Self Improvement Digest

The Wheel of Life is one of the fundamental coaching tools the new coach discovers when they start their coach training. There's no doubt it's a useful tool for coaching one's clients and it has deservedly stood the test of time for life, business and executive coaches. However, you may not yet have considered how adaptable a tool the Wheel of Life is.

As you know, the Wheel of Life allows your clients to simply, quickly and intuitively assess their lives in eight areas, usually career, health & fitness, family & friends, finances, home environment, spirituality, personal development and leisure & hobbies. Many new and experienced coaches alike find the Wheel of Life a fabulously easy way to get a coaching series off to a strong start.

The great thing, though, is that it's easily adaptable. Here are five ideas to get you started...

Health and Fitness Wheel

Your client wants to lose weight and / or get fitter. Help them brainstorm the options and log their top six or eight possibilities on a Wheel which they rate to measure their interest or commitment levels

Home Environment

Perhaps your client wants to carry out a complete de-clutter or redecoration of their home. They divide up the Wheel according to the number of rooms in the house and assess them from most important (or easiest to complete) to least important (or longest to complete)

Business: Entrepreneurial Characteristics

Your client is a new business owner, or perhaps considering leaving paid employment to work for themselves. Help them come up with what they consider the most important characteristics for a business owner. They then choose the eight they consider most vital and log them on a Wheel, assessing them according to their current skill level

Finances: Income Wheel

If a client has an income goal ie to earn $100K (or ?100K) in the next year, ask them to draw a blank wheel which represents that total amount. Their task is then to divide it into segments depending on where they see that income coming from. If they want to make $25K in property investment they section off a quarter; if they intend to make $10K from their writing they section off a narrower segment - and so on. This visual representation can help clients see their income goal as much more achievable than they believed

Team Coaching

In an organisational or executive coaching setting, you could be coaching a manager or their team in a team-building context. Get the individual or group to discuss the characteristics of a strong team and assign each one to a segment of a Wheel; they then assess how effective their team is in each area.

By the way, if you are working with a group of people make sure each member first has time to assess each area individually before discussing their scores in the group so as not to be swayed by the more vocal -- or senior -- people!

These are just a few ideas to show you how you can adapt that mainstay of the new coach's toolkit, the Wheel of Life, to any number of different situations. What a client may have difficulty putting into words can often be illustrated graphically and quickly using that simple Wheel of Life as a starting point.