Balance in achieving wellbeing

A healthy body - often achieved through proper nutrition, exercise, sleep and preventive healthcare measures. Emotional wellbeing - with a focus on managing emotions, developing resilience and positive relationships. Other dimensions include finances, work, personal growth, and spirituality.

Most importantly is to focus on what your best self looks like – what is important to you, what do you know about it, and how do you become it? One long established approach is to consider the wheel of life. How you roll along in your life.

Dimensions or domains of life are listed on the outside of the wheel – Family, Social, Community, Profession, Personal, Recreation, Spiritual and Financial. Everyone’s life is different and so it okay to add a domain or remove on from those listed.

Using the wheel note the scale one to ten and take a minute and score each domain and numerically how you are doing – one the lowest and ten the highest. Take a different colored pen and score how you feel about the importance each of the domains to you – one the lowest and ten the highest. Consider the scale in each of the domains – let's say you score family as important – a nine and you score how well you are doing in that domain as a five. The gap is five points and may show an area affecting your wellbeing and an area you would like to improve.

Now that you have scored the wheel take a moment and think about how it rolls for you with good balance? The way you would prioritize it.

Whatever your decision, now you have found areas you can take steps to improve.

As you review your wheel consider these questions. When you look at your wheel what do you see – what is your insight? How would you like to change the shape of it? What surprises you? If you were to change a score in a domain, what would that feel like? Where would you like to start? Could action in one score or domain impact another area?