The activity is meant to help you get a subjective sense of how you’re feeling across many areas in your life.
A Wheel of Life is a visual indicator you can use to sense into how you are living and how that differs from how you want to be living. It also gives you a sense of how balanced your life feels in terms of fulfillment. Which areas of your life feel great, and which areas are you not feeling so great about? This isn’t about any quantifiable place you’re at in your life, it’s about how you feel about where things are.
The point of this isn’t an in depth nuanced reflection; it’s to paint a broad stroke, step back and look at how it feels. Then you can investigate more into how you might add more balance, or increase your experience of fulfillment for each area.
1. To begin, you need to decide what’s important in your life. We have a list of categories we like, but we invite you to change these, and add your own! (You might get some ideas that might be alive for you, from the values exercise). You can have as many or as little as you’d like, but try to get a good assessment across what makes up your life.
Here are some classic categories (you may even want to break some up):
- Relationships
- friendship, family, intimate partnership, self
- Purpose & meaning
- Finances
- Career
- Health / wellness
- mental, physical, emotional
- Fun
- Personal development
- Spirituality / connection to the sacred
- Environment
Here are some additional categories you could try:
- Contribution / impact
- Learning
- Integrity and alignment with values
- Creative expression
- Rest / slack / spare time
- Flow
- Sovereignty / self-authorship & agency
2. Once you’ve picked your areas, it’s time to rate and visualize!
You can either make a copy of this spreadsheet template (by going to File → Make a copy) or draw a wheel in front of you.
Here’s an example of what it will look like:
Now, give each of your areas a score from 0-10, with 10 being “I am completely fulfilled and satisfied in this area of my life” and 0 being “I have absolutely no satisfaction with how this area is going”. This is about where you are at, in this moment, not where you wish to be.
Ask ‘Why’ to your answers. What is going on in each of these areas that led you to rate it how you did? What are the subcomponents that you’re considering?
Bonus: To get even more depth on each of these areas, you can make another wheel within each, creating a new set of categories down a level of abstraction (eg. for Health & Wellbeing, your wheel might include: exercise / movement, diet, sleep, vitality, mental health, peace, emotional health, mobility… or even more specific things you care about)
3. Now step back and look at the whole thing.
What comes up for you as you see the shape?
Which areas can you and do you want to do something different in? (There may even be one thing you can do that would generate more fulfillment across multiple areas)
What might you prioritize?