Why Wanting It Too Much Is Holding You Back (And What to Do Instead)
- Gökçe Kutsal
- Sep 9, 2024
- 8 min read
Updated: 47 minutes 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.
She had wanted the big stages since she was a teenager...
By her thirties — after moving countries, after children arrived, after the path kept bending in ways she hadn't planned — she still wanted it just as badly. The wanting hadn't faded at all.
She was also, when she came to me, seriously considering quitting music altogether.
If those two things sound like opposites, I'd gently suggest they aren't. Wanting something intensely and wanting to walk away from it are not always at war with each other. Sometimes they're the opposite faces of the same coin. And the reason that happens more often than you'd think happens to be the subject of this post.
Because most musicians are often told (and half-believe) that the problem is 'wanting it too much'. That if they could just care a little less, want it a little less desperately, hold it a little more loosely, the anxiety would settle and the playing would free up.
Except I don't think that's quite right. With the client I mentioned, the problem was never that she wanted it too much. The problem was what the wanting had slowly turned into.
I'll cover what that is — when a healthy desire becomes something heavier — what it does to your musicianship, and the strange, almost paradoxical thing that happens to a performance when the grip finally loosens.
Little disclaimer: This isn't a "want it less and universe will bring it to you" post. It's close to the opposite. Consider yourself warned.
When a Desire Becomes a Survival Condition
First things first: Wanting things is healthy.
Wanting the big stages, the title, the recognition, the career you imagined for yourself at seventeen — none of these are a flaw to be coached out of you. It's a sign you're a normal human being, you're alive, and you care about your work. A desire, on its own, is a good thing.
The trouble starts when a desire stops being something you want and quietly becomes something you need in order to be okay.
And you can usually hear the shift in the internal monologue. It stops sounding like I'd love to play on that stage and starts sounding like if I get there, it means I'm good enough — and if I don't, it means I never was.
The stage stops being a place you want to stand and becomes the verdict on whether your life amounts to anything. The audition stops being an opportunity and becomes a referendum on your worth.
That's the moment a desire becomes a survival condition. And once that happens, your mind and body stop treating the situation as exciting and start treating it as dangerous — because, to your psyche, it genuinely now is. Your sense of being okay is on the line. Your system responds accordingly, treating it as a threat.
This is worth being precise about, because it's the hinge of everything that follows. The intensity of your wanting is not the problem. A musician can want something enormously and still perform freely. What changes the experience entirely is what the wanting is resting on. When it rests on "this would be wonderful", you get energy. When it rests on "without this, I'm nothing", you get fear.
(If you've read my post on imposter syndrome, you'll recognise the neighbour of this idea — the part of you that treats every high-stakes moment as a threat to who you are. )
What This Does to a Performance
Once a performance has been reclassified as survival, your system does what any system does under threat. It clenches.
The clench can show up as over-control. You monitor every note instead of letting it happen.
You grip the outcome so tightly that there's no slack left for music to actually happen in. Your attention also splits — half on the phrase, half on what the phrase means about you — and a divided attention cannot do its most delicate work (a.k.a. delivering a fine motor skill performance).
The playing narrows. It gets careful, accurate maybe, but airless. Hollow.
And the freedom that makes a performance worth listening to is the first thing to go, because freedom requires a margin of safety, and survival mode has spent the entire margin.
Essentially the harder the outcome matters, the worse you can access what you actually have.
Now, there is no doubt you've built the skill. It's genuinely there. But a system braced against a threat can't reach for it cleanly, it's too busy trying to stay alive.
(I've written about this from other angles too — in why auditions feel worse than concerts and in what performance confidence actually is — it's a similar underlying mechanism.)
So you end up in the bitter position of wanting it most and playing worst in exactly the moments you most wanted to play well... because the wanting had become survival, and survival is a terrible state to make music in.
The Everyday Version
This isn't unique to musicians, and it might be clearer to see if we step outside the practice room for a moment.
Think of the freelancer whose income has stopped being money and has quietly become proof that they aren't a failure. Every slow month isn't just a cash-flow problem now — it becomes evidence. So they freeze exactly when they need to act: Too afraid to raise their rates, too afraid to pitch, too afraid to put themselves in any situation where a "no" would mean something about them.
Or the person in the early weeks of a relationship who has decided, somewhere underneath, that this one has to work. Every unanswered message becomes data. Every slightly flat conversation becomes a verdict. The wanting is so loaded with survival that they can't simply be present with the person in front of them — they're too busy scanning for the outcome.
Even though the environment differs, it's the same mechanism. The job application that can't be sent. The phone call that can't be made. The thing you want most becoming the thing you can't move toward, precisely because you want it that much — or rather, because of what the wanting has turned into.
Can you see how it's the same story, just with books of sheet music in your hands?
Now let's bring it back to the stage.
The Strange Thing That Happens When You Stop Needing It
There's a funny little story nearly every musician has experienced at least once.
The morning of a performance, or an audition, you wake up and something in you says: Fine*. It might go badly. And whatever happens, I'll survive that.
(* or you might've used a different f-word)
Think of the audition you walked into already at peace with the worst outcome, and then, bafflingly, you performed freely, fully, better than you had in months.
That's the exact same mechanism we're talking about, running in reverse.
The moment the stakes dropped from survival back down to desire, your system unclenched. The margin came back. The attention stopped splitting. You could finally reach the skill you'd had all along, because nothing catastrophic was riding on each note anymore.
If you've read the Harry Potter books, or seen the films, or just absorbed them by cultural osmosis, you'll remember this scene: Near the very end, Harry holds the golden snitch to his lips and says, I am ready to die, and walks into the forest. Seven books spent keeping that boy alive, and the story only resolves when he stops needing to survive. And in case you're thinking 'oh so he just gave up'... in fact, it's a story about what becomes possible the moment the outcome stops being a matter of life and death.
I worked with a brass player once who stumbled into this in the most direct way possible. Before one audition, worn down and out of patience, he essentially thought to hell with it, and walked in genuinely at peace with whatever will happen.
He played the audition of his life. He was offered the job... and he turned it down.
I find that little detail perfect, because of what it proves. A person in survival mode cannot turn down the job — the job is oxygen, refusing it is unthinkable. He could refuse it precisely because, for him, in that moment, the stage had gone back to being a choice rather than a verdict. He'd gotten his freedom back. And the freedom included the freedom to say no.
That's what I'm most proud of about my work. It's not the winning or the job offer (though they are certainly nice). The thing worth having is the version of you that could take it or leave it. Actual freedom.
You Don't Have to Want It Less
I want to be careful here, because this is the point where the message most often gets misheard :)
This is not a post telling you to detach. It's not telling you to want the stage less, to lower your hopes, to protect yourself by caring in moderation. That advice — the spiritual-bypass version of "just let it go and universe will bring it" — tends to produce musicians who are a little numb and a little smaller than they used to be. That's not the goal.
Nor is it the opposite advice, the hustle-culture version: Want it more, hunger for it harder, let the desperation fuel you. That's the exact thing that built the survival condition in the first place.
The actual aim sits in a third place, and it's a strange one, if I have to admit. You're trying to want it fully — every bit as much as you do now — and at the same time genuinely know that you will be okay if you don't get it. Both at once. The full wanting, and the survivable losing, together, at the same time.
That second half is what frees the playing. When "I'll be okay either way" is genuinely true for you, the stakes settle back down to their right size, the system stops bracing, and the skill becomes reachable again. You get to want the stage with your whole heart and play as though your life doesn't depend on it — because it doesn't.
But the work of getting there isn't a quick mindset trick or a single good practice day. It's the slower business of separating your sense of worth from the outcome of any one performance, building the genuine, felt knowledge that you can handle not getting the thing, and learning to move toward what you want without it carrying the entire weight of who you are. It takes time to take root. But it's the difference between a career that costs you yourself and one that doesn't.
The Stage Was Never Supposed to Be the Verdict
The singer I mentioned at the start: We worked together once. Afterward she wrote to tell me she'd decided not to quit.
I won't overstate what one coaching call can do. She still wants the big stages — that hasn't changed, and it shouldn't, and I'd never want it to. What had started to change was something underneath: A bad performance beginning to be just a bad performance, rather than evidence filed against her worth as a musician and a person.
That's the whole of it, really. The goal was for the stage to stop being the verdict on her life — so that she could walk toward it freely, want it completely, and still know, in her body, that she would be okay either way.
If you recognise yourself in this, if you've noticed that the things you want most are the things you somehow can't move toward, or that the dream has started to feel less like a dream and more like a sentence you're waiting to hear read out... that's the work I do with musicians in private coaching.
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.
