How to make a plan to get you from where you are now to where you want to be
By Sam Hook, Life Coach at Uniquethinking
Taking stock of your life can help you analyse what you’d like to do differently to transform where you are now into where you want to be.
It’s easy to feel lost, overwhelmed and aimless in life and, if you don’t know what you’re doing or where you’d like to be heading, a life audit can help you to build your life with intention. An audit may well bring you new insights and will get you thinking about what you want from life, as well as creating more clarity.
Conducting a life audit can mean the difference between living life by default or living your life by design and with purpose.
There are many areas in which you can conduct a life audit depending on what’s important to you. Here are a few you might like to consider:
- Your career
- Your relationship with a partner
- Your skills/education
- Your finances
- Your relationships with friends or family
- Your living conditions (how clean and organised your home is, and how comfortable you feel in your home)
- How you spend your time
- Your health/fitness level
- How happy you are
- Your spirituality
- Your leisure time
- How much fun you’re having
- Your appearance
- Your weight
Here’s how to conduct a life audit:
- Choose which areas you’d like to include in your audit from the above list.
- Score each area out of 10 in terms of how successful you feel it is.
You could use metrics that are important to you and your situation. For example:
Relationship with your friends
- Do I remember my friends’ birthdays and special occasions?
- How often do I speak to my friends on the phone?
- How often do I see my friends?
- Are my friends supportive of me and my goals? Am I supportive of them?
- Do my friends have healthy lifestyle habits?
- Do my friends enrich my life?
3. Design a form that you’re going to use for your audit. It can be something very simple, such as my Life Audit form (pictured).
4. Once you’ve determined where you are now, list out the problems. Decide where you want to be and then put together an action plan.
5. Carry out your action plan and progress your plans with a friend or a life coach at least once a month.
Your Wheel of Life
You might like to also see elements depicted as your ‘Wheel of Life’.
To do this, add eight sections that represent aspects of your life. Next, take the centre of the wheel as 0 and the outer edge as 10, ranking your level of satisfaction with each area out of 10 by drawing a line to create a new outer edge (see diagram). The new perimeter of the circle represents your own ‘Wheel of Life’.
Once you have your wheel, answer the following questions:
- Describe what kind of ride this would be if the wheel were real.
- How do you feel about your life when you look at the wheel?
- List the areas that you need to work on most
If you need help conducting your audit or would like to work on your own goals while being accountable to someone in order to achieve them, contact Sam at Uniquethinking Coaching at [email protected]
Sam is also running a series of workshops in 2021 with the first entitled Spring into Action, taking place on 27th March in Newcastle. You can book your place here.
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