Wheel of Life Instructions

The Wheel of Life is a tool to guide some thinking about the quality or direction of a person’s life. The wheel looks at various areas of your life and then provides a scale from 0 (at the center) to 10 (at the outer ring) to measure satisfaction (or potentially other measures) in each area of life.

1. Review the twelve areas of life represented on the attached wheel.
2. Add, subtract, split, or rename any of the areas as you feel appropriate to represent your life.
3. Rank your current level of satisfaction with each area of life by drawing a line across each segment. Satisfaction might be a cross-product of progress, passion, production, and purpose. Scoring is between 1 (very dissatisfied) and 10 (fully satisfied). Draw a line across that area and shade in the enclosed area.
4. On an additional wheel, rank your level of desired satisfaction. (While we might all dream of achieving 10, or fully satisfied, in every area, reality tells us that is unlikely, and we might need to make some tradeoffs or prioritize those areas where we want higher levels of satisfaction.)

Some other benefits or uses of the Wheel of Life:

• Describe briefly what each area of your wheel encompasses.
• Prioritize the areas on your wheel as to which are most important to you. Rank order is one possibility, but it is sometimes more effective to allocate points (perhaps dividing 1,000 points) to each area to differentiate the importance of each.
• Describe the basis for your current satisfaction or lack thereof for each area of life.
• Prioritize which areas of your life you want to work on. This could be based on the greatest importance, the widest gap in satisfaction, the ease or difficulty, the biggest bang for the buck, etc.

The Wheel of Life will be an important tool later in the Life Planning process as you begin to set goals and define action plans. Understanding the priority, current situation, and desired situation will help you set priorities and define actions.

This article is part of a series of articles describing the Life Planning process. To see the other articles in the series, click here. While individuals are welcome to complete this process on their own, partnering with a Life Coach is often more effective. Please contact us for more information.