Have you ever told yourself you don’t have a creative bone in your body?
This week, we’re looking at why that belief is a trap—and why it’s almost certainly a lie you were taught to believe. In this Report from the Creative Closet, I explore why we’ve narrowed the definition of creativity so far that we’ve lost sight of our own resourcefulness, adaptation, and meaning-making.
It’s an invitation to stop treating creativity like a talent show and start seeing it as the life force that helps you feel human again. We discuss why you don’t need a plan or a portfolio to be creative—you just need the courage to be messy.
I’m Nancy Norbeck, and I’m your Messy Muse Mentor. I help people feel alive again through curiosity and play.
In this episode, we discuss:
- The “Creative Bone” Myth: Why your school experiences didn’t give you the full picture of your potential.
- Broadening the definition: How the way you solve problems and navigate uncertainty is a deeply creative act.
- Evaluation vs. Exploration: Why performative art makes us disconnect and how to find your way back.
- The Aliveness Factor: Why creativity isn’t about “fixing” yourself, but returning to the truth of who you are.
Ready to send your inner critic to summer camp for an hour?We get together once a month for a relaxed, co-working-style session where you can work on whatever you want—without any pressure to do it “right.” We send the shoulds and inner critics off to summer camp where they’re kept busy rather than getting in our way. Join the Creativity Circle.
Get in Touch
I’d love to hear your feedback, questions, and experience with these ideas! Send me a note at fycuriosity.com, or contact me on Instagram, or Bluesky.
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Escaping the “Not an Artist” Trap | Report from the Creative Closet #5
Please note: This is an unedited transcript, provided as a courtesy, and reflects the actual conversation as closely as possible. Please forgive any typographical or grammatical errors.
Nancy Norbeck [00:00:06]:
Welcome to Follow Your Curiosity. Ordinary people, extraordinary creativity. Here’s how to get unstuck. I’m your host creativity coach, Nancy Norbeck. Let’s go. Welcome to this week’s Report from the Creative Closet. It’s not exactly glamorous, but it works. Just as a reminder, I’m speaking here as a creativity coach working with many people over many years. I am not a therapist.
Nancy Norbeck [00:00:33]:
Now last time, we talked about what humans lose when we lose play. We lose experimentation, curiosity, flexibility, resilience, low stakes exploration, which is more important than it might sound. And, you know, the thing is, a lot of us think that creativity was only art. But what if it’s not? Maybe some of those capacities that
Nancy Norbeck [00:01:00]:
I just listed actually are creativity. So I’ve
Nancy Norbeck [00:01:04]:
mentioned before that we tend to define creativity way too narrowly. And I think, you know, we a lot of people hear that word, and immediately they think of artistic talent. They think of drawing and painting and aesthetics and some kind of performance art. And as a result, a lot of people decided ages ago without a word, I’m not creative. I have heard this from so many people over the years, and usually it comes in the form of, I don’t have a creative bone in my body, which is a whole lot stronger than, oh, I’m not creative. Now sometimes it is just that simple statement, but so many times it is literally, I don’t have a creative bone in my body. I have heard it so many times and it breaks my heart every single time because it’s just not true. But it is the lesson that people learn from school experiences that don’t go well, from comparing themselves to other people who do have abundant artistic talent, especially usually visual arts talent, but sometimes performing arts talent.
Nancy Norbeck [00:02:18]:
It happens when people are praised for correctness instead of exploration. It happens when creativity is treated like a talent rather than an actual inherent human capacity. So creativity becomes associated with talent and impressiveness instead of with responsiveness and resourcefulness and experimentation, adaptation. Lord have mercy, human beings are the most adaptable creatures on this planet. Look at all of the things that we have created in order to adapt to our surroundings, to the weather, to all sorts of circumstances in our lives. We are incredibly adaptable creatures that is all unbelievably creative, but we don’t call it that. And if you are deciding or thinking or realizing right in this moment that you haven’t thought of yourself as creative in years, even though you do all of those things on a regular basis, that’s probably why. And my main point here, if I have one thesis in my life, it is that creativity is so much broader than art.
Nancy Norbeck [00:03:33]:
Creativity includes all of those things that I just mentioned. It includes adaptation, improvisation, experimentation, curiosity. Curiosity and creativity are so closely intertwined that I often have a a hard time pulling them apart. It includes responsiveness and resourcefulness. If you are doing almost anything in this life, at some point, you are going to have to be resourceful because you are in a situation where you don’t have the tool that you need or that tool doesn’t exist but you still have to figure out a way to make something work. We’ve all done it. Parents do it all the time. People in jobs do it all the time.
Nancy Norbeck [00:04:07]:
We make meaning all the time. Human beings are meaning making machines. That’s why we are wired for story. Every single one of us does this every day, but we don’t necessarily consider it creative. Let me give you a couple more examples. If you’re solving a problem differently because maybe the way you’ve solved it before didn’t work or maybe you’re solving it for the first time because it’s new to you, if you’re navigating uncertainty, if you’re trying a different approach because the one that you used to do didn’t work before, the thing that used to work with your kids, suddenly the kid is onto you and you gotta try something else. If you are making meaning from your experience, which we all do every day, because if we don’t make meaning from it somehow in so many cases, we’ll lose our minds. Right.
Nancy Norbeck [00:04:56]:
If we can’t make something make sense to us, the alternatives are unbearable in so many circumstances. If if we respond instead of just repeating ourselves, right? When when we actually sit down and think about circumstances around us and respond to them thoughtfully instead of just regurgitating the same thing over and over again, All of these things are deeply creative because they require us to think differently and to use our imagination and to try new things. Art is only one expression of creativity. It is not the whole picture,
Nancy Norbeck [00:05:40]:
not by a long shot.
Nancy Norbeck [00:05:42]:
And if you’ve never thought of creativity this way, you are not alone. In fact, you are the vast majority and that’s part of why I’m here is to expand people’s idea of what creativity is, because I guarantee you, if you are a living, breathing human being, you are creative. It’s just that you haven’t, if you have thought previously that you weren’t creative, seen what you do every day in a creative light. Now, when creativity becomes an evaluative thing, when it becomes performative and polished and marketable, people disconnect from it. We stop experimenting. We stop wandering and wondering and making bad art and trying things without guarantees. And we definitely stop engaging with creativity unless we’re sure that we can
Nancy Norbeck [00:06:33]:
do it well, which is the antithesis of being creative. It’s the
Nancy Norbeck [00:06:40]:
antithesis of why we do things and experiment and play. And that’s when we become less flexible because everything feels like judgment. Irony. Right? That explains why doing your creative things started feeling stressful, and that’s why people avoid it.
Nancy Norbeck [00:07:01]:
So what I wanna give you today is a completely different way to look at creativity. Because
Nancy Norbeck [00:07:09]:
a lot of the time we are told, as I have said here many times, that creativity is just for kids. It’s an optional thing. It’s a luxury. It’s nice to have. It’s just fluff because it’s just for kids. Right? Adults don’t need creativity, and yet think think about how much money we spend on the arts. Make it make sense. Right? But here’s the thing.
Nancy Norbeck [00:07:32]:
Creativity isn’t therapy, but it can be incredibly therapeutic. And that’s not because it fixes people. It’s because it reconnects us with our curiosity, with our experimentation, with our agency, with our selfhood, and with our aliveness. Right? When we are doing our creative thing, it almost always is a thing that lights us up. Just as one example, I’m a lifelong choral singer, and I can tell you that every transcendent moment I have ever experienced in my life has been while I’ve been singing with a choir because singing in a choir absolutely lights me up from the inside. It is the most magical thing I have ever experienced. It is the most alive thing I have ever experienced. It connects me to something I can’t even explain.
Nancy Norbeck [00:08:23]:
If you know, you know. And your creative thing probably makes you feel the same way, even though we may
Nancy Norbeck [00:08:30]:
not have good words for it.
Nancy Norbeck [00:08:33]:
So it it is it is something that returns us to ourselves in a way that nothing else can. And that’s why we are not talking about transformation theater here. I am so wary of the word transformation. It is so overused these days. And so much of the time, it really is theater. You know, it’s blown out of proportion because it sounds big and important. And I’m not saying that transformation can’t happen because it can. But I’m talking about something different.
Nancy Norbeck [00:09:08]:
I’m talking about creativity as a way to return to yourself, to the truth of who you actually are without having to be fixed, without having to turn into something that you’re not. That reconnection to that aliveness, to that part of you that lights up when you are doing the thing that you really love. It’s restorative creativity
Nancy Norbeck [00:09:36]:
and it feels really different. It does not have to be a performance. It’s all about how everything feels in here.
Nancy Norbeck [00:09:48]:
And here’s the thing. When we’ve been away from our creativity for a long time, it doesn’t have to come back in big pieces and it doesn’t have to be loud and noisy. It often comes back through simple side quests, through curiosity, through bad art, through wandering, through really, really small steps and experimentation. It’s, it’s little acts of exploration. It’s gradual. It does not have to be this dramatic process of reinvention and this, this radical transformation that we hear about. It can be soft and slow and gentle and easy and really, really, really
Nancy Norbeck [00:10:32]:
possible. And it is accessible.
Nancy Norbeck [00:10:37]:
It’s accessible to anybody who wants to try it. So I hope I’ve given you something to think about with that. Next time we’re gonna talk about why modern adulthood feels so emotionally exhausting. Again, if you know, you know. Why so many people feel trapped in performance and pressure and why it is so hard to stay human in environments that constantly evaluate us. Again, if you know, you know. So if this feels like your kind of corner of the internet, you are welcome in the creative closet anytime. And subscribe so that you’re notified whenever there’s something new, we would love to have you stick around.
Nancy Norbeck [00:11:20]:
I also host a free follow your curiosity creativity circle once a month. It is a gentle space for curiosity, experimentation, and creative exploration. We come together. We work on our own thing. We have little social time where we can show off what we’ve been working on if we want to, show off in a very, very low key way, get to know each other, and just have some time carved out to get our stuff done. So you’d be very, very welcome there. It’s completely free. The link is in the show notes or below this video, depending on where you are watching or listening to this.
Nancy Norbeck [00:11:50]:
And otherwise, I really appreciate you spending some time with me here in the creative closet. I am your messy muse mentor, and I help people feel alive again through curi curiosity, creativity, and play. And I hope to see you next time. If you’re tired of thinking about answering a creative call but never actually doing it, come join me for an hour and start feeling like yourself again. The Follow Your Curiosity Creativity circle is a safe, welcoming, and encouraging environment where we send the shoulds and inner critics off to summer camp where they’re kept busy rather than getting in our way. You can find it at the link in your podcast app. See you there and see you next week. Follow Your Curiosity is produced by me, Nancy Norbeck, with music by Joseph McDade.
Nancy Norbeck [00:12:37]:
If you like Follow Your Curiosity, please subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And don’t forget to tell your friends. It really helps me reach new listeners.