The Lost Wisdom of Childhood

You’re getting older. That’s the one thing that’s always true. If you’re reading this, you’re probably a grown-up, and like me, you left your childhood behind many years ago.

But here’s the question. When you left your childhood behind, did you also leave behind some of the life skills you had when you were young that you could actually use today?

I want you to remember the lost wisdom of your childhood. Because seven-year-old you knew some things that forty-year-old you has completely forgotten.

Children Don’t Take No for an Answer

Mum, can I have some chocolate? No. Dad, can I have some chocolate? No. Please… can I have some chocolate? No. Why can’t I have some chocolate?

And on and on and on.

If you’re a parent, you’ve had this conversation approximately seven thousand times. Children are focused on what they want. Their whole world depends upon their immediate needs. They’re not frightened of the word no. The word simply doesn’t faze them. It’s not even a setback. To them it’s just information that tells them to try a different angle.

Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, you learned to accept the word no. You learned to stop asking. You learned that persistence was annoying to others, that asking again was pushy, and that polite people accept rejection gracefully and move on without making a fuss.

And now you’re stuck in a new situation, and the first obstacle you hit, you back down. The first person who says “that won’t work” or “you can’t do that” and you stop pushing. Seven-year-old you would be horrified that you’d given up so soon. Seven-year-old you would have asked again, differently, from a different angle, or a different parent, until they got what they wanted.

Persistence, the ability to keep going in the face of setbacks, matters more than most people assume, and it’s a quality children have naturally. Adults train it out of themselves and then wonder why they can’t get what they want.

Children Ask Questions Without Shame

Why is the sky blue? Why do dogs have tails? Why can’t I fly? Why do people die?

Children ask questions that adults are too embarrassed to ask. They ask because they genuinely want to know. They’re not worried about looking stupid. They haven’t yet learned that asking a question can be interpreted as weakness, ignorance, or a sign that you’re not keeping up.

You’re in a new situation right now, and I guarantee there are things you don’t understand, processes you haven’t figured out, and people who could help you if you asked. But you don’t ask, because you’re worried about what they’ll think. You’re worried about looking incompetent. You’re worried about confirming the imposter syndrome that we covered earlier.

Children don’t have imposter syndrome. They haven’t learned it yet. They just ask the question, get the answer, and move on. No shame. No overthinking. No lying awake at two in the morning replaying the conversation and wishing they’d kept their mouth shut.

Children Live in the Present

When a child is building a sandcastle, they’re building a sandcastle. They’re not thinking about the tide coming in. They’re not worried about whether the foundations are structurally sound. They’re not comparing their sandcastle to another one higher up the beach.

They’re completely absorbed in what they’re building right now.

Jon Kabat-Zinn’s work on mindfulness essentially tries to teach adults what children do naturally: the ability to be fully present in the current moment without judging it, worrying about the future, or regretting the past.

You’re navigating a new situation, and I’d bet a significant chunk of your mental energy is being spent in two places that aren’t useful. The past, worrying about whether you made the right decision to change in the first place. And the future, catastrophising about everything that might go wrong from here.

Neither of those places is where the work gets done. The work gets done here. Now. In this moment. Building the sandcastle, and not worrying about the tide.

Children Fall Down and Get Back Up

Watch a toddler learning to walk. They fall over. Constantly. They faceplant into furniture, tumble backwards onto their nappy, stagger sideways into walls. And every single time, they get back up and try again.

They don’t have an existential crisis about it. They don’t sit on the floor analysing what went wrong. They don’t conclude that walking isn’t for them and maybe they should just crawl forever. They just get up.

Research by Carol Dweck on growth mindset shows that children naturally approach challenges with what she calls a “not yet” mentality. They can’t walk yet. They can’t read yet. They can’t ride a bike yet. The “yet” is implicit in everything they do.

Adults lose the “yet.” You try something in your new situation, it doesn’t work, and you conclude that you can’t do it. Not “you can’t do it yet.” Just “you can’t do it.” Full stop. The failure becomes permanent and defining instead of temporary and informative.

Toddlers are better at failure than you are. Let that sink in for a moment.

Next time something goes wrong in your new situation, and it will, try adding the word “yet” to whatever you’re telling yourself. “I can’t figure this out yet.” “I don’t belong here yet.” “I haven’t made this work yet.” One word changes the story from a dead end to a work in progress.

Children Play

Play isn’t just fun. Play is how children learn about the world, develop skills, solve problems, and build resilience. Stuart Brown’s research on play found that it’s essential for brain development, creativity, and social competence. Not optional. Essential.

When did you stop playing? When did everything become serious, measured, purposeful, and productive? When did you decide that messing around, experimenting, and trying things just to see what happens was a waste of time?

Your new situation probably feels very serious right now. And it is serious. But that doesn’t mean there’s no room for play. In fact, the most creative solutions, the most innovative approaches, and the biggest breakthroughs often come from a playful mindset, not a stressed one. You don’t solve problems better by gripping tighter. You solve them by loosening up, trying things, seeing what happens, and being willing to look a bit silly in the process.

We covered gamification in the last article. This is the deeper principle underneath it. You don’t just need to gamify your goals. You need to rediscover the fundamental attitude of play. The willingness to experiment, to try things without knowing the outcome, to be curious rather than certain, and to treat the whole messy business of navigating something new as an adventure rather than an ordeal.

Children Are Honest

The emperor has no clothes. It took a child to say it.

Children tell the truth because they haven’t yet learned the social rules about when to lie. Daddy, why is that man so fat? Mummy, why does your friend smell funny? These aren’t cruel observations. They’re honest ones, delivered without the filter that adults have spent decades carefully constructing.

You’ve probably got some truths you need to tell yourself about your new situation. Things that aren’t working. Decisions you’ve made that were wrong. People you’re relying on who aren’t reliable. Goals that need adjusting because they weren’t realistic in the first place. Plans that looked brilliant on paper and are falling apart in practice.

But you’re filtering. You’re telling yourself the socially acceptable version of the truth instead of the actual truth. You’re doing it because the actual truth is uncomfortable, and grown-ups have learned that uncomfortable truths are better left unsaid. You smile and say “it’s going well” when it isn’t. You say “I’m fine” when you’re not. You pretend the plan is working when you can see perfectly well that it isn’t. You tell your friends and family that the new situation is great because you don’t want them to worry, or worse, to say “I told you so.”

I see this every week in my consulting room. People who’ve been lying to themselves for so long that they’ve forgotten what the truth actually looks like. They come in with symptoms that are their body’s way of screaming what their mouth won’t say. The headaches, the insomnia, the chest tightness, the fatigue, once we’ve ruled out the physical causes. Their body is being honest even when they’re not.

Say it anyway. Be seven years old for five minutes and tell yourself what’s really going on. You don’t have to tell anyone else. Just stop lying to yourself. That’s always the first step.

Remember What You Knew

You knew how to persist before the world taught you to give up. You knew how to ask questions before the world taught you to stay quiet. You knew how to live in the present before the world taught you to worry about the future. You knew how to fall down and get back up before the world taught you that failure was shameful. You knew how to play before the world taught you that everything must be productive. And you knew how to tell the truth before the world taught you to be diplomatic.

You’re not learning something new here. You’re remembering something you forgot.

You aren’t born knowing you have control. You learn it, through experience, through social conditioning, through repeated exposure to situations where your efforts genuinely mattered. Martin Seligman’s later work on this, revisiting his own earlier research on learned helplessness, found that a sense of control has to be learned. And just as it can be learned, the perception that you have none of it, learned helplessness, can take its place instead, through repeated experience of situations where your efforts didn’t seem to matter. You learn to stop trying. You learn to accept the word no. You learn to stop asking questions. You learn to worry about tomorrow instead of building today’s sandcastle.

But learned behaviour can be unlearned. That’s the whole point. The child who knew all of this is still in there, underneath the layers of adult caution, social conditioning, and accumulated fear. You haven’t lost these skills. You’ve buried them.

You’re nearly at the end of this course now. You’ve learned about your mental blocks, your cognitive biases, the traps that trip you up, and the tools that get you moving. You’ve been given the diagnosis and the treatment plan. But maybe the most important thing you can take away from all of it is this.

You already knew most of it when you were seven. You just forgot.

Trust the seven-year-old. They knew what they were doing.

Further reading

• Dweck, C.S. (2006). Mindset. Random House.
• Duckworth, A. (2016). Grit. Scribner.
• Seligman, M.E.P. & Maier, S.F. (2016). Learned helplessness at fifty: Insights from neuroscience. Psychological Review, 123(4), 349-367.
• Kabat-Zinn, J. (1990). Full Catastrophe Living. Delta.
• Brown, S. (2009). Play. Avery.