The Impact of Emotional Attachment on Reaching Your Goals

One common thing that slows progress and holds people back from achieving their goals is that they become emotionally attached to the way that they think life should be. When life doesn’t look the way that the person thinks that it should, they get upset. They essentially get in an argument with reality and they think that they are right and that reality is wrong. Reality always wins the argument. Here is a small example of emotional attachment. Years ago I used to think that the sky should be clear and sunny outside and that it should not be cloudy. Every day that the sky was cloudy I would think that it should be this way and I would let it affect my mood the whole day. My productivity was lower and sometimes I would complain about the weather to other people. No matter how much I thought that the sky should be clear and sunny, the reality of clouds in the sky remained so I always lost that argument. At some point I realized that I was letting something outside of my control (weather) affect my whole day and decided to stop letting that happen. Once I decided that the weather wasn’t good or bad, right or wrong, and that it simply accepted the weather each day for what it was, I was free. Now I rarely notice when the sky is cloudy. Before I was emotionally attached to the idea of the sky being clear and sunny. Now I focus on what I’m committed to achieving that day.

When it comes to achieving goals, sometimes we have a picture of what it should look like to work towards that goal, what the progress will look like, and how the result will happen. We imagine the perfect scenario however life is imperfect and life rarely goes exactly as we plan. The pitfall is for us to become emotionally attached to the way achieving our goals should look like instead of focussing on being committed to achieving the goal. In order to stay focussed on achieving our goal, we need to let go of the emotional attachment to how we think that it should look. If we don’t let go of the attachment, we will focus on all the unimportant things that are “wrong” with it. This is how it slows us down and sometimes we abandon the goal altogether.

Why do we become emotionally attached? Sometimes we want what we want, even if it doesn’t make logical sense. Sometimes we have attached a meaning to the perfect image that we have in our head such as if things go perfectly then “I did a good job” and that if it doesn’t go perfectly then “I did a bad job” or “I’m a failure” or “I’m not good enough.” If any of those are the case for you then the attachment could be to proving that you did a good job, are not a failure, and are good enough. These emotional attachments are a distraction to achieving your goal. Achieving your goal is black and white. It was either achieved or not because it’s measurable. Your judgement, assessment, and opinion of yourself as either doing a good or bad job, a failure or success, and good enough or not, are completely separate from whether your goal was achieved or not because your assessment was not based on the goal but on the way that you thought that life should look like.

Perseverance, determination, commitment and the attitude of not giving up are useful when put towards the achievement of the goal and not the perfect image of how things should be. Letting go of the perfect image is not the same as giving up on your goal. Letting go of the emotional attachment frees us to focus on what’s really important, what we are truly committed to, and to the results that we are working towards, including the benefits. Staying emotionally attached becomes an obstacle and a burden to achieving our goals while creating unnecessary emotional stress. It creates an internal back and forth thoughts such as:

“I should do it, but I don’t know if I can.”

“It’s already taken so long, and I don’t think that I can catch up.”

“I can’t fail again. This time it must be different.”

None of these thoughts help us progress towards achieving our goals so they are not useful thoughts to focus on. Let them go, put them aside, and ignore them when they pop into your head again. Refocus on your goals and the next set of actions to take to progress towards your goals.

Once you refocus on your goals, quickly assess the current status and progress towards achieving your goals.

1) Identify what is complete and what still needs to be done. This gets you grounded in reality.

2) Determine what actions were effective and not effective at making progress so far.

3) Determine if you need to make any adjustments, updates, or modifications to your plan or actions in order to achieve your goals. Do you need to follow your current plan? Do you need to adjust the quality or quantity of actions? Do you need to adjust the timeline and milestones? Do you need to create a new plan because you have discovered that the current plan will not achieve your goals?

The most important part is to focus on the goals and executing the immediate actions that take you closer to reaching your goals. It’s like pushing a stalled car. It takes significant effort to get the car moving but once you do it’s easier to build momentum and to keep it going. It takes more effort to let the car stop and then push to get it going again. The same is true for progressing towards your goals. Keep taking actions. Periodically, pause to reassess your progress compared to your plan and make the adjustments when needed to get back on track.