Story lover Lucinda Sage-Midgorden and I met here on Follow Your Curiosity last year. We got together this past week for a short conversation for her Patreon about why you should think about making bad art and embracing anti-perfectionism. What does that mean (and not mean), and how might it change your life? For that matter, how are we defining perfectionism—it’s often not what we expect it to be (as I learned myself when I was training as a Kaizen-Muse coach, to my great shock and, yes, horror!).
Lucinda was kind enough to share the recording of our conversation with me, and I want to share it with you. If you’ve been wondering if my Make Bad Art course is for you, you might find the answer here—for instance: whether you need to be an artist to make bad art, and if there’s a right way to make bad art (spoiler: no, and no). This conversation is short, but you’ll get a lot out of it. Make Bad Art starts on November 4th (the day after this episode is being released), but it’s not too late to sign up, and we’d love to have you.
Episode breakdown:
00:00 Introduction
01:23 Kaizen-Muse coach helping creatives break perfectionism.
05:43 Realizing hidden perfectionism hinders creative projects.
09:05 Creating bad art frees creativity for good art.
10:54 Next class starts November 4; contact details provided.
14:03 Anti-perfectionism practice: Easier and fun in groups.
18:56 Need to relax and overcome perfectionism daily.
21:51 Join “Make Bad Art” starting November 4th.
Please leave a review and in it, tell us about a time when a story was important to you.
Want more? Here are some handy playlists with all my previous interviews with guests in theatre and writing and publishing.
Show links
Subscribe!
You can subscribe to Follow Your Curiosity via the handy links at the top of the page for Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart Radio, TuneIn, and YouTube. If you enjoyed the episode, don’t forget to tell your friends!
Transcript: Why Make Bad Art with Lucinda Sage-Midgorden
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. Story lover Lucinda Sage-Midgorden and I met here on Follow Your Curiosity last year. We got together this past week for a short conversation for her Patreon about why you should think about making bad art and embracing anti-perfectionism. What does that mean (and not mean) and how might it change your life? For that matter, how are we defining perfectionism? It’s often not what we expect it to be, as I learned myself when I was training as a Kaizen-Muse coach, to my great shock (and yes, horror). Lucinda was kind enough to share the recording of our conversation with me and I want to share it with you.
Nancy Norbeck [00:00:55]:
If you’ve been wondering if my Make Bad Art course is for you, you might find the answer here. For instance, do you need to be an artist to make bad art? Is there a right way to make bad art? Spoiler: no and no. The conversation is short, but you’ll get a lot out of it. Make Bad Art starts on November 4, which is the day after this episode is being released. But it’s not too late to sign up and we would love to have you. Happy listening.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:01:23]:
Today I’m talking to Nancy Norbeck and Nancy and I connected on her podcast, Follow Your Curiosity. And so I wanted to share with my social media friends and my pod, my Patreon community about her new course. So Nancy, I’m going to let you tell about your course and then maybe I’ll ask some questions.
Nancy Norbeck [00:01:51]:
Okay. So I am a master certified Kaizen-Muse Creativity coach and—that’s that’s really a big fancy word for somebody who helps creative people who get stuck to get unstuck again. And I just decided this summer I offered two free workshops. The first one was called Permission to Play and the second one was called Make Bad Art. And they really in many ways dealt with similar issues from different angles. But after I did Make Bad rt, we had so much fun in those two hours and it was just, it’s such a liberating experience for people to be in a situation where they are specifically given permission to have fun and let go of all of the things that our culture tells us we have to be like: to be perfect, to always do the very best thing that we can possibly do, to have super high standards and expectations, to always do it the right way. I’m not convinced that there even usually is a right way. I think somebody just made up the Right way.
Nancy Norbeck [00:03:09]:
And then everybody else, that’s how they had to do it. And the biggest thing that making bad art does, when you sit down and you deliberately, intentionally say, I am going to make a piece of bad art, it shuts down your inner critic.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:03:30]:
Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:03:32]:
About it. Your inner critic has no job to do because you’re not trying to make a masterpiece. You are not trying to outdo Michelangelo. You are trying to make a crappy piece of art. So your inner critic can’t sit there and say, I don’t think that part’s good enough because there is no good enough.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:03:54]:
That’s right.
Nancy Norbeck [00:03:55]:
And it is a fabulously liberating, amazing experience for most people. And we had so much fun with it. And people really didn’t know what to expect. I kind of had an inkling of what to expect because I’ve done some of these things before, but people in the workshop really didn’t know what to expect. And when it was over, pretty much as soon as it was over, I found myself thinking, this needs to be a whole course. This needs to be more than, “I spent two hours on a Sunday afternoon with a bunch of strangers writing a crappy poem.” So I sat down and I said, okay, I think this is what I need to do. So now I need to figure out what this is going to look like and how to put it together and talk to a bunch of people.
Nancy Norbeck [00:04:40]:
And finally, here it is. So it’s a six week course and it’s all. It’s two hours each week. Every week. We will be making bad art, but we’re also going to be talking about what goes into digging out the sneaky, pernicious roots of perfectionism that are in all of us. And, you know, perfectionism is a weird word because unless you have kind of turned perfectionism into your Holy Grail, most people don’t want to be called perfectionists because we tend to think that perfectionism is not a great thing. And also, I’ll tell you a little bit of my own perfectionism story. People tend to think that perfectionism means that you’re the person who has to have everything lined up on your desk the right way, or fold your towels all the same way and line them up the way on the shelf or something like that.
Nancy Norbeck [00:05:43]:
That’s what I thought perfectionism was when I took Kaizen-Muse training. And so when we got to that section, I was like, I don’t have to worry about this part because I’m not a perfectionist. Because, you know, a lot of creative people are kind of messy. So I figured I’m not a perfectionist. I’m good here, you know, not that I didn’t need to learn it to deal with other people, but at least I personally was okay. And then the coach mentor that had been assigned to me was talking to me about it, and I said this to her and she said, are you sure? I said, of course I’m sure. I mean, seriously, you know, that’s never been me. And she said, okay, are there projects that you don’t do because you figure that they’ll never be good enough and so why bother doing them? And I just sat there as this pit opened up in the bottom of my stomach and I went, yeah, hi.
Nancy Norbeck [00:06:48]:
Okay. I think I am a perfectionist, so never would have guessed that that was perfectionism. But yeah, there’s a whole lot of stuff that I just decide I’m not going to bother with because I’m not going to do it well enough, so.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:07:06]:
Right. Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:07:07]:
So. Okay, guilty as charged. You got me. So, you know, it. It comes up in all of these ways that we don’t expect and sometimes we don’t even label that way, but it is with us. It comes out as self judgment and this belief that we’re not good enough. And so giving ourselves permission to just play around and do something badly is a great way to undermine its effect on us, which is not the only way we’re going to tackle it in this course.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:07:37]:
Right. Yeah. So I have a couple of things to say when you were talking about how fun it was to just make bad art, because I think it was Edison who said, you know, he. How many times? Or maybe it was Alexander Graham Bell when he was creating the telephone. You know, I figured out a thousand ways or. Or 1500 ways or however many ways not to create something. It only took one to create. To create the thing.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:08:11]:
That was one thing. And then I had a friend who used to say, you’re, you know about writing your first draft is going to be crap and just let it be crap because then you get to go back and fix it, you know, so. Right. So any kind of artwork. Yeah, any kind of endeavor, actually. I mean, don’t scientists do that? They do the experiments and. Oh, that didn’t work. And then they do more experiments.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:08:36]:
I just finished reading Lessons in Chemistry and then they do more experiments and that doesn’t work. And you know, so it’s just all. It’s all just being. It’s all just being creative. It’s, you know. Yeah, I love it.
Nancy Norbeck [00:08:52]:
Right. And with every one of those experiments, they discover something new that they didn’t know before.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:08:57]:
Right, Exactly.
Nancy Norbeck [00:08:59]:
Every failed experiment is a new piece of information. Now we know X doesn’t work, Y doesn’t work.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:09:04]:
Right.
Nancy Norbeck [00:09:05]:
These other things don’t work. So you’re one step closer to the thing that does. Right. But also when you’re making bad art, the thing is, you’re freeing yourself up, you’re shutting up your inner critic. You’re making a lot more room for the good art to come out alongside the bad art to surprise you. Some of your bad art could turn out to be really good. When I told my friend Dawn Kotzer, who is also a Kaizen-Muse coach who used to work with florists about this, she used to tell her florists to go and make bad floral arrangements. She would say, stay within, you know, design principles, but deliberately make bad floral arrangements and then put them in the front window.
Nancy Norbeck [00:09:53]:
And she said every single time the bad floral arrangements sold first.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:10:02]:
Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:10:02]:
What you think is bad might not actually be as bad as you think it is.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:10:07]:
Exactly. Yeah. Because I was thinking that that, man, you could be making bad art and someone’s going to look at that and go, oh, that’s really cool. You’ve started a whole new art, you know, like, like Impressionism or whatever, Pointillism or, you know, you’ve created a whole new school of art, you know, a new, whole new technique.
Nancy Norbeck [00:10:32]:
Yeah, yeah. But when you’re trying deliberately to make good art, you’re so busy judging it harder for that to come out. And you may create really good art and not recognize it because you’re judging it so much. So there’s, there’s multiple angles to this whole thing. Yeah.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:10:47]:
Really?
Nancy Norbeck [00:10:47]:
The idea is to help you get out of your own way so that you can create more and create better.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:10:54]:
Yeah. So now when does your next. That we’re recording on? August 30th. I mean, excuse me, August. Oh my gosh. October 30th. And when is your next class start? And how do people get a hold of you? I mean, I can put it in the, you know, the notes on my social medias and stuff, but tell how they can get a hold of you because, you know, there are so many stressed out people right now with the election coming up. Maybe they’re going to need your class.
Nancy Norbeck [00:11:32]:
It certainly could be a helpful antidote to post election stress for sure.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:11:36]:
Yes.
Nancy Norbeck [00:11:37]:
We’re starting on Monday, November 4th, so very soon.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:11:41]:
Oh, okay.
Nancy Norbeck [00:11:42]:
And there, there is a link that I’ll give you.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:11:45]:
Okay.
Nancy Norbeck [00:11:46]:
Yeah. Also find me fycuriosity.com, short for Follow Your Curiosity. And yeah, I mean, we’re gonna go for six weeks where there will be a break for Thanksgiving because that I know everybody tends to be crazy and families come to town and whatever. And I will have some special tips for how to kind of have an anti perfectionist Thanksgiving, especially if your family comes and tends to want to make it a very perfectionistic event.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:12:16]:
Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:12:18]:
Because it’s kind of. It could be a great test of how well you’re incorporating all of this stuff. And I want to say this is. It’s been kind of interesting to watch people’s reactions. There have been questions about, you know, oh, I have to check my calendar to make sure I can be at every call. Which is kind of a perfectionistic approach to taking the course. Like, I appreciate the enthusiasm, but you do not have to make every call. They will all be recorded.
Nancy Norbeck [00:12:44]:
It’s great if you can be there, but if not, don’t freak out.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:12:47]:
Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:12:48]:
People have also asked me, what if I don’t make bad art “right.” There’s no wrong way to make bad art. And if you’re not an artist, it’s okay. It’s bad art. You’ll be fine. And you don’t have to do the course perfectly. It’s an anti perfectionistic course. It’s okay.
Nancy Norbeck [00:13:04]:
As long as you can make a good faith effort, you will get something out of this course. So now that I’m done interrupting myself, we’ll finish right before Christmas. So it could be a great Christmas gift to yourself.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:13:18]:
Yes.
Nancy Norbeck [00:13:19]:
I can’t promise that you will be a fully reformed anti perfectionist. I’m not sure in our culture that that’s possible because it’s being thrown at us. Right. But you’ll be much closer. And then you have a great new attitude for starting the new year. So.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:13:36]:
Right.
Nancy Norbeck [00:13:37]:
That timing.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:13:39]:
And you can take it more than once.
Nancy Norbeck [00:13:42]:
Correct. And I will be doing it again. Yeah.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:13:44]:
Yes. Because, you know, it’s. It’s like a little spiral. You take care of a little bit and then you get spiral around, take care of some more. So you might have to, you know, might want to take it more than once just for fun and to be creative. Yeah. Right.
Nancy Norbeck [00:14:03]:
In many ways, I think anti perfectionism is a practice. I don’t think you’re ever really fully recovered and you can always. Can always use a little refresher session, get yourself back into it, especially if you work in a really perfectionistic kind of field. I’ve worked as an editor and proofreader for a long time. It’s very, very perfectionistic and so you need an antidote to that. This kind of stuff can be hard to do on your own and it’s really, it’s a lot easier to do it in a group because you know, you’re not alone. It’s also a lot more fun.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:14:40]:
Yes, yeah. The camaraderie and the connections that people make. Yeah. So now you’re doing this via zoom, right?
Nancy Norbeck [00:14:48]:
Yes.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:14:49]:
And yeah. So you’re getting people from all over the country maybe, or all over the world maybe. Yeah, I love that. And I’m assuming that it’s in the evening, your time or there is an.
Nancy Norbeck [00:15:08]:
Evening session, 7 to 9 Eastern Time. And I’m also putting together a session that’s more friendly on European time. Yeah, yeah. Because that’s a terrible time if you’re in Europe.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:15:22]:
Oh, it’s in the middle of the night.
Nancy Norbeck [00:15:24]:
In the middle of the night. But I wanted to make sure that it’s accessible to people who are working during the day.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:15:29]:
Right.
Nancy Norbeck [00:15:29]:
So. So there will be another daytime session that I’m just working out the details for as. As people are showing up. So.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:15:36]:
Yeah. Now can you tell I know a little bit about the form of art that you were talking about or teaching Kaiser. What is it called?
Nancy Norbeck [00:15:47]:
Kaizen-Muse is a creativity coaching method. Yeah.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:15:52]:
Say it again?
Nancy Norbeck [00:15:53]:
Kaizen-Muse Creativity Coaching. It’s. Kaizen is the Japanese word for continuous improvement through small steps.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:16:01]:
Yes.
Nancy Norbeck [00:16:01]:
Which is a big part of Kaizen-Muse. And then the muse part. Jill Badonsky, who put together Kaizen-Muse, took the idea of the nine classical muses and reimagined them as nine creativity principles. Right. So that’s, that’s the muse part. It’s not an art method, it’s a creativity approach.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:16:23]:
Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:16:24]:
And that.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:16:24]:
So you don’t apply to anything.
Nancy Norbeck [00:16:26]:
You can apply it to anything at all. And it can go beyond creative stuff too.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:16:32]:
Yeah. Right.
Nancy Norbeck [00:16:33]:
If I wanted to, I could use it for business coaching for somebody. But that’s not my. So that’s not what I do.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:16:39]:
Yes, right.
Nancy Norbeck [00:16:40]:
But yeah, it’s. It’s a great non linear coaching method that really takes into account, you know, that people don’t naturally move from A to B to C. Life comes up, stuff comes up, all sorts of things. So.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:16:57]:
Yeah, yeah. And that’s the way someone, I can’t remember who was describing this. It might have been a book I was reading about grief. But grief doesn’t go that way. You don’t go from. You don’t go through all the steps linearly. It’s. Yeah, you go backward and forward.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:17:15]:
I mean, that’s how all growth is. You take some steps forward and then something happens and you’re back at the beginning and then, you know. Yeah. So I love that. I love that idea. I. Where did. I wonder where perfectionism came from? Can we blame the Puritans?
Nancy Norbeck [00:17:37]:
You know, I blame them for everything, so I don’t see why not. I mean, they. They were busy trying to be better than everybody else, so it’s as reasonable a guess as anything.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:17:52]:
I mean, I hope there aren’t any Puritans living right now because we’re criticizing. Because we’re criticizing them. But I think they died out.
Nancy Norbeck [00:18:00]:
I think they did.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:18:02]:
Yeah. Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Yes. Because, I mean, I’m. My theater’s. And background. My background is in theater.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:18:10]:
I’m talking backwards. Perfectionism. And when I lost my teaching job in high school teaching drama, and I had to go teach English, but one of the things we read was The Crucible, and that is such a good example of perfectionism right there. You have to follow all the little rules, and if you don’t follow the rules, you have to pay, you know, you have to pay. If you don’t show up to, you know, meeting, you have to pay a fee because you didn’t show up. I mean, it’s, it’s.
Nancy Norbeck [00:18:48]:
And if you. If you don’t have as much stuff as everybody else, God doesn’t like you as much.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:18:53]:
That’s right. Yeah. Right.
Nancy Norbeck [00:18:55]:
Yeah.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:18:56]:
Yeah, exactly. So, yeah. Oh, man, we definitely need that. We need something to break up our perfectionism because I think we probably almost all of us suffer from that. I mean, if I wake up, I’m. My husband and I are now retired, you know, so I had to get used to the fact that, oh, I don’t have to get up and make his breakfast before he goes off to work, which means I’m not waking up as early as I used to, or if I do, he’s still in bed and, you know, my morning routine is disrupted and oh, my gosh, when am I going to get in to work on my novel or edit my podcast or whatever it is. And then yesterday I was reading something and I went, you know what? I just need to relax. If I do a little bit of something every day.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:19:50]:
That’s good.
Nancy Norbeck [00:19:52]:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And a little bit every day is. Is a big part of this course. You don’t need to spend your whole day on it. If you have Five or ten minutes a day. You’ll be fine.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:20:04]:
Yeah, right. Someone else that I interviewed. I think I interviewed them for my podcast, Story Power. Who? They do the same form Kaizen-Muse as you. They do that too. So, yeah, that would be really great if we had a lot more people teaching that. So, okay, so I encourage my. Anybody on my social medias who just needs to relax and have fun, or anybody on my Patreon community, go talk to Nancy.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:20:43]:
Go sign up for her course. I’m putting the link in on all of my outlets so that you can connect with her and just have fun and get over your puritanical perfectionism. We’ll blame the Puritans.
Nancy Norbeck [00:21:02]:
Absolutely. Why not?
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:21:06]:
Right? Really? Yeah. Okay. Oh, wow. Do you have anything else you want to say?
Nancy Norbeck [00:21:12]:
I think that’s. That’s really it. I mean, I just think it’s one of the greatest gifts you can give yourself.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:21:17]:
Yes.
Nancy Norbeck [00:21:18]:
And it kind of is a gift to others because the less you’re judging yourself, the less you’re likely to judge others, too. It trickles into all sorts of other areas of your life. It’s a great thing.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:21:29]:
Yes. Yeah. Really. Because we are so hard on ourselves all the time. We are. I don’t. I wonder if other people in other countries are as hard on themselves as Americans are, because in the United States, we are just so hard on ourselves. Yeah.
Nancy Norbeck [00:21:47]:
Yeah.
Lucinda Sage-Midgorden [00:21:48]:
Oh, Nancy, this has been so fun. Thanks.
Nancy Norbeck [00:21:51]:
Yeah, thanks for having me. That’s it for this short episode. Make Bad art starts on November 4th, and we would love to have you. If you know someone who might be interested, please pass this episode on to them. Thanks so much, especially to Lucinda Sage-Midgorden for sharing this recording, and I hope to see you in class. If this episode resonated with you, or if you’re feeling a little bit less than confident in your creative process right now. Join me at The Spark on Substack as we form a community that supports and celebrates each other’s creative courage. It’s free and it’s also where I’ll be adding programs for subscribers and listeners. The link is in your podcast app, so sign up today.
Nancy Norbeck [00:22:33]:
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.