The Wheel of Life

Just imagine that you are driving on a freeway at a speed of 60 miles/hr and suddenly one of your car tires got punctured. Now, there is one possibility that you reduced the speed and drove it to the open space by the side of the road. There is another possibility that you lost control and met an accident. In the first instance, it is a delay to reach your destination. In the second instance, the outcome is more fatal and it can even take our life. I have illustrated the above example to draw a relation with our life. Our life is nothing but a car, which is running on wheels, the wheels of life.

Have you ever thought that we have so many different characteristics with in us. Different people have different expectations from us. Your boss in your office wants you to be very sincere. He will be extremely happy if you spend extra 2/3 hours in office or take up some of his responsibilities. Your spouse wants you to be very caring and loving. He\she wants that you spend extra time with him\her. He\she expects that you spend ample time to bring up the kids. When you are busy in satisfying the demands of your boss and spouse, your friends become disheartened by the fact that you are not coming to meet them often and not giving them enough time. So, you can see that you are playing different roles in different arena in your life. It is very difficult to satisfy everyone associated with you. And exactly here comes the concept of wheel of life.

 

As we have pointed out that there are different dimensions of life. If we fail to take care an important dimension, our life can be dis-balanced as it happens in case of a wheel with uneven spoke. To decide whether our wheel of life is not distorted, we have a very simple and powerful tool. You can easily practice it at home.

The Wheel of Life - A simple tool

Draw a wheel as given below. In general, there are five concentric circles. The smallest circle starts with 1 and biggest one ends with 5. Also, there are number of spokes of the wheel. Each spoke signifies an important dimension or role in your life. The number 0 (centre) to 5 signifies how well you have played a particular role. Now let’s start using the tool, the wheel of life.

1.     Think thoroughly and find out different important dimensions in your life. You can take help of someone to find out these roles. Each of these roles will represent a spoke in the wheel of life. Some generic roles are displayed in the figure here. If required, you can take a print out of the figure and customize according to your need.

2.    Now think through and determine how successful you are in playing these roles. Rate in the figure of 0 to 5. 0 signifies that you are totally failed to play the role and 5 signifies that you have played that role to the full extent possible.

3.   Now draw each role as one spoke of the wheel of life. The length of each spoke depends on your rating for that particular role.

4.   Join the tip of each spoke.

 

Now it represents your wheel of life. Is it uneven or is it a smooth circle? If all the spokes are of same length, your wheel of life can move on smoothly. If it’s not, you need to find out, where you have given less rating. For example, if you have given less rating in the role of Parents, you should find out what you should do to fill up this gap. To move it back to balance, you need to create a plan of action and task list. Once you work on a certain point, come back after one month or so to check the wheel of life again.

 

We need to keep in mind two different aspects here. 1) The rating is given by you and you should always judge from an angle of what should have ideally be done in your situation and what you are doing now i.e. the rating will signify the achievement. The rating should always be an honest rating. Otherwise, you will be fooling yourself. 2) It is not necessary to have a rating of 5 but the rating should be consistent across all the dimensions. Otherwise, it will imply that you are ignoring that particular role of your life to some extent in compensation of putting more focus on the others.

 

I suggest that you use the wheel of life tool frequently. It is an eye opener for us and helps us to take necessary action before it’s too late.