@PapaCurly That’s not a hit to your ego it’s a hit to the other guys bad attitudes. It may not have been smart but it was brave. In the past I’ve carried an old, cleaned harp in sealed plastic and offered it to loudmouths with ‘OK show me how it should be done’, Only once had a taker and boy could he play! and he played with the harp upside down, we’re still in touch. Jay1
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Mr. Jay, I presume…
I sorta live in Philadelphia. I sojourned to Pittsburgh for a job interview. Advice: keep it local if you can.
I went to listen to harmonica players. I just changed my mind. As though some bad habit, listening to other harmonica players.
The prompt say’s, about technique. Inclusion for technique. So, what I did people… I picked out a Lou Reed album. For next time, I find myself at this dilemma.
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Interestingly, for me, my playing took some leaps forward when I decided to have more of my identify involved in being a harmonica player. This will shake out differently for everybody.
Part of it was that I learned more about the role of defensiveness.
If we are insulted about something we feel totally secure about, it barely registers! For example, if I said to Jay “you are a terrible lawyer” he’d probably think, “Ha! Some days it feels like that. But on the whole I do just fine.”
UNLESS the back of his mind was previously talking to him, seeding doubts. If that were the case, he might react in a defensive manner. When we are defensive, we are actually defending ourselves from our own inner critic.
And for me, my inner critic was always saying "sure you have a lot of technical skill on the harmonica, but you are not doing this for real. just noodling along like a casual chuffer. So then if someone pointed out that my playing was noodly, rather than taking it as an effort to help, I would be defensive.
So when I made harp playing more of my identify, this kind of defensiveness gradually tapered, to the point that now I’m able to take the feedback and see it for what it is - someone else taking the time to help. There’s no need for me to reject or push away. I can listen, consider, say thanks, and then later determine if I want to integrate the feedback.
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@Hogie.Harmonica I think this is too personal to generalise (UK spelling). If you said to me “you are a terrible lawyer” my attitude would be ‘are you qualified to know’? I’ll seriously consider critics whose opinions I value or should value, others I ignore. I suppose it’s a matter of self confidence, a reasonably self confident individual will react differently from one that has less or even one who has more self confidence; it’s like DNA we’re all different. Jay1
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I imagine that for all people there is some point at which they felt defensive, and that for most of those instances, a defense wasn’t actually needed.
The lawyer bit is just an example I reached for because there’s no way I’d hurt your feelings with it 
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@Hogie.Harmonica Peter. whatever gave you the idea that lawyers have any feelings? 
Jay1
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@Jay1 we can’t all like the same thing if we did there’d only be one sort of music and what a boring world it would be. I for one cannot understand why Pink Floyd are so popular you can’t dance to them they are depressing and their lyrics are basically pretentious belly button contemplations, not knocking the musicianship but if I want to hear a long tonally brilliant guitar solo give me BB King or Albert King anyway.
@PapaCurly I know exactly how you feel! I was walking down the street in my neighborhood, minding my own business, having a ball playing a fox chase, and some guys yells from his garage, “don’t quit your day job!”
He may have even said it twice. And boy he thought he was really funny.
I didn’t really respond. Feigned a laugh, and kept walking and thought to myself “wow that is so ironic, this guy has not idea that this literally is my day job.”
But it stung for several days. The words probably came echoing back to me a few times for weeks or maybe months.
But I think @Hogie.Harmonica 's point is really well taken, this only hurts bad if it echoes words that we’ve already been hearing from our own inner-critic.
This whole thread has actually been very liberating for me and I want to thank everyone for your contributions to it. What’s been liberating for me personally is just admitting to myself that my ego motivates me to practice.
Music and Sports are both great forces for unifying people, but in music there are no “winners” and “losers” which is part of why it is so dear to my heart. My personal mission has been to use music to encourage the brokenhearted, promote unity, and encourage hope and faith.
Reading this thread, I found myself not wanting to admit that my ego drives me to practice, but of course it does! I realized that I also have a negative association with the word ego.
I looked up the definition in psychology and it says: the part of the mind that mediates between the conscious and the unconscious and is responsible for reality testing and a sense of personal identity.
That’s kind of interesting. But when I say my ego motivates me to practice, I mean to say that I practice because want to be able to play something that is impressive. This goes to what @Hogie.Harmonica said about “development of taste.”
Right? We hear something that inspires us. “Wow! That’s cool! I wanna learn how to do that too!” Nothing wrong with that.
Where things go wrong is when it moves from inspiring us to try new things into the self-sabatoging pity party, “oh I’ll never be as good as so-and-so. I’m terrible. I don’t even wanna play anymore.” Uh oh. Wrong turn. Dead end.
So we need our inner-critic to help us achieve more musical excellence. We need better technique in order to have more freedom of expression. We need more discipline to achieve better technique. All of this involves the ego.
I think that 
is a very helpful thing for me to keep in the back of my mind.
One final thing, I thought it very interesting @Hogie.Harmonica that having your identity be in a harmonica player made you less defensive of criticism. Fascinating!
I’ve music directed A LOT of groups over the last 15 years, and it’s always interesting how carefully I have to tread when giving someone constructive criticism. The sweetest, most laid back person can all of a sudden becomes so tense and rigid when I ask them to approach the music in some different way. And I’ve always thought that people becoming overly defensive in these situations is because music requires vulnerability, and perhaps our identities are TOO CLOSELY wrapped up in our music. So I just found that so fascinating that your experience was literally just the opposite of this!
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It is interesting for sure! Very often we look outside of ourselves to explain why we feel something (e.g., “they did X to me”) rather than inwards (e.g., "that makes me feel X, is it because I ______)?
A combo of both I think fits a musicians disposition.
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I don’t know if ego has anything to do with it but I practice because I want to get better at it not to impress other people but to please myself? I don’t really care what anyone else thinks that’s always been my approach. Most people I know tend to be impressed not by me but by the fact I’m a short bald harmonica player and my wife is a five foot nine knock out who does not look her age! When guys ask me how’d you get a woman like that? I take great pleasure in saying ( whilst looking suitably confused.) Well, I’m a harmonica player? 
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I am the same way. If I stopped practicing right now and forever…I’d still be a really solid harmonica player. But I (generally) enjoy the process of improvement. So I get what you mean.
Though ego plays a role in most things humans do, or in the way they do it. Even wanting to improve could be considered an aspect of one’s ego. Hell I wear decent clothes because of my ego, and that’s a really good thing!
Ego helps us, and it can hurt us. But tuning into its presence is very helpful.
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My Wife makes me wear decent clothes because of her ego when we first got together she made me throw stuff I’d been wearing for years out. I also restarted my training program and lost my steroid weight from my cancer medication ( which the doctor was adamant that I couldn’t lose it, so never say you can’t do it to me! At 62 years of age I still do 100 press ups a day and other stuff) My parents have been stunned at the change in me. I went from having zero confidence and hiding myself under layers of clothes, and being very lonely, to being a little more confident wearing nice clothes, I even got piercings and tattoos. That’s why I mention my wife a lot, she is my biggest supporter my absolute rock without whom I would’ve never returned to playing the harp, but if there was anybody I wanted to impress it was her. Never been that bothered about impressing anyone else.
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