Balance > Success: The Wheel of Life
When starting coaching, many coaches use the tool, The Wheel of Life, to support you in shifting your thinking from tunnel-vision (e.g. ‘a job will make me happy’) to thinking about your life holistically. The Wheel is normally split into 8 categories, each representing a different arena of your life. Doing this exercise helps you see your job as one, among many, arenas to nurture in your life. Your career sits in the broader context of who you are. It can serve the whole, but is not the whole. This is one of the ways to release the pressure valve around work: to see it as one piece of the puzzle in where you’re at right now. It puts each aspect of your life in a broader context, and in relationship to each other. It’s a great exercise for making you conscious of any unconscious places you’ve been over or under nurturing, helping to elucidate what ‘balance’ actually means to you.
There is an idea in Mindfulness: “where you put your attention and energy, grows.” If your wheel looks spiky like a spider, this is a call to dial down energy from one aspect of your life and redirect it towards an undernourished part. Just like you wouldn’t give a starving person a full meal, start small when bringing an undernourished part back to life. Micro changes are proven to be more effective than macro ones, because you are meeting yourself at the realistic plane of where you actually are.
Here’s the Wheel of Life and how to do it:
🖨️ Download the printable version of the Wheel, and do the following:
Draw a dot within each pizza slice to give it a rating as to how fulfilled you feel in that arena. The outer edge of the slice (the crust) is a 10 – maximum fulfillment. The inner point of the slice is a 1 – minimum fulfillment. The space in the middle is 2-9. Rate each of the 8 arenas of your life from a scale of 1-10.
Then, take a pen and connect the dots.
Look at the final shape: does it look like a spider or like a circle? The goal is to get it to be a smooth circle – where every part of your life feels in balance.
