There come times in your journey with vitiligo when you find yourself lost, having no idea if you doing enough to pursue your professional and personal dreams. This calls for a life audit – taking a moment to realize that “you are way more than your vitiligo.”
Conducting your own life audit helps you identify what you should stop doing and what you should keep doing to be a better version of yourself. It’s a self-reflection exercise that will grant you the clarity and space you need to look after your emotional needs. It will also allow yourself to look beyond vitiligo and reflect on the things that spark joy in your life.
But, the big question is “how would you audit such complexities of life?” It’s nothing like a financial audit, where your assets are the economic value that you own (real estate, stocks, money) and your liabilities are the things that you owe (debt, mortgage, and loans). In case of a life audit, can we get that quantitative?
I can tell you that conducting a life audit isn’t a cakewalk, but it’s definitely worth it. Here, are my notes on the process.
Step 1
Write one goal, wish, or dream on a Post-it, and repeat the process until you completely run out of goals. For this step, choose a quiet space with ample space. Ensure you minimize distractions and don’t take calls during this exercise of self-reflection.
Once you are done with post-its, you will notice that each aspiration naturally falls into different categories – professional, personal, and creative. You should further break these categories down into smaller subcategories like Health, Career, Relationships, Finances, and Leisure.
Step 2
The second step is slightly scientific. The ‘Wheel of Life’ is a visual tool that can enable you to instantly identify which areas of your life need attention. Here, each color in the wheel would represent a different subcategory. The concentric circles drawn in the main circle would help you indicate satisfaction levels from 0 to 10.
Step 3
Prepare a ‘Questionnaire for Self’ to mark the concentric circles in each subcategory. Add multiple questions in the questionnaire about your satisfaction levels in each category. These questions could be anything from “how eager are you to get to work?” to “how often do you meet your friends?”
Step 4
Once you have an honest chat with yourself, label collected data into a spectrum of satisfaction. Organize the data into simple labels like “happy” and “unhappy” or “great” and “could be better”.
Step 5
Labeling the data this way will enable you to know what you want from your future. For instance, if you realize that your vitiligo is causing you a great deal of sadness, you can work on an action plan to tackle that unhappiness.
Ensure you prioritize and work your way around the planned actions in the action plan rather than trying to tackle all problems at once. You can put your action items into NOW (immediately actionable items), SOON (aspiration that needs the next steps and prioritization), SOMEDAY (long-term goals), and EVERY DAY (deliberate mantras to live by every day) sections.
Step 6
Whether you’re measuring your career growth or the number of hours spent thinking about vitiligo – setting a benchmark metric is your best bet to assess your progress.
A word from Unite For Vitiligo
The process of conducting a life audit can be overwhelming. So, perform it in steps as mentioned above. Stay true to yourself during the audit and take ‘one small step at a time’.
After conducting the audit for the first time, give yourself at least 3 months. Post that rinse and repeat the whole exercise.