“Change is inevitable. Growth is optional.” —John C. Maxwell.
It is common for everyone to desire to put in more effort and progress toward accomplishing their goals and targets. However, before improving the state of your life, you must know how you are doing at the moment.
Therefore, understanding how to have a life audit and employ it as a tool for personal development is a crucial skill that every person should have. Anyone intentional about building the life of their dreams knows that the quote above is correct.
The process of growth is a process of change. However, it is essential to understand that growth is first a conscious decision to be willing to put yourself through learning, unlearning, and relearning all that you need.
In such a process, the concept of having a life audit comes in. You can define a life audit in simple terms as a process in which a person evaluates, examines, and makes positive changes to diverse parts of their lives.
What Does It Mean To Audit Life?
The essence of a life audit is to provide you with more clarity about your purpose and the direction of your life. To have a life audit means to put yourself in a condition that allows you to scrutinize specific areas of your life.
Doing so gives you more control and a clear-headed view of where you are going in life. As a result, it becomes easier for you to prepare for the future and enable you to live the life of your dreams.
Think of the process of having a life audit as cleaning your room on a beautiful morning on the weekend. First, remove all the dirt, blemishes, and unnecessary items that keep the room clogged and filthy.
How do you often feel after cleaning up the room? You usually feel a lot more confident, relaxed, and satisfied. That’s the same effect that comes with a life audit. A life audit leaves your soul refreshed and your mind satisfied and ready for growth.
And this is why it is essential to learn to take a pause and reflect on what you might be doing right or wrong and what might be preventing you from growth.
Whatever answers you might be looking for in your career or personal life, it all begins with the conscious decision to make changes, and committing yourself to a life audit is one.
10 Tips To Have A Life Audit
It is widespread for folks to ask questions like, “how do you carry out a life audit?” It is one thing to know you need to change your life. It is another thing to know how to have a life audit.
Questions like this made me put this article together. In this article, I will be putting you through everything you need to know on how to have a life audit in 10 straightforward steps. Let’s dig in!
1. Choose Categories You Wish To Audit
Putting yourself through a life audit comes with knowing what you want first! Yes! The first step to learning how to have a life audit and a successful one is to understand what area of your life you want to improve and the problems you need to fix.
A quick tip? Take a pause. Look at specific areas of your life and check how much you have grown and the current challenges you experience regarding that part of your life.
Once you notice that you are making little or no progress and you can’t seem to find or fix the problems that have become limiting, then it’s a sign that you need to evaluate that part of your life.
A suitable method for recognizing categories of your life that need auditing is conducting a SWOT Analysis for every area of your life. Doing this will give you an extra clear picture of the current state of your life and where you need to work.
It will also prevent you from constantly improving one area of your life and leaving the others out, which is a form of imbalance.
Deciding to audit every area of your life at once might be overwhelming. So, I suggest that you select one category advisably, the most demanding and important one, and begin.
After some time, you can progress into auditing other areas of your life as you progress. Here’s an exercise that can help you create categories of your life that you wish to audit.
Get a notepad and begin to write down one goal, dream, or wants until you run out of what to write. You will notice that they all fall into different categories as you continue.
Then, begin to place them under each category below. You can add others too.
- Health
- Family
- Skills
- Finances
- Fun
- Career
Try to keep an open mind while doing this. The essence of this exercise is to highlight and expose things tha fall under your values.
2. Set Parameters For Rating Yourself
Sometimes, the best way to make actual progress is to set outstanding standards for your growth and success.
Another powerful method of knowing how to have a life audit is setting measures to grade and track your efforts and growth speed.
Setting parameters for rating yourself will allow you to become aware of your progress and how much improvement you need. When done correctly, it can also serve as a pointer for identifying areas that need work.
These boundaries will also serve as the tools for marking the borderline between success and failure.
In setting those parameters, you must ensure that they challenge and influence you to work harder and, at the same time, fair enough for your current level of competence and capacity.
A mistake you must avoid is setting parameters that will not challenge you to be better and leave you to remain mediocre or average. Be free to use whatever grading system that you are very comfortable with.
The most important fact remains that your grading metrics or system must be easy to understand. This is so that it can be easy for you to achieve consistency in your grading after each audit.
A grading system like this might be helpful:
- Very poor
- Poor
- Satisfied
- Very good
- Excellent.
If you feel like the system above is too simple for your gradings, you can add decimals to give a more detailed perspective to your grade sheet.
3. Define The Frequency Of Rating Yourself
One tool that you will find very helpful in learning how to have a life audit is the consistency you grade yourself. Consistency is a potent tool, especially when unleashed with a beautiful combination of diligence and hard work.
However, in knowing how to have a life audit, you must be careful and pay attention to how much you place yourself under ratings and self-evaluation.
Grading yourself in the context of a life audit every time is not very advisable, especially if you want to see the real difference in your growth process.
Hence, when rating yourself, ensure that you give a little time gap to help you see the changes that must have occurred within the time difference between your last and next grading session.
Time is a very influential factor that you must learn to consider during growth. It would be easier to see how well you have progressed when a healthy time difference exists between your growth process.
Another factor you should consider when determining the consistency of grading yourself is the category involved. For example, it would be unwise to use the same grading frequency for both your exercise and financial life.
Growth takes time! And if you want to measure how fast, slow, or well you are doing, you must learn to use the correct grading frequency for the right category.
For example, you can decide to set your rating frequency for your workout and health goals to be monthly and twice a month for your finances. It will be easier for you to recognize and see the difference when there is a healthy time gap.
4. Use Your Values Rather Than Categories
If you don’t feel too comfortable about using categories for understanding how to have a life audit, you can choose to use your values instead.
Values are a more excellent pointer to what we consider significant, healthy, and virtuous to our personality.
A lot of factors influence values. Things like exposure, personality types, and environmental influence are a few influencing factors that affect our values as persons.
Seeing just how influential the above factors are on our lifestyle, then a good bunch of our values is a product of those factors. A question that I am pretty sure you might ask is; how do I know or recognize my values as a unique individual?
Simple! Here’s an exciting activity that can help you figure it out. I outlined them in steps to make them easier for you to follow and understand.
- Write down a list of things that seem important to you. Feel free to make a list as long as you want.
- Do not hold back. So as long as it catches your fancy, then there is a tiny bit of relevance that you have subconsciously attached to it. Keep writing until you run out of things to note.
- Read through the list slowly. You will notice a trend of similarity amongst a few of them. Take out a separate piece of paper and carefully select and place similar items under the same margin.
And there you have it. A simple list of your values. You will probably find items like “hanging out with friends” or “meeting new people” under the same margin if you value relationships.
After you have an idea of your values, you can now begin to grade yourself in response to each value.
For example, a person with solid values of hard work and productivity can grade himself using how much time he spends in productive activities. Another person who values good time use can grade himself based on time management skills and habits.
5. Use Thought-Provoking Questions
Thoughts are potent tools that have been in use since the existence of intelligent, ancient human civilizations.
The ability to think, create and proffer solutions to the many problems that enslave humanity was considered an almost god-like skill in those times.
In understanding how to have a life audit, you must know how powerful your thoughts can be. Your thoughts are like machines that can help you explore the rich earth of your mind, thus providing you with solutions and clarity.
Hence, if you must learn how to have a life audit, you must be willing to take advantage of your thoughts. An excellent way to begin is through thought-provoking questions and meditation.
Although for it to be effective, it will require you to be brutally honest with yourself, it is a technique that you will find to be result-yielding.
Here’s an exercise that can help you use your thoughts as tools during a life audit session.
- Get alone with a blank piece of paper in a quiet environment.
- Pick a category or a value that seems to be very challenging to you at the moment.
- Ignite your curiosity and begin to ask yourself questions. Questions like, “Where am I getting this all wrong?” “Am I truly growing?” “How can I get better?” will help you crosscheck your progress and help you identify problems and generate solutions to them.
- Write down whatever answers come and begin to use the solutions you acquire.
Besides the fact that thought-provoking questions can be beneficial when conducting a life audit, they can also help you gain clarity and build a more focused perspective on your desired goals.
6. Study Your Behavior, Actions, And Results In The Previous Months
A wise man once said, “a person who does not know history is bound to repeat it.” So an excellent way to prevent yourself from going in circles with a poor sense of growth is to compare yourself and the changes you have experienced in previous times.
One of the many advantages of studying your behavior, actions, and decisions made in the past is that it helps you identify vital mistakes you might be making. And that, in turn, gives you room for you to make the necessary changes and improve the quality of your life.
Evaluating your past decisions and actions can also give you a clearer picture of the possibilities in the nearest future and how you can place yourself in a more advantageous position.
Sometimes, it is easier to predict the future by studying the past and present occurrences through a constructive and honest evaluation.
Therefore, if you must learn how to have a life audit and take full advantage of it, you must learn how to scrutinize and examine your past.
Constructively evaluating your behavior and attitude can also be a source of encouragement and comfort in difficult times, especially when there is progress.
Often, we get caught up with a single setback that we lose sight of the bigger picture. The history of your previous life audits and the growth made as a result can prove that things are generally getting a lot better for you.
7. Rearrange Your Priorities
When arranged and defined adequately, priorities can be a vital source of direction, among other things. Therefore, in learning how to have a life audit, you must understand how important having the right priorities are in your growth.
Priorities are needs, goals, or desires of utmost importance to us. The essence is usually determined by critical factors such as urgency, demand, and available resources.
Have you ever come across the term “laser focus?” The word defines a state of being utterly focused with an edge-cutting ability to ignore distractions and waste time on frivolous activities.
Having the right priorities will help you separate your wants from your needs, eliminate distractions, and achieve laser focus. When used correctly, your priorities can become a crucial pointer in helping you determine how to have a life audit session.
Here are a few questions that can help you pinpoint your immediate priorities.
- What are my present and my most demanding needs?
- How does this affect my future positively?
- What areas do I need growth?
Answering these questions will help you highlight your priorities correctly and in order of importance and urgency.
You can even use the economic scale of preference technique to help create a more detailed analysis of your priorities.
8. Create An Action Plan For Your Goals
The actual power of a life audit is not just the clarity it provides. Instead, the force behind a life audit as a result-providing method is the measure of transformation that it brings to a person who has learned to utilize it properly.
Hence, after performing the above steps, the next phase in a life audit is a plan to achieve your goals. A plan is a series of well-structured steps that advance the progress of a goal or objective during its application.
The essence of a strategy is to enable you to channel your resources properly, make smarter decisions, and hit your targets on an excellent scale.
For each value/category/question, ask yourself what steps you need to take to get a better score in your next audit. Sometimes, it might be easily noticed and sometimes take a bit of research.
Creating an action plan to achieve your goals will require you to spend hours, sometimes days, researching to understand better the metrics and working principles within the niche for that goal.
Often, you might need to seek help from an expert or someone who already has success in the field of interest. Understanding the factors that affect the niche for your goal places you in a better position for success.
After concluding your research, begin to outline clear steps you intend to take after getting the necessary information from your study. To find tips on how to create an effective personal development plan, check out the guideline provided here.
You can also attach possible challenges you might encounter to make you mentally prepared and give you a more realistic perspective of what execution might look like.
The significant aspect of learning how to have a life audit is mastering how to create tailor-suited strategies to achieve your goals.
9. Crosscheck Your Goals And Set New Ones
Here is another vital tip that will help you learn how to have a life audit.
Sometimes the reasons we never seem to grow are a result of the kind of goals we have.
Having a life audit is a call to review the goals and targets.
In reviewing your goals, you might be shocked to find out some of them are either redundant or no longer useful for the direction your life is taking.
Goals serve as our aim, the mental picture of what we want to do or become within a phase-in time. But, like all other necessary factors for success, sometimes they need to be re-evaluated and edited. Pick out the last set of goals you wrote down and ask yourself a few questions.
- Are these goals necessary for the achievement of my dreams?
- How well have I implemented them?
You can add more but keep in mind that the answers you get from the above questions will determine the next step. So, after reviewing your present goals, scrape out the irrelevant ones and set new ones.
Do not hesitate to set more challenging goals than the previous ones. You can even use resources like Goal Chaser to help you set standard goals and achieve them!
Get A Copy Of The Goal Chaser Here
If you seem satisfied with your present goals, it’s alright. Just ensure that you put more effort into execution.
10. Use The Levels Of Personal Consciousness
A tool that will be very helpful while mastering how to have a life audit is Barrett’s seven levels of personal consciousness.
Barrett’s model of personal consciousness attempts to explain the planes of awareness that individuals come into during growth and success.
Using a tool like that for auditing your life helps you discover what plane you are, the realities there, and how you can grow into a more responsible and successful person.
You can combine Barrett’s seven levels of personal consciousness with life audit checklists or life audit workbooks as a quick and practical part of your life audit sessions.
First, identify the level you are currently at, and put efforts into moving to a higher level in the nearest future.
Conclusion
Sometimes having a life audit is not something you can do alone. Being in a virtual or physical environment that allows you to have the right set of people around you can be a massive key to personal growth and development.
You can find and create such beautiful relationships on online platforms such as Little Steps, Big Miles community on Facebook or follow the community on Instagram.
Remember that a life audit aims to help you grow into a better version of yourself consistently. As you employ these principles, ensure that that purpose is not defeated.
Sharing is caring!
INSTAGRAM || FACEBOOK || TWITTER || PINTEREST || YOUTUBE Â || LINKEDIN