Image provided by My Life Quest.
Dear friends,
Despite all the challenges in the world right now, I’m all about fall! For me the vibe is less pumpkin spice and more fall sunshine (goodbye, Fogust!), Diwali, and Halloween. I hope I get to gather with you to find joy together in these difficult times.
I know from talking with many of you that we’re all doing a lot of soul-searching right now, and It’s hard to know how to think about long-term goals and alternative pathways when the environment is so unstable. I recently tried a process called a life audit which was interesting and useful. I used the book The Life Audit by Ximena Vengoechea, a user experience (UX) researcher, as a guide. I did not follow her instructions exactly, and I completed only Part 1 of the book. I recommend it for those of you who enjoy hands-on analog approaches- you are going to need good pens and lots of sticky notes!
I did this life audit over the course of about three hours. The hardest part was finding that block of time when I could be truly undisturbed. In my case, that meant setting aside a Saturday morning when my husband and son were out of town and my daughter was doing a timed practice SAT. The first step is to write down 100 wishes, one per sticky note, in 1 hour. The idea of writing out 100 wishes/ goals/ dreams/ hopes isn’t new, but doing it in a limited time changed the experience. It is fascinating how there are things we wish for that we feel we should not want, isn’t it? Time pressure made me more honest with myself. My wishes ranged from big professional goals like an endowed chair to much less consequential goals like finally attending a concert at Stern Grove.
The next step is what Vengoechea calls “affinity mapping” which is essentially grouping similar wishes into categories. She suggests many options for categorizing your wishes. I ended up with the following: Experiences, Travel, Relationships, Home, Abundance, Service, Professional, New Skills, and Health. Putting a bunch of grouped sticky notes on my wall and looking at it was really enlightening. I absorbed the information differently than I did when it was written in a notebook or typed on my laptop.
Vengoechea’s third step is to count up how many wishes are in each category. I did not agree with this step, because, as my qualitative-methods-expert friends remind me, it doesn’t make sense to count up this type of data! My most frequent wishes were categorized as Travel, but that’s because each destination was a different wish. Each Travel wish was a discrete, well-defined activity. In contrast, the smaller number of wishes I had under the Relationships category represented much more profound and time-intensive pursuits. Skip the counting, I say! I appreciated her fourth step, identifying the underlying values behind my wishes. I asked myself, “why do I want this?” – a question that definitely increases self-awareness.
I am realizing as I write this that even this part of the life audit is a lot. If you’re following along with me, this is a good stopping point in the process. You can do the rest another time, as I did. I’ll write a bonus blog post in a couple of weeks about what happens next. I would really love to hear if decide to do any of this, and, if so, what you have learned. As always, I look forward to hearing from you. Please share widely, as usual, and let others know they can sign up here.
Warmly,
Urmimala