Wheel of life a life balance wheel for eight areas, scored from 1 to 10

What is the wheel of life

The wheel of life is a circle divided into segments, one for each major area of your life, such as health, work, money and relationships. You give each area a score for how satisfied you are with it right now, usually from 1 to 10, and mark that score along the segment's spoke. When you join the marks, you get a shape that shows your current life balance.

The name is easy to remember. If the shape is round, the wheel rolls. If one segment is much shorter, the wheel has a flat spot and the ride gets bumpy, an imbalance the picture shows more clearly than a list of numbers.

You will also see it called a balance wheel, a life balance wheel or simply a life wheel. It is a coaching tool for self-reflection: it does not diagnose anything and does not compare you with a norm group.

Wheel of life categories: the eight areas and what they cover

There is no single official list of wheel of life categories. Most versions use 8 areas, some between 6 and 12. Common choices are health, career, finances, relationships, family and friends, personal growth, leisure, home and spirituality or meaning. These are the eight used here:

If an important part of your life is missing, such as your home or your community, swap it in on a paper version. The categories should together cover your whole life without much overlap.

How to use the wheel of life: the exercise step by step

To use the wheel of life, score each area for how satisfied you are today, look at the shape, then choose one area and one small, concrete step; it takes 10 to 15 minutes. Here you move one slider per area and the wheel is drawn as you go, with your average, balance gap, weakest area and a first step shown underneath; you can also print a blank wheel of life template.

• Find a quiet 15 minutes. Scoring in a hurry tends to produce the answers you think you should give.
• Score each area from 1 to 10 for how satisfied you are right now, not last year and not how things should be. 1 means very dissatisfied, 10 means fully satisfied.
• Go with your first honest number, then ask yourself one check question: what specifically makes this a 6 and not a 5?
• Look at the finished shape and notice which area jumps out.
• Write one sentence per area about what a score one point higher would look like in practice.
• Choose one area to work on and one step you can take within the next 7 days.
• Save or photograph your wheel and put a date on it, so you can compare it with your next one.

The fifth step borrows from scaling questions: a move from 4 to 5 is far easier to picture than a move from 4 to 10.

How to read your wheel of life results

Read your wheel of life result by looking at two things: how big the shape is (your average) and how even it is (the gap between your strongest and weakest area). A wheel with an average of 7 and a gap of 2 tells a very different story from one with the same average of 7 and a gap of 6. The table below describes the four most common shapes.

Write down two numbers each time: your average (sum of the eight scores divided by 8) and your balance gap (highest minus lowest score). Over repeated wheels, a rising average shows broad change and a shrinking gap shows the wheel becoming rounder.

Wheel of life example with real numbers

Here is a worked wheel of life example. Imagine someone who has recently taken on a demanding new role at work and fills in the wheel on a Sunday evening.

The scores add up to 44, so the average is 44 ÷ 8 = 5.5. The strongest area is work at 8 and the weakest is rest and fun at 3, so the balance gap is 8 − 3 = 5. The shape has one clear peak (work) and two low points (rest and fun at 3, family and friends at 4).

The pattern fits the several-peaks shape: the new role is going well, and its hours seem to come out of rest and friendships. The one-point-higher question for rest and fun might produce: one evening a week with no work email and time for a hobby. That step can be checked a week later.

How to choose which area of your life to work on first

The area to work on first is usually the one where importance to you is high and satisfaction is low, which is not always the area with the lowest score. A low score in an area you care little about right now is less urgent than a middling score in an area that matters a great deal.

To see this, give each area a second score from 1 to 10 for how important it is to you at this stage of life, then subtract satisfaction from importance. The larger the positive difference, the higher the priority. Continuing the example:

Rest and fun has the lowest satisfaction score, but family and friends has the largest gap (5), followed by health and energy (4). For this person, the first step would sensibly go to family and friends. A negative number, as with work here, means you are putting more into an area than you currently need from it, which can be a place to free up time.

Whichever area you choose, keep it to one, and make the step small, specific and scheduled: calling one friend on Wednesday evening rather than a general plan to be more social.

Where does the wheel of life come from

The wheel of life is most often attributed to Paul J. Meyer, an American who founded the Success Motivation Institute in 1960 and built a business around goal setting and personal development programmes. Circle diagrams of life areas exist in many forms, so sources usually say attributed rather than invented.

The tool spread through coaching. It appears, for example, in Co-Active Coaching by Laura Whitworth, Henry Kimsey-House and Phil Sandahl (1998), one of the best-known coaching textbooks, and today it is a standard opening exercise in wheel of life coaching sessions and workshops.

The 1 to 10 scoring has a parallel in solution-focused brief therapy, developed by Steve de Shazer and Insoo Kim Berg in Milwaukee in the 1980s. Its scaling questions ask: from 0 to 10, where are you now, and what would one point higher look like? The wheel asks the same of eight areas at once.

How the wheel of life compares with scientific wellbeing models

The wheel of life is a coaching exercise without published norms or validation studies, so its scores cannot be compared across people. Wellbeing researchers use other instruments and models:

Relationships appear in every model, meaning appears in PERMA and in most wheels, and Gallup's career, financial and physical elements map onto the wheel's work, money and health segments. The wheel turns these broad ideas into a personal picture you can act on.

What research says about relationships, money and life satisfaction

Two areas of the wheel have unusually strong research behind them: relationships and money. On relationships, the Harvard Study of Adult Development, which has followed its participants since 1938, found close relationships to be one of the strongest predictors of a long, healthy and happy life. The study's current director Robert Waldinger and associate director Marc Schulz summarised its findings in The Good Life (2023). That is a good reason to look carefully at your family and friends and love and partnership segments.

On money, the findings are more nuanced than the popular headline that happiness stops rising at 75,000 dollars. In 2010, Daniel Kahneman and Angus Deaton reported in PNAS that emotional wellbeing in the United States rose with income up to about 75,000 dollars a year and then levelled off. In 2021, Matthew Killingsworth, also in PNAS, found no such plateau in his data. The two sides then ran a joint study (Killingsworth, Kahneman and Mellers, PNAS, 2023) and concluded that the levelling off appears only among the least happy group, roughly 20 percent of people; for most people, wellbeing kept rising with income.

For your wheel, the practical point is modest: take your finances score seriously, and also the time and energy that earning money takes from the other segments.

Common wheel of life mistakes and how often to repeat it

Most problems with the wheel of life come from how it is filled in. These mistakes come up most often:

• Scoring how things should be. If you give your family a 9 because you feel you ought to, the wheel loses its point.
• Trying to fix everything at once. Eight goals usually means none gets attention.
• Comparing your wheel with someone else's. One person's 6 may be another person's 8 for the same situation.
• Aiming for 10 everywhere. What counts as enough differs by area and changes over life.
• Treating the result as a verdict. The wheel is a snapshot and moves with your mood; a bad week can lower several scores at once.
• Filling it in once and forgetting it. One wheel shows a state; two or more show a direction.

Repeat the wheel every few weeks or months, at natural checkpoints such as the start of a year, the end of a quarter, or after a big change like a new job or a move. Keep the old wheels and put them side by side.

Wheel of life variations for couples, teams and business

The same idea works for any group of areas that compete for time and attention.

For couples, each partner fills in the wheel separately, then you compare. Look at areas where your scores differ by 3 or more, which you experience differently, and areas you both score low, which are shared priorities. A relationship wheel can use its own categories, such as communication, time together, intimacy, money, household and shared plans.

For teams, each member scores the team on areas such as clarity of goals, communication, workload, trust, skills and recognition; the spread of scores often says more than the average. A business wheel does the same for a company, with segments like sales, product, finances, operations, marketing and the owner's own energy. The rules stay the same: honest scores, one area, one concrete step, a repeat later.