I wrote this up elsewhere and several folks found it useful, so I will leave it here for anyone who may find need of it.
Learn to see the good in Imposter Syndrome. Let’s recontextualize imposter syndrome without invalidating it.
It protects you against arrogance. You care about being genuine and your self questioning prevents blind overconfidence.
How about empathy? People who doubt themselves are more understanding of other peoples struggles and avoid belittling them. In this sense, I have found those with imposter syndrome to be wonderful collaborators musically and otherwise.
It also means you care. Indifference doesn’t create imposter syndrome and that fear of being “found out” signals that the work you put in matters, the role matters and integrity matters. See? It’s not doom, it’s investment.
Don’t bother trying to eliminate it entirely. Josh himself still says he struggles with it and the guy can slap Larry Graham beats. Just reframe it from any self-sabotage into..I don’t know a word for it. Calibration? Like, instead of quietly saying “I suck at bass”, you break it down to “Are my notes buzzing? Is the timing inconsistent? Is my fretting hand too tense and am I holding my breath? Is the muting sloppy?” etc. Now any vague shame you may feel becomes a skill gap you can work on.
The moment you can hear your mistakes clearly, then you’ve already improved
Imposter Syndrome traps you into thinking that when you mess up it’s because of inherent failings as a person aka you’re bad and you should feel bad about it
Confidence lets you recognize that mistakes can be made and recovered from. Most people won’t notice anyway aka Victor Wootens whole thing about wrong notes.
Yes, reframing can be helpful. Seeing something that is supposedly experienced by between 9% and 82% of people (according to literature) as a thing is difficult for me. It seems like someone wanted to state a phenomenon. Is it one or is it just self doubt? Is it a normal thing in life to feeling to not fulfill ones role? Yes, failure is nothing nice to experience but failure is also a chance to improve. No phenomenon needed to my mind. YMMV. I may be wrong but I’m no fan of psychopathologizing normal dynamics.
That’s a great point brother- you’ve got to walk up and go all in as if you are going to crush it- too much self-doubt and you get choppy and miss the feel. Gotta have a little swagger when you walk into the tee box:) Just a little tho. Just enough to believe you can pull it off.
No, unless all the people mentioned in the sentence had been sampled from the same group of people in the same study. Like, if we were talking about the students of one classroom, then it would make a lot more sense to say 26% don’t experience it, like you said:
But if the persons sampled belong to different groups (different geographic locations, or ages, or genders, or professions, etc), then maybe the text would mean that in some groups the phenomenon was experienced by 9% of the people interviewed, while in another group it was experienced by 82% of people, and somewhere else it was experienced by 15%, or any number between 9 and 82%. It would also mean that there was no group in which it was experienced by less than 9% or more than 82% of the people sampled.
It would also leave a lot of unanswered questions, like, why in one group most people experienced it, while in another group most people did not? What is the reason for such a difference? Because 9% means almost no participants in the study, while 82% means most participants. It makes it sound like a contradiction. It leaves answered questions and would demand more data.
“Fake it ‘til you make it” is a time-honored tradition for creatives of any stripe, but particularly for musicians.
How one pulls off the “imposter” phase varies per individual: some lay back, others lay out. But if you mean to be a player some day, whether its scary, or not, you gotta step up and play.
This is such an essential practice. It’s 20 times more important than the one more practice run. The “dry run” only music volume up and the bass volume down. If you have never try one stop what you are doing before your next practice and try this, you don’t even need to tune it up,
This “Air Bass” practice puts your mind and body at ease and and not “Note Bound”
definitely I’d never blamed my swing.
!!