That Work is Mine: Why Musicians Struggle to Take Credit (and How It Fuels Impostor Syndrome)
A colleague told me recently that she’d been teaching for years without a single playing-related injury in her students.
“That’s you,” I said. “You did that.”
She paused, deflected, and began to give the credit back—to the method, to me, to the tradition. I stopped her.
Yes, she learned the tools. But she applied them, refined them, sustained them. That is her accomplishment.
The hesitation in her voice was familiar, because I’ve heard it from countless musicians and educators:
It wasn’t me. It was the method, the teacher, the composer. I was just the vessel.
That reflex is not modesty. It’s training.
The Early Conditioning: Giving Credit Away
From our very first lessons, we are taught to transmit—not originate.
We’re told to “do what the composer wrote,” to please the conductor, to follow the phrasing of our teacher. This isn’t inherently wrong. Fidelity matters. But the hidden lesson is this: Your job is to disappear behind the work.
By the time we enter professional spaces, this pattern is so deeply embedded that even our most remarkable successes don’t feel like ours.
We’re praised—but we hand it back. We lead—but credit the tradition. We succeed—but feel like we borrowed the win.
The Cost of Never Owning Your Work
When we deflect every success, we erode our internal evidence of capability. We don’t remember what we did to get here. We forget that we built this skill, this studio, this career—day by day.
That forgetting is what opens the door to impostor syndrome.
When you can’t take credit for your accomplishments, every success feels unearned. You wait to be “found out.” You assume your wins were a fluke. You fear your students or colleagues will discover you’re not as competent as they think.
But what if impostor syndrome isn’t a flaw?
Impostor Syndrome as Protection, Not Pathology
What we call impostor syndrome may actually be a survival strategy.
Many musicians learned to play small because it was safer. We learned to hide behind humility, because early environments punished confidence. We learned to downplay our instincts, because asserting them got us labeled difficult or arrogant.
Impostor syndrome, then, is not a mindset problem—it’s a nervous system adaptation.
If you grew up in an environment where being visible felt unsafe, then doubting yourself became a way to stay protected.
It’s not a character flaw. It’s protection.
But protection doesn’t always equal truth.
Impostor Syndrome Lives in the Body
This isn’t just a cognitive experience. You feel it.
The tightness in your throat when you’re about to speak in a faculty meeting.
The shallow breath before a performance you’re overqualified to give.
The posture that contracts even when you’ve just accomplished something extraordinary.
You don’t just think you’re not enough. You feel like an intruder in your own body.
This Is Not a Personal Failing
If any of this resonates, please know: you’re not the problem.
You were shaped by systems that prioritized replication over authorship. You were trained in environments that rewarded invisibility. You learned to survive by blending in—even when you were more than capable of standing out.
This is not about blame. It’s about naming the conditions that made impostor syndrome feel inevitable.
Reclaiming Ownership as a Radical Act
Saying That was me is not arrogance. It is a return to wholeness.
Because when we name our own contribution, we begin to remember ourselves.
We remember:
The hours of refinement no one saw.
The students we mentored into clarity.
The performances that came from our own body, breath, and imagination.
We remember: I did that. And in doing so, we build the capacity to trust ourselves—not just for today’s success, but for what comes next.
Practices for Reclaiming Your Work
Start here:
Notice the Deflection.
The next time someone praises your work, pause. Before you redirect the credit—breathe. Try saying “Thank you. I’m proud of that.”Keep a Record of Wins.
Make a running list of accomplishments, insights, risks you took. Name what you did—not just what happened.Track It Somatically.
Notice how your body responds when you start to take credit. Is there tension? Shame? Shrinking? That’s not failure—it’s information.
You're Not a Fraud. You're a Survivor of a System That Forgot to Teach You How to Belong.
You’re not broken. You’re responding to systems that conditioned you to disappear.
But you don’t have to keep disappearing.
Reclaiming credit is not just an individual act—it’s a collective one. It models to your students, your colleagues, and your communities what it looks like to honor your work without apology.
Because when we stop giving away our wins, we stop feeding the doubt.
You did the work. You get to say so. That work is yours.