Are you feeling stuck? I have an exercise for you that is fairly common and used by many Life Coaches (you may have even seen it before) – the Balanced Life Wheel Chart. First make you Life Chart by drawing a circle and dividing this into eight sections. It could be more or less depending on what you want to look at in your life. Each section (or piece of pie) should be identified with one of these aspects: Career, Physical Environment, Fun & recreation, Personal Growth, Romance, Friends & family, Health , and lastly Money. Now draw two circles within the original circle, so that your chart now looks somewhat like a dartboard. Label the inner circle as Unsatisfied, label the next circle as Whatever, (meaning you are not unsatisfied, but it certainly could be better) and the last, original circle is labeled Satisfied. You can make more circles on your Life Wheel it just depends on how much detail you want to assign to it. (you can see an example of this wheel on my website on the Fun Free Stuff page).

Now start coloring in the pieces of pie. If you are unsatisfied with the romance in your life, color in only to the first circle. If you feel OK with your Health color that section up to the middle circle… and naturally if you feel good or satisfied with any aspect color the entire piece of pie.

Now what you have is a visual aspect of your Balanced (or Unbalanced) life. Focus on the colored section; if that were a wheel on your car, how smooth do you think your ride would be? This simple exercise is an excellent example of the balance in your life. If there are one or two segments that are only colored in to first line, (and this was a wheel to your car) you can understand how easily your car would get stuck! And if you don’t get stuck, at least you are up for one bumpy ride! What if you don’t have significant dips, but every segment is colored in to the "Whatever" circle. Well, again if this were the wheels of your car, you might not get stuck but (just like any smaller wheel) you will have to work a great deal harder to get to the same place.

Our goal in life should be to color in the whole piece of pie. Yes, that is not an easy task to do, but it certainly is a task worth trying to do. There will be days when you will get a flat tire – something goes wrong with your relationship, or you get hit with a huge tax bill, and this will knock you out of balance, but then you focus on that part of your life for a time till you can get it back up to speed.

“I feel like I’m constantly fluctuating in my wheel”, you say, “I start feeling lonely so I go out and party. Then my friend piece of pie is colored in better, but my money pie starts to shrink, or I’m so hung over my work suffers”. This is basically going through life rotating the tires. You’re not focusing on getting better, you’re focusing on keeping the status quo and making slight adjustments to get by. Fix the problem and stop robbing Peter to pay Paul. By the way, don’t think you are alone in doing this – most people do this. We tend to think it’s easier to live life this way, but if you think about it is it? How would you feel if you physically had to rotate your tires every other day? You’d get pretty exhausted really quick!

Be balanced.

Love and Bright blessings ~ Richard