Are you too attached to your goals? “Isn’t the whole purpose of goals to be very attached to them in order to achieve them?” I hear you ask. When I first came across the concept of non attachment I felt that way too. It has taken me awhile to realise how I can apply this to my daily life.
Let’s take an example of someone who wants to reduce their debt and save some money. Perhaps their goal is to reduce their debt by half in time for their
If they wanted to apply the concept of non attachment to their debt reduction goal then they need to take a step back and consider what it is that they were trying to achieve. Perhaps they wanted to cut debt as they thought that’s what they should be doing at their age. This is an idea – about who they are, the best way for them to live and how their life should look. Their attachment to this idea can cause a lot of suffering.
At the moment when you feel stress or anxiety there is a large chance that you are hanging onto an idea. Take a moment to ask yourself, “What idea am I hanging onto?” Then ask yourself, “Is it worth the stress and frustration that I am feeling?” The vast majority of the time, it won’t be, and you can let the idea go. This does not mean that you give up your goals rather it’s a case of recognising that clinging to an idea doesn’t always assist you.
One of my goals was to enter (and finish!) a 5km road race by Christmas last year. About two weeks away from Christmas I realised I wasn’t going to be able to achieve that goal as I was going to be out of town when the race was held. I was annoyed with the timing and was considering driving for 2 hours each way in order to be there for the race. It occurred to me that I wasn’t enjoying my run and was feeling angry and frustrated.
I asked myself “What idea am I hanging onto?” That was simple; I wanted to be back to my previous level of fitness as soon as possible. My next thought was “Is it worth the stress and frustration that I am feeling?” For me it simply wasn’t worth it. Feeling that way certainly wasn’t helping my fitness levels and I wasn’t enjoying what had previously been a nice run. So I had a reality check and reminded myself that the reason that I had set my goal was to keep myself motivated to increase my fitness. I also laughed at myself getting so serious as it was only 18 months ago that walking for 5 minutes had been very painful due to an injury. I focused instead on the fact that I had achieved a great deal in the 5 weeks since I had started running again. With those thoughts I let go of the idea of the race and enjoyed the rest of my run.
Once I separated myself from the idea that I had to run a race to get my fitness back on track, it became easier to realise that forcing myself to increase my fitness level at that rate would decrease the enjoyment that I had gained from starting to run again.
My frustration had been caused by my attachment to the idea that I had to take part in a race in order to increase my fitness level quickly. When you change your idea about something this changes the way that you feel about it.
