When you feel off, look within
How an Inner Self Audit can help you realign before you derail
Hi 👋 I’m Alex Turpin, author of Leading Yourself First.
This Newsletter helps you build a high-performing high-fulfilling life, without burning out or selling out. I share thoughts, strategies, and concepts that are helping me walk that path.
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There are moments in life when nothing is obviously wrong, but something doesn’t feel quite right.
You’re not burned out. You’re not stuck. But you’re not in flow either.
You go through the motions. You keep showing up. You reply to emails, deliver on tasks, hit deadlines. But inside? Something feels off. Your energy is low in strange ways. Your focus slips. You feel unmotivated even though you believe in what you're doing. You try to push through. You tell yourself it will pass.
Over the years, I’ve learned that these moments aren’t random. They’re signals. And instead of brushing them away, I’ve trained myself to stop and pay attention.
What I do in those moments is something I call an Inner Self Audit.
The problem isn’t always outside. Most often, it’s misalignment within oneself.
With a background in Science & Engineering, I’ve always been drawn to systems thinking. I’v devoted the last 5 years of my career leading my teams towards assess performance, troubleshoot bottlenecks, and align on goals. But what I didn’t fully realise until later was that the same kind of assessment we do in teams or organisations is just as important to do within ourselves.
I created a simple yet powerful structure for that. A quarterly or monthly personal check-in that I now think of as the Inner Self Audit.
This isn’t about judging yourself. It’s about reconnecting.
It helps you pause and ask: Am I living in a way that reflects what really matters to me? Are my daily choices aligned with the person I want to become?
Sometimes the answer is yes. Sometimes, not quite.
And that gap is where we get the signal.
The audit has two use cases
Regular check-ins: These are proactive, scheduled audits. Every quarter (or month if you prefer), you take a short pause to reflect. You look at the areas that matter, ask key questions, and adjust course if needed. Just like a GPS recalibrates if you miss a turn, this helps you stay on track. You know that you're going in the right direction. If there's something in your life that's not aligned with your objectives, then it's time to act on that. And having someone to do this self-check in is priceless. In my case, it's my wife. Before having the second kid, we always religiously had 1 dinner a month when we checked in openly about ourselves, about how we saw each other, as well as how our relationship was going. Now with the 6-months old little one, we make sure to check in regularly, perhaps we can't afford a whole dinner. We do a coffe and sometimes even a 1h road trip when the kids are sleeping in the car works. The point is to carry out an introspective exercise regularly.
Emergency audits: These are reactive. You wake up one day feeling flat. Or your week is off and you can’t quite tell why. Maybe your sleep is worse, your relationships feel distant, or you’re constantly distracted. That’s when you stop and say, Something's up. I need to check in with myself.
Both are necessary. The first keeps you aligned. The second helps you recover alignment.
The structure of the Inner Self Audit
I use five core pillars to reflect. Each represents an essential dimension of a well-designed, high-integrity life. These are working categories that reflect the things most of us care deeply about, whether we name them or not.
1. Inner Operating System
This is about how you relate to yourself.
Are your thoughts clear or cloudy?
Are your beliefs serving you or limiting you?
Are you aware of your emotions, or are they running in the background unexamined?
Are you acting from intention or reaction?
Your mindset, your emotional awareness, your core values, your self-talk. This is your inner OS. If it’s not performing well, everything else is harder.
2. Performance Protocols
This is about how you manage your energy.
Are you sleeping well?
Are you moving your body regularly?
Are you nourishing yourself?
Are you recovering well from stress?
This isn’t about being perfect. It’s about being honest. You can’t perform well in any area of life if you’re depleted. And sometimes, a simple tweak in this area lifts everything else.
3. Time & Attention
This is about how you spend your life force.
Are you spending your time in ways that align with what matters?
Are you focusing your attention where it has the most impact?
Are you leveraging your skills, tools, or systems to work smarter, not harder?
If your calendar is full but your life feels empty, this is usually the pillar to look at.
4. Leadership
This is about how you show up for others.
Are you leading at home, at work, in your community with presence and clarity?
Are you growing others, or just managing tasks?
Are you creating spaces where people can thrive, or just coping with the noise?
Leadership isn’t about titles. It’s about influence and responsibility. If you’re out of alignment here, it affects your relationships and your sense of meaning.
5. Legacy and Craft
This is about how you build and what you leave behind.
Are you creating something you believe in?
Are you refining your craft, or just maintaining?
Are you living in a way that your future self and my kids would be proud of?
This pillar is about purpose, contribution, and direction. The long view. It’s easy to neglect it in the day-to-day, but doing so eventually drains our spirit.
How the audit works in practice
The actual audit isn’t complicated. You sit down and walk through each of the five pillars. You score yourself on each from 1 to 10. Then, you reflect:
Where am I strong right now?
Where am I slipping?
Where do I feel most out of sync with the kind of life I want to build?
Sometimes, this takes 15 minutes. Sometimes longer.
I also like to split the audit into two phases:
Open reflection: I brainstorm everything that comes up. Free writing, notes, voice memos, whatever helps surface the signals. My favourite is to spill on a whiteboard absolutely everything that comes to my mind, with no order, with no structure. That simple task of removing all my thoughts from my brain and visualising them on a whiteboard, already gives me a good hint of what’s the area or areas that need more attention. What are my worries. What are the aspects of my life that are being left behind and misaligned with my goals.
Structured review: I go through each pillar systematically. Give it a score. Write a sentence or two about what’s working or not. Then I make one or two decisions to adjust.
The goal isn’t to be absolutely exhaustive with your life every time. It’s to course-correct early.
A personal story
Recently, I did an emergency audit. The trigger? My fridge.
Yes, you’re reading right.
I opened it one morning and it was pure chaos. Leftovers, old stuff, no clear plan for meals. And I noticed how that made me feel: cluttered, reactive, a bit disappointed. That’s not how I normally keep things.
And then I realised: this wasn’t just about food. It was a mirror.
I had been so absorbed in writing and researching for this newsletter that I stopped paying attention to the small things. I was sleeping less and worse. I was skipping workouts. I was spending too much time in front of screens. I hadn’t really planned the week. And all of that added up to a version of myself that wasn’t performing well, not just in work, but in life.
So I did the audit. And it showed me where I needed to rebalance. I brought my wife into the process. We talked about how we were both feeling. We made small adjustments: planned better meals, went on more walks, reduced evening screen time. I also blocked time for short workouts, even if just 30-45 minutes.
The shift wasn’t dramatic. But it was real. And the week after felt smoother, lighter, more intentional.
This isn’t about guilt. It’s about integrity.
We all drift. The question is: do we notice? Do we respond?
You can’t always avoid misalignment. But you can shorten the time you spend in it.
That’s the power of doing these audits.
It’s not about being harsh or trying to optimise every second of your day. It’s about living in alignment with your values, energy, and purpose. It’s about being a good sheppard of your time here.
Final thought
Your external world is often just your internal world made visible. When your days feel chaotic, it’s worth asking whether something inside needs attention.
Doing an Inner Self Audit regularly is like giving your inner compass a recalibration. You don’t need to wait until things fall apart. And you don’t need to be in crisis to pause and reflect.
Sometimes, it just takes a quiet moment and a few honest questions to find your way back to clarity.
What would your own self audit reveal right now?
Maybe it’s time to check in.
PS: I have prepared a Guide for performing an Inner Self Audit. If interested, DM me and I’ll share it with you.