The Power of Being Childlike

Do you ever find yourself looking at a young child running around a playground and wishing you could have their sense of freedom and wonder again, even if only for a little while? As we grow up, we are expected to put our childish ways behind us and to live up to the expectations of society. Too often in business, there’s this unspoken rule that to perform, we must conform. The risk in doing so, however, is that we create a herd of timid sheep who are afraid to stand out from the group.

But standing out is risky. It draws attention to us and makes those around us pay attention to what we are saying and doing. And that means that may judge us… and could find us lacking. Bottom line, it’s a little scary to put ourselves out there.

I’d like you to think back to when you were a really young child… when you can remember being truly carefree. If you can recall such a time, next think about how you felt at the time. I suspect that you might remember feeling a sense of freedom since you could explore anything or pretend to be anything you wanted, or perhaps you felt creative since you could make up something new, and – probably – you felt pretty happy.

Personally, I can picture that time and I do remember feeling all of those things. It was awesome. And then I remembered a time when someone (my brother in this case) made some critical comment about what I was doing and I began to realize that not everyone thought like me or liked everything I was saying or doing. And it felt kind of bad. So as I got older, I started to “normalize” my behaviors so as not to stand out and be judged as some weirdo. My innate desire to be liked and accepted caused me to suppress some of what made me uniquely me.

However, something happened in college which, I believe, helped me strike a better balance overall. I was in the School of Business and was offered a job tutoring English and grammar to my fellow students. I joked that I was the token business guy as everyone else working there was pursuing some sort of liberal arts degree – language, theater, philosophy, etc. And what I found was that these people had kept the flame of creativity alive in themselves. And, by my being around them, I found that it started to rekindle my own creativity again.

I’d discovered a group of young adults who appreciated uniqueness and thinking differently. Heck, they reveled in it it. And, little-by-little, that on-going exposure helped me to reconnect with my own inner child.

After working in the tutoring lab for a year, I decided to add a second major – marketing – to my finance degree since marketing was the closest I could find to a liberal arts degree in the School of Business. I remember my parents looking at me oddly when I did this but I explained that finance, while highly useful, wasn’t exciting me but that marketing (and management, if I was being honest) did. Thankfully, they were supportive and I was able to pull off the double major. And when I graduated, I set aside the finance degree and have spent my career in marketing and management.

As my friends in college showed me, not everyone loses touch with their inner child. If you are one of those people, then bravo – keep up the good work. For the rest of us, however, I strongly urge you to try and reconnect with that part of yourself. It’s still in there, trust me. It may just be hidden away.

It’s interesting in that, the older I become, the more perspective I gain about what is important in life. And, at least through my lens, the opinions of others doesn’t really rank so high, especially from the casual acquaintance. My family, my good friends and those I respect in all areas of my life – their opinions still count and continue to help shape me into a better person {which leads to a whole separate theme here about surrounding yourself with good people}. But the rest of the world? Ehhh… listen to what they say but always balance it against the opinions of those you respect and especially to how you think and feel about it.

If you feel like you have allowed yourself to “grow up” too completely, I encourage to take that step back and consider taking a few risks… and possibly end up looking foolish. Accept the fact that we’ll all say or do something stupid and give grace to yourself and others when it happens. None of us are perfect but by re-embracing our child-like natures again, we can all become far more interesting and, I believe, far happier.

Know that I’m pulling for you!