The Wheel of Life — Starting 2025 with a focus on what truly matters to you

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At the end of each year, we often find ourselves reflecting on our lives — but how often do we take a structured approach to truly understand where our satisfaction lies and where we might improve?

The Wheel of Life is a method that helps you assess and visualize the most important areas of your life all at once. Sometimes, we become so absorbed in our lives or work that we fail to notice if some areas are suffering as a result.

That’s why it’s beneficial to regularly assess our happiness in the most important areas of our lives. What better time than the end of the year? I usually do this exercise every three months, and the start of 2025 feels like the perfect time to do it again.

The wheel of life is a method that helps you to assess your fulfillment in each of the most important areas of your life.

How does The Wheel of Life work?

To begin, create your Wheel of Life by drawing a large circle on a piece of paper (or use Excel — click here to access my template). Divide the circle into 10 equally sized slices to form a pie chart. Then, assign one important area of your life to each slice. For me, these are:

My health, subdivided into:

• Body
• Mind
• Soul

My personal life, subdivided into:

• Romance
• Family
• Friends

My work, subdivided into:

• Purpose
• Finances
• Growth

And lastly, my overall joy in life.

Of course you can also use different categories. Identify which areas of your life are most important to you, but generally the categories above apply to most people.

Once your Wheel of Life is set up, you can rate your current happiness and fulfillment in each area on a scale from 0–10 (10 being super happy). It should look something like this (I know you can probably do it nicer on paper):

This allows you to identify areas where you’re thriving and areas that could use improvement. In the example above, the personal section (romance, family, and friends) is strong, while the work (purpose, finances, and growth) and health (body, mind, and soul) sections need attention. Overall joy is satisfactory.

Based on your ratings, you can create actionable steps to improve happiness in lower-scoring areas. For example, you might go to the gym three times a week instead of two, find a work project that gives you more purpose, or reduce triggers that negatively affect your mindset.

These are only some hypothetical ideas, but I think you get the gist.

Concluding remarks

The Wheel of Life is an extremely powerful method to assess your life’s fulfillment and identify action steps for the areas where you are not quite as happy. The end of a year is obviously a good time to do it, but I prefer doing it quarterly so that I can counteract any factors of dissatisfaction early.

If you’d like my Google Sheets template, click here, and I’ll send it to you by email. I hope this method resonates with you — let me know your thoughts!

Wishing you a wonderful 2025! Jakob