The Wheel Of Life: A Self-Assessment Tool
“Usually, where we put our focus is the areas that we’re going to improve and do well, and this is a tool that helps you figure out where you should be focusing and directing your energy.”
The Wheel of Life is a great tool for assessing your life and finding out what areas you need to work on. It also works as a fantastic coaching tool for quickly getting to know your clients.
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Video Transcription: Hey, Dan here and in this video, we’re going to go through the Wheel of Life, which is a coaching and personal development tool that you can apply for yourself or if you happen to be a coach or a consultant, you can use it in that role as well. I find this tool really helpful for lots of reasons we’re going to cover, and so that’s why I’m making this video.
So, the Wheel of Life is a coaching tool where you’ll look at 8 areas of your life and basically assess how you’re doing in them from an area of ‘1’ which is ‘Terrible’, to ’10’ which is ‘Awesome’!
And of course, you can evaluate these relative to you, so if you’re someone who’s always been really healthy but you’re in a slump, you might give yourself a ‘6’, but if you’re someone who’s always been really unhealthy, like you grew up on McDonald’s, possibly like I ate all through college, then maybe eating a salad once a week put you up at a ‘7’, right?
So, it’s always based on relative to you. Anyhow, you use this assessment tool to just get a snapshot of your life.
Now, as a coach, I find this really helpful because every area in our life really interacts, right? If you’re having trouble at home, you and the missus or the mister not getting along so well, well, you don’t think that’s going to impact you in work-life, your ability to focus, your, maybe sleeping habits, right?
Stress overrides us in all areas of life. So, if one area of life is going really poorly, we’ll probably struggling in other areas, right?
So, even though people usually hire me as a business coach, I think it’s important to understand all areas of life, because if your relationships are really weak, that might impact your eating habits or your health, which will impact your energy, which will have a huge impact on your ability to grow your business. So, it’s a really good tool for that.
In terms of using this on your own, it’s also a great tool to just get a snapshot of where you’re at, identify maybe your weak spots and also track your progress, so you can see, “Hey, like, last year I was really struggling in health and relationships and that’s going a lot better. So, maybe my business isn’t exactly where it should be, but I’ve really improved in these other areas of life, which are just as important to me,” right? So, it’s a cool tool for that.
To start off, I want to go through the 8 different areas that you should be looking at and just run you through basically what each one is all about and how you properly evaluate it when you’re setting up your wheel.
There’s no particular order on how you should go through these, as well as with this tool, there’s no implication of what is more important than the other. If you want to personally figure that out and say, “Hey, you know, my health and family are the most important things, and those are the areas I want to focus on but I want to look at all 8,” great.
But, you can also treat them as all sort of equal, if that’s what’s right for you. And one of the things I like about this tool is, it does at least by default, treat everything as equal, because it acknowledges that, again, all these areas of our life impact one another and relate.
The first area here is ‘Family and friends’ and it’s just what it sounds like. How are your relationships? How are your time?
Now, as I said earlier, this is all relative for you. So if you’re someone who’s always had really strong family relationships and the last year or last few months has been tough or strained, then you might rate yourself kind of a ‘5’ or a ‘6’, even though your relationship still might be really strong compared with other people.
Similarly, if you’ve had strained relationship with your family, I’m not going to say ever give yourself a ’10’, but if those have been improving over the last year, you know, you’ve been getting better, you’ve been getting along better, then you could give yourself a higher rating because you’re progressing.
Now, with these ratings for all these categories, I do encourage you also to be extreme. So, if you just sort of fall in the middle, like give everything a ‘6’ or a ‘5’, or a ‘7’, it doesn’t really help you that much with figuring out your weak spots.
So, I’d encourage you to be extreme on both sides. If something is going great, hey, that’s a ‘9’, that’s a ’10’. Something’s going really poor, hey, that’s a ‘2’, that’s a ‘3’, that’s a ‘1’, like, give yourself extreme so you get an actually accurate picture and some motivation to change them.
One last thing on ‘Family and friends’, and this is maybe is one of the more complicated of the eight, is, you might want to separate these two and actually make 9 elements to your wheel. If you have really strong relationships with friends or with family but not the other, you might want to break this into 2 categories, rather than just merge them down into one.
The next category is ‘Significant other’ or ‘Relationship’. How is the romance? How is the love life? So, whether you’re dating or you’re married, fill this category in appropriately, right? Are things going well? Are you satisfied in that area of life?
Next up is ‘Fun and recreation’. Are you enjoying yourself? Are you taking time to actually relax, and you know, give yourself some rewards for the hard work?
You know, I found out, I’m probably going to botch the facts on this, but I’ll do my best to get it right. I found out that here in the Czech Republic, under the Communist regime, there was actually enforced recreation.
So here, I am living in Prague in the Czech Republic, and it’s very common, everyone has a cottage, people spend a lot of time going away, going to the cottage and I started asking about this and the reason is that during the Communist time, which was up until, hang on, 1990, 1991 maybe?
It was enforced. You had to do this, like at least once a month, I believe, you had to go to your cottage and they knew that was an important part of people relaxing and, you know being rejuvenated to work well and being healthy and having good relationships.
There’s some irony there, I think, that during the evil Communist times, and they were evil in many facets, but during that time, people had forced vacations and had to go to their cottages and relax and enjoy themselves where most people in North America now have what, one vacation a year, likely don’t own any kind of cottage? I think there’s some humor there. My point being is that, relaxing, having fun, it’s really important to refresh yourself.
So, this is one of the categories here. And if you want to be just giving yourself a rating as you go through this video, please do, please participate in, just assign a number between 1 and 10 as I go through each of these elements.
Next up is health. Health is all-encompassing, right? How is your energy levels? How’s your fitness? Are you exercising, if that’s one of your goals? How’s your health, 1 to 10?
The next area is money. So, how are your finances? Are you stressed about your savings, investments, are things going well? This is not about your career or your business.
So, let’s say your business is going really well, that will make you more money, but this is more about your personal management of it, right? How your finances are? How you’re feeling about that? Again, give it a number between 1 and 10 of how you will rate your money situation.
Next up, ‘Personal development’. So, are you taking time to actually learn and grow and develop yourself? Are you watching videos like this? If you’re watching this video, you have to give yourself at least a ‘6’ for personal development. If you subscribe to my channel, I’ll let you bump it up to at least an ‘8’.
Seriously though, this is an important part of just growth and progress, you know, you can never know too much, you can never be finished learning. So, how is that part of your life? Do you have regular reading routine, or watching videos like this or doing courses? Again, give that a rating between 1 and 10 for personal development.
Next up is your ‘Physical environment’. So, the obvious part of this is your home, right? How is it set up? Does it give you a nice feeling? Is it conducive to productivity, to happiness, to relaxation? Whatever your other goals are in life, does your home support you in that? Is it a place you’re proud of, does it make you feel good?
Now, you can expand this in terms of your physical environment. If you’re a little crazy like me, if you’re location independent or you have the desire to live all over the world, then you might look at physical environment on a bigger picture. The way I do is, “Hey, do I like Prague? Do I like the city I’m in, or the country I’m in?” and adjust that.
So, it all depends how you want to look at it, right? But it’s basically what is around you, because ultimately the things around us, whether it’s our city, our home or just our neighborhood have a big impact on how we feel. So, again, that’s how you would rate physical environment between 1 and 10.
Last but probably not least for a lot of people is ‘Career’, or if you’re one of my freelancers or consultants, then this would be your business. So, whatever is your main source of income comes in here.
Are you satisfied with your career or your business? How are things? Are you generally on track? Are you reaching your goals? Are you happy with where you’re at? Give this a rating between 1 and 10.
So, now you should be able to look at this collection of 8 areas, 9 if you’re separating ‘Family and friends’, and have a pretty good overview of where your strong points are, where the areas that are really contributing to your life and helping to set you up for success, and where the areas of weakness that you might want to focus on a little bit.
Now, in personality type, I talk a lot about strengths and weaknesses, and when it comes to who you are in terms of your personality, definitely focusing on strengths as I think, the route to success, right? If you’re terrible at math and you’re an incredible writer, don’t try to get better at math, just become a great writer and hire a good accountant.
But when it comes to the areas of your life, it’s a little different and there is some importance to rounding out your life, literally in the case of the circle which will go here, right?
I think one of the kind of corny phrases that’s used with this is, you know, a wheel won’t roll if it’s not round, or whatever, right? So you have your wheel of life here, and if a couple of areas are 4’s and the rest are 9’s, it’s going to be a pretty crummy wheel, right? The car is not going to drive well.
So, think about that is, how can you improve those negative areas, because unlike personality weaknesses, negative areas in your life can really be draining if you, let’s say your physical environment, you rate as a ‘2’, that sucks, right? Every day you’re going to come home, it’s going to drain your energy, it’s going to stress you out, you’re going to be unhappy, we’ve all sure been through this experience, right?
We’ve had a roommate where you’ve been living with and you just hate each other, or maybe you’ve moved in with someone you’re dating and you’ve broken up but I don’t know why people do this, but you stay living together until someone finds a new place.
That’s a terrible way to be living, right? And that will impact all areas of your life, not just your home life.
So, think about how you can improve the really low points and start to bring those up to at least 6’s or 7’s, and also take pride in the strong points.
If you’re an ‘8’, a ‘9’ or a ’10’ in an area, think about why that is and maybe what you could take from there that you, you know, has made that area work and apply it to other areas of your life.
Usually, although not always, the areas that do really well are the areas we’re focused in, right? If you’re always thinking about health and personal growth and learning, probably those areas are pretty good for you, where you might be neglecting relationship or family or things like that.
So, usually where we put our focus is the areas that we’re going to improve and do well, and this is a tool that helps you figure out where you should be focusing and directing your energy.
So, I hope you’ve found this video helpful. If this is the tool you’re going to use or hopefully you’ve actually been using as you went through this video, filling it in, leave a comment below. Just let me know if you found it helpful and, what is your weakest or strongest spot in your own wheel, I’m just curious.
If you found this video helpful, I would love it, love it, if you would help my business and just subscribe to the channel. That’s all I ask. That’s it, pretty easy, subscribe to the channel and I’ll catch you in other videos around personal development, coaching and just creating a more awesome life for yourself.
Once again, thanks for watching. Catch you in other ones.