Filling In Your Life Audit - Who Are You?

The Life Audit
by Caroline Righton

Whether you want to simply make more time in a busy schedule or plan a whole new way ahead, Caroline Righton's The Life Audit is the solution you've been waiting for. This totally original life makeover looks at life like a balance sheet, and offers an innovative, practical plan to account for the precious minutes in your day and reallocate them for maximum fulfillment. Righton's easy, step-by-step process will help you evaluate, or "audit," the different areas of your life — from relationships and money to family, career, and more — and use simple worksheets to take stock of where you are and get on the fast track to where you want to be. By doing the Life Audit, you will:

• Discover exactly how you spend your days
• Pinpoint the periods when you are happiest and accomplishing the most
• "Audit" out the things and people that create stress and waste your time
• Spot your potential and be brave about pursuing it
• Make changes that will lead to the life you want

Complete with worksheets, checklists, and the inspiring stories of people who have used Righton's remarkable road map with great success, The Life Audit is the ultimate plan for taking charge of your life and making every minute count. No matter where you are in life — a graduate searching for the perfect job or a retiree wondering how to make the most of your days — you can use this system to figure out where you want to go next. Packed with worksheets, charts, and checklists to walk you through the process, and inspiring real-life success stories from Righton's clients, The Life Audit is ready to help you take control of your life now — because every minute counts!

Chapter 1

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.

Copyright © 2006 by Caroline Righton. Excerpted by permission of Broadway, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Caroline Righton has worked as a broadcaster, journalist, and television producer, but decided to leave her job as a television executive after developing the Life Audit and applying it to her own life. She is now a freelance producer, consultant, and writer who travels internationally, conducting Life Audit workshops. She lives outside of London and is married with two children.