As coaches or trainers, we want to provide our clients and trainees with the best possible support to ideally turn weaknesses into strengths. The foundation is always similar, whether in general life coaching or sports training. At the beginning, the current state of the person in question should be carefully examined. Just like a surgeon doesn’t cut off a leg on suspicion only to later find out the hand is broken (and then has to painstakingly reattach the leg—time is precious, after all ;-)).
To offer your clients or yourself optimal coaching and address the right areas, it is essential to get an overview of what is currently going wrong.
By asking your client the right questions at the start of coaching, you can learn a lot about their current state. As a trainer, you might simply have an athlete demonstrate their movements to identify weak points. This is important so you can develop an optimal coaching strategy and support your client effectively in their wishes and goals. With some luck, your client might even start thinking about the questions and come up with some solutions on their own. To avoid relying on luck and to ensure the evaluation of problems helps not only you but also your client find a strategy, you can use the Wheel of Life early in the coaching process.
This tool is a standard part of many coaches’ repertoires. The Wheel of Life helps you pinpoint exactly where your clients are struggling and allows you to visualize this directly to highlight neglected areas of life.
How is the Wheel of Life used?
Shaped like a pie chart, the tool immediately shows that all areas of life are interconnected. Each slice of the pie represents a specific area of life.
Examples of different life areas include:
- Health
- Family
- Career
- Hobbies
- Friends
To visualize how satisfied the client is with each area, you ask them to assign points, which are arranged on the wheel as fields from the outside inward. The score decreases toward the center, which is the zero point. The outer edge represents the highest satisfaction with 10 points. Once the points are assigned, the wheel is colored in. Each slice is filled from the zero point to the assigned score. This way, the areas that are going well immediately stand out. Likewise, the uncolored areas reveal the deficits.
Based on this, you can discuss with your clients which life areas urgently need more attention and which are currently going well. For example, a typical workaholic’s career slice might be quite large, but hobbies or family might be neglected. The Wheel of Life makes this imbalance immediately clear to your client.
For which coaching situations is the Wheel of Life suitable?
This exercise is, of course, very well suited for life coaching, but its range of applications is broad.
As mentioned at the beginning, trainers can also use the Wheel of Life to help their students. For this, subdivisions like coordination, jumping power, endurance, or movement sequences can be broken down into individual parts to analyze whether problems occur at takeoff, rotation, or landing. This also makes it clear how everything is connected. Generally, the landing won’t improve if errors are already creeping in at the start of the jump.
Where can you get the Wheel of Life?
To save you from having to grab a compass and protractor and to free up your time for more important things, we have prepared a handy pad with multiple Wheel of Life sheets that you can always have on hand. This way, you present yourself professionally and save your valuable preparation time. You can find this practical helper in our shop. Click here!
