What if the very thing you think is “childish” is actually the life skill you need most right now?
In this “Report from the Creative Closet,” I’m looking at the fear of uncertainty that keeps so many adults stuck. We discuss why we’ve become so uncomfortable with open-endedness and why we feel like we need a manual for everything—even for taking a break.
I share the “Obsolete Child” philosophy, the reality of the “Imagination Lab,” and why reclaiming your sense of play is the fastest way to break the cycle of perfectionism. This isn’t about making “art”—it’s about remembering how to be a person who is willing to try, fail, and stay curious.
I’m Nancy Norbeck, and I’m your Messy Muse Mentor. I help people feel alive again through creativity, curiosity, and play.
In this episode, I discuss:
- The Adulting Bind: Why we can’t do things well because we won’t try until we’re already perfect.
- The Instruction Obsession: What a 3-week break taught me about the difference between adults and children.
- Adaptability vs. Rules: Why “play” is actually the highest form of problem-solving and resilience.
- The Power of Permission: How to give yourself the green light to move outside the boxes you’ve built.
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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Why Adults Fear Play (and How to Reclaim Your Aliveness) | Report from the Creative Closet #4
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. Just a reminder that I am speaking here from my own experience as a creativity coach, who’s worked with many people for many years. I am not a therapist. Last time we talked about how a lot of people slowly prioritize being correct, predictable, and acceptable over being fully themselves.
Nancy Norbeck [00:00:39]:
I think that changes our actual capacity for play, experimentation, curiosity, and exploration. Because the more I work with adults, the more I notice something really strange. A lot of people don’t just feel connected from creativity. They feel genuinely uncomfortable with open endedness, with uncertainty. If we think about what play actually does, if we actually stop and think about play for that long, because a lot of us don’t, a lot of us just think that play is a thing that kids do. And that’s part of the problem. We think that play is only for kids. It’s not just for kids, but if we
Nancy Norbeck [00:01:16]:
think about it that way for just a minute, play
Nancy Norbeck [00:01:20]:
is actually how kids learn. It develops their sense of experimentation, their curiosity, their flexibility, their ability to improvise because most play is improvised, their imagination. Right? The thing that we associate most with kids, especially very young kids, is off the charts because they play constantly, but it’s also their ability to recover after mistakes. If you notice when those kids are playing, if something goes wrong, they don’t even stop for very long. They they pretty much stop long enough to notice that there’s an issue, and then they just pick right up and they go in a different direction. It doesn’t stop them. It doesn’t break their hearts. It doesn’t destroy their confidence most of the time.
Nancy Norbeck [00:02:02]:
It’s just, oh, okay. Here we go. Something else. No problem. They they deal with uncertainty really, really well because they just go. They they it doesn’t matter so much because it’s all imagined. It’s all play. None of it’s real.
Nancy Norbeck [00:02:21]:
Even when it’s real in their heads. A lot of the time they, they’re, they’re in this weird state of real and not real all at the same time. Now I know, I know if that favorite toy goes missing, it’s very, very real,
Nancy Norbeck [00:02:36]:
but the game that they’re playing, it, it doesn’t have the same
Nancy Norbeck [00:02:41]:
kind of consequences most of the time as it does for us when we’re adults, because we don’t think of it as a game. Right? Also, let’s think about the level of curiosity that comes out of play for kids. Their curiosity is off the charts. And if you’ve ever sat with a
Nancy Norbeck [00:02:56]:
three year old, you know what I’m talking about? It’s why, why, Why. Why.
Nancy Norbeck [00:03:05]:
Why. Until you think you might lose your mind because you’ve just explained it six different ways, but that kid is still curious because they want to know all of the things. And adults are satisfied with very surface level answers an awful lot of the time because we’ve been taught not to question anymore. The number of questions that small children ask dwarfs the number of questions that adults ask. It’s it’s amazing when you see the statistics. I interviewed a guy named Warren Burger a couple years ago, literally wrote the book on questions. You should check it out if you wanna know more. Play creates low stakes momentum, and it’s part of why they learn so quickly through play.
Nancy Norbeck [00:03:47]:
Humans learn to adapt by trying lots and lots of things and seeing what works and honestly humans are remarkably adaptable creatures. If you’ve ever watched a group of humans under difficult circumstances, we figure new things out really quickly when we have to, but we also figure them out really quickly when we’re playing. And kids are the masters at it. That’s why I hold them up as our best teachers a lot of the time. Play is where kids and humans practice things that don’t have to be finished. There’s no product that needs to go out to market to customers. There are no stakeholders that have to be satisfied. It’s all just trial and error and experimentation, and it’s glorious.
Nancy Norbeck [00:04:30]:
There’s no need for mastery certainty. You can discover through interaction and you learn responsiveness instead of control. Now if you’re listening to all
Nancy Norbeck [00:04:40]:
of this and you’re thinking, haven’t really thought about play this way before or in a long time. And, this is this
Nancy Norbeck [00:04:49]:
is hitting me because I have noticed that I’ve had some trouble with uncertainty and, you know, actually, these are life skills. Yeah. Yeah. They are. And when we come in and get all adults don’t need to play because we are grown up and we are very serious now, the thing that we don’t realize is that we lose those life skills because we’re not practicing them anymore. Doctor Seuss famously said that adults are obsolete children, and part of that obsolescence is that we are no longer practicing that kind of adaptability and spontaneity. And then we wonder why we sit in our boardrooms and no one has any new ideas, or we don’t like the new ideas because they’re not the same as the old ideas.
Nancy Norbeck [00:05:43]:
Yeah. I’ve been in those meetings.
Nancy Norbeck [00:05:45]:
And to be fair and to tell on myself,
Nancy Norbeck [00:05:48]:
I had an experience recently where this became clearer to me for myself and in general than it ever really had been before.
Nancy Norbeck [00:05:59]:
I was talking to a couple of business colleagues about my, my course imagination lab for grownups, as opposed to imagination lab for kids, both exist. And how I was thinking about
Nancy Norbeck [00:06:12]:
launching it with, with a three week break in the middle of the six week program. Because
Nancy Norbeck [00:06:20]:
if I had launched it in the spring, there was no avoiding the need for the three week break. I was just not going to be avoidable. And was this going to be practical
Nancy Norbeck [00:06:28]:
was my question. Was was it going to be complete madness? And for several reasons, I decided that it probably would be. But in the course of the conversation, one
Nancy Norbeck [00:06:38]:
of my colleagues said to me, well, but you can’t leave a group of adults for three weeks with no direction. You can’t you have to leave them detailed instructions for what they’re gonna have to do for those three weeks. And I just thought,
Nancy Norbeck [00:06:55]:
really? And I said, I mean, I’m not teaching children here. There’s a lot to unpack in that statement. A lot. And it took me about a week before the full depth of what I had said hit me because really, I insulted every child
Nancy Norbeck [00:07:19]:
on this planet. When I said that I fell into that cultural belief that children can’t be trusted to motor on their own and require super responsible adult supervision every second of the day regardless of what we’re talking about. And the fact is that if I had been teaching children, especially small children,
Nancy Norbeck [00:07:45]:
they would have been completely fine for three weeks in a
Nancy Norbeck [00:07:48]:
course called Imagination Lab all on their own. Because children do not need to be told how
Nancy Norbeck [00:07:54]:
to play. Children do not need instructions. They do not need props. They do not need toys even. Children know how to play.
Nancy Norbeck [00:08:03]:
And you know this if they’ve if you’ve ever watched children, if you’ve had kids of your own. You know that they will figure out how to play whether you give them anything to help them or not because they are so wired for it. They will make toys out of sticks and rocks and, you know, tree branches and whatever they can find that’s handy. They will imagine toys. They you do not need
Nancy Norbeck [00:08:31]:
to give them anything. They have everything they need right here between their ears, and they will go. They will write things. They will draw things. They they do not need your help.
Nancy Norbeck [00:08:43]:
They do not need detailed instructions, and they would happily go for three weeks and and would have presented me with a pile of things that they had done with great glee.
Nancy Norbeck [00:08:55]:
They would have done this if I had been teaching children. It’s the adults who have no idea what to do if you tell them you have a three week break,
Nancy Norbeck [00:09:08]:
go play and experiment and have fun.
Nancy Norbeck [00:09:13]:
Because it’s too open ended. And their brains break, and they don’t know what to do because the limits and the lines and the rules that they’re so used to aren’t there anymore. And we don’t know what to do without the rules that we have been conditioned to place ourselves inside of. And the most terrifying word to a whole lot of adults is the word play.
Nancy Norbeck [00:09:42]:
And if you don’t believe me, think about the last time you were in a professional development session and somebody decided that you were going to play a game. And the reaction that you and everyone else in
Nancy Norbeck [00:09:56]:
the room felt at the word play. Because, yes, I understand. In a professional development setting, everything changes. But as soon as
Nancy Norbeck [00:10:08]:
the word play comes in, everyone seizes up because, dear God, what are we going to be asked to do? It is the ultimate expression of uncertainty in a group of adults that does not want anything uncertain to happen in that room. It freaks adults out
Nancy Norbeck [00:10:28]:
because we are so disconnected with our ability to play. We have been told that it’s not okay, that it’s not allowed, that we shouldn’t even want to do it.
Nancy Norbeck [00:10:39]:
And so when someone gives us permission to our brains are like those old pinball machines that scream tilt at the top because we just have absolutely no idea what to do with that. Now I would hope that after three weeks in imagination lab for grown ups with me, a group of adults would be able to motor on their own for three more and try new things and have
Nancy Norbeck [00:11:01]:
a renewed spirit of experimentation and play, and it would be fine. Because if they weren’t, I wouldn’t have done my job very well. Obviously, they wouldn’t be at the
Nancy Norbeck [00:11:11]:
end of the six weeks. But still, three weeks should be enough to get them started on that. But adults have lost that connection and feel much better if everything is spelled out for us. And really, in this situation, according to the cultural idea of who’s an adult and who’s a child, If you have to have everything spelled out for you, who’s really the child here? And if you’re feeling called out right now, I get it. And I am certainly not trying to say that adults are incapable. I’m just saying that we’ve spent a
Nancy Norbeck [00:11:48]:
lot of time being almost surgically disconnected from our curiosity, our sense of exploration, and our inborn instinct to play by a culture that doesn’t do this consciously and yet does it really, really well.
Nancy Norbeck [00:12:10]:
And the thing is, this is not just about making art. Right? Losing your sense of play affects the way that you experiment and your willingness to experiment. It affects your adaptability, your resilience, your your ability and your willingness to try without a sense of certainty, which is ironic because you often can’t have a sense of certainty until you have tried several things in the first place. Your willingness to tolerate imperfection. This is why a lot of people have trouble beginning new things because we want everything to be perfect, but you can’t be perfect at something usually ever, but you can’t get close to it until you’ve tried it enough times to learn the skill. So we get ourselves into a bind here where we can’t do things well because we’re not willing to try to learn because we can’t do things well. That’s the soul of perfectionism right there. We want that guarantee that we can’t have because we won’t begin.
Nancy Norbeck [00:13:12]:
And as a result, many adults just
Nancy Norbeck [00:13:17]:
monitor ourselves and where we are within the rules until we have boxed ourselves in
Nancy Norbeck [00:13:22]:
to the point where we’re afraid to move. The thing is, adults don’t lack potential or ability. We lack a safe relationship with uncertainty and with the willingness to break out of those little boxes that we’ve put ourselves into. And I get it. It’s hard. Right? We’re afraid of doing things wrong. We don’t realize that we feel like
Nancy Norbeck [00:13:48]:
we need permission before we start or that we can give that permission to ourselves. The emotional weight of the possibility of making a mistake is like that anvil that falls on Wile E. Coyote in the Roadrunner cartoons. Right? And it leaves us unable to move because who can move with an anvil sitting on
Nancy Norbeck [00:14:10]:
top of your gut? Feel familiar?
Nancy Norbeck [00:14:14]:
I’m gonna bet that it does. I I mean, this is why Stephen King famously said the hardest part is always right before you start. Because you’ve got all of this stuff sitting in your head saying, I don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m scared. I want it to be perfect. I’m afraid it’ll be terrible. And you have to get through all of that just to put the first brushstroke on that canvas, the first word on the page, just to pull out the camera in the first place.
Nancy Norbeck [00:14:45]:
Once you do, it gets easier, But that’s that’s a lot to get through. And the thing is, you know, I don’t believe that most people are uncreative even though a heck of a
Nancy Norbeck [00:15:02]:
lot of people try to convince me that they don’t have a creative bone in their body if I had a nickel.
Nancy Norbeck [00:15:08]:
I think most people have just been separated from their sense of play for a really, really long time. And we’ve narrowed creativity into a very, very, very small thing. Most people have this definition of creativity that some of them think that it’s just visual art. Creativity
Nancy Norbeck [00:15:29]:
is way broader than that. The arts themselves are way broader than that. But it goes beyond the arts. That’s any kind of problem solving. If you’re a parent, I guarantee you’ve been creative at least 50 times today dealing with your kids. Screenwriter Matthew Jacobs defines creativity as that thing that comes from within you that only you can do. That’s my favorite definition of creativity. And it encapsulates so many things.
Nancy Norbeck [00:15:59]:
We don’t realize how deeply connected it is to experimentation and curiosity and just plain being alive. So we haven’t lost it. We’ve just stopped recognizing where it actually lives.
Nancy Norbeck [00:16:14]:
And we’re gonna talk about that more. But for now, if you like this little corner
Nancy Norbeck [00:16:21]:
of the Internet, you’re welcome in the creative closet anytime, and you can subscribe if you’d like to stick around so that you’ll always get the latest update. I also host a free Follow Your Curiosity Creativity Circle every month. It’s a safe space, a very gentle, low pressure space to reconnect with your curiosity, experimentation, and creativity with no pressure or perfectionism. You bring your own project, or I always have a prompt or two that you can use or not. We work on our things independently. We come together with some social time to share what we’ve worked on and get to know each other. It’s it’s a super simple, low pressure structure to help you make sure that you get something creative done every month that we would love to have you. Beyond that, I just really appreciate you spending some time with me here in the creative closet.
Nancy Norbeck [00:17:09]:
I’m your Messy Muse Mentor, and I help people feel alive again through creativity, curiosity, and play. And I’ll 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. If you like Follow Your Curiosity, please subscribe, rate, and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Nancy Norbeck [00:17:58]:
And don’t forget to tell your friends. It really helps me reach new listeners.