Relighting your inner child

Can you remember being a child and building worlds and experiences out of things around the house? At these ages, we felt the freest, we created what we thought, and we were capable of bringing ideas to life with the bare minimum. Having grown up and worked in the creative industry for the past ten years, I have begun to question why this creativity has died in most of us in society. Or has it?

I believe all of us still have our inner child flaming inside us without being conscious of it. As professionals, we can utilize it no matter what industry we reside in, and businesses can empower users’ inner child to amplify their brand.

To truly understand how we can add fuel to our fire, let’s take a step back to our childhood.

Play as an instinct

It has widely been agreed children learn the most when they are engaged through play. Being a 90’s baby, I grew up learning about the world through exploration; I would break things to create things that to me was my form of play and taught me how ideas in my mind could become real. It was this form of play that kept me curious to discover more.

Creativity at the early ages is mostly untouched, and it’s most active; this is crucial as it motivates them to play without barriers of real-world limitations. There is no right or wrong when playing, but only the experience they are engaged in, comparably to adulthood life where we weigh our decisions based on pre-empted right or wrong responses.

Silencing our inner child

As we grow past our childhood days, we got consumed in the ways of society around us. Playtime is replaced with classroom lessons, exploring is replaced with deadlines, and trying is replaced with passing or failing. Before we knew it, we aren’t creating the world we want to be in but being a part of a world already made for us.

These adolescent years are taught creativity is a talent reserved for the designers and artists of the world, something we all don’t have, so we must eat what we are served for most of us. We all long to experience those childhood joys again where we were all creatives creating the world we wanted to live.

Awakening the inner child as a professional

Our days become risk advert and, in turn, has canceled any room for creativity through play.

The first action we can do to bring our inner child to the surface is to move away from the mental model of failure; failure should be seen as exploration, just as we did as children and not something we fear, be bold to fail fast and learn quicker.

Secondly, retire the individual factory styled desks for collaborative rooms where everyone is seen as creative. Some initiatives to ignite everyone’s inner child,

• Instead of online documentation, get the sharpies and whiteboards out for all the play.
• Crazy eight sessions so everyone can design solutions as we did in playtime
• prototype experiences with real-world objects (I’ve previously prototyped a VR experience using cardboard boxes and makeshift props just like a child would create a make-believe world)
• Role-play situations to understand scenarios
• Create games to achieve an objective

Thirdly have fun building, do passion projects, create for the sake of creating and break all mental barriers of limitations. We are all born creators. Don’t let your job be the wall to your capabilities.

Empower the inner child as a brand

Brands can do more to elevate users’ inner child while experiencing their brand, especially as we know people are most engaged when the experience resonates with their inner child. As businesses, we must be aware that value is not only conversion but can come in the forms of joy and playfulness.

A user’s experience should be a joyful, seamless exploration that promotes empowerment to play and rewarding with delight. Technology has given us open opportunities for brands to utilize; if we are showcasing a car, could we replicate the same joy we had playing with toy cars as children? If we are selling a service, could we replicate the same emotions we felt when we pretended to be in make-believe worlds?

One benchmark of bringing playfulness into a brand’s core value streams can be seen from IKEA; the ability to create living spaces through playing in augmented spaces creates a sense of joy, which in turn does lead to conversion.

Be foolish, be childish.

No matter how much society has dampened our flame, our inner child is always waiting to be relit as a professional making impact by becoming a creator or as a user wanting to resonate with our childlike instincts.

“For in every adult there resides the child that was, and in every child there lies the adult that will be”

John Connolly