Coaching practices for How to Examine Your Life
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For How to Examine Your Life, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- I’m living by a whole set of rules about how life should go, and it’s started to dawn on me that I never actually chose most of them
- My days just blur past on autopilot and I crawl into bed having never paused to ask where I was at my best today and where I drifted from who I want to be
- I can think of a few times in my life when I felt genuinely, fully alive, and I want to study what those moments had in common
- I only ever take stock of my life around New Year’s, and by then the year I’m grading is already gone
- When I look at how I actually behaved today I can only ever do one of two things
Practices that may help
- Conduct a regular examined-life audit
Periodically ask: which of the beliefs I am living by have I actually examined, and which am I just inheriting?
The Socratic Method, Made Practical - The daily examen (end-of-day review)
Spend five minutes each evening reviewing where you were most and least true to yourself today.
Svadhyaya: Self-Study as a Daily Practice - Peak experience analysis
Study your life-line high points for the values and conditions they share — they reveal what fully alive looks like for you.
The Life Line Exercise - Run a quarterly life audit, not just an annual one
Review all four quadrants of your life every 90 days while the feedback loop is still tight enough to correct.
The Eisenhower Life Audit - Look honestly at your responses
Face where you fell short and where you acted well, without spiraling into either.
The Daily Examen: Reviewing the Day - Review the day following your feelings
Walk back through the day in sequence, tracking the emotional quality of each moment.
The Ignatian Examen: Five Movements of Daily Review - The Examined Life
Socrates’ claim that "the unexamined life is not worth living" (Apology, 38a) means that a life lived without sustained reflection on one’s values, beliefs, and actions is a kind of sleepwalking. The Socratic method — elenchus — is a specific form of examination: honest questioning that surfaces inconsistencies and untested assumptions. As a practice, it overlaps with metacognition and reflective practice, which have genuine evidence bases, though Socrates’ philosophical claim is stronger than any psychological finding. - Use the wheel as a relationship check-in, not just a solo exercise
Sharing your wheel with a partner, coach, or trusted friend turns a self-assessment into a conversation and a commitment.
The Wheel of Life, Made Practical - Know thyself — map your actual values against your actions
Compare what you say you value with what your behavior reveals you actually value.
The Examined Life - The Life Line Exercise
The life line exercise is a narrative reflection tool that asks you to map your life visually — high points, low points, and turning points — on a timeline. It surfaces the implicit story you have been telling yourself about your life, makes that story revisable, and identifies the experiences that most shaped your current values and patterns. Evidence is primarily clinical and observational; it is an established coaching and therapy tool with a solid mechanistic rationale.
Related concerns
- The Examined Life With My Team
Socrates’ claim that "the unexamined life is not worth living" (Apology, 38a) means that a life lived without sustained reflection on one’s values, beliefs, and actions is a kind of sleepwalking. The Socratic method — elenchus — is a specific form of examination: honest questioning that surfaces inconsistencies and untested assumptions. As a practice, it overlaps with metacognition and reflective practice, which have genuine evidence bases, though Socrates’ philosophical claim is stronger than any psychological finding.
- Authentic Life Audit
Identify the places where your choices reflect others’ expectations rather than your own values.
Audit whether you are living your life or someone else’s
- Examined Life Practice
Socrates’ claim that "the unexamined life is not worth living" (Apology, 38a) means that a life lived without sustained reflection on one’s values, beliefs, and actions is a kind of sleepwalking. The Socratic method — elenchus — is a specific form of examination: honest questioning that surfaces inconsistencies and untested assumptions. As a practice, it overlaps with metacognition and reflective practice, which have genuine evidence bases, though Socrates’ philosophical claim is stronger than any psychological finding.
- Examining Your Conscience
Face where you fell short and where you acted well, without spiraling into either.
Look honestly at your responses
- Life Review Exercise
Robert Butler proposed that systematically reviewing one’s life narrative — organizing memories into a coherent story, reconciling conflicts, and identifying what has mattered — is a natural developmental task that, when done consciously, produces ego integrity, reduced depression, and greater life satisfaction. Randomized studies in older adults find moderate positive effects; the practice is also used meaningfully across adulthood, not only at end of life.
- The Examined Life At Work
Socrates’ claim that "the unexamined life is not worth living" (Apology, 38a) means that a life lived without sustained reflection on one’s values, beliefs, and actions is a kind of sleepwalking. The Socratic method — elenchus — is a specific form of examination: honest questioning that surfaces inconsistencies and untested assumptions. As a practice, it overlaps with metacognition and reflective practice, which have genuine evidence bases, though Socrates’ philosophical claim is stronger than any psychological finding.
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