Thinking outside the box is more than just a business cliché. It means approaching problems in new, innovative ways, conceptualizing problems differently, and understanding your position in relation to any particular situation in a way you’d never thought of before.

Here are 11 ways to beef up your out-of-the-box thinking skills. Make an effort to push your thinking up to and beyond its limit every now and again -- the talents you develop may come in handy the next time you face a situation that “everybody knows” how to solve.

1. Study another industry

Go to the library and pick up a trade magazine in an industry other than your own, or grab a few books from the library, and learn about how things are done in other industries. You might find that many of the problems people in other industries face are similar to the problems in your own, but that they’ve developed really quite different ways of dealing with them.

2. Learn about another religion

Religions are the way that humans organize and understand their relationships not only with the supernatural or divine but with each other. Learning about how such relations are structured can teach you a lot about how people relate to each other and the world around them.

3. Take a class

Learning a new topic will not only teach you a new set of facts and figures, it will teach you a new way of looking at and making sense of aspects of your everyday life or of the society or natural world you live in.

4. Read a novel in an unfamiliar genre

Try reading something you’d never have touched otherwise -- if you read literary fiction, try a mystery or science fiction novel, if you read a lot of hard-boiled detective novels, try a romance and so on. Pay attention not only to the story but to the particular problems the author has to deal with. Try to connect those problems to problems you face in your own field.

5. Write a poem

Poetry neatly bridges your more rational left-brain though processes and your more creative right-brain processes. The idea is to shift your thinking away from your brain’s logic centers and into a more creative part of the brain, where it can be mulled over in a non-rational way.

6. Draw a picture

Drawing a picture is even more right-brained, and can help break your logical left-brain’s hold on a problem the same way a poem can. Also, visualizing a problem engages other modes of thinking that we don’t normally use, bringing you another creative boost.

7. Turn it upside down

Turning something upside-down, whether physically by flipping a piece of paper around or metaphorically by re-imagining it can help you see patterns that wouldn’t otherwise be apparent.

8. Work backwards

Just like turning a thing upside down, working backwards breaks the brain’s normal conception of causality.

9. Ask a child for advice

Children think and speak with an ignorance of convention that is often helpful. Ask a child how they might tackle a problem, or if you don’t have a child around think about how you might reformulate a problem so that a child could understand it if one was available.

10. Invite randomness

Embracing mistakes and incorporating them into your projects, developing strategies that allow for random input, working amid chaotic juxtapositions of sound and form -- all of these can help to move beyond everyday patterns of thinking into the sublime.

11. Take a shower

There’s some kind of weird psychic link between showering and creativity. So maybe when the status quo response to some circumstance just isn’t working, try taking a shower and see if something remarkable doesn’t occur to you!