(Image: Personal Excellence)
Today I’d like to talk about the life wheel. It’s one of the tools I use in my coaching and will be an essential tool in your growth journey.
What is the Life Wheel?
The Life Wheel is a tool that gives you a snapshot of how you’re doing in your life now. It is essentially a circle divided into segments, usually 8, that represent the key areas of your life. Here’s a sample diagram:
There are many variants of the life wheel, with common segments being career/studies, family, love, friends, finance, and health. The remaining few are more varied. They can be recreation, spiritual, or others.
Each segment comes with a scale of 0-10 where you rate how well you are doing in it right now. 0 is the lowest score and 10 is the highest score. After you rate each segment, you mark out your scores on the wheel and connect the dots. At the end, you will get a web-like diagram that gives you a visual representation of how you’re doing in life.
The most useful part of the life wheel is the visual representation of how you’re doing in life. After all, it’s hard to know how you’re doing in your life when you’re focused on day-to-day tasks. You may subconsciously know that you’re putting an area of your life on hold, but this neglect may not be obvious. Subsequently, you have no real call to action.
The life wheel lets you spot gaps in your life right away so that you can intervene and work on the low scoring areas before it’s too late.
When I first used the life wheel with my clients, I used an 8-segment wheel. After a while though, I realized that there are other important areas that are left out in an 8-segment wheel. I have since created a 10-segment wheel as you can see in the diagram below. These 10 segments are listed in no priority order as they are all important to live your best life:
life:
(Image: Personal Excellence)
- Career/Business/Studies — The name of this segment depends on what’s applicable to you now. Use ‘Career’ for employees, ‘Business’ for entrepreneurs, and ‘Studies’ for students. This is considered a crucial segment as work/studies makes up a big portion of our waking lives.
- Finance — How you’re doing in your finances.
- Health —Your physical health as well as your lifestyle. Diet, sleep, rest, and exercise fall under here.
- Social — How you’re doing socially. Do you have friends? Do you have positive, like-minded friends whom you can talk to about anything?
- Family — Your relationship with your family members.
- Love — If you’re in a relationship, this represents your satisfaction with your relationship. If you’re single, it represents the amount of love you feel in your life and how vibrantly you’re living your life as a single. Just because you’re single doesn’t mean that you’ll automatically get a 0/10; similarly just because you are with someone doesn’t mean that you’ll get a 10/10. A single can rate him/herself highly here just as someone in a relationship can rate him/herself lowly here.
- Recreation — Whether you have the space to explore your hobbies and interests outside of work.
- Contribution — How much you’re giving back. How you are caring for the world and environment. Social causes fall under here.
- Spirituality — Your connection with the universe and your higher self. Contrary to common belief, this has nothing to do with having a religion. How connected are you with the spiritual aspect of life?
- Self-image — Your self-image. This includes your body image and self-confidence.
No matter who you are, these 10 areas are essential to live your best life. It is through these 10 areas that we develop our Mind, Body, Heart and Soul.
Some people may feel that only certain areas of the life wheel apply to them. For example, they may think that spirituality is unimportant to them as they’re free thinkers. This is a misconception as spirituality refers to your connection with the universe — it has nothing to do with having a religion. So they ignore the spiritual aspect of their lives and build on tangible areas like career and health.
However, spirituality relates to our soul and it’s an essential part of living a full life. For those who neglect their spirituality, there comes a point when they feel empty about life. What’s the meaning of life? Why am I here? This is when they start to look for a deeper meaning behind their existence.
Some people disregard money, saying that money is not important. That’s a misconception though. Money is merely a symbol for value in today’s world. While not a perfect measure of the value one gives, money is the currency that people use today in the exchange of goods and services. When you reject money, you’re rejecting the act of receiving value for your work. In the long run, rejecting money makes it difficult for you to achieve your long-term goals because you lack the monetary resources to do so.
With self-image, I realized that it is something that many people neglect today. Do you respect yourself? Do you love yourself? Do you believe in your capabilities? Do you value what you do? You are the one person who will be with you in your entire life. If you don’t have a healthy self-image, then who’s going to respect or appreciate you? If you have a poor self-image, everything else will suffer. On the other hand, when you have a strong, healthy self-image, it provides you with the foundation to excel in life.
This article by Ceres continues at link below:
How Are You Faring In Your Life Now? The Life Wheel – Personal Excellence
