129 Creating A Creative State of Mind not generate more ideas during a brainstorming task at the end of the day in Study 1, but their ideas were more creative nonetheless. Although these findings were unexpected, fluency and originality can be seen as correlated but highly separable constructs (Dumas & Dunbar, 2014). Indeed, fluency is not a sufficient nor necessary requirement for originality (Cotter et al., 2020; Runco et al., 2011), and one may argue that the most important feature of creativity is whether the ideas are, in fact, original (Dumas & Dunbar, 2014; Runco et al., 2011). The nature of the brainstorming task used in Study 1 may have evoked a creative expectation among participants, potentially reducing variation in the number of ideas they reported. The findings suggest that a state of mindfulness may pave the way for more focus and efficiency in the creative process, which may (partially) be due to ‘de–automatization’ – facilitated by mindfulness (Kang et al., 2013). Engaging in mindful reasoning may have helped the participants to think clearly and to overcome habitual and dominant but uncreative responses (cf. Bishop et al., 2004; Brown et al., 2007; Zedelius & Schooler, 2015). A similar pattern emerged in the second study among workers in the creative industry, whose creative work performance was evaluated by their supervisors. On days that the participants proactively managed their physical and mental energy for work, they were more mindful, and their work was assessed as more creative. Overall, these findings corroborate earlier research on the mindfulness-creativity link (Lebuda et al., 2016). However, some studies have shown inconsistent or inconclusive results regarding the benefits of mindfulness for creativity (e.g., Baas et al., 2014). As both mindfulness and creativity are relatively complex and multidimensional constructs, it is not surprising that their relationshipmay be complex as well. Moreover, methodology may play a role. Although there are a few daily diary studies on mindfulness (e.g., Haun et al., 2018; Hülsheger et al., 2013), the link between mindfulness and creativity has not been studied on a within-person or daily level. Research has shown little or no relationship between trait and state mindfulness (Bravo et al., 2018; Thompson & Waltz, 2007), and because mindfulness is inherently concerned with varying levels of awareness and attention to ongoing events and experiences (Brown & Ryan, 2003), a diary approach that captures fluctuations in mindfulness seems highly suitable to examine this phenomenon. Indeed, it has been argued that between-person variation may not be used as a surrogate for within-person variation, and that the correlates and causes of between-person and within-person variation need to be analyzed as 5
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