Allow me to introduce myself. I am the illustration of the term “Feel-good-about-Self.”  I am one of the 40 new concepts that are launched in the upcoming book by Antoinetta Vogels:  A healthy Sense Of Self – How to be true to yourself and make your world a better place! I represent a feeling that many of us strive for day in and day out.  It is a feeling that gives structure and meaning to our lives , when there isn’t a real sense of purpose.

The real purpose comes from being totally and fully yourself – then you become your own purpose. You live for your own experience of it – you have a body that you need to maintain by taking care not to overeat, or feeding it continuously the wrong (junk-) food and do your workout to stay in shape. Then there is your mind – and even that part of you is in need to be managed and kept in a state of order. If you do not take action to clean out old stuff, you mind gets cluttered and doesn’t function the way it could.

If you do not own your Self, as it is meant to be, because you have never learned the skill to really being in touch with your Self or get a sense of who and what you are, chances are that “Feeling-good-about-yourself” plays a crucial role in your life. You may even be addicted to working your way up to that state as without that Feeling Good you feel as if you are not allowed to be.

Now, do not get me wrong. Feeling good about yourself is not always a bad thing. There is nothing wrong with experiencing a sense of satisfaction after a job well done, a test passed successfully, help provided to a friend or any other type of activity. In fact it seems to be the very thing that many people strive for, and rightly so.

But when the need to get that feeling at all cost, when working your way up to “Feeling-good-about-yourself” becomes rather compulsive, and you can’t stop working or doing before you get that feeling, then you might have a problem. The activity that leads to such a feeling can be anything: it can be tasks on the job, raising your kids, cleaning your house, washing the dishes and almost any other thing. This craving to “Feel-good-about-self” can also be achieved through behaving in ways that, we think, would make us a better person.

I used to be a bassoonist. Playing the bassoon is hard, especially when you have to build your own reeds. and I was compulsively driven to keep scraping my reeds until  I got the right tone quality and ease of speaking and then I felt good about myself. To risk working with a reed less perfect was just not an option.It would feel as if my existence was at stake in other words, that my life depended on it.

John was an actor. He had to practice his lines to perfection, till he felt good about himself. There is a fine line between dedication and compulsion. The difference lies in, on the one hand, doing the things you do because you are dependent on the outcome for your Sense of Self, often times in the form of “Feeling-good-about-yourself” or, on the other hand, whether you DO things from an inner place of already knowing that you ARE. It seems subtle, people, but it is huge!