Why Hitting Your Career Goals Still Feels Empty
The reason you still feel empty after hitting your career goals is because those goals were extrinsically motivated, based on fear, and probably never what you really wanted to begin with.
(I know - real talk, right? 😬)
We’ve all been there.
We’ve all poured time and energy into something we really hoped would help us feel satisfied, successful, and solve our problems, only to achieve it and feel … nothing.
No fanfare.
No celebration.
Just a bit ‘meh’ 🤷🏼♂️
This is exactly what happened to me in my late 20s, when I created a five year plan and smashed through 80% of it in 12 months. You’d think I’d have felt accomplished (or even a bit smug) but I just felt empty, disappointed, and exhausted.
That experience was a pivotal moment in my career (and life). It showed me that no matter what goals you set, how difficult they are, or the amount of focus, discipline and effort you put in, there is really only one thing that divides success and satisfaction from emptiness and disappointment.
Luckily, once you know about it, you won’t ever make the same mistake I did. So, let’s get cracking!
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What Are The Different Types of Career Goals?
There are many different types of career goals - enough for every single person’s goals to be completely different from each other.
Some classic career goals you’ve probably tried are:
Getting a promotion
Increasing your salary
Starting a business using your skills
Moving to a more interesting or ethical company
Becoming a manager or leading a team
But you might also have tried, or be interested in, some less traditional career goals:
Aiming to retire early, in your 40s or even 30s
Developing multiple income streams
Getting equity in a company so you benefit when it is sold
Travelling extensively through your work
Helping communities in need
Being at the cutting edge of innovation in your industry
And there are loads more, unique to every person and that particular point in their career!
There are no career goals which are ‘better’ or ‘worse’ than any other, no matter what those 5am hustle culture bros say. Some goals are more socially acceptable than others, some are more popular than others, but ultimately there’s no one type of career goal that is guaranteed to make you happier (or more depressed 😬); it’s far too individual for that.
What is guaranteed is that no matter whether it’s a classic career goal or one that’s less traditional, even if you achieve it you can still feel empty. You can slog away to get early retirement, start a business, or even help communities in need, and still feel disillusioned when you do actually achieve your goal.
And there’s one simple reason for that.
The satisfaction you get when you achieve a career goal doesn’t come from the type of goal.
It comes from your motivation behind it.
Why Is Motivation So Important?
Motivation is important in achieving your goals because there are many complex and often uncontrollable factors that influence your ability to succeed, such as peer group and environment.
A 2026 literature review on predictors of academic success showed that socio-economic status, prior achievement, personality, how students interacted with technology and several other factors all contributed to their likelihood of success. Lots of these factors were outside a student’s control.
However, many other studies have identified that motivation can predict success beyond a person’s intelligence or ability, making it a powerful tool that, along with other key character traits, you can actually control. So having a clear understanding of your own motivation can help protect your actions against other random factors in your life.
For example, if you want to stop drinking but your peer group is committed to weekly benders at the pub, your motivation will be going head-to-head with your environment. Or let’s say your partner really wants you to get a promotion, but your heart’s not just in it - this time it’s your motivation (or lack of it) vs their own ambitions.
Now to be clear, there’s no moral dimension to your motivation, or other people’s behaviour; you’re not ‘boring’ for wanting to stop drinking or ‘lazy’ for not wanting to go for a promotion. Rather, by understanding how and why you are motivated, you can see where there might be tension with other factors in your life - and you can mitigate against that.
And when it comes to career goals, there are three excellent reasons for wanting to understand your own motivations:
You’ll be able to review past goals and understand why achieving them didn’t feel satisfying
You’ll feel more confident choosing future career goals which are guaranteed to feel fulfilling
And best of all, you’ll be able to accurately predict whether or not hitting a goal will bring you satisfaction - or whether you’ll feel empty.
Remember, it’s not about the type or scale of goal you have - it’s about why you are aiming for that goal in the first place.
To be able to make these predictions and choose meaningful career goals, you need to understand the four types of motivation behind a goal.
The Four Types Of Motivation
The four types of motivation are extrinsic, intrinsic, fear, and love.
Extrinsic vs Intrinsic Motivation
Extrinsic motivation is when something outside of you inspires your action. Intrinsic motivation is when something inside of you inspires your action. Sometimes these are very closely related and hard to untangle.
For example, an intrinsically-motivated career goal might be to get a promotion and therefore increase your salary because you want more money. This is something you want, coming from inside of you.
However, once you have that promotion and have upgraded your lifestyle (thanks to the raise), an extrinsically-motivated goal could be to retain that level of seniority or go higher in the company, because now you have more expensive responsibilities to pay for. Your goal is motivated by something in the external world, outside of you as a person.
Fear vs Love Motivation
I’ve worked with many clients as a career coach to help them understand the difference between extrinsic and intrinsic motivation. These factors have been widely researched and it made sense to focus on them. But as my philosophies developed I recognised there were more complex motivation factors than just these two. This is where the fear and love motivations come in.
Fear motivation is when you are inspired to action by something you are afraid of, whether that is in the past, present, or potential future. Love motivation is when you are inspired to action by something you truly love or desire, which brings you joy and pleasure. Two people can have the same goal, extrinsically or intrinsically motivated, but with different fear or love motivations.
Let’s take our first, intrinsically-motivated goal of getting more money via a promotion:
Person A wants more money because they feel afraid of being poor, or not having ‘enough’ (fear motivation)
Person B wants more money because they have a dream holiday they are just so excited about (love motivation)
Next, let’s look at the extrinsic motivation of retaining that promotion:
Once they have the promotion, Person A retains their lifestyle because they are scared of losing respect and not keeping up with their peer group (fear motivation)
On the other hand, Person B retains their lifestyle because they are devoted to their quality of lifestyle and take great pleasure in their home (love motivation)
These are the same extrinsic or intrinsic motivations, with the same goal, but the fear and love motivation changes the ‘flavour’ of them. These multi-dimensional differences are what contribute to whether hitting your career goal will feel satisfying and meaningful - or empty and unfulfilling.
Why Does Hitting Your Career Goals Still Feel Empty?
If you’ve achieved a career goal and it still feels empty, it’s because that goal was based on extrinsic motivation, fear-based motivation, or both. Let’s look at why these two types of motivation almost always result in achieving goals that feel empty.
The Drawbacks of Extrinsic Motivation
Goals which are extrinsically motivated are based on factors outside of ourselves. These types of goals are often ‘inherited’ from family members, schooling, or peers. They are rarely what you actually want - more just things you think you want because so many people have told you over and over again that they are the ‘right’ thing to want. This means that when you do achieve them, you feel empty because they were never really what you wanted to start with!
A simple way to reflect on this is to consider the sort of things your parents or caregivers would say when they talked about your career, either to you directly or within earshot. What did your school tell you, or your peers, or programmes you saw on TV? In my book Finding Your Professional Purpose I call these ‘secret messages’ and they tend to directly inform the extrinsically-motivated goals that we set as adults.
Achieving extrinsically-motivated goals feels empty because the measure of how successful that achievement is is based on someone else’s approval. It’s not based on how you think or feel about what you’ve done, but about what someone else thinks or feels - and if they don’t give you the response you want, it can feel soul-destroying.
I think the best example of this is thinking about any exam you took as a teenager. Every kid I knew (including me) wanted to get As and A*s. But like, why? No seriously - why? Those letters didn’t actually mean anything to us in themselves.
Instead, we wanted to get those grades so our parents would be proud, so our preferred university would let us in, so we would be in the top X% in the country - which are all examples of extrinsic motivation. And when those grades didn’t give us the pride, acceptance or ‘cream of the crop’ vibe we wanted, didn’t that feel awful?
Achieving goals based on extrinsic motivation is likely to result in feeling empty because these sorts of successes give you diminishing returns. These goals require someone (or something) outside of ourselves to validate what we have done. If they don’t give us that validation, or enough of that validation, we end up working harder and harder with the same motivation, needing more and more external approval to feel satisfied, and never actually getting it.
Imagine taking your driving test, and you pass - but with seven minor faults. So you go back the next week and take it again, this time getting five minors. You go back every week, over and over again, for the next three months until you pass with zero faults.
This would be completely unnecessary and time-consuming, right? Yet it’s exactly what we do when we have extrinsically-motivated goals. We keep slogging away, hoping our ‘driving instructor’ will give us a better score next time, wasting money and energy on trying to be that perfect A+ student when a B is actually what’s needed.
(By the way if this is hitting close to home then you might want to read my other article, I’m A High Achiever Feeling Lost At Work - What’s Going On?. Just saying 🤷🏼♀️)
The Disadvantages of Fear Motivation
Fear motivation is when your goal and your actions to achieve that goal are based on something you are afraid of - either in the past, present, or future. Achieving these sorts of goals feels empty because it’s very hard to rest, enjoy and celebrate your successes when you are simultaneously feeling a little bit afraid or worried all the time.
Fear-based goals often result in feeling empty when you achieve them because without having something to fear or worry about, you tend to feel directionless. If most of your achievements, for most of your life, have been based on fear motivation, then success - and even happiness - can feel weird and uncomfortable to you. You might take it as a sign that something is wrong, because you’re so used to worrying about what’s coming next. You may also skip the ‘satisfied’ part and immediately fall into feeling directionless, because you no longer have the scary thing inspiring you to action.
Because once that scary thing is ‘gone’ there’s nothing to motivate you to continue. That means after you’ve achieved a goal motivated by fear you’re likely to slip into bad habits such as self-sabotage or unhealthy behaviours. It’s why it can be so challenging to stay out of debt, or maintain a weight that you feel happy with; once the debt has been cleared or any initial weight has been lost, the fear of ‘being in debt’ or ‘being over/underweight’ has disappeared and there’s nothing to keep you going. So the cycle starts again.
My best analogy for this is the scene in a horror movie where the gang of teenage kids make a run for it, dashing out of the house away from the monster and into the woods. They run and run and run because the thing behind them is terrifying - and then when they’re in the deep, dark woods, and they think the monster is far behind them, they stop for a breather.
And we all know what happens next. Gore, guts, screams - and the monster has got them.
The thing you are afraid of is the monster. Your fear-based goals help you run away from it, but just when you think you’ve ‘made it’, you relax and everything goes to sh*t.
The result is that some people who rely on this fear motivation never stop running; they are always busy, always doing more, never relaxing in case the monster catches them. Others take a break but can’t enjoy it, because they’re sure the fiend is just around the corner.
Because of all this, the fundamental disadvantage of fear motivation for career goals is that it is unsustainable. Just like the kids in the horror movie, fear motivation will give you an initial kick up the booty, but after that it’s just exhausting.
Being afraid of falling into a career rut, of getting stuck, of not living your best life, can all be fantastic motivators for taking the first steps to change your career and how you relate to your work. But consistently relying on fear-based goals will only result in a feeling of emptiness as you pour all your energy into achieving something just so you stop feeling afraid.
Eventually, you have to face the monster.
How to Set Fulfilling Career Goals
To set fulfilling career goals, you want to make sure you consider your motivation first, before any strategy or action.
The most effective, satisfying and fulfilling career goals grow from intrinsic, love-based motivation; goals which are about what you truly desire. For a lot of people, finding out what they truly love can feel quite challenging, because we’re so used to basing our career goals on extrinsic factors or avoiding something we’re afraid of.
How can you find out what really motivates you?
You can find out what really motivates you by examining your existing goals and intentions, and working out which type of motivation drives you.
It’s important to remember that any goal can be motivated by extrinsic or intrinsic factors, and by fear or by love. Several people can have the same goal but their motivation is radically different. Only you can know why you want what you want - the key is to figure that out!
This is one of the first steps in my Wild Success methodology: uncovering the intention behind a goal you already have and seeing where you can adapt that motivation to be more positive and effective. We do this by playing The Why Game.
Here’s a pared back version for you to try:
Write down your current career goal
Ask yourself ‘Why do I want this?’
Each time you give an answer, ask yourself ‘Why?’ again (a bit like a curious toddler)
Eventually you’ll get to the ugly truth - an uncomfortable realisation that feels awkward but extremely resonant
That ugly truth will help you understand where your motivation lies: externally, internally, from fear, or from love.
As an example, when I started out in the world of work, I had one goal: to earn a good salary. I had no real idea what that meant, but I wanted it. But when I actually asked myself why I wanted it, the ugly truth was that I was afraid of not having enough money. It wasn’t anything to do with having a ‘good salary’: it was a goal motivated by the fear of not having enough.
Knowing this meant I could adapt my goal to reflect the intrinsic, love-based motivations that were really important to me. It didn’t stop me from earning more money, or going for bigger opportunities - it meant I was guaranteed to feel satisfied when I got there, rather than putting in all that effort only to feel unsure and empty.
If you want to find out what truly motivates you, then my YouTube tutorial will help. It's called The Goal Behind The Goal: Getting Honest About What You Actually Want.
How can you motivate yourself more positively?
You can motivate yourself more positively by moving away from extrinsic, fear-based goals to ones that are built on intrinsic and love-based motivation.
At first, it can feel difficult to change your motivation if you’re used to living your life by other people’s approval, or by running away from what scares you. The best method is to get curious about who you are, what you enjoy, and what truly feels satisfying to you. From there you can set goals which are aligned with your deepest desires: the internal, love-based motivation that guarantees success and satisfaction.
The following journaling questions will help you with this process - grab a pen and your favourite notebook and give them a try.
11 Journaling Prompts for Career Goals
What do I really love about my current job? (get as specific as possible)
What recent work (or non-work) activity felt really satisfying to me?
If my boss could show me appreciation in any form, what form would I want that to take?
Fill in the blank: If I finished every working day knowing this __________, I would feel deeply satisfied.
What work-related challenges feel like puzzles I want to solve (rather than a mountain I have to climb)?
If I could spend all day learning and practising one thing, what would it be?
What’s the most ‘out there’ job I would love to do, that all my family would be surprised by?
Fill in the blank: When I daydream about about quitting my job, this is what I think about: ___________
What is something I love to do, to the point of mild obsession?
Whose career do I really envy? What makes their career so desirable?
Fill in the blanks: If I had all the money I needed and wanted, I would spend my days doing _________, going _________ and seeing _________.
Frequently Asked Questions: Goal Setting At Work
Is it important to have career goals?
Yes, it’s important to have career goals, but they shouldn’t be something you base your entire life around. Often people who are interested in finding purpose at work and setting career goals for themselves can get hyper-focused on the right goals, the right strategies, etc. But ultimately work is just one part of your life.
Because we now spend so much time at work, it makes sense that we want to feel positively motivated and find satisfaction in what we are achieving there. But it’s not the only or the most important element of our lives: that’s reserved for self-development, community, friendship, wellbeing, faith - all the relationships and pleasures that make life worthwhile.
Career goals help you maintain momentum, feel purposeful, and stretch yourself, but only in the context of a well-balanced life.
How do I set SMART goals for my career?
You can set SMART goals for your career by identifying a practical goal you wish to achieve and defining it so it’s specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. This works best for goals that are linear and quantifiable e.g. increasing salary, improving a testable skill, gaining a qualification or another goal that your manager might set for you.
SMART goals do not work for other types of goals: those which are more feeling-based, qualitative, experiential, or coming from those intrinsic, love-based motivations. That’s because those types of goals are about ongoing experience - specifically your personal, private, individual experience of your career. That experience cannot (and should not) be made ‘SMART’; it would be like trying to nail down a rainbow!
At our Wild Success retreats and in the Soul Driven Goals Workshop I offer an alternative goal-setting methodology to the traditional, corporate SMART approach. It’s specifically designed to shape an intrinsic, love-based goal and make a plan to help you achieve it.
What’s a meaningful career goal?
A meaningful career goal is one which feels inspiring and fulfilling to you personally, and it is normally intrinsically motivated. It doesn’t have to be purely related to your career; it could be something you hope to achieve through your career as well.
For example, a meaningful career goal might be to provide a comfortable life for your family. You go to work for the satisfaction that providing their lifestyle brings you. Another example of a meaningful career goal could be becoming an expert in your field, for the pleasure of deepening your skills and being an advisor to others.
In my work as a speaker and career coach, I’ve seen that when career goals are extrinsically motivated or based in fear, they tend not to feel meaningful (or enjoyable) and often produce unfulfilling results.
That’s because the success of these types of extrinsically-motivated, fear-based goals is dependent on other people’s validation and / or the absence of something you feel worried about. This ultimately feels disempowering and can lead to ‘meaningless’ achievements because the goals haven’t come from you and what you truly want.
Where Can I Get More Help With Career Goals?
I’ve written a number of other articles specifically about career goals:
If you struggle with self-sabotage, then this article will help you understand what’s going on and how to fix it: Why Do I Keep Self-Sabotaging My Goals? And How You Can Stop
If you tend to see your career goals only in terms of money, then this article will give you a new perspective: Why Your Financial Goals Are Keeping You Stuck (And What Your Soul Really Wants Instead)
If you want to practise setting your own intrinsic, love-based career goals then my in-depth YouTube tutorial will help: How To Set Career Goals That Won't Make You Feel Empty.
And if you’re looking for more in-depth career coaching, then come to our next Wild Success event: two days to plan the next move in your career and build a practical, 90 day plan to make it happen.
About The Author
Astra is an inspirational speaker, career coach and writer leading experienced professionals to wild, untamed success.
Astra's unique insight is based on 10,000+ hours studying purpose, meaning and the human condition. Their study has led to over 2,000 hours teaching, coaching and facilitating, plus published writing, keynotes and conferences, peer-reviewed research, digital content and working with 60+ brands as a communication professional - as well as living on a commune, in a warehouse, and with the Hare Krishna monks.
Through their Wild Success methodology, Astra teaches talented professionals how to find their purpose, take consistent action, and finally start experiencing the wild success they are destined for: not 'next year', not 'some day', but now.
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