created: 6 May 2019; status: first thoughts on paper; reviewers: none
I’ve recently been working with a coach after I came to the conclusion that I needed a neutral 3rd party to help me take an outside view of my goals, capabilities, and plans for my career and life. She’s an acquaintance certified in a methodology known as Co-Active coaching and has brought a number of exercises from that model that have been interesting to work through and think about.
This month I’m working on the Wheel of Life: a tool to assess and correct the balance between 8 major life areas.
The exercise is to rate your satisfaction in these 8 areas on a 1-10 scale:
- Career
- Family & Friends
- Significant Other / Romance
- Fun & Recreation
- Health
- Money
- Personal Growth
- Physical Environment
The goal of the exercise is two-fold: to assess how “bumpy” my wheel is, indicating imbalance in my life; and to identify what changes I can make to smooth out the areas that are lagging behind. I found it generally interesting and useful, but one step in particular stood out to me:
When I stopped to think about what each possible score would mean — e.g. what’s a 3 vs a 5 vs a 7 on career satisfaction? — my thought processes about what I think is valuable in life and the limits of what I think is possible were revealed.
I still have some work to do on this exercise, but I’ve found that my areas of improvement generally fall into two categories: gratitude and persistence. All of my strongest areas can be meaningfully improved by feeling more gratitude towards what I have in my life, and all of my weakest areas can be improved by working more persistently on the problems that I’m already well aware of.
