Photo by Neopixx

How satisfied are you with your life? Are you doing the things you want to do? Living the way you want to live? Are you happy with the way it is all turning out? Think about it for a minute. No, I mean really think about it. Go on, I’ll wait.

Done yet?

If you’re anything like me, you probably didn’t answer yes to all those questions. Heck, if you’re anything like me, you probably answered no to all of them. Very few of us live the lives we dreamed of living. We stumble through our days, trying to make ends meet, and feeling pressured every second along the way.

But if that’s the case, I have a question for you. In the words of Sean Connery from The Untouchables…What are you prepared to do?

You can continue along, doing tomorrow what you did today, wondering why it never changes, or you can get up off your butt and do something about it. In my world, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting change is called stupidity. Which is why I know my readers would all chose the second option, right?

Sure you would. You just aren’t certain where to begin or how to get started, right? Well I’ve got good news for you. That’s what this post is all about. Starting.

I want you to grab a piece of blank paper and draw a big circle on it. Yes, I’m talking to you – go get that paper. Yes, I mean right now.

Ready? Okay. Now divide that circle up into six to eight equal pie pieces. Label each one with an aspect of your life that are important to you. Things like Health, Finances, Career, Family, Friends, Personal Growth, Rest and Relaxation, stuff like that. Don’t just pick my categories. Choose the categories that make sense to you in your life.

Now I want you to rate each category on a scale of one to ten, with one being the lowest and ten being the highest. Draw a line across each individual slice at the point where you rated it. Think of the very tip of the slice as being a zero and the outer edge of the circle as being a ten. When you are finished, each pie slice should have a line drawn across it somewhere showing how well you think you are doing in that aspect of your life.

We can call the circle by a hundred different fancy names, but the one I like is the wheel of life.

(I would have said Circle of Life, but I’m still fighting Disney over that trademark after they stole it from me for that lion movie a few years back. That’s a joke, Disney, okay?)

If you were perfectly satisfied with how your life was going, you’d still have a perfect circle in your hands. But if you are not perfectly satisfied, you’re probably left with the same funky shape I’m left with, each pie slice being a different length than the others. If it were truly a wheel, I’d be left with a very bumpy ride.

But it does something very important for me. It tells me just where I’m content and where I’m not. It lets me know, in a visually clear way, just what I like and don’t like about my life. It helps me identify the areas in which I need to make a change.

Tomorrow we’ll look at part two of this exercise – how to begin implementing change in each of the areas you identified.