How to do a life audit 
& redefine your midlife  

A Life Audit is a powerful tool of reflection and discovery for all of you midlife women (and increasingly more men) who are feeling lost and directionless.

Midlife can be a time of transition. Life changes. Career changes. Health issues. More responsibilities. Or fewer responsibilities, leaving you with more time, that you don’t know what to do with it.

Empty nesters. Change or end of career. Loss. It can all be very unsettling.

And increasingly, it leaves us questioning how we’re living our life. And how we want to live the rest of our life.

WHAT IS A LIFE AUDIT & WHY DO I NEED IT? 

A Life Audit is a comprehensive life review that helps you gain clarity and direction in all the key areas of your life.

“Intentional living is the deliberate effort to live with direction and meaning. It means making choices about how we use our time, energy, talents, and money.”
~ John C. Maxwell

“Intentional living is the deliberate effort to live with direction and meaning. It means making choices about how we use our time, energy, talents, and money.” John C. Maxwell

It’s a chance to review exactly where you currently are in life, how content or satisfied you are across each key area of life, how you’re currently spending your time, and how you can reprioritise and regain balance.

It’s designed to be illuminating and empowering, evaluating your current life, helping you to identify what’s important to you in life, and letting go of what isn’t.

If you’ve reached this point, you’re one of the lucky ones. You get to redefine your midlife. And choose to live with more purpose, energy, health and happiness.

MY MESSY MIDDLE

Hi, I’m Jules. I’m a Life & Wellness Coach, dedicated to helping midlife women build a life they love after midlife. I help them live with much less stress, and find more purpose, hope and happiness for this chapter of their lives.

I’ve guided hundreds of midlife women to prioritise their wellness and happiness, and design a lifestyle that works for them.

I’ve also redefined my own midlife. I work remotely from a Mediterranean island, doing a job I love. I’m a coffee lover, yogi, introvert and writer. I love nature, especially with my little rescue dog – a midlife woman living life on my terms.

But how did I get here?

I didn’t choose my career. It was never a dream of mine. But I was offered an opportunity, other opportunities followed and it became what I did. And I was good at it. I worked hard, did my best and I kept progressing in my career.

But I never felt fulfilled. I was ‘successful’ but unhappy. And unwell. Stress, burnout, perimenopause, and I didn’t have a healthy lifestyle.

Age 45, I did my very own life review. I’ve shared it later for you to see. Almost nothing in my life was healthy or satisfying. My life needed to change.

I leapt.

Maybe a little too soon as I hadn’t fully designed my new life or put practical steps in place to move forward. But I did have a very clear vision of how my life could be. So I followed my intuition.

Fast-forward, through burnout and breakdown, I’ve become a life and wellness coach and writer, living a healthy, balanced life (mostly), in a beautiful location. Feeling very lucky to have found my purpose of helping other women find a healthier more fulfilled lifestyle that makes them excited about the possibilities of midlife.

I’m glad you’re here. Let’s review and redefine your midlife…

* download your Life Audit Workbook here

LIFE AUDIT 

This review is pretty comprehensive and you will need to set aside some time to work through it. I suggest you give yourself a few sessions to work through everything. That will make sure you don’t become overwhelmed, but it’s also helpful to take some time away to reflect and revisit what you’ve written. 

Not all of the exercises are simple. Some might even be a little uncomfortable, but sometimes we need to be guided gently through that discomfort, so that we can allow ourselves to venture into new possibilities.

I don’t believe there is one strategy, or a step-by-step blueprint that works for everyone. So you don’t need to do every exercise, and you definitely don’t need to answer every question. Consider them as guides. Take an intuitive approach and choose those that feel useful to you. Our heads and sensibilities have guided us to this point of our lives. Let’s invite our hearts and intuition to help redefine the next chapter.

How to get started

Create a nice space where you’re comfortable and not likely to be interrupted. You’ll need a notebook and pen. The space can be peaceful and quiet, or play music if it helps you feel more relaxed and inspired.

Most importantly. Be honest, bold, genuine and even a little selfish. That’s how you’ll get the best insights.

YOUR KEY LIFE AREAS

I believe in a holistic approach to achieving balance and wellbeing in life.

Every area of your life is important and they all impact on each other. If any aspect of your life is out of balance then it will put a strain on the others, affecting everything else and creating imbalance.

10 Key Life Areas:

• Health & Wellbeing (physical health, mental health & emotional wellbeing)
• Career / Business
• Connection & Belonging (relationship, friendships, family, community)
• Personal Growth & Learning
• Finances
• Home
• Purpose & meaning
• Interests & creativity
• Travel & Adventure
• Spirituality
  (later, you’ll get a template to create your own list to make sure it’s right for you)

My Key Life Areas Review:
To demonstrate this step I’ve shared the life audit review of my key life areas that I did back when I was in my corporate career. 

As you can see, this is a pretty strong visual that my life was completely out of balance.

I was working 65-70 hours a week. I was at the height of my career, my finances were good, and I was very happy in my home. But I was starting to experience the physical symptoms of stress, I was in perimenopause, and I was on the edge of burnout.

I didn’t have much time for personal growth and learning and I had zero energy for interests and creativity. I was at a point where I knew I needed more. I had no purpose, life was pretty meaningless, and I had no faith or spirituality.

(For me health and wellbeing are so important that I separate physical health and mental health so that I can keep each separately under review and care.)

Step 1: Identify Your Own Key Life Areas:

Everyone’s key life areas are individual and personal to them. No two lives are the same so you’ll start by identifying your own Key Life Areas so that you can fully personalise this exercise for yourself.

So I encourage you to take some time to consider these key life areas. Delete any that aren’t relevant to you and add those that are so important that they should be reviewed and planned for as part of this exercise.

This the chance for you to personalise this to make it even more relevant and meaningful for you.

Step 2: Assess your whole life as it is right now. 

One by one, consider each Key Life Area and rate or score each area from 0-10
– 0 is if you are completely dissatisfied, or its non-existent in your life
-10 is if it simply couldn’t be any better

This is your life, your exercise, your way. So get creative, be honest, and dream big!

Once you’ve done this initial assessment, we’re going to use it as a foundation to fully explore and set goals for all areas of your life.

Step 3. What’s not going so well?

For each key life area, consider:

– What’s working, what’s not?

– What boosts your energy

– What do you find draining?

Step 4: How do I want this area my life to be?

Think about how each key life area would be if you were living your ideal life.

Describe this ideal in detail.

Step 5: What’s holding me back from making changes?
Fear, time, money, support, responsibilities, playing small, people pleasing, imposter syndrome, procrastination….

Step 6: What’s the first step I could take to change this?

Just one step for each key life area.

You don’t need to think too far ahead right now. We’ll do more planning later. 

MORE QUESTIONS TO HELP YOU EXPLORE & CONSIDER

• Are there any surprises for you?
• How do you feel about your life as you look at your scores?
• Where do you spend most of your time?  
• How would you like to spend your time?
• Which of these key life areas would you most like to improve?
• How could you make time or space for these changes in your life?
• What help and support might you need from others to make changes?
• What change should you make first?
• And what change do you want to make first?
• Are you setting the right priorities?
• What have you accomplished that makes you feel proud?
• What do you want more of?
• What do you want less of?
• How do you feel about your relationships and friendships?
• Can you do more to improve your health and wellbeing?
• What’s impacting on your health and wellbeing?
• Are you comfortable and confident in your own body?
• How do you want to feel in your daily life?
• How can you be more intentional with your time, energy, money or attention?
• How can you give back?
• If there was one key action you could take that would start bring your life into balance, what would that be?

DEVELOPING YOUR LIFE PLAN

A life plan is like a map that helps guide you towards a more meaningful life. Having one can keep you from drifting along with no direction, vision or purpose.

• What is your vision for the future?
• How can you get there?

In your life audit review, you already started to imagine your vision for the future.

Exercise: Picture Yourself…
Imagine that it’s ten years from now.
– Now, try to create an image in your mind of your future life.
– What does your life and business look like on a day-to-day basis?
– Try to imagine is as if you were living it right now.
– Describe how it ‘IS’, as though you are in that moment.
– How does it ‘FEEL’?
– Hold this vision in your mind by contemplating it for a few moments, each and every day.
This practice starts reprogramming your mind towards this new way of life.

Exercise: Picture Yourself…

Imagine that it’s ten years from now.
– Now, try to create an image in your mind of your future life.
– What does your life and business look like on a day-to-day basis?
– Try to imagine is as if you were living it right now.
– Describe how it ‘IS’, as though you are in that moment.
– How does it ‘FEEL’?
– Hold this vision in your mind by contemplating it for a few moments, each and every day.
This practice starts reprogramming your mind towards this new way of life.

Vision Board

A Vision Board is a powerful tool to help daily visualisation and focus on your vision.

You can be creative and add inspiration for all key areas of your life, creating an inspiring collage of images (and words) that will inspire and motivate you towards your goals and vision.

But you need more than visualisation!

Visualisation alone won’t get you to your future. You need to be taking practical steps to begin moving towards your goals.  

Exercise: PLANNING

Goals

– Set at least one goal for each key life area

Personal Development

– What personal development & learning will help you develop the skills you need?

Letting Go

– In Step 5 above, you identified what was holding you back from making changes?
How can you overcome these?
– What / who is holding you back from the person you want to be and the goals and vision you want to live?

Challenges

– What  challenges or obstacles might you face?

Planning Next Steps

– In Step 6, you figured out your first step.
– Consider your next steps and set monthly, weekly and quarterly goals and milestones
– Do you need resources or support?
– How and when will you evaluate and review your progress? 

REVIEW REGULARLY

It’s a good idea to get into the practice of doing this review regularly to understand each key life area at that point in time, how you would like to change those, and actions you can take to move towards your vision.

I do a light Life Audit at least once every 6 months, and a full Life Audit every year. It’s a chance to review what’s working for me, what’s not and then I make plans for the months ahead. 

Annual Review

At the end of each year, or around your birthday, is a good time to look back on the past year, to capture achievements, memories and milestones.

It’s important that we don’t forget to recognise and celebrate milestones and achievements. Capturing memories too, means you have something very special to look back on each year.

Exercise: If this is something you don’t normally do, why not start right now, to capture all you’ve achieved in the past year?

Here’s a simple template you can use to do that:

REFLECTION

Highlights

What were your biggest achievements?
What were your happiest memories?
What are you most proud of?
What were your best decisions this year

Challenges

What do you wish you had accomplished this year?
What challenges did you face? How did you overcome those?
What goals did you not meet? What did you learn from these?
Did you take any risks?

Personal Development

Did you develop new skills?
Any new healthy habits?
What lessons did you learn?

Letting Go

Where did you spend too much time, energy or money
Any bad habits?
What bad decisions did you make?

Community

What people had the most positive impact or influence?
What people had the most negative impact or influence?

The Year In Review

Write 5 words that describe this year.
What are you most thankful for?

Exercise: And if you need a little more inspiration… 

7 QUESTIONS TO HELP YOU DISCOVER YOUR LIFE PURPOSE

These questions can help you to discover your life purpose. As always, be completely honest with yourself:

1. What do you LOVE to do?

2. What do you love to LEARN and TALK about?

3. What SPARKS your creativity?

4. If money was no object, what would you do for FREE?

5. If someone were able to look in your kindle/bookcase/audio library, what would they find?

6. What is it you ALWAYS notice?

7. What would you REGRET not trying?

If you do all this, what results can you expect?

Well done on taking the time to review, reflect, redefine and intentionally create your midlife!

If you’re new to life review and planning, doing these exercises for the first time can seem like a lot. But even though I’ve intentionally kept a simplicity to the process and templates, you will find them to be incredibly insightful, empowering and inspirational.

If you dedicate just a few hours initially, and commit time to regular reviews and a more in-depth annual review (all sounds very corporate, but I promise you its not!), you can:

• Redefine the next chapter of your life
• Feel empowered and excited about the future
• Prioritise yourself and your self-care and wellbeing
• Develop confidence and resilience
• Enjoy huge health benefits including reduced stress, alleviating anxiety, emotional wellbeing and finding peace and calm
• Live consciously and intentionally 
• Live a happy, healthy, fulfilling, more meaningful life

Hi, I’m Jules!

I’m a Life & Wellness coach da Life & Wellness Coach, dedicated to helping midlife women create a life they love after midlife. I help them live with much less stress, and find more purpose, hope and happiness for this chapter of their lives.

I’ve guided hundreds of midlife women to prioritise their wellness and happiness, and intentionally create a lifestyle that works for them.

I’ve also redefined my own midlife. I work remotely from a Mediterranean island, doing a job I love – a midlife woman living life on my terms.

I help you evaluate your life as it is now, design how you envision your dream life then put practical, realistic plans in place to achieve the goal of living life with wellness, energy, passion and purpose.

For deeper exploration and personalised support to redefine your life and wellness in midlife, my coaching programme offers tailored guidance, support and accountability.

Click below to schedule a free 30 minute call with me to start your journey to a wellness, peace and meaning. During our call, you’ll:

• Create a clear vision for a healthy, happy, balanced life.
• Uncover key stressors and hidden challenges sabotaging your goals.
• Leave the session re-energised and inspired to make lasting changes.