Get A Life

New Year’s Eve – time for resolutions. But why make the usual round of promises that we know are bound to fail? Cassandra Jardine talks to Nina Grunfeld, a new breed of self-help guru, who offers an alternative. It’s called Life Clubs, it’s catching on fast and your first lesson starts here…




New Year’s resolutions tend to be of the hair-shirt variety, so no wonder hardly anyone sticks to them. Vows to abstain from alcohol or chocolate, to go to the gym or lose half a stone can be a way to start the new year on a low of self-disgust. Wouldn’t it be better to launch into 2006 in a more upbeat spirit?

Instead of all the Puritan options, this year make a different kind of resolution: to be kinder to yourself. This could mean focusing on your generous, imaginative, creative (you supply the adjectives) qualities, rather than the fact that you were always lousy at tennis and can’t speak French. It could involve identifying something you would like to do, such as earn more money or get married, then making it happen.

The major drawback of such a resolution is that it is even more difficult to stick to than the usual negative ones. After all, when do you do all this self-love? Who will encourage you? And what’s to stop you giving up at the first obstacle?

Enter Nina Grunfeld. This 51-year-old mother of four with a flair for ideas and masses of calm good sense (though she probably wouldn’t have been able to say that about herself until recently) has written The Big Book of Me, a guide to thinking more positively about yourself. Behind it lies a business idea that one day could be as much a part of life as book groups or slimming clubs.

“It came to me one day when I was looking at the McDonald’s sign,” she says. “I thought, that’s what I want: a presence on every street corner.” That presence would be the local branch of Life Clubs, the chain of self-help groups she started 18 months ago. Grunfeld envisages us all trotting along to a few life coaching sessions whenever we need to rethink our lives.

Life coaching is already a hit with those who can afford it. An executive-coaching session can cost £250 for just half an hour. The rich, including Madonna, Cherie Blair and Vanessa Feltz, seem to lap it up, and companies are increasingly offering this kind of session to staff. But, for most people, even ordinary one-to-one coaching at £60 an hour, is more than they can afford. Grunfeld has the solution: her group sessions cost only £15 each, because once a topic has been introduced the members are left to coach each other, albeit under expert guidance.

The interest certainly exists. Google “life coaching” and more than 18 million references pop up for courses, phone and internet coaching and books galore. The term was coined by a financial adviser from the US city of Colorado Springs, who found that his clients didn’t just want to be told what to do with their money, they wanted to make the best of every aspect of their lives – in short, “to realise their dreams”. To judge from the explosion of interest, it appears that his clients are far from unique.

Britain was slow to catch on to what sounded like a suspect American idea for making money by inflating already overblown egos. In the past five years, however, it has become a craze to equal sudoku. Dozens of colleges are training thousands of new coaches each year and it is impossible to know how many have tried its stimulating effects.

The appeal of life coaching is that it isn’t intimidating and you don’t have to feel like a screwball to need it. Its point is not to dwell on the past: the focus is on where you are now, where you want to be in the future and what’s stopping you getting there.

On the downside, life coaching can sound so waffly that it’s hard not to make Woody Allen-style jokes about being more loving towards yourself. And, with some courses churning out “trained” coaches after only two days, there have been tales of clients feeling cheated into paying for a few bland platitudes. Grunfeld, however, doesn’t think that means we should ignore its power to change lives.

“I know I can sound like a creep when I talk about it, so I try to avoid words such as ‘empowerment’ and ‘enlightenment’,” she says, conducting me upstairs from the child-filled basement to the paper-strewn drawing room of the Westminster house where she lives with her QC husband. “It’s hard to explain, but what life coaching can do is help you discover parts of yourself that you have forgotten. Sports people have coaches who say to them, ‘I know you can do it’, and it lifts their game.”

“Having a life coach is like having a personal fan club. It’s about unconditional love: the ideal relationship that you might have had with a parent, but maybe you didn’t. Life coaching is a way of learning about yourself, becoming more confident, understanding your motivation. I see people who have been life coached standing taller, looking me in the eye, coaching each other. One woman said her husband couldn’t believe how much happier she was.”




Grunfeld’s “don’t knock it until you’ve tried it” enthusiasm is enough to halt any knee-jerk scepticism. Indeed, the tendency to pour scorn on new ideas or resist the possibility that lives can be changed for the better may be exactly what holds people back. But, even if we would all benefit from having someone helping us work out what we want and how to get it, why pay a stranger? Wouldn’t it be simpler and cheaper to talk to a friend or relative?

“Not always”, says Grunfeld: “In the past, there was more support available, from the family or the Church, that doesn’t exist now.” Besides, as those who have been coached say, friends and relatives have their own agendas. They may not encourage those they like having nearby to move away, even if it is best for them, or help them become successful and then feel failures by comparison.

Grunfeld herself is a glowing example of what life coaching can do. A few years ago, she admits, she was Mrs Depressed-In-Suburbia. “Now I spring out of bed. I see life as an adventure.” Talking about her childhood, she sounds as if she might have been a prime case for more traditional shrinkage, but she is glad to have taken this practical approach.

“My problems were minor,” says Grunfeld, the child of two loving but critical refugees who divorced when she was young. Shuttling between her rich businessman father and her more cash-strapped mother, who felt an outsider in Britain, was tricky. “My father would say I never worked hard enough. My mother would say I was selfish because I wanted to help other people, rather than always help her.”

The tensions induced wild behaviour and led to her expulsion from St Paul’s Girls’ School in West London, which made her feel worthless. Then, when she was 20, her father took her to visit his family’s graves in Poland and announced that he was not her biological father.

“By then my real father was dead, so I couldn’t get to know him better,” she says, “but at least it explained the mystery of where my woolly hair came from.”

Although she has always wanted to help others, her early career involved graphic design and publishing. Her most notable success was Nanny Knows Best, the book and television series based on the wisdom of Nanny Smith, who had cared for her as a child. But, after her last baby was born seven years ago, Grunfeld decided to spend more time with the family and sent out a round-robin email announcing that she was going to be more professional about her hobby of advising people.

One respondent suggested that she look into the new field of life coaching, and she duly signed up for the first of many courses, which involved being coached herself. “I really enjoyed it,” she says. “It’s not like discussing whatever’s on my mind with my husband. Coaches are trained to ask questions such as ‘What is your goal?’ or ‘What will help remind you of that goal?’ It has helped me to come into my own, rather late in life. I used to want to disappear because of my vast amount of frizzy hair, now I like being the centre of attention.”

One of life coaching’s key elements is the balance chart, in the shape of a wheel with 10 spokes. Each spoke represents an aspect of life – money, family, career, fitness and health, and so on. The idea is to circle a number on each spoke to indicate how well that aspect of your life is going. Does Grunfeld now score a full set of 10s? “Not at all,” she says. “That’s not the point. Sometimes you are happiest scoring 10 for romance and very little on the others. It’s just a tool for noticing. I know I don’t spend enough time on social life, for example, but I’m doing something about that – having a party.”

Fortnightly coaching sessions still help her deal with worries and focus on what she is trying to achieve. They also make her more understanding when those she coaches are slow to achieve their goals. “Normally there is a reason for it,” she says.

Richard Porter, 33, was coached by her, and is amazed by the results. “I had been working all hours, doing my job and standing for Parliament, and my finances were in a mess,” he says. "I was so depressed that my GP put me on anti-depressants, but a friend told me about life coaching. Nina is very bright, with it and good with people, and I decided to look with her at one aspect of my life: my career. Now I’ve got a new job, more time and my finances are fine. Once you sort out one area, the rest seem to sort themselves out.

“One of the most useful exercises was to imagine meeting myself as I would like to be in 20 years. I had to envisage how I would like to look and what I would like to be doing, and then work out how to get there. There was no question of becoming too dependent on her: once I had achieved what I had set out to achieve, she suggested calling a halt. But I can always pop back. I now feel that most people who are depressed have just lost direction.”




Like many men, he is resistant to the idea of group life coaching. “I liked someone concentrating on me,” he says. So far it is mostly women who come to the group sessions held in several London locations, as well as in Salisbury and Ipswich, with more due to start in other parts of the country.

“Women are more comfortable talking about themselves,” says Grunfeld, who expects men will pile in when they realise that the groups are filled with go-ahead women, some of them eager to increase their score in the family and romance charts. “They aren’t like AA meetings. You don’t have to tell people everything about yourself.”

One divorced woman in her late 30s who took a Life Clubs course says she did so to broaden her social life, lose weight and keep positive. “Focusing on the week’s achievements boosted my confidence,” she says. “I was able to tell myself, ‘I did that, I did cope.’ At those moments when I couldn’t be bothered to go out, it gave me an extra incentive.” Another woman in her early 30s, who had just returned from working abroad, says: “In the past, things would just happen to me, but life coaching helped me to forward-plan, organise and prioritise. It’s easy to get stuck in a rut and criticise yourself.”

The feedback from these first groups is so encouraging that Grunfeld has written The Big Book of Me to spread the word still further. Her eventual aim is to see it introduced into schools. “It would have helped me so much when I was 16,” she says.

What is her own goal? To make money? “I’ve always been comfortably off so that doesn’t interest me. What I want is to create a product that grows, and to help other people.” And her New Year resolution? "To make sure I apply to myself the things I recommend to others.