The Life Audit

Episode 5 of The Reset Series is about something most of us avoid: taking an honest look at the life we’re living.

The Life Audit explores the relationships, habits, routines, environments, and inner narratives that shape us — and asks whether they still align with who we’re becoming. This episode is a reminder that exhaustion isn’t always about doing too much; sometimes it comes from carrying things that no longer belong to you.

I talk about burnout, emotional disconnection, people-pleasing, digital overwhelm, self-worth, and the quiet grief that can come with growth. But more importantly,  I talk about the reset — the small, honest changes that bring you back to yourself.

Because a reset doesn’t always mean rebuilding your life from scratch. Sometimes it simply means remembering who you were before the world told you who to be.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hi everyone and welcome back to the reset series. Today we're going to talk about the life audit. And when I talk about the life audit, what I mean by that is that you take the time to actually look at your life and you think to yourself, Am I happy with the life that I'm living? And this might be, you know, at a time in your life where you have your home, you have a beautiful home, you have a lovely car, you have a partner, you have a good job, you have all these things to the external world looks like you're achieving in your life. And it looks like you actually should be happy. But the thing about it is you realize that you're actually just managing your life. You're getting up every day, you're ticking your boxes, you're managing it, but you're not actually living your life. And remember, there is a very big difference between managing your life and actually living your life, like living your life to its fullest. And I've said this so many times before, and I'm gonna continue to say it again, but we only get one life. And I spoke about the dash between the day we're born and the day we die before, but like I can't emphasize that enough. Like it's such a small little window, and so many of us just function through life. You know, we show up, we reply to emails every day, we reply to WhatsApp groups, so many of them actually were inundated with being contacted in so many different channels right now, and we go through the mundane processes of life of going to work every day, sitting on the bus with your headphones on, heading into a job that maybe you haven't asked yourself in the last five years, are you happy with that job? You know, maybe you took that job five years ago with the intention of staying there for a year, and then in between that time, you know, you had a child, or you got some loans out, or you got a mortgage, or you know, you're in a financial situation that you can't get out of, and you've forgotten that five years ago you said you'd only take that job for a year, and then you were gonna go on and fulfill your dreams, and now five years has passed, ten years has passed, and you know you haven't thought about it, you're just functioning every single day, and that's what happens so much to people that they go through life and they start to function, and then they actually don't ask themselves anymore. Um, am I happy with this? Like, is this the relationship I want to be in? Is this the home that I want to live in? Is this what I envisaged my life looking like all those years ago when I had dreams and aspirations? Um, because remember, like at one point in our lives, we all had high dreams and aspirations about what we envisaged our life to be. And life, you know, has a way of throwing things in your direction that sometimes it brings you on different avenues than what you originally planned, and then we lose sight of what it is, you know. And I suppose it's important to say that a lot of people think about an audit, and like you know, a lot of us do audits and work and stuff like that, but a lot of us think about an audit in terms of like you're gonna audit your business or you're gonna audit your finances, you know. So, like if you're if you're running a business, well, you're gonna audit that regularly, you know, you're gonna make sure that you're getting value for money, that you're not operating at a loss, and it's the same like in your home, you know, you're gonna manage your finances really carefully to make sure you can pay your bills, to make sure you can have whatever holiday it is, but I can guarantee you that almost nobody audits their emotional well-being. And like your emotional well-being is at the core of absolutely everything. And like, I'm speaking about this from my own personal experience with emotions. Like, if you're in a situation and that's a job, your home, a family, a friend, anything that is not emotionally in line with who you are as a person, and you haven't dealt with that, and you've just decided to go through the process every day, or subconsciously, look, maybe you're not making that conscious decision to do that, it's just how it happened, it's how it's just happened. Like, and you don't address that and you don't audit it, well, then like you're not going to be happy, and little by little that really does like start to chip away with you, or chip away at you, should I say. And this episode is really going to be about complete honesty, complete honesty for me, but also complete honesty to yourself, you know, to have those conversations with yourself, to ask yourself, like, am I happy? You know, and I suppose I'll start with that by saying, like, what is a life audit? So, like, a life audit is to take inventory of your life, you know, to think to yourself like, well, think about your life, like, whatever stage, everybody listening to this is going to be at a different stage in their life. So, some people are going to be married, some people are going to be separated, some people are going to be starting out on their careers, and some people are going to be a good way through their careers. Some people might be on a weight loss journey, and some people could be on a bodybuilding journey. But it's about sitting down with yourself and writing out a list of where you are in your life right now, and then asking yourself, what is aligned in your life right now with who you are, like what's aligned with your current goals, and you can separate them very easily. You can put like your current status, your current situation, and you can break it down to a real granular level, and then beside it, you can put your core values, and very quickly, you will be able to see if where you are is actually aligned with your goals and with where you want to be or where you wanted to be previously in your life. And a big one is, and I really cannot recommend doing this enough in your life because, like, like you need to notice what's draining you in your life, what and who are draining you in your life. Because if you have, and I've called them this before, an energy drainer. If you have an energy drainer in your life, and I had several of them, you know, and don't get me wrong, like they still come into my life, like you're not rid of them when you get rid of them once, it just doesn't work like that. But it's about being aware, once you remove them from your life or you recognize them for what they are, you're not really gonna want those kinds of people or situations in your life again, and then asking yourself, like, well, who and what no longer fits in my life, and that's what a life audit is. It's basically about you know looking at all those things and seeing to yourself and just asking the questions because if you don't write them down on paper and if you don't sit with yourself and ask the questions, well, the alternative is you are literally just going to go through your life in autopilot, you are literally just going to get up every single day, you are going to get dressed. Like for me, when I wake up in the morning, is I have my coffee and I journal. That's just what I do, that's my thing. I didn't always do that. It took a long time for me to get to a point where I didn't doom scroll or I didn't like waste my time in the morning. So for me, journaling is really important because it helps me identify these things. I have goals and aspirations in my life, and journaling and writing them down is so important because if you don't factually put them down in front of you, well then you're not going to be aware, and awareness is key to everything. If you're not aware that these situations are in your life, these people are in your life, or you know that you're living a life, you're just existing in a life on autopilot every day, getting up, having the coffee, getting dressed, doing the cleaning, doing the washing, going to work, coming home from work, eating your dinner, maybe watching crack crap on the TV, and you go through life every single day doing that. And before you know, like six months has passed, a year has passed, two years have passed, three years have passed, and you're still doing the exact same thing. And the reason you're still doing the exact same thing is because you're an autopilot, you don't actually know what you're doing anymore because the routine now has become your identity, so you've lost sight of all the dreams and aspirations that you had, and all the places that you thought you'd be, and things you wanted to do, and you know, people that were aligned with who you were, and now this new routine of autopilot has become your identity, it's who you are, and it's what you're used to, you know. And that is how so many people wake up emotionally disconnected, they're no longer emotionally connected to themselves, and so many times they are not emotionally connected to the people around them, and that is why it's so important. Like, if you're in a relationship, like relationships are hard work, like they're actually hard work, they're not like you don't get with somebody, even if you're married, and think like that's it now, job done. Like, it just doesn't work like that, and if you emotionally switch off, well, like you just become very disconnected, and I think that's what happens to a lot of people when they don't audit their situation regularly, they become disconnected from real life, and then they lose sight of who they were and who they wanted to be, and this routine just becomes their life. And sometimes living with exhaustion isn't actually from doing too much, it's from carrying around so much that doesn't belong to you. And I spoke about that in the previous episode where I spoke about the invisible backpack, you know, and like about unpacking that, and if you don't unpack that and you keep adding to it year by year, like that is a heavy load to be carrying around with you in this little window of life that we have to live, you know. So I'm gonna cover a couple of different things, and the first one I'm gonna cover, I spoke about there briefly, is relationships, you know. And what you need to be asking yourself if you're doing an audit of your own life is basically if you think about a relationship, and I'm going to use relationships as in they're very broad. So I people think a relationship and they think you think your partner, but I'm talking about relationship as in like a friend, a family member, a parent, a sibling, you know, even a child. It can even be a child, like an adult child, you know, it could be any of these people in your life. What you need to ask yourself about these people are who gives me energy, like who gives me a real positive energy? You know, the people in your circle, think about them now when you're listening to this, and think about like the core people in your life. Do they give me energy? Do they give me a feel-good feeling about myself? And then who drains me? Who's an energy drainer? Who's in my life? You know, even if they're in your life once a week, once a month, as I said, it could be a parent, it could be a sibling, it could be a friend, it could be a co-worker, actually, as well, it could be any of these people, but who drains me? Like, who's draining my energy? And where am I shrinking myself? So if you're going into situations and you're making yourself smaller to make someone else feel bigger, well, then like who in your life is making you do that? Now remember, they're not making you do it, no one forces us to do anything in our life, however, we do all fall into like roles, we all role-play throughout our life, and unbeknownst to ourselves sometimes, we fall into these roles. So, is there someone in your life that you're shrinking when you're around them? And look, I've been guilty of doing that before, you know. I I had people in my life before where they liked to comment when I was doing things, and it was always something that was something that maybe they weren't doing. So, you know, for instance, like if I was doing really well in the gym, um, and when I say really well in the gym, like I was going consistently, you could see it in my physical appearance, you know, people were starting to notice that I was doing well or looking well. Well, these people would always put me down. So, what happened to me was then when I was in their company, I'd never I'd never talk about it. Now I would have never been boasting anyway, but I would never talk about it. Then that started to filter into the rest of my life. If I got a promotion, I wouldn't tell them, you know, if I did well and like was getting something done in my house, I wouldn't tell them. I started to shrink who I was as a person because I knew what the reaction was going to be from them. So, do you have somebody in your life, you know, that makes you feel like that, that you can't be yourself, you can't be your authentic self around them. And then, like, what relationship are you in that's reciprocated? So, like, who who treats you back the way you treat them? So, if you're really good to somebody, you know, and you do a lot for them, well, are they good to you? Like, in your time of need, if you had somebody in your life and you know they were going through a really hard time and you were there for them, 100% there for them. You know, you were taking their calls, you're answering their texts, you're checking in on them, you're, you know, ringing them regularly, you know, sending them positive stuff just to get them through it. And then the tables turn and your turn comes, and you need somebody there, and it's tumbleweed, they're nowhere to be seen. Well, like, do you have people like that in your life? So you need to write it down and ask yourself, like, what are they bringing to your life? Because one very good quote is that not everybody in your life is meant for every version of your life, and I learned that the hard way. I had some childhood friends, I spoke about this briefly before, and I loved them, I loved them dearly. You know, we had so many amazing memories together. However, I reached a point in my life when they were not nice to me anymore, and I shrunk as a person, I felt worse when I was in their company, I needed them and they weren't there for me. Like all of the things I'm talking about, and I realized that the version that I was moving into, they weren't coming with me, and yeah, it was really sad, but like that's just the way it is sometimes, and sometimes you have to just be brutal. And another thing is like if you think about your job, okay, like everyone has to work, you know, you just have to work to pay the bills, but you don't have to hate your job. Like, most people don't love their job, they like their job, but you don't have to hate your job. But no matter what age you are in life, you can ask yourself like, am I fulfilled with this job, or am I just like going to it because I'm getting paid? Like, am I building a life or am I just maintaining one? So, like, are you actually in that job for purpose? Do you see a future? Do you see, you know, promotions? Do you see yourself growing? Do you see a future in there? Or are you just like in that job to get the paycheck every Friday? There's nothing wrong with that either. If you're happy doing that, but a lot of people who are living that life aren't actually fulfilled, they're just ticking a box because that's become who they are. That's just what they're so used to. That's the habit that they live every day. And if nobody, if you had no pressure, if you had no mortgage, this is a really good one to put it, if you had no mortgage and you had no rent and you had no bills to pay, would you be doing that job or would you take the risk and do something else? And I think when you remove all the external factors that we have, that we have to do our jobs that we do, um sometimes you can take the risk. Like I get that, it's not as easy to just drop everything, drop your job, and go and try a new one. But if you didn't have all those things, let's just say you didn't, well, would you actually step out and do something totally different? And habits and environment play a really, really key role in our life. And I speak about habits all the time because obviously, in reset and rise coaching, that's a big part of that. Like habits, habit setting, changing your habits, like your habits play such a huge part of your life because they're things you do every single day, and a lot of the time you're not even aware that you do them, they've just become your identity. And questions for yourself, you could ask yourself are like what habits numb me? Like, what habits don't serve me in any way at all? So, for instance, it could be like you know, doom scrolling, it could be hanging out with friends who are not good for you, oversleeping or lack of sleep, moving too much or not moving enough. Doom scrolling, like I don't know anybody who does not have negative thoughts about themselves or their own situation from doom scrolling, you know. So, like, that's a habit that isn't really good, it's probably not serving you, and there's definitely much more useful things you could be doing with your time. And then, like, what habits nourish me? So, I spoke about journaling earlier on, and I am a big advocate of that. Like, I went through um a good period of my life in therapy, and it's taught me huge self-reflection. I am very self-aware of myself, I'm very self-aware of my emotions, what triggers me, you know. But journaling helps me deal with that every day. Um, I use journals that let me set my intentions for the day. I also have journals that allow me to show gratitude, and that's enough gratitude in terms of like it doesn't have to be something big, it could just be being thankful for the coffee that I have in my hand while I sit in my garden listening to the birds. Sometimes you need to bring it, like, really bring it back to basics, you know, and think about like, you know, well, like what habit is really good for me? It could be hanging out with that amazing friend, it could be, you know, going for a platease once a week, it could be meditating, like what's serving you and what's nourishing who you are and who you want to be. And then I think it's important to also look at like what environments make me feel anxious and small. Um, like there are environments in all of our lives where we don't feel our best self, and we all put ourselves into those environments, and sometimes it can be from duty because they're family, you know, and like we excuse a lot for family, and we excuse an awful lot of behaviours because of family, and we don't want to fall out with them. But I always use the quote, like, if they were my friends, or if that was your friend, like would you take that from them? And if the answer is no, well, you shouldn't take it if they're family, you just shouldn't. Nobody in the world, nobody in this world has the right to make you feel small, ever. Period. It doesn't matter who they are, nobody has the right. So if there is an environment that you feel really anxious going into, or you feel really small, well, you need to be aware of that, you know, and you need to ask yourself, what is this actually serving me? You know, how is this actually helping my life? Because your environment is shaping you even when you don't realize it is. So when you hang out with those people or you spend time with people who make you feel small, when you come away from that, you're not gonna feel confident in yourself, you're not gonna feel enriched and you know, ready to go and take on the next challenge. You're going to feel nervous, anxious, and you're gonna have a lot of self-doubt, a lot of self-loathing, a lot of critical thinking, you know, um putting yourself down. So, like, what is that actual, like, what does that serve you? Where is that bringing you in your life? You know, and I definitely like this is a really, really key thing for me. How we speak to ourselves is just so important, it's more important than how we allow other people speak to ourselves. If you are critical of yourself, so I spoke about this before, where I had hundreds of thoughts every day that were negative towards myself. Now, this is going back a really long time before I did any therapy, before I looked at like the trauma that I'd endured in my life, but every single day I traumatized myself, I didn't need anybody to do it to me anymore. I would like be so negative and so horrible to myself, and then I started asking myself, like, you know, what would I speak to one of my friends like that? And like the answer was clearly no, because one, I wouldn't have any friends if I spoke to people like that, but it wouldn't be acceptable, like I would not speak to anybody else like that. So, why did I think it was okay to speak to myself? And then I really dug deeper and I thought, is my inner voice punishing me or pushing me to do better? The answer was simple. My inner voice was punishing me hundreds of times a day, and I guarantee you, if you really think about this now and think about the messages that you're telling yourself, you're gonna realize that you know, maybe you're not being that nice to yourself, and maybe the thoughts and the voice that you're telling yourself every day is not kind, and it's not like it's not how you should speak to yourself. And do you commit to things or do you always move the goalpost? So, like if you if you have a goal, this is something I used to do a lot. If you have a goal and you get really close to achieving that goal, and because you're not used to that and it's scary and it's daunting, do you move the goalpost? Therefore, you can't achieve it. Like, does that relate? Like, do people relate to that? I guarantee you do, because I talk to a lot of people about this, and this is something people do, especially people who've suffered trauma in their life, they will definitely relate to this. And the reality is when you start making this and when you start documenting this, there are people in your life that are not going to survive the audit, and that's okay. They're not meant to survive the audit. Not everybody is meant to be with you at every chapter in your life. They're not. And if you keep everybody at every chapter of your life, then you're never going to grow. Your life is never going to change, and you're always going to be just going through the motions. And if I don't know you and you're listening to this, or if I know you and you're listening to this, do not spend your life going through the motions. You're better than that. We're all better than that. None of us were put on this earth to go through the motions. Not one of us was put on this earth to just go through the motions. You deserve to be free from those people who make you feel small. You deserve to be free from that self-talk that you're talking to yourself every single day. You deserve to go after the job that you want. You deserve to join the class that you want, and you're too afraid to do it. You know, you deserve all these things in life. And how you can do that is you can start with a small little reset of a couple of different things, and that can look like saying no. Like saying no is very empowering. And like you don't have to say no for the sake of it, you know. But like I used to say yes to everything, absolutely everything, because I was so afraid of letting people down that I would be running around ragged, saying yes to everybody, but in my mind I'd be saying no, and then I I started saying no, and that got a bit wild because I started saying no to everything because it was so liberating that I could actually say no, um, but saying no and not being not feeling guilty about it, this is your life, and if something doesn't fit right for you at that moment, that's absolutely fine. You have to be true to yourself, you have to do what's right for you. Like reconnecting with yourself, your true self, your inner self. Like I speak to my inner child all the time, and some people won't understand that, and that's because maybe they've never done any inner child work, but I have, and I I understand that my younger self didn't pack up and leave when I became 30 or 40. My younger self is still in there, my seven-year-old self is in there, my 12-year-old self is in there, and sometimes when I feel an emotion, I realize that isn't the 40-something year old feeling that emotion, that's the little seven-year-old, and she's scared. And I tell her it's okay. So it's really important to reconnect with your inner self, your true self, and don't make the mistake of changing everything drastically because then you will fail. That is why so many people do this and they fail because they try and change everything. So they wake up one morning, they say, I'm not having my coffee, I'm going for a run, I am not knocking on my phone, I'm deleting all the apps, I'm gonna eat healthy, I'm gonna be in bed by this time, and by Friday it's all gone. So make little gradual changes. If you're not comfortable addressing those problems with your friends, your relationship with your family right now, focus on the other things because that will naturally come. Because little by little, as you start to look at your own life and you start to audit your life, you will start to realize that you're worth more than that, and that this is your one life, and you don't owe anybody anything. There is nobody in this world that you owe anything to, um, you know, and a reset doesn't always have to be a brand new beginning, like sometimes it's basically, as I said, just going back to your true self. Remember, that person is in there. It's you're not going out to find a whole new person, you're not going out to reinvent the wheel. What you're looking for is actually within you, and you have the power to draw that out, but it's really important that you do the work, you know, to get that for yourself. And I think, like, you know, you don't need, as I said, to chuck everything out, like your life doesn't have to be completely overhauled, your life doesn't have to be, you know, pulled apart, but it needs to be examined with honesty and awareness. You can't be writing down a list and saying that everything's amazing, but inside you feel empty. Well, that's not an honest list. Sit down and say to yourself, you know, I'm gonna really look at this and I'm gonna really think about, you know, maybe the version that I'm looking for isn't who I am anymore, but maybe it's underneath there somewhere if I actually just remove the things that are no longer serving me. And you know, I really hope you do do that because that work, although it's great to lose weight, and although it's great, you know, to look good, I cannot tell you how much it is and how amazing it is to feel good on the inside, to face challenges in your life that are absolutely horrendous, and know that you have the strength and the courage to face them because you've done the work, you've audited your life, you've changed those habits, you've reset things in your life that are more aligned with who you are, and these are small little things every day, but remember the small things add up to be the big things, and the big things then become your life, and that becomes the new routine for you, that becomes who you are, so you're no longer living a life that you know you're not happy with, you're no longer getting on the bus in a mundane way, just going through the motions. You're awake, you're alive, you're alert, you're you know, yeah, you're just alive again. So, I really hope that you do that for yourself because you deserve it. So, thanks for listening, everybody. This has been the reset series. Thank you.