No. You do not have to 'let go' of wanting the goal.
Most confusion here comes from treating one community convention as if it were a law of outcomes. It is more useful to examine the mechanism and the cost.
Separate tool from rule
The useful thing to release is excessive control over timing, route and every internal state—not the ability to plan, care or respond to evidence.
This approach also reduces self-blame. External outcomes usually contain variables that are not controlled by one person's thoughts or emotional state.
When it helps
Use letting go as permission to stop rehearsing the same desire and return attention to the parts of life and action you can influence. Before repeating the practice, ask what changed because of it.
Useful outputs include a clearer criterion, a calmer response, a decision, a rehearsal, a plan or a completed action.
When it becomes noise
It becomes confusing when people are told to want something intensely and simultaneously prove they do not care about it. A warning sign is temporary relief followed by a stronger need to repeat the ritual because uncertainty has returned.
What to do next
Define the next review point, take the next relevant action, then stop checking until new information is due. Put the result somewhere observable: a calendar entry, checklist, decision rule, progress measure or conversation you can actually complete.
Decision example
After submitting a proposal, the useful release is to continue other work until the client responds, not to withdraw the proposal or pretend the outcome is irrelevant.
The important part is the causal chain. The practice may influence preparation or behaviour; the external result still depends on the system around it.
Do not overclaim
Letting go should not cancel reminders, applications, appointments or conversations that the real process requires. Money, health, safety, employment and relationships all contain consequences or other people's choices that no inner practice can simply erase.
What to measure
Track the bottleneck rather than the ritual count. If the bottleneck changes, the practice may be helping; if the same bottleneck remains untouched, more repetitions are unlikely to solve it. If the phrase increases anxiety, drop it. Replace it with a clearer instruction: 'I have done today's part; I will review again on Friday.'
A seven-day experiment
Use a small field test. Start with the real-world example here: After submitting a proposal, the useful release is to continue other work until the client responds, not to withdraw the proposal or pretend the outcome is irrelevant. Translate that logic to your own situation, then choose one low-risk action that can produce feedback. A good test teaches you something even when the hoped-for outcome does not happen. That makes it more informative than repeating a ritual until the result eventually arrives or the explanation changes.
A two-minute audit
Before adding another rule around Do you need to let go?, list what is already under your control and what belongs to external systems or other people.
Then add: what I can influence next and what evidence will make me review the plan. This keeps the manifestation technique in proportion to the larger strategy.
Bottom line
Optional practices should remain optional. Your agency is larger than any single ritual or wording rule.
No journal, phrase, tense, mood, visual image or ritual deserves more authority than the evidence and values relevant to the actual goal.
A decision rule you can actually use
For Do you need to let go?, treat the practice as useful only while it improves the part of the process it can plausibly touch. Define the next review point, take the next relevant action, then stop checking until new information is due. Then ask whether that step produced information, preparation, follow-through or a clearer boundary. If it did, keep the useful part. If it did not, changing the ritual is less important than identifying the untouched bottleneck.
The stop signal is equally important. It becomes confusing when people are told to want something intensely and simultaneously prove they do not care about it. When that pattern appears repeatedly, reduce the technique before adding another one. You are not abandoning the goal; you are removing a rule that is no longer helping the route to it.