Back To Life

Changing your life needs careful planning not hasty new years resolutions. Life coach Nina Grunfeld recommends making changes one step at a time.

I don’t know about you, but I always feel excited about a new year. It feels like a fresh start, as if I could now achieve what I’ve always wanted to achieve. For years I regularly started Canadian Army exercises every January 1st, only to give up at around the 16th. These days – older and wiser – New Year’s resolutions have moved over and I set myself longer-term goals for the year ahead. Instead of going crazy for the first couple of weeks of January, I’ve found a few sports I like – tennis, walking, swimming and dancing – and am more realistic about my goals. I now know that if I don’t push myself too hard, I stand a better chance of keeping them going for longer.

What motivates you to keep to your goals? Right now, take a piece of paper and write down three things that you’d like to achieve this year. One could be a personal goal for you – wanting to lose weight, wanting to see friends more often, wanting to relax a bit more. One could be work related – maybe changing job, maybe to get promoted, maybe to get a good annual appraisal. The third could be to do with other people – possibly doing a run for a charity, visiting your parents more, spending special time with your children – those sort of things.

Once you’ve written down your three goals for the year, imagine those goals belong to someone else and they’re asking you how to stick to them. For example, if one of your goals is to get rid of all the rubbish in your home so that it looks like the sexy minimalist interiors in magazines, imagine that’s the goal of one of your best friends and that they’re phoning you up in despair: “What can I do? I want to get rid of stuff but I’m worried that everything I chuck out I’m going to need sooner or later, and all these things I find remind me of the things I haven’t done – recipes I’ve never cooked and places I’ve never been to. Help – give me some advice.” In your new role as agony aunt, write down the advice you’d give to your best friend about how to stick to their (your) three goals. Then read the advice you’ve just given, because that is the advice to give to yourself so that you can stick to your goals.

We each get motivated in a different way. Some of us like being told what to do: “if you want to de-clutter your home, start by getting two large black bin liners – one for charity and one for the dustmen…” Some of us like visualising the future as we want it: “Imagine your home looking all spacious and clear. You’ll be able to sit down easily find your cd’s, open your bathroom cabinet without everything falling out.., won’t life be different?” Yet others get motivated by being asked questions: “what’s stopping you clearing out your home? What will inspire you to do it?”




Now let’s think about what keeps you motivated. As you’ve got your pen and paper out, make a list of a few of the things you have achieved, things you’ve stuck to. It could be that you’ve kept your best friend since school, or that you’ve won a medal for your ballroom dancing, or that you’ve just finished reading the entire works of a particular author. What kept you going with those achievements? Was it enjoyment? Competition? Accountability?

I run a business called Life Clubs. In the week we help people make goals – and they then stick to them. Not just those once a year resolutions, but regular small goals that make a difference to your life. You come for one and a half hours (we have Life Clubs all over the country) and you work on yourself and your life and find out how to give them both a boost. You also help the others you meet there feel excited about achieving their goals, so you’re helping yourself and helping another at the same time. It’s what we call “me time” (absolutely essential for everyone) and you come out skipping on a high that lasts all week, especially when you then achieve that weekly goal you set.

We have a few couples at Life Clubs, which is what inspired me to write my new book, The Big Book Of Us: Creating The Relationship You Want. I noticed how the couples in my club were becoming closer through thinking about certain aspects of life together every week, and those who were meeting in the Life Club were also bonding. It made me realise that the materials I’d created for individuals at Life Clubs could also work with couples.

Why not think about making a few goals with someone else this January? What do you want in terms of your relationship for the new year? At Life Clubs, we think about 10 aspects of our life: love and romance; home; creativity; health and fitness; rest and relaxation; friends and social life; career; family; money; spirituality – and how satisfied with them we are. New Year is when you can take a moment to work through these areas together: What do we both want from love and romance in our lives? Are we close enough? Are we having sex often enough? What would I like us to do more of together? Just snuggle up and work on your relationship together or, if you’re alone, think about how much love you’re giving yourself this January and what would happen if you gave yourself more. Remember yourself as a small child, and how you’d spoil that little person. After all, what’s really changed?

Make one of your goals to come to your local Life Club. What could be better than putting all your resolutions into perspective and achieving them?