The Wheel of Life is a coaching tool I’ve used both personally and professionally for more than a decade. It’s the tool I return to again and again because it’s simple and highly effective.
The wheel gives you a powerful visual representation of how balanced your life is currently. When you do the exercise, you are immediately more self-aware and empowered to take action in the areas of your lifestyle that need a bit of TLC.
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Wheel of Life
Here’s how to do it.
- Take your journal or a piece of paper and draw a circle on it.
- Divide the circle into eight segments.
- Label those segments Food, Mind, Body, Home, Family, Exercise, Work, Self Image.
- With zero being the mid-point of your circle, and ten being the outer edge, consider how satisfied you are with each area of your life. Add a dot to show your score.
Once you’ve scored each segment, join the dots and you’ll see which areas of your life you feel positive about and which areas need a bit of work.
Click here to download a printable version of the wheel of life.
Personalise it
You can change the segment labels according to what you value or want to value. A balanced wheel doesn’t mean a perfect circle. My definition of balance is most of my days feeling calm and peaceful, not frantic or guilt-ridden. I don’t expect perfection in any area, but I want to feel like I’m making progress in each of the areas that matter to me. Sometimes I’m happy for a segment to score 3 or 4 because it’s just not a priority for me right now.
Balance is whatever feels calm and peaceful for YOU. You might not have 8 segments on your wheel of life. You might have only 3 or 4 segments that are important to you at this point in time. Whatever feels right to you is right.
Make a plan
You’ve completed your wheel of life, but now what?
The next step is to make a plan to deal with your key priority areas. Decide which one or two areas of your lifestyle you want to make improvements in and decide what action you can take to improve your score.
Also, consider if there are any areas you’re spending too much time in at the expense of others. Balance isn’t about adding more to your plate; sometimes it’s pulling back a bit and slowing down in some areas. There’s no point aiming for a 10 in your career if, to get there, your family or health falls to a 3.
In my book, Eating Habits for Healthy Skin, I outline my approach to habit change. My philosophy is to start small with goals you know you can stick to. Small steps taken consistently will get you where you want to go.
Start small
I read a lot of books on the Law of Attraction. What many of them have in common is that they encourage you to challenge yourself by setting big goals where your desire is so strong you leap out of bed in the morning and don’t stop until your dream becomes your reality.
While this completely makes sense to me, I need a different approach with some goals. Changing your lifestyle can be hard and there’s never an endpoint. You never say ‘great, I’ve achieved perfect health, now I can go back to doing what I was doing before’.
There’s very little immediate payoff when you change your lifestyle one meal, one session in the gym, or one skincare product at a time. It’s easy to lose motivation when you don’t see quick results from the changes you’re making. And when a goal is too ambitious, such as going to the gym three times a week when you haven’t exercised for years, it doesn’t take long before your body resists the change and you tell yourself that it’s too dark, or too cold, or you have to work late.
This is where starting small comes in. If you want to exercise more, commit to doing 5 squats a day, or downward dog for 30 seconds every morning, or meeting family or friends for a walk every weekend. By keeping the goal small, and/or making it fun by involving others, you will actually do it. The feeling of accomplishment is what will keep you doing it day after day.
Daily progress is powerful and will keep you on track. Your goals and priorities will change over time and the wheel of life will evolve with you. If you focus on the step that’s right in front of you, you will always be moving in the right direction.
Focus on positive changes
We all think change is hard, and it can be. One of my degree subjects was sociology. I was fascinated by the science around human behaviour and why people resist change. Most of the time, resistance is driven by fear, uncertainty, and loss. But I think there’s a shortcut with lifestyle changes that can help you bypass all of those feelings—stop trying to change your habits and give yourself some new ones instead.
The easy place to start with this is diet. Don’t give up takeaways, chocolate, sugar, coffee or whatever if you know you’ll never be able to sustain it. A healthy diet is not defined by what we exclude from our plate. What you actually eat matters far more than what you don’t eat, so focus your energy on including lots of plant-based foods in your diet regardless of what else you’re eating.
Most of us know we need to eat a wider variety of plants. Plants give us essential vitamins and minerals, plus the fibre we need to feed our gut microbiome that we now know plays a massive role in maintaining our overall health.
Focus on adding extra plants to every meal you make and you’ll boost your health with very little effort. It can be as simple as adding a handful of leafy greens or fresh herbs to your dinner, mixed salad to your sandwich at lunchtime, and a handful of nuts, seeds, and berries to your porridge in the morning.
If you take nothing away, you can’t feel deprived. You’ll soon see how success in one segment of your lifestyle circle drives positive changes in other areas without the usual resistance and reliance on willpower alone.
Let go of being perfect and embrace the opportunity to make progress every single day by focusing on positive changes.
For more or increasing the variety of plants in your diet, click here to read how I do it.
What is the source of your stress?
The wheel of life exercise may identify many sources of stress and imbalance for you. Acknowledge the difference between smaller and larger sources of stress.
You can take care of the little things like eating more greens, taking deep breaths, and going for a walk at lunchtime. But you also need to take care of the big things, especially if it’s something that feels too big to handle. Maybe it’s a tense relationship, a job you don’t enjoy, or financial worries. Get clear on what’s causing you stress, look at where you can get support, develop a plan to improve or change your circumstances, then put that plan into action.
You can do as many breathing exercises and get as many facials as you like, but they won’t help you to de-stress in the long term if you don’t deal with the primary source of that stress. Taking action, however small, to counter those bigger sources of stress is key to creating balance in your life.
When to get professional help
The wheel of life is a personal development tool. If you find any aspect of your lifestyle is affecting your self-esteem, your relationships, or your social life, don’t be afraid to seek professional help from a doctor or therapist to find the right support.
Download the Wheel of Life printable here.
