It’s a world that can be overwhelming and it calls for an outlook that is clear about what we want to achieve and how we can do it.Unlocking the skills you have either forgotten or never knew you had.Looking back to move forward.Thinking little to achieve big.So, are you ready to grow down?At any given time, most adults’ truthful answer to that question will be a list of things they are worrying about.We worry about doing our job well, the team we are responsible for, or trying to find work in the first place.We worry about our friends and family, relationships new and old, and looking after the people we love.We worry about money, and how to afford the things we want and need.Rather, I simply want to highlight that, in our adult lives, we live in a complicated world where worries and difficulties, though they may be small, are never far away.I’ve heard it said that we process more information in one day now than a person living in the sixteenth century did in their whole lives.That’s mind blowing.What becomes difficult in this context is to see and think clearly.The risk is that, by focusing on so many things at once, we do none of them well.Our attention is split so many ways that concentration can be fatally diluted.It’s no wonder that, according to Microsoft, the average human attention span is now less than that of a goldfish.I bet it wasn’t like that in the 1500s.All this is a world away from the way many of us were lucky enough to live as young children.For toddlers, it is simplicity and not complexity that rules.They’re not worried about what happened yesterday, or what lies ahead tomorrow.They make up their own rules, because they haven’t learned that there is a ‘right’ way to do things.They see and experience the world as something new and fascinating, because it is.And if they want something, they might scream the house down, throw their toys and refuse their food until they get it.My proposition is that toddlers are some of the world’s most creative, ambitious and determined humans.Of course, relatively few of us start businesses or become corporate leaders, but we were all once toddlers.Those innate abilities and behaviours are in us all.Each of us has the ability to improve the way we think, act, communicate and explore in our everyday lives.We can all be more creative and imaginative.These are skills that require not so much learning as rediscovery.For me, that is exciting because it means that the keys to understanding our true selves, changing our chosen paths and taking control of our lives are within our own power, not anyone else’s.In every one of us, there is an internal energy and knowhow waiting to be unleashed, and which only we can unlock.The keys are kept safe in the memory of our own toddler selves.We just need to know how to find them.This is not as easy as simply turning back the clock.An adult who has spent decades assimilating to cultural norms has to open a mind that in many unacknowledged ways has become closed to new things.To unlock your full potential, you have to learn once more what it means to take those first baby steps.To approach the world without the burden of assumption or preconception.To nurture the spark of creativity undimmed by cynicism or even pragmatism.In other words, to think like you did as a toddler.I can see a few of you raising your eyebrows already at the thought.Surely it’s the qualifications, experience and social skills you develop while growing up that really matter?How else could you make your way in a successful career, be it in the boardroom or the classroom or on the shop floor?Before launching Ella’s Kitchen I gained the valuable experience of helping to run a business and develop new markets, in the early days of digital television with Nickelodeon.And yes, that all matters.But it doesn’t make the difference between doing well and achieving your very best.What you have learned through formal education and workplace experience should inform how you work, but it should never limit it.Being your best requires more than the ability to consume information, pass exams and learn on the job.Learning to walk, for example, much as you might now take it for granted, wasn’t easy.The problem is, just as we forget that we ever had to learn, we also tend to forget how we learned.We have no memory of the sheer determination it took to go from sitting up to crawling, or then standing up and taking those first steps.We’ve forgotten all the times we fell over and failed and all the different things we were curious enough to try until we got it right.But we did all those things.That ambition and determination is already inside us, just waiting to be reawakened.All that reawakening, and more, is what I believe you will need to fulfil your ambitions and achieve your dreams.What you have learned growing up can take you a long way.However, my experience suggests that what you learn when you grow down, looking at the world again through the same eyes you did as a toddler, is even more important.Recapturing the same innocence, openness to new experiences and willingness to try new things, can transform your whole approach to life.It certainly doesn’t take away any of the difficulties you will face, or provide a secret recipe for success.What thinking like a toddler does allow you to do is look at the challenges in your life with a different perspective.To think more imaginatively and with greater clarity.To work more effectively with others, be they your immediate colleagues or people you thought were competitors.And in doing all these things, I think many of us will find the keys to our most creative, curious and ambitious selves.This is about shaking off the constraints that many of us live and work within daily, whether we recognize them or not.About daring to think about things in a different way, and then doing something about it.About the courage to say what you think, to risk being wrong and not be embarrassed that some people will know about it.The knowledge that the world won’t end because someone doesn’t like your idea, or disagrees with it.It is about being yourself and expressing yourself.So we have to work at it.To strive for the clarity and simplicity that is at the heart of success in almost any field.Now, I can imagine some of you are thinking that toddlers are the least appropriate role models for a successful life and career.Wouldn’t you be better off following the example of inspirational leaders from business, creative and artistic geniuses or alpha figures from sport or politics, than an innocent child?Well, I beg to differ.What’s more, there is a growing body of evidence to suggest that a childlike approach to thinking can be of benefit to the adult brain.Robinson conducted one such experiment in 2010, in which a group of undergraduates were asked what they would do if classes were cancelled for the day.The experimental half of the group was asked to imagine themselves as seven years old, while the control group was asked to respond to the situation as their adult selves.Respondents from the latter group wrote mainly about catching up on sleep and work.‘I would go back to bed for a while if school was cancelled,’ wrote one respondent from the adult group, who also spoke of finishing coursework, cleaning their apartment and going to the gym.I would then go to the pet store and look at all the dogs.After that I would go visit my grandma and play a few games of gin.Then she would make me cookies and give me a huge glass of milk.This research not only fascinates me but also puts a smile on [my](https://gitee.com/uk_b6a6/sync/wikis/Nursery Management Systems) face.And it suggests that, by the simple act of thinking like a toddler, we can begin to unlock benefits in terms of creativity and original thinking.What’s more, Zabelina and Robinson are by no means alone in their conclusion.A raft of research backs up the contention that children’s minds are more creative and, moreover, that the spark is snuffed out in many of us at a relatively young age.Anyone like me who has raised young children will know that their ability to see things differently, and think creatively, is unparalleled.In a world of endless discovery and play, toddlers make connections that might seem absurd to us, but which make perfect sense to them.It’s why, to the perennial frustration of parents, expensive toys can be cast aside as a hundred and one uses are found for the boxes they came in.The power of a child’s imagination, captured in timeless children’s literature from Alice in Wonderland to The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Peter Pan and The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, is at the heart of their creativity.There was even a time when both believed that, between me leaving for work in the morning and coming back in the evening, I spent the whole day in our front garden, hiding behind the wall.Toddlers have an imagination that allows their world to be a boundless one, where every new person and object holds exciting, or sometimes intimidating, possibilities.It is a world ungoverned by the rules and conventions that we mostly abide by as adults, because the concept of them simply does not exist.Before children are taught to think and act in a particular way, they dream about and do what comes naturally.That engenders a curiosity and creativity that is both stronger and more persistent than at almost any other age.Recent research has begun to suggest that the basis of toddler creativity is not merely circumstantial, but cerebral.It is the wiring of the brain, and how that changes as we grow up, that might explain the creativity gap between toddlers and teens, let alone toddlers and adults.‘Baby brains are more flexible than adult brains.They have far more connections between neurons, none of them particularly efficient, but over time they prune out unused connections and strengthen useful ones.Baby brains also have a high level of the chemicals that make brains change connections easily.’Equally important may be those parts of the toddler brain that are slow to develop.Its absence in toddlers ‘may actually be tremendously helpful for learning’, Gopnik believes, citing a lack of inhibition as something that ‘may help babies and young children to explore freely’.Far from being mere unfinished adults, babies and young children are exquisitely designed by evolution to change and create, to learn and explore.Those capacities, so intrinsic to what it means to be human, appear in their purest forms in the earliest years of our lives.Our most valuable human accomplishments are possible because we were once helpless dependent children and not in spite of it.The very way our brains were set up made us sponges for learning and searchers for the new and interesting.Physically weak, we were mentally agile in the extreme.For anyone looking to do better in their professional life as an adult, what better example could there be than that?What did we lose in the process of growing up and how can we tap back into that toddler mindset?As Alison Gopnik’s research suggests, part of the reason for our increased conformity may be driven by how our brains mature, equipping us with both the ability to think logically and the tendency to be inhibited.The mindset of adults, on the other hand, is likely to involve trying to find the ‘correct’ conventional solution to a presented task or problem.