What Color Is Your Imagination? For Kids

What Color Is Your Imagination? is an inspiring children's book that helps young readers discover imagination as a superpower. Through colorful metaphors, playful language, and child-friendly lessons, the book explores how curiosity, courage, feelings, facts, teamwork, mistakes, and big ideas all work together to help children create, solve problems, and dream in bright new ways. What Color Is Your Imagination? was inspired by a conversation with the author's then four-year-old son, Andrew. His question and subsequent declaration about the color of his imagination developed into an inspirational speech for her Head Start program staff. More than a decade later, and several presentations of the theme as a workshop and keynote for various Owens Burton Consulting clients, the lessons on creative problem-solving were put into a book in 2019. What Color Is Your Imagination? includes a metaphor where the types of problem-solving behaviors and environments are represented by an assortment of colors. For example, Yellow Imagination is the "we've always done it that way" type of imagination, or the imagination of fear. Green Imagination sees creativity as a commodity to be traded and, therefore, is highly impacted by personal motivation and incentives. White Imagination is the implementation of the creativity of others and is therefore not as "vivid" and "vibrant," is less impactful than original ideas. Black Imagination is what we would call the "mad genius" type of imagination. Those exhibiting this type of imagination are the ones about whom we usually say, "If they would only use their powers for good." The ideal is Purple Imagination. It is a combination of Red Imagination and Blue Imagination. If we take Red Imagination (love, passion, and enthusiasm) and combined it with Blue Imagination (analytics, statistics, and empiricism) we get Purple Imagination: a synergistic, almost exponentially beneficial relationship where innovation and invention can occur. Then, the second half of the book gives the reader ten ways to increase their chances of creating their own Purple Imagination. Now, more than 20 years after that initial conversation, Nadine Owens Burton is working with Andrew, as the illustrator, to create the children's version of the theme.