Becoming Again a Child at Play
Bieke Teerlinck on new ways of combatting burnout and the importance of remembering what you loved before the world told you what to be
In our childhood—decades before the pressures of careers consumed our lives—we experienced flow—moments when time stood still and we became lost in what we were doing. According to Bieke Teerlinck, reconnecting with those moments may be the key to reinvigorating our professional lives in an age of unprecedented burnout.
The numbers paint a stark picture: 82% of employees are now at risk of burnout, with nearly half of American and Canadian workers reporting daily work-related stress. For younger workers, the crisis is even more acute. Peak burnout now occurs at just 25 years old—17 years earlier than the average American, suggesting that traditional career paths are failing an entire generation before they’ve barely begun.
As executives and HR leaders grapple with retention challenges and declining mental health across their organizations, conventional solutions—wellness apps, flexible schedules, mental health days—provide only temporary relief. Without intervention, burnout costs the U.S. healthcare system alone $4.6 billion annually, largely from turnover and reduced productivity. But what if the answer to this modern crisis lies not in the future, but in our past?
Belgian executive coach and Senior Client Partner Advisor at Korn Ferry, Bieke Teerlinck was experiencing her own version of this crisis some years ago. After 14 successful years with the same company, she found herself at 41, disengaged and uncertain. “I had been largely happy during most of my career,” she recalls, “but something fundamental was changing.” During a sabbatical, she made an unexpected decision: she returned to two childhood passions she’d abandoned decades earlier—playing piano and competitive sports.
That decision sparked a radical question:
What if the activities that captivated us as children hold the key to professional fulfillment as adults?
The Flow Identity Theory
Teerlinck’s research, conducted through INSEAD’s Executive Master in Change programme, challenges conventional career counseling wisdom. Rather than relying on personality tests or skills assessments, she developed a methodology to help mid-career professionals reconnect with what she calls their “flow identity”—the core attributes of activities that naturally absorbed them as children.
The concept builds on psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s groundbreaking work on “flow”—that state of complete absorption where time seems to disappear and the activity itself becomes intrinsically rewarding.
Children experience this regularly. Watch a four-year-old draw for hours, oblivious to everything around them, or a ten-year-old lose themselves in building elaborate structures. They’re not thinking about outcomes or external rewards; they’re simply engaged in something that feels deeply right.
“Children spontaneously devote time to activities they love doing—their passions—without anyone telling them what they should or shouldn’t like or do,” Teerlinck writes.
But as we mature into professionals, something fundamental shifts. We make choices based on practicality, parental expectations, monetary rewards, or status. The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott described this as developing a “false self”—suppressing our genuine desires to meet others’ expectations, leading to what he termed “self-estrangement.”
The consequences of this estrangement are now everywhere. Sixty-seven percent of workers reported experiencing at least one symptom commonly linked to workplace burnout in the past month, including lack of interest, motivation, or energy. Many mid-career professionals find themselves successful by conventional measures yet profoundly unfulfilled.
Drawing as Discovery
Teerlinck’s methodology is deceptively simple yet remarkably powerful. She worked with twelve professionals aged 30-50, all in career transition, guiding them through a series of drawing exercises focused primarily on childhood. Drawing itself is often a flow activity, creating an ideal medium for accessing deeper memories and emotions.
One participant, a 46-year-old woman recovering from a three-year burnout, arrived with no energy and a heightened sensitivity to noise that limited where she could function. During the first drawing exercise—a self-portrait incorporating past, present, and future—something unexpected happened. Despite initial discomfort with her drawing skills, she became absorbed in the activity. Her drawings exploded with color and playfulness, depicting a childhood filled with sunshine, sweets, and birthday parties.
“Wow, I was so surprised realizing that I had such a satisfying and happy childhood, full of energy!” she told Teerlinck after the first session. “Why can I not get this back now? Today I don’t have any energy. I want to do many things, but I’m immediately tired.”
Through subsequent exercises—drawing her “passion biography” at ages 5, 10, 15, 20, and beyond—patterns emerged. Words like “creating,” “experimenting,” “liberating,” and “shining” surfaced repeatedly. When Teerlinck suggested she saw a “magician” in the drawings, the participant lit up: “Yes! Something crazy, magical and unexpected sits in me! I’m also always looking for a reason to laugh!”
Yet her career told a different story. She’d become a nurse almost by accident, making choices based on convenience and fear of not being “good enough” for her real dream—dancing. She’d spent decades in pharmaceutical companies, never feeling passionate about the work. The disconnect between her flow identity and her career path couldn’t have been starker.
By the intervention’s end, she’d identified five core attributes: 1) expressing herself and being herself, 2) connection with others and herself, 3) recognition, 4) expressing craziness and 5) laughter.
The Consistency of Core Values
Perhaps the most striking finding from Teerlinck’s research is how consistent these childhood attributes remain throughout life. Every participant completed a Career Anchors assessment—identifying aspects they’d most enjoyed in their professional lives. The correlation between childhood flow identity and career satisfaction was unmistakable.
One 43-year-old man, unexpectedly laid off after 18 years with the same company, revealed something profound through his self-portrait. He drew it horizontally rather than vertically and left the left side—representing childhood—completely blank. He hadn’t noticed the omission himself.
Probing deeper revealed a difficult childhood: his parents’ move to Hawaii when he was 10, followed by their divorce. He felt different from everyone else “in a negative way,” forced into lower-level studies as a pâtissier when he’d aspired to more. He carried shame about this educational path even as he’d later completed a Master’s degree while working—an impressive achievement he couldn’t fully own.
The blank space in his drawing represented what he’d been blocking. By the final session, he had reached a breakthrough: “I now realize that I should be proud of what I have achieved, instead of feeling shame and anger about my childhood education.”
Beyond Traditional Career Counseling
The implications challenge how we think about career guidance. Traditional approaches focus on personality assessments like Myers-Briggs or skills inventories, attempting to match people to suitable roles. But these tools miss something fundamental:
What activities make us feel most alive?
Teerlinck’s approach doesn’t deny the value of developing new skills or exploring unfamiliar territories. Rather, it suggests that understanding our flow identity provides a compass for navigating change. The same core attributes can manifest across multiple roles and contexts—what researcher Herminia Ibarra calls our “multiple working identities.” The key is not to lose sight of the core attributes of your unique flow identity and to remain cognizant of the need for them to informed whatever “working identity” you may be embracing at the moment.
Practical Applications
For organizations grappling with the burnout crisis, these findings suggest new approaches to retention and development. Rather than generic wellness programs, what if companies helped employees understand their flow identity? What if career development conversations began not with “What do you want to do next?” but “What activities made you lose track of time as a child, and what was it about them that captivated you?”
The methodology Teerlinck developed could be adapted for team-building or onboarding. Understanding colleagues’ core attributes related to flow identity—one person craves connection and collaboration, another seeks independence and challenge—could improve team dynamics and project assignments.
For individuals in career transition, the implications are even more direct. Before updating your resume or browsing job postings, the first question should be: What is my flow identity and what are its core attributes? Those core attributes then become non-negotiables, the elements without which no amount of salary or prestige will create lasting satisfaction.
A Different Question
As workplace stress continues to escalate and traditional career paths satisfy fewer people, perhaps we’re asking the wrong questions. We obsess over skills gaps and competency frameworks, resume optimization and interview techniques. We tell young people to follow their passion but rarely help them understand what that actually means beyond superficial interests.
Teerlinck’s work suggests a more fundamental inquiry:
What activities absorbed you so completely as a child that you forgot everything else?
What was it about those experiences—not just the activity itself but the underlying attributes—that created that sense of flow?
And how might those same attributes be woven into an adult life and career?
The approach isn’t nostalgic or escapist. We can’t and shouldn’t try to recreate childhood. Life grows more complex; responsibilities accumulate; we change. But perhaps those childhood passions weren’t just pleasant pastimes or developmental phases. Perhaps they were our truest selves, expressing something essential before the world told us who we should be.
In an era of unprecedented career anxiety, when 43% of Millennials and 44% of Gen Z workers have recently left jobs directly due to burnout, maybe the way forward requires looking backward. Not to return to childhood, but to reconnect with the child who knew—before anyone told them otherwise—exactly what made them come alive.
The research discussed is based on Bieke Teerlinck’s thesis “Becoming Again a Child at Play: Reconnecting with Childhood Passions through Flow for a More Meaningful Career and Life” completed in 2019 as part of INSEAD’s prestigious Executive Master in Change programme.
References and Further Reading
APA poll finds younger works feel stressed, lonely and undervalued. (2024, June). American Psychological Association. Retrieved November 29, 2025, from https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2024/06/younger-workers-stressed
Burleigh, E. (2024, March 14). Around 82% of employees are at risk of burnout but employers are failing to to make well-being a priority | Fortune. Fortune. https://fortune.com/2024/03/14/employees-at-risk-burnout-disconnect-bosses-well-being/
Carra, M. (2025, March 5). Is workplace burnout the new normal for Americans and Canadians? The Bay State Banner. Retrieved November 29, 2025, from https://baystatebanner.com/2025/03/05/is-workplace-burnout-the-new-normal-for-americans-and-canadians/
Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2014). Flow and the Foundations of Positive Psychology: The Collected Works of Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Springer Science+Business Media.
Don’t want to lose your Gen Z and millennial talent? Here’s what you can do. (2025, June 11). Deloitte Insights. https://www.deloitte.com/us/en/insights/topics/talent/deloitte-millennial-survey.html
Gallup. (2024). State of the Global Workplace Report. Retrieved from gallup.com
Guys, I. (2025, October 19). The State of Workplace Burnout in 2025: A Comprehensive Research report - The interview guys. The Interview Guys. https://blog.theinterviewguys.com/workplace-burnout-in-2025-research-report/
Ibarra, H. (2023). Working Identity: Unconventional Strategies for Reinventing Your Career. Harvard Business Review Press.
Schein, E. H., & Van Maanen, J. (2013). Career Anchors: The Changing Nature of Work and Careers (4th ed.). Wiley.
Teerlinck, B. (2019). Becoming Again a Child at Play: Reconnecting with Childhood Passions through Flow for a More Meaningful Career and Life. INSEAD Executive Master in Change thesis.
Winnicott, D. W. (2007). Ego distortion in terms of True Self and False Self. In Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development (pp. 140–152). Karnac Books.
World Health Organization. (2019). Burn-out an “occupational phenomenon”: International Classification of Diseases. Retrieved from who.int
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