The Nail That Sticks Out: Why So Many Musicians Are Afraid to Shine
- Gökçe Kutsal
- May 13, 2025
- 12 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
* Where I describe clients in my blog posts, I've changed names, instruments, and other identifying details to protect their privacy. Sometimes I'm describing one person, sometimes a pattern I've seen across several. The essence of the experience and what we worked on together remain true.
I have a confession to make...
A while ago I started singing in a community choir.
And nobody there knows what I do for a living. They don't know I coach professional musicians, or have an MA in Voice Pedagogy, or spent decades as a vocal technique geek. As far as the choir is concerned, I'm just another alto who turns up every week and tries to find the right note.
That's exactly the point of it.
After years of working closely with singers and musicians, paying careful attention to their breath, their sound, their habits, the small physical things that shape what comes out — I wanted somewhere I could just sing....
Just open my mouth and produce some sounds alongside other people and have it be uncomplicated.
It's been one of the most secretly enjoyable things I do :)
So, a couple weeks ago, we were working on a jazz number. And I have to say... I don't think our choir is at our best in jazz. You see, our timbre is on the lighter, flutier side of the spectrum, which sounds genuinely lovely in classical harmony. Jazz wants a slightly different quality... something more brassy and metallic in the blend, an edge that catches the harmonies and makes them ring. We don't really have that.
Basically, we sound like a classical choir bravely attempting jazz... which, I guess, is its own kind of charming.
Anyway. Back to the point.
The musical director was working us through a scat passage. He looked up at our section. Then he looked, coincidentally, at me... in the middle of the take.
And he said one word, with an enthusiastic little smile:
"Shine."
...
Can you imagine the reaction I had?
(Spoiler: In my head, it sounded like eeeeeeek!! )
A half-second of frozen who, me? followed by an internal flinch... a small, sharp no thank you, please look at someone else, pretend I'm invisible.
It was so fast and so automatic I didn't even notice it was happening until afterwards...
And the second I noticed it, I started laughing internally.
Because I have had this exact conversation, in some version, with more clients than I can count.
The Shape of the Reaction
Once you see this you'll notice it everywhere...
When someone in authority looks at you and tells you to be excellent, to be visible, to take the spotlight, to shine... and a part of you immediately wants to deflect, hide, minimise, or hand the moment to someone else, that's not a personal quirk.
That's not 'just shyness'. It's not even stage fright in the traditional sense (though it's adjacent to it).
It's something older and more cultural than that. And for a working musician — whose job, structurally, is to be excellent and to be seen being excellent — it sits at the heart of a particular kind of professional suffering that almost nobody names out loud.
A Saying for Every Culture
The Japanese version is the one most people have heard: Deru kui wa utareru — the nail that sticks out gets hammered down.
It's an old proverb, used historically in homes, schools, and workplaces as a caution against drawing attention to yourself.
The message is clear: Stand out, and you should expect to be brought back into line. Be modest. Don't seek individual attention. Don't think you're special.
The Japanese version is the most widely cited internationally, but the same idea exists, with different metaphors and slightly different shades of meaning, in cultures around the world.
In Scandinavia, the version is Janteloven: The Law of Jante, articulated in a 1933 novel by Aksel Sandemose, summarising attitudes the author had grown up with in small-town Denmark. Its ten principles include you shall not think you are anyone special, you shall not think you are smarter than us, you shall not think you are better than us, and so on.
(Most Scandinavians today will tell you Janteloven is officially over — but most of them will also recognise the small twist in the gut when a Scandinavian friend mentions a promotion, or an award, or anything that could be construed as standing out. The cultural muscle memory is long.)
In Australia and New Zealand, it's the tall poppy syndrome: The cultural tendency to cut down individuals who grow taller than the surrounding field. The term comes from a story in Livy about King Tarquin of Rome cutting the heads off the tallest poppies in his garden as advice on how to govern. Research has shown that tall poppy attitudes function as a kind of egalitarian enforcement mechanism, particularly in Australian and New Zealand workplaces, and particularly directed at women.
In the Netherlands, the term is maaiveldcultuur — literally ground-level culture — the idea that anything growing above ground level should be cut down. Dutch friends will sometimes describe this with a particular small shrug, half-apologetic and half-proud.
In the UK, the version is more class-inflected and more atmospheric: There's no single proverb, but a pervasive cultural preference for understatement, embarrassment around overt success, and the quiet weaponisation of who does she think she is? as a social brake on women's ambition particularly. Scotland has its own folk version — I kent yer faither (I knew your father) — used to deflate anyone who seemed to be getting above themselves by reminding them where they came from.
In Mediterranean and Middle Eastern cultures, the pressure not to stand out often comes wrapped in something more relational — protection rather than disapproval. The Turkish saying roughly translates to the sheep that separates from the flock gets eaten by the wolf. Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Greek versions of this often weave together family loyalty, fear of attracting envy or the evil eye, and a collective sense that succeeding loudly outside the family is a kind of betrayal of it. I've worked with Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese musicians who described almost identical patterns to my Scandinavian clients, where the parent who couldn't celebrate a success directly because don't get too proud, something might happen.
In Latin American Spanish, there's chaquetear — to pull the jacket — meaning to hold someone back when they start to rise.
I also have a feeling the 'crabs in the bucket' saying is related to all of these cultural phenomena... though apparently this is only a case when the poor crabs are in captivity, not a typical behaviour in their natural habitat.
You can see where I'm going with this, right?
You can find versions of this in almost every culture if you look. Cross-cultural psychologists have spent decades documenting the broader framework underneath these sayings. Markus and Kitayama's foundational 1991 work distinguishes between independent self-construal... common in Western European and North American cultures, where the self is understood as a bounded, unique individual whose job is to express its inner attributes — and interdependent self-construal — common in East Asian, African, Southern European, and many other cultures, where the self is understood through its connections to others, and where fitting in, maintaining harmony, and not standing out are core values.
A particularly interesting paper by Güngör, Mesquita, and colleagues compared Japanese and Turkish interdependent cultures specifically, and found that they enforce the don't stand out norm slightly differently. Japanese interdependence tends to emphasise fitting in (the conformity model, as in be like everyone else). Turkish interdependence tends to emphasise sticking together (the relational model, which in a music context usually means never separate from the group, even by succeeding).
The mechanism might be different, but apparently the pressure on the individual not to shine is the same.
My point is that there are real and beautiful aspects to interdependent cultures... like the social cohesion, the family loyalty, the equal distribution of attention and resources, the protection from arrogance. But they also come with strings attached.
(And even if you didn't grow up with a saying like these, there are also real costs to independent cultures too... such as loneliness, atomisation, the worship of individual achievement at the expense of community. So some people still find themselves trying to blend in and not stick out automatically.)
So for a working musician, whatever culture you grew up in, there is a very good chance you absorbed some version of the message do not stick out too far...
And then you went and chose a profession whose entire structure requires you to stick out :)
The Double-Bind for Musicians
Think about what we ask a working musician to do:
You audition for orchestral positions where the panel is explicitly trying to identify the one person who plays better than everyone else in the room. You play solo recitals where the spotlight is literally on you. You apply for principal positions, for soloist engagements, for prizes, for fellowships, for media coverage. Your career depends, in large part, on your willingness to put yourself forward and be seen succeeding.
And in many cases, you were raised in a culture (by parents who were raised in a culture too) that told you, in a thousand small ways, that the worst possible thing you could do was put yourself forward and be seen succeeding.
The professional context demands one thing... the cultural inheritance demands the opposite.
So you spend your career caught between them, often without realising that's what's happening.
In my coaching practice, I've seen it look like:
A small flinch every time someone praises your playing.
Audition preparation that mysteriously falls apart in the final week.
An inability to enjoy the success you've worked years for.
A particular kind of self-sabotage that activates especially when something is going well.
Survivor guilt around peers who haven't had the same opportunities — who am I to be doing this when so many people aren't?
An internal voice that gets louder, not quieter, the more you succeed.
A reluctance to share good news with family, because their response will somehow take the joy out of it.
The feeling that every step up the career ladder requires you to become a person your culture would disapprove of.
If you've been reading my other posts, you'll notice this overlaps with territory I've covered before:
The internal critic gets sharper in perfectionism,
The comparison to peers version of it lives in the comparison post,
The I don't deserve this version is one of the engines of imposter syndrome...
But the cultural-pressure-not-to-shine layer is underneath all of those. It's part of what gives the others their power.
A Story I Want to Share With You
A few years ago I worked with a Scandinavian classical singer... a brilliant woman in her forties with a substantial career outside her home country.
She'd built her professional life carefully and well. She had a string of credits any serious singer would be pleased with. By any reasonable measure, she was successful.
She came to me because something kept going wrong at exactly the moments when her career should have been moving up another step. Auditions where she somehow ended up underprepared, important showcases where she got "sick"...
A particular pattern of small, almost-invisible self-sabotages clustered around the bigger opportunities — never the smaller, unimportant ones.
We worked through the surface causes for a while: Performance anxiety, practice habits... you know, the usual stuff.
But the story she told me that really clarified the picture was about her parents.
Throughout her career, no matter what she achieved, her parents had had one consistent response: But you're not at La Scala yet.
Whatever she did was framed against the gold standard she hadn't reached.
And then, if she ever sounded too pleased with herself — if she ever, in her own words, "got too comfortable with success" — there would be a particular kind of careful comment from one or both of them, designed to bring her back to earth. Don't be too proud. Plenty of people are better than you. Anything less than the very top isn't worth it, and even if you got there, you shouldn't be proud about it.
She told me it's a particularly Scandinavian version of the message (the Janteloven layer wrapped around the parental relationship) but I've heard close variants of it from clients from many cultures.
The parent who couldn't celebrate without immediately undercutting.
The family that loved you fiercely and couldn't tolerate the discomfort of your standing out from them.
The grandmother who, when you won a prize, would say that's nice, but don't let it go to your head.
What was so painful for her was that she didn't want to be a person who needed external validation... she wanted to enjoy her work for its own sake. But the internal voice had been so thoroughly trained that any movement upward, any visible success, triggered an immediate, automatic deflation response.
She was sabotaging the auditions because some part of her had been taught that succeeding too visibly was dangerous.
This is what the cultural inheritance does. It shows up as a habit that sneakily undoes the thing you've been working towards, just before you cross the finish line.
How I Approach This In Coaching
When I work with clients on this in coaching, the first thing we do is name it.
I know, that sounds underwhelming, but it's almost always the most powerful single step.
People have lived with this internal voice for so long that they've stopped hearing it as a separate voice. It just sounds like them. They think I shouldn't be too pleased about this and assume it's their own honest evaluation, not a recording playing in the background.
When you can hear the voice as something separate — as Janteloven talking, or who do you think you are talking, or don't be too proud talking — you've created a small space between yourself and it.
The next step is to look at where it came from. Not in a long-archaeological-dig way (that'd be a therapy session, not coaching), but enough to recognise it as inherited, not original or unique to you.
Most clients I work with on this can identify a specific voice in their family, or a specific cultural pattern from their upbringing, or both. Naming the source helps. It means the voice isn't just the truth — it's a particular set of people, in a particular set of circumstances, communicating a particular set of values that may or may not be the ones you want to live by now.
Then comes the harder work, which is deciding when to listen and when not to.
You see, the pressure not to stand out isn't entirely wrong. There are situations where modesty is genuinely the right move. There are colleagues whose comfort matters more than your need to talk about your achievement. There are moments when the inherited voice is offering useful social information, and ignoring it would actually cost you something.
But there are also situations (like the audition you've prepared for, the solo you've earned, the moment the conductor says shine) where listening to the inherited voice will actively undo the work of your career. The skill is being able to tell the difference.
This is the noticing without obeying move I write about a lot in coaching.
The thought arrives — who do you think you are — and you don't have to argue with it. You don't have to talk yourself out of it. You don't have to win an internal debate. You just have to recognise it, name it, and act according to what you actually value anyway.
Which, in the case of an audition you've been working towards for two years, is probably: Perform well, take up the space, let yourself be seen.
An unexpected part of this is self-compassion... the kind of work researchers like Kristin Neff have spent decades on. The internal critic in this case isn't yours originally. It's been donated. You can absorb the love it was wrapped in (the parents who said don't be too proud often meant I don't want you to be hurt by people's envy) without continuing to internalise the limitation.
That separation — I can love them and not run their software — is one of the most important pieces of work many of my clients do.
What the Conductor Was Doing
Going back to my choir for a moment...
I think what the musical director was doing when he looked at me and said shine wasn't asking me to be arrogant. He wasn't asking me to drown out the alto section.
He was asking me to make a full sound with conviction, because that was what the music needed in that moment. A jazz scat passage doesn't work if you sing it apologetically. The unconventional harmonies require the singers to commit. Without commitment, the chord just sits there weirdly, sounding like a mistake.
In other words: Being asked to shine wasn't an invitation to be a show off. It was an invitation to do the actual job of the music.
A lot of professional musicians have spent their careers being asked to do this, and a lot of them have been fighting an internal current the whole time. Don't be too much. Don't take too much space. Don't make this about you. Don't be the one who stood out.
You don't have to win that fight in one go... you can't dismantle decades of cultural inheritance to play one good audition.
But you do, eventually, have to be willing to walk towards the spotlight when the music asks you to — and to let yourself be visible in it, even when an old voice inside you is asking you to please look at someone else.
Because, you see...
The nail that sticks out gets hammered down only in some rooms. The rest of the time, the nail that sticks out is exactly what's needed.
If this sounds like the rent-free voice in your head and you'd like company in learning to take up the room when the music asks you to, private coaching is where we can do it together.
About
I'm Gökçe Kutsal, a performance coach for professional orchestra musicians and opera singers, with an MA in Voice Pedagogy and over 2,100 hours of coaching and teaching experience. I work with principals, titled positions, and audition candidates across Europe, the UK, North America, and Australia — and I write about performance anxiety, audition preparation, and the craft of practice for musicians who already have the technique and are trying to work out why it doesn't always hold up under pressure.
Research cited & further reading
Markus, H. R., & Kitayama, S. (1991). Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psychological Review, 98, 224–253.
Güngör, D., Karasawa, M., Boiger, M., Dincer, D., & Mesquita, B. (2014). Fitting in or sticking together: The prevalence and adaptivity of conformity, relatedness, and autonomy in Japan and Turkey. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 45(9), 1374–1394.
Sandemose, A. (1933). A Fugitive Crosses His Tracks — the novel that articulated Janteloven.
Holmes, J., Marra, M., & Lazzaro-Salazar, M. (2016). Negotiating the tall poppy syndrome in New Zealand workplaces: Women leaders managing the challenge. Gender and Language. 11. 1-29. 10.1558/genl.31236.
Kristin Neff on self-compassion — self-compassion.org
