Have you ever found yourself getting excited about a new topic, hobby, or idea, only for someone close to you to say, “That doesn’t really sound like you”?
Welcome to Follow Your Curiosity! In this dispatch from the Creative Closet, we’re exploring integrity—the second area of practice in the Restorative Creativity Framework™.
We often think of integrity as living by our moral values, but integrity is also about letting your inside and your outside match up. When you spend your life managing other people’s expectations of who you “should” be, you lose the freedom to follow your own curiosity and surprise yourself.
In this episode, I share a personal story about flying across the country to a wine festival by myself—a choice that surprised me, too!—and why I wanted to go without my friends. Going alone gave me room to try new things without having to fit anyone’s familiar idea of Nancy.
I also explain why I call creativity the fastest path back to yourself: experimenting, discovering your preferences, and making choices about what feels right to you can help you trust yourself beyond your creative projects, too.
In this episode, I discuss:
- The Squee-Harshing Effect: Why hearing “that doesn’t sound like you” makes us doubt our own instincts.
- The Expectation Backpack: Why taking loved ones along on new adventures often means bringing their rigid definitions of you with you.
- Integrity Reimagined: Why true integrity is about alignment between who you are and how you live in the present moment.
- Creativity as Reconnection: Why making creative choices—from paint colors to wine tasting—teaches you to trust yourself again.
- The One Small Choice: A simple, practical prompt to help you trade someone else’s expectations for your own freedom today.
Episode breakdown:
0:00 The Burden of Other People's Expectations
1:08 A Surprising Trip Across the Country
3:25 The Freedom of Being Alone
5:09 Integrity as a Practice of Self
10:01 Creativity as the Path Back to You
I’m Nancy Norbeck, your Messy Muse Mentor. I specialize in using creativity to reconnect people with themselves, so you can make room for things that interest and delight you and feel like you’re actually alive again. You do not need to become someone new. You just need to come back to life.
Resources and Community:
- Send your inner critic to summer camp for an hour: Join the Creativity Circle here.
- Have a question for the Curiosity Clinic? Submit it here.
- Grab your free printable Daily Credit Report and Bingo Card here.
- Catch up on earlier Reports from the Creative Closet here.
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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Other People Don’t Get to Define You | Report from the Creative Closet #11
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. You didn’t lose your creative spark. You were taught to leave it behind. I’m creativity expert Nancy Norbeck, and I’m here to help you get it back. Let’s go.
Nancy Norbeck [00:00:20]:
Welcome back to the steadily unglamorous, but perpetually functional creative closet. I’m wondering, have you ever had that experience where you have discovered a new interest that you’re really excited about? And it it could be just a new topic that you’re interested, a new hobby, maybe even just a new movie that you wanna go see. And you’re telling your friends or your family about it, and they say, That doesn’t really sound like you. That’s a strange thing for you to be interested in, Sally. And it kinda harshes your squee, as the kids at least used to say. And you find yourself thinking, well, but I am interested in it. So does this mean that now I have to change what I’m interested because y’all don’t like it? And and you don’t think that it really sounds like me? Do I have to adjust myself to your expectations, or can I go and do the thing that I’m interested in anyway? And, you know, this kind of came up for me when I went to Oregon in 2015 to go to the international Pinot Noir celebration because on its face and in many ways beyond its face, a massive wine festival did not sound like me at all. Because I’m the girl who usually, when someone offers me wine, says, sure.
Nancy Norbeck [00:01:55]:
I’ll take a thimbleful and a glass of water. Because wine is typically not really my thing, and I don’t want to waste other people’s very good, very expensive wine. So I’ll just have a little bit to have a taste of it. That’s plenty for me and move on to something else. So for me to say that not only am I going to go to a wine festival, but to one clear across the country with a rather significant price tag is the kind of thing that for people who knew me would induce not just disbelief, but gales of laughter, possible rolling on the floor, and eventually, I’m sorry. Who are you, and what have you done with Nancy? And I can’t blame any of those people. I was surprised too. It’s not the sort of thing that I normally would have picked.
Nancy Norbeck [00:02:47]:
Though, as I have said elsewhere, it looked like one hell of a party, and it was. But I was curious. And, you know, I knew that I might feel like a fish out of water. Can’t imagine why, but I wanted to go. And so my answer was, yeah, I’m going. And at that point, especially when, let’s be real, I did have an ulterior motive in the guest of honor, but, you know, several of my friends wanted to come for that same reason. And that’s when I said, yeah. No.
Nancy Norbeck [00:03:30]:
Because I wanted to have that experience on my own. And it was because I knew that if I took my friends along, I was also taking their expectations with me. And that meant that I would know that I needed to fit their expectations for who I was, whether those were conscious expectations or not. Most of us don’t sit around, you know, with a little checklist. Tommy acts like this, and Billy acts like this, and Susie Susie does these things. We don’t do that. But those expectations live inside of us because we define each other according to what we’re used to. And I wanted the freedom to have none of that on me.
Nancy Norbeck [00:04:19]:
It was a brand new experience, brand new place, brand new people, so I could effectively be whoever I wanted. Now I wasn’t expecting to wake up one morning and decide that I wanted to be Marilyn Monroe that day. I still wanted to be me. I just wanted to be more me. I wanted to have the freedom to try new things and not have somebody saying you’re doing that. Right? Because that’s the kiss of death. That’s what happens when somebody says, that doesn’t seem like you, Sally. So that’s why I said, no.
Nancy Norbeck [00:04:55]:
I’m gonna go by myself. If you want the full story of this trip and everything that happened, that is available to you in curiosity clinic episode number two. And I’ll just say for now that looking back, that moment was a major moment of integrity for me. And I can’t tell you where that realization suddenly came from, but it did. And I’m glad that it did. Because it it marked a change for me in how I see myself in the world and how I see myself in relation to how other people see me. And this is all really important because, as I’ve mentioned before, there are six areas of practice in my restorative creativity framework. Last time, we talked about humanity.
Nancy Norbeck [00:05:43]:
And this time, integrity is the one that I wanna focus on because integrity is all about your inside and your outside matching up. It’s when who you are and how you are are the same thing. And a lot of the time we define integrity as being true to our values, and that’s part of it. You know, if you value certain things and you believe that you should behave in certain ways and then you’re out behaving in a completely different way, then you’re out of integrity with yourself. That’s pretty basic. But integrity is also being true to who you are. Knowing your values is not the whole picture. It’s being true to your sense of yourself.
Nancy Norbeck [00:06:29]:
And that can be a little bit difficult to tease apart. But like, in my example, I wanted the freedom to follow my own curiosity and the room to find out who I wanted to be in an individual moment. You know? Maybe I wanted to try the Riesling. Maybe it turned out I really liked Riesling. Spoiler alert. I really like Riesling. And maybe I didn’t. And I wanted to do that without anybody passing any kind of even the tiniest little bit of judgment or expectation on that.
Nancy Norbeck [00:07:05]:
I wanted to have no preset preconceived notion of who I had to be to fit into. And in particular, just to be able to be me, not to be somebody else or somebody else’s idea of who I needed to be. I know I’ve kind of said that before, but I think it bears repeating because we are always around other people and those other people always have ideas of who we are. You know, the people that you’re around at home have one idea of who you are. The people you’re around at work have another idea of who you are. Every single situation that you put yourself in likely people have a slightly different view of who you are in those situations. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it does affect how you tend to be in those situations for better or worse. I wanted none of that.
Nancy Norbeck [00:07:59]:
I wanted to just say, this is who I am right now. And that means that I had a whole lot of freedom because when you don’t feel the weight of those expectations, you get to choose in the moment every single time which thing is right for me right this second. That is intimidating sometimes, not gonna lie. It’s also really, really powerful because it means that we’re in charge, and we don’t have to bend to other people’s expectations all the time, but we get to learn all the time about ourselves and what pulls to us and what interests us. And our understanding of ourselves deepens a whole lot in that process because it could be this morning, I thought I wanted to go see this movie, but this afternoon, actually, I wanna go see that one that this morning didn’t sound interesting to me at all. What’s going on there? I don’t know.
Nancy Norbeck [00:09:03]:
Maybe I should go
Nancy Norbeck [00:09:04]:
see that movie and see if my instinct’s right. Maybe it is. Maybe it’s not. Maybe it’s because I had the chili at lunch and the beans aren’t agreeing with me. I don’t know. Only one way to find out. And then we learn something, and we’re allowed to surprise ourselves and to try something new. Never thought that I would buy an expensive ticket to a huge wine festival across the country.
Nancy Norbeck [00:09:30]:
And if I had ever imagined that I would do something like that, I don’t think I ever would have thought that I would have so much fun when I did. So, you know, you get to know who you are, you get to surprise yourself and you learn to trust yourself because the more things you do like that, the more you can say, yeah, you know what? I don’t really know why I want to do this. I just know that I do. And I’ve had enough of these experiences that I know I can trust my instincts. Now I know that I can say, I don’t know why I wanna do this thing, but I do. I’ve had experience. My experience says my instincts are pretty good. And other people don’t get to define you because, you know, you can trust you.
Nancy Norbeck [00:10:17]:
That’s important. It’s really, really important. Now if you’ve been around here for a while, you’ll know that I like to say that creativity is the fastest path back to yourself. And I say this not because I have done a scientific study, let’s be real, but because I’ve seen it so many times. I’ve seen it in myself, and I’ve seen it in people that I’ve worked with, where when you give people permission to be creative and try new things and experiment with something that they love or that they’ve never tried before, but they get to decide that they like it or they don’t, and they could try something else if they don’t, that it opens things up for them because they get to make choices. They get to find out their preferences. They get to play with things. If they’re painting, they can play with what kind of paint do I like? What kind of colors do I like? How do I like to put them together? What feels right to me? The feeling right is a huge piece of this.
Nancy Norbeck [00:11:19]:
What what sorts of things do I like to assemble? The same is true if it’s music or photography or dance or anything else. If it’s cooking, anything. Again, if you’ve been around for a while, you know my definition of creativity is really big. It doesn’t even have to be something that typically falls into the arts. Creativity is enormous. It’s about experimentation and play and making choices and finding the things that you enjoy, those are the things that make you you. And they bring you back to yourself, especially if you’ve been in an environment where somebody has tried to override those for a long time. It’s fast because it’s fun and because it usually connects you to parts of yourself that you haven’t been in touch with since you were a kid.
Nancy Norbeck [00:12:08]:
And when you were a kid, you did not let anybody tell you that you should be using the green crayon instead of the red. You might have by older kid age, but when you were three or four, you didn’t. And then when you were three or four, nobody cared. Right? So you were in that more pure I’m going on instinct stage, and and that was what everybody expected. So nobody got in your way. And those creative choices not only help you find who you are, but they give you the confidence to make other choices too. That’s the magic of restorative creativity, and that’s why I created the restorative creativity framework. There’s more to it than that, but that’s the basics.
Nancy Norbeck [00:12:52]:
And the six areas of practice all tend to overlap to a certain degree. So you can see where integrity is connected to the same kind of aliveness that we talked about with humanity. Humanity is a little bit deeper in it. But when when you start to figure out who you are and the things that light you up, that lighting you up is the same kind of aliveness that we see with humanity. All of these things are interconnected, which is part of why they work so well together. Now here’s my question for you. Where are you fulfilling somebody else’s expectations? And in particular, where are you filling… Fulfilling someone else’s expectations rather than your own? And when you’ve got that, what’s one small choice that you can make to get you closer to what you actually want? And can you make that choice for yourself today? Because that choice will give you a step that will take you closer to the freedom to be yourself.
Nancy Norbeck [00:14:03]:
So I hope that you will take that step as soon as you possibly can. If you like this corner of the Internet, you are welcome here anytime you wanna come and check-in. And if that’s the case, I hope that you will subscribe either if you’re watching on YouTube or in your podcast player so that you know every time that I release something, which you can come and hang out in between too. There’s plenty of stuff here. Also, if you’re looking for a place to come and exercise one of those creative choices, the follow your curiosity creativity circle meets every month, usually on the fourth Saturday. We would love to have you. We just set aside a time to come and spend some time, dedicated time, on whatever kind of project you’ve been trying to find an hour or so to dig into or five minutes or whatever works for you. We don’t judge.
Nancy Norbeck [00:14:54]:
There’s no pressure. Come and go as you please. Just a bunch of really cool people. No pressure. We get together. We hang out a little bit. We share what we’re working on, and it’s there for you free of charge. The link is also in your podcast app or below this video.
Nancy Norbeck [00:15:11]:
And I am Nancy Norbeck. I’m your MessyMuse mentor, and I’m all about helping people use creativity to reconnect with themselves because the thing is, you do not need to become someone new. You just need to come back to life. Thanks for joining me, and I’ll see you next time.
Nancy Norbeck [00:15:30]:
If you’re tired of being productive and just wanna feel alive again, come join us in the Follow Your Curiosity Creativity Circle. It’s a free hour each month to stop overthinking, make something just because you want to, and reconnect with the part of you that remembers how good it feels to play. 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.
Nancy Norbeck [00:16:11]:
Thanks so much, and see you next week.