Goal Setting with the wheel of life
Goal Setting: the wheel of life
In today’s Mastermind, I improvised a quick version of the Wheel of Life. It’s a very simple tool that can provoque deep insights about your current situation in life. It visually shows how balanced your life is, and it also helps you to assess where you are and compare it with where you want to be.
Interested? Let’s get into it!
Creating your wheel of life
Start by picking up 5 to 10 areas that are really important to you in life at this moment. It can be things like:
- love
- friendship
- finance
- career
- health
- community
- spirituality
- housing
- etc etc
Now draw a circle and place 1 dot for each of your selected category at equal distance from each other (if you draw it, there is no need for it to be perfect).
Now place a dot at the center of your circle.
Next trace a line between the center and each of your dots on the circle line.
You should now have something that Excel calls a “spider graph”, looking similar to the picture that is at the beginning of this post.
Assessing your wheel of life
Now that you have created the base wheel of life, it is time to assess yourself against each category.
Consider that the center is equivalent to a score of 0, and that the maximal score of the scale is at the other end of each line.
I recommend scoring from 0 to 5.
STEP1: where are you right now? Place a mark based on your current score for each category.
Remember: you are your own judge, so it is up to you to decide how honest you want to be with yourself!
STEP2: pick a time frame (I suggest to focus on 12 months from now) and mark where you want to be by that time.
Using your wheel of life
There are mainly 2 uses that you can directly extract from this simple exercise.
Start by joining all your “current” marks and then also join your “future/target” marks.
How round is your drawing? The more round the better balanced your life is. See, it’s not just about being at 5 every where, but it’s also about making sure you focus on the areas of your life that do not satisfy you. For example if you have 1 for love and 4 for finance, more money is probably not going to provide you a stronger feeling of fulfilment…
How are you going to get there? You have placed targets to move from where you are to where you want to be. Now take a moment to write down HOW you are going to move from where you are to where you want to be. What actions, what goals, what changes? Welcome to your new action plan!