The Wheel of Life is a great exercise and tool for helping you create more balance and success in your life. It is often used in coaching and is a great foundation exercise when goal-setting. Below, you can download the free wheel of life template which is used by more than 3,000 people every month.
The Start of Happiness’ guide on the Wheel of Life helps
approximately 3,000 people every month
find balance in their life and take action for making change.
Below is a quick video I put together to explain how to use the Wheel of Life.
Welcome to your Wheel of Life!
As a starting point for creating balance, happiness and success in your life, the Wheel of Life is the perfect tool to begin your journey. Using this tool, you will be able to reflect and gain some insight into the balance of your life and how satisfied you are in life’s different areas. Following on from this self-reflection, you can utilise this exercise to further delve into why your wheel of life looks the way it does, what you would like your wheel of life to look like, and further into how to make this happen.
This Wheel of Life Exercise is not to be confused with the Buddhist Wheel of Life. The Wheel of Life used in Buddhism focuses more on an awareness of your mental state. In our Wheel of Life that is commonly used in coaching and goal-setting, it’s purpose is to identify how you’re currently spending your time and how satisfied you are in the different categories of your life.
Before we get started, this post has a supplementary tool which can be found in the Success Starter Toolkit. Enter your details below to gain access to the Success Starter Toolkit and download your free Wheel of Life templates, guide and action plan.
The Building Blocks of the Wheel of Life
Essentially, the Wheel of Life is divided into different areas or categories that are important to you. What you see above is a common example of the Wheel of Life, split into major categories of life including Business/Career, Finances, Health, Family & Friends, Romance, Personal Growth, Fun & Recreation, and Physical Environment. There is a scoring system behind using the Wheel, where you simply reflect and rate your satisfaction levels out of 10, where 1 is closest to the centre of the circle and 10 is at the edge of the circle. The above diagram is colour-coded to simplify it and also make it aesthetically pleasing… feel free to change this as you wish!
Note that the categories on the Wheel are a suggestion. You will find that with the above you will be able to score yourself in the majority of key areas in your life. However, before you rush into it and complete the Wheel, you may like to have thought whether there are any other categories or specific areas you would like get an understanding of, such as Spirituality or Contribution to Society. Perhaps you may want to have Family & Friends as two separate categories to understand each more specifically. Below is an example of what your Wheel of Life may look like.
Photo credit: Personal Excellence
Remember, this is about you finding happiness and balance in your life so it will need to be clear and simple for you to understand.
One of the biggest benefits of the Wheel of Life is the pictorial representation it gives of your satisfaction with life. When your Wheel is completed, it will give you a spider-like diagram or ‘inner-circle’ of your satisfaction levels and allows you to quickly and easily identify any gaps between where you are now and where you want to be.
Now that you understand the building blocks of the Wheel, let’s go ahead and actually complete it!
Step 1 – Setup
Print off one of the above Wheels to use as a template, or simply draw your own on a piece of paper. To download the free wheel of life templates, please access the Success Starter Toolkit.
Step 2 – Complete the Wheel
Score your satisfaction levels against each of the different categories you have on your Wheel. Take your time doing this, I would recommend 15 minutes or so. Put yourself in a place with no distractions and reflect on your life as a whole. To help you with this exercise I have provided some thought prompter’s.
Business, Career & Studies: Is your career where you want it to be by now? Are you heading in the right direction?
Finance & Wealth: Are you earning enough income to satisfy your current needs? Are you financial setup for future growth in wealth?
Health & Fitness: How physically healthy are you? Are you satisfied with your level of fitness? Are you satisfied with your diet?
Social & Friends: Are your friends supportive of you? Are you engaging friends and socializing to your satisfaction levels?
Family: Is your family supportive of you? Are you supportive of your family?
Love: Do you feel loved? How often are you expressing love to others?
Recreation & Fun: Are you enjoying your life and making it fun? Are you satisfied with the level of activity that you do?
Contribution: How would others rate your contribution to society or them as individuals?
Personal Growth: How focused are you on personal growth? Are you satisfied with your direction? Are you trying new experiences and seeking to learn?
Spiritual: How connected are you to the inner and outer world? Are you satisfied with your relationship with your spiritual being?
Self-Image: Do you think of your abilities highly? Do you respect and love yourself? Do you appreciate yourself?
Step 3 – Reflect
You should now have a completed Wheel of Life. It may look something like the below.
Take a moment to appreciate your Wheel of Life. What does it look like? Are there any surprises to you?
If you have scores of 8 to 10 for any of the categories, congratulations! You are very satisfied in this particular area. It’s important you maintain what you are doing to ensure you remain satisfied in this area, however don’t overlook that there may be areas for improvement. This is important to ensure you are not limiting your potential for even further growth and satisfaction in this area.
If you have scores of 5 to 7 for any of the categories, you are reasonably satisfied in this particular area but there is definitely opportunity to explore ideas to move this up the scale.
If you have scores of 0 to 4 for any of the categories, you are not very satisfied in this particular area and you will need to explore ways of enhancing your satisfaction here. No need to get down about these scores though, as scores of 0 to 4 are full of opportunity! I find this as quite exciting when someone has a lower score as often is the case the individual has not fully explored opportunities that are available to them. It’s also the area where the individual can grow the most and get the most value!
I encourage you to answer the below questions:
Why did you score yourself in each category the way you did?
What is my ideal score for each category to achieve in the next month, 3 months, 6 months, one year?
Where are my biggest gaps in satisfaction levels?
Which area of my life do I primarily want to focus on to enhance my satisfaction levels?
An important thing to remember is that this is your Wheel of life. Is your current wheel crooked or is it balanced?
What happens when you try to move forward and you have a crooked wheel? How efficient and effective are you going to be in life if you can not move forward in a balanced way?
It is very easy to become extremely satisfied in one area, but at what cost?
For example, you can spend all your time and energy working on your career and make some fantastic progress. Perhaps you will even become extremely satisfied with your finances and wealth. However, what may happen to your relationships? Your health and well-being? Are you having fun along the way?
The key is to find the balance and that is the beauty of the Wheel. To do this, you want to grow your Wheel, not balance your Wheel by trading off in some areas of your life. It’s about moving forward, challenging yourself and pushing your boundaries to expand your Wheel and make it bigger while maintaining a balance.
Step 4 – Action!
Based on the above, it’s time to put the wheels in motion! (How’s that for a pun??)
The Wheel of Life exercise is the perfect starting point for goal-setting and this is why so many life coaches, career coaches and executive coaches use it as a tool.
You now have a visual snapshot of how satisfied you are in different areas of your life. Through reflection, you have now identified your biggest gaps between where you are now and where you would like to be.
Commit yourself to taking action TODAY. What are the specific actions or steps that you are going to take to enhance your satisfaction in your desired area? Write what you will do down on the same piece of paper that your Wheel is on. Keep your Wheel close by in a place that you can easily refer to on a daily basis.
Track your progress! The Wheel provides a snapshot in time of your satisfaction levels and ultimately happiness. Complete the Wheel on a regular basis so you can easily track your progress. I recommend at least once every 6 months, depending on what your goals are and when you have aimed to achieve them.
Get access to the Success Starter Toolkit and download the Wheel of Life templates, supporting guide and action plan.
For the Comments
How was your Wheel of Life? What sticks out for you? Is there anything that jumped out at you that you didn’t not realise in your life? Do you know what you need to do create balance or expand your Wheel? Share your thoughts and comments below! I look forward to the conversation!
Start the Happiness!
Brendan
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While I certainly understand the intent of a tool like this, which is to take a thoughtful look at your life as a starting point to make changes, it falls short of the desired impact, in my opinion.
The major aspect I see missing is an exploration into the beliefs going on behind a particular person’s answers to the questions. What is the rules behind their answers?
For example, one area is “Family: Is your family supportive of you? Are you supportive of your family?”
The current instructions read, “I encourage you to answer the below questions:
Why did you score yourself in each category the way you did?
What is my ideal score for each category to achieve in the next month, 3 months, 6 months, one year?
Where are my biggest gaps in satisfaction levels?
Which area of my life do I primarily want to focus on to enhance my satisfaction levels?
An important thing to remember is that this is your Wheel of life. Is your current wheel crooked or is it balanced?”
I would want to see a questions like, “What does your family have to do for you to feel supported? What do you do to support your family? What would have to change for you everyone to feel more supported? How can you make that change for yourself in one way today?”
In general, when we have lop-sided life wheels, it is often because we are compensating for feeling powerless in other arenas of our lives.
I think this exercise could be even better if you built in strategic questions that helped the user imagine new behaviors that could empower them to make change.
Let’s start with the assumption that each person’s life is in it’s current state because the perceive they are doing the best they can.
At this point this activity does three things:
1) Creates a visual representation proving that your life is out of balance
2) Ask you to acknowledge it should be in balance
3) Tells you to make an action plan to fix it
It complete neglects that most people don’t know HOW to fix it. As Alcoholics Anonymous wise says, “Your best thinking got you here.”
Add in another step that asks the user to pick one area they would most like to improve, and then lead them through a separate exercise to imagine new possible solutions.
Perhaps you have this step elsewhere in the many free (and generous) offerings in this website, but by not including a link to it here, this exercise falls a bit flat for me.
This tool could be a homerun!
Hi Leslie,
Thanks so much for the detailed comment!
I like your thinking and I completely agree that it would be beneficial to have more detailed questions to help people through the ‘how’ with a few basic questions. The tricky thing is you’ll need a whole set of different questions for each category in the Wheel of Life. But it’s doable.
Perhaps I’ll update the Action Plan template when I get the time. I think it’s a great idea.
Brendan