Have you ever tried to force yourself into a new habit through sheer willpower, only to end up exhausted and paralyzed a week later?
In this week’s Report from the Creative Closet, I’m exploring the High Expectations Trap. We talk about the deep-seated cultural belief that change only happens through hard work and discipline—and how that belief actually triggers our internal surveillance system to shut us down. From the “Puritanical Trap” of the American work ethic to the reason we need to stop treating our lives like a performance review, we look at how to rebuild trust through permission and play.
It’s an invitation to stop overthinking your way to a “better version” of yourself and start returning to the creative capacity you were born with.
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 Discipline Fallacy: Why high pressure is actually the enemy of the pursuit of excellence.
- Internal Surveillance: Why your inner critic needs a vacation to a local summer camp ropes course.
- Restorative CreativityTM: How to trade “Transformation Theater” for a genuine return to yourself.
- The Luke Skywalker Principle: Why the biggest changes always start with tiny, quiet experiments.
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 High Expectations Are Keeping You Stuck | Report from the Creative Closet #8
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 is not exactly glamorous, but it does work. Now, just a reminder that I am speaking here from personal experience and observation as a creativity coach working with adults over many years. I am not a therapist.
Nancy Norbeck [00:00:35]:
Creativity is not therapy, but it can be incredibly therapeutic. Now last time we talked about the fact that insight alone doesn’t change patterns, unfortunately, and that repetition and practice matter because they do. The thing is that people often try to force change through pressure instead of permission. And this one is near and dear to my heart because lord knows I have done it. You’ve probably done it too. And when I talk about it, people tend to think that I’m a little bit crazy because they haven’t really thought about it. So stick with me. There is this idea in western culture, and especially in American culture that says that the only way to do anything, especially when it comes to ourselves, especially when it comes to fixing ourselves.
Nancy Norbeck [00:01:29]:
And I just wanna say here that a large percentage of the time, we don’t actually need to be fixed because we aren’t broken. But the only way to do any of these things is through hard, hard work and discipline. In America, I think that this comes from our puritanical ancestors because they were really into that stuff. But here’s the thing. High pressure doesn’t work. I mean, if you are the very, very rare kind of person that gets off on that kind of thing, It can be beneficial for a while, but for most of us, adding stress to the mix makes us shut down. It makes it impossible to move because the stakes are too high and our brains just cannot function when it’s it’s so calamitous if we fail that we can’t process being able to do anything as a result. We just can’t.
Nancy Norbeck [00:02:32]:
And so we overanalyze, we overthink we over everything and absolutely everything becomes a potential catastrophe. How could anyone ever move in that environment? Spoiler alert. Most of us can’t. You’re probably one of them. I definitely am. And that that’s not a failing. That’s just being human because high pressure and high expectations. And this is where people think that I’m crazy.
Nancy Norbeck [00:03:03]:
They don’t work. And there’s documentation of this high expectations people confuse with the pursuit of excellence. There’s nothing wrong with the pursuit of excellence, but you can pursue excellence without pressuring yourself to death and without setting your expectations so high that they are impossible to reach, which is self defeating. There’s an important distinction to be made there. And I don’t know that I actually have time to make that distinction today, but that’s the core of it. And I hope that you’ll stick with me and see where I’m going here. What actually helps is permission, lowering the expectations. Because when you lower the expectations, you make room for curiosity, experimentation, the reduced internal surveillance, because holy moly, when you have the expectations super high, your internal surveillance system is on overload.
Nancy Norbeck [00:04:00]:
When you knock them down and and, you know, when I say internal surveillance system, there’s really no difference between that and your inner critic. When your inner critic is out there absolutely overachieving, can you move? But when your inner critic has been sent off to the ropes course at the local summer camp, you can do whatever you want because now you are free to play and experiment and try new things and see how they feel and say, oh, I like that one. This one doesn’t work for me at all, but this one is really, really interesting. And when you hit that moment of, Oh, this is really interesting. That’s where magic starts to happen. That’s where things get to be fun. That’s that’s where experimentation and play and joy come back into the mix. And that’s where everything changes because you are no longer in high performance car mode.
Nancy Norbeck [00:04:57]:
You don’t have to be the NASCAR vehicle that has to perform at top notch mode every second of every day. You can just be you again. I have seen this happen in courses that I’ve taught where we lower the pressure and the expectations immediately. And I give people a simple, easy exercise and what happens. They start to smile. They start to giggle. They start to have fun. They laugh at the things that they’ve created because they are genuinely amused by them.
Nancy Norbeck [00:05:27]:
Everything in them relaxes. I can see it in their whole body language and they start to realize that they do not have to be on constant alert. Their nervous system can just totally settle down and they can actually say, Isn’t that interesting? What do I, what do I think this is? How about if I do this? What if I try that other thing? I wonder what that is. And that’s where the door opens to a new experience, a new way of being a new way of trying things that they hadn’t realized was possible before because everything in them was saying, no, no, I must be on full alert. I must follow every single rule. I am not allowed to diverge from the plan, and we end up back in this little box made of all the rules and all of the high expectations and, oh my god. What’s happening? But when you can relax and you can breathe for the first time possibly in years, and you get all of that oxygen back into your lungs because you have your whole lung capacity back. Now wonder and curiosity and experimentation and play and joy open everything up to you.
Nancy Norbeck [00:06:56]:
Can you feel the difference? I’m gonna bet that you can. And this is really what I mean when I talk about restorative creativity. It’s the framework that I’m developing around using creativity to get back to curiosity play and self trust. It is not about optimizing or becoming a better version of yourself. It’s about the opposite of optimization. It’s about reclaiming your human, your, your humanity and rebuilding contact with your natural capacity for creativity and exploration and feeling into what is uniquely you and following that. And it’s an amazing thing. Adults carry this self presentation pressure.
Nancy Norbeck [00:07:45]:
Last time I talked about it as what role am I supposed to be playing right now? Right. If I’m at work, I am a professional. If I am at home, I might be the parent. I might be the child. I might be the spouse. I might be something else. We all have all of these different hats that we wear to use the cliche, and we need to know which one we’re supposed to be wearing at any given moment. Right.
Nancy Norbeck [00:08:08]:
But which one is just me? Because every time we have to worry about which hat we’re wearing, we are evaluating ourselves. We are constantly emotionally managing ourselves and we’ve lost me. Whereas when we get back to play curiosity and humor and imagination and just letting go and wondering and experiencing awe and, and joy and humor, we start to find ourselves again. And it’s not because they fixed you because nothing was broken about you in the first place. It’s because they’ve interrupted that performance. They have eliminated the need to worry about which of the 83 hats you need to have on your head right now. You just get to be you, which you might have been missing. So restorative creativity is the return to your curiosity, your experimentation, your self trust, your aliveness.
Nancy Norbeck [00:09:14]:
It is not transformation theater. It is not self improvement because self improvement can backfire. Right? Self improvement tends to be self rejection, which my friend doctor Kelly Flanagan has said several times, and he is not wrong. This is about return to yourself. It’s not about reinventing yourself. Lots of people want to talk to you about reinventing yourself, but what if there’s nothing wrong with you and it’s just that you lost yourself? So the thing to do with all of this, could you maybe be really, really excited in this moment? The thing to do with all of this is remember what I said at the beginning about lots of pressure and high expectations. It’s super, super, super easy to fall into that trap when you’re really, really excited of going out and wanting to try all the things. I get it.
Nancy Norbeck [00:10:03]:
I am so prone to that myself. I get excited. I wanna go do everything. And so it can feel really anticlimactic to hear me say that you probably actually wanna start small. You wanna try tiny little experiments because they matter. Every tiny little experiment is information, whereas the big experiments can be daunting and and so daunting that they can fall flat on their face and leave you frustrated rather than wanting more, which is what tiny experiments tend to do for you. It can also be important to just play around with bad art. That’s what I talked about way back at the very beginning, and it’s super, super, super important.
Nancy Norbeck [00:10:45]:
And wander, try a side quest, change it starts quietly. It it doesn’t start with, you know, the big heroic journey. Think about Star Wars. Right? Star Wars is just Luke on his aunt and uncle’s farm. He’s not expecting to go on this big quest. And when he first meets Obi Wan, even he thinks Obi Wan is an old crank. He is not prepared to go on this big journey to find out who he really is himself. Not Obi Wan though.
Nancy Norbeck [00:11:19]:
Both really. Right? You’re you’re not you’re not gonna build Rome in a day, and you shouldn’t try. Start small. Start with what feels possible on any given day, because otherwise you’re gonna burn yourself out even with stuff that you love. Ask me how I know. So this is me officially inviting you into gentleness and experimentation with no pressure to fix yourself. Because, honestly, you’re really, really not broken. We may all be a little wounded, but very few of us are actually broken.
Nancy Norbeck [00:11:55]:
If you take nothing else from this video, I hope you take that, but I hope you also take the part about high expectations too. Now, if this feels like a corner of the internet that you would like to stick around in, you are welcome in the creative closet anytime. You can subscribe so that you’re always notified when there’s a new video or podcast episode out. I also host the free Follow Your Curiosity Creativity Circle that meets once a month. It is a space for experimentation, curiosity, creative exploration, and you are so welcome there. We meet, we all work on our own creative project. We share that project. We have a little social time to get to know each other and.
Nancy Norbeck [00:12:34]:
See what we’ve been working on and show off in a little bit if we want, but it is super, super low pressure, gentle, and easy. And you’re all welcome. We would love to have you. And I just want to thank you for spending some time with me here in the creative closet. I am your messy muse mentor, and I help people feel alive again through creativity, curiosity, and play. And I will 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.
Nancy Norbeck [00:13:20]:
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. And don’t forget to tell your friends. It really helps me reach new listeners.