Join The Club And Change Your Life

Self- help groups started by life coach Nina Grunfeld are springing up throughout the UK. Sally Williams checks out this new trend – and is impressed.

“Ready? Right, OK, let’s begin. Anything really nice happened to you today?” Silence. “OK, I admit, this can be really difficult. We’re so used to thinking, ‘Oh nothing good happened to me today’, but there is always something nice.” Silence. “Hang on a minute, the sun is shining and that is nice because this morning it was raining! Fantastic!” It is 6.30pm on a Monday in summer. We are in central London, near Parliament Square, and the speaker is a middle-aged woman named Nina Grunfeld, who is “releasing the full life potential” in a group of eight people around a table. To them she is important. She is crucial. She is changing lives. “I went swimming,” volunteers a man with glasses. “Great! Thank you!” beams Nina.

And now, everyone wants to join in. Everyone wants to tell Nina that one thing that made them happy today. Brian filled out his tax form. Sandra read the newspaper. Caroline was offered a promotion. “Although I’m not sure I want to take it.” But anyway, “that’s great news!” says Nina, “Fantastic!”

This opening drill, as any “clubber” will tell you, is from Life Clubs, a chain of self-help groups, which meet once a week, for 90 minutes, around the country. Launched in 2003 by Nina Grunfeld, a 53-year-old-mother of four, Life CLubs provide “a lovely place to go and think about yourself”. It’s not, she stresses, therapy. This missus the point. The point is not to go backwards, but forwards. The point is “personal development” not “personal recovery”. “When you need to lose weight, you go to WeightWatches; when you feel like having an injection of energy, you come to Life Clubs.”

Life coaching is already a big hit with the rich. Madonna, Gwyneth Paltrow and Hillary Clinton are among those who have lapped it up. Companies, too, are increasingly offering sessions to staff. But it is expensive. An executive session can cost anything up to £300 an hour. Even ordinary one-to-one coaching, at £60 an hour, is more than many can afford. Grunfeld feels she has the solution: her group sessions cost only £15. Once a topic has been introduced the members are left to coach each other, albeit under expert guidance.

The term life coaching was coined by Thomas Leonard, a financial adviser from California, in the early Eighties; he had found that his clients wanted broader guidance as well as financial advice. Britain was slow to catch on, but now “personal development” is a new craze. The ranks of advisers, therapists and gurus who claim they can turn your stressed existence around are swelling fast. The Somerset-based Life Coaching Institute saw student numbers treble to 2,000, in 2006, while the UK College of Life Coaching predict numbers will double again by the end of 2007.

But Nina is keen to distance Life Clubs from this bandwagon. “Like counselling, life coaching will go in and out of fashion; I see Life Clubs as something that will always be there when you need a shot in the arm.” The appeal, she says, is that it isn’t intimidating, and you don’t have to feel crazy to need it. Neither does it build up an expensive reliance, as with traditional therapy – you can drop in, as you like. “It’s for people who haven’t particularly got anything wrong with their lives, but every so often we all need a bit of support.” This applies particularly at times of change, for example during a divorce or at retirement. She adds: “Someone said, Life Clubs are like stepping into a warm bubble bath. People feel invigorated afterwards. They come out almost skipping.”

The most important thing people learn from Nina is positive thinking. In person she is straightforward and direct, tall and powerful-looking, but the key to her success is an enthusiasm that borders on religious zeal. Phrases fall from her lips like “maybe is not the right word – you will do that” and “be conscious of your successes” and “what are you waiting for?”

Life Clubs and their spin-off guide, The Big Book of Me – together with her gung-ho, can-do positivity – are aimed at creating the life you want. “I am an eternal optimist,” she admits. But then, it’s an emotional strategy that has served Nina well.

Brought up in London, her parents, both refugees, divorced when she was six. Thereafter, she shuttled between her rich, businessman father and her mother, a former photographer. Tensions induced rebellious behaviour and she was expelled from scholl at 17. A further shock came at 20 when her father announced that he was not her biological father. “My real father had died by then,” she says, “but at least is explained the mystery of where my woolly hair came from.”

Her early career was in graphic design and writing books. She is perhaps best known for Nanny Knows Best, the book and television series based on the wisdom of Nanny Smith, who had looked after her as a child. The turning point, however, was the surprise arrival of the fourth child, when she was 44.

She decided to spend more time with her family, and be more professional about her hobby of advising people. “I’ve always liked helping my friends discover what the passions in their lives really were and helping them get into the careers they could shine in.” She trained as a life coach, and thoroughly enjoyed it.

“I love seeing people change, that is very exciting, but I think what I’m really enjoying is building up my business.” She writes all the material, designs the graphics, and drives marketing. With her Life Clubs – 20 of them from Edinburgh to Tunbridge Wells – she has finally found her métier. “I have come into my own rather late in life,” she says. “I used to want to disappear because of my vast frizzy hair, now I like being the centre of attention.”

Rian Roberts, 68, is a cheering example of what Life Clubs can do. A former divisional MD of a research company specialising in marketing and advertising, Brian retired at 63. At first he was euphoric. He had devoted his life to his career, and providing for his family. By the time he retired, he was divorced with two grown-up children, and was looking forward to freedom and spending time with his new partner.

Four years later he was feeling lost and unhappy. “I was wondering what it was all about really. I had no particular financial worries, and a roof over my head, but something in you calls to create this hive of activity so that you are stressed every second of the day.”

Brian decided to go along to a Life Club meeting. “It was just very useful. It covered things like relationships, change, and how it happens. It produced insights into what was important for me to do at that time – and all for 15 quid a week.” He likes the practical approach. A key element is a wheel-shaped chart with 10 spokes, each representing an aspect of life – money, family, career, fitness, 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. “It gives you a structure for how to think about your life,” explains Brian, “And if you’re not happy with it, you change it.”

After a few meetings, it emerged that one of Brian’s main obstacles to happiness was his home, which he neglected since moving out to live with his partner. He threw away whole chunks of his past: the boxes full of bank statements, the stereo speakers that no longer worked, the first computer he’d bought. He felt cleansed; had been forced to confront what he’d outgrown. He had taken stock and could now move on.

Frances Howard, 68, local historian, was also amazed by the effect of her visits to a Life Club. Among the many attractions she lists: a chance to hear how others sort out their problems (Frances lives alone, works from home, and is widowed) and a welcoming atmosphere; she particularly enjoyed the support of younger people in the group. She said: “It’s not always easy to understand where young people are coming from; sometimes I found I was being a bit reactionary. It’s good to find out what pressures are on them.”

The enthusiasm for Life Clubs is pretty clear. The only problem, it would seem, is finding the time to go. “It almost feels like a guilty pleasure to give oneself an hour or so, and sit somewhere nice and be treated reasonably,” says Jennifer Dodds, 56, a market researcher. She has three demanding daughters in their early twenties,a mother-in-law with Alzheimer’s, and a mother “with bits falling off her.” Women of her age, she points out, “can feel squeezed on all sides”. As a result, when she surfaces from an evening of “positive affirmation” at her local Life Club, she comes out glowing. That’s how good it is.

Back in Nina’s workshop, Big Ben is sounding eight o’clock. “So, tell me what you’ve learnt that you can take out into the world,” Nina asks the group.

They take it in turns to speak. Caroline is not going to be so hard on herself. Sandra is going to take up horse riding. Brian is going to book that trip to Thailand and Colin, a balding thirtysometing who works in HR, when asked to picture what he used to be like, exclaims, “I am a punk rocker! Yes. A punk rocker. And I need to remember that!”