Everyone has to pay attention to many, competing goals each day. How you allocate your time and attention to a particular goal like losing the weight may depend on how much progress you're making toward achieving the goal. In other words, if you're closer to meeting your weight-loss goal, you put it higher up on your daily list of goals, focus on it more, and give yourself a better chance of reaching it.
But there are some mitigating circumstances.Your reasons for allocating time and attention might in some circumstances be influenced not by progress but by losing the weight as a challenge. You want to find ways of mastering this weight-loss challenge, and so you stick with it above all else, even though your progress isn't very good.
Then, too, you may be faced with daily circumstances for which you have no clue how to respond successfully--like a relationship. In this case, you try to rectify this by setting your goal at solving the relationship because it needs solving the most. Your goal to lose the weight takes a back seat.
So here's some advice if you want to make the most headway toward your goal of losing the weight without being taken up with competing goals.
- Make sure you are making the most progress possible toward your weight-loss goal
- Make the tasks involved in losing the weight the kind of challenge you want to master
- See if you can solve what's hard for you in other areas of your daily life before you commit to losing the weight