If you’re feeling disconnected from yourself and your creativity, the problem is not you. 

It's not that you are not talented enough.

It's not that you don't have enough time. 

It's not even that you don't have enough energy. 

And it’s most definitely not that something is wrong with you.

The problem is that we focus on making everything perfect, including ourselves. 

We believe that we need a lot of energy to create, when in fact creating is what gives us more energy. 

We think we need a lot of time to do it.

The lower your expectations are, the easier it is to create. The higher our expectations are, the less we create because we get hung up on whether it’s perfect enough.  

You'll often hear advice like: loosen your grip on perfection, take more chances, and just have fun, but how do you actually do that when you are so used to having such high expectations?

It's one thing to decide it's time to let go of perfectionism. It's often another to achieve it. 

Going it alone can be rough, especially in a world that keeps telling you all your troubles will be over if you're just perfect enough—if you finally attain that pinnacle of achievement you see on TV and Instagram. 

That's why I've created a group program called Make Bad Art: to give us a safe place to intentionally practice imperfection and celebrate our experiments and our own personal quirks. 

I absolutely recommend Nancy to others. Working with her has taken me to places and to depths that I did not expect.

I would recommend her to anybody who wants a different relationship with their creativity, but I would also recommend Nancy to anybody who wants a shift in their relationship with themselves.

—Beth, painter and mixed media artist

Make Bad Art is a six-week group program for recovering perfectionists (and soon-to-be recovering perfectionists!) who are ready to reconnect with their authentic selves and start being more creative—and having more fun. 

In six weekly two-hour sessions, we’ll examine the 9 Ps of my Anti-Perfectionism Formula:

We’ll also have time on each call to intentionally make bad art. Why? You have to make bad art before you can make good art. All the gold is in the things you’re afraid to make—the things you think won’t be good enough, that you’re not allowed to make, shouldn’t make, or are half-baked. 

The more bad art you make, the more good art will sneak out in the process. 

Don’t believe me? It’s actually been proven that quantity leads to quality. When students in an art class have been divided into two groups—one told to make as much art as they can for the rest of the course, and one told to focus on creating one perfect piece of work—the quantity group produced better work. 

It’s the frequency of creation, without worrying about the quality of the output, that creates better results. 

Take that, perfectionism! And score a point for trusting the process and creating just for the joy of it—which is what we’ll be doing in Make Bad Art. You’ll also be encouraged to do the same between classes and share in our online course space. 

On the calls and online, we will also take time to observe the anti-perfectionism process, be gentle with ourselves as we gain awareness of how this process works in general and for ourselves.

One of the core principles of Make Bad Art is this: You do not have to make bad art perfectly. You do not even have to use the tools perfectly (if you did, you’d be exhibiting perfectionism)! You are a flawed human being making flawed art because that’s what it is to be human, and THAT IS OKAY. 

And don’t worry: there is literally no way to fail at making bad art (except not to do it at all).

Our culture tries to teach us over and over again that the solution to every problem is to do the thing harder. Bad grade on a test? Study harder. Mom’s mad at you? Try to make her happy harder. Boss doesn’t like you? Work harder. Gained weight? Diet and exercise harder. Not measuring up to someone else? Be perfect even harder. Because what you did or who you are isn’t enough, and the only way to be enough is to do it harder.

If trying harder—and being harsher on yourself (trying harder’s ever-faithful companion)—was the answer, wouldn’t it have worked by now?

Doing it harder never works. It only makes us hate ourselves—harder. 

The only thing that works is embracing the truth of who we are, gently, with care, and being willing to honor that truth, gently, patiently, and with a whole lot of love and imperfection.

Because who we are is enough. And who we are is wonderful.

Being a creative person, sometimes you do feel like you live in your own world and that nobody else understands the creative process.  I really enjoyed meeting other creative people in Make Bad Art and hearing them talk about their creative lives.

The course also gave me different ideas on how to make time to be creative, and how to respect my creativity—all those things that are usually not encouraged.

I see now that my art is definitely worth the time, and that’s powerful. The other day, I had this big project, so I got started by making several small steps. Thanks to Make Bad Art, I feel like I have a better idea of how I want this project to go by doing the small steps and using the other tools from the course.

Nancy taught me to incorporate those tools, and encouraged me to go ahead and be creative. Because when I'm creative, I'm in a happy space and that helps me deal with everything else.

I would tell others who are considering Make Bad Art to be open to the possibilities. Don't limit yourself; just show up and be willing to participate. There aren’t any big, hard things to do in this class—they’re smaller activities, and there's a lot of encouragement from other people in the group.

— Emily, Founding participant in Make Bad Art and member of the Follow Your Curiosity community

My name is Nancy Norbeck, and you may know me as the host of the Follow Your Curiosity podcast. I’m an author, a singer, a sometime actor/improviser, and a Master Certified Kaizen-Muse Creativity Coach. I’ve also worked as a writing teacher at the secondary and post-secondary levels, and as a copy editor and proofreader. 

I know what it’s like to have a job that requires an exacting level of perfection, even when I personally don’t care whether every quotation mark is curly or not, and to catch hell if I missed one of them—and to have to pretend to be someone I’m not every day because the management is drenched in toxic positivity and only wants smiley, happy people in their office. 

That kind of environment wears on you, because constantly having to strive for that level of perfection and play pretend against your will isn’t good for you. It sand-blasts your soul and turns you into a really judgmental person, toward others and toward yourself.

Having an active creative focus is a balm in those situations—I know for sure that starting my podcast a few years into that toxic copy editing/proofreading job gave me enough pride and joy in my own accomplishments—something totally independent of, and the complete opposite of, everything I was being told about myself every day—that it saved my sanity, and maybe even my life.

I also know how it feels to lose touch with a creative pursuit. I wrote constantly in high school—to where I’m quite sure my 10th grade English teacher regretted asking to see my never-ending work-in-progress Doctor Who fanfiction at the beginning of that year—but when I got to college, it became harder to keep it up. 

Fifteen years later, I finally got my literary feet wet again via an online fanfic challenge, which eventually led me to enrolling in the MFA program at Goddard College. And that led to discovering Kaizen-Muse Creativity Coaching.

I created Make Bad Art after teaching a 2-hour workshop by the same name this past summer. We had such a fantastic time intentionally drawing and writing badly that I realized there was a larger appetite for it within myself and others—and that it was just too much fun!—not to turn it into an extended experience that could form a community of budding imperfectionists who want to support each other in uncovering their true, wild, curious, adventurous, creative selves.

All of these factors are why Make Bad Art is so important to me. It’s both the course I need, because I’m a recovering perfectionist, too—I don’t think you’re ever really done—and the course I know others need, because I also know I’m not alone. 

It’s really hard to challenge these beliefs on your own. We need to know we’re not alone to succeed. We need to recognize ourselves in others, to have each other’s backs, and to celebrate our awareness of the bizarre things we catch ourselves doing in the name of an artificial standard that doesn’t actually do anything but make us miserable—and then have a good laugh at them, because they are genuinely hilarious. Recognizing that hilarity takes their power away.

Your creative joy is alive and well, too, no matter how lost you think it is. It’s just waiting for you to come find it again. 

“It was such an exciting way to shift stuck energy around playing. Nancy creates such an easygoing space to really have fun. I mean, like, REAL wholehearted, pure unadulterated FUN! She's got the gift!”  

—Angela R. Smith, Founder of Root Cause Breathwork, Certified Compassion Key Practitioner and Breathwork Practitioner

In Make Bad Art, you’ll regain your freedom. You’ll also find that the more you let go of perfection—the more you surrender control and align deliberately with imperfection—the easier it is to find creative flow and a greater sense of play.

Let’s look first at a few things you will lose when you loosen the grip perfectionism has on you (effects vary per person, as we each engage with the process in our own way):

And here are some things you gain to replace them:

But I am pretty sure you’ll find that the biggest thing you’ll reclaim in Make Bad Art is yourself. The imperfect, carefree, clever, curious, adventurous, daring, open, courageous, playful, wonderful, wild, inner creative genius you’ve always been but forgot you were. 

And you matter.

The next cohort of Make Bad Art kicks off on Monday, January 20, 2025.

You are invited to stop contorting yourself and reclaim your wildly imperfect inner kid. 

$597 unlocks the door to freedom, inspiration, compassion, kindness, and play. 

So what do you say? Are you in?

The first ten people to sign up will also receive a copy of my Creative Tune-Up Kit and a 30-minute 1:1 coaching session with me.

I guarantee…

While I will not guarantee specific results or perfection,

I guarantee that you will have a blast.

I guarantee that you will learn to see yourself differently.

I guarantee that you will make a meaningful contribution to others.

I guarantee that we will laugh a lot, especially at what gets in our own way.

Why is this course different from anything else out there?

Because you will be in it. 

While I put a lot of thought into how Make Bad Art works, I also know this course is a co-creation between me and my students, because students can’t help but bring a lot to it. 

Someone will tell a story that will blow us all away with its depth and the lessons we can take from it. Someone else will mention a book or movie or documentary that will add to the experience. Someone else will share a song or painting or joke that reminds us all to take ourselves more lightly. 

And I’m leaving room for all of that to happen as we go. In fact, I actively want input and feedback to make the program the best it can be.

“A delightfully lighthearted workshop where I found my inner child again in a wonderfully freeing way, so that I am now implementing ideas Nancy introduced in her workshop! Fabulous!” 

—Amy Adams, photographer

• Six two-hour live sessions starting Monday, January 20, 2025. 

(We’ll take a week off for President’s Day, and I’ll have some special tools and tips to help you keep the Make Bad Art spirit alive for yourself over that holiday period.)

Sessions will be held over Zoom from 1-3 pm or 7-9pm Eastern Time*:

January 20

January 27

February 3

February 10

February 24

March 3

*There will be two sessions each week to accommodate different schedules/time zones. You only need to attend one, but you can always switch back and forth if you like. When you sign up, I'll ask you which one you'd like to choose as your primary time.

1-3pm Eastern Time: 10-noon Pacific, 6-8pm London, 7-9pm Rome, 3-5am Brisbane

7-9pm Eastern Time: 4-6pm Pacific, 12-2am London, 1-3am Rome, 9-11am Brisbane

• Call recordings so you never miss a thing
• Call transcripts
• Online community, which includes access to me between calls
• Weekly Parallel Universe Time co-working calls so you can have focused time to Make Bad Art

The first ten people to sign up will also receive a copy of my Creative Tune-Up Kit and a 30-minute 1:1 coaching session with me.

January 20, 2025

If you genuinely believe you’re not creative, then I’m very sorry to tell you that someone lied to you. Every single human being is creative in some way. It may or may not be a way that is generally recognized as creative (creativity is not limited to the arts!). 

Your creativity may be in cooking, decorating, problem solving, software development, woodworking, or any number of other areas. You may love to sing in the shower but not be willing to sing for anyone else. Maybe you like to build elaborate Lego landscapes. It may be some other quirky thing that you think other people will think is weird.

Or maybe there’s something you’ve always wanted to try, but haven’t been brave enough to do yet. Make Bad Art is the perfect, safe place to explore that dream in a gentle, easy way.

You only need to believe in your own creative self and creative dream to begin.

You’ll need two hours for our class time, and 5-10 minutes a day on your own, plus whatever time you want to spend checking into the online community. If you can or want to carve out more time, that’s great, and if you miss some days, that’s fine, too (we’re not aiming for perfection here, remember?). 

You can expect to meet new friends—and accomplices—in the fight against cultural perfectionism, and allies as you reclaim your true self.

You can expect increased awareness of your tendencies around perfectionism, plus tools and tips to interact with them differently.

You can expect to start taking yourself and these quirks more lightly as you begin to see them not as part of you but as something you put on, like a costume, in response to the expectation of others.

You can expect to start treating yourself with more compassion and less judgment as you let go of all those external expectations.

And you can expect to create more freely, and have more fun in the process, than you have since you were a kid.

YES. Engaging with our creativity lights us up, and the things that light us up always give us more energy. If you’ve ever watched a teenager discovering Taylor Swift for the first time, or going nuts over their favorite World Cup team, you know what I’m talking about—they could go on and on and on for days without sleeping. 

The effect may not be quite so dramatic, because we’re all different (and we’re not teenagers anymore!), but if you don’t find yourself feeling more energized at all by the end of the second week, I want you to tell me so we can figure out what’s getting in the way.

There’s literally no way to fail at the actual act of making bad art except not to do it. Even if all you have to work with is a paper clip and an old envelope, if you’re willing to experiment with them in the spirit of making something bad, by definition, you will succeed. The bar here is extremely low, and it’s low for a reason—because it works. This is where trusting the process comes in, and in trusting the process, you’ll also learn to trust yourself. Cool, huh?

Yes! There is an option to pay in two monthly payments built into the signup below. That said, I want everyone who wants to Make Bad Art to be able to, so if you need something different, I’m happy to set up a plan that works for you. Get in touch and we’ll make it happen! (You're not bothering me or wasting my time—I promise! I want to hear from you so I can make this work for you!)

While Make Bad Art is a great program for the right folks, it’s not for everyone. It’s very important to me that this group be made up of people who are open and willing to do something that, while simple, can be difficult—and that sounds absolutely bonkers to a lot of the culture we swim in. If you’ve read this far, odds are good you fall into this category, but just so we’re on the same page:

You should not sign up for Make Bad Art unless:

👉  You are READY and EAGER to grow. If you’re content with the way your life is right now, Make Bad Art will be a shock to your system. This group is for folks who are yearning for a change, and know there’s a better, freer, more creative way to be in the world.

👉  You want to be part of a COMMUNITY. Make Bad Art is not a spectator sport. That does not mean you have to do it perfectly—you don’t have to be on every call or reply to every post in the forum! But we do all need to be there for each other, which means being on camera as much as possible on the calls, supporting each other to the extent you’re able, and giving yourself and each other grace when you can’t. 

👉  You are OPEN and COACHABLE. This should really go without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: you should only join this group if you are interested in hearing other perspectives, and trying new things! Of course, not every idea or tool will be everyone’s favorite, but you’re welcome to modify any of them to fit you better and to run with the ones you love and leave the ones you don’t (though I do hope you’ll give them all a try first just in case your initial impression is wrong!), but if you ignore everything that is suggested, you won’t get any results.

👉  You're about connection and relationships, but NO DRAMA. While Make Bad Art will be looking deeply at our patterns of perfectionism, it isn’t therapy or a support group. If the people who know you best would describe you as a traveling vortex of chaos, this group isn't for you.

Have questions? Not a problem! Let's connect and I’ll do my best to answer them.

Please note that this program is coaching, and therefore is not a replacement for therapy. For most people, that’s not a problem. If you’re dealing with an issue that requires a therapist’s help, you’re welcome to enroll as long as you’re also working with a therapist. If you’re not sure, no problem! I'm happy to talk with you to help clarify any concerns you have (really, truly—no question is too silly or too small. I love to talk to people about Make Bad Art, so please don’t hesitate to ask!).

If any (or all) of the above is a turn-off for you, then that just means that this group isn’t for you, and that’s okay! I wish you all the best on your journey, and hope our paths will cross again someday.

But if all of the above felt true and energizing for you, then you are a perfect candidate for Make Bad Art, and you can sign up right here.

Yours in imperfection and creative courage,

Nancy Norbeck

Master Certified Kaizen-Muse Creativity Coach

Host, Follow Your Curiosity Podcast

nancy@fycuriosity.com

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