Wanting vs. Needing
Intention over attachment for durable performance
The sun will rise whether you win or not—freeing you to want the medal without needing it. Art by Lize Helsen.
If you want comfort, stop here.
This is not a feel-good read, it is a mirror and a knife.
A mirror to see what is true, a knife to cut away what is not.
Enter with intent.
If you want clarity, read deliberately, question yourself, act on what matters.
One piercing takeaway
Set clear goals, then bind yourself to the intention behind them, not to the outcome and nor to any method.
Wanting keeps you precise and open, needing makes you rigid and blind.
To want is to walk with a compass, to need is to force life into a mould.
Straight from the Olympic and leadership arena
My experience with a top athlete, Seppe
Seppe did not begin judo for applause. He began for love. As a boy he stepped onto the tatami and felt his heart sing in the precision of grip, leverage, timing, and breath control. No sponsors, no crowd, only the simple joy of judo, throw and fall and rise again.
Success came. With it came cameras, contracts, and an invisible weight. The love that started everything slowly gave way to questions that haunted him before every fight, each beginning with “What if…”.
In one of our conversations, I shared a confession from my own “what-if” hauntings. At school pickup, another father asked what I did for a living. I would hear myself say, almost by reflex, “Olympic physiotherapist”. Driving away, I would think, “Why did I add Olympic there?” It was fear disguised as status, the fear of being nobody if the label fell away. The moment your identity fuses with a result, you start protecting an image instead of pursuing the work.
Seppe recognised the same fusion in his sport. What began as love had become a negotiation with his self-worth. Sponsors, expectations, responsibilities, all of it had pulled him away from his original intention. We worked to return him to that source. A small part of the process went like this: You were Seppe before this fight, and you will be Seppe after this fight. You will always be the same Seppe, experiencing different emotions. But if you are the one experiencing your emotions, you cannot be your emotions, can you? Who would experience your emotion if you were the emotion? Trying to find the one who feels outside the feeling is like trying to bite your own teeth. You are already complete, with or without the medal. From that completeness, choose the fight again, not to fill a hole, but because you love the craft.
He exhaled. Over time, he learned to catch the reflex that had quietly crippled long-term performance. Wanting returned. Needing loosened. Attention returned to the now and drifted away from the haunting question of what if. His decisions grew cleaner. His judo became simple and sharp. His performance rose without strain.
(For a deeper dive into why attention drives performance, see “The Currency of Performance”.)
My experience with a top leader, Claire
Claire set a strong goal for her division, clear, measurable, and aligned with the group vision. Then she made a classic error. She started to carve the outcome in stone and pour the method in concrete. By wanting to do an excellent job setting the destination and the route, she unconsciously began to over-fixate on both. When reality threatened to deviate from her plan, she felt tension creep in. Her team sensed it. Performance dipped. When you fixate on one preconceived route to your goal, you stop seeing anything else. Opportunities at the edge of the plan go unseen.
We paused. Goals are essential, they anchor aspiration and focus. But when self-worth rides on whether you achieve them, and when only one path is considered possible, the mind shifts into survival. You start to believe that if you do not achieve the goal, you have no worth. You will then do almost anything to prevent that outcome, not to serve the mission, but to protect identity. Fear narrows attention. Curiosity, which widens attention, silently dies.
I offered her a sentence to try on.
Your commitment to the goal should not be contingent on your ability to attain it.
The goal stands. Your identity does not hang from it. What matters most is the intention behind the goal. Is your intention to survive and validate your existence, or to thrive, doing what you love for its own sake? Let intention be the compass. Let the path reveal itself as you walk.
It was not instant. There was wrestling with her conditioned survival system, the pull to stay in the known and the expected. Through her persistence in creating clarity about her internal processes, there was a visible release. She kept the aim, opened the method, shortened review cycles, and listened for what reality would teach. With a perspective of wonder rather than expectation, she met a result she had not imagined, better, richer, and more aligned than her first projection.
As an Australian Olympic medallist put it, “High performance is a careful balance of wanting the medal but not needing it. Not needing it for self-worth or to feel loved, but wanting it! Sayin, “Yes! I’m willing to give it a crack and be tough, and if it does not happen, the sun will rise tomorrow.” “
That line is elite composure, said simply.
The science in simple terms
When the outcome becomes a condition for self-worth, the brain reads threat. Threat physiology activates fight, freeze or flight, the sympathetic nervous system. Cortisol and adrenergic tone rise, attentional scope narrows, and working memory declines. You scan for danger, you force the first plan harder, you miss novel cues, you lose flexibility exactly when the task demands it. This is why needing often produces short bursts of effort followed by inconsistency, while wanting produces steady, adaptive excellence.
Psychological flexibility is the antidote. It is the skill of staying in contact with the present while moving in service of your values, even when emotion and thought are loud. Awareness and acceptance based training builds this flexibility, not by suppressing signals, but by understanding them and returning to meaningful action.
The social brain adds a second layer. Status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness are primary needs. When they feel threatened, the nervous system shifts toward survival. Stabilise these domains and you restore the conditions where wanting can lead. Recognition for status, clarity for certainty, choice for autonomy, a genuine check in for relatedness, transparent rules for fairness. Small moves here create large performance dividends.
“The Devil and his friend”
The story by A. De Mello goes like this.
The devil once went for a walk with a friend. They saw a man ahead of them stoop and pick up something from the ground.
“What did that man find?” asked the friend.
“A piece of truth,” said the devil.
“Does that not disturb you?” asked the friend.
“No,” said the devil, “I shall let him make a belief out of it.”
A belief is a signpost pointing toward truth. When you cling to the signpost, you stop moving toward the truth because you think you have it already. The goal is a signpost. Intention is the road.
Practical explanation
Wanting
Commitment without attaching self-worth to the result and/or the method. Aim is non-negotiable, path is flexible, attention stays in the now. You work with reality, not against it. Curiosity becomes default. New information updates the plan quickly. Pressure sharpens perception instead of shrinking it.
Needing
Commitment fused with attachment of self-worth to the result and/or the method. Aim is rigid, path is singular, attention fractures into past and future. You resist reality, you protect the initial plan, you misread signals that do not fit. Pressure collapses perception. Effort rises, effectiveness falls.
This difference sounds subtle. In practice, it changes everything, from how you brief your team, to how you breathe before a serve, to how you decide on Tuesday at 16:00.
Tools that work under pressure
Use these now. They are simple, precise, and field-tested across sport and boardrooms. They are pointers, not idols. If the sage points at the moon, the fool sees only the finger. Use the tools, do not cling to them.
Use these now. They are simple, precise, and field-tested across sport and boardrooms. However, remember that these tools are no more than pointers to get to reality.
When a sage points to the moon, a fool sees only the finger.
Use the tools at your service without clinging to them, without making beliefs out of them. They are only helping you to cover a part of your path towards your truth.
Name the attachment
Write this sentence and finish it: “If I do not achieve X, then Y.”
Rewrite the truth, if I do not achieve X, then it means I did not achieve X yet.
You cut the wire between result and identity.
State the intention, out loud
State your intention from wanting, not needing, from thriving purposes, not survival purposes. For example, serve the client with clarity, protect energy for the long season, create profit with integrity. Intention becomes the compass that allows multiple valid paths.
Anchor attention
Inhale for four, exhale for eight, once. Add a tactile anchor, press thumb into index until you feel it fully, then release. Twelve seconds to return attention to the only place action lives, the now.
Ask the WIN question
What is important now? Not what is loud, not what soothes anxiety, what is essential in this exact phase. Write one move, do that move without retreat, then reassess. (For a deeper dive into the impact of the WIN question on overwhelm, see “Overwhelm Is the Ocean. Clarity Is the Oar.”)
A short checklist for teams
The intention is clear, the goal is set, the path is a set of hypotheses.
Ownership lives at the edge of reality, not at the origin of the plan.
Review cycles are short, language is precise, emotion is allowed and named. (For a deeper dive into leveraging your emotions as data, see “Are You Leading Your Emotions, Or Are They Leading You?”)
Threats in status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, and fairness are addressed quickly.
Rituals exist to return attention to the present before decisive actions.
A pledge worth signing
My commitment to this goal is not contingent on my ability to attain it.
I will navigate by intention, I will let reality teach the method, I will want it fully, I will not need it to validate my existence.
Final reflection
If you tie your identity to the finish line, you stop seeing the path. If you carry a compass of wanting, the path keeps appearing under your feet. Wanting is courageous clarity. Needing is elegant fear. Fix your intention, walk, adjust, repeat. And yes, if it does not happen today, the sun will rise tomorrow. Bring your best today.
