The Wheel of Life coaching tool is an interesting activity often used in official life coaching sessions, but it can also be self-inflicted, as it were.
In other words, you can use it yourself just as easily as with a coach, although a good coach will be able to bring its usefulness to a whole new level with wise guidance and pithy insights.
You might be wondering how it works and I’ll try to explain, in broad terms, here.
The idea is that you split your life into a few big chunks, and I give some examples in the sections below. This is the first step in getting a grip on where you stand in relation to your goals, or just how happy you are in each of the areas that are important to you in your life.
I’ve used five concentric circles here for clarity, but they are each given two points, which meant they go from zero in the centre to ten on the outside. (continued below…)
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Feel free to use my ‘Rainbow Teaching & Learning Values’ mind map as follows:
1) For any NON-commercial use
2) Leave it EXACTLY as it is
3) Don’t change ANYTHING
4) Make sure the © Copyright text is included and intact
5) See 2) and 3) (you get the idea!)
You CAN reproduce it online or embed it in your blog or website as long as you…
6) Respect 1-5 above
7) Include a credit to ‘Sab Will / Mind Map Mad’ AND include a clickable link to this page ( http://www.mindmapmad.com/wheel-of-life-coaching-tool/ ) on the web page next to or near the image – thanks!
Anyway, it’s a place absolutely crammed with cool mind maps, including mine – he he! You can download the actual original iMindMap file (the mind mapping software I use) and play around with it yourself. Nice!
I’ll talk a little about the categories I’ve chosen in the sections below, but in order for you to still use the model version if you like it, I’ve included three possible subcategories for each main section. These are shown on the branches leading off from the main category heading boxes.
There are no rules and the life areas should be completely your own. So if you want, for example, to make the ‘Health’ category totally about Exercise, or totally about Diet, that’s fine. You can get even more specific if you want. Maybe your goal for the health category is to become a member of the national athletics team or maybe to lose 20 kilos before Christmas. Then give that goal or activity an entire section of the Wheel of Life if it’s that important to you.
It may be that you’re not sure where to put a certain topic. For example, should running go under Health or maybe Sport or Hobbies in the Leisure category? You decide, it doesn’t matter, as long as it makes sense to you.
Do you absolutely need to have eight areas in your life? No. If you want six, or ten, then do it. But be careful
Too many sections and it’ll be hard to track major progress. You might end up feeling overwhelmed, like having a To Do List with 30 items on which you try to kid yourself you will all get done today. You won’t get them all done and what’s more you’ll feel bad about it!
Too few section and the Wheel of Life won’t fully represent the richness and variety of your existence. If you had just three categories for People, Work and Free Time, for example, you wouldn’t be able to home in on specific areas you want to see good progress in soon.
Below I show you two ways of using my wonderful mind mappified Wheel of Life Coaching Tool – choose the one you like best and go for it!
10 means it’s utterly amazing and 1 means it’s utterly crap.
Then you join the lines around the wheel to give you a multi-sided shape – a polygon as they say. You should shade in the form to make it clearer to see.
You will notice that it goes out further in some areas than in others. This will give you an idea of where you feel most satisfied and where you could do much better.
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As you can see in the picture above, this wheel wouldn’t roll anywhere in a hurry, and the person who created this might decide to work on their personal development, taking up a new hobby and above all sorting out their health by scheduling regular exercise or joining a gym for example.
This is another way of doing exactly the same thing. If you like it better then use it – the main thing is that it works for you.
Here, instead of marking your life ‘satisfaction scores’ on the radiating lines, you fill in blocks of the corresponding ‘slices of pie’, starting from the centre and continuing out until you get to the number you chose.
I personally like this one because it’s nice and colourful and very graphic and clearly shows where areas of your life are lagging behind.
Again, it’s important to realise that it’s more important to get more balance into your life than to desperately struggle to get all of the areas up to 10. A nicely balanced life with all of your areas around the 7 mark might actually feel absolutely wonderful!
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Alternatively, you might decide that this year you’re going to focus almost exclusively on improving your relationship with your parents, or finally set up that charitable organisation you’re always dreaming about, in which case you might want to concentrate on pushing the Family and Community areas out to 8 or 9 over the next few months.
I won’t go into any more detail here as it’s a big subject but hopefully that gives you an idea of how you could start using this useful tool.
Below I say a few words about each of the example areas I’ve chosen but of course you should adapt or change them depending on what’s important to you. It’s your wheel of life and you should roll with it on your own terms!
In most maps you will only see the main categories without any subcategories. I wanted to go further by suggesting subcategories for each main ‘slice of life’ but I’ve also created completely blank versions for people who want to use the image but do their own thing. Aren’t I kind?!
This is for humans you need to deal with or want to have contact with on a regular basis but who don’t qualify as family. Many of them will be as important and often much more important than certain members of your blood relatives. Stick them here.
Friends: Experts recommend having a small handful of close acquaintances you can trust. They don’t tend to judge you like, well, your mother-in-law, for example 😉
Colleagues: Including your coworkers and probably your boss if you have one. Also people in other companies like customers, suppliers, your doctor, your coach (or coachee) or your mentor too maybe…
Neighbours: Let’s face it, whether we like it or not (a bit like family), if they live next door or across the road they ain’t going anywhere anytime soon so we’d better get used to it.
Put your main family members here. Some people will split these categories differently. They may have a single section for their partner, they may put colleagues together with career or job, it’s up to you but this is an idea that could work.
Partner: Your better half, your significant other, her indoors, him in the shed, however you look at it, this is probably going to be part of one of your categories, if not a whole category on its own.
Parents: This may be an important area which you want to work on improving. Time goes on, people get older, and little by little we realise what’s precious to us and that we shouldn’t take it for granted.
Kids: No explanation needed. But sometimes – often! – we can do better in our interactions and dealings with out nearest and dearest rugrats. You can focus on that here.
These categories are kind of random and vague – take ideas from them and then change them to make them meaningful for you.
Goals: Here you can work on your main professional objectives for the next few weeks, months and years.
Direction: This could be about rethinking where you want your career to go and possibly about changing direction altogether, having realised that what you’re doing right now isn’t making you happy.
Mission: This could be about developing a clear vision for what you actually want to spend your professional life doing, on a higher level than just increasing sales and getting that Rolex… Could equally be linked to the personal development or even spiritual areas…
Always spending it, never enough of it, right? And if you do happen to have a bit, what do you do with it? That’s what this section’s for.
Savings: You can use this theme to gather your thoughts on your savings plans and investments for the future to get it all clear and sorted in your head.
Objectives: Again, like in the career section, you may well like to be more organised in your finances and have a clearer plan for where you want to be, money-wise, a few years down the line.
Income: Where are you taking home now? Where do you want that to go? They say that having an earnings goal (or any goal for that matter) in mind, can focus you and help you get there.
There’s more to life than just living our own, it would seem. We live in society, interacting with others and, it turns out, getting profound pleasure and satisfaction from being a valuable member of our community and helping others. Who’dda thunk it?
Cause: Adopt a charity, start your own, help others less fortunate than yourself, promote something that’s important to you – try it, you might end up a much ‘bigger’ person for your efforts!
Contribution: This is similar to ‘Cause’ above but it could also take a different form, such as financial or psychological or simply personal. You could support well-building or educational programmes in Africa, or offer free counselling in an area you know about, or pay for a poor music-lover’s piano lessons, for example.
Environment: Here we can think personally – our own home or work conditions and how relaxing and conducive to good feelings they are, or locally, such as making our town a nicer place to live in by taking part in a litter pick-up day, or nationally and globally; anything is possible.
I know, let’s do… absolutely nothing for a change! Well, that’s certainly an option as part of your leisure activities, but you could also develop ideas for enriching your life through pleasure in a huge number of potential ways.
Culture: Why not decide to see more films or plays, read a classic book a month, visit art exhibitions, go to a concert.. you’re brain will love you for it!
Hobbies: For the good of mankind we should all have something we are passionate about but all too often childhood interests or adult dreams get left by the wayside on the thundering highway of modern life. So get stamp-collecting, take up archery or become a scary scrapbooker – but you decide, ok?
Fun: This modest but essential area can get forgotten over the years. We need to take time to just do things that make us smile, laugh or feel good about ourselves and others. This can overlap with lots of other categories but it’s worth highlighting it – what are you going to do that’s pure fun THIS week?!
I’ve left two of my favourite life areas for last in this list, but don’t be fooled, there is no correct order. All the categories are of equal importance until you decide to place more emphasis on some than others.
In the Health section it’s all about realising that our mind and our bodies are absolutely NOT separate, and that a health body will mean a better, longer life, it’s as simple as that.
Sleep: We don’t get enough. True or true? Well it’s true, based on a huge number of scientific studies and not just because it would be nice to lie in a little longer. Sleep has some essential functions, both physical (recovering and rebuilding) and mental (learning and creating memories), just to give two examples.
Exercise: Plan your getting-back-in-shape programme here. Make it something you will enjoy. Follow a system. Do it with others. Track your progress. Have a laugh. Whatever it takes, but do it!
Diet: Eat and drink right and lose those kilos. Heck, you can even use my amazing (yes!) mind map called How I Lost 7 Kilos In 7 Weeks (I actually lost 20 in the end) to help you. I know, I know, you don’t have to thank me… just yet!
Ahh, personal development, now there’s a topic. Self-help books, doncha just love ’em? I do and I’ve got the heaving bookshelves to prove it. This is where you put some of their ideas into action.
Personal: Choose the category or section names that suit you but Personal Development in some form or other should surely be on everyone’s Wheel of Life, don’t you think? Study ancient Greek philosophy. Start a personal blog for your thoughts and inspirational writings. Learn to become your own life coach for crying out loud!
Emotional: Where should we start? There are so many ways of growing emotionally, but one thing is sure, self-discovery and understanding will help you more than you can imagine. And this will then radiate out into the world for others to enjoy and benefit from too, but it has to start with you.
Spiritual: If you want to discover God, do God. If Mother Nature’s more your thing, go find her, she’s waiting. Become a Zen master or simply meditate your way to inner peace – this can be one of the most important categories of all.
To finish this off, let’s talk about what you generally do once you’ve identified where you are at the moment. It’s probably no surprise that you think about where you’d like to be soon!
To do this you weigh up how you feel about what you’ve discovered about the balance – or lack of it – that you currently have in your life.
You might be happy with some areas as they are, but you will probably spot two or three areas you’d really like to focus on and improve. On the Wheel of Life this means that you want to ‘push out’ some of the sections to move your personal wheel closer to the outside or at least to make it a less lumpy, wobbly wheel that looks like it will roll much more easily!
Then we get into goal-setting and following through which is beyond the scope of this article but is certainly also something you can do with mind maps, along with lots of other fun visual tools.
I won’t make it a secret that I’m personally excited about the area of coaching, both for myself and others, and this fun mind map is a step on the way to developing into this areas. In fact, it fits nicely into the Personal Development (and why not Career) section of my own Wheel of Life, and I hope you are feeling as inspired as I am!
Mind mapping is a great personal development tool. One of my objectives for the coming year is to learn more about its potential and to create and share more motivating tool to keep on moving on – I hope you’ll join me!
2016 Sab Will / Mind Map Mad
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PDF Document ~ Sab on Biggerplate!
JPG Image 800 px ~ JPG Image 1920 px ~ JPG Image 3500px
PDF Document ~ Sab on Biggerplate!
JPG Image 800 px ~ JPG Image 1920 px ~ JPG Image 3500px
PDF Document ~ Sab on Biggerplate!
JPG Image 800 px ~ JPG Image 1920 px ~ JPG Image 3500px
PDF Document ~ Sab on Biggerplate!
Feel free to use my ‘Rainbow Teaching & Learning Values’ mind map as follows:
1) For any NON-commercial use
2) Leave it EXACTLY as it is
3) Don’t change ANYTHING
4) Make sure the © Copyright text is included and intact
5) See 2) and 3) (you get the idea!)
You CAN reproduce it online or embed it in your blog or website as long as you…
6) Respect 1-5 above
7) Include a credit to ‘Sab Will / Mind Map Mad’ AND include a clickable link to this page ( http://www.mindmapmad.com/wheel-of-life-coaching-tool/ ) on the web page next to or near the image – thanks!
Anyway, it’s a place absolutely crammed with cool mind maps, including mine – he he! You can download the actual original iMindMap file (the mind mapping software I use) and play around with it yourself. Nice!
Sab Will enjoys creating fun and helpful mind maps and articles on a wide range of topics.
As well as Mind Map Mad (this site!) Sab runs
Sab is available for training in innovative thinking, creative problem solving and mind mapping. Please get in touch here to find out how increased creativity and innovation can help boost your business.
P.S. Keep up to date will ALL Sab’s latest creative output over on his newest home on the web, the Sab Lab!
© 2016 Sab Will / Mind Map Mad
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