Heard of the Wheel of Life and want to understand how it works and why it is an important tool for achieving life balance and setting goals. Well, keep on reading.
WHAT IS THE WHEEL OF LIFE?
The wheel of life is a tool that is commonly used in personal development and by life coaches. Sometimes it also referred to as the Coaching Wheel or the Life Balance Wheel.
The purpose of the wheel of life is for the person using it quickly create a visual representation of how fulfilled they are in their life at the moment of filling it in.
The wheel is usually split into 8 or 10 sections with each section being assigned to a different category or area of your life. Then an individual will score each category from 1-10 (1 being dissatisfied or unfulfilled and 10 is highly satisfied or highly fulfilled).
HOW TO USE THE WHEEL OF LIFE WHEN SETTING YOUR GOALS?
Step 1: Fill in your wheel
Firstly you will need to a wheel of life that you can draw on. You could either take a wheel of life that already has the different areas of your life plotted around the wheel or you can get a blank wheel and decide for yourself how you would like to divide up the different areas of your life.
If you choose a blank wheel you’ll need to decide on the categories. The point of the wheel is to help you achieve a life balance so choosing the right categories is essential. You should be thinking of different aspects of your life. To give you an idea here are some examples you could use:
- Family
- Friends
- Love, Dating, Significant Other
- Career, Work or Business
- Finances or Money
- Health
- Recreation, Fun, Leisure or Hobbies
- Personal Growth, Personal Development or Learning
- Community
- Spirituality or Religion
Once you have chosen the areas of your life you would like to rate it is time to start filling out your wheel. For every section mark on your wheel your current level of satisfaction/fulfilment from 1 – 10.
Once you have completed all of the areas you can join the dots up and this should give you a “spider web”.
This visual representation should hopefully show you very quickly if there are certain areas that are currently below or above your normal level of satisfaction/fulfilment.
Step 2: Visualise what 10 looks like in every area of your life.
So far you have been filling in your wheel of life from your current position, but when it comes to using the wheel of life to set your goals you need to get clear on what highly satisfied or fulfilled looks like.
Take a moment to consider every aspect that is labelled on the wheel and write down what would need to happen in order for you to score that area as a 10.
Step 3: Set your goals
You know where you are right now and you know what a 10 looks like. Now the aim is to close the gap. Remember the point of using the Wheel of Life is to help you to set goals that are balanced. There are a number ways to set goals.
You can set goals using the Be, Do, Have Model (click here to read how to use this method ) or another common way to set goals is by using the SMART method (click here to learn how to use the SMART method).
Whilst both are great ways to set goals they don’t ensure that you are setting a balanced set of goals.
The reason why the Wheel of Life is so powerful as a goal-setting tool because it ensures you set goals across the different areas of your life so hopefully you’ll improve your satisfaction or fulfilment with your life across the board.
Now you can look at your wheel and look at the areas in your life with the lowest score. Ask yourself “Is this an area of my life I want to improve?”. The fact is some areas may have a low score, but they may also be of low importance to you. If it isn’t an area you are highly concerned about. However, if it is an area of your life that is important ask yourself “What can I do to improve my score by 2-4 points?”. Going from 2-10 is a big jump, but 3-5 or 4-7 is much more achievable.
Continue to ask yourself this for every aspect on the wheel (unless you scored a 10 in the aspect) and you should be left with a set of goals that you can focus on achieving.
