What happens when you spend so much time being “reliable” that you forget how to be meaningful?
In this third Report from the Creative Closet, I’m exploring the “Be Good” trap. We often learn very early that being predictable and agreeable is safer than being fully alive, but that safety comes at a high price.
I discuss the Traffic Rule Covenant—a look at how we use rules to reduce uncertainty, and what happens when we stop treating those rules as tools and start treating them as our identity. We’ll explore the “quiet grief” of adulting, the friction of being “manageable” in professional environments, and why your “rough edges” are actually the parts of you the world needs most.
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 Social Survival Instinct: Why we’ll do anything to avoid being “thrown out” of the community.
- The Traffic Light Metaphor: Understanding rules as tools for safety rather than definitions of self.
- The Reliability Tax: Why professional “manageability” often requires us to override our internal signals.
- The Adulting Lie: Why being a “grown-up” shouldn’t require you to abandon your curiosity and play.
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. Join us here!
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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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The Cost of Being “Good”: Rules, Reliability, and Reclaiming Your Aliveness | Report from the Creative Closet #3
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.
Nancy Norbeck [00:00:19]:
Welcome to this week’s report from the creative closet. It’s not exactly glamorous, but it works. Just a reminder that I’m speaking here from my own experience as a creativity coach working with clients over many years. I am not a therapist. Last time in the creative closet, we talked about what happens when people lose touch with themselves, when they override their own instincts, ignore their internal signals, and disconnect from their own responses. I don’t think that most people consciously decide to abandon parts of themselves. Why why would we? Most of us gradually learn that being predictable and agreeable and acceptable is a whole lot safer than being fully alive. And that makes sense.
Nancy Norbeck [00:01:04]:
Right? Humans form communities, and we learn at a very young age that it’s much safer to be in the community than it is to be thrown out. It’s terrifying to be thrown out of the community and staying in that community was often linked over centuries and millennia to our survival. We know that deep in our DNA, we don’t wanna be thrown out of the community. So we’ll do anything to stay in that community and feel like we belong in it. And often that means shaving off what feel like those rough edges And the easiest and biggest way that we do that is to be good. The idea of being good is so common that I think we often don’t even know what being good means. What is good? I don’t know. It’s a big vague term, but we hear it all the time.
Nancy Norbeck [00:01:56]:
We hear it especially when we’re little kids. Be good at school. Be good for your grandmother, your aunt, your babysitter, whoever it is that’s taking care of you. Be good because Santa Claus is watching you at the end of the year. He knows what you’ve been doing. He sees you when you’re sleeping and when you’re awake, that’s not creepy at all. Be good. So you get the gold star or the special badge.
Nancy Norbeck [00:02:19]:
You want the right answers on the test. You want the good behavior marks on your report card. You want to manage your emotions because that’s, what’s good. You want to be predictable. You want to get approval for mom and dad and your teachers and all of the adults around you so that they will keep loving you. There’s a lot packed into that one. And the thing is none of this is inherently sinister. We all need to be able to function as communities, as societies.
Nancy Norbeck [00:02:50]:
And, you know, that means we all need to give a little to get a little. And I’m not trying to say that rules are bad. You know, we all have rules that we make with each other to benefit each other and to benefit the whole. And a lot of them are really good rules. Mine are my favorite rules that I always come back to is traffic rules. Right? Think about it. There are a mazillion and one traffic rules, and traffic rules get really complicated. But what if we break it down? The core traffic rules that we think of right away are really simple, right? You think about a basic intersection.
Nancy Norbeck [00:03:31]:
Everybody wants to go, but if everybody goes at the same time, disaster. So we have traffic lights. Simple colored lights that tell us who gets to go and who has to stop. And the deal is I stop for a while when the light is red so that you get to go safely when your light is green. And then your light changes to red so that I get to go safely. The whole thing is to reduce the chance of uncertainty so that I know when it’s my turn to go, odds are pretty good that I can safely go through that intersection. Obviously we can’t predict everything, but the odds that I’m gonna get smacked on my way through that intersection when the light is green are much smaller than if that light wasn’t there at all. And we all had to improvise.
Nancy Norbeck [00:04:19]:
Imagine a busy intersection with no traffic light and no one directing traffic. It would be chaos. You’d have a traffic jam. You would have accidents all over the place, and traffic fatalities would be much higher. We don’t have a complete absence of those situations now, but they’re comparatively rare because we have this covenant with each other that we call traffic rules that keeps things running smoothly. And it’s really amazing to me that we have all accepted these rules and agreed to them, and they work as well as they do. If only everything in life worked as well as Traffic Rules. The problem comes when we are surrounded by so many rules and we take them so seriously all the time that we stop treating rules like tools and we start treating them like they’re our identity.
Nancy Norbeck [00:05:11]:
When it becomes, I can’t ever disrupt anything. I can’t ever inconvenience anyone. I should never be difficult when they be these rules become personality traits instead of reasonable responses to a situation. Right. We we assume them as part of who we are. Merging them together, they were never supposed to be that kind of situation. They were never supposed to be us. They’re supposed to be tools like the hammer in your toolbox.
Nancy Norbeck [00:05:42]:
And that’s why it’s hard for us sometimes, you know, not all rules are created equal. If we need to break some tiny little rule that doesn’t really matter that much, it could still be really hard for us because we’ve made the rules part of our identity instead of something that serves a purpose for us. And the cost of this is not small. Over time, we stop asking questions. We stop wondering what feels true for us, what’s interesting, what feels alive to us. You know, if we have parents that told us that we shouldn’t be interested in dance or music or acting or architecture or, you know, whatever it is that lights us up, maybe we wanted to go and be a professional chef because we grew up watching the food channel. And, you know, your dad said that’s a stupid career. You should be an accountant.
Nancy Norbeck [00:06:30]:
And I really should stop picking on accountants. I have cousins who are accountants. I know it’s a it’s not the boring thing that we say that it is. But but we start saying my life has to be reasonable. My life has to be acceptable. I have to just follow the smooth beaten path because that is the easy way to have a good life, whether it’s what feels right and alive to me at all. So we start performing acceptability for other people, and who we are and what we want gets lost. And in that process, what happens is that we polish the rough edges off of our identities.
Nancy Norbeck [00:07:15]:
Those rough edges tend to be the most interesting parts of who we are. We edit our reactions. We manage the perceptions of other people, which we can’t ever really truly know because we’re not those other people. So we’re managing what we think their perceptions are. We choose what we think is acceptable over what’s actually honest. I mean, when was the last time you answered a tricky question honestly instead of what you thought was acceptably. Now I’m not advocating that you go out and you just shoot daggers all over the place. Right? You need to know your time and your place and your moment And blowing up situations willy nilly is not necessarily always the right wise move or the right move.
Nancy Norbeck [00:08:06]:
But when you’re doing this all the time, it takes a toll. And the irony of that is that while it’s taking a toll on you internally, we often get rewarded for it externally because we get narrowed into predictability because we are rewarded for it socially and professionally. Our friends who love us and often love us for the things that are those sharp edges that are the most interesting parts about us, still love when we are predictable because that means that we’re reliable. It’s a very, very fine edge. And yet, many of our friends also love us when we are not predictable, so I’m not dissing our friends. Right? Our really good friends, the friends who really, really love and know us, will love us for both. But professionally, how often do you hear the word reliable? We want you to be reliable. We also want you to be manageable.
Nancy Norbeck [00:09:17]:
If you’re not manageable, you’re probably also not considered employable. And that can be devastating for your livelihood. Employers want people that they can easily put into boxes and manage. So what happens when you wanna be inconsistent one day because you disagree with that management? Or you wanna point out that something is not as un as certain as that management wants it to be? You face difficult choices. You face a whole lot of pressure to go along to get along. And it may even be less difficult than that. It may just be that the real you doesn’t fit in that professional environment. And even that can be really, really difficult to navigate.
Nancy Norbeck [00:10:18]:
Because if you’re aware of that, even a little bit, there’s no not being aware of it. And that friction is is hard to navigate. Now I wanna be really, really clear here that I’m not saying people are fake and society is bad and employers are evil. All of these things are necessary, and most people most people are good. People do not do things knowingly that they believe are bad. Most bad things that happen in the world, people have to be convinced to do them. That’s a whole other subject probably for an entirely different podcast or channel, so we’re not gonna go there today. But these things all have an effect on us regardless of what the intent is and and the reason behind them.
Nancy Norbeck [00:11:10]:
Because we have to adapt, we have to manage our social survival, and a lot of us just start editing ourselves in response because we are rewarded more for consistency than we are for our own aliveness, even though I believe that our own aliveness makes the world a better place. Unfortunately, most people haven’t asked me. So we don’t experiment as much. We don’t allow for surprise as much because we’re not as comfortable with certainty, especially in professional environments. Curiosity is not encouraged as much, which is unbelievably ironic in professional environments where curiosity often would benefit that that organization. It would benefit things greatly if people were more curious and took more chances. But management tends to frown on those things because certainty makes them feel better, and they believe that it would be better for their bottom line. So you end up with this sort of stable, acceptable selfhood.
Nancy Norbeck [00:12:16]:
But underneath, it tends to be this current that says something’s missing. Something’s not quite right. And you may feel that if you think that you’re kind of boring or that things feel flat in your life. And that sense kind of a quiet grief that we don’t have words for because it’s not the sort of grief that leaves you ugly crying in the ladies’ room. It’s the kind of quiet grief that leaves you feeling like your instincts are muted and that you’re not as spontaneous as you used to be and that you don’t have as much fun anymore. And maybe even that you’re rejecting yourself before other people or even your own life can because you’re overriding yourself to fit in. The thing about adulting is that a lot of people learn to abandon themselves so early and so consistently in the name of responsibility. Because that’s what we tell people adulting is.
Nancy Norbeck [00:13:18]:
You know? That it’s ignoring your curiosity. It’s not playing anymore. It’s letting go of all the things that you desire that light you up. It’s choosing being manageable over being meaningful and disconnecting from all of your core responses, reactions, and internal signals in the name of being a grown up, because that’s what we say being a grown up is. I’m not really sure that anybody is actually a grown up unless they really believe that that’s all there is to life and that that’s the way it’s supposed to be. In case you haven’t guessed, I don’t think that’s all there is to life or that that’s the way it’s supposed to be. And that’s why I don’t think that most people consciously choose this. I don’t think you ever would.
Nancy Norbeck [00:14:14]:
Not when you know that there’s play and awe and wonder and magic out there in the world waiting for you to reconnect with it. It’s really just that we slowly learn that making ourselves acceptable to the group is easier and safer than letting ourselves feel the fullness of being really, really alive. And the thing about that is that, you know, when you spend years learning how to be correct and predictable and acceptable, eventually, you you don’t just lose your spontaneity and your aliveness. You lose practice because connecting with yourself is a practice, And you lose play. And we’re gonna talk about all of that next time. For now, if you like this little corner of the Internet, you are welcome here in the creative closet anytime. You can subscribe if you wanna make sure you don’t miss anything. We’d love to have you here.
Nancy Norbeck [00:15:22]:
I also host a free follow your curiosity creativity circle once a month. It’s just a super gentle, little, very mild, easy structure for you to reconnect with your curiosity and creativity without turning it into a performance. I know the word structure tends to freak creative people out, and I get it. It’s just like a little holding space to make sure that you have time once a month to get to that thing that’s been sitting there in the back of your mind or in the back corner of your house waiting for you to get to it. This way you’ve got it on your calendar, so you know it’s gonna happen. And you can come do it with a group of really cool people who are gonna do their own thing just like you are, and then we’re gonna have some social time where we could share what we’ve done, get to know each other. That’s all there is to it. You can bring whatever project you want.
Nancy Norbeck [00:16:10]:
I also have a couple prompts that I share every month. You can use them or not use them. Easy peasy. It’s free. There’s a link below this video or in your show notes if you’re listening to it. No sweat. Love to have you. And with that, thank you so much for spending time with me here in The Creative Closet.
Nancy Norbeck [00:16:27]:
I help people feel alive again through creativity, curiosity, and play, and and I hope we’ll see you next
Nancy Norbeck [00:16:32]:
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 [00:16:55]:
You can find it at
Nancy Norbeck [00:16:56]:
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.