Mutale Nkonde helps out all those among us who have failed on their New Year’s resolutions.

It’s 31 December, you’re trying to squeeze into the perfect black dress. You vow to start doing yoga, look in the fridge and vow to buy more vegetables, trip over a pile of newspapers and vow to become neater. By the time you leave the house you’re convinced you’re a brand-new woman. You go out into the night, determined to kick ass, earn more, inspiring those too weak to change their lives effectively. It’s a new year and a new you. Fast forward six months: are you still on the road to reinvention?

In a straw poll of friends and family, 90 per cent of respondents had abandoned their New Year’s resolutions. When I asked them how they felt about this, responses ranged from blank stares to feelings of intense guilt. Dr Robin L Smith – Oprah’s resident psychologist and author of Inspirational Vitamins: A Guide to Personal Development and Lies at the Altar: The Truth About Great Marriages – says the key to affecting real change is “going in with our eyes wide open”. So, if you start the year with the intention of becoming richer, thinner and better read, you need to ask yourself if your lifestyle services these goals. If not, will you change? This no-nonsense, tell-it-how-it-is approach may be fine in the States, but how will it go down with us surly Brits?

So I went back to the lovable flakes in my inner circle and asked how serious they were about changing their lives. After some eye rolling and teeth sucking, I found that once people had lapsed on the one resolution they allowed the others fall by the wayside. However, this is the kind of thought that Dr Robin guards against. She suggests we use the mid-point of the year to look at where we are, identify new goals and rewrite our resolutions for the next six months. This refusal to fail has allowed black people to prosper throughout the Diaspora. Therefore, it was with renewed vigour that I approached my New Year’s resolution cheats.

We decided the first thing we wouldn’t do was throw the baby out with the bathwater, and so I asked us to pool our achievements. Through this exercise we found out that collectively we were $2,000 richer, two stone lighter and had been to the gym 50 times. We then decided to find out what was really important to us. Saving for Christmas, spending more time with our children and laying the foundations of strong relationships were all seen as key. We then looked for collective ways to reorganize our schedules to mind the kids, thereby allowing for some much-needed adult time. We also planned group activities for the kids to re-enforce the feeling of family and set up a Christmas Savings Club.

The best thing about this exercise is that it took the focus away from the cynicism surrounding pop psychology and made us focus on how to make 2006 the best year of our lives. We were able to transfer this feeling of empowerment to our jobs, relationships and ways of increasing our revenue schemes. The thing most people love about Oprah is her ability to improve our lives – something Dr Robin was able to do over the weeks we took her advice, which is something I suggest to all you New Year’s resolution cheats.