Happy New Year!

Welcome 2010!

A new year - a time when many of us set new or renewed goals. We tend to approach these fresh start times with an optimism about our ability to make changes in our lives. One of my life rules is "Run your own race". I see many people who set themselves up to fail by choosing impossible goals. I like every one else have done this in the past. You know the game, lose 20 pounds in 3 weeks or run a marathon in 3 months. I've experienced a lot more success by tracking my personal improvements against my past performance. A recent example was last spring when I decided I wanted to start doing push ups to improve my upper body strength and posture. I started by trying to do the classic military style push up. It didn't go well. I asked my husband to watch me and give me some tips. After observing and laughing out loud (easy for him as he is very fit), he said I needed to start smaller and lift free weights for a while because obviously I wasn't strong enough to start with push ups. So I did that for a week or two until I watched a weight loss program and saw an instructor show someone how to to a modified push up off of a bench. Wow! It worked I could do 3 that way. Then later I could do 10. Then later I could do 25. Now I'm doing 4 sets of 25, 3 times a week. I'm still working off a bench and I'm slowly moving the bench further down my body so eventually I will get to the classic style. So the lesson is not to choose an end goal it's to aim for an improvement, any improvement and then measuring yourself against your own performance.

So this is a knitting blog. What does this have to do with knitting? Pick your challenge and move towards it slowly. If you want to knit a cabled masterpiece of 12 different cables with different row counts and four different texture stitches in between the cables. Start small. Choose a simpler version and build slowly to your intended goal. You will get there in small increments. Instead of choosing to start with the masterpiece and giving up before you accomplish anything because the standard was to high for your current skill level go slowly, enjoy the process and measure your steps not some other knitter's.

Happy New Year - Happy Knitting