Home > IELTS Speaking > Recent Speaking Cue Cards > Cue Cards About People > Describe a positive change in your life

You should say: 

They say that it’s never too late to change your ways and that’s something I learnt a while back when I joined a club. I know it doesn’t sound all that exciting but it was a book club. We meet up around once a month in a member’s house – there are ten of us altogether and we take turns to host the meeting – and we sit around discussing that month’s book. 

I joined the club about a year ago and it’s really turned my life around. I mean, I work for a finance company and my job is very high-powered, and extremely stressful. You’re constantly under pressure, working around the clock and what I found worst, I was taking the job home with me, you know, never switching off. 

I have friends and colleagues who do sports or workout every day at the gym as a way to deal with stress but I’ve never been into that sort of thing and when a neighbour of mine told me about this club, I jumped at the chance and went along to the next meeting with her.

What happened was that I bumped into this neighbour in the elevator and I noticed she was carrying a copy of a classic Charles Dickens’ novel Great Expectations, a book I’d been more or less forced to read in my last year in high school. I asked her if she was enjoying the book as a kind of a joke really but she then told me how the novel was all about learning that wealth and social class are so less important than true values like love and loyalty, it struck me that maybe there’s more to reading literature than meets the eye and pretty soon I was hooked.  

For me, it’s been like a breath of fresh air. I’ve made new friendships and discovered a love of literature for the first time in my life. Reading these books, whether they’re classic or modern, gets you out of yourself, and into another world and yet, at the same time, helps give you new perspectives on life in general, especially the issues we’re facing today. The other week for example, we talked about the Tom Wolfe novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities. It’s about ambition and greed in 1980s New York and we all agreed how true the book’s themes ring today. 

At the same time, I’ve found that reading and talking openly with friends about what we’re reading, has helped me so much in my daily life. It’s done me a world of good. You see, I’m not so much tied up in my little world of finance twenty-four-seven.  I have a great social life and my work is on the up and up as well.   It’s made me a much happier person, I think. Yes, I’d say that it’s really been a change for the better. 

Listen to the full tutorial here: IELTS Speaking cue cards answered by an ex-examiner

See the full list of vocabulary here: IELTS Speaking Vocabulary about People, Personalities and Characters