The Happiness Challenge – Confidence
Michelle – Focus – Enthusiastically Engaged
Here is my first hat. Since it had a Christmas theme, I gave it to Kate early. I made it to match her puffy winter coat. She was so gracious and genuinely seemed to appreciate it. (Kate is an advanced knitter and has won blue ribbons at the SE Alaska State Fair with her knitting projects).
As I was doing the Happiness Yoga Flow this AM, I contemplated how my confidence improves when I am enthusiastically engaged. Lately I’ve been knitting hats for friends and family. This is something new for me. I learned how to knit when I was a kid on our long family camping car trips around the country every summer (my parents were teachers so every summer we’d take off). In college, I was into knitting sweaters with lots of little characters on them – at the time I was calling them Icelandic wool sweaters – but I’m not really sure the name of the style. Beside the odd pair of mittens here and there and Christmas stockings for the girls when they were babies, I have not knitted much in the past thirty years. But I wanted to get back into knitting and make the same patterns on hats (a lot less knitting then sweaters).
I’m developing more capability (and confidence) for designing and knitting hats – it’s what I’m enthusiastically engaged with in the moment.
About a week ago, I went to the yarn store in Haines to get started. Teresa who runs the store told me to design the hats on a spread sheet. She gave me a couple patterns to get me going with creating my own. I made the first one and got into the swing of things. I’m pretty absorbed into knitting these hats – this is what I refer to as being enthusiastically engaged. What I’m noticing is how my confidence is increasing the more I do this. So for me, just being enthusiastically engaged helps me increase my confidence in whatever it is I’m pursuing.
I’ve been wanting to learn how to use the program “In Design” by Adobe – but their graphic user interface is so foreign to me. In the past, when I tried to figure it out, I got supremely frustrated. I do not have much confidence at all in my abilities to learn this. But as I reflect on what I’ve just learned with this renewed interest in knitting, and how captivated I am with my current knitting projeccts, I’m realizing, yes I can learn how to use In Design too. So being enthusiastically engaged in one activity, increasing my confidence in that activity, does help me get more confidence to learn new skills in other areas as well.
