Alexandra Niel walks through the Wheel of Life exercise to rebuild after divorce. Score eight areas of your life from 1 to 10, pick 2 or 3 to improve, then create one concrete action per area. Reassess quarterly to rebalance and reclaim joy.
Do you ever feel like you're kind of just going through the motions? Like the fog of your divorce hasn't quite cleared and you're operating on autopilot, doing the same things you've always done because you have to keep things moving forward, but you haven't had a chance to really sit back and think about what you want your future life to look like. One of the things that I found super helpful after my divorce was I after diving into the world of personal development, I discovered this thing called the Wheel of Life. And what the Wheel of Life consists of, it's really a— literally a wheel. It has 8 different spokes, and those represent the different areas of your life. And I'm going to read them because I want to make sure that I get them all: partner and love, career, finance, health, leisure, friends and family, home, and personal growth. What I discovered was that there were some areas in my life that I paid absolutely no attention to, like personal growth. Didn't even know that was a thing. Fun and leisure wasn't really a big part of my life because I was so focused on my commute, work, working on the business with my husband, doing the chores. There wasn't a whole lot of room for having oodles of fun. The good thing about a Wheel of Life is that you can tailor it to whatever are the important places and the important things you want in your life, right? So maybe you're not partnered right now with anyone, so partner love category probably doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but self-love maybe makes more sense because I know that's one of the things we have to rebuild after coming out of a divorce. You might want to add things like community or service or other things like that. So you can tailor it and make it really anything you want to that is going to reflect what you want your life to look like moving forward, bringing in the things that are most, most important to you. And the great thing about it is you can use it to rebalance where your attention goes and the things that you invite into your life. So you can look at your results and say, okay, clearly I'm not performing here— not performing— I'm— I don't have the result that I would like to have here, and I'm over-indexed over here. So it gives you a chance to bring back some balance and to bring back some harmony. So how do you use the Wheel of Life? Well, you're going to rate yourself on each of these categories on a score of 1 to 10, 1 being completely dissatisfied and 10 being fully satisfied. Once you have that, you're going to start to get a feel for where your life is at the moment. Does anything surprise you? Do you like how it feels when you look at where you're allocating your time on the wheel? If not, it's a perfect moment to kind of rethink how you're doing your life, right? And there are questions that you can ask yourself that are going to help you to do that. How do you spend time in the areas that are concerning for you today? And how would you like to spend your time there? You can also ask, how can I make space in my life to make these changes? What help or support might I need to be able to make this happen? And what changes should I make first? Now, my recommendation would be to really only focus on 2 or 3 changes at a time. Anything more than that is going to feel super overwhelming. So focus on the 1, 2, or 3 areas where you think you can make the most impact most quickly or in the areas that are your biggest resistance or your biggest pain points. Once you know that and you've asked yourself these questions, think about what is one thing that I can do in each of these categories that is going to help me to move forward, right? And you can do one per category, or you can say, okay, I've got these 3 categories, what are 3 things I can do in each? What is one thing I can do in each, right? It really depends on how you want to tackle it. You might have to find what the best way is for you, but the idea is, how do I get from— if you scored yourself a 3 on finances, for example, and 5 feels like a good number for you to be at, what do I need to do so that I can make that jump? From 3 to 5? Are there skills that you need to develop? Is there— are there people you need to talk to? Is there some course that you can take that's going to help you to manage things more effectively so you don't feel so overwhelmed? That's really as simple as it is. That's how you use the Wheel of Life. You use it to rebalance. You use it to bring more harmony in your life. You use it to understand where are the places that if I made a shift are going to really impact all of the other areas of my life in a positive way. And the last thing not to forget is this: this is an exercise that you can do over and over and over again. I go through it more or less every quarter because I like to see where I've made changes, how that's— those changes have impacted the other areas of my life and to see in the areas where I said I wanted to go from a 4 to a 6, did I make that jump? Did I take actions that got me closer to that 6? So I may not, may not feel like I'm at a 6, but maybe I feel like I'm at a 5. So I've already moved things forward a little bit and I know there's a bit more work to do. So it's a great recalibration tool. It's a great way to keep yourself on track. And committed to the things that you wanted to do in order to improve your overall feeling about your life. I'm going to leave you to it. Have a great time and let me know how you net out because I would love to hear from you.
