The Wheel of Life
The start of a more balanced live.
Already a while ago I wanted to write to you about the Wheel of Life. A lovely HR colleague introduced me to this tool a few years ago. Everyone is so busy nowadays that we sometimes forget to look at where we are spending our time with. Finding the balance across multiple sections of what we find important in life brings balance and helps to focus on what we really want. Only too often we find ourselves in the It usually helps me to feel happier by living a more balanced life and doing more justice to other parts of it too.
The Wheel of life is a very simple tool. You simply grab a piece of paper put a date on it and draw a pie with slices on it. It is actually up to you how many slices you have. Typically there are 8 categories as below:
- Business/Career
- Finances
- Health & Fitness
- Family & Friends (you might want to split these two — I do!)
- Romance
- Personal Growth
- Fun & Recreation
- Physical Environment
(Here you can take a look on further explanation of the possible sections of your pie.)
You can choose to exclude some fields not relevant for you and exchange by other as “spirituality” for example. I like to number these fields from 1-8 making up a prioritization of the available fields. I believe that we cannot be all the time great in all areas so it is important to understand where our real priorities lie. Normally 1, 2 and 3 are my absolutely must dos and others I try to be more flexible. Here is a neat kit to start your own assessment.
Now go to a quiet place and take some time for reflection. Ask yourself questions for each of the categories. In example for health and fitness: “How is my health condition? Am I eating healthy? How often am I exercising?” Rate your satisfaction with each area from 0-10 (zero being not satisfied and 10 being fully satisfied). Then distribute your actual percentage of time spent into each area of the pie.
Once you have all the information on your pie take some time to analyse achievements the gaps where you will want to take actions to balance things out a bit.
I am sure there is a more professional way of using this tool but this is how I do it and it helps me. I used it in various occasions to simple get an overview of things and I often revisit my old pie to reprioritize when needed.
I hope you like the concept of the Wheel of life tool and that you find it as useful as I do.
