The Joy First® Audit
Find your 'JFP' Joy First Pulse
Before we figure out how to put more ‘joy first’, we must know where we are starting from.
I recorded this episode in my living room at about 9pm on a Tuesday. I finally wrapped-up bedtime with the kids… my husband had just walked in from his 67th paddle game of the week…. Despite doing the shopping an hour earlier, I had to go back to get the rest of the stuff for tacos…. so of course, the second I pressed record, my dog grabbed a squeaky toy.
I stopped.
I started again.
And I thought, honestly, this day is exactly right for this episode.
Today we’re talking about taking stock of your life as it actually is, not as you wish it were. Your life on a Tuesday at 9pm when you’re running on nothing but lukewarm tea, an ambitious to-do list, and the best intentions.
That’s real life.
What branding taught me about life
One of my favourite things to do in my work is a brand audit. It works like this…
Someone sends me their brand, their website and they fill out a short questionnaire, and I go deep analysing what’s working, what’s not, what their archetypes could or should be, and their brand’s ideal personality type and colour psychology… and I send back a canva whiteboard and a video with the honest big-picture view: what’s working, what’s in tension, and where I see the most opportunity.
It’s one of these things in our businesses that almost always requires an outside eye, even (especially) for experts. I need someone else to do it for my own business, and I do this for a living! Anyway…
I had one of these to complete the other day and it really got me thinking: When do we ever do that for our lives?
When do we stop, actually stop, and take a proper honest look at where we are across all of it? Not just the one category that’s screaming at us right now, but all of it together?
Most of us don’t. We move from the urgent thing to the next urgent thing and somewhere along the way we lose the thread of whether any of it is actually working. Whether we are ever really feeling joy at all?
This is why the Joy First Audit exists.
I developed a ‘happiness quiz’ way back in 2015 when I ran my first group program for pet photographers and needed a way to establish a real baseline before we started working together. I’ve been using it myself on-and-off since then as well.
This year I’ve updated it to covers six categories: Vitality, Security, Connection, Joy, Environment and Purpose. Each one is weighted (Vitality and Security count for more, because where fear is concerned they can destabilize everything else). At the end, you get a score out of 100.
This your ‘Joy First Pulse’: a reading of where you are right now, so you have something real to measure against later.
My Joy First Pulse
I just took the audit myself… My Jan 2026 Joy First Pulse: 75/100.
And if you want more of the details, I’m diving into it in S4E2 of the Joy First podcast:
In this episode, I share my actual scores across 6 key categories. I explain why having a baseline like this matters, why I'm moving over here to Substack, the custom AI co-pilot I built to walk you through the audit (get it below by becoming a paid member), and the 3 A's I’ve established for showing up online this year.
Welcome to the messy middle, documented in real time… can’t wait to be in it together.
Subscribe to get the Audit:
FREE to get the simple version
PAID to get the custom AI co-pilot version