How Attaching Emotion to Your Goals Will Ensure You Achieve Them
It’s about emotion, not practicality.
We all have goals and aspirations.
Some are small, micro-goals like getting up twenty minutes earlier or walking to work more often. Some are larger, like packing on thirty pounds of muscle or starting our own business.
Whatever form our goals take, and however badly we might want them, we all seem to fall into the same perpetual trap. We give up before we make it to where we plan to be.
Even when we know that this goal or that goal will improve our lives exponentially, making us happier and more successful individuals, we fall from the wagon early and revert back to square one. Alas, we never progress — but the progression is essential.
As Tony Robbins put it,
“Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible.”
None of us wants to settle for an average life discoloured by our inability to commit to making our deepest wishes a reality. It follows, therefore, that we should strive to reach those precious goals of ours. Most of us just don’t know how.
Attaching Emotional Weight to Our Goals
I’m reading a fantastic book at the moment called ‘Burn the Fat, Feed the Muscle’ by bodybuilder Tom Venuto. In it, he discloses key pieces of information about losing fat, gaining muscle and achieving our fitness goals.
In the book, Venuto splits the essentials of bodybuilding into four key pillars: nutrition, strength training, cardio, and most importantly, mental training. The chapter on mental training is all about goal-setting and working to achieve those goals rather than giving up early like most of us do.
Venuto places great emphasis on the importance of goal-setting. As he writes,
“Goals, when properly planted in your subconscious mind, provide direction and stimulate action. Goals create energy and motivation. Goals get you out of bed early in the morning and into the gym.”
In essence, goals are essential when it comes to improving our happiness, success rates and overall progress in life. They’re what get us out of bed in the morning. The key to remaining motivated to actually achieve those goals, Venuto says, is to attach them to our emotions.
What does this mean? Well, setting a goal to eat more protein or swear a little less is one thing — but why are we doing it? What’s the point? What emotions are driving our desire to achieve that goal?
If we want to lose weight, what is it within us that’s sparking that wish? Perhaps we want to get fitter to provide our spouse with a more attractive partner, or maybe we want to start taking our health seriously to avoid any serious health conditions.
Whatever it is, having a clear emotional reasoning mind is essential to keep ourselves motivated, and in turn, to our long-term success. But there’s more to it than that.
The Power of Focus
We are, invariably, whatever we focus on. If we focus on our insecurities, we become them. If we focus on our strengths, they empower us. That being said, the success of our goal-setting efforts depends not only on attaching emotions to our wishes but also on the things we focus on.
In a practical sense, this involves having a clear endpoint in mind. Saying we want to lose weight is one thing, but our weight fluctuates on a daily basis. How can we succeed at losing weight if we haven’t defined what losing weight actually means?
Perhaps we want to lose thirty-five pounds before July. Maybe we want to start earning £2K a month by the end of 2019. Whatever our goal is, we need to get specific about what we want. Otherwise, we won’t know when we’ve made it there, and we won't know what to focus on along the way.
More, though, having that goal in mind allows us to recalibrate our efforts as we move along the path we’re on. With the end in sight, we can adjust our actions along the way if we find we aren’t going to make it on time.
Subconsciously, our efforts will be channelled towards what we focus on, whether that’s success, failure or dropping a dress size. Focusing on a specific endpoint will motivate us to keep moving forward.
As Denis Waitley puts it:
“Since we become what we think of most of the time, whatever we are thinking of now, we are unconsciously moving towards the achievement of that thought. Divorce, bankruptcy and illness are all goals spawned out of negative attitudes and thought patterns.”
The Formula For Successful Goal-Setting
In his book, Venuto goes on to break his goal-setting philosophies into three key pillars. Those are:
1. Set Specific Goals
We’ve already covered this one briefly, but setting specific goals is crucial to their success.
Imagine a cabin crew on a ship. As the ship veers slightly off course, the captain shouts down to the rest of the team, ordering them to ‘Go west!’ Indeed, the crew may veer in the right general direction, but they’re probably not going to make it to where they need to be.
In the same way, when we tell ourselves to ‘Lose weight!’ or ‘Earn more money!’, we don’t really know where we’re heading and so we don’t ever reach our destination.
Setting specific, detailed goals is crucial to our success. Use timeframes, dates and numbers. Be specific.
2. Set Big Goals
Often, we sell ourselves short by assuming that we haven’t got it in us to make it as far as the other people we see. We don’t think we’ll ever be able to become a millionaire or reach single digits in body fat percentage or become successful dancers like our role models have done.
We’re told to be realistic by our peers — but ask yourself this: When was anything great ever achieved by people being realistic?
As Michael Phelps puts it:
“I think goals should never be easy, they should force you to work, even if they are uncomfortable at the time.”
Aim big. Even if you don’t reach your wildest dreams, you’ll achieve a lot in the pursuit of them.
3. Set Long-Term and Short-Term Goals
In any situation, it’s important to have both short-term and long-term goals in mind. Indeed, you might wish to earn x amount of money by the end of the year, but that’s a long time from now. What do you plan to do in the meantime?
Short-term goals are the things you plan to achieve in the near future — perhaps in three-months time. Ask yourself where you’d like to be by then and what you’d need to have achieved to feel as though you’re on track.
Remember, too, that setting goals too far in the future can hinder your progress in the short term. According to Parkinson’s law:
“Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.”
A task will take as long as you allow it to take. If you want to lose thirty pounds in a year, you’ll gladly let slip several times until then because you have plenty of time left to correct your mistakes.
Instead, light a fire in your belly by shortening the timeframe a little. Give yourself slightly less time, even, because then you’ll be far more motivated to commit to your plans than if you had all of the time in the world.
The Takeaway
We all have goals that we want to achieve, but nearly every time we try we wind up sabotaging our efforts and reverting back to square one.
How long are we prepared to wait, though? Time moves fast, and unless we commit fully to actualising our deepest wishes and desires today, we might look back in the future to realise we wasted several decades putting short-term pleasure before our long-term aspirations.
By using the above principles, attaching emotional weight to our goals and ensuring that they’re specific, measurable and as grand and noble as we please, we’ll vastly improve our chances of succeeding.
Before we know it, with a little commitment, we might find that we’ve achieved far more than we set out to in the beginning. In shooting for a moon we once deemed impossible to reach, we’ll amass more stars than we ever dreamed possible.
Wouldn’t that be wonderful?
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