How to use the wheel of life

If you have ever felt stuck or overwhelmed and you have worked with a coach, you may well have done a wheel of life. It’s a popular coaching tool, and for good reasons. It’s based on the principle that all the areas of your life that are important to you, should be in balance. It’s no good having an amazing career, if you’re desperately unhappy in your relationship. Or if your finances are in order but you never do anything fun. Today I’d like to explain to you how to use the wheel of life in your life and/or business.

1. Get clarity

The most important use of the wheel is to get clarity about what and who is important to you. Although you will always get some suggestions as to which elements you might like to include, it’s very important that you come up with your own areas in your own words. 

Once you have written them all down and coloured in your wheel, the clarity comes from seeing the whole wheel as one. It will show you that your life consists of various elements which are all important to you.

This is especially useful if you’re feeling overwhelmed with one of the elements. Say you’re very unhappy at work or you have major health problems, then it can seem that your whole life is in trouble. But when you do a wheel, you will often see areas that are going well, and that alone can lift your spirits. 

2. Get focus

A major benefit of doing the wheel of life is to know what to focus on. Once you have chosen your areas, you’re asked to score how happy you are with them from one to ten. This will instantly show you which ones are high and which ones aren’t. You can then choose to work on an area that you want to improve.

And the best thing about that is that most of the time, improving one area also improves other areas. 

Say for example you want to improve your money situation. By taking consistent action around this, you may also improve your social life because you have more money to spend. Or working on your career can also help your relationships because you are no longer complaining about it all the time.

It always helps to focus on just one area at a time, especially when you have lots of areas that are low. When you are too overwhelmed with the task, you’re unlikely to do anything, whereas if you focus on just one thing, it’s more doable and you’re much more likely to take action. 

3. Check your progress

It’s a good idea to do a wheel of life on a fairly regular basis, say once every 6 months or so. That way you get to see any progress you’ve made in a particular area, and it will help you find your focus for the next 6 months.

Because most of the time, people forget how far they’ve come, and they only think about all the things they still want to do or achieve. This is not helpful as it can make you feel resentful or you might think you’re never going to achieve anything (dramatic I know, but that’s how some people think). 

4. Stop feeling guilty

Another great benefit of the wheel of life is that it can help you feel less guilty about what you’re doing. The perfect example is working parents: at home they’re worried about not working hard enough, and at work they feel guilty about not spending enough time with their kids.

But once you realise that a balanced life comes from being happy in all of the areas in your life, you don’t need to feel guilty about spending time in any one particular area.

Another example: health is important for everyone, yet if you’re a busy mum and you spend some time doing yoga, you can feel terribly guilty that you’re not doing the shopping or crafts with your kids. However, realise that you are spending time in an important area and if you ignored it for too long it would end up crashing down to an all-time low.

5. Use for specific purposes

You can do the wheel for the whole of your life (as in the examples above), or you can do a wheel for a specific area. You can do a wheel of career, a wheel of business or a wheel of health for example.

The premise remains the same: you find out what areas or elements make up the whole of that wheel, and then you see where you want to make improvements.

Just ask yourself: who and what is important to me in my career / in my business / for my health and then you come up with your own areas for that particular wheel.

So as you can see, the wheel of life is really versatile, and I would highly recommend you do one if you’ve never done one before. I’ve put a link to the exercise at the bottom.