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Wheel of Life Assessment
Rate how satisfied you are with each area of your life, from 1 to 10. The wheel draws itself as you go, and the flat side shows you where to start.
How to Do the Wheel of Life Assessment
- Check the eight areas. They're the ones from our Wheel of Life guide. If one doesn't fit your life, click its name and rename it: Spirituality instead of Romance, say, or Studies instead of Career.
- Score each area from 1 to 10 by how satisfied you are with it today. Not how it looked last year, and not how you think it should look.
- Go with your first answer. If you catch yourself debating a 6 or a 7 for a minute, pick one and move on. You're after a snapshot, not a precise measurement.
- Add target scores if you want to see where you'd like each area to be in a few months. The wheel shows them as a dashed line.
- Pick one area to work on and answer the questions the tool gives you.
- Save an image or print it, then do the assessment again in three months and compare.
How to Read Your Wheel of Life
Look at the shape before the numbers. A wheel with one or two deep dents would give you a bumpy ride, and those dents are usually the areas pulling the others down. A small but round wheel tells a different story: nothing is badly off, but nothing feels great either.
A low score isn't automatically your priority. Some areas sit low for good reasons. Fun and Recreation is often a 4 in an exam month, and that can be fine for a few weeks. What deserves attention is a low score that bothers you. With target scores on, that shows up as a wide gap between the wedge and the dashed line.
Then pick one area to work on. Small changes in one area often spill into others: more sleep tends to show up in your Health score and your Career score at the same time.
Questions to Ask After Your Assessment
The tool suggests questions for the area you choose. These help with the wheel as a whole:
- When you look at the shape of your wheel, how do you feel?
- What surprised you most?
- How do you spend your time in each area at the moment?
- What small step would make the biggest difference to how satisfied you feel?
- Could one action lift more than one area?
If writing helps you think, take these into your journal. Once you've chosen a step, our guide to SMART goals will help you turn it into something you'll follow through on.
Prefer to Do It on Paper?
Our printable Wheel of Life PDF template is a 4-page PDF with a pre-drawn wheel, a blank one for your own categories, and a scoring guide, for $1.49. Print it as often as you like. It sits in our collection of well-being templates alongside worksheets for self-reflection and year planning.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is the Wheel of Life?
The Wheel of Life is a self-assessment tool that scores your satisfaction with the main areas of your life and draws them as slices of a wheel. It's used in life coaching to see at a glance which areas are going well and which need attention. Our Wheel of Life guide explains each area in detail.
What are the 8 areas of the Wheel of Life?
The eight areas in this tool are Career, Finances, Family & Friends, Health, Romance, Fun & Recreation, Personal Growth and Physical Environment. Coaches use different versions, so rename any area that doesn't fit your life.
How often should you do a Wheel of Life assessment?
Every three months works well for most people: often enough to notice change, far enough apart for change to happen. It also helps to redo it after a big event, like a new job or a move, and at the end of the year as part of an end-of-year reflection.
Are my scores private?
Yes. Your scores are saved only in this browser so you can come back to them. They aren't sent to us or anyone else. If you clear your browser data, they're gone, so save an image if you want to keep a copy.