How do you decide when something you’re doing just isn’t working for you anymore? These days, whenever I am bemoaning a task, I remind myself of my purpose.

Automatically Remind Myself Of My Purpose

All it takes is for me to have a whiny thought about something I’m doing. My brain has gotten good at reminding me of why I’m doing it. If there’s satisfaction in remembering that joy, then the whining goes away immediately.

I do quite a bit of volunteer work. The Men’s Knitting Retreats is my biggest effort, but I also donate my time to a social group or two.

And most of that work is web site maintenance, e-mail correspondence and social media updates.

The work I do with the Men’s Knitting Retreats is almost always a joy. And the rare occurrence when it feels burdensome, my mind automatically reminds me why I do it. This amazing community of guys is always inspiring. And honestly, it never feels onerous to do any of the work involved with it. Especially when an event where I’ll get to be there is imminent for me.

My social volunteering is sometimes a little bit more difficult to assess.

Unlike the men’s knitting community, I deal with a much broader group of people in my other volunteer work. And dealing with people who I don’t know can be very challenging. So I find myself whining about urgent, last-minute requests for help, lack of understanding of web-site technologies, feeling under-appreciated, etc.

So, my mind is working overtime (sometimes) to evaluate whether my purpose in volunteering is worth the aggravation. Fortunately, I get an enormous amount out of my volunteer work. And reminding myself of my purpose gets me back to why I’m grateful for the opportunity to volunteer.

I sometimes wish I had done a similar evaluation of my various jobs over the years. I would have either gotten back to being satisfied with what (and why) I worked on, or I might have decided to make some changes more quickly than I did.

Current Knitting

One more hat down, only two more to go!

These hats are turning out really well. Even though this is production-knitting, I’m enjoying the process and the result.