PRACTICE: The Mid-Year Audit
The most powerful antidote to path dependence
Burnt Out? Stuck? You're Not Broken
–
Find Your Discernment
–
Click Here To Work With Me
–
Burnt Out? Stuck? You're Not Broken – Find Your Discernment – Click Here To Work With Me –
For nearly a decade, I’ve journaled by hand. Every day (well, almost), I write about the day before, and what’s facing me for the next 24 hours.
I’m a huge believer in by-hand journaling, for all its benefits. But there’s one in specific I want to talk about today.
The thing with writing by hand is that journals have finite numbers of pages. Eventually—every six months, for me—you run out and have to buy a new one.
And for the last 8 years, setting up a new journal has become a bit of a ritual for me. It’s a chance to take an audit of the last six months and decide if that’s where I want to put my energy for the next six.
PS. You don’t have to do this audit on your own. Work with an expert instead:
For the last two weeks, we’ve been talking about path dependence—how perfectly reasonable choices can lead to completely unreasonable outcomes. I started by telling you about Josh, the client who made every decision “the right way” and still ended up in a flat, colorless existence.
Last week, we explored the science behind path dependence, the phenomenon behind why decisions don’t get made in isolation. Each decision narrows the field of decisions that come next, until the cumulative shape of your life starts to feel less like something you authored and more like something that happened to you.
This week, given that it’s almost the end of June, we’re talking about the antidote to path dependence: the mid-year audit.
Side note: Don’t let the word “audit” turn you off. I tried to find others, but thesauruses failed me (the mid-year probe, the mid-year investigation, the mid-year interrogation—they’re all awful).
Think of the mid-year audit as a bit of a cousin to what the IRS does (and somehow does 4.7 times more often to Black folks than to white folks, gosh I wonder why). Where a financial audit is supposed to catch errors and levy fines, the life audit is designed to catch a divergence between the life you’d choose today and the life you happen to be living. (And to levy no fines).
Doing this regularly is important because drift is much harder to see from inside the path, because each step looks like a continuation of the last. The audit’s job is to step outside the path long enough to see its shape.
Before we go on… Are you stuck on some big decisions? Let’s talk ↓
The Mid-Year Audit
Step 1: Describe The Path You’re On (So Far)
If this is the first time you’re doing a mid-year audit, first list the 5–7 most consequential choices that shaped your last decade. These are usually career, location, relationship, lifestyle, or finance choices, but they may be others. Did you choose to escape for a year and travel the world? Did you face a major health issue? Did you welcome a new child? These are consequential enough to have shaped an entire decade, so write them down.
Also, be concrete. An audit should look like, “I took a job at THIS company in 2019,” instead of simply, “I went into finance.” Do that for every one of the consequential choices: not just “I moved to Denver” but “I moved to Denver because Sam got into grad school there.”
(If this is not your first time to do a mid-year audit, I want you to do the same thing, but look only at the 5–7 consequential choices of the last 12 months. Rehashing the last decade gets old…)
Step 2: Which Of These Choices Did You Choose?
Now, for each of the 5–7 consequentials: was it an active choice or did you accept a default?
An active choice is one you weighed against alternatives. You considered other options, ran some version of a comparison, and picked. Importantly, an active choice is one you could readily have made the other way.
This is super important in light of path dependence. Let me give you an example.
Let’s say you have to choose between a promotion at your current company or a completely new job in, say, Bhutan. You know your current company.
On the other hand, you don’t speak the language in Bhutan, heck you don’t even know what it’s called. Also, you’ve never been anywhere near the country, and you’re married to a partner who doesn’t like to travel and with whom you have four young children.
I’d argue that you’re not facing an active choice here. Yes, you could blow everything up and move to Bhutan (and that may be the right answer). But the likelihood is high that you’ll default to staying home.
I would, too.
This is your sign to do a mid-year audit. Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash
An active choice is one you could reasonably pick any option for. A default is one you slide into because it was easier than the alternative, because someone else made the call and you went along, because the timing made it feel inevitable, etc.
If I’m honest about this exercise, it often startles me. It feels like our lives are full of decisions. That’s our narrative. But the lives we actually live, are often instead a handful of active decisions amid dozens of defaults and drifts.
Have grace for yourself, though. If most of your last decade was default-accepted, that doesn’t mean you made bad choices. All it means is that you made fewer choices than you think. It means others made decisions about your life, which you accepted for all sorts of reasons.
Let’s deal with that next.
Step 3. Run The “If You Knew” Test
This is one of my favorite steps. Oh my god, I love this step.
For each big domain in your life—your career, your closest relationship(s), where you live, etc—ask yourself one question:
If you KNEW you wouldn’t fail, what would you do?
I’m not going to lie…this is a terrifying exercise. Irrespective of how good (or poorly) my life is going at the time, this test never fails to make me feel like I could be doing better.
That’s not the point.
The point isn’t to convince you to blow everything up and do the thing (on the other hand, sometimes that is the right choice).
The point, instead, is to pull you outside of the life you’ve built, the life where every piece feels load-bearing, and ask, “Well if you did knock down all the supporting columns, what would you do?”
One last caveat: don’t force the answers to be different from your current state. Sometimes, the answer is, “if I knew I wouldn’t fail, I’d marry them anyway!” Good—those are the parts of your life where your past self chose well for your present self.
Pay attention to those, and pay attention to the mismatches, the hesitations, the maybes, the “probably but not like this”es.
Again, you’re not obligated to act on every gap. You’re obligated to see them.
Step 4. Name The Path Dependence, Honestly
For each gap—for each domain in which what you have isn’t what you’d have chosen—ask yourself what’s keeping you there.
The answers will almost always sort into two piles.
The first pile is genuine value. You stay in the city because your closest friendships are there. You stay in the field because the work itself still matters to you. You stay in the job because you’re saving up for school.
That’s not path dependence. If these are the honest reasons, then they’re reasons. Even if the city, the job, the field isn’t ticking every box, it’s still serving a purpose.
(This pile, also, is why you don’t blow everything up in Step 3. There’s value in this pile.)
The second pile is the cost of friction. This is the path dependence. Remember: the more locked-in you get to a specific path, the more friction you have to overcome to change it. Be honest about these friction costs.
Maybe you’d lose money breaking the lease. Maybe your stock vests in 3 more years. Maybe your kids would have to find a new school.
There’s no shame in friction costs! They’re real and they’re common. The point of naming them is simply to see them clearly. A nebulous cost feels insurmountable, while a cost, written down, is one you can evaluate.
Step 5. Pick One Small Disruption
You know that first pile? The value pile?
Leave that pile alone.
From the other pile, the path dependence pile, pick one small disruption that you commit to accomplishing before the next audit. Are you in a job because of path dependence? Commit to updating your resume and shopping it around.
Are you in a relationship that’s got less joy in it than Almond Joy has almonds? Commit to a single change.
Are you tired of living where you’re living? Commit to exploring a city you’ve always wanted to move to.
Path dependence is undone the way it was built: through sequential choices, but in a new direction. Just like the drift compounded over time, these choices will do the same. The way out is symmetric to the way in.
So end your audit by picking one small choice for the next 180 days.
Then do it, and see if you can wrest back control of your life from the autopilot you didn’t sign up for in the first place.
Thank you for reading! This is my last post before the fall; I’m taking the next two months off of weekly writing (but not off seeing clients). Planning to do my own mid-year audit.
In the meantime, put any comments and questions you have below!
Facing a consequential decision?
You don’t have to navigate it alone. Work with a decision coach who knows how to guide you to a life you’re madly in love with again.
→ Check out my packages here. They range from 4 weeks to a year, and they take you from “what the heck do I do next?” all the way to clarity and a step-by-step plan that honors both your calling and your right to thrive. Click here to apply!
→ Want more FREE weekly content about making consequential life choices with confidence and clarity? Join my mailing list!