To be a successful goal setter for recovery from low self-esteem, you need to:

• Be ready to change to a healthier, recovered lifestyle.

• Be ready to accept the short-term pain, inconvenience, and deprivation to gain health, satisfaction, and high self-esteem.

• Be ready to monitor and evaluate how successful you are in lifestyle changes.

• Be ready to admit the real obstacles to achieving a changed lifestyle.

• Be ready to give up old habits, old patterns of believing and acting to achieve the new lifestyle of recovery.

• Be at a proper point of discouragement or dissatisfaction with your current lifestyle to motivate the necessary changes.

• Recognize that your current lifestyle is so unhealthy that it could lead to illness, disability, or death.

• Recognize that your current lifestyle is self-defeating, self-destructive, and passively suicidal.

• Be honest with yourself as to why you are seeking this change.

• Change your lifestyle for yourself only, not for anyone else.

• Be open to all possibilities, alternatives, or solutions necessary to achieve a healthy lifestyle change.

• Be willing to accept personal responsibility for all changes (no shifting responsibility to others).

• Be convinced that your current lifestyle needs a major overhauling or change.

• Be free to make the changes necessary (not feel constrained due to family, work, or social pressures).

• Feel supported by your social support system.

• Work on ridding yourself of the irrational beliefs that block your efforts to change.

• Develop a rational belief system to support the desire for a healthy change.

• Be honest in your assessment of how much needs to be changed.

• Be realistic in assessing the amount of time it will take for the changes to be accomplished. 

• Be able to take long-term goals and break them down into short-term objectives with a greater likelihood of being accomplished in a short time.

• Be patient, be able to take one day at a time, and celebrate success daily no matter how small.

In order for successful goals to be set:

• A personal confrontation must occur in which you admit that you can no longer use excuses, rationalizations, or lies to avoid the fact that your life is unhealthy.

• You must admit that you need help to change your lifestyle.

• You must realize that old habits and patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting must be altered radically.

• You must be willing to do anything to rid yourself of your personal disgust.

• A social support system must be developed for positive feedback.

• You must recognize that personal motivation is the only attitude that will keep you in pursuit of the goals.

• You cannot be dependent on others to keep motivated to change.

• You must accept 100% of the responsibility for taking the necessary steps to change.

• Kidding, fooling, fibbing, fabricating, storytelling, rationalizing, and lying must stop.

• You must accept that "without pain there will be no gain.''

• You must admit that a complete lifestyle change is necessary, which includes time management, restructuring, exercise, balanced diet, emotional control, and proper health practices.

• You must accept that old beliefs and attitudes will be hard to break; lots of support and assistance will be required.

• You must commit to a program of change and "recovery'' that will take a lot of time to complete.

• Set short-term goals that can be achieved on a weekly basis; you set yourself up for discouragement by setting only long-term goals.

• Set goals at a realistic level of attainment, nothing unrealistic.

• Set phasing-in goals, which are small increments of change accomplished over a period of time, until the complete change has been phased into existence; no overnight reformation.

• Set a realistic time frame to account for the actual time needed to achieve target behavior changes.

• Set goals that concentrate on behavior changes, not only on growth in self-esteem.

• Set goals that you can live with; be honest with yourself.

• Set goals that are you rather than somebody else; do not imitate other's goals.

• Set only goals you want to achieve, nothing just to impress someone else.

• Do not set yourself up for failure by overshooting the mark; avoid using absolute statements like "always'' or "never.''

• Set up a system of evaluation to give you immediate feedback; use your support system.

• Avoid goals that require other people to perform them; you must be your own agent of change in your life.