When is the last time you stopped and actually asked yourself how you are doing? Not the general “How are you doing? I’m Fine”, but the way deep down the butterflies that make you feel in your stomach. The calling yourself out on your own bullshit kinda how are you doing?
I feel like most of you know what feeling I’m talking about. Because you are here on this page reading about how to do a Life Audit for Yourself in 2023.
What is a Life Audit?
A life audit is an assessment of your life. No stone is unturned. You go through anything and everything that is taking up time, space, mental energy, physical energy, and money… you name it you go through it with a fine tooth comb.
By the end of it, you have a clear picture of what is going well what isn’t and what you need to work on the most. The purpose of doing a life audit is so you can answer the age-old question of “what’s next”?
WARNING: Doing a life audit can be tough. You have to be ready to be COMPLETELY honest with yourself. You have to be willing to admit in certain areas of life are not okay. It is okay not to be okay. As long as you know that you aren’t and you are working towards something better for yourself.
Please put on your self-love gloves and handle yourself with care. Doing a life audit is not meant for you to shit on your life and compare what you have or don’t have to someone else. Doing a life audit is a way to be completely honest with yourself when you tell the world you are fine.
A life audit is a part of self-love because you are admitting to yourself you don’t have your shit together but you love yourself enough to want to grow, experience more joy, and add meaning to your life … So you can become a better version of yourself.
What is the purpose of a life audit?
The purpose of a life audit is to help you create a road map of your life. It takes you from just rolling with the punches to questioning everything and making decisions that align with what you say you want. Working on a life audit opens up a whole can of worms that you may not be ready for.
What I mean by that is you have to deal with past trauma. You are assessing every area of your life and somehow you are opened to the world of intentional living. You are spending time figuring out your core values. Those ideals that are most important to you. You are taking control of your life and making it truly a life you want to live not just living on autopilot.
This knowledge you get from exploring your life frees you from the burden of guessing your wants and needs or making choices based on other people’s opinions.
According to Lisa Olivera, a therapist in Oakland, California, and author of the book “Already Enough: A Path to Self-Acceptance,”
Intentional living comes from living out your values. This means taking action and making decisions that are important to you and true to who you are. Intentional living also becomes “an everyday practice that we might fall in and out of, knowing we can always start again at any moment.
An intentional life brings joy and lowers stress. But sometimes, particularly when you’re making some changes, it can be difficult — especially if your current intentions don’t line up with what you’ve learned in your early life.”
The Inspiration for doing a life audit
Growing up I remember having this mentality that it was me against the world and no one really cared about me. So, F them. I would constantly judge people thinking they were already judging me. In addition to those who were nice to me, I would be rude for no reason. I honestly thought they didn’t really care about me anyway. So why be nice to them? You are probably asking yourself what this has to do with a life audit. I bring this up to show you how doing these audits really changed my personality and demeanor. I went from a not-nice person to wanting everyone to live their best lives.
This mentality lasted a long time. I can’t tell you specifically what changed or when it changed. I just know it did. If you ask me what I think it was, I would tell you it could be all the crappy relationships I was in or the experiences I have had with people who are just unhappy with their lives, those who wanted to bring others down to make themselves feel better. It really made me take a step back and re-evaluate where my life was headed. I am a firm believer that your life reflects those you have around you.
Being with like-minded people
I remember talking to Mike about how I didn’t want to be that negative person anymore. I really sat and thought do I want people to remember me being a complete bitch to them and remembering all the nasty comments I have ever said to or about them? Or… Do I want them to remember how I encouraged them to do things that inspire them deep within their soul? Do I want people to remember me being generous with my time, my words, or anything else I could offer to them?
What really helped was being with someone who has the same goals in life as I do. Definitely, since Mike and I got together a lot of things have changed. Obviously, he is just a naturally laid-back person. Unlike me who is neurotic as well as constantly worried and over-thinks EVERYTHING! I have really embraced being more laid back and really try not to overthink things before they happen.
We talk a lot about where we see ourselves in the future to where it just came naturally for us to answer some life audit questions. When we would discuss our life we always end up asking ourselves the same 4 questions to evaluate who, what, where, when, and how to make our lives continue on the path we wanted them to. Without even realizing it we were auditing our lives together.
What does this have to do with anything? What starts as a simple conversation about aligning our goals and making sure that he and I were on the same page as a couple. This life audit has become something so much more in our lives.
Evolution of our life audit
When I originally wrote my life audit post in 2019 it was about how my fiance Mike and I came up with a system to stay on track with our goals. We answered 4 questions that really help us reflect on who we want to be, who we want in our lives, and how we want to live our lives. We did monthly check-ins and then one big giant audit at the end of the year.
It has evolved in the last 3 years. Especially when 2 of those were during a pandemic. You know that time when we all reflected on our lives and had to make big adjustments within the world?
Not only were Mike and I doing our life audits together as a couple I started doing them on my own. I found myself really questioning everything during the panini. So I started doing life audits on my own time checking in with myself.
Being on lockdown really gave me those feelings of when I was growing up. Just trying to survive to see another day.
Do you need a life audit?
If you are here reading this post and resonating with anything I have written for whatever reason I would say the answer is yes.
There are a lot of signs that you need to do a life audit and you don’t know.
Here are some signs you need to do a life audit:
- You feel stuck.
- You feel like you are living the same day over and over.
- You have feelings over being overwhelmed every day.
- You feel unfulfilled.
- Something is off, but you can’t figure out what it is.
- You feel like something is missing from your life
- Some big change has happened in your life (a new job, moving, a death, or a relationship)
- Your emotions are taking over you
Everyone, at some point, needs to do a life audit. I recommend doing once-a-month check-ins with yourself and then doing a full life audit once a year.
Even if just one thing on this list resonates with you, it might be time for a life audit. Let’s dive into exactly what that looks like.
How To Do A Life Audit
The first thing I recommend if you are anything like me… is to dig through your stash of unused notebooks and grab your favorite pens. Something about handwriting things just makes me feel more connected to what I am doing.
It becomes intentional… There’s that word again, Intentional… Intentionally handwriting your life audit allows you to remember details and certain pieces of information that you would normally not when thinking through or typing out your life audit.
Your brain is connected to your hand. You think of words thoughts and phrases and your hand automatically writes them out for you. Don’t worry about grammar or punctuation. This is not meant to be perfect. This is meant to open your eyes to areas that need improvement or need to be more important and brought to the forefront of your life.
You also don’t have to do this in one sitting. Going through each area of your life can be a little overwhelming especially when you have never done it before.
For your first time, I recommend giving yourself a week or two.
To do a life audit, you need to fully assess your life. As I said before the goal is to have a clear picture of what is going well what isn’t and what you need to work on the most. The purpose of doing a life audit is so you can answer the age-old question of “what’s next”?
Again as I ALSO said before my life audit has evolved into something else. It is a 4 step process.
I do a deep dive into all the areas of my life. When first doing a life audit a deep dive is necessary. You need a baseline on where you are starting from.
Then I ask myself some hard-hitting questions that stemmed from doing that deep dive to maybe work through something that has been blocking me or I answer just some basic questions on which direction I want my life to go. After that I write a summary of what I have learned (remember this is ALL HANDWRITTEN) and Finally, I set myself one area of my life to work on a week.
Area of your life to work on
These are just the basic areas but you can get as specific as you want because doing a LIFE AUDIT IS COMPLETELY CUSTOMIZABLE BABY! You do whatever works best for you.
- Relationships (partners, friendships, family, and one you come in contact with, your community)
- Self-Care (doing things for yourself, adventures, hobbies)
- Career (finding a job you love, making the money you deserve)
- Financial (understanding of, use of, and relationship with money)
- Education (growth, learning, exploration, self-improvement)
- Spirituality (either your religion or connecting with the world around you, nature)
- Physical Health & Wellness (Exercise and eating healthy)
- Environment (your home, your belongings, and the resources you have at your fingertips)
- Online Presence ( social media, technology you use, the millions of photos/files you have)
- Emotional Health ( understanding and working on your emotions, traumas, and self-love)
- Mental Health (self-awareness, mindfulness, outlook on life)
- Daily Life (Lifestyle, Routines, Habits)
When going through each of these areas write the good, the bad, and the ugly. Write everything. Things you love, things you want to change, things to improve. Doing a life audit is not all about the bad stuff and what a shitty person you are. It is auditing everything that IS WORKING and everything that IS NOT WORKING. Remember be nice to yourself.
Questions To Ask Yourself
Asking questions is a big part of getting to others and ourselves. We have to ask hard-hitting questions, especially to ourselves. Out of everyone in this world we need to be completely honest with ourselves. When working through each area of your life there might be a question that you want to answer later write it down so you can answer it here. Make a note for yourself to explore a certain area more when you are done.
These questions are for you alone. They can be as long or as short as you want them to be. If you are not into long-form answers try making a list. Again this is COMPLETELY CUSTOMIZABLE.
The list of questions I ask myself has gotten longer in the past few years. Here are the OG questions
- Where do we see our lives going?
- What kind of people do we want to be?
- What kind of people do we want in our life?
- What have we learned in the last 6 months to a year doing life audits?
These are still valid questions, but I have gotten a little deeper than those.
- How am I feeling about life right now? (stream of consciousness)
- How satisfied am I with each area of my life?
- What is causing me stress lately?
- What brings me great joy?
- Are my time and energy being put to good use?
- Am I causing stress for myself?
- What am I doing to help lessen stress?
- Am I being truthful to myself?
- What is working?
- What is not working?
- Am I finding it easier to make decisions or harder?
- When is the last time I felt truly happy?
- What is my inner Negative Nancy saying these days? (bitch, complain, be negative)
Get honest with yourself. No use in lying to yourself trying to pretend everything is okay and that you are fine when you can’t shake the feeling of something is missing.
Summarize Your Insights
After you deeply analyze your life and answer those gut-wrenching questions. The 3rd step is to summarize what you have learned and what you want to happen. Is there a recurring theme in the things you are admitting to yourself? What can you do to work on this?
Write such a clear picture of what direction you want your life to go in now. Add so much subsistence to your life that you become a force to reckon with. You live your life with no regrets. Be more intentional with each area of your life. Add value to your life so that your decision-making, what you can live with and let go of, and the actions you need to take to figure out the question you have been asking…
What’s next?
Weekly Area Rotations
To make sure that I am working on the areas of my life that I want to. I pick one of the 12 areas I listed to work on for a week at a time. Because I know that if I don’t rotate some things are gonna be put on the back burner and I will never go back to working on them. LOL
So to help keep me on track I do a weekly rotation. If some things don’t need a full week’s attention, I take those few days to catch up on some self-care. Am I really gonna complain about overfilling my self-care cup?? No!
Again you don’t have to pick all 12 areas to work on. This is just my example.
There are 52 weeks in a year. That is 4 quarters a year. I can do work in all 12 areas and still have a quarterly check-in. That means I can work on each area in my life 4 times a year. This is how I balance all of the areas in my life. It doesn’t hurt to try it this way. If not, no biggie. Remember doing a life audit is COMPLETELY CUSTOMIZABLE.
January – March
April – June
July – September
October – December
Then the first week or 2 of January I do a full life audit and go over all the notes I have taken along the way in my handy dandy notebook!
Time to take action!
Doing a life audit you have to be honest with yourself. How are you going to learn from your past to make your current and future life better? When you reach a level of honesty with yourself nothing anyone says or does will throw you off your track. You know yourself so well to your core that nothing shakes you.
That’s when you know your life audit is working.
Until Next Time, Have a Great Day! Remember you are a badass!
