By Kristin Backert-Evans

2023 is officially here! Honestly, I’m still not sure how 2022 is already over…wasn’t it just April last week? But since a new year is indeed upon us, it’s time for a tradition: to set some New Year’s resolutions!

On the surface, setting goals sounds like it should be the easiest thing in the world. Think of something that you want to do differently, say that you want to do it, and boom, you’re done. But thinking about goals in a superficial way makes it a lot harder to actually meet them. For example, one thing that I’ve been struggling with is how specific to make my goals. I know that I want to read more. While I usually read before going to sleep each night, that means that it can take weeks to finish a book since I have such a limited time in which to read. Initially, I figured that I could set a goal to read X number of books this year so that there’s a concrete, tangible number that I’m working towards. However, knowing myself, I would feel as though that number was looming over me, and I would feel soooo guilty if I didn’t meet it. And if I didn’t meet it, I would convince myself that every single other action that I took was wrong (if you hadn’t decided to watch that movie, you could have finished that book! If you hadn’t decided to play on your Switch, you could have finished another book! SHAME!). While I could revise my goal number as the months go by, I think that I would still feel guilty for not being “good enough” to hit that initial goal. Based on this, I’m going to set the specific goal of reading for at least 20 minutes during the day on the weekends. To me, that feels more realistic than telling myself to just magically find a way to read X number of books. 

Another goal that I have is to better my crochet techniques. I’ve made a lot of progress over the last 1.5 years, but there’s still so much room for improvement. With crocheting, I think that setting very specific goals would benefit me. For example, I could improve my ability to crochet in the row; for some reason, this basic technique gives me more trouble than it should. This is something very specific, so I could deliberately choose patterns that use this technique so that I have to practice it more frequently. I could also improve my sewing ability so that when I add limbs to a doll, they go on straight and don’t look like some flailing Muppet. An even bigger goal to work towards would be to write my own pattern, which would basically mean choosing a figure (e.g., a book/TV character, an animal, an object) and creating it from scratch instead of following a pattern that someone else has written. That would challenge me because it would involve a lot of trial-and-error as I figured out how many stitches needed to be in each round, what the design should look like, and more. These types of specific goals (as opposed to a more general “get better at crocheting” goal) will help me to, hopefully, improve at a faster rate. 

When you’re setting goals for this New Year, remember that you can make goals as specific as you want! There’s no wrong or right way to do this – the important thing is that you set goals that you feel comfortable with and believe are realistic. Let us know what you’re working towards this year!