Achieving Your Goals But Not Feeling Fulfilled? This Could Be The Hidden Reason Why

A Curious Case of Missing Fulfillment

How can a person successfully create or achieve everything they dreamed of and still feel unfulfilled or even downright miserable? What happens when you achieve or attain what you wanted, and you don’t feel the way you thought you would feel?

This was Andrew’s story. He was a small-business superstar whose thriving food truck was highly sought after for local events. But when I first met him, the desperation in his voice betrayed the public hype. “I don’t know if I can keep this up. I might have to walk away from my business,” he said as he slumped forward, tears rolling down his face.

By all accounts, including his own, he was living the dream. But behind closed doors, he was struggling with chronic stress and debilitating overwhelm on a daily and weekly basis. Despite all the work he was putting in, he couldn’t shake the feeling that he was invisible to his employees and customers. To make things worse, he felt guilty that he felt so bad despite everything seeming so good.

Through some deeper exploration, we discovered that these feelings of invisibility, stress, and guilt were not new. In fact, he had been carrying some version of these feelings throughout most of his life, and they started in his childhood. He just thought that building a successful business would finally help him get free from these feelings once and for all. Boy was he wrong! Luckily for Andrew, once we got to the bottom of this, he was able to resolve these feelings at the root. Not only was he finally able to enjoy his success, but he went on to scale his business, opening a flourishing brick-and-mortar location that functioned as the community hub he always wanted.

People have a natural habit of trying to change their environment or produce some material results in order to change the way they feel. These changes we seek take the form of goals that we pursue. Changing our material or social environment does impact the way we feel, and achievement does contribute to our experience of fulfillment. But oftentimes, even after people make these changes in their “outer world”, they still don’t experience the deep and lasting satisfaction and fulfillment that they have truly been chasing this entire time.

When some outer change or achievement doesn’t lead to fulfillment, the reason why tends to come down to one of two things, or a mix of both: Unfulfilling Goals and Emotional Blocks.

Are You Creating Unfulfilling Goals?

“I don’t feel happy in my job, so I’m getting a new one.”

Xavier struggled with this very issue. Feeling unhappy at his already cushy job, he switched to a new one, thinking it would lead to a more fulfilling work life. But once he got to this new company, he continued to struggle with focus, motivation, productivity, and work relationships. His real problem wasn't solved.

As we worked together, he realized that what he really wanted was not simply a new job. That was a shallow understanding of his true goal. What he really wanted was to feel a sense of creative power, freedom, and impact on a daily basis.

"Reality" was teaching him that even though his new job was better than his old one, just changing his environment wasn’t enough to give him the experience he was really after. The truth is that he needed to find out how to experience creative power, freedom, and impact regardless of the environment he was in. This more fulfillment-aligned goal meant he had to focus on a completely different set of changes, skills, and habits than he initially thought.

Xavier was actually seeking creative fulfillment but the real problem was that he didn’t understand what he actually needed in order to feel creatively fulfilled. He didn’t understand the conditions that needed to be met for him to experience full engagement and flow in his work and projects. He didn’t understand how to frame his problems and challenges in a way that would unleash his full creative power -- regardless of the situation he found himself in. Because he didn’t understand these things, he pursued and achieved a goal that didn’t lead to lasting fulfillment.

4 Principles for Fulfilling Goal Design

It is possible to design your goals and workflow in a way that allows you to experience fulfillment on a daily and weekly basis as you pursue and achieve your goals, even in the midst of difficult challenges. And it requires learning a particular set of "goal design" skills.

There are experts across the internet who teach these skills, many of whom I have learned from and integrated into my own process. So I won’t attempt to reinvent that wheel here. However, I can share four principles that can help people avoid some of the most common goal design mistakes and move towards designing more fulfilling goals:

1. Move Towards Fulfillment NOT Happiness: Some people design their goals with happiness in mind, but happiness is not the same as fulfillment. Over-focusing on happiness can sometimes have a counter-productive effect of creating additional layers of fear, frustration, and suffering whenever you are not in a particularly happy mood. Well-designed goals should be based on a solid understanding of what actually leads to lasting fulfillment in life. This is because you can still feel deeply fulfilled even if you aren’t in a happy mood.
2. Focus on the Inner Experience BEHIND Material Outcomes: Some people might over-focus their goals on getting to some material outcome while taking for granted or completely ignoring the deeper why, or the inner experience they want those material outcomes to support. Ideally, one’s goals should be based on a deep understanding of why you want what you want, especially in terms of inner experience. They should allow you to have your desired experience regardless of material circumstances, and provide you with multiple pathways to having that experience rather than just one.
3. Source from Self NOT from Others: Many people create goals from a place of comparison or social expectation, seeking to replicate something they saw someone else achieve or make others happy, without regard for what makes them distinct. Truly fulfilling goals are sourced from deep within and based on who you truly are. They are attuned to your distinct purpose, values, and strengths, not based on others or societal standards.
4. Design an Integrated System NOT an Isolated End Point: Nearly all of us, at one point or another, create reactive or only partially articulated goals in response to perceived problems, gaps, or lack. Well-designed goals are mindfully selected, clearly articulated, and fully integrated across all aspects of your life. They are a part of a whole system of meaningful goals and intentions rather than isolated one-off outcomes that you want to achieve.

If you suspect that you may not be designing your goals in a way that leads to lasting fulfillment, then I invite you to book a free exploratory call with me. I can help you clarify what’s missing and point you in the direction of learning what you need.

For a few potential starting points, I recommend Martin Seligman’s seminal Book on well-being, Flourish: A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-Being, Mindvalley’s LifeBook Course, and August Bradley’s Notion Life Design Videos.

When Better Goal Design Isn’t Enough

Although Xavier did need to learn the mindsets and skills associated with the above principles so that he could actually design more fulfilling goals, the strategies he learned only made an incremental difference, and did not fundamentally change the way he felt in a deep or lasting way.

Despite knowing what he needed to do differently, he still struggled to apply his newly acquired knowledge and skills effectively, and he continued to struggle with distraction, procrastination, and stress on a daily basis. This is because, beneath all of this, he had an insidious fear of being incapable that sabotaged all of his efforts. He had an emotional block that he needed to clear from his system on a deeper level in order to experience the fulfillment he was after.

What is an Emotional Block?

After making the daring move of becoming a financial advisor this late in her career, Raven achieved her goal of earning well over $100k in annual income. But for some reason, she still wasn’t feeling the sense of security that she hoped she would get from hitting this number. In fact, she now felt a near-daily debilitating anxiety that she could lose it all at any moment.

If you find yourself in a situation where all of your external circumstances should make you feel good, but for some reason, you continue to feel bad, you may have an emotional block.

An emotional block is a deeply felt negative emotional “charge” such as fear, anger, sadness, guilt, and the like that feels “stuck” in your body. It prevents you from being, doing, having, or feeling what you want. It persists despite many efforts to deal with it. And it requires deep healing work to clear from your nervous system.

Not all emotional charges represent blocks. It is when that emotional charge doesn’t go away despite trying to change your actions, habits, thinking, or environment that you might call it a block. An example of this is when you notice that you are feeling anxious or stressed and you try to meditate to make it go away, or you try to identify and challenge your anxious thoughts in order to relax, but your body still won’t calm down.

An emotional block is likely at play when you want to feel or perform a certain way, but some emotional state keeps “hijacking” your experience or compromising your performance. An example of this is when a charge of fear and tension shows up and prevents you from enjoying a social event or doing well in an interview.

Emotional blocks also show up as patterns of behavior. They may be the culprit in situations where you keep making the same mistakes or ending up in the same situations that make you feel the same uncomfortable emotional charges over and over again. For instance, when someone knows they need to say “no” more, but fear of missing out or disappointing others makes them continue to say yes, and that keeps them in a pattern of overextension and burnout, that’s an emotional block. Even though they know what they should be doing differently, something on a deeper emotional level is getting in the way.

Where Do Emotional Blocks Come From?

An emotional block is synonymous with the concept of traumatic memory. Traumatic memory is different from normal memory in that it is not just a recollection of something painful or traumatic that happened in the past. Traumatic memory refers to the distinct way our brains and bodies “remember” overwhelmingly threatening or painful experiences. This type of memory is pre-verbal, meaning that you may not be able to put it into words. But you feel it in your body. This type of memory is intertwined with the body’s fight/flight alarm system, and it is easily triggered by perceived threats that remind us of past painful experiences. For example, a person may have to engage in a sales conversation with a prospect, but completely avoid it or procrastinate out of fear of rejection. That conversation may be reminding them of previous times they felt painfully rejected.

It’s worth noting that these overwhelmingly painful experiences need not fall into the category of formal trauma. Even as a trained therapist, I had always associated the label of trauma with some of the worst of human experiences: emotional, physical, and sexual abuse, tragic accidents and disasters, war, and the like. Yes, these things do fit the standard definition of traumatic events. But my definition has expanded in recent years.

Not everyone experiences “traumas” that are severe enough to cause conditions like PTSD or Complex PTSD. However, we all have experiences that are so painful that we instinctively turn away from them, push them out of our minds, and try to avoid them as much as possible. In your own life history, you might have instances of rejection, failure, disconnection, or abandonment that caused such overwhelming feelings in you that you automatically shut them down, ignored them, or found a way to escape.

Perhaps you even created goals or sought to perform better in order to protect yourself from feeling this same pain again. In instances like these, our goals can actually secretly be defense mechanisms. The basic logic goes like this: If I can be/do/have x, then that will save me from feeling or experiencing y. This way of thinking reflects a dynamic where fear and pain are secretly -- subconsciously or unconsciously -- driving our goals. One visual metaphor I have for this dynamic is the image of fear and pain as some inky fluid contaminating goals that would otherwise be completely clear. This is like the proverbial fly in the ointment.

How Do Emotional Blocks Contaminate Our Goals?

How can emotional blocks subtly sabotage the goals we create for ourselves? Emotional blocks represent a bundled memory of reactive thinking and feeling that typically involves a faulty view of the self as less than whole. This has a cascading impact on what we think we want, how we go about getting it, and how we feel while pursuing it. Here’s how:

Emotional blocks impact…

• Who we think we are: Emotional blocks correspond to emotionally-charged beliefs that we are “not enough”, deficient, inadequate, unworthy, or incapable in some way. This way of relating to ourselves blinds us to our true gifts and strengths. It prevents us from fully seeing, owning, and operating from what makes us special, unique, or different. This way of relating to ourselves also becomes an insidious self-fulfilling prophecy, causing us to act in ways that reinforce the experience of deficiency or unworthiness.
• What we think we want or need: This causes us to focus on getting whatever we think we are inherently missing or fixing whatever we think is broken within us. Dig deep enough, and you may find that you have unconsciously been trying to use your achievements and attainments to get to a feeling of safety, security, acceptance, belonging, worthiness, okay-ness, or love. This can send us on a wild goose chase, where we use our achievements and attainments to fill a hole that 1) isn’t actually there, and 2) can only truly be filled through healing the memory that created the perceived hole in the first place.
• What we think needs to happen to get it: This also creates an experience where the thing that we most deeply want feels perpetually out of reach, and it causes us to continue to create new and different hoops to jump through to get it. For instance, instead of going inside ourselves to create a feeling of safety and security, we assume that we need to find a partner, make a certain income, and achieve some public recognition…then we will feel secure. When the truth is that we could feel safe and secure with much less effort by focusing on healing the past experiences that made us feel chronically insecure in the first place.
• How we feel while pursuing our goals: Because of the way emotional blocks work, we pursue our goals while carrying fear and stress in our bodies and feeling sensitive to threats. We continue to feel this same distress after we achieve the goals. So long as these blocks are present, regardless of whether you achieve your goals or not, you won’t be able to feel a true or lasting sense of inner peace and enjoyment. Your nervous system literally won’t have the capacity to feel this.

Towards Healing

Because of the impact of emotional blocks on our goals and our ability to enjoy achievement, I have found that the most strategic point of intervention for people can sometimes be identifying and clearing the emotional blocks that are undermining their performance and experience. This is is the work of healing, returning to self, returning to love, and returning to one’s full creative power.

When you do this, everything else tends to fall into alignment. Yes, people could always use some tips and tricks to help design more fulfilling goals, but the truth is that people tend to need the most help doing the deeper inner work of clearing their limiting beliefs and emotional blocks in a way that actually feels safe, skillful, and effective. I have noticed that when people do this, they automatically start to create more intrinsically fulfilling goals without needing much help from me.

If you would like to learn more about the inner work involved in designing fulfilling goals and clearing emotional blocks, I invite you to subscribe to the Actualize Newsletter and explore The Fulfillment Accelerator program. If you got something valuable from this article please comment below and share with others that you think might benefit. If you have any questions and would like more direct and immediate answers, I encourage you to book a free exploratory call with me.

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Join The Fulfillment Accelerator

The Fulfillment Accelerator is a four-month one-on-one coaching program that helps entrepreneurs deepen the self-awareness needed to design truly fulfilling goals while also helping them to identify and eliminate limiting beliefs and deep emotional blocks that might sabotage them along the way. People who participate in this program report dramatic shifts in their day-to-day experience of inner peace, presence, and fulfillment. If you want to learn more, visit my website and book a free exploratory call.