Wheel of Life: A Free Template for Seeing Where Your Life Is Out of Balance
Rate eight areas of your life from 1 to 10 and the wheel draws itself. Tells you which area to work on and whether your wheel is low or simply lopsided. Free, printable, no signup.
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Rate each area from 1 to 10 on how satisfied you are with it right now — not how well you think you should be doing.
Rate each of the eight areas below from 1 to 10 and the wheel redraws itself. The shape it makes is the point: a life that is a solid 6 everywhere is a genuinely different situation from one averaging 6 with a 2 in it, and a list of numbers hides that difference while a wheel does not.
The eight areas
The standard set, and what each one is actually asking:
| Area | The question behind it |
|---|---|
| Career | Does the work itself feel worth doing? |
| Money | Is your financial situation a source of stability or of background dread? |
| Health | Sleep, movement, energy — how does your body feel to live in? |
| Family & Friends | Are the relationships that matter getting real attention? |
| Romance | Satisfaction with your relationship, or with being single, as it currently is. |
| Personal Growth | Are you still learning anything, or has it been a while? |
| Fun & Recreation | Is there anything in your week that exists purely because you enjoy it? |
| Home & Environment | Does the space you spend your time in help or drain you? |
These labels are not sacred. The wheel is routinely adapted — coaches substitute Spirituality, Community, Study, or Parenting depending on the person (Byrne, 2005). If an area genuinely does not apply to you, a low score there means nothing and you should mentally drop it.
How to fill it in honestly
Rate satisfaction, not performance. The question is how you feel about the area as it is, not whether you are meeting some standard. Someone earning very little can score Money at 8 if it is stable and sufficient for their life.
Answer fast. The first number you think of is usually the honest one. The number you reach after a paragraph of internal justification is usually the one you would like to be true.
Do it at an ordinary moment. Filling this in during a terrible week gives you a picture of the week, not of your life.
Then stress-test the high scores. For anything you rated 8 or above, ask what would need to happen for it to fall to a 4. Some high scores are robust; others are one deadline or one argument away from not being high at all. That question often reveals more than the low scores do.
Reading the shape, not the average
Most versions of this exercise stop at drawing the wheel. The reading underneath this one deliberately reports the spread — the gap between your highest and lowest area — alongside the average, because the two shapes mean different things.
A spiky wheel (a gap of five points or more) usually means the rest of your life is working and one area is not. This is the good case, in a sense: concentrated effort in a single place will visibly change the picture, and you do not need to overhaul anything else.
A flat, low wheel — everything clustered around 3 or 4 — more often points to something sitting underneath all eight categories at once. Sleep, untreated health problems, money stress, caring responsibilities, and overwork all depress every score simultaneously. The common mistake here is reading it as eight separate problems and writing eight separate goals, when there is really one.
A balanced, decent wheel means nothing is in crisis, which is the situation where deliberately choosing something to raise beats reacting to whatever is loudest.
The part that actually changes anything
The wheel diagnoses. It does not treat, and it has a well-known failure mode: people finish it, feel briefly clear-eyed, write down five resolutions, and change nothing, because five resolutions compete for the same finite evenings.
So take one area. The lowest one that you actually care about.
Then convert it into a behaviour rather than an intention. "Improve my health" is not actionable; "a twenty-minute walk after lunch on weekdays" is. The translation from a life area to a repeatable weekly action is the entire distance between a filled-in wheel and a changed one, and it is the step most people skip. Our guide to getting your life together works through that translation in more detail, and the habit formation calculator will tell you roughly how long the new behaviour needs before it runs on its own.
Then leave it alone for three months. Areas of life move on a scale of seasons. Re-drawing the wheel every fortnight measures your mood far more sensitively than it measures your life.
What this tool is not
It is a structured way of noticing, not an assessment with psychometric properties. It has no validated scoring, no norms to compare yourself against, and the categories are a convention rather than a theory of wellbeing. Its value is entirely in making you look at eight things at once instead of the one that happens to be shouting.
If an area of the wheel reflects something clinical — persistent low mood, a health problem you have been avoiding — the wheel has done its job by surfacing it, and the next step belongs with a professional rather than a habit tracker.
The Wheel of Life is a widely used coaching exercise introduced by Paul J. Meyer in the 1960s. This tool is an independent implementation and is not affiliated with or endorsed by any coaching organisation.
References
- Byrne, U. (2005). Wheel of Life: Effective steps for stress management. Business Information Review, 22(2), 123–130. https://doi.org/10.1177/0266382105054770
- Lally, P., van Jaarsveld, C. H. M., Potts, H. W. W., & Wardle, J. (2010). How are habits formed: Modelling habit formation in the real world. European Journal of Social Psychology, 40(6), 998–1009. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.674
- Gollwitzer, P. M. (1999). Implementation intentions: Strong effects of simple plans. American Psychologist, 54(7), 493–503. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.54.7.493
Frequently asked questions
- What is the Wheel of Life?
- The Wheel of Life is a self-assessment tool that shows your satisfaction across the major areas of your life on a single diagram. You divide a circle into segments — usually eight — rate each from 1 to 10, and join the scores. The resulting shape makes imbalance visible in a way a list does not. The modern version is credited to Paul J. Meyer, who founded the Success Motivation Institute in 1960 and introduced the wheel during that decade; it has since become one of the first tools most coaches learn.
- What are the eight areas of the Wheel of Life?
- The most common set is Career, Money, Health, Family and Friends, Romance, Personal Growth, Fun and Recreation, and Home and Environment. There is nothing fixed about these — the wheel is routinely adapted, and coaches swap in categories that fit the person, such as Spirituality, Community, or Study. What matters more than the exact labels is that the categories cover things you actually care about, since an area you are indifferent to will score low without meaning anything.
- How do you score the Wheel of Life?
- Rate each area from 1 to 10 on how satisfied you are with it as it is right now, not on how well you think you ought to be doing or how it compares to other people. Answer quickly. The first number that comes to mind is usually more honest than the one you arrive at after justifying yourself. A useful check afterwards is to ask, for any area you scored 8 or above, what would have to happen for it to drop — that tells you which high scores are stable and which are fragile.
- What does a spiky wheel mean versus a flat one?
- They call for opposite responses, which is why this tool reports the spread between your highest and lowest area rather than only the average. A spiky wheel — a large gap between best and worst — usually means one specific area needs attention while the rest are fine, so concentrated effort in one place works. A flat, uniformly low wheel more often points at something underneath the categories, such as sleep, health, money stress, or overwork, which is depressing every score at once. Treating a flat low wheel as eight separate problems is the common mistake.
- What should I do after filling in the Wheel of Life?
- Pick one area, not four. The wheel is good at revealing imbalance and bad at telling you to prioritise, and the usual failure is leaving with six resolutions that compete for the same evenings. Take your lowest meaningful area, decide what a satisfying version of it would look like in three months, and turn that into one repeatable weekly behaviour. Then re-draw the wheel in three months rather than three weeks, since areas of life move slowly.
- Is this Wheel of Life template free to print?
- Yes, and there is no signup. The wheel renders in your browser and there is a print button that produces a clean copy with your scores on it. Nothing you enter is sent anywhere or stored — closing the tab clears it. If you would rather work on paper, print it before filling it in and the blank wheel comes out with all eight axes ready to mark.