Finding More Balance and Wellbeing: How To Use The Wheel Of Life Tool
Have you ever Googled “how to be healthy”? If you did, you’d see that the solution, according to most, is to adopt some fad diet or ‘do’ a list of things and you’ll suddenly feel happy, healthy, and free.
When you have that sense of craving more, of striving for health, well-being and fulfillment, it can be hard to know where to start with your journey.
The best place to start is to first see and understand wellbeing and health as holistic. True health is found when you encompass yourself as whole. Meaning it goes beyond just physical health (or what you eat) and encompasses your mental, energetic, spiritual, physical, and social health and well-being.
You have to look at all aspects of your life in order to truly flourish and feel that sense of freedom you desire.
Day-to-day life presents a number of challenges and demands that can throw off and disturb your natural sense of balance. When work demands increase or parenting tasks build up, things like exercise and hobbies fall by the wayside. Things like sleep and nutrition often suffer when we have the world pulling us in multiple directions.
The Wheel of Life Tool can provide you with a clear visual framework to assess all areas of your life - allowing you the ability to see your life as a whole picture. The Wheel highlights imbalances so you know which parts of your life need some TLC and attention.
Assessing Your Wellbeing Picture
The Wheel of Life paints a picture of the 12 core areas of your life:
🎨 Creativity - finding ways to tap into a flow state
💰 Finances - managing and nurturing your money
👩🏽💻 Career - finding purpose and meaning in your work
🎓 Education - growing through learning experiences
✨ Health - finding your balance and wellbeing
🏃🏻♀️ Exercise - finding ways to move that feel good
🥗 Home Cooking - connecting to what and how you eat
🏡 Home Environment - taking care of your outer world
👩🏻🤝👩🏾 Relationships - building, nurturing, and releasing
🥳 Social Life - finding balance between alone and social
💛 Joy - embracing fun, playfulness and happiness
🪐 Spirituality - feel connected to something bigger
When completing the wheel, take an honest look at each area and rate your current level of satisfaction from 1 (fully dissatisfied) to 10 (fully thriving). The visualisation quickly reflects and highlights disparities and areas that are lacking. You may already know some of this, but seeing it laid out is extremely powerful.
I personally enjoy the act of doing this exercise every few months using pen and paper. It makes the whole process feel like a ritual of self-care, and gives me some much-needed space and time to reflect and connect to myself.
Any area in which you score less than a 6 is an area to give some love and attention to. You can then connect the dots on your wheel and you’ll start to see how balanced your circle really is.
Pick one to two of the lowest-scoring areas and think about the following questions:
Why did I rate this area of my life so low?
What can I do to improve my satisfaction levels here?
What specific actions would make a positive impact?
Having some more clarity around root causes can help you find momentum and strength to make some positive changes. This is also why 1:1 Coaching is so helpful and important in this process. Sometimes it’s easy for us to know and see the areas in our lives that we want to improve but it’s another thing to start working on improving them.
The Wheel of Life tool serves not as a punishment but as a motivator for prioritising ourselves and our wellbeing. It can be the perfect navigation tool for guiding us back to ourselves and helping us find more balance, fulfilment and wellbeing in our lives.
