Easy Priority Setting with the Wheel of Life

Coral Owen: Hi there, thanks for listening to the Practicing Connection Podcast. I’m Coral. My co-host Jessica is here today as well. Today we’ll be talking about setting priorities with ease using the Wheel of Life, and Jessica will be sharing a practice with us. Hi Jess, how are you?

Jessica Beckendorf: I’m doing pretty great today. This time of year, things slow down in the meeting department, so I’m able to spend a little time cleaning my office. Actually, I’ve been inspired this week weirdly by the simple act of cleaning my office. I use copious amounts of Post-it notes for my note taking. As I go through all these tiny Post-it notes and I recycle some old papers that I don’t need anymore and actually start to see my desk and floor again, it’s really been having an effect on me. I want more, and I’m not even the person that needs to have a neat workspace in order to like feel productive or get things done.

It’s also been fun to be inspired by myself in a lot of ways, which sounds really weird to say it that way. I find notes with ideas on them that I wasn’t able to pursue yet, but then I’m reinvigorated by those ideas. I’m like, “Oh yes, that’s right. I remember I thought of that one day, and maybe I can like put that back into the hopper.” Along with that has been the realization that while I have a lot of really good ideas and intentions, there really is limited time to tackle them. I’ve had to remind myself that it’s not a failure that I didn’t get to do all of the things that I intended to or that I had ideas for this year. It was really just a matter of priority. When I think back, I feel like I did tackle the right priorities most of the time this year. I feel pretty good about that too.

Coral: That is awesome. I have a friend. She also lives that sticky notes life. She will from time to time do that deep cleaning, and she has just– it’s an actual basket. She calls it the percolator. She drops the sticky notes in there. She’s like, “This is a great idea, but for a later time.” She just sticks them in there. I really like the idea of being kind with yourself and realizing that we do have limited time in the day, in the week, in our lives to do all of the things that hit our brain and they might feel magical and they probably are, but that there needs to be prioritization and intentionality so that we can still also be ourselves. That’s great. Thanks for sharing that, Jessica. I love that percolator idea and I might copy that.

It’s funny that you mentioned– I don’t know, I think a lot of times people will share things, when you ask them, “Oh, what’s inspired you?” People tend to think about what they’re reading or whatnot. In a similar vein, I oddly have found inspiration in my kitchen. This was a little peek into my life outside the podcast realm, but I’ve gotten into fermenting and pickling in this past year. It’s just something that has piqued my interest, but it’s also been really intimidating for me for some time because, I don’t know, it’s science-y and, I don’t know, has always seemed a little less straightforward than a recipe and you measure and bake and it just turns out if it turns out.

For whatever reason, a couple of weeks ago, I just decided to go for it with some sauerkraut, and it turned out great. Just my inspiration or takeaway here is that sometimes I just need to trust the process, not overthink it and just let things do their thing. Yes, whatever the ‘it’ is, it can turn out okay if you just let things do what they do.

Jessica: That sounds like great advice for so many things. Also I just love that you can find inspiration in sauerkraut because as a person who really hates pickled anything and fermented things like sauerkraut, I guess it warms my heart. Plus sauerkraut actually has a special place in my family’s heart, even though I hate it. My family comes from an area where there’s a big sauerkraut factory and they all have worked there at one point or another. It’s interesting that I hate it so much, great advice for trust the sauerkraut process.

Coral: There you go. We should make a bumper sticker. We would also love to hearing what’s inspiring our listeners. Please share what’s inspiring you. You can click the message, send us a text at the top of the description of this episode. When you click the link, your text messaging app will open and you’ll see a seven digit number and the words “Do not remove,” don’t remove them. You can type your message after that and click send. Don’t remove that number. We just won’t see your message. Also to protect your privacy, we won’t see your phone number and we can’t text you back, unfortunately, but we’ll share your feedback on a future episode.

Also if you’re listening on a computer, you can just shoot us an email as well, [email protected]. Let us know what is inspiring you right now. All right. Jessica, let’s learn more about the Wheel of Life and how it can help us set priorities. Can you tell us a little bit more about the practice you’ll be sharing it and also why you chose it?

Jessica: Absolutely. I am super excited about this because the Wheel of Life is one of my favorite practices. It’s used a lot in coaching, but I first came to it through a planner. The planner had a monthly review that included, among other things, a Wheel of Life and instructions on how to use the Wheel of Life. We’ll go into the details of how to use the tool in a moment, but it’s basically a pie chart that’s broken out into six or eight or more domains of life, like financial, social, intellectual. You assess how well each of those domains are going for you. Really, just how you feel about how they’re going for you, and you assign a value to it. Usually it’s from 1 to 10 with 1 being you’re not feeling fulfilled in that domain of life and 10 being like you’re super fulfilled in that domain of life.

Typically you’ll color in the spaces or you’ll draw from point to point on the pie chart, and then the diagram that results from that helps you very quickly see the domains of life that might need your attention. I immediately took to this practice partly because it was super easy because they provided the framework, and then on top of that, it was really powerful because in this planner they chose domains of life that would work for– they worked for me anyway. I don’t know if they would work for most people. I guess I’m assuming that they would work for most people.

It was super easy and it was really powerful. Every single month I was able to quickly assess which areas of my life were feeling successful and which areas were not. Then I could set some intentions around that. Just the tracking itself was really helpful for noticing the little impromptu moments that were actually helping me with one of my goals, partly because I was so aware of the areas of life that were feeling successful and then the areas of life that weren’t feeling successful for me, that in the moment I started to notice like, “Oh, this social interaction I’m having right now is helping me with my intention that I set that I wanted to have more social interactions.” I would notice it more. It improved my noticing skills in a way. Just tracking it was really helpful.

Over time, I started to write in my own domains of life where it made sense. If you write in your own domains to get started, I would recommend using some sort of framework out there that has been tested a little bit just to get started. After a while, when you’ve been doing it, you start to recognize maybe where the framework isn’t working for you as well, but you could use something like the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration’s Eight Domains of Wellness or Health.mil’s Total Force Fitness, or whatever is important to you right now. We’ll have links to both of those resources in the show notes. Overall, this activity, partly because I was practicing it monthly and partly because it is such a powerful tool, I really was able to make decisions about the upcoming month and what I felt like I needed to do in that upcoming month to just find a little bit of balance in my life. That’s why I chose it.

Coral: I love that so much. My background is in health education, and one of the things that we would often talk about is the multifaceted composition of identity and the habits that support health and well-being from a multitude of angles. I just love that this practice so accurately reflects how we can cultivate wellness and well-being and health in all of those different scopes and how they feed together. I would love to hear more about how we can actually do this thing. Could you guide us through some steps, Jessica?

Jessica: Yes, absolutely. We’re going to have a resource that you can download where you can fill out your own Wheel of Life. We’ll have an example that has the domains of life filled in for you, and then we’ll have a blank one available as well. You’ll be able to draw this in. You’ll want to start then with a template with the domains of life already identified, or you of course can also identify your own. If you identify your own, I would just reiterate that you might want to use something like SAMHSA’s Eight Domains of Wellness or Health.mil’s Total Force Fitness.

Then you’re going to go through looking at those domains and you’re going to rate your current level of satisfaction in each domain. Don’t worry about accuracy. If you can, just go with your gut feeling or think about for each of the domains, you could also think about what parameters would make you feel successful in that area. In my case, I was able to go with my gut, but I know that may not work for everyone.

You are going to go through each one. You’re going to say to yourself, “Do I feel like this area rates a 1, which is low, or a 10, which is high, or somewhere in between?” Plot it out on the wheel. You can choose to color each section in, or you can place dots and draw a line connecting those dots from domain to domain.

Then step back. You don’t have to literally step back. Take a look at the results. Look at the shape of your diagram. Are there some areas that feel like they need attention? I want to mention that the goal here isn’t so that you work toward having all of those domains of life at a 10. It’s not so that you’re maxing them all out. This is really about how do you feel about each of those domains? Maybe there are some domains where you feel really successful at a 5, and that’s okay. This is really about how do you feel about how things are going.

Once you take a look at that, if you feel like there’s an area that needs attention, maybe it’s relationships. You think about, well, what relationships in the coming month, if I were able to do something about this domain of life, which relationships would help me do that? What would help me create some balance in that domain? You can set a few intentions for the coming month. I do like a monthly basis, but you can also do this annually if you prefer.

Then you set some goals and some intentions around the domains that you feel like could use a little work. You’re not striving for perfection here. You’re just striving for a tiny bit more balance. If you felt like that relationships area was super low, and you’re not satisfied, and you can think of 10 things that you could do to change that, you don’t have to do all 10 of those things. Just do a couple, and you will already have started to make that area more successful. I love this practice of intentionality and also being able to do it throughout the year.

Coral: Thanks for guiding us through, Jessica.

Jessica: Oh, absolutely. This has been hugely helpful. I’ll admit I have been out of practice with this and just doing this episode has made me pull out my old diagrams, and I’m going to get going on it again because it really is a great exercise.

Coral: Great. I think I may actually leverage it for myself and we can check in with each other around the first of the month.

Jessica: Love that. Yes, let’s do that.

Coral: Wonderful. That’s it for this episode. Thanks for joining us. If you enjoyed this episode, click the share button in your podcast app to share it with a friend or a colleague. We’ll be back next week with a practice for habit stacking. Until then, keep practicing.

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Kalin Goble: The Practicing Connection podcast is a production of OneOp and is supported by the National Institute of Food and Agriculture, U.S. Department of Agriculture, and the Office of Military Family Readiness Policy, U.S. Department of Defense under award number 2023-48770-41333. you

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