Yesterday I began the process of posting my 2022 reading resolutions by first looking back and assessing how I did on my 2021resolutions. You can read that post here.
Today, using what I learned by assessing how last year went, and knowing what things I have planned for the coming year, I present my 2022 Resolutions-- the ones I will hold myself to for assessment a year from now.Again, please remember, I post these both so that I am forced to hold myself to them [or not as the case may be] but also because I am a big proponent of the "lead by example" leadership style. If I am advocating for you to make resolutions and then go back and assess how you did before making the next year's resolutions, I also have to do it myself.
These are my resolutions and goals for 2022. I create these for myself specifically; however, I hope you can use them to help you craft resolutions that will work best for you.
Finally, I want to make a plea to do resolutions or goals for yourself no matter how you are feeling. They do not have to be lofty. I love this post from Book Riot with easily achievable reading resolutions. These are no stress, and may seem silly on first glance, but I think they are great. Having something as a goal gives you direction and encouragement to keep moving forward even as we enter year 3 of a pandemic. Small victories add up to larger advancements.
Okay now on to my 5 official resolutions for 2022:
2022 Resolution: I will continue to pursue partnerships so that I can provide more training and advice without spreading myself too thin. As I mentioned in my assessment yesterday, I made excellent strides in my training offerings on being Actively Anti-Racist, working with Trustees, and the HWA's Library Committee. While my standard, solo training programs are still going strong, I am going to keep looking for partnerships before adding anything new to my plate. As you will see below, I am starting to think about the second half of my career in a more formal way, and continuing to grow as a single provider of content and training is not helpful to anyone-- clients or myself. If I decided to stop tomorrow, there would be a vacuum. [I'm not going to stop tomorrow, but I don't plan to be working this hard indefinitely either.] Growth needs to come with partnerships so that I am not indispensable. Also, including more voices in my training programs energizes me and gives clients a better product. As I mentioned yesterday, while I did not actively seek to make partnerships last year, it happened and was successful, so now I am going to embrace it officially as a path forward.
2022 Resolution: I will work on my organization and time management. I am getting busier yes, but I am also working with more people and groups than I ever have before. I had a few close calls where there were double bookings and major deadlines were almost missed. My big reckoning came in June and I have been much better since; however, there were still times when I could have been better prepared. I have begun a few internal measures that have been working well. I am going to spend the first half of 2022 trying to standardize these measures and improve in these areas. I am hoping that when I look back on 2022, I will not have had any "reckoning" moments.
2022 Resolution: I will write my non-paid review immediately in order to harvest my true feelings about the book better. I have to choose my words so carefully for my paid reviews and I have to craft those reviews to the book's best reader. None of those reviews are purely from Becky's perspective as a reader. I love this because I am exposing Horror titles to more readers, and nI am forced to think about books as a professional critic, assessing their place within the genre. But sometimes it means that I do not have energy to write reviews for the books I read for fun. I want to NOT have my personal read reviews become a chore. I want them to be about immediately capturing how I felt about the book as a reader. This is important for me as a professional reviewer, connecting me to the reason reviews are a useful tool, but also it will nourish my soul as a reader. Over the years I have had resolutions giving myself space to be less formal on the reviews I write for non-paid outlets and granting myself the space to read things because I like them [not because someone paid me to]. It has worked. I am now able to do both of these things on my own without a resolution driving it, but even though I have been happy writing less formal reviews for personal reads, I have not always done them in a timely fashion. I am hoping that by encouraging myself to be more timely, I will have more honest and candid reviews for these titles. And, I will have more fun writing them. Just as reading became a chore when most of my reading was assigned for paid reviews and I had to work to find the balance, now it is time to find that balance with reviews.
2022 Resolution: I will spend time in 2022 thinking about where I see myself in 5 to 10 years. My career and my husband's career are both sky rocketing professionally. From a personal standpoint, our kids are also growing up. Our oldest daughter is in college and our son is in the second half of his junior year. They don't need much hands on parenting. We both have time and standing within our professions to think about where we want our careers to go from here and we want to do it tandem to make sure our goals align [and if not, figure out how to make them align]. I have been so busy growing RA for All and my work in the Horror world that I haven't had time to pause and think what the end goal is. At this point I have no idea, or from day to day my idea of the end goal shifts. None of that is good. Exponential growth is not sustainable or useful anymore. I need to do some personal strategic planning to figure out where I should be headed. Ironically, I have been [and am currently] part of many strategic planning processes for multiple organizations, and yet, I have never engaged in that work for myself. Well, 2022 is the time. I see this as an outgrowth of my work writing my EDI mission statement and then my Anti-Racist mission statement in pervious years. I am excited to strategically plan for myself and my company.
2022 Resolution: I will publish a personal, non-horror related essay. I am currently going through an exciting, but complicated [emotionally] life change. Well, that makes it sound more earth shattering and dire than it is. It is not dire, but the process is something that I think is worthy of an essay. It has to do with parenting and my Jewish identity. It has to do with coming to terms with atrocities and if forgiveness can be accepted in the form of a type of reparations or if trust broken so horrifically can never be truly forgiven. It also involves a lot of paperwork; mountains of paperwork, and fingerprints. It is deeply personal but I also think worthy of sharing with a larger audience. I anticipate I can close the loop on the situation by mid-year and then I will be writing a long form essay about it to shop for publication. Although I have been a pro-rate level writer for many years now, this will be my first non-Horror piece. We will see. This is my outside the box resolution and I am excited to see where it goes. It is a way to grow my writing career in a new way, which moves hand in hand with the resolution immediately above this one as well.
Now let's do this 2022!
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