The Wheel of Life may be ‘old hat’ for us trainers, but it is a powerful visual training tool with many uses in the world of training. In fact, it may be the best and most flexible training tool in any coach’s toolbox.
We forget that The Wheel of Life is still new to most of our clients. And even when they’ve encountered it before, it will tell them something new when they use it again, because like most training tools, it can only capture how someone is feeling at any given moment.
So besides the common use of the wheel to see the balance of life, how else can we use The Wheel of Life to help our clients? Here are 11 new and improved uses for The Wheel of Life:
- Use The Wheel of Life to help your clients set meaningful goals. Areas with low scores are ideal candidates for your clients to set bigger goals. Advice: This is an especially useful tool for business and career/executive coaches: to guide left-brained clients into ‘softer’ areas that improve their entire lives. Which of course will benefit their careers and business in the long run.
- Use a wheel to go deeper and help your clients understand their lives and problems more deeply. Take one of the segments or categories and ask them to dig deeper by writing down 8 areas that make up that segment for them. Advice: E.g. a ‘Finance’ wheel could include saving for a house or wedding, spending less/budgeting, saving for retirement, paying off credit cards, getting a better paying job, etc.
- Help your customers see how far they’ve come. Use The Wheel of Life monthly or quarterly with your clients, as a check-in to see how they’re doing AND as a way for them to see how they’ve improved and grown. Improved scores demonstrate the concrete value of coaching and helping clients see their learning and progress. Advice: It’s a bit like looking back at an old journal and seeing how far you’ve come!
- De-stress your Clients! What about The Wheel of Stress from The Wheel of Frustration? Eliminate the usual ‘life balance’ categories and help your client ‘think free’ through their problems. Ask them to label the top 8 areas that stress or frustrate them the most. Ask them to rate HOW stressful and frustrating each of their 10 areas is, and review the results with them. Advice: Ask, what area stresses them the most? Are there surprises? How could they lower their scores?
- Help your clients get excited about life! How about The Wheel of Happiness, Fun, or even Excitement? Depending on what your client needs/looks for, ask them to come up with 8 areas or things that are fun or excited or make them happy. Label the wheel segments accordingly and ask your customer for an action or commitment for each segment. What do you notice? How could they bring more of each segment into their lives? Advice: Help them find multiple wins, ie. areas where a stock increases your score in multiple areas?
- For Business Coaches, use the wheel to identify Sales and/or Marketing actions for your clients. Take a blank wheel and add the key areas your customers need to take action on. Ask your clients to propose actions for each of them to complete in the next month. Advice: For example, a marketing conference could include the following; online social networks, SEO, article marketing, traditional networking, newsletter, fairs, advertising, seminars.
- Priority Management. What are your customer’s top priorities? This could be at work, home, or life in general. Ask your customer to label each segment and specifically identify their top 3 priorities. Then ask them to rate their satisfaction out of 10 for each area. Advice: What do you notice? Are their priorities “clear” or do they need to change their focus? What actions could they take to improve their scores?
- Understand what is TRULY important in life. Have your client list or brainstorm their priorities or goals; Asking her to list everything she wants to “Be, Do, and Have” in life is a great way to do this. Now ask them to take each priority or goal and go through the ‘balance’ categories of the Wheel of Life and ask themselves, “Will this improve my satisfaction in this area?” and for each area that is improved, that goal gets one point. Then review which goals get the highest and lowest scores. What do you notice? What have they learned? This helps people see what will really make a difference in their lives rather than what they think will make their lives better. Advice: Suppose your client wants to buy a Ferrari. Will it improve your finances? No. Will it improve your relationships with family and friends? Probably not. Will it improve your career? Unlikely. Will it enhance your fun? Yes. And so on until you get a score of maybe 2 out of 8. Now consider being a great dad. It may not improve your finances or your career (although you never know), but it will help your family relationships, fun, health, personal growth, etc., which is why you might get a score of 6 out of 8.
- Identify skill gaps for promotions/new jobs/careers. Use a blank wheel and ask your client (or you can do it beforehand) to label the top 8 skills they’ll need to get the job or promotion they want. Now ask them to rate, out of 10, where they are right now on each of the skills. Finally, assign an action against each of the skill areas where they need to improve their skills. Advice: You could even ask them to identify an action for the areas they score highly in, “What could you do to really excel at that skill?”
- Help your clients identify what they are looking for in a relationship. This is called The Wheel of Relationships. So, take a blank wheel and ask your client to label the segments with the 8 qualities that an ideal partner would have. This MUST be done by the customer! And then ask them to give a score of how IMPORTANT each quality is out of 10. This will help them identify whether being attractive or romantic is just as important as being trustworthy, having a good sense of humor, or being a good parent. Advice: You can even use the strategy outlined in #8 above, where you take each personal quality they’ve listed and give it a point for each area of the Wheel of Life that it improves. What qualities will really make a difference in their lives?
- General Action Planning. Simply use a blank wheel to help your client think about actions. Write the goal at the top of the page and then ask them to write down the 8 actions or parts of the job that make up their goal. Advice: Have them put a date on each one, and they can use the pieces of the pie to record the % complete for each area until it’s complete!
Of course, you’re not limited to 8 segments, it’s just a useful number, and an easy one to split on the wheel! So feel free to use fewer segments or split segments to get more.
And whatever we’ve used the wheel for, I like to ask this question when it’s complete: “So if this wheel represented your life/relationship/career/marketing strategy, is it a bumpy ride?”
I hope this has given you some new ideas on how you can work with and use ‘The Wheel of Life’ in your coaching practice. Try it, it’s very good!
