How to Use The Wheel of Life to Bring More Balance & Fulfilment into Your Life

Think about your life for a minute. Does it feel somewhat off? Are you crushing it at work, but your relationships seem to experience constant problems? Or maybe you are in the best shape of your life, yet your projects or finances are non-existent?

The Wheel of Life, a popular tool used to assess and improve balance and satisfaction in life, can help you understand where you're going wrong. Here is how it works: you draw a circle, identify and write down all areas of life that matter most to you, and rate your satisfaction with each on a scale of 1 to 5 (or 10). Once complete, you’re presented with a visual view of your life, what areas you're satisfied with and what areas you should put more focus on to feel more fulfilment and balance.

I did this exercise for the first time a few years ago and it really helped me get a better grasp of where I was going wrong. My career slice looked impressive, but my relationships and personal projects had very low scores. Suddenly, that sense of "something is not quite right, but don't know what" transformed into a clear map of where I should target more of my attention. I set better goals, redirected my energy, and within months my life felt more intentional. All areas of life balanced out enough to make them all look similar to an actual circle, not some heart cardiogram.

Here's a quick step-by-step guide that'll help you to create your own:

Step 1: Name Your Slices

First, start by identifying all areas of life that actually matter to you. The number of areas will be different for everyone, but I came up with a whopping 8 of them: Home, Career/Work, Relationships, Personal Finance, Personal Growth, Fun/Hobbies, Health/Fitness, Lifestyle, and My Passion Projects. If you’re doing this, keep in mind that you don't need to have that many - it’s fine if you only care about 3 areas of life, too!

Step 2: Draw The Circle & Rate Your Slices

You can download the Wheel of Life template off the Internet somewhere or create your own by grabbing a piece of paper, drawing a simple circle, and dividing it into as many sections as areas of life you came up with.

Once the circle is ready, rate each area of your life from 1 (deeply unsatisfied) to 5 or 10 (perfect).

I personally start by considering all pluses and minuses in a given area of life, which then enables me to decide what score it deserves. For example, a basic example could look like this:

• Work/Career:

Pluses:

• The job is quite interesting and varied.

• There are a lot of opportunities to grow.

• Culture is informal and feels like it’s just a group of friends working towards a common goal.

• The wage is decent.

Minuses (or what could be better):

• Need more flexibility.

• Want it to be fully remote.

• Need more holidays.

• Need less stress.

• Need more autonomy.

• Want to work on more meaningful and lasting projects that would leave a real impact on the world.

As you can see from the example above, there are pluses and minuses, which show that this area of life is quite decent but there is plenty of room for improvement. I’d suggest giving this area a score of 3, but the rating can differ from person to person, depending on how you value each different point.

You can follow a similar process for all areas of your life and rate them accordingly.

Step 3: Face Your Reality

Now that you have a pretty good idea of how you’d rate each area of your life, it’s time to visualise it on your Wheel of Life and figure out which areas are out of balance.

Ideally, all areas of life will create a perfect circle and will be rated as 4 or 5 (or between 8 and 10 if you’re using a 1 to 10 scale). This would mean that your life is balanced and fulfilling for you. However, this is rarely the case unless you lead a lifestyle that allows you to focus and perform on all areas of life to the exact extent you want to.

Now you can decide whether you’re actually pretty happy with where you are right now and nothing needs to be improved. Maybe you’ll want to improve all of them (which was the case for me when I created my Wheel of Life the first time). Or, you might want to focus on improving some key areas whilst maintaining the rest.

Step 4: Define What "Better" Means

If you followed my suggested process of scoring each area of your life, then you’ll already have a pretty good idea of what each of them should ideally be like for you to feel fully happy and fulfilled.

If you didn’t follow the suggested process and simply scored each area as you felt without much thought, then it’s time to go through all of them again and describe all the things you’d like them to have that would make you score each area as a solid 5 (or 10).

For example, let’s say you rated your Relationships as 3. Describe what exactly you’d like to experience in this area that would make you rate it as 5 (or 10). Would you like to have more meaningful relationships? Would you like to hang out with your friends a minimum of once per week? Would you like to expand your network of friends? etc.

Once you know what each area of your life should ideally look like, write down some key goals/objectives you’d like to achieve for each of them in the future (for example, within 6 months, 1 year, 5 years, etc.).

If you want to improve your Relationships area, for example, you may decide that you need to do the following:

• Organise a fun outdoor activity with your closest friends at least once every 2 weeks.

• Reach out to old friends you rarely talk to at least once per month.

• Join and engage in relevant forums/groups where you could discover more like-minded people daily.

• Host a dinner party for your closest friends once per month, etc.

You may create a long or short list of goals for each area you want to improve - either is fine. Please note, however, that if you've a very long list of goals, you’ll end up having an even longer list of tasks to get done each week and day, too. And, if you don’t have enough time to get them done, it’ll exhaust and demotivate you. As you may already know, it’s very important to find enough time to unwind, relax, chill, do nothing, or do something very random regularly. If you haven't already considered this, you might want to put this as one of the goals/habits/tasks on your list, too. 😃

Step 5: Create Your Action Plan

The final step is to create a plan of action to achieve all the goals you set in step 4 and use some sort of tool to monitor and keep track of your progress. Consider using a goal or life planner, or maybe a monthly/weekly/daily planner or any simple journal to do this  -  whatever works best for you.

I’d recommend creating a list of tasks to do for each goal you have. Some goals may require only 1 or 2 tasks to get done to achieve them, whereas some of them might be more complex and require several tasks that will need to be updated as you go and learn more information (e.g., you may not yet fully know how to achieve certain goals and more research is needed).

Once you have a long list of all the tasks for all the goals you set for each different area of your life, you can start planning how you'll get them done in months to come.

Here is a simple system:

Monthly Planning: Select all the tasks you want to try to get done in month 1 (e.g., January) and create a joint list of all the tasks related to different goals and different areas of your life for that month.

Weekly Planning: Once you know what you'll be focusing on in month 1, you can start breaking down these monthly tasks into smaller, weekly tasks  -  your key priorities as well as things that would be nice to get done once your priorities are cleared. You might decide to plan one week at a time or all 4 weeks at once  -  it’s totally up to you. I personally plan one week at a time as things change in my life frequently and I’d likely need to keep updating and rewriting my weekly schedules if I did them all at once.

Daily Planning: Finally, once you know your week’s priorities and tasks to get done, consider how much time and effort you expect you’ll need to complete them and space them out on your daily planner/schedule accordingly.

Repeat the same process for months 2, 3, 4, etc., until all your tasks have been completed and goals achieved.

I hope I managed to explain the process properly and that you were able to follow along. It's really a very good and helpful tool and it does make a difference if you follow through with it. The key word being "follow through." Drawing the wheel is easy, but living differently is hard. But if you commit to the process, I believe you'll be amazed at how much can shift in just a few months.