The Life Audit:
Ten Areas,
Three Answers

When a woman tells me she wants to change her life, she almost never means her life. She means a part of it. She just can’t point at which part, so the whole thing goes into the sentence and comes out sounding enormous.

That’s the actual problem. Not the wanting - the size of it. “My life isn’t right” is too big to do anything with on a Tuesday morning, so you don’t. You carry it around for another year instead.

This is the exercise I use to cut it down. It takes about an hour, you need a pen and a piece of paper, and you should not do it on your phone.

Why three answers and not a score out of ten

Most self-assessment quizzes ask you to rate each part of your life from one to ten. They’re useless, and here’s why: a scale lets you hedge. You give your marriage a six, your job a five, your health a four, and you finish with a page of middling numbers that tell you nothing except that things are a bit meh - which you already knew.

So you get three words instead. Only three, and you have to pick one.

• Still true. This fits the woman I am now. Not perfect - nothing is - but if I were choosing today, I’d choose it again.
• Expired. This was right once. It genuinely was. It isn’t any more, and I’ve been carrying it out of habit.
• Never chose it. I didn’t pick this. I inherited it, or agreed to it to keep the peace, or drifted into it because it was what women like me did.

Three words force a decision that a number lets you avoid. That’s the whole design.

The ten areas

Write the ten down the left of the page. Beside each one, write one of the three words. Don’t think for long - your first answer is nearly always the honest one, and everything after it is negotiation.

Use the question underneath each heading, not the heading itself. The headings are too polite; the questions are the actual thing.

1. The work itself

Not the salary, not the title, not whether you’re good at it. The eight hours. If the money were identical somewhere else, would I stay?

2. Money

Not how much. How it’s handled, and by whom. Do I know what’s in the accounts, and do I have any real say in what happens to it?

3. Your marriage or your partner

Whole and honest, in one question. Are we two people building something, or two people managing a household?

4. Where you live

The house, the town, the country. Did I choose this, or did it arrive with the job, the schools, or somebody else’s family?

5. Your body

Not how it looks. Am I looking after it, or am I spending it?

6. Your friendships

Who in my life have I actually chosen in the last five years - and who is just still here?

7. A Saturday

This one catches more people than any other. Whose weekend is it?

8. Your role

Every family hands out parts. The organised one, the strong one, the reliable one, the one who doesn’t need anything. What’s mine, and did I audition for it?

9. What you’re learning

When did I last get to be a beginner at something? If you can’t remember, that’s an answer.

10. What you say yes to

In the last month, what did I agree to that I didn’t want to do - and what did that cost me?

Ten lines. Three words. One hour. It’s more than most women give this in a decade.

Now read the pattern, not the words

When you’re finished, don’t read it line by line. Stand back and look at the shape of the page.

If most of it says still true

Then the thing eating you is smaller than it has felt, and you now know exactly where it lives. That’s the best possible result, and almost nobody expects it. Two dead things you can name is a solvable situation. “My whole life” is not.

If two or three say expired

This is the most common outcome by a wide margin, and it’s the normal shape of a life at forty-something. Things expire. The job that was right at thirty-four for reasons that no longer exist. The routine built around children who have left. Nothing went wrong - you changed, and some of the arrangements didn’t change with you.

Expired things don’t need drama. They need renegotiating, and usually one at a time.

If anything says never chose it

Stop there. That line is the most important thing on the page.

That answer means you’ve been maintaining something you never picked, sometimes for twenty years, and part of your tiredness is the maintenance. It is also the line most women want to cross out immediately after writing it, because writing it makes them feel disloyal.

Leave it. You haven’t done anything yet except write a word on paper.

If nearly everything says expired or never chose it

Then this exercise isn’t what you need first, and I’d rather tell you that than sell you a next step. Do the ten again in two weeks, when you’re not in the middle of whatever this week is. If it comes out the same, talk to somebody - a good therapist, or a doctor, or both. There’s no version of this work that goes well while you’re running on empty.

What to do with it, and what not to

Not this: read the page, feel the rush of clarity, resolve to fix all three things, and get precisely nowhere. That rush is real and it burns off in about four days.

Do this instead. Circle one line - the one that would make the biggest difference to an ordinary week, not the one that’s the most dramatic. Those are rarely the same, and the dramatic one is usually a decoy.

Then leave it there. Genuinely. Don’t plan it tonight.

Because the next step isn’t action, it’s arithmetic. Before you change anything you need to know what the current arrangement is actually costing you - in hours, in money, in how you sleep - and what changing it would cost. That’s the step nearly everyone skips, and skipping it is why the January version of this never survives to March.

This exercise is step two of four. Faith, then Awareness, then Numbers, then Clarity. You’ve just done Awareness, which is the one people find hardest and the one that makes all the rest possible.

Put the page somewhere you’ll find it again. You’ll want it in about three weeks.