The life of each of us consists of several important areas in which we balance from day to day. It often happens that we focus on only one or two, while forgetting to care about improving the rest. American coach and author of motivational bestsellers Paul Meyer figured out how to harmonize your life. To do this, he created a special technique.
What is it and what is it for?
The technique is a practical exercise, during which you need to fill in the circle, dividing it into areas of life and assigning each area a score, i.e. the degree of satisfaction with its condition. You need to evaluate on a ten-point scale, where 1 is nowhere worse, and 10 is complete satisfaction.
Each sector of the circle represents one of the spheres of life. Looking at your finished image, you can understand which areas need improvement, and in which you are investing enough effort or giving all your strength.
The main idea of the circle of life is the search for balance. You may have noticed that the unbridled pursuit of career success often negatively affects family relationships and can undermine health. Emphasis on some areas will inevitably give rise to a lack of success in others.
There comes a time when everyone asks questions:
How harmonious is my life? What am I spending my life on? How efficient am I in general? Isn't it time to change something in your life? And you can figure it out now.
Areas of the wheel of life.
Traditionally, the circle is divided into 8 spheres:
Health. This is how attentive we are to the state of our physical body. Do we eat right, do we take enough time to sleep, do we often walk in the fresh air, do we find time for sports, etc.
Money. Are you satisfied with the size of your income, do you have enough money for the necessary needs and everything that brings joy?
Job. Here you need to answer the question of whether you like the activity with which you earn money, whether you care about your own self-realization, career, business.
Family. This area may include relationships with a loved one, with children, parents. You can analyze how often you spend time together, how much you trust each other and whether you can be frank with loved ones.
Society. This includes relationships with friends, colleagues and others. We evaluate how sociable we are, how we see ourselves in social circles, what place we occupy in them, how many like-minded people we have and those on whom we can rely.
Personal growth. This is all that makes us better: reading books, watching high-quality films, learning foreign languages, pumping useful skills, getting rid of bad habits and developing useful ones, working with fears, self-esteem, etc.
Rest. You need to rest just as well as work. Traveling, hobbies, entertainment, new experiences - this is all that gives us strength, energy and joy.
Spiritual development. Everyone determines for himself what this sphere means to him.Maybe this is a search for something greater than the person himself: God, the meaning of life, purpose, truth, the study of religion, philosophy, etc.
These are the main areas that are most often used in drawing up the circle of life. But it is not at all necessary to divide your diagram/circle into 8 segments. There may be 6, 10 and 16. Below I will list other directions, among which you can find your own:
Brightness of life.
Friendship.
Love.
Relatives.
Sport.
Appearance.
Parenting.
House.
Trips.
Capital, investment.
Free time.
Creation.
Inner harmony.
Studies.
Stability, security.
Charity.
Self-esteem.
How to work with the wheel of life balance?
Goals of the exercise:
Find out what your life is about.
Understand which areas are prioritized and which need attention.
Identify steps that can influence the situation to change for the better.
*For work, we need colored pencils or felt-tip pens and a calm environment))
How to fill in a circle?
So that the completed sheet of paper does not become a mere formality, but is really a motivational tool for improving and planning life, it is important to correctly divide the circle into sectors. To understand what areas your circle of balance should consist of, think about what a happy life is for you.
Without what essential components your happy life is impossible?
What areas should be present in an ideal life in order to feel completely satisfied?
After reflecting on these questions and honestly answering them for yourself, you will understand how many sectors you need to divide the wheel of life and how exactly to call them. You should not use ready-made templates with areas invented by someone else, because there are no templates for happiness. Create your personal balance chart.
For example, instead of the standard “Work”, you can name the sector with another word that suits you:
freelance;
my career;
dream business; etc.
The very semantics of the name of the sector will warm the soul, be associated with something personal and give rise in the imagination to what you need to strive for.
The next step is to evaluate and assign each sector a particular score on a scale from 1 to 10. To do this, you first need to find out for each category what the maximum pumping of this area means to you.
Let's take the family sector as an example. What does a 10-point happy family mean to you? Is it an official marriage, cohabitation, or maybe a guest marriage? Does the family have children and how many?
Having created a clear picture of family happiness in your head, you will understand how the 10 points in the “Family” area should look like for you.
The next step is to assess the current situation. How does it match your happy picture? Based on this, put a score within the assessed segment on the circle of life balance.
And so on, until the circle is completely filled. After that, you need to connect all segments with neighboring ones to get an additional inner wheel.
Improvement Plan
So we come to the next important part of the exercise. We found out which areas are priority for us and how far we have progressed in each of them on the way to full satisfaction.
What to do with all this now?
Before we have two tasks:
Assess how smooth our inner wheel turned out. Does it look like a harmonious circle or does it have deep dips and big bumps?
To analyze exactly how spheres can be brought to balance: how to pull up scarce areas and slow down where we are too stubborn.
The main secret of personal growth is development in all areas of life that a person considers a priority for achieving happiness.
IMPORTANT! It is not necessary to “twist” all spheres to the maximum, rather it is worth balancing according to your personal priorities.
The essence of the improvement plan is to write down 2-3 goals for each area.
For example, to improve the health sector, you can promise yourself to do the following:
Go to the gym 2 times a week.
Exclude fast food.
Make vision correction.
To improve family relationships:
Visit your parents more often.
Make a pleasant surprise for your spouse.
Read books to children before bed.
And so on. All goals must be written in the relevant sectors.
What to do next?
So, the spheres are defined and the goals are set. Now it remains to start implementing them and watch how the points in the wheel of life balance begin to grow.
It is not at all necessary to grasp all spheres at once. Pick the one with the lowest score in the circle and work hard to get it in order. Results in some areas can be felt already a month later, others will require a year or even more. Don't be afraid to make long term plans. Such, for example, are most often in the sector of career, personal growth, finance, training.
Save your chart sheet and try again 3-6 months later. What changed? Which areas have become more satisfying for you, and which, on the contrary, less?
Pitfalls of the technique
The wheel of life balance is an exercise that helps you see where the "subtle" is and understand where you should direct a little more energy. But the technique may turn out to be ineffective if, when working with the wheel, you fall into its traps and overestimate expectations, both from yourself and from the results in general.
Try to make the exercise based on logic, and not on emotional jumps.
Don't compare a balance wheel to a physical car wheel. And you don't have to strive for perfection. Better strive for harmonization and development.
Sector Equation
Another trap associated with the name of the technique. When imagining a wheel, we recreate in memory its spokes and assume that all sectors should be the same width as the distance between the spokes.The illusion is created that all sectors are equally important for life balance and happiness. BUT it's not! The size of the sector itself, as well as its fullness, is determined solely by you!
Expectations
This is when points are set not in accordance with the real picture, but based on expectations. In this way, the spheres are underestimated because you consider yourself 10 points away from the ideal image.
Avoid high expectations and perfectionism. Your life is already good. Often we get so used to the good that we do not notice it and focus on what we do not have.
After studying the methodology, it is time to move on to its implementation. Further you will find formed circles in which it is possible to outline the required number of sectors and complete tasks. With the first round, you can start working now, and you should return to the second round in six months and repeat the exercise again)
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