Most musicians chose music for one reason underneath all the others: They loved it. And then, somewhere down the line, the thing they got into for love started costing them the love. This post is about what happens when the path you took for love stops feeling like love — why it happens, why it's almost certainly not your fault, and what you can do about it that isn't just quit and isn't just push through.

Years ago I came across an idea in a book about writing fiction: Your characters need solid traits, but not everything they do should be in character. And if you're having a character act out of character, you'd better have a good reason for it. I think about this when I work with musicians. Because the same character that makes you good at being a person can actually make you worse at performing... and most of us don't realize it until it's too late.

One of my clients has a small ritual he does before every gig. He sits in his car in the venue parking lot, takes a full breath, and says out loud, with feeling: F*** it. (Note that post content is uncensored!) The way you might say it when you've been overthinking something for a week and you've finally decided to just do the thing. He's not the only one. A surprising number of the musicians I work with have some version of this. The research is actually on their side.

It didn't used to feel like this, did it? For a lot of musicians, music starts as a refuge — somewhere you could go where things made sense for a bit, where you weren't being measured all the time. And then, at some point, something shifts. You start looking around. Mapping where you sit. Who's ahead. Who's been doing this longer. Who seems more secure. And the strange thing is, the comparison usually starts before anyone else has actually compared you to anything. You do it

Your hands start shaking... sometimes before you've played a note, sometimes halfway through. And your attention goes straight to it: This is going to ruin everything. This question shows up in coaching almost weekly. Sometimes it arrives after a specific audition that didn't go the way someone hoped. Sometimes it's pre-emptive — I have one coming up and I know this is going to happen, what do I do. The underlying request is almost always the same: Make it stop.

There's a particular kind of musician I see a lot of in my practice, and they say variations of the same thing: I just have really high standards. It's why I'm good at what I do. I care more than most people. These sound reasonable. Healthy, even. But what those same musicians describe in the same session is something else entirely. Here's what the latest research shows about perfectionism in musicians, and what I see in the practice room.

It's one of the most common questions I get from musicians, and the logic underneath it almost always runs the same way: I've done the hours, I know the piece, if you asked me in a lesson I could play it. So why does my body keep behaving as though I haven't? Two musicians said something almost identical to me in the same week recently — a 17-year-old and a music teacher in his fifties. Different careers, decades apart, almost the same sentence.

A trumpet player I worked with recently came to me with exactly that question. He's been a professional for fifteen years. In rehearsals, concerts, lessons, even when teaching, he doesn't have to fight for anything. He just plays, and everything works. And then there are auditions, where he'd feel like a totally different person. One with about ten years less experience. He'd slept fine. Felt prepared as usual. But the moment he stepped out to play, he could feel the shift.

Should I stop drinking coffee before an audition? The question shows up more often than you'd expect — usually a few days before, sometimes the morning of, occasionally in the car on the way there. The phrasing varies, but it's almost always wrapped in the same logic: caffeine raises my heart rate, I already feel activated, so removing the coffee should make things better. Most of the time, the answer is no. Here's why — and how to tell which kind of musician you actually are

You're thinking about quitting music. Maybe you've been thinking about it for months, maybe years. The guilt feels unbearable — you've invested so much. I'm not here to convince you to stay or leave. This post is about giving you a framework to decide clearly, without guilt, shame, or others' expectations clouding your judgment.