1018: The Step-by-Step Guide to Building the Life You Want with Ximena Vengoechea

Pete Mockaitis
Ximena, welcome back.

Ximena Vengoechea
Thank you so much for having me back. It’s great to be here.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, I’m excited to chat through your latest goodies. You wrote a post that really resonated with folks and you’ve now made it into a book. Tell us about this so-called life audit.

Ximena Vengoechea
So, this is a post that I wrote about a decade ago that is now a book, and basically The Life Audit is this exercise, this kind of checkpoint for you to see, “What is it that I want to of this one true beautiful life? Am I heading in that direction? What are maybe some of the deep-seated desires, wishes, goals that I am not in touch with that maybe I need to kind of resurface? What are my core values? And how do I navigate that in this lovely thing called life?”

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that sounds like, generally, a kind of a prudent practice. I mean, just to confirm, clarify, will Federal agents swoop in if I conduct a life audit?

Ximena Vengoechea
They will not be making you an appearance.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Ximena Vengoechea
Yeah, this is just for you. This is really, you know, I’m sure we’ll get into this but my background is in user research, and a lot of what that role is doing is about understanding other people, and really kind of understanding the psychology of people. What are their needs? What are their motivations? What are their perceptions, usually, with regard to understanding how to design a better product that actually fits those real human needs?

And in this case, we’re taking these same practices, but we’re turning them in on ourselves. So, this is something that is really just for you. It’s a tool to help you reconnect with yourself to uncover some of this inner wisdom and intuition, and then it is practical also to kind of help you take steps in that direction. Yeah, you are welcome to share it if you’d like, but, if not, you don’t have to share your paper with anybody.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so reconnecting with yourself and uncovering wisdom, generally, sounds like something kind of cool, kind of handy. But could you perhaps make an even stronger case for the why behind this?

If folks are thinking, “Oh, maybe, but there’s maybe a dozen journaling kinds of things I probably ‘should’ be doing, along with some mindfulness practices and gratitude, and so on and so on,” could you share perhaps your own story or the story of some of your biggest life audit fans on what kind of impact this can make?

Ximena Vengoechea
Yes. I certainly never want this to feel like a chore. So, this is something that you should pursue when the moment feels right. Usually, for most people, that’s at some kind of crossroads or life milestone. So, in my case, I had moved from the East Coast to the West Coast. I was in this phase of just great excitement, of starting this new career, meeting lots of people, had lots of hobbies, interests, things that I could be pursuing, but also felt overwhelmed by the possibility. What a beautiful place to be in but also a little bit scary.

And I remember just thinking like, “Oh, my God, like, I don’t know where to start. And is this career even right? Like, was this move even right?” Just having a lot of doubts about what came next. And for me, it was really an opportunity to kind of step back, assess, not just this moment, but, on a longer term, what it was that I wanted out of my life.

This is something that we usually don’t allow ourselves to do. So, a lot of times when we’re getting those resolutions in for the New Year or setting goals, we’re usually doing it on a much smaller timeframe, or maybe we’re not even thinking about the timeframe, and we just think, “This is a thing that I want to do.” The Life Audit is really unique in that we are looking at a much longer time frame.

So, in my case, I was starting to do user research. I had a bunch of hobbies that I sort of didn’t know what to do with them, you know, design, illustration, writing. These were things I was excited about, but I didn’t really know what to do with them. And 10 years later, “The Life Audit,” that post that I wrote after conducting my own, where I sort of learned these things about myself, went viral. That post was then picked up by Fast Company.

Fast Company then invited me to be a contributor. A literary agent saw my work in Fast Company. I am now a published author working with that agent. This is my third book and, yeah, I had some wishes around writing, writing books, like figuring out how to make a career out of that. And I think that had I not sat down and really taken the time and space to uncover that, but also just kind of sit with it and really internalize that about myself, I don’t know what would have happened.

I mean, maybe life is long, maybe you meander in that direction. But it, certainly, for me, gave me a lot of clarity and purpose and conviction around the things that I wanted to pursue. And I hear that a lot from people who have conducted their own life audits, that it’s really about crystallizing things, things that maybe you’ve buried or maybe you haven’t made space to uncover before, and providing that clarity is really just so key.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that so much. Clarity is something many of us want, crave, and in practice, it seems it’s relatively rare for us to pause from the interesting, the urgent, the impulse to check something, whether it’s the news or social media or email or whatever, but really to go deep and to go internal. So, I think that’s one huge piece right there is to just remember, “Hey, if clarity appears to be missing, perhaps what is also missing is some form of quiet introspection, reflection, be it a life audit process or there’s something different.”

Ximena Vengoechea
Yes, we don’t often make space to ask ourselves these big questions, and there are many reasons for that. Part of it are the distractions that you were talking about. Part of it is also, I think, emotional. It takes a certain amount of courage for many people to sit down with themselves, just with themselves, not with anybody else, not with their manager or a partner or a roommate, giving them advice or telling them what they should pursue.

I think we all have, by virtue of living in this society, we have societal messages, expectations that are put upon us. There’s a difference between, and I think we sometimes kind of lose this distinction, but there is a difference between pursuing things that you think you should pursue versus things that you genuinely want to pursue. And for many of us, those external messages crowd out the internal side.

And I think that’s when we can kind of, suddenly, maybe you’re in this career and you’re at the top of your field and you step back and go, “Wait, but is this it?” you know, or, “Am I happy? Do I like this? My LinkedIn resume is amazing, but is this it?” And so, I think that’s one of the main things that we’re doing, is we’re really trying to set some of that aside. It’s not to say that those voices can completely be erased, but we’re trying to recognize and acknowledge when it’s somebody else’s desire versus our own.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, that’s really handy. And so, in terms of when to do it, it sounds like often it comes with life transitions, a move, turning a milestone age of 30 or 40, new job, new partner, breakups, transitions. These sorts of things are fine prompts, and maybe the New Year or just any reason at all, like, “I just think now would be great to have some extra clarity.” So, that’s cool.

And if we don’t do something along this, we may very well find ourselves swept along into a pathway of, “Oops! Is this really what I want? Uh-oh. Where did life go? Uh-oh.” So, walk us through it then. If we’re thinking, “All right, life audit sounds great,” how do we proceed?

Ximena Vengoechea
Yes. So, it’s a very simple process. It’s deliberately lightweight. So, what I mean by that is I’m not going to ask you to get any specific equipment. You don’t have to download anything. Your tools really are quite simple. And we’re starting with sticky notes, so Post-it notes, which maybe you have at home, and Sharpies, permanent marker, which hopefully you also have at home, and if not, that’s at the office, quick Staples run, whatever. But that’s it. It’s very minimal, and that’s deliberate.

And so, what we are doing, there are sort of three phases. The first phase is really generative, and this is when we are brainstorming, essentially, and pulling up wishes. So, I usually recommend that people dedicate an hour and they aim for 100 wishes. So, you’re writing one wish per sticky note. You’re keeping it simple. So, that is why we use a Sharpie. We’re not writing long essays. We’re not writing anything that involves a comma. No, it’s usually just one or two words, a handful of words, and you’re just going to keep going until you hit that hour mark.

The hour is a guideline, just as 100 is a guideline. Some people are going to blow past that and some people won’t hit that number. That’s totally fine. This is just to get the wheels turning, but essentially like this first phase, you know, in user research, we talk about brainstorms, and whenever we talk about brainstorms, we say we’re encouraging wild and crazy ideas. There are no bad ideas. This is blue skies so you don’t want to self-edit during this stage.

And that’s another reason for using sticky notes is they are intentionally disposable. If you decide later that was a dumb idea, you don’t want it, you can just crumple it up and get rid of it. So, we’re really trying to make this less heavy because it can feel a little intense of, “Oh, my God, what am I doing with my life?” No, we want it to feel lightweight, playful. We’re just dreaming during this stage. So, that’s the generative stage.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, so we got the Post-its, we got the Sharpies, we’re dreaming and we’re putting a dream or wish on one per sticky. Could you just give us some examples? The dreams can be big or small. Like, give us a few nuggets.

Ximena Vengoechea
Sure.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s like, “I want to get good at making barbecue,” all the way to, “I want to live in Hawaii.” Like, anything there?

Ximena Vengoechea
Yeah, exactly. It could be anything from, “I want to launch a podcast someday. I don’t know when, but I want to do it,” to, “I want to write a book someday,” to, “I want to make six figures in my career,” to, “I want to be more patient.” So, it can be a little bit more abstract too. So, there’s a whole variety. And, usually, what happens when you step back and you get to the analysis phase, which we’ll talk about next, usually what happens is you do start to see that your wishes kind of fall into three buckets of, “This is something I can carry with me every day.” I think of these as core values.

So, for example, a desire to be patient, a desire to be generous, to tell your loved ones that you love them on a regular basis, like things that you just want to kind of carry with you, I would put those in the category of core values. And then you tend to also have wishes that are really about things you want to achieve or see through in the near term, let’s say, in the next 6 to 12 months.

And then you’ve got another category which is really kind of someday wishes, like, “I want to do this someday. I want to launch a podcast someday. I don’t know when, but at some point, that seems like something that I would enjoy, that I could be good at.” So that’s a whole other category of wishes.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we’ve generated many wishes and we find they fall into some categories. And I guess if they’re Post-its, are you imagining like rearranging them on a big old wall or a giant desk or piece of furniture? Or, kind of visually how does that unfold?

Ximena Vengoechea
Yeah. So this is something else that I really like about using Post-its is you can manipulate them, and you can move them around and look for patterns. So, this is our second phase where we’re really looking to, essentially, analyze our data. So, this is something that as a user researcher you would do. You have a bunch of data about a study and then you have to make sense of it, and you need to turn the data into insights. So, it’s not just numbers or information, it’s actually telling you something useful.

So, I usually recommend that you just start by doing a simple cluster analysis, which is essentially we’re looking for wishes that are in some way related to each other, and we’re just going to group them. So, it sounds fancier than it is, but we are just looking for things that are related. So, for example, common themes that might come up, you might have a bunch of wishes around family, you might have a bunch of wishes around career, money, volunteering, travel, creative pursuits, spirituality, mental health, physical health. There’s a lot of things that could come up.

But we’re essentially going to go, “Okay, I’ve got my hundred wishes. Now I’m going to start to physically move them and put them in groups so that I get a bigger picture of what’s really happening.” Because, essentially, what we’re looking at here is a reflection of our true desires, is a reflection of today, “Who I am today, these are the things that I want.” These things can change, we evolve as people. But today, this is a snapshot, it’s sort of a self-portrait.

And so, you get to look back and go, just really quickly, see visually too, “Oh, wow, I have a ton of wishes around family. I have a lot of wishes around finance. I don’t have that many wishes around my career. Why might that be?” So, you’re kind of observing and asking yourself questions of, “How do I feel about how this is mapping out? Why might this be mapping out in this way?”

I think one of the interesting things to consider when you have your life audit is that areas that are, let’s say you have a smaller number of wishes, sometimes we think, “Wait a minute, am I not as invested, for example, in my career as I thought I was?” Maybe. But another thing could be that you are investing so much already in that area of your life that you don’t need it as a wish. It’s kind of already taken care of, right? It’s something that you are regularly doing, supporting, pursuing.

So, I always tell people, you know, the life audit, especially at this stage, it’s not a progress report. It doesn’t tell you, like check mark, like, “Here’s what I’ve done. Here’s what I haven’t done.” It’s really trying to reveal, like, “Right now, what are the things that I’m most interested in pursuing,” and to teach you something about that.

Whether it’s that there are areas that are not coming up because you are really actively embracing them already, or whether there are things that you kind of step back and go, “Wait a minute, that’s actually weird that I have so many things in this column around physical fitness because I hate exercising. Like, where did that come from?” And that’s when you kind of can ask yourself, “Is this a true wish? Is this a should wish? Like, somebody thinks I should do this. Is this really mine?” So, this is a really fun phase too because it’s all about self-discovery and learning something about yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
That is really fun. And, you’re right, when you ask those questions you might say, “Oh, no, it’s just because I was listening to some health podcasts yesterday, and that’s very top of mind.” Or, maybe you don’t have much in careers, like, “Oh, do I not care about career? Well, maybe it’s already taken care of.” Or, maybe, “Well, I’ve got two in career, and they’re hugely important to me!” So, all right, it doesn’t matter so much the quantity of pieces of paper. And when I’m looking for clusters and connections, do I need yarn, like an FBI investigation board? Or do I just let them hang?

Ximena Vengoechea
No, you do not need yarn.

Pete Mockaitis
All right.

Ximena Vengoechea
If that feels good to you, that would be your own unique modification. I will not stop you. But, no, usually, I suggest doing this either on a wall, a foam core board if you have one, but if not, a wall is great, or the floor is also fine, and you’re just moving things around. So, we’re keeping things flexible. We don’t need to attach anything else to it. We’re just kind of seeing where things land.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And then what’s our next step?

Ximena Vengoechea
So, from here, we’re going to start thinking about some other factors to help us understand what’s happening. So, we’re going to look at, okay, let’s say we’ve got however many wishes, we’ve grouped them into themes, we can start to prioritize. Usually, I suggest that people commit to three to five wishes a year, and that’s a guideline.

As you mentioned earlier, you might have two wishes in career, they might be huge. We need to be aware of that. You don’t want to commit to five huge wishes, but you do want to find a little bit of a balance, and that’s where knowing, “Is this a core value that I’m going to live through every day? Is this something I want to do in the next 6 to 12 months? Is this something that I need to work toward eventually, someday?” That’s where having that in mind really helps so that you’re not tackling all, let’s say, someday wishes, like huge wishes. You find a balance, but you’re really going to start to prioritize.

And prioritization can come on multiple axes. So, you might be a really rational thinker and look and say, “Okay, what do I know is achievable, either because I have the right skillset in place, I have the right resources, I have the time and money available to me, I have mentorship?” Maybe it’s geographically feasible, right? But if you’re a really logical thinker that might be a really useful way for you to prioritize.

Some people hear that, and they think, “Oh, my God, that sounds so boring. That sounds like homework.” And they might be more drawn to just intuition of, like, where is their natural heat? Like, “What am I naturally drawn to? I’m going to just follow that instinct.” Other people might also think about this more emotionally of, “What am I afraid of? Like, maybe that’s actually the entry point I want to take in. The things that are scariest to me might also be most exciting to me.”

So, there’s a lot of that you can go into it, but you want to choose whatever feels right for you. Usually, it’s a combination of those things that you might want to ask yourself some questions around before you kind of come up with that short list.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. So, we’ve got our short list, then what?

Ximena Vengoechea
So, at this point, you also want to start thinking about what’s feasible. So, I usually recommend that folks do a little bit of an audit of their time, “So, knowing that these are the things that I want to spend my time on, how am I spending my time today?” And I usually recommend that folks just look at an average day and make a quick list of “Here’s how I usually spend my time.”

You can think of it as like a pie chart, give yourself little percentages, maybe work takes up 50% of the time, child care or pet care or life admin, just start to chart it out, and see what is the delta between where you want to be and where you are. I think, similarly, doing a little bit of a relationship audit. So, thinking about who are the people in your life who you spend the most time with. That doesn’t necessarily mean physically, like you’re in the same room, but like these are the people you’re connecting with the most on an average day.

Usually, these people are somewhat convenient. So, maybe there’s someone you work with, or maybe they live in your building, or you have some reason that you’re seeing them a lot, versus they’re actually someone who can help me see these wishes through, who can help me see these goals through, and I don’t mean that in a transactional sense. I don’t mean, “So-and-so works in the recording industry. Like, I can talk to them about getting a foot in the door for whatever goal.” That’s not what I mean.

I mean people who are really inspiring to you, are motivating, the friend who you have a coffee catch up with and you walk away and you’re like, “Yes, like life is good. I can do anything.” Like, the people who boost you up or genuinely invested in you as a person. person, that’s what I’m talking about. I call them gems.

So, what we’re doing here is we’re kind of taking a look at, “Okay, there are some stuff that I want to do, that I want to pursue. What does my life look like now? Who is kind of supporting me? Who could support me? Where are the gaps?” because that is also going to give us information about where some tweaks might need to be made in order to support our pursuit of these goals and wishes and desires.

Pete Mockaitis
Very good. Okay, then what?

Ximena Vengoechea
At that point, you’ve got a lot of information about changes that you might want to make. That can feel both galvanizing, energizing, exciting, and daunting. Like, you might look at your lists and go, “Oh, my God, I’m not talking to anybody who I actually want to talk to,” or, like, “My schedule is not really in my control. Like, how can I shift even a little bit?”

And this is usually, I think of this as like a phase where, for example, if you’re setting a New Year’s resolution, we’re often not doing this depth of self-analysis. We’re kind of making the wish or setting the goal and forgetting about the rest, but we’re going so much deeper that now we can see some of the gaps in our own schedule, in our own lives, in our own network, however you want to put it. So, now this phase is about making sure that we don’t get dissuaded or discouraged by what we’re seeing because it’s normal to have some gaps.

If you didn’t have any gaps, you probably would have pursued those goals and wishes earlier. So, it’s normal, it is expected. And now at this point, we want to see, like, “Okay, how do I begin to chart a path forward?” And so, the third part is really all about goal-setting, and how to make these goals more manageable for yourself.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And how do we?

Ximena Vengoechea
So, I usually tell people, you know, like taking a look at those, let’s say, three to five areas. Like, how do we break those goals down into really achievable goals? So, for example, let’s say you have a wish that’s just to read more. You used to read as a kid, you don’t really read now, like you want to return to your love of reading.

Rather than go to the bookstore and buy 20 books that look awesome and put them on your bedside and go, “Okay, I’m starting tonight,” what if you got one book? And what if you committed to a paragraph a night? And then you work your way up to a chapter a night, right? Like, starting really small, so whatever that goal is, essentially how can you break it down into something really manageable? So manageable that you are virtually guaranteed to succeed because, especially in the beginning, it is important to get that momentum.

Psychologically, when you’re pursuing something new, it’s important to get these quick wins so that you go, “Okay, I can do this,” and then you can continue to make progress against that. So that’s one thing that I suggest.

Pete Mockaitis
I love that a lot. And we had B.J. Fogg on the show talking about Tiny Habits, and that really resonates in terms of in my own life and the results that he’s seeing, in general, it feels good to win and to be able to celebrate something. And it is worth celebrating something new, even if it’s super tiny. And he uses the example of when a child takes his or her first steps, no one says, “Okay, yeah, whatever, you only made it like six inches, dude.” It’s like, no, no, it’s beautiful and wondrous and worthy of celebration.

And so too is it if, “Hey, if we want to read more,” we’ve kind of had that as a hidden desire for years, and then we finally buy book and read a paragraph, that is worth celebrating. That’s something. Go from zero to one there.

Ximena Vengoechea
Absolutely, yeah. We’re making progress. It can feel really small, but that’s what we’re doing, is we’re making progress. The other thing that I recommend is to think about having some kind of accountability partner because it is totally natural, when you are pursuing something new, that things will get hard. Your schedule will be difficult, someone will get sick, like, things will get thrown off, you’ll forget. There are just a number of things that get in our way, as anyone who’s either tried to start a new habit or to stop a bad habit from forming. Lots of uncontrollable factors.

One thing you can do, though, is to have an accountability partner. So, let’s say you have something like, you know, there’s that yoga studio in your neighborhood that you pass by all the time, kind of wistfully looking at, like, “That could be me. Like, maybe someday,” and you’ve decided, “No, I’m actually going to get serious about exercise, and that is where I’m going to start.” Maybe, you find a friend who will go with you to this yoga class. Maybe you guys sign up to do this on a weekly basis. It is much easier to cancel on ourselves than it is to cancel on someone else.

So, when we have somebody else who is waiting for us, excited to see us, there’s just more accountability built in, and we are less likely to bail even if it’s really freezing out and we’d rather not put on our heavy down jacket and head out into the cold to the studio. Having somebody there on the other side really helps encourage us to keep going.

Pete Mockaitis
I dig it. Having been through this and seen other people go through it, have you observed any patterns in terms of ideal mindsets and not-so-ideal mindsets, in terms of the headspace or approach that we take while working these steps? Any do’s or don’ts come to mind there?

Ximena Vengoechea
Yes. I would say that you’ll have more success if you come into this with an open mind and self-compassion, the ability to give yourself some grace for when things are difficult. If you come into it with this mindset of “Everything should be perfect. Why am I already failing? Why haven’t I done all these things in my life audit? I’ve wasted my life. Like, now I’m behind and I have to really like catch up,” that’s a lot of pressure. That’s a lot of, like, emotional pressure to put on yourself. And that means that anytime there’s any kind of setback, with that mindset it’s going to be a lot harder to overcome those setbacks.

So, really, if you can do the opposite, if you can bring a spirit of openness, of curiosity, of, “Why haven’t I pursued that? Oh, that’s interesting. What might have been in the way at the time? Okay, what has changed in my life that maybe now is the right time to pursue this? Why is this getting harder? Maybe I need somebody else in my life supporting me, or maybe there’s a set of skills that I realize I don’t have in order to pursue this.”

But, really, coming in with openness, with curiosity, and a spirit of adventure, of like, “Okay, we’re going to try this, and we’re going to learn some things along the way, and not everything is going to work out, and that’s okay, because we’re trying, and we are still making progress toward living a life that is more aligned with our values,” I think that can be so much more productive and fruitful, and, frankly, more fun. And when things are more fun, we tend to stick with them.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s great. Well, Ximena, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we hear about some of your favorite things?

Ximena Vengoechea
I think just thinking about this as really an opportunity to get to know yourself and to carve out some time for yourself, again, I think we don’t really have many nudges to do this, so if you’ve been on the fence about, you know, or feeling a little bit off, then I would say just like consider this your nudge to dive deep and go for some self-discovery.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Now, could you share a favorite study, or experiment, or bit of research?

Ximena Vengoechea
I’m always interested having my career in user research. One of the things that always comes up is how often participants have a desire to please you as a researcher, right? It’s like you show them study, you show them something, a prototype, a concept, and there’s such a strong…

Pete Mockaitis
“Oh, it’s really good.”

Ximena Vengoechea
Yeah, and you’re like, “No, this is broken. Like, I know it’s broken. It’s broken in all these ways. It is deeply flawed.” So, that always interests me, like this idea that even with a perfect stranger, there’s a pressure to perform. There’s a pressure to please in some way.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. And a favorite book?

Ximena Vengoechea
I just read this book by Natalie Sue, I Hope This Finds You Well, and it is a very funny office workplace novel. It perfectly captures office politics at its finest. It’s very funny. If you work in any kind of corporate setting, in particular, I think you will find it funny and a great main character.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite tool?

Ximena Vengoechea
Sharpies, Post-its, and I love a good notebook, like a Moleskine notebook.

Pete Mockaitis
Is Moleskine your preferred brand?

Ximena Vengoechea
I like them, and then there’s also a German brand which I don’t know how to pronounce. I think it’s Leuchtturm. I’m sure that is not the correct pronunciation. But, yeah, both of those brands, I like.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Ximena Vengoechea
Breaking things down into smaller chunks, but, really, I didn’t mention earlier the fresh start effect. Like, I love that for habits when you start on the first day of the year, or the first day of a new season, or having moved. That’s all, there’s a lot of research around how you can use a fresh start to make habit-building more effective.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Ximena Vengoechea
People really seem to connect with the idea of the life audit as a kind of spring cleaning for the soul, is the phrase that I use, and that’s something that comes up in a lot of conversations of, like, “Yes, that is exactly what this is.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Ximena Vengoechea
Yeah, so a great place to start is my website, which is XimenaVengoechea.com, and that is kind of a hub for all ways to connect with me, whether that’s social media or my newsletter, and beyond.

Pete Mockaitis
And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Ximena Vengoechea
I think just checking in with that little voice, you know? I think just making space for it and not ignoring it. I think that’s really the main one.

Pete Mockaitis
Ximena, thanks. This was a lot of fun.

Ximena Vengoechea
Thank you so much. This is great.