The Life Wheel concept was originally created by Paul J. Meyer, founder of Success Motivation® Institute, Inc.
“For everything there is a season, and a time for every matter under heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance; a time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together; a time to embrace, and a time to refrain from embracing.”
My Wheel of Life
Do you have a balanced life? You’re probably out of balance if your career is flourishing and your money is rising, but you don’t have time to enjoy it. Your life may be out of balance if your interests and pursuits keep you from seeing your loved ones. You probably need to rearrange your priorities if you are too preoccupied with other things to pay attention to your health. Your equilibrium is off if you have a home, a car, a boat, and a lakeside retreat but no one to share them with.
Have you ever felt like your life was out-of-control? If so, you most likely struggle to strike a balance between your priorities in life. Balance is the kind of concept that makes sense in theory but is challenging to implement in “actual” life.
It could be challenging to picture a life that allows for all the activities you would like to do, given the continual pressures of our jobs and families. Many people make the error of prioritising the needs of others before their own. However, in the long run, this could prove to be an expensive error. When we fail to prioritise balance in our lives, we frequently pay a price in the form of burnout, despair, and loss of health.
Great leaders and prosperous people throughout history have likely understood the value of maintaining balance in their lives intuitively. They worked to live rather than working to survive. They improved their overall life balance and well-roundedness as a result, traits that are linked to success.
You might be asking at this point how you, too, could create better balance in your life and profit from it. Identifying the aspects of your life that are out of balance is the first step.
Here is a quick exercise that will assist you in achieving this. You can assess whether you are putting too much emphasis on one aspect of your life while ignoring others by using the wheel of life. There are different portions on the wheel. Give each aspect of your life a satisfaction score between 0 and 10, with 10 representing complete happiness.
Looking at your wheel of life, here are some great questions to ask yourself to take the exercise deeper:
- Are there any surprises for you?
- How do you feel about your life as you look at your Wheel?
- How do you currently spend time in these areas?
- How would you like to spend time in these areas?
- What would make that a score of 10?
- What would a score of 10 look like?
- Which of these categories would you most like to improve?
- How could you make space for these changes in your life?
- What help and support might you need from others to make changes and be more satisfied with your life?
- What change should you make first? And what change do you want to make first?
- If there was one key action you could take that would begin to bring everything into balance, what would it be?