I heard a saying once that went something like, “Don’t let life happen to you, make your life happen.”
I love this saying because it’s all too easy to let life pass you by. You get caught up in the day-to-day and suddenly weeks, months, even years have passed by.
Life happens, and you end up as a passive bystander.
Feeling that you’ve lost time is hard to accept – but there is a solution.
You can refocus your life and get back in the driver’s seat by doing one simple thing – conducting a life audit.
What Is a Life Audit?
Think of a life audit as a spring clean of your heart, mind, and soul. It’s an opportunity to dust out the cobwebs of things that no longer serve you, recalibrate your hopes and dreams, and ensure you’re living as truly and purposefully as you can.
Take Inventory
With a life audit, you segment your life into categories that matter to you and then compare your current lifestyle, goals, and actions against your ideal life.
It allows you to remove yourself from the Drama Triangle – situations where you’re stuck in the roles of victim, persecutor, or rescuer – and instead take on the empowered roles of creator, challenger, and coach.
By reviewing what is and what could be, you can then create a plan to take control of your life and step into the greatest version of yourself.
This type of self-authorship also allows you to critically evaluate your beliefs and determine which ones are outdated, and which ones need to be rewritten to suit who you are today.
Just like a regular spring clean, I recommend conducting a life audit at least once a year to help you continually expand your potential.
On top of that, if you ever find yourself feeling misaligned or lost, wondering what to do with your life, conduct a life audit to help you reconnect with your highest self.
Why You Should Audit Your Life
Life audits are beneficial for everyone. If you’re feeling stuck or down, a life audit can help you reinvent yourself by uncovering the gap between your current reality and where your soul longs to be.
Even if you’ve found your purpose in life, life audits are still a terrific idea because they help you to pursue continual progress. As Carol Dweck found in her book, Mindset, we humans feel our best when we’re continuously learning and growing.
Tool for Self-Reflection
To become stronger, bolder, and live a fulfilling life, we need to evaluate the status quo every so often and keep challenging ourselves to live as courageously and wholeheartedly as we can.
Ready for your first life audit? Here’s what you need to know.
How to Do a Life Audit
I’m not going to sugarcoat it. Even though conducting a life audit will be healing for your soul, it can also hurt your heart. It takes courage to look in the mirror and acknowledge areas of your life where you’re playing it too safe, ignoring your needs, or procrastinating.
Take comfort in the fact that any pain you experience is a positive sign that you’re on the road to growth. You’re taking the brave step to change your life and close the gap between who you are today and who you want to be.
So, without further ado, here’s step one:
Step 1: Set Aside Time
Life is a big messy, complex, beautiful thing. So, naturally, your life audit is going to take a little time.
With that in mind, it’s crucial to set aside intentional time to conduct your life audit. This should be time for just you, where you can bring mental focus and be alone with your innermost thoughts for a couple of hours.
If finding that amount of time is difficult, that’s perfectly okay! You can approach your life audit in bite-sized chunks: 20 minutes here, half an hour there.
Step 2: Pick Your Life Categories
To conduct a life audit, you’ll need to divide your life into meaningful categories, with the idea of analyzing the differences between how things are and how you’d like them to be.
The exact categories you decide on will vary depending on your unique vision, but here are some suggestions to guide you:
- Physical Health
- Emotional Health
- Self-esteem
- Personal Development
- Friendship
- Family
- Love Life
- Career/Business
- Giving
- Community
- Passion
- Finance
- Spirituality
Step 3: Reflect on Your Core Values
Now, it’s time to meditate on your core values: the foundations of your truth. Once you understand what you hold close to your heart, you can then discover ways to align your actions and values to reach your goals.
Ask Yourself:
What inspires me to action? What brings me a sense of meaning and fulfillment? When do I feel most connected, loving, and harmonious with the world?
If you’re uncertain about what’s important to you, I’ve written an article on defining your core values with valuable exercises to help you figure out your most deeply rooted beliefs.
You’ll find even more guidance, encouragement, and self-discovery tools in my Take Control Course.
Step 4: Evaluate Life Categories
Next, I’d like you to evaluate your life categories, keeping your core values front of mind. This exercise has two parts:
First, choose one of the approaches below to visualize your life audit.
Then, reflect on the questions I’ve listed for each of your life categories.
Visual approaches
- Numerical Method: Imagine for a moment what a perfect “10 out of 10” life looks like for each category you’ve selected. Then, document what these categories would look like if you were living your dream life. Craft these descriptions as if you’re experiencing them right now, expressing them through affirmations or manifestation statements. Next, evaluate how fulfilled you currently feel in each category on a scale of 1 to 10.
- Mind Map: Take a big piece of paper and put a circle in the middle. Next, draw branches off the center to denote your chosen categories. Using one colored pen, write the things you are currently doing in your life. Next, write the things you’d like to do in another color.
- Pros and Cons: If you find it hard to visualize your dream life, this method is for you.
For each of your life categories, create a list of pros and cons. In the pros section, write down what you think is working well and what you’d like to do more of. In the cons section, write down any habits, activities, and thought patterns that are bringing you down or holding you back. - Wheel of Life: The wheel of life is a free worksheet you can get online that niftily divides your life up into a colorful pie chart for you. Once you’ve printed your template, jot down the amount of attention you’re devoting to each life category and mark the score on the wheel. Then, contemplate how your current wheel of life compares to the ideal vision in your mind.
Questions to guide you
- Am I content in this area of my life, or do I feel unfulfilled?
- Have I set meaningful goals and am I making progress towards them?
- Am I living as my authentic self?
- Do I feel emotionally connected to this area of my life?
- What do I love about this area?
- What do I wish I could do more of?
Step 5: Acknowledge Areas for Improvement
Now, it’s time for the tough part – taking responsibility for any discrepancies between your dream life and your current one. Look through your chosen visual representation and take the time to acknowledge where your reality is misaligned from your inner truth.
Leave Judgement Behind
Resist the urge to judge yourself or be self-critical about any wishes, goals, or hopes you’ve neglected.
Conducting a life audit is about reconnecting with and nurturing your truest self, not shaming the parts of you that have felt scared, lost, or overwhelmed.
Now that you realize that creating your dream life is within your power and control, it’s time to get started. Here’s what to do next:
Step 6: Notice When You’re Stuck in the Drama Triangle
The Drama Triangle is a social model that describes dysfunctional interactions among people, involving the roles of victim, persecutor, and rescuer.
Popularized by psychologist Stephen Karpman, it represents a cycle of conflict and disempowerment and illustrates how people can get stuck in unhealthy dynamics.
Let’s take each role in more detail:
- Victim assumes a helpless stance, feeling powerless and blaming external factors or individuals for their situation.
- Persecutor takes on an aggressive or critical role, often blaming or attacking others, becoming the “villain” in the dynamic.
- Rescuer attempts to fix things for the victim, often enabling their dependence or reinforcing the victim’s sense of helplessness.
By noticing where you are in the Drama Triangle and the roles you might be playing, you can consciously shift towards an empowered approach.
Instead of the victim, persecutor, or rescuer roles, you can instead assume the role of creator, challenger, and coach:
- Creator takes responsibility for their actions and circumstances, focusing on solutions and personal agency rather than playing the victim.
- Challenger encourages growth by respectfully questioning assumptions or behaviors, prompting self-reflection and growth without attacking or persecuting.
- Coach provides support, guidance, and resources to assist others in their self-empowerment and problem-solving journey without fostering dependence.
By adopting this framework, you break the cycle of disempowerment and take ownership of your actions. This in turn allows you to foster healthier and more supportive relationships.
If you want to learn more about the Drama Triangle and how to remove yourself from it, check out this video by Heide Priebe.
Step 7: Set Your Goals
Your chosen visualization exercise will give you a solid idea of what success means to you. Now, it’s time to craft goals that will guide you forward.
Remember, setting your goals is just the start. Research shows that 92% of people who set goals fail to achieve them. To chart the course towards personal fulfillment, you need an intentional approach to long-term goal setting.
Here’s what I recommend:
- Break your long-term goal into baby steps: You need to know what specific steps to take each day, week, and month to achieve your goals. This will stop your vision from seeming overwhelming.
- Establish metrics of success: KPIs (key performance indicators) to help you know when you’re on the right track.
Step 8: Embrace Resistance
Often, the goals we set involve letting go, as well as taking on new habits.
Learn to Let Go
Whether that’s releasing a relationship that knocks your self-esteem or quitting a habit that harms your health, letting go of people and activities that no longer serve you is a challenging act of courage.
Knowing this is super important. You will feel resistance, fear and sadness as you transform into the next best you.
Know that this resistance is part of the process of becoming and that your heart knows the right direction, even if the path forward doesn’t seem clear right now.
Step 9: Combat the Neutral Zone
Once you’ve written down your goals, you’ll probably feel a lightning bolt of motivation and drive.
But long-term goals take time, especially if you’re working on something major, like starting a new side hustle or running a marathon! And that’s where the neutral zone comes into play.
As William Bridges outlined in his superb book, Managing Transitions, pursuing any long-term goal involves entering the neutral zone – the limbo between your old reality and identity and the new one you are working towards.
The neutral zone feels scary and disorientating, and you may want to retreat back into your old habits and patterns. When these emotions arise, lean on these science-backed tips to stay motivated:
- Keep learning: Embody a student mindset, soak up new info, and tweak what you know.
- Get creative: Whether it’s writing, drawing, painting or sewing, taking part in creative activities will open your mind and keep you moving forward.
- Lean on your support system: Don’t go solo. Grab a mentor or a sounding board (maybe a coach) to provide perspective, comfort, and balance.
- Embrace Risks: Instead of retreating, step out of your comfort zone and embrace the new. That’s where the magic happens.
- Don’t Quit: PERSIST! Keep pushing, keep hustling. Don’t let self-doubt or imposter syndrome hold you back from living a badass life.
Step 10: Make Room for Failure
There’s no such thing as an overnight success. Achieving big goals takes plenty of work, plenty of time…and plenty of failures.
Embrace Failures
I want to stress that these failures aren’t something to feel ashamed about or afraid of. In fact, it’s only natural to experience failure along the way when pursuing your dreams.
Keep in mind that failure is not the end. As the saying goes, rejection is just redirection. Within every failure you encounter, you’ll find learning opportunities, moments of clarity, and an invitation to build internal resilience.
Remember, success isn’t a neat, straight path. It’s a rollercoaster ride of joy, frustration, setbacks and growth. In the end, the failures we encounter along the way are often what makes success feel so worthwhile.
Step 11: Review Progress and Celebrate
Conducting a life audit is a never-ending journey in the best way possible. There’s always more room to grow, to give, and to love.
So, as you chart the course towards your ambitions, I recommend committing to a journaling practice to review your progress, celebrate your success, and ensure you’re still on the right path.
Here are some reflective questions to get you started:
- What went well so far?
- What have you learned?
- What’s the next step?
As you ponder these questions, I want you to be your cheerleader. Resist the urge to focus on what’s gone wrong. Acknowledge your hard work and progress, and give yourself a pat on the back for your efforts. Then, look forward with optimism.
It’s Time to Step Into the Best, Truest, Badass Version of You
Conducting a life audit is the first, bold step towards increasing your sense of self, raising your level of confidence, and creating a path to purpose and personal fulfillment.
The journey ahead will be transformative, challenging and, ultimately, beautifully rewarding.
If you’re looking for help as you maximize your potential, the SoulSalt book is here to help.
Through a series of self-reflection exercises, it will help you kickstart the journey to reach the life of your dreams.
