How to run a life audit, and why it's the best thing you can do.

I’m a big thinker but I love nothing more than taking those big thoughts and transforming them into practical and actionable steps.

There’s nothing I love more than running a life audit. It sounds official but it doesn’t have to be; the basic principle is taking time to reflect on all that’s happening in your life, and making active and purposeful decisions on what to add in or take out.

See life is happening all the time, and without us actively creating it, it can easily just plod along in whatever direction it’s heading without us having actively choose.

Don’t get caught up in the ‘how’ of this - you could do this manually in a journal, on your computer, out loud in a conversation with someone, or mentally in your brain. I like to break down the audit into a couple of different categories:

What are we loving in life right now?

What are we not loving in life right now?

What do we want to do less of?

What do we want to do more of?

The main non-negotiables are that you carve out time for this and make it a very purposeful process, and then that you take action on the results.

You can only really do two things wrong while doing this process:

1. Viewing your life through someone else's lens. It’s super important that you view and evaluate your life through your own lens, not the lens of other people. Your definitions of success need to be your own, not what society thinks success should look like, and your evaluation needs to be based on

2. Be very conscious to define what success looks like on your own terms, not on the terms that society defines. This can be tricky as often these thoughts are very embedded so they become quite unconscious.

3. This is why I often find it’s easier to ‘out loud’ this process with someone you know well, as ideas that are based on societal pressures or influenced by someone elses ideas of what reality should look like are easier to pick up when we literally out-loud them.

ACTIONS

What actions do I need to take once that will give me a

What changes do I need to make on a daily basis

Actions

Following your audit, it’s action time! Based on the decisions you’ve made through reflection, it’s time to get to the practical implementation of those decisions. I find that my actions generally fall into a few distinct categories:

Navigational actions -

Taking these actions is like physically grabbing the wheel and steering your ship in a new direction. Without these big-picture pivots, we can generate as much propulsion and speed as we like, but we will still be progressing towards the same destination which ultimately, we haven’t really chosen. To change the destination we must physically change our course, and that’s done with taking big-picture action.

Sometimes initially, the only action that’s required is actually bringing these big-picture decisions into your consciousness by identifying them and physically writing them out or telling someone about them. By bringing these ideas into a conscious state we are essentially upgrading our software and our perceptions of reality to be in alignment with your new reality. It sounds a bit airy-fairy but trust me this is a super essential step that kicks off a whole flow-on effect of sub-conscious action thanks to our reticular activating system - a fancy little network of neurons in our brain that help us to decide what to focus on. See there’s so much noise and information that our senses experience on a minute-by-minute basis that our brains need to decide what information is ‘important’ for us and therefore what to focus on and what to block out in our brains. You can google the science of this (it’s super fascinating!) but basically in super simplified lamens terms, in identifying consciously what we want in life, our brain seeks out information that’s relevant to that goal and then feeds it to us. It’s kinda like magic.

One-off actions - We’ve consciously re-set our course, and have updated our processing systems, now it’s time to get into taking practical actions to support our new direction.

One-off actions are those that you only need to take once, but that will have a big flow on impact. These are generally structural changes that will support your big navigational change. They’re pretty self explanatory so I’m going to jump to an example here.

EXAMPLE - if you set some financial goals perhaps you need to re-organise your bank accounts system so that your money funnels into different savings accounts automatically, or maybe you need to increase your mortgage repayments. Technically they’re not ‘one-off’ because you’ll want to run the audit frequently and you may find you need to increase that mortgage payment again since you’re doing so well with your savings, but the bottom line is that these actions are ones that pivot you to change direction, and once they’re done they’re on autopilot.

Daily actions - These actions are the small but mighty as they’re the ones that generate speed an propulsion for our proverbial ‘ship’. Our daily actions are the behavioural changes we need to make to be able to achieve our goals - they’re the ‘heavy lifting’ actions and they’re the ones where we want to focus on getting our repetitions in. Without daily actions our ship is pointing in the right direction but we’re just bobbing along in the ocean without actually going anywhere fast.

Let’s continue the idea of our money goals. You’ve increased your mortgage payments and have set up a great ‘money flow’ within your accounts but without daily action we’re not going to be actually earning any more money to service our updated systems. Your actionable daily steps would be to prioritise earning more money on a daily basis - perhaps you need to prioritise actively generating new business leads in which case you might want to block out 30 minutes of your day each morning to lead generation.

Things you can’t control.

As much as I’m a big believer in actively creating your own reality, I do also realise there are some things in life that we can’t control. While we physically can’t control certain situations or people, we can still take ownership of these things in our lives by actively deciding how we choose to feel and react to these things. We always have decisions to make about how we react to certain situations, or how we feel about them.

The importance of doing this regularly.

We grow and change as people constantly, particularly when we’re playing an active role in understanding ourselves and crafting our lives. As a result of this change our goals and direction in life will change, and should change! It’s important to regularly review the life audit process to make sure you’re still in alignment with the direction you’re heading in, or if things need a little bit of tweaking to make sure you’re on the path you want to be on.

Go forth and audit, and then make it a regular thing you do every few months!