut on the moon?
Or
How will you perform your duties when you are a fireman or pilot?
Ensure you let them come up with their own suggestions on what they want to be when they grow up. This is supposed to be fun and stimulating for their impressionable young minds.

The silent treatment
Give your child some different words and ask them to convey these words with only actions and gestures.
Some examples of words you can give them that will evoke large creative gestures could include:
Sunny, Screech, Explode, Bounce

Everyday living
Act out a scene from everyday life with your children, such as making dinner, going to the shops or going to the doctors.
Take the role yourself as the doctor or shopkeeper and encourage your child to act as they would have to if they had to approach this situation on their own.
Use props or costumes where you can and make the situation as real as possible as overcoming any difficulties they may encounter helps them to become more independent and shows them how to deal with strangers.

“Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand.” Albert Einstein

Enjoy what your children’s imagination creates.

Damon Bailey

When decorating a room for a child, many go the obvious route of painting everything a simple color. Whether you go with a unique color or you go with white, you’ll find that the basics will never go out of style. However, there are some that prefer to another route and for these iconoclasts of tastes, a good route to take involves kids wall murals. That might sound a bit odd or a bit different, but there are a lot of different things that you can do to the room partitions that are around the home.

There are a few things that you should remember before you invest any money into designing the room for your child. First and foremost, consider their age and think about what they like most and what you can do to help bring that together into a living space that is just for them. This might take a while, so don’t just jump the gun and pick whatever option, let the notion sink in, and you’ll find something perfect.

When looking to update the look and feel of a room, you will want to make sure that you don’t go with a permanent solution. You might be tempted to paint an amazing piece, but often times that will simply get painted over and the painstaking task of creating something new in the place of it, can be rough. If you want to play it safe, than you definitely have to see the way the latest kids wall murals are set up. Much like you would put wallpaper you can now put up decals of just about anything. Whether you want the room to have a natural forest motif, or you want the ocean and sand in the vicinity, there are a variety of options to look for that will have your child thinking they are in a new world.

It’s an interesting thing to see many parents go with traditional options for a child’s room. Often times they go with white or some sort of pastel color, and as the kid grows up they end up covering a great deal of the plain areas with posters, and pictures of their favorite things. That’s where the latest murals come in to play. As the child grows out of adolescents and matures, there are a variety of options that you can switch out with relative ease. The latest decals and images you can place straight on a wall will stick without having to worry about damaging paint or having to paint over it when children grow up.

There is no reason to paint a room solid with a boring color, instead try out this latest and greatest décor idea. You’ll find that you can have a beautiful living space for even the most artistic of children. Whether your looking for nature, or something more imaginative, you will find that the modern times call for modern solutions when it comes to visual aesthetics for children’s rooms. Take a closer look at your options and you’ll be amazed with the results. You can send them into a new world every time they are in their room with a new view.

Executive leadership strategies must adapt to Imagination Age challenges, complexities and conceptions.

Years ago, when famed scientist, Albert Einstein, said, “To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science”, he was teaching today’s executive leadership teams how they should behave, believe and become Imagination Age strategists.

How will executives, managers and entrepreneurs use their Imagination Age leadership skills to achieve significant, sustainable, strategic advantages through intelligent, instructive and innovative applications of their leadership power, practices and policies?

The Imagination Age demands greater and deeper levels of our cognitive, creative and collaborative competencies – therefore, we need different executive leadership strategies.

Executive leadership policies, plans and philosophies will revolve around the missions, mandates and meanings being employed, embraced or embarked upon by the fertile imaginations of their stakeholders and paid personnel.

While every group, leader and follower is an unique, self-determining entity, I can propose an executive leadership mission, mandate and meaning which has served our company and some of our clients faithfully well:

MISSION = “Enrich the productivity, profitability and prosperity of our strategic imaginations and our leadership power!”

MESSAGE = “Opportunity demands that we imaginatively, innovatively and intuitively use our discipline, direction and diagnostics to fully realize its possibilities!”

MEANING = “We are endowed with a God-given potential to contribute value through the artistic, scientific, vocational and competent exercise of our leadership power!”

4 Ranges of Executive Leadership Activities and Practice Throughout history, leaders have been influenced and guided by the discipline, direction and diagnostics of 4 distinctive domains of executive leadership practices – these domains, or field of actions or range of knowledges or responsibilities are simply known as the art, science, vocation and competency of leadership practices.

Here are a partial list of the actions involved – to be brief, I have not included the catalog of knowledges or organizational responsibilities for leaders:

“1) Art – performs, philosophies, paints and perfects 2) Science – uses methods, technologies, techniques, tools and processes 3) Vocation – embraces, espouses, engenders, evangelizes and encourages 4) Core Competence – demonstrates an expertise, experience, extension, evolution or expansion in effective leadership practice”

3 Executive Leadership Strategies For The Imagination Age As you consider the concepts being explored here, I remind you that we are discussing executive leadership strategies for practicing the art, science, vocation and competency of leading.

And these strategies represent the various approaches, directions, imperatives, indicators, intentions and responses leaders can adopt to effectively handle the environmental stimuli, conditions, forces or factors affecting, impeding and surrounding their organizational ecosystem.

The following 3 suggestions for executive leadership strategies being revealed in this article might help influence, impact and inspire you to lead more intelligently, instructively and imaginatively.

Imaginative and Creative Leadership And in this emerging Imagination Age, the world is looking for leaders who can help others quickly, reliably, wisely and elegantly organize information into practical, useful, relevant chunks of knowledge or collective inputs of wisdom.

We need those leaders to apply their own unique innovative, imaginative, insightful processes to create new advantages, value-added assets and awesome advancements.

Finally, executive leadership strategies which empower, engage, encourage or energize the development, dedication and deployment of other creative leaders throughout the organizational ecosystem and its environs will payoff handsomely in the Imagination Age.

Intelligent and Cognitive Leadership Our Imaginations are that functionality which drives those actions which we call imagining, thinking, conceiving, believing, reasoning or realizing, assuming, supposing or conjecturing.

Our imaginations give us the power and ability to form or shape images, sensations and concepts inside our minds.

It’s very important to note that our imaginations are the factory within which those pictures, perspectives, emotional impulses and ideas are formed, shaped and conceived in those moments when those items are not and can not yet be perceived by our sight, hearing or our other senses.

Can you see how cognitive leadership strategies help you deal with and unravel the complexities of our global economy?

Instructive and Collaborative or Coaching Leadership Strengthening your executive leadership skills means learning how to effectively coach, collaborate and train your people to prepare, guide and optimize their ability to handle the many challenges of constantly changing world.

Imagination is that work of our minds which we call resourcefulness, innovation and creativity.

Imagination provides meaning to our experiences and this mental faculty supplies a relevance or a context for understanding knowledge.

Our imagination is the fundamental and essential means through which we make sense of our reality and assign meaning or significance to our world, and as such, our imaginations play key roles in the processes of learning, teaching, collaborating and communicating with other people.

One Final Point If your executive leadership strategies, practices and knowledge domains need to evolve, then it’s obvious that you’ll need to discover how the philosophies, physics, processes, technologies, tools and techniques being used in today’s leadership skills training programs need to change too!

Copyright 2011, Mustard Seed Investments Inc., All rights reserved worldwide.