What is Wheel of Life? And why is it the great tool for goals setting?


Wheel of life is a great exercise and an amazing self-assessment tool to help you better examine each area of your life and assess what is off balance and identify areas that need more attention. This technique is used widely in life coaching. It is also a great starting point to goals setting and reviewing your priorities.

How do you use Wheel of Life

The purpose of Wheel of Life is to identify how you are currently dividing your time between different things and how happy and satisfied you are in the those spheres of your life. Ideally we would like to have a balance between different areas of our life but it is not always a case. So many of us spends too much time at work and there is not enough time left for family pleasures or simply me-time, etc.

Here, during the exercise, you will be able to assess for yourself all important spheres in your life. Each area of your life is mapped on a circle, like the spoke of a wheel.The Wheel of Life gives you a visual representation of the way your life is currently and can give you some kind of reflection about the way you would ideally like it to be.

5 steps of working with Wheel of Life

You can draw your Wheel of Life yourself or use templates available to download from the internet. If you would like to print out your template, you could use this link to download one. Otherwise you could search for other template available from the net.

1. Set up your Wheel of Life. 

Usual categories used in Wheel of Life are: Friends and Family, Partner, Career, Money, Health, Personal Growth and Learning, Fun & Leisure and Physical Environment. You can change, split or rename any category of the Wheel of Life so that it’s meaningful and represents a balanced life for you.

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2. Brainstorm your life areas and score them.

After you choose the areas you want to focus on, do some brainstorming. Think about each category and ask yourself relevant questions which would help you to better assess your satisfaction in given category.

For example:

  • Is your career where you want it to be?
  • Are you earning enough income to satisfy your current needs?
  • Are you satisfied with your level of health and fitness?
  • Do you feel loved and you can can express your love?
  • Are you satisfied with your personal growth?
  • Do you do things for fun?

Your aim is to get the honest score that will represent how happy and fulfilled you are in this area of your life. This step is to assess the amount of attention you’re currently putting to each area. Think about what success feels like for you in each category. Remember that everybody is different, so your ideal scores per each area would be different then other people. This exercise is for you to realize where you are now and what you potentially would like to change.

3. Complete the Wheel of Life.

Next, taking the center of the wheel as 0 (very dissatisfied) and the outer edge as 10 (fully satisfied), rank your level of satisfaction with each area out of 10 by drawing a line across each segment (see example below).

wheel-of-life

4. Reflect on the results. Think about your ideal levels.

You completed your Wheel of Life. Have a look at it and reflect on what you see. Is it balanced in all areas? If it is unbalanced- what categories stand up? Any surprises?

Look at your wheel and think if it would give you smooth or bumpy ride…

Think about the score in each category which you would consider as ideal for yourself. How far from it are you at this moment? Even if it is far from ideal, it is no time to panic and get depressed. Rather opposite- it is time to take some action and set up new goals.

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5. Take corrective actions. Set your new goals.

Now, after some contemplation about each category, you will have some kind of idea what score you will call good for yourself. Think about any actions you could potentially take to make yourself more satisfied in the selected areas of life. Those areas with lower scores are actually full of opportunities. You can grow the most in this area as you haven’t explore or the options in these areas yet. Focus on setting up new goals to achieve better outcome. Commit to make some good changes for yourself and enjoy your journey of personal growth!

If you need some help with process of setting goals, check my related posts

It is probably a good idea to revisit this exercise every few months to check how your priorities and scores changed and if you are more balanced in your life. Good luck!

pursue your goals

 

How did you like this exercise? Any surprising results? Please leave me a comment below 🙂

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