Life audit: How to review every area of your life (free template)

Key takeaways

A life audit is a structured self-review that scores every major area of your life and shows where your days and your values disagree.

Most audits cover five areas: health, relationships, career and money, personal growth, and rest.

Score each area twice, once for satisfaction and once for importance, then act on the widest differences rather than the lowest scores.

Check your scores against last month’s calendar and bank statement so the ratings reflect evidence rather than mood.

Coaches and therapists use the audit as an intake tool that sets the agenda for the first few sessions.

A life audit is a structured self-assessment that scores every major area of your life, from health to money to rest. It shows you where your daily choices have drifted away from what you say matters most. You then pick the two or three areas worth changing first.

This guide covers what to assess, how to score each area honestly, and what to do with the results. If you coach or counsel people for a living, the later sections show how the audit works as an intake tool. The free template at the top of the page follows the same process.

What is a life audit?

A life audit is a self-assessment framework that reviews several parts of your life at once. Instead of working on a single goal, such as a promotion or a fitness target, you look at the whole picture. Health, relationships, work, money, growth, and leisure all get examined together.

The core practice is honest reflection. You rate each area from 1 to 10 for how satisfied you feel right now. Then you rate how much that area actually matters to you. The distance between those two numbers is where the useful work sits.

You can work through the audit alone, or with a coach or therapist guiding the questions. Structured consultation questions keep that conversation on goals rather than symptoms. Either way, the aim is honest data, not a verdict on your life.

Benefits of a whole-life review

Reviewing everything at once shows patterns that a single-issue focus hides. Money worries often trace back to overwork, and overwork is usually what has been eroding your relationships. Cutting your hours can move three scores at the same time.

• Clarifies your core values and what you want more of
• Shows where your calendar and your stated priorities disagree
• Points to the areas that need attention first
• Gives you a baseline you can measure progress against
• Surfaces links between areas, such as work stress spilling into family time
• Makes vague dissatisfaction concrete enough to act on

Coaches and mental health practitioners use the same exercise to move clients from dissatisfaction to direction. The scores give a goal-setting conversation somewhere concrete to start.

Practitioners benefit from auditing their own lives too. Regular self-review is one of the practical defenses against therapist burnout. It also models the habit you are asking clients to build.

The five areas to review

Most life audits cover between five and seven areas. The names vary, but the idea holds. You break your life into parts you can score separately, then read the pattern across all of them.

• Health and wellness. Physical health, mental health, sleep, exercise, nutrition, and energy levels.
• Relationships and social connection. Partnership, family, friendships, community, and time spent with people.
• Career, work, and money. Job satisfaction, income stability, savings, and where your career is heading.
• Personal growth and mindset. Learning, habits, confidence, and how closely your actions track your values.
• Hobbies, fun, and creativity. Leisure time, creative outlets, rest, and play.

Some people prefer to plot the same scores on a life balance wheel, shading each segment of a circle to show where they stand. The format changes, the questions do not.

Health and wellness

Score your energy, sleep, movement, and mental health. Are you looking after your body and mind, or running on empty? This area is usually the first to show strain from work or family pressure.

Relationships and social connection

Score your partnership, family ties, and friendships. Are you investing time in the people who matter to you? Do you feel supported? Low scores here often point to isolation, or to a conflict you have been avoiding.

Career, work, and money

Score job satisfaction, income stability, and savings progress. Most people spend more than 40 hours a week at work and never review it until resentment builds. A low score here tends to prompt the fastest action.

Personal growth and mindset

Score your learning, your habits, and how closely your daily actions track your values. Are you becoming the person you want to be? People skip this area, because nothing external forces the question.

Hobbies, fun, and creativity

Score the time you spend on things you do purely for enjoyment. Art, sport, reading, music, and time outdoors all count. This area scores lowest in most audits, because it is the first thing a busy month cuts.

How to do a life audit, step by step

Set aside 30 minutes to two hours, and work alone or with a coach guiding the questions. The free template follows these steps, and splits the five areas into nine rated categories.

1. Set the stage. Find a quiet slot and put your phone in another room. Bring the template or a notebook. Honest answers are worth far more than flattering ones.
2. Score each area twice. Rate your satisfaction from 1 to 10. Then rate how important that area is to you, on the same scale. Add one sentence explaining each number.
3. Check the scores against evidence. Open last month’s calendar and bank statement. They show where your time and money actually went. Adjust any rating your own records contradict.
4. Find the widest differences. Subtract satisfaction from importance in every area. The biggest differences matter more than the lowest scores, because that is where your life and your priorities have parted company.
5. Set intentions. Take the two or three widest differences and write one specific change for each. Those become your focus for the next 90 days.

Questions to ask yourself

Use these prompts area by area. You do not need to answer all of them. Pick the ones that land.

• Health and wellness: Do I feel energized most days? Am I sleeping well? Am I moving my body in ways I enjoy? Is my mental health where I want it?
• Relationships: Do I have real closeness with the people I care about? Am I investing in the relationships that matter most? Do I feel supported and understood?
• Career and money: Does my work satisfy me? Is my income stable enough? Am I saving toward something that matters? Do I sleep easily about money?
• Personal growth: Am I learning skills I value? Do my daily actions match my stated values? Am I becoming the person I want to be?
• Fun and creativity: Do I spend time on things I enjoy for their own sake? Am I making anything? Do I rest and play regularly?

What to do with your results

A finished audit is only worth the time if something changes afterwards. Work through the results in this order.

1. Pick two or three areas. You cannot improve everything at once. Start with the widest differences between importance and satisfaction.
2. Describe the outcome in plain terms. Write what a higher score looks like day to day. Instead of “improve health”, write “three gym sessions a week and seven hours of sleep”.
3. Build a 90-day plan. Break each outcome into monthly milestones. Decide what support, budget, or time you need to make them happen.
4. Book the re-score now. Put the review in your calendar three months out. Progress in one area usually creates momentum in the next.

If you run audits with clients, digital intake forms keep the scores and the action plan attached to each client record. Nothing has to be retyped between sessions.

How coaches and therapists use it in onboarding

Coaches, therapists, and wellness practitioners increasingly send a life audit before the first session. It gives them the whole context rather than one presenting issue. A client who books for stress may turn out to have long hours and four hours of sleep behind it.

Coaching client management tools let you attach the completed audit to a client file before session one. The scores then set the agenda for goal-setting and keep the timeline you agree on realistic.

Those scores also give a coaching program its spine, because each low-scoring area becomes a block of work. Pair the audit with a coaching intake form for the administrative details.

Naming the exercise to clients helps as well. When people can see they are being assessed across their whole life, client engagement improves and they follow through on more of what you recommend.

How Pabau keeps audit scores in the client record

Most practices email the audit as a PDF attachment and get it back the same way. The scores end up in an inbox, the notes end up in a notebook, and by session three nobody can find the baseline. Re-scoring then starts from memory.

Practice management software like Pabau handles it differently. You send the audit as a digital form before the first appointment, and the answers file themselves against the client record. The scores sit alongside your notes, appointments, and invoices.

When the review date comes around, clients open their answers again through the client portal. You re-score, compare against the original baseline, and show the client exactly what moved. That removes both the spreadsheet and the hunt for a lost attachment.

Keep every client’s goals in one record

Pabau sends your life audit as a digital form before the first session, then files the answers in the client record. Scores, notes, and follow-ups stay together, so you can show clients what has changed.

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Conclusion

The value of a life audit sits in the second number. Satisfaction scores on their own only tell you what feels bad. Pairing them with importance scores tells you what to fix first, which is a far more useful answer.

Book the re-score before you close the template. An audit you never repeat is just a snapshot, and the direction of travel is the part that matters. Ninety days is long enough to move a score and short enough to keep you honest.

If you run these with clients, the admin decides whether the habit survives past session two. Book a demo to see how Pabau collects life audits, files the scores, and reminds you when a client is due to re-score.

Continue your research

Ready to plan the next 90 days? Action plan template turns each low-scoring area into dated steps you can check off.

Need a weekly structure for the health scores? Health and wellness planner breaks sleep, movement, and nutrition goals into a schedule.

Running preventive checks for female clients? Women’s wellness exam covers the physical review that sits alongside a life audit.

Tracking physical recovery as well as goals? Motor assessment scale scores movement recovery with the same rate-and-review approach.

Seeing clients under 18? Consent form for minors covers the paperwork you need before any assessment starts.

Frequently asked questions