Something’s off in your life.
You wake up in the morning with little motivation to go to work. You haven’t been communicating well with your family. And you’ve noticed that you’re less grounded, leaning on unhealthy coping mechanisms to get by.
When you sense dissatisfaction with the current state of your life, it’s time to seek clarity. Along with professional assistance from coaching or therapy, self-assessments like the Wheel of Life® can help you self-reflect to find what’s missing or off-balance in your life.
When you feel out of control or like nothing motivates you, the Wheel of Life® pinpoints imbalances and shows you exactly what parts of your life need attention. You’ll create focus areas for growth and build the foundations of an action plan toward holistic wellness.
What is the balance Wheel of Life®?
The Wheel of Life® is a self-assessment tool that breaks down different areas of your life and measures the strength of each. The wheel itself contains triangular sections, like the spokes of a wheel or pie slices, to represent eight different areas:
- Relationships
- Career
- Finances/money
- Health
- Enjoyment/personal fulfillment
- Personal growth/learning
- Environment
- Spirituality
The Wheel of Life® exercise asks you to rate your current satisfaction in each area on a scale of 1–10, with 10 being the highest. If using a physical Wheel of Life® worksheet, you’d shade in the satisfaction points in each “slice” of the graphic. An app or online tool will do this work for you with a quiz.
When you finish the Wheel of Life® coaching tool, you’ll see exactly which areas of your life are the strongest (the most shading) and which need the most attention (the least shading). Then, you’ll rate the level of satisfaction you aim to have in the future on the same scale. With that self-awareness, you can reflect on what goals to set and focus your energy intentionally.
Who created the Wheel of Life® assessment?
Paul J. Meyer, founder of the Success Motivation Institute and a leader in the self-improvement field, created the Wheel of Life® assessment tool in the 1960s. Meyer hoped to motivate others, and this exercise helped him pinpoint how people could reach their full potential on an individual level. Since then, multiple studies have proven its relevance and efficacy in life coaching.
What is the objective of the Wheel of Life®?
The goal of the Wheel of Life® assessment is to visualize your current state and reflect on what areas of your life need improvement. And since you rate each area both on its current importance and future importance, you’ll see the gaps, showing which ones will require more effort in the future.
If you’d like to feel fully satisfied in your career — that is, a 10 out of 10 on the scale — and you’re at a five now, you know you have lots of room to grow. This clue can be the first step toward making a change, whether you decide to talk to your manager about upskilling opportunities or decide to change careers entirely. The Wheel of Life® offers the insight you need to realize you need to take a leap.
The Wheel of Life® can also help you establish a better balance. If you rank highly on physical health and poorly on career or relationships, you’ll know that those two latter areas need tending for your life to gain balance. Perhaps your relationship is suffering because you’ve been prioritizing workouts instead of quality time with your partner, or you invest so much effort into a relationship full of red flags that your career is taking a downturn as a result. The wheel can help you redistribute your energy accordingly.
What are the traditional areas on the Wheel of Life®?
The Wheel of Life® tool exists for personal reflection, and if the original eight areas don’t match your needs, you can adjust the graphic as necessary. If you’re retired, you could replace “Career” with “Family” or “Learning.” If you’re struggling with a mental health challenge, you could break “Health” into “Physical health” and “Mental health.” It’s up to you, and you aren’t limited to only eight areas. You can customize this tool to make it work for you.
For a more traditional, well-rounded approach, use the original categories:
1. Relationships
This aspect of the wheel explores how content you are with your relationships: family, friendships, or a partnership. This part of the exercise will encourage you to consider whether there’s a relationship you’d like to foster, like rekindling with an old friend or looking for a romantic partner, or if your current connections are healthy.
2. Career
This section helps you assess your current career and professional goals. Perhaps you’d like to earn more, get a promotion, or take on more responsibility. This section could also show you that the change you seek is more drastic, like a career shift, if your score for this category is really low.
3. Finances
Filling out this chart section will push you to get introspective on your financial wellness. You can’t achieve financial goals overnight, but are you tracking toward them? Is now the time to shift your spending? You may discover that you want to land a better-paying job or double down on savings.
4. Health
How would you rate your physical and emotional health today? This broad section asks you to reflect on how you feel inside and out. Perhaps your doctor has recently suggested you need better rest, or you’re ready to work with a mental health professional. Doing the Wheel of Life® exercise helps you accept and start working toward those next steps.
5. Enjoyment
Enjoyment is an essential part of life, but if you have a busy personal or professional life, it might take a backseat. Use this part of the graph to explore your happiness and reflect on what brings you purpose and how you like to have fun. You’ll start to question whether you have enough time for the activities you enjoy, like reading books, hiking, or volunteering, and how often the social events you attend make you happy or drain you. It could be as simple as prioritizing family game night or coworking with your friends to break up the work week.
6. Personal growth
Personal growth focuses on improving your self-knowledge, emotional intelligence, and baseline state of happiness. If you spot a gap here, you might feel the urge to boost a skill through a class or start journaling every day to better understand the inner workings of your mind.
7. Environment
During regular self-reflection, your physical environment might not come up. It’s easy to take the spaces around you for granted when you’re used to them or feel like they’ll never change. In this section, consider your work environment, the city you live in, and your home spaces, and whether there’s room for improvement.
8. Spirituality
When you hear the term “spirituality,” you may associate it with religion. But spiritual wellness means having a productive relationship with yourself and your culture along with any higher power you believe in.
Spirituality can support your values, bring peace, and help you remain accountable to your communities. Filling out this part of the chart may lead to a decision like volunteering at your place of worship or taking a digital detox to reconnect with yourself.
How to use the Wheel of Life® assessment
If you’re working with a coach, the Wheel of Life® tool can go hand-in-hand with guidance from your coach. But if you’re navigating it independently, you may wish it had a clear instruction manual. Here’s how to use this tool correctly:
1. Obtain or create a wheel
There are plenty of Wheel of Life® online assessments and templates, which are great starting points. If you want to create your own, or modify an existing one, decide which eight categories it should contain. Consider the common ones, so you have a general idea of what to include, and then intuitively remove and add areas as they relate to you. Then, you can print out or start digitally filling your wheel.
To create the wheel, find a center point, then draw a small circle around it. Continue adding circles around the center until you have 10. Then, divide the circle into eight sections, like pie slices. Label each section with one of your eight target areas, and you’re ready to start shading.
2. Assess each focus area
A ready-made tool may prompt you by asking, “How satisfied do you feel with [area]?” before you rank or shade in the graph. It’s easy to go with your gut and answer with the first number you think of, but spend some time considering instead of instinctively filling it in. This ensures you go beyond the surface level of your feelings.
If you’re a happy person with many hobbies, you may jump to rate your enjoyment a 10, but you could also question whether there’s room for improvement. Rating your current enjoyment a nine and projected enjoyment a 10 instead can signal healthy satisfaction but acknowledge room to grow.
3. Indicate the gaps
Automated programs may perform this task for you, but if you’re working by hand, you’ll have to indicate the differences between your current state and the state you’d like to reach in the future. You could shade one darker than the other or draw a line between the two to show the difference. This shows either a match or a visual leap between numbers, highlighting a gap in your skills or fulfillment levels.
4. Reflect and goal-set
Step back from the Wheel of Life® chart and make initial observations. Is there a rating that surprises you for being high or low? Question what that designation means to you.
Then, set realistic goals. If you ranked poorly in the career section, perhaps it’s time for a shift. Determine action items, like polishing your resume, cover letter, and portfolio and applying to a certain amount of new jobs in the next few months. If you realize you aren’t enjoying your physical environment, you could revamp your home office or even decide it’s time to move cities.
How do you rank items in the Wheel of Life®?
Rankings are subjective and relative, so although assigning numbers might seem simple at first, it can be a challenging task. Here are a few guidelines to follow:
10 is perfection
It’s normal not to have a 10 on your chart. This number should denote perfection, and you’ll only give this score if you feel you have nothing to improve. Perhaps you’ve just met an ideal partner, and your communication and connection are solid. This may deserve a 10, but a satisfying social life that’s missing a bit of spark won’t. You might rank “Relationships” as an eight instead.
1 is dire
Just like you’ll unlikely have many 10s, it’s similarly rare you’ll rank ones. Reserve lower numbers for areas of your life that are so unsatisfactory they demand immediate change.
If you rank a one on an area of your chart, consider seeking the help of a mental health professional or coach who can guide you through your next steps. They might have you use an emotion wheel to determine what feelings are behind this lack of purpose and passion.
It’s about balance
Remember that this tool focuses on relativity and balance. If you’ve rated one area of your life high and another low, the visual helps you understand that you may be focusing more time or effort on a particular part of your life. These ratings aren’t meant to force perfectionist fears over not having an “ideal” life. Some areas might be sixes, sevens, and eights, and that doesn’t mean you need to make changes — immediately or at all.
Find clarity through self-assessment
When a lack of balance in life negatively impacts your well-being, it’s tempting to make swift changes to improve your state. But when making choices about your personal development, it’s wise to take a step back, assess your life, and make an informed action plan.
The Wheel of Life® assessment can help you do just that. By taking a holistic look at your satisfaction, you can understand where your life lacks balance and in what areas you could set goals for positive, fulfilling change.
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