Wheel of life : assess your life in 30 minutes

Yesterday, my friend Allison told me that the story of my self development inspired her. She wanted to know herself better. But she didn’t know where to begin. It is not easy to make the first step. Her request made me think. So where to begin?

Wheel of life

How about doing an easy exercise to assess your life ?! I did this exercice myself. It was amazing to have such a quick and visual overview of my life.
It’s a powerful coaching tool that is often used in the beginning of coaching to help a person to have a clear view of their life.

How does it work ?

First, you choose at least 8 areas of your life you want to assess ( popular areas are in bold):
– Family
– Friends
– Relationships
– Love
– Career
– Business
– Money
– Personal development
– Spirituality
– Education
– Health
– Wellness
– Sports
– Contribution
– Community
– Fun
– Recreation
– Self-image

It is up to you to put any other area that is important to you. Everybody is different after all 🙂

1. Take a sheet of paper and draw a circle. From the center, draw as many lines as the number of areas you choose. If you choose 8 areas, it should look like this.

2. Rate your level of satisfaction on a scale of zero to ten for each area of your life. Zero means not satisfied at all, ten means highly satisfied.
3. Mark on the life wheel each score and connect them. It should look like a web. The wheel shows how balanced and how satisfied you are about your life.
4. Rank each area according to their importance

Analysis

Now that you have a pretty web on your wheel of life, how should it be interpreted ? 🙂

The wheel of life helps to reflect on the questions :
How satisfied am I about my life ? What is the gap to a fulfilled life ?

A fulfilled life is represented by a round wheel with the highest scores in every area.
A balanced wheel is represented by a round wheel with homogenous scores in every area.

Pay attention to the following topic and try to reflect about it:
– The lowest scores: Did you rate some areas very low ? Why? Maybe those areas are holding you back in your happiness but you didn’t pay much attention or put much effort.
– The area you usually put the most effort in your life. You may put the most effort in an area but you realize it is not so important in your life. You can consider prioritizing your actions knowing that.
– Where do you want to put effort to improve your life?
– Which area would be the easiest to improve and bring the most satisfaction?
– How do you feel about the wheel? Are you satisfied with your wheel?
– Have you neglected some important areas in your life?

It will help you identify the area where you want to focus and you want to give more energy. For example, if your contribution has a very low score and it is the least important for you. It’s maybe not worth spending time to develop this area. On the contrary if you rate it as highly important, you might consider taking actions to improve this part of your life.

My wheel of life

My wheel looked like that at the beginning of my coaching

I ranked the area like this :
1. Love
2. Personal Growth
3. Family
4. Self-Image
5. Health/Fitness
6. Social/Friends
7. Spiritual
8. Recreation/Fun
9. Career
10. Finances/Wealth
11. Contribution

There is a lot to say about my wheel :/. Personal growth, family and self image are ranked very high but the scores are quite low. I was facing some issues and I had neglected those areas that seemed important to me.
I’ve put a lot of effort in my life to build my career and my finances but now that I take some perspective it doesn’t matter that much. Still I felt the need to improve my career because it was holding me down.
I’ve never realized that my personal growth was so important until I did this exercise. Now that I spend a lot of my time working on my self development I feel much happier and satisfied with my life. Every area in my life is positively impacted.
If I had to do the exercise again, the ranking and rating would be very different now.

Let’s look for a sheet of paper and draw the wheel and tell me about it!