The Life Audit: Handbook for Life - Softcover

Filling In Your Life Audit--
who are you?

Now you are ready to begin filling in your own Audit. My belief is that each of us holds the answers to our own life's dilemmas and decisions if we can learn how to read our innermost feelings and be absolutely honest about ourselves. For you to do that successfully, you need to be very clear about the person you are.

It's highly likely that the person you think you are isn't the person you are at all. How do I know? By making so many unexpected discoveries about myself, and by hearing about those that others have made about themselves. Our personalities and thought processes are like a set of clothes that we put on day in and day out, and frankly don't particularly notice anymore. We don't pay attention to the color, the texture or the weave of the fabric, and we may also have stopped noticing the actual cut or fit.

Even if you are very clear-cut about yourself and what you want to achieve by auditing your life, I expect you will uncover some surprising revelations about yourself. And if your starting point is one of uncertainty about what the future holds, then the Life Audit will add clarity and focus to the dreams and ambitions you don't even know you hold at the moment.

The Life Audit starts by asking you to come up with some simple statements and assumptions in two personal statements. As you proceed through the first stage of the process, you will keep making discoveries about yourself that will change your self-perception. It's going to be rather like getting better acquainted with a person you've met in passing, discovering layers of interests and opinions about them that weren't immediately obvious.

You'll need to get into the mind-set of acknowledging what these things reveal about you. Be kind to yourself; if you unveil some unpleasant characteristics or aspects of your life, acknowledge them and adjust the picture of yourself accordingly. For instance, I had to face up to the fact that deep down I'm lazy. I grasped this pretty quickly when, having created the free time to do more exercise, get on top of the housework and learn to play golf, I then really had to galvanize myself and stop finding other excuses.

Tom understood within a couple of days of auditing how much he avoided dealing with issues that caused him grief. "I was forever putting off sorting out problems--so much so that they would start out as molehills and become mountains. It nearly always involved having to have a frank chat with someone--a colleague, my wife or daughter--about something I was concerned about. I watched myself avoiding situations and finding reasons not to have these confrontations, and then saw the situations getting worse by the minute."

Jane said she felt embarrassed when her Audit showed up her mania for housework. "I wrote on my wish list that I wanted to meet more people, find a boyfriend and have more fun, so what on earth was I doing spending most of the weekend tidying an already tidy home and not going out anywhere?"

Sarah was shocked at how resistant she was to freeing up some time. "I couldn't seem to prioritize at all, and watched myself finding things to do and virtually making the kids need me to be in Mommy or Granny mode all the time." Gillian was the same. "I had a list of things I wanted to do but I was reluctant to give up being needed by others, and even though I complain about it all the time, I heard myself asking my daughter-in-law which nights she wanted me to pick up my grandsons from school."

So be prepared to find some aspects of doing the Life Audit embarrassing or unpleasant. Some professional therapists say you have to learn to love yourself before you can "grow." I think you also need to face up to any personal "bad behavior" and address it, because it's likely to be having an adverse effect on your life or on others. However, by the same token, you should enjoy gathering the evidence that reinforces your good points and that makes you lovable or enhances your life. It's so important that you get to know yourself thoroughly and that you are ultra-honest with yourself.

An important aspect of your ability to be candid is how private you will be able to keep your notes. It's going to be hard enough at times being honest with yourself about some aspects of your life, let alone writing things down that may fall into the wrong hands. Remember, you may be writing down the names of friends you plan to drop, bad personal habits you want to break, your innermost wants and desires, or health worries you'd only care to share with your doctor. You should consider the impact of telling partners, family or close acquaintances about doing the Audit. Obviously there will be curiosity and, if there are any negative entries about them, the potential for domestic drama. However, the experience of most Life Auditors indicates that doing the Audit becomes a talking point, a forum for discussion about the things that matter in life generally and communally, even though you are essentially doing it for yourself.

By necessity you'll need to keep account of what happens in your life each day. That means writing it down, and if the thought of note-taking seems daunting, be reassured by the experience of others that it quickly becomes an addictive process. You can put as little or as much time as you want into the process, and you can make the notes as brief or as detailed as you need to reach the informed conclusions you are aiming for. Even one-word prompts might suffice. Some of the charts may not seem relevant to your life, and you may choose not to fill them in at the moment. Remember, though, that the more data you collect the more information you have to work with and the more surprising the discoveries you may make. Pencils poised, then? Let's begin!

Personal Information--
facts and figures

The first thing you need to do is to fill in the two sheets that provide a kind of personal "situation report" before you start deciding on any changes you want to make to your life. The first of these, the Personal Information page (Chart 1), can say as much or as little about you as you wish. It's an opening statement of fact about who you are, what you are, where you live, with whom and doing what. It's all straightforward information, which makes it a pragmatic starting point, the sort of information you would put down on an application form. When I began my Life Audit I was overwhelmed by what I saw as a sprawling and chaotic life that needed such a radical overhaul that I couldn't see where to start. Stating the proverbial obvious seemed as good a place as any.
The main function of this page, then, is to get you on your way--you won't need any soul-searching to fill in the boxes, and it will take only a few minutes to do. There is space at the top of the page in which to put a passport-size photo of yourself if you want to. This is an optional extra, and might seem an odd thing to do in a journal that is "for your eyes only." But after all, you are doing this exercise because in a sense you have lost sight of yourself, and on a page that says, "This is what you see," a picture seems rather appropriate. The first time I did the Audit I didn't bother to stick in a photo, but when it became a more formal process, I did. I found it added a dimension of connection with myself as well as augmenting the process of looking at someone I quickly realized I didn't know as well as I thought I did. Throughout the Audit process I kept going back to the Personal Information pages, and I would find myself looking rather quizzically at the picture, with varying degrees of confusion and dawning comprehension of the person in it. Don't tell me you've never talked to your reflection in a mirror while shaving or putting on your makeup--it's that sort of thing. But it's absolutely not compulsory.

At the bottom of the page there is a blank section for adding any further information that is pertinent only to you. Drawing on my experiences and those of others, I've tried to include most areas of life in the questions. But there may well be other issues, facts and statements that constitute a very important component of what makes up you, and at each stage and on most charts of the Life Audit there is space for you to add individual data about things unique to you in the statement box.

The example I've filled in here is just to get you started.

Really Personal Information--
ambitions and frustrations

Now, think back to the reasons that prompted you to buy this book, because those will inspire what needs to be written in this section. Presumably the idea of "auditing" your time grabbed you. Perhaps that's because you have a list of things you long to do but never get around to, or maybe you are fed up with having to spend time doing things you dislike.

Chart 2, your Really Personal Information chart, will sort out which parts of your life are worth hanging on to and which need to be minimized, if possible. It also asks you to confront those nagging regrets we all have and, most important of all, to write down your dreams, large and small.

It's a really useful exercise and you'll immediately notice some recurring themes--after all, most regrets have an opposite desire on a wish list. What you have to do is find a way to disperse the sadness of lost opportunities and realize the dreams. Don't exclude anything on the basis of it being too small or too large. If you regret picking at that spot that has now left you with an acne scar, write it down. If you wish you could change the world, put it down on paper. If you don't know where to start identifying your feelings about your current life, wishes and regrets, try some self-interrogation.

Ask yourself these questions:

· What happens in your day-to-day life that makes you grumpy?
· What things in life do you look forward to?
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