A couple of days ago my DH and I were talking about goal-setting in business. It was in the context of what makes a good sales manager, concentration on making your sales goals (amount sold), or concentration on developing you as a person and making you a better sales person.
When I was in sales I preferred the later and mostly confounded the former. This was because I always made my goals, quarter after quarter, big or small, when we had restrictions on what we spent and when we didn’t. I had a sales manager, a real numbers guy, who was confounded by this and asked me how I did it.
My answer was simple — needlepoint.
That’s how I learned to set goals for myself that were realistic and that’s how I learned to achieve them. You see I used to stitch on my commute into SF on the bus. I stitched mini-socks, in fact some of the ones in this picture.
Every morning I would set a goal for where I’d be when the bus pulled in. It took me a few months but soon I learned how much I could accomplish. Barring traffic jams, I came to meet my goals every day.
I learned what was realistic to expect when doing this stitching and how long I could take to accomplish a task. So often we don’t set these little goals for ourselves, but we are better for it.
It sounds strange but that tiny bit of goal-setting and stitching every day was one of the best life lessons I’ve ever learned from needlepoint.
How about you? What life lessons has needlepoint taught you?
About Janet M Perry
Janet Perry is the Internet's leading authority on needlepoint. She designs, teaches and writes, getting raves from her fans for her innovative techniques, extensive knowledge and generous teaching style. A leading writer of stitch guides, she blogs here and lives on an island in the northeast corner of the SF Bay with her family
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