Introduction
As we begin a new year, resolutions or commitments often come to the forefront. The Wheel of Life or Life Balance Wheel is a popular visual tool or worksheet exercise used to help give you a snapshot of how balanced or fulfilled your life is.
It usually consists of 6-10 categories or areas considered important for a whole or balanced life. You rate your level of satisfaction within each area, then map this onto an image of a wheel. This gives you an immediate overview of your current “life balance”. Most importantly, the life wheel scoring system also allows you to see right away which areas of your life might be deficient or need improvement.
More than an assessment, the wheel can help you to become more self-aware and more motivated to make changes and create a fulfilling life. Through self-knowledge, it empowers and gives you focus and direction.
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8 Typical Wheel of Life Categories with Alternative Labels:
NOTE: Adapt any wheel of life category by splitting an existing category.
- Family and Friends. Alternatives include Community, Social. Family and Friends can also split into separate categories of “Family” and “Friends”.
- Significant Other: Alternatives include Dating, Relationship, Life Partner. Some remove the designation Romance.
- Career: Alternative labels include Vocation, Work, Business, Motherhood, Fatherhood, Parenting or Volunteering.
- Finances: Other label ideas include Money, Financial Security or Financial Wellbeing.
- Health: Alternatives include Wellbeing and Fitness. This category could also split into Emotional Health and Physical Health, and/or include Spiritual Health.
- Home Environment: Other labels could be “home”, “house” or “apartment”. This category could split into two for work and home environments. Finally, this wheel of life category can also switch to “Work Environment” for career or business people.
- Fun & Leisure: Some other ideas for this category label include Leisure Time, Sports, Recreation, Play, Creativity or Enjoyment.
- Personal Growth: Alternatives include Learning, Self-Development or Spiritual.
A History of the Wheel of Life Tool
Paul J. Meyer’s Original Wheel of Life
The original concept of The Wheel of Life is attributed to the late Paul J. Meyer who founded the Success Motivation® Institute in 1960. Paul J. Meyer was a thought leader, entrepreneur and coaching industry pioneer. He built many programs to help people achieve their goals, manage time and be a better leader. It isn’t known exactly when the Wheel of Life was invented, but it’s likely that it was in the 1960s, shortly after Meyer created the Success Motivation® Institute.
Today, the Wheel takes on many different visual forms and can be completed on paper as well as online, and on mobile phone apps.
Different Styles of the Wheel of Life
While there are many, many design variations, there seem to be two principle key styles of the Wheel. All the wheels I have seen are plotted out in one of these two ways:
The “Pie” Style: The ‘original’ style of the coaching wheel looks like slices of a pie or pizza – and it involves drawing a line across each segment to rate each area.
The “Spider Web” Style: The other key style – more often seen with online versions because it’s easier for computers to draw – is what I call the “spider web” style. Here you place the scores on the actual “spoke” lines for each category, rather than across the segment, creating a spider web effect.
How To Complete The Wheel Of Life
This exercise is a way to take a good, hard look at each facet of your life, and rate its relative quality level, so you can uncover which areas need more attention than others. The categories or domains you select should be pretty representative of the major areas of your life. You give each category a 1-10 satisfaction rating, with a score of 1 indicating that you are very dissatisfied, and a score of 10 meaning you are highly satisfied. By getting this “helicopter” view of your life, you can identify where you are excelling and where there is room for improvement – to discover where the gaps are between where you are today and where you want to be for your perfect Level 10 life.
In taking your “life inventory” you can choose to give a rating to each dimension in a broad, general sense, or you can find detailed questions for each category and put down your average score in each of these.
Once you have plotted out your satisfaction scores for each section, examine the shape of your wheel, and you should have a pretty clear picture of your strong and weak areas. If you desire to have a more balanced life, you then need to develop an action plan that focuses on making the wheel of your life more well-rounded. I recommend reassessment of your Life Balance Wheel every so often as your action plan goes into effect.
Taking The Wheel Analogy A Step Further
In their book, Born To Win, Zig and Tom Ziglar, take the wheel analogy a step further, creating a bicycle, with one wheel representing one’s personal life and the other one’s business life:
It’s easy to see how an imbalanced personal or business wheel could lead to a bumpy ride! Ziglars provide power to their bicycle with the pedals of Persistent Consistency, a seat of character and at the center of each wheel God. If you want to purchase Born To Win, just >CLICK HERE<.
Conclusion
The Wheel of Life inventory can display how balanced the various areas of your life are. In seeing your strengths and weaknesses, you can focus on creating your vision of a Level 10 life. You can download various versions of this for free online, or there are even smartphone apps you can use.
A program I am involved in called the Entre Institute teaches similar principles of a balanced, awesome life besides giving you an opportunity to learn how to earn extra income from a work at home online business. If you want to learn more about this, CLICK HERE.