If you’re out of work or feeling stuck in a job you don’t enjoy, it’s easy for your unhappiness in this area to spill over to other areas of your life and affect your self-esteem.
But you are more than your job, and it’s important to take time every now and again to take a more holistic view of your life – to appreciate and give yourself credit for the areas that are going well, to start coming up with strategies for improvement in the others, and to check how ‘in balance’ your life is as a whole.
The Wheel of Life is a common life coaching tool which gives an easy way to take stock of your life today; to show you where your life is out of balance, and the areas where you want to focus on improving. I often use this with new clients to help us decide where best to spend our coaching time, and I have this exercise available for all to use at http://www.soulambition.co.uk.
You only need about 10/15 minutes to create your Wheel of Life (though you can of course spend longer on it) – which makes it perfect for a coffee or lunch break. So, grab a pen and a sheet of paper and follow these instructions:
1. Draw a circle and divide it into eight equal parts
2. Label each of these parts for different areas of focus in your life. How you label them is up to you, as you are the expert on the priorities in your life. A possible list could be:
Health/Fitness
Home/Family
Relationships
Work/Career
Personal Finances
Social Life/Interests
Community/Environment
Personal Development
What’s important is that the labels describe the different areas of your life as you see it. You could also divide your circle into six, or 10 if need be. For many people, eight is a good number of areas to work with.
3. Along the spokes for each topic, put a large dot to represent how satisfied you are with that area. Use a scale of zero to 10, where zero is at the centre of the wheel, and 10 is on the rim.
4. When you’ve completed this for all of the areas you identified, join up the dots. How smooth is the line? Does your life look ‘in balance’, or does it guarantee a bumpy ride? What areas are you already very happy with/grateful for? Which need your attention?
5. For each area of your life, list three things you are grateful for, or are happy with. It’s important not just to look at what’s missing, but also at what you already have. For many people, this shift in perception can help them realise things aren’t as bad as they may think, in certain areas of their lives.
6. Now pick a couple of areas where you’d most like to bring about improvement. For each area, think about what it is you want to achieve. What does success in this area mean to you? For example, in work/career, is it security? Or flexibility? Financial success? Meaningful work?
7. For each of these areas you’ve identified, list three action steps you can take today or tomorrow to bring you closer to your goal. For example, if ‘health & fitness’ is your area of focus, you might put the following three steps:
Start a food & drink diary
Make an appointment with your GP to discuss an ongoing healthy-eating or exercise plan
Buy a yoga or home workout DVD
Now that you’ve an action plan in place, take action each day to bring you closer to where you want to be. If you can do something easily today, don’t wait until tomorrow. If an action step seems too big or unmanageable, break it down into smaller chunks. Always ask yourself ‘what can I do today to improve this area’?
As you progress, you can repeat the exercise to check how you’re doing, and
to remind yourself how far you’ve come. And remember to congratulate yourself on your progress!
Many of us are better at focusing on our failures than on applauding ourselves for our successes. This sort of modest’ does us no good; you don’t need to take out an advert in the local paper every time you reach one of your goals, but by all means do a private victory dance around your own living room… Perhaps close the curtains first, though.
Enjoy the process!
You can dowload a template Wheel of Life here