Adding my two cents, and agreeing with both Whistle Stop and M. Ted, some people react negatively to positive thinking (like me!) except as dosed very, very carefully. I have usually found positive responses useless, because you can't do anything with them; while negative criticism, unless it is just blankly negative ("You'll never play that thing") is usually quite specific. But I have recently noticed in myself at least that this strategy is in part misleading: what one really wants is positive encouragement from people who know how to criticise properly. In my life, virtually all the people who knew how to criticise properly were negative thinkers: great critics, but not much on the encouragement side. The positive thinkers were mostly all vague encouragers. But in that acid bath of negativity you learn to survive and get good by honing. However I have come to think that most people who survive it don't really learn to flourish in such an environment -- or so it seems to me. I think it is a special, small category of people who thrive on constant punishing criticism, who can integrate it, and still be free and generous with themselves when necessary -- they are out there, some of the greatest people, but it really does take something special.

yours, Peter T.