Photo by VSQZ

In my last post I introduced the Wheel of Life, a quick but insightful exercise to help you discover just how satisfied you are with the various aspects of your life. If you haven’t read it, go ahead and do so now.

Okay, now we’re all on the same page. Today I want to talk about what you can do with your Wheel.

Maybe one or two of you are perfectly content and your wheel actually came out looking like a wheel. For the rest of us, our wheels are certainly NOT symmetrical (and probably resembled something Cro-Magnon Man might have come up with while trying to invent the wheel, but that’s for a different post.)

Now we’ve got to decide just what we want to do about it. Change is difficult to implement, not because there isn’t a desire to change, but because the process often seems so daunting that we never actually get started. We talk about making change. We plan to make change. We even dream of making a change. But in the end, we fail to take any concrete steps that actually can bring about change and so we fail. Often repeatedly. Before we know it, the very idea of change makes us tired and depressed.

Until now, that is. I want you to take your wheel and find the three areas that you ranked yourself the lowest in. I don’t care what they are - just find the three lowest.

Got them? Okay, now take a separate piece of paper and write down three things you can do this week in each area that can move that category from your current level up one point to the next. Is your Health rated at a 3? Then what three things can you do this week to move it to a 4? How about that relationships category? What can you do right now to move it from a 6 to a 7?

By breaking our dissatisfaction down into recognizable categories, we help identify just what it is that is making us dissatisfied. By isolating each category and coming up with three small steps we can take to move us just a bit further down the road toward being satisfied, we can get our hands around the problem and it no longer seems so insurmountable. Just a little bit of change can make a huge difference.

Give it a try. Take one category and implement what you’ve come up with. Give it a week or two. Then see how you feel. Go on - what are you waiting for?