“When little things start to bother you, girlfriend, it might be because you need more big things in your life.”

Now that’s the best New Year’s advice I received. It’s from Mike Dooley. He says: “Sign-up, enrol, book the session, take the class, apply, interview, practice, try out, and above all, be with friends, old and new.”

The reason we don’t do these things is because of “the little stories we tell ourselves”. That’s the name of one of the chapters in Anna Quindlen’s memoir, “Lots of candles and plenty of cake’. The chapter is a story of balance, strength, persistence and determination and . . . at the end of it Anna stands on her head.

“Oh, those little stories we tell ourselves,” she writes. “They make us what we are, and, too often, what we’re not. They are the ten commandments of incapability, cut to order. I can’t cook. I’m not smart. I’m a bad driver. I’m no jock. Maybe they’re even true. It’s hard to tell at a certain point. The little stories we tell ourselves become mythic, difficult if not impossible to discount or overcome.”

Anna says that one day her doctor gave her an unexpected prescription. On the pad she had written: “Get a trainer”. Those trainers not only led Anna to dead lifts and one-legged squats, but also to question the little stories she’d so long told herself about her strength and balance.

She writes that there’s something seductive about the thing we believe we cannot do, the achievement that seems out of reach – like standing on your head. “I imagine it’s what keeps people climbing mountains or surfing during storms, that sense of going to the edge of possibility and then over it successfully.”

“I know that along the way I told myself a little story about every stop, a story that always contained the word can’t,” Anna writes. “But one day, reporter that I am, I decided not to write the story in advance of the facts.”

So, girlfriend, how do you get to tell yourself a different story so that you can put more big things in your life? Life coach Marie Forleo says that there are five powerful questions you can ask yourself to bring more clarity in your life, whether you’re starting 2024 feeling super clear and fired up about what’s to come or you’re feeling stuck, lost, unmotivated or just “meh”.

Marie, whose motto in life is that everything is figure-out-able, says the ideal thing is to get out of your everyday typical environment when you ask yourself these questions. Go sit in a coffee shop or on a park bench and write down your answers by hand.

• Where am I craving something better in my business or life? Dissatisfaction is a good thing here – it’s your soul nudging you to grow. Pay attention.
• What truth am I pretending not to know? What are you avoiding looking at? Maybe it’s something embarrassing or disruptive. This question points you towards areas of life that you don’t want to deal with. Maybe it’s telling the truth about a relationship you’re in, your finances or your health? These are the areas that could be creating massive pain if you stay in denial.
• What rules in business or life have I been told to follow, but they don’t work out for me? Marie says that you have to challenge the so-called rules. There’s nothing that says you have to stick to the status quo.
• If I don’t change my daily habits, will my life be better or worse 36 months from now? Those months will pass in any case. Daily habits play a huge rule in outcome – it often happens without you even noticing. If you stay unconscious of those habits, you’ll probably stay on auto-pilot.
• What do I need to let go of? It could be a physical clean-up of your office or home, but it could also be non-physical things, such as an emotional pattern, a goal, project, expectation of yourself or of other people.

Don’t censor your answers. Just write down whatever comes up in your mind and heart. Chances are that, when reading what you’ve written, you’ll start seeing that some things are just another little story you keep telling yourself.

This could be the year you start refusing to tell it.