Try a Wheel of Life to get a clear outlook on where to focus your time and energy
Have you heard of a Wheel of Life? It has a lot of names, and it’s leveraged by a ton of coaches, consultants, therapists and strategists.
Ultimately, if you’ve been feeling lopsided, overwhelmed, stressed, and unsure where to focus your energy and time? I’ve got you.
What is a Wheel of Life?
A wheel of life is an activity chart, to simply review where you’re at in different aspects of your life. It’s a simple “wheel” where you can take a look at how you’re doing across each aspect of the things that are important to you.
An example below:
And if you’re not following me on the IG: @rikki_goldenberg
Simply put this is a really quick activity, where we take a simple circle, and segment it. I have sections included that might give you a starter point. Some example areas:
Friends & Community
Family
Love
Health & Wellness
Personal Growth
Money
Career
Fun & Leisure
Other! Is there another category you’d add to reflect on?
How to use a Wheel of Life
Simple is going to be the theme of this one. Leveraging the wheel of life can be broken into a few “quick” steps.
Step 1: Draw your wheel of life. Feel free to use a version of mine, and add/swap for your own categories that are missing. It won’t hurt my feelings.
Step 2: Take a few moments to “rate” how you’re doing on each segment. If you're crushing in that area, make a mark closer to the edge of the wheel. If you could improve, mark closer to the center. It often helps to really think about both how you think you’re doing, and, how you’d assume others would respond. I.e. if you’re doing a really good job with your love life, but, your partner hasn’t been saying that, take that into consideration. Don’t spend too much time. Just rate it.
Step 3: Take a look at your wheel. What are your thoughts? Full disclosure: no one’s wheel is a perfect circle. (It just may look that way on Instagram!) In truth, you know the saying, the grass grows where we water it? That’s normal. There may be times that you’re super focused on work and health and wellness is getting a bit of a back seat. That’s human. We aren’t creatures of perfection. We’re creatures of strange oddities!
Step 4: Consider what you want to change. That being said, you may want to make an effort in some of the lower areas. Health and wellness important? Okay. That’s the one we’ll be working on to better “round out” our wheels.
Step 5: Take action on your change areas. Make a plan and set a goal to take action on that specific area. Then do it.
Step 6: Reflect and repeat as needed. Have you ever gone hard into a workout type, say, running, and then discovered you can’t do yoga so well anymore? That’s normal. Ultimately, as you work on one Wheel of Life area, you may find that another area fell a bit behind and needs to be nurtured. If that makes you feel exhausted, or wary, I hear you.
We don’t have to do it all. Let go of the guilt and expectation you have to do it all perfectly. In fact, take time to allow yourself to let things drop to lower priority. It doesn’t mean we’re resting and ignoring, it means we’re making the consicous choice to focus our limited energy and awareness on what is currently most important to us.
Good luck.
And if you’re struggling with this exercise, selecting the area of work and taking action? Let’s talk.