The first step to living your best intentional life, is identifying those intentions - and identifying the areas in your life where you’re not completely satisfied, where you need more balance, the aspects of your life that need a little work in order for you to really show up.
This “Wheel of Life” exercise will help you do just that: it offers a visual aid so you can quickly see where you need more balance in your life, a way to clarify priorities for goal-setting.
Another way to use this exercise is to ask someone who knows you well (and who you trust) to complete the scores for you. That will tell you how you show up to others.
How to Take the “Wheel of Life” Exercise
Step 1: Review the eight areas of your life
Think briefly what a satisfying life might look like for you in each category of your life. These are
- Personal growth
- Fun & leisure
- Home environment
- Career
- Money
- Health
- Friends & Family
- Significant other
(this list does not imply any specific order - that’s why we represent the categories in a wheel, see image below).
Step 2: Assess your satisfaction in each area of life
Now, let’s draw a line across each segment that represents your satisfaction score for each area.
Imagine the centre of the wheel is 0, and the outer edge is 10; choose a value between 1 (very dissatisfied) and 10 (fully satisfied) for each area.
Now draw a line and write the score alongside - see example.
IMPORTANT: use the first number (score) that pops into your head, not the number you think it should be!
Tip: relabel the categories to better suit your own situation.
If you feel like the categories don’t quite match your situation, you can relabel them, change the category name, split them into different categories. Check out the following suggestions:
- Family and Friends: split into two separate categories.
- Significant Other: change the category name to “Dating”, “Relationship”, “Life Partner”
- Career: change the category name to “Work”, “Business” or “Volunteering”
- Add a category for “parenting” or “motherhood”
- Finances: change the category name to “Money”, “Financial Security” or “Financial Well-Being”
- Health: split or change to “Emotional”, “Fitness”, “Spiritual” or “Wellbeing”
- Fun & Leisure: change to “Recreation”
- Personal growth” change to “Learning”, “Self-Development” or “Spiritual”
- Other categories could include “Security”, “Service”, “Leadership”, “Achievement”, “Community”, “Faith”, or many others.
How to Use the Results to Get More Clarity on Your Life
Here are some great questions you can ask yourself so you can use the results and go deeper:
- Are there any surprises for you?
- How do you feel about your life as you look at your Wheel of Life?
- How do you currently spend time in these areas? How would you like to spend time in these areas?
- What would make each area get a score of 10?
- What would success or satisfaction feel like for each area?
- How could you make space for these changes in your life?
- What help and support might you need from others to make changes and be more satisfied with your life?
- What change should you make first? And what change do you want to make first?
- What is working for you, and what isn’t? What lessons can you learn from this? How can you improve your process?
How to Take Action on the Wheel of Life Exercise and Improve Your Life
Identify one area of your life you’d like to improve, and pick one to three actions that would move you closer to “fully satisfied”.
Or (alternatively) choose three areas in need of improvement and identify one single action for each area.
Be really clear on these actions: when are you going to take them, how often should they recur, what will you do exactly?
Tell us in the comments - nothing better to stay accountable than sharing your intentions with others!
Begin immediately and be 100% committed!
To learn more, download my Free Ebook “3 Steps to Feel Great Right Now Regardless of Your Circumstances.” Get started mastering your mind and transforming your thinking.
