Of course your goal is to maintain your weight loss. After all, you worked so hard to get there. But do you also have goals you’re not aware of that work against you? What could these goals be and why do they conflict with your primary goal? If you think about this, you might come up with goals like:

You must maintain a high level of self-esteem at all costs—emphasis on all costs.

Your moodiness upsets you and you must do something about it.

Here are two possible hidden goals that are as important to you as keeping the weight off; and they compete with your conscious goal of keeping off the weight. Because these competing goals are not evident, they make you feel helpless and ineffective when you fail to stick to what you see as your primary goal. Ironically, not sticking to this conscious goal causes you lowered self-esteem and increased moodiness, and these are the very feelings you want to avoid.

But what can you do when you have competing goals that are hidden and equally as strong as your very important conscious goal? One good remedy is to take your conscious goal and break it down into sub-goals. For example, instead of just working toward keeping weight off, set the bar at first identifying and then achieving some of the many sub-goals that make up the big goal. Choosing food wisely could be one of these sub-goals. Shoring up a relationship to take some of the tension off you is another.

Break your goal of maintaining your weight loss into smaller parts as a way to successfully fight off competing hidden goals.

Then too, you can do the same thing with your hidden goals. Take them out of hiding and break them down into smaller, more achievable sub-goals. In this way, your hidden goals, now broken up into achievable-size goals, won’t pose a threat to your primary goal.

Yet another possible solution is to tie your hidden goals to your main goal. For instance, your goal could be to upgrade your self-esteem by achieving one those sub-goals having to do with keeping the weight off. In this way, you’d be paying attention to your self-esteem and not just your weight. You might even give your self-esteem more prominence and not hide the fact that your goal is two-fold—weight management and self-esteem.

Hidden goals are inevitable. It is up to you to ferret them out, and do something about them.

by Maria's Last Diet