Take it back to the basics

Progress is something we should all strive for. But, as with anything in life, we often experience setbacks and plateaus that can make progress feel like a distant dream.

Sometimes we need to take a step back and reassess. In busy times, in stressful times, even in times of plenty or peace—we can all benefit from some life analysis. Where does our satisfaction lie? How can we improve our satisfaction? This is where the Wheel of Life comes in.

What is the Wheel of Life?

Often called the Wheel of Balance, this exercise is meant to assess and organize the most important areas of your life, ultimately providing insight on how to get closer to achieving harmony, peace, and yes, balance.

It’s a great, customizable exercise that you can use to assess your levels of satisfaction—and how to improve them—in any stage of life.

Make it work for you

For ease of understanding, let’s walk through a pre-filled version. Our wheel has six spokes based on the following areas of life:

Personal — your physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being

Social — your friends, family and colleagues

Occupational — your job and/or career

Environmental — the physical space you exist in; your home, for example

Financial — your current financial status and goals

Educational — your schooling, professional development, and training

Our wheel has five levels of satisfaction, as seen by the concentric circles moving towards the middle. What you do is assess each “spoke” and determine your level of satisfaction for each area of your life. In this case, “1” is closest to the middle of the wheel and indicates the least amount of satisfaction, while “5” is the most. Color in the spoke at the level of your satisfaction to the middle. To help determine which number you’re at for each area, you could ask yourself: Where am I now? Where do I want to be?

When you’re done, it might look something like this:

The more even and balanced your filled-in areas appear, the more balanced you are in life. If your filled-in areas don’t form a perfect circle, are you surprised? If so, don’t worry! Very few people have a perfectly balanced circle. It’s what you do next that matters.

From reflection to action

No matter what, it’s important to remember that this is just an exercise. It can be quite valuable, particularly if you tend to be introspective and are self-motivating, but ultimately it’s just a tool.

Is your filled-out wheel an eye-opener for you? It’s great because it shows you, at a glance, your general place in life at any given moment. It gives you an idea of where to start to get closer to achieving balance! Understanding that is the simple part.

Now for the part that requires effort. Let’s run through an example scenario.

Looking at the wheel above, you’ll notice the person who filled it out gave themselves a five in “social,” a three in “occupational,” and a two in “environmental.” We can assume this person feels really good about their social situation—side note: What determines levels of satisfaction will mean something different for everyone—but isn’t so satisfied with their career or job prospects, and by proxy, they aren’t thrilled with their current living situation.

You may or may not be surprised to realize that all areas of the wheel tend to be related. Using this example, this person could:

• Improve their environment (home) by improving their job prospects
• Improve their job prospects by leveraging their robust social circle
• Alternatively, they could improve their job by improving their educational satisfaction (going back to school)
• Which could also eventually improve their financial satisfaction

And so on. By now, you can probably see how improving one area of your life can potentially set off a chain reaction, improving other areas of your life—eventually resulting in a more filled-out, even Wheel of Life.

What this means for adult learners

While absolutely anyone can use this for any stage or season, the Wheel of Life can help adult learners in particular with goal setting and visualizing the future.

Pay specific attention to what level of satisfaction you indicated for your “education” spoke. How can other areas of your life improve that? And subsequently, how can improving your satisfaction with your education improve other areas? Remember the chain reaction—you might be surprised what happens when you improve your satisfaction with a single area of your life.

We can’t wait to see how your wheel helps you!