Stop the drama: Inviting curiosity and adventure

When our need for adventure and novelty goes unmet, it doesn’t simply disappear. Sometimes it goes looking for substitutes. We might distract ourselves using many different strategies. It can be that we borrow intensity from other people’s lives through gossip, tension, and drama. It creates movement, friction, a sense that something is happening. Cynicism can play a similar role. It sharpens things, adds bite, makes the world feel less flat while quietly closing the door on curiosity.

For some of us, the urge turns inward and upward. We exercise more, or have weekly new resolutions promising optimisation, transformation, a better version of ourselves. For a while, this feels like momentum. Eventually it becomes unsustainable. Fatigue sets in, followed by a familiar inner evaluation: I can’t keep up. I’m not disciplined enough. I always fail. The adventure collapses into self-criticism.

And sometimes the need is numbed altogether. Alcohol, scrolling, sugar, work, noise. Anything that dulls the senses enough that the ache for novelty, curiosity, or aliveness becomes less noticeable. The cost, of course, is that the very capacities we would need to feel interested in life again are the ones being switched off.

I do see all of these patterns in my coaching practice. Often, they arrive disguised as productivity problems, motivation issues, or “bad habits” and when I ask what the client wants instead of the problem, they mention “aliveness” or a life of adventure and curiosity. Of course, it would be a mistake to assume that all of these behaviours are driven by a need for adventure or curiosity. We want to be thinking with our clients and not about them or assume things that they have not said. Only the client can tell us what they really want. That is why the most useful questions are often the simplest ones: What does this help you with? or What would you like instead?

If, in answering those questions, it does turn out that there is a genuine hunger for adventure and curiosity, then the solution does not have to be dramatic. It does not require quitting a job, running a marathon, or reinventing your entire life. It can begin much smaller. Even if our clients are fed up and want to create a revolution rather than an evolution, it might make sense to invite a reflection on small steps to a life of curiosity. Adventure does not have to be extreme. It can be quiet, local, and deliberately modest. Here is what my clients have come up with:

Intellectual adventures: following an idea purely because it interests them, reading outside their usual territory, learning something they don’t need, or letting a question remain unanswered for a while.

Relational curiosity: starting a conversation they would normally avoid, engaging with people who hold completely different views, asking one genuinely curious question and resisting the urge to steer the answer, saying yes to something mildly inconvenient but interesting, or saying no to something habitual and noticing what changes.

Physical aliveness: moving in a way that is unfamiliar rather than optimised, using the body without tracking or measuring, slowing down where one would normally push, playing with balance, coordination, or strength without turning it into a performance, engaging in unfamiliar movements like a dance from a different culture.

Sensory variations: taking a different route without choosing the fastest one, revisiting a nearby place that was postponed, changing a small daily ritual, paying attention to one sense at a time, or going for an ice-bath for the first time.

All of this can be playful: allowing oneself to be a beginner, doing something badly on purpose, treating a mundane task as an experiment rather than a chore.

These are some ideas for inviting curiosity and adventure in. Of course, these cannot be meant as prescriptions. The invitation to ourselves and our clients is to reflect on small ways of testing whether curiosity can be reintroduced gently, without pressure, without turning yet another part of life into a self-improvement project.

Sometimes, the most radical adventure is not doing more, but listening more carefully to what we really want.

If you want to reflect on the learnings that your clients have brought to you or otherwise hang out with cool people or learn about our classes, why not join one of our free meetups and exchanges?

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