If you would do it truly for yourself, you would not beat yourself up

Many times we are lost in our approval flywheel not doing things for the right "why". There is actually a great testing question you can ask  anyone to find out, if they do things truly for themself or for approval of others. I call this testing question "approval junkie test". Here is the simple question:

• When you don’t do the thing you supposedly love, what is your self talk afterwards?

If the answer is "I hate myself for …" or "I am sucker I did not do …" or "I will never be …" or "I don’t like to do that but I must …" or "I must do more". Don’t get me wrong. There is a fine line between constructive criticism and regular beating. If your answer to the question about is most of the time negative one, you are a suspect of doing things for wrong reasons. That is great because you can start looking for what those reasons are :).