In our fast-paced society, it’s easy to lose the balance that we crave. As a result, it’s easy to neglect important areas in our lives that bring us meaning and fulfillment. This is where the Wheel of Life can help us out.

What Is the Wheel of Life?

The truth is that without learning how to mindfully monitor our daily lives, we can end up focusing all our time and energy on a single area and neglecting other important parts. This is where a tool called the Wheel of Life can serve as a highly useful and informative resource. It helps us look at each of these different life categories and identify which areas are doing well and which areas we need to allocate more attention to. It does this by graphically representing the different life categories as they are now, compared to how we would ideally like them to be. Then, you can identify gaps and where you need to spend your time. Through understanding this, we can then identify what steps we need to take in order to live a life of happiness and success.

Visualize It

Looking at the wheel of life, you can easily find a visual representation of it. It’s commonly a circle that’s sectioned off into various quadrants. These quadrants vary from person to person depending on the career coaches or life coaches that you’re talking to. At the end of the day, the concept is the same: You’ll import areas of your life into an assessment and that assessment will tell you the size of that quadrant. Usually, each quadrant isn’t filled up to the top and the visual representation of it will show you clearly where you can work. Online you can find many different ideas and creatives for the wheel of life. Find the one that best suits your needs and design preferences.

The Wheel of Life Categories

No life is exactly identical to someone else’s. As such, it’s possible that different categories of living will be included in the Wheel of Life for different individuals. What’s important is that the categories you choose to include provide an accurate representation of the important areas of your life that will help you achieve an overall life balance. That being said, there are some common ones:

1. Health

In this category, you aim to rate how physically and mentally healthy you are. You can ask yourself questions like:

How do I feel? How regularly do I exercise? What is my diet like? Are there any changes I’d like to make to live a healthier lifestyle?

2. Career

In this Wheel of Life category, you are beginning to think about the job you’re currently working at and rating how satisfied you are with it. Are you happy where you are, or would you rather be working a different job, potentially in a different field? Does the career path you’re currently on bring you happiness? Can it support the lifestyle you desire?

3. Personal Development

This category on the Wheel of Life looks at how you are investing in your personal growth. Are you pursuing opportunities that open you up to new experiences? Are you eager to learn new things? What are you doing to evolve and develop into the person you hope to be one day?

4. Finances

The financial category encourages you to reflect on whether or not your current income supports your basic needs, as well as the lifestyle you are hoping to live [1]. Are you going to be happy with the progression of your income over the next 5 years? Or are you going to have to make changes? No, money is not the only thing that influences our happiness, but it’s certainly one of the key players.

5. Life Enjoyment

Here, think about what kind of activities you engage in to bring yourself life satisfaction and a sense of life enjoyment. Whether that’s sports, reading, writing, or any other hobby doesn’t really matter. What matters is that you are engaging in some things that bring you happiness on a regular basis. All work and no play makes for a dull day, and eventually a dull and unsatisfactory life. You can analyze your level of life enjoyment a bit more using this article.

6. Societal Contribution

This Wheel of Life category asks you to reflect on what is it that you are giving back to others. How are you giving back to the people around you or the communities that you are a part of? Do you volunteer? Do you help out with local sports or clubs? Are you engaged in political issues to make your community a healthier and safer place for everyone?

7. Relationships

Now you’re going to evaluate your relationships with other people, including family and friends. As you do this, ask yourself whether you feel these relationships are built on a good foundation or not? Do you trust the other person in the relationship? Do you each support one another? Can you build on the relationship that is currently established in a positive way? Are these relationships having a positive influence on your daily life?

8. Romance

Now you’re going to ask yourself a few questions about a specific relationship, the one you have with your partner. In the Wheel of Life, this is one of our most important relationships. The most important question that you can ask yourself here is if you have a partner who is committed to you and who you can build an amazing relationship with. Are you supporting each other’s growth? Do your values align? Are you able to make each other laugh? It’s very rare to find all these things in another person, so if you find someone who checks a lot of these boxes, you’ve probably found a special someone worth keeping around.

How To Use The Wheel Of Life

Every “slice” of the Wheel of Life represents one of many life categories. Each of these categories is rated by you on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being poor and 10 being excellent. Once you’re done rating where you feel each of the different categories are right now, you’ll be left with a diagram with a mosaic-like wheel appearance, something like a spider web. This will allow you to visualize which areas of your life you’re currently lacking in right now. Then, you can go around the Wheel of Life again and indicate where you would ideally like each of these categories to be. The visual representations above will show you which areas of your life require the most effort and attention at this moment. Every aspect of the Wheel of Life has an important role in your life. Your goal should be to answer the questions as honestly as possible. This will provide you with the most accurate representation of your current life. Don’t forget, we are always capable of change and improvement. If you aren’t satisfied with certain categories on your Wheel of Life, or the entire wheel in general, then get motivated to make changes!

4 Steps to Live a Better Life Using Wheel of Life

Here is how to be using the Wheel of Life to enhance your personal development.

1. Reflecting on Your Results

If you feel like you would now go and create your own Wheel of Life that you can use in order to improve your own life, then check out this Wheel of Life assessment tool. [2] This is a free version of the wheel that asks you to provide your current and ideal category scores and then creates your Wheel of Life for you. It’s free and only takes a few minutes to complete. Once you’ve completed your Wheel of Life and accurately and honestly identified the current and ideal scores for each category, you can move forward with these insights in order to improve your life. You might ask yourself questions like:

Why do you currently have a low/high score in a given category? Which categories have the largest gaps between their current position and your ideal score? What can you do in order to move the category score from its current position to where you would ideally like it to be? Which categories on your Wheel of Life are the most important to you? Which categories are currently having the biggest impact on your life? Are there categories that you would like to dedicate more/less attention to?

These are all important questions that you can answer to provide yourself with useful information moving forward as you improve your life. By taking a look at your entire life like this, you can also begin making connections between different areas. For example, how is your career impacting your personal development, or how are your relationships impacting your finances and life enjoyment? These are all things that the Wheel of Life allows you to consider and visualize.

2. Pick An Area And Set Goals

After reflecting, start to think about what plans, strategies, and steps you can begin taking in order to get where you want to be first of all. It seems simple, but don’t mistake the simplicity for easiness. The planning stage is crucial as it sets the tonne for how you’ll improve. To start, focus on one area of your life on the wheel and think about what actions you can take towards improving that area and do some goal setting for that. For example:

For your health, you can improve it by losing weight, doing daily stretches, or going for a walk. In your career, you’ll be looking at how to get a promotion, work for another company, or venture into another industry even. Personal development will be setting goals that help you to evolve and develop as a person. Setting goals around self-discovery like planning to take walks in nature, meditating, or writing in a journal. Finances would focus on saving money or improving your income through new revenue streams or increasing existing ones. Life enjoyment will be looking into hobbies and committing to them. Societal contributions are about community involvement goals. Volunteering, contributing to local sports or clubs. Relationships will be working to enhance current friendships or gain more of them. This extends to other people in your life along with family and friends. Romance will be working on the love you have with your partner. Goals that can work on making romance better would be on contributing to making the relationship work, offering support, and understanding values and working to appease them.

3. Stretch The Goals To Other Areas

Once you have mapped out one area, it’s important that you begin working on another area of your life in the process here and there. The idea about all of this is that you want to have a balance wheel rather than a lopsided wheel. The thing about life is that by focusing on one thing in your life, you are neglecting the other areas of your life in the process. And by continuing to ignore the other areas can cause a lot of harm later down the road. For example, working on your career goals is nice as it can also cover financial goals too. However, by putting too much time into work, you’ll put more strain on your relationships, and health. Any life coaches that are coaching wheel of life practices should tell you that spending a bit of time in all areas in your life is important and do not neglect them. Keep it in mind when planning that not all of your time needs to be devoted to one thing. Once one aspect is started, work on another and determine what’s a reasonable amount of time to work on that area.

4. Reflect On New Results And Build Further

The Wheel of life is a powerful tool as it points out areas where you can improve in your life and can funnel you into setting goals and striving to complete them. These areas of your life are deeply personal to you so it’s easy to find reasons to commit and make an effort to work on those areas. But while you’re going through that process, it’s important to reflect on your new results and see if things need to be changed or if things could be improved upon. When facing new challenges, we learn and develop ourselves. We come up with new solutions that can remain buried in our subconscious. Spending time once a month or even once a week reflecting on how things can get easier or better you can make adjustments and build further in that area while balancing everything else.

Final Thoughts

Do your best to think of your life in terms of the big picture so that you can understand how the different aspects of your life influence each other and impact the overall quality of your life. This will help you in finding balance and working on goal setting for success. By understanding the big picture, you can then take action towards bringing the life you’ve always wanted into reality!

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Featured photo credit: Jean Gerber via unsplash.com