5 Ways to Be a More Creative Pharmacist

Let’s talk about two things that don’t often appear to go together (but in my world do): 1. pharmacy and 2. creativity.

Aside from the day job in pharmacy benefits, and behind healthcare career coaching and development in the nontraditional space, the #2 question I most often get is how I find my creative juice when it comes to healthcare, education, and ‘all the things’ that I do.

Well, first, you get energy from what you focus upon — so if creativity is important to you, it’s just like anything else — you have to practice it. Athletes work out. Researchers experiment. The creative, create.

Creativity workouts for me are usually on the weekend when I can read, listen to podcasts, take online courses, chill, and think. That’s my weekend jam. Other creatives may set aside time during the week to fill their creative tanks. Google uses 20% time. Other companies allow employees to experiment 15% of the week. Whatever and whenever — the point is that you regularly schedule a date with your personal creative energy and maximize it. If you don’t, you’ll feel drained (at least I do!)

All that aside, let’s dive into some sites and places I recommend we all can go to get a little more creative, disruptive, transformative, and slightly uncomfortable right now…ready?

Creative Power-Ups

1. Divergent thinking — one of the most powerful things I do to boost the creative juice is NOT study healthcare. I completely try and walk away from my current day job and profession and jump into other worlds and industries that benefit from creativity. I take the best hits from — fashion, design, art, fishing, camping, sports, whatever — industries that are as far away from healthcare as possible, and then drag those BEST ideas from other industries kicking and screaming back into healthcare and pharmacy. Mashing up seemingly disparate ideas and concepts is one of my superpowers, but I pay a lot of attention to honing that skill too. There’s a test out there right now that takes 4 minutes for you to check your own divergent thinking right now — if this is of interest to you, go take it and start getting a little weird about other industries.
2. Design thinking — This was one of my favorite concepts to teach when I taught in pharmacy school full time — starting with empathy and being customer-centric. What do our customers/patients need that is MISSING out there? Sometimes, customers don’t even know what they need. (Did any of us need a smartphone before smartphones?) It’s staying ahead of trends and always keeping the customer in mind that create winning ideas. My current CEO at the day job, John Gause always says — “What’s working today in healthcare will not work tomorrow,” so we have to stay on top of innovation and disruption. That always starts with listening to the customer.
3. The Sandbox — I have a lot of friends in healthcare, but I also have a lot of friends who are not in healthcare. I like hanging out with my healthcare homies, obvs, but I love hanging out with my non-healthcare peeps too. Why? Because they think differently. They have different ideas about the world. Sometimes we get stuck in our own ways and our own little world silos — so every now and then, I like to meet up with my non-healthcare friends to understand how they view the world. I heard this term on a course I recently took about having a “sandbox” or a mental or workspace where we can allow ourselves to experiment. For me, part of that is who I hang around. So — ask yourself, when was the last time you checked on your quirky/interesting/totally different mindset-than-yours friends and hung out with them?
4. Classes — there has never been a better time to learn online from the BEST in whatever subject you’re interested in at next to no cost, other than maybe your time. This is a reason why I re-joined LinkedIn premium recently — so I could hop on LinkedIn Learning and take in more on topics I’m interested in for $29 a month. There’s also Khan Academy, EdX, Coursera, TED — so many places to learn online. Challenge yourself to try a new online course. They’re really cool and it’s fun to have a different prof of the day or week!
5. Collaborations — I will be the first to admit that during the pandemic, collaborations became really hard to do, simply because we’re not in the same physical room as other people as often, and now I’m not so sure if or when we’re ever going back to the way things were. But, master creatives are also very strategic about who they collaborate with…I look at the music industry probably the most here for great definitions of collaboration. Maybe I need to find a rapper to collab with? I don’t know, but collaboration is key with super creatives who want to level up. It kind of goes back to #3 here — get around people who are NOT like you. This is something in pharmacy we definitely need to work harder on because pharmacists connect with each other a LOT. (Pharmacists often end up marrying other pharmacists — it’s that….close.)

There. Creativity is all around us, we just have to practice it — just like anything else. I hope that we ultimately can get more creative as a profession — because we’re going to need to innovate, change, evolve, transform, and even disrupt our profession. The only constant is change, so let’s spice that change up a little, shall we?

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Erin L. Albert is an author, podcaster, pharmacist, inter alia. Her opinions are her own unless noted otherwise above.