How Are You Faring In Your Life Now? The Life Wheel

by Celes |
Self-Improvement

Posted: Aug 2, 2010
Updated:
Nov 2, 2024

The Life Wheel is the first task in Live a Better Life in 30 Days, my 30-day program to live a better life.

Today I’d like to talk about the life wheel. It’s one of the tools I use in my coaching and it will be an essential tool in your growth journey.

What is the Life Wheel?

The life wheel is a wheel that provides a snapshot of how you’re doing in your life now. It is a circle divided into segments, usually eight, that represent the key areas of your life. Here’s a sample diagram:

There are different variations of the life wheel, with common segments being career, family, love, friends, finance, and health. The remaining segments are more varied. They can be recreation, spiritual, or others.

Each segment comes with a scale of 0-10 where you rate how well you are doing in the area right now. 0 is the lowest score and 10 is the highest score. After you rate yourself in each area, you mark out your scores on the wheel and connect the dots. You will then get a web-like diagram which shows you how you’re doing in life right now!

This web-like diagram is great as it provides an instant visual snapshot of your current life status. After all, it’s hard to get a big picture of what’s happening in all other areas of your life when you’re focused on the little daily tasks. You may subconsciously know that you’re neglecting an area of your life, but this neglect may not be obvious. Subsequently, you have no real call to action. The life wheel lets you spot gaps in your life right away so that you can intervene and work on the low-scoring areas before it’s too late.

When I first used the life wheel with my clients, I used an 8-segment wheel like the above. After a while though, I realized that there are important areas left out in an 8-segment wheel. I then created a modified version of the life wheel with 10 segments that I identified as the 10 key areas of our life:

(Image: Personal Excellence)

Career/Business/Studies — The name of this area depends on what’s applicable to you right now. Use “Career” if you’re employed, “Business” if you’re running a business, or “Studies” if you’re studying. This is considered a crucial area as work and studies usually make up a large portion of our lives.
Finances — Your finances. This includes your income, savings, and assets.
Health — Your physical health. This includes your diet (whether you’re eating healthy), fitness (whether you’re having enough activity and movement), sleep and rest (whether you’re having enough rest), and your overall physical health.
Family — Your relationship with your family members, including your parents, siblings, and children (if you have any).
Friends — Your social life. This includes your social relationships and friendships.
Love — If you’re attached, this refers to the state of your relationship with your partner currently — if it’s where you want it to be, and how happy you are with him/her. If you’re single, it refers to how happy you are as a single. Just because you’re single doesn’t mean you’ll automatically get a 0/10; similarly, just because you’re attached doesn’t mean you’ll get a 10/10.
Self — Your relationship with yourself, including your self-love and self-esteem.
Recreation — Your level of fun and enjoyment in life. Whether you are able to pursue your personal hobbies and interests.
Contribution — How you’re giving back to others, such as society and the world. Social causes (like environmental causes, animal rights, and humanitarian causes) fall under here.
Spirituality — The development of your spiritual self. If you have a religion, this refers to how connected you feel with your religion. If you don’t have a religion, this refers to your connection with your higher self and the universe.

There’s a reason why the categories are ordered as such.

The first 3 areas — Career, Finances, Health — form the material and physical aspects of our lives. The next 3 areas — Family, Friends, Love — form the relationship aspect. The next 2 areas — Self, Recreation — are about the self. The last 2 areas — Contribution, Spirituality — tend to come in after we have the first 8 areas in place, and they relate to our connection with the universe and our spiritual self.

In general, people tend to focus on developing the material and physical parts of their lives first, as we live in a physical world and we need to secure our physical needs first as part of survival. This is followed by the relationship and self aspects of their lives. When these main blocks are in place, they start to examine their relationship with the world and their spiritual self.

While the order will differ from person to person, ultimately all 10 areas are essential to live your highest life. It is through these 10 areas that we develop our Mind, Body, Heart, and Soul, and become our highest self.

Some people may feel that only certain areas of the life wheel apply to them. They may think that Spirituality isn’t important to them as they’re free thinkers (a misconception as Spirituality refers to your connection with your higher self and the universe; it applies even if you have no religion). So they ignore the spiritual aspect of their lives and build tangible things like Career, Love, and Health.

However, Spirituality relates to our soul and it’s an essential part of living a full life. While they start off working on tangible things like career and money, at some point Spirituality becomes important as they seek higher-order things in life. This is when they start to have a midlife crisis and look for a deeper meaning behind their existence. (You will work on your life purpose on Day 16.)

Some people disregard money (Finances), saying that money isn’t important. Yet money is a symbol for value in today’s world. While it’s not a perfect measure of the value one is creating, it’s the currency that people use today in the exchange of goods and services. When you reject money, you reject receiving value for your work. In the long run, rejecting money makes it difficult for you to achieve your bigger goals because you lack the monetary resources to do so.

There are people who disregard Recreation, saying that they don’t need to pursue any hobby and that their work is their passion. But Recreation lets us explore other interests and other aspects of ourselves, which give us new inspiration for our work and life.

The same goes for people who deny needing Friends, Family, Love, Contribution, and even a passion-filled Career. We work for many hours of our waking life, so it’s important to have a job that we love. We are social creatures, and having meaningful relationships is important to our existence. For Contribution, no man is an island and we are all connected by living in this world. Our actions and inaction affect the world on a daily basis, whether we realize it or not. It’s important that we work on making the world a better place, both for ourselves and for future generations.

For Self, it’s an important yet often neglected part of the wheel. Do you love yourself? Do you believe in your capabilities? Do you tend to think about yourself in a positive or negative light? You are the one person who will be with you throughout your entire life. If you don’t have a healthy self-image, then how do you expect others to respect you? If you have a poor self-image, other things will suffer in your life. If you have a strong and healthy self-image, it provides you with the foundation to excel in life.

Ultimately, all 10 areas of the life wheel are important as they are all parts of your life. Disregarding any one area may help you gain headway in the other areas initially, but you’ll eventually stall in your growth. Because when you disregard an area, you disregard a part of yourself and hence put your life on hold.

Today, your task is to assess your life with the life wheel! :)

Task: Assess Your Life with the Life Wheel

Part 1: Assess your life (20 min)

Rate each area of your life on a scale of 0-10 (where 0 is the lowest, and 10 is the ideal state). Use the questions below as a guide.
1. Career/Business/Studies — How are you doing in your career, business, or studies? Are you happy with your current progress and results? Are you growing to be your highest self through this medium?
2. Finances — How are you doing in your finances? How are your income, savings, and physical assets?
3. Health — How is your health? Do you have a healthy diet? Do you get regular movement and activity? Do you get enough rest and sleep? What is the overall state of your physical health?
4. Family — How are your relationships with your family members? This includes your parents, siblings, and children if you have any. Do you spend enough time and quality time with them? (You can have individual scores for each family member if it is a distinct relationship.)
5. Friends — How is your social life? Do you have positive, like-minded friends? Friends you can talk to and confide in? How are your relationships with them?
6. Love — If you are married or attached, how happy are you in the relationship? How happy are you with your partner? If you are single, how happy are you by yourself?
7. Recreation — Are you having fun and enjoyment in your life? Do you have time to pursue your hobbies and interests?
8. Self — How is your relationship with yourself? Do you love yourself? How is your self-esteem and self-image?
9. Contribution — Are you contributing to the world beyond you, such as society, the world, and social causes? (Environmental causes, animal rights, and humanitarian causes fall under here.)
10. Spirituality — How is your connection with your spiritual self? If you have a religion, how connected do you feel with it? If you are non-religious, how connected do you feel with your higher self and the universe?
Write down why you gave that score. Feel free to write as much or as little as you want!
Draw your life wheel.
- Draw a circle and divide it into 10 equal segments, like so:
- Mark out the scores for each area on the diagram. Then, connect them! You should have a continuous line that connects all the scores together and returns to the original point.

Different Life Wheel Shapes

There are four possible shapes you can get. Generally, the bigger the web, the better you’re doing, though there are exceptions as I share below.

#1: Constricted web with low scores on most fronts

This means you’re facing many limitations in life right now. Perhaps you have been putting many of your goals on hold, or compromising on your goals. This could be due to your life circumstances or limiting beliefs. Reflect on this. Why do you have a constricted web currently?

Yet without fixing this, you’ll keep shirking in your life until you are backed into a corner with nowhere to go.

If you have a constricted web, examine it closely. What restrictions are you facing? Are they external factors, self-imposed factors, or both? How can you address them?

#2: Lopsided web that’s high in some areas but low in others

That’s great — this means you are doing very well in some areas! However, you’ve neglected other parts of your life in the process. As I mentioned, all 10 areas are essential to living your best life. Neglecting any of them will only limit your life experience in the long run.

First, mark out the 2-3 areas you’re severely underperforming in. Understand why that’s the case. What can you do to bring them back up? Next, identify how you are going to improve on them as you continue to do well in the high-scoring areas. We don’t want to neglect the high-scoring areas just to bring the low-scoring areas up – that will just be switching from one problem to the next! The long-term sustainable solution is to form a plan where you can maximize all the areas together.

#3: Broad web with generally high scores

This means you’re doing very well! This is fantastic work and a testament to all the hard work you’ve been putting into your goals. Congratulations!!

At the same time, there is always room to improve. Be careful of what I call the complacency and self-contentment trap. With the complacency trap, people rate themselves highly and feel that there is nothing left to improve because they are doing so well — yet growth is a never-ending journey and we can always do better. With the self-contentment trap, people focus too much on feeling happy despite glaring issues in their lives, to the point where they make do and develop a complex set of beliefs to convince themselves that they are “happy” when, deep down, they are not.

Remember that no matter what we are doing, there is always room to improve. A thriving business can always grow further. A relationship that is great can always be better. It’s fantastic that you have such high scores in your life now. Moving forward, how can you take things to the next level? What is the next milestone you want to achieve in life?

#4: Complete circle with full scores

Last but not least, the full circle — your ideal life. Here, full 10/10 scores are more like ideals to work toward vs. a permanent end state that you reach and declare yourself “done.”

Meaning, just because you rate yourself 10/10 now doesn’t mean you’ll automatically have this score forever. For example, maybe you rate your relationship with your partner a 10/10 today — doesn’t mean it’ll be 10/10 forever. You still need to put in the work to build your relationship and grow in love with your partner. Also, perhaps your 10/10 now is to enjoy your relationship with your partner. Five years down the road, perhaps you want to start a family together.

In that sense, 10/10 is an evolving vision. As you grow and achieve your goals, your definition of 10/10 will grow too. :)

Part 2: Reflection… (20 min)

Now that you have drawn your life wheel, it’s time to do some reflection.

What is the shape of your wheel? Why? Refer to the 4 shapes above and pick the closest one. Whatever your life wheel looks like now, it’s not a chance occurrence. If you did this assessment a month or two ago, you’d likely have gotten a similar shape. The bigger question is, why? Read my analysis of your wheel shape above and reflect on your current life circumstances. What are the 3 biggest reasons why your wheel looks like this?
Which are your lowest-scoring areas? Why do you think this is the case? All 10 segments are important to live your best life. Some people may think that they can ignore 3-4 segments and get a 0-1 score in those segments, but it doesn’t work that way. Whenever there’s a part of your life that is put on hold, a part of you is blocked too. Which segments have the lowest scores? Have you been putting them off? Why?
Are you happy with your wheel? What if you have to stick with this wheel forever? How would you feel? Would you be happy? Be honest with yourself.

Part 3: Action (20 min)

Moving forward, what are your biggest priorities to achieve your ideal 10/10 wheel?
What are the biggest action steps you can take to achieve your goals?

Other Exercises For You To Try Out

If you’ve found the life wheel exercise useful, be sure to check out:

Live a Better Life in 30 Days, my 30-day program to live a better life. The Life Wheel is the first task of the course, with 29 other powerful tasks to help you live a better life.
Write a Letter To Your Future Self
Create Your Life Handbook

The life wheel is the first task of Live a Better Life in 30 Days, my 30-day program to live a better life. 30DLBL is a life transformation course with 30 different tasks to live a better life. Read more: Live a Better Life in 30 Days