Do you ever get tired of being “good”? Refusing dessert, going home early, walking away from the shoe sale … all under the auspices of trying to be good.

But what are we suggesting to ourselves? That if we don’t restrict or deny ourselves we’re, what … being bad? It at least implies that we’re not good enough.

Experience has taught me that as soon as I tell myself I’m on a diet, all I want to do is eat junk. If I’m not allowed to do something, I feel a craving to do it all the more. I also know that feeling bad, or less than, usually comes with an urge to find ways to block out that feeling, distract myself or numb it: cake and shoe-shopping spring to mind.

Combining these two I see a vicious cycle brewing in the trying to be good approach to life. Feeling pressured to be good, I’m tempted to do the opposite. If I give in then I feel bad and end up wanting to do more of the opposite to console myself.

Besides, what do I get for being good? Is somebody going to give me a gold star for all my goodness? Is it a belief that good will lead to happy?

What troubles me is, where are we getting our idea of good? Whose good are we aiming for? Research suggests that we are exposed to upwards of 3,000 advertisements per day. That many opportunities for other people to fill our heads with ideas of what we should be doing, what we need to buy, what we should look like, how we should act, what success is. These images and concepts are designed to infiltrate us, convince us that their products and lifestyles are good — but for someone else’s profit and not necessarily our better interest.

According to the Buddhists, suffering occurs when our circumstances don’t align with our expectations. But whose expectations are we expecting? If we’re thinking we need to look like airbrushed Calvin Klein models, that our house/family/job should match a car ad, and we have to be as chipper and domestic as a Tide commercial in order to be happy, then it’s no wonder we can feel miserable. We’re being sold unrealistic expectations so we are suffering. And then we reach for a bottle or our credit card or the Sara Lee to try to make ourselves feel better. The cycle continues.

So what would happen if we let it all go? If we laid down all the expectations, all the pressures on ourselves to do things a certain way, be just so, or conform to some preconceived notion of good? What if we felt truly good enough, just as we are? I know for many, myself included, that seems such a foreign concept but I invite you to try it on for a moment.

If you had no one else to answer to or anybody judging you for being how you are, and you could do what you liked, what would you do? I wanted to know for myself, so I decided to experiment. Next week I’ll share with you my findings and some surprises I discovered along the way.

Julia Pitt is a trained success coach and certified NLP practitioner on the team at Benedict Associates. For further information contact Julia on 705-7488 or www.juliapittcoaching.com.