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How to start on your Personal Development journey

I have a number of blog posts in the making about various tactics and strategies that I have found to be extremely useful in terms of my continued personal development journey, but before publishing them I thought it would be useful to go back to the start and show a few simple techniques to establish who you are and where you’re at.

Start with some simple questions and a Life Wheel

To find where you are right now in your life a useful technique can be found by making use of a Life Wheel (also known as a Wheel of Life). This is a tool used by many life coaches to help their clients identify areas in their life that need some focus and nurturing. It’s a quick method of visually illustrating areas that could be targeted for further work.

Like everything in this world, especially when it comes to personal development, in order for the Life Wheel to be successful you have to be 100% truthful with yourself and not attempt to control your responses to influence the wheel to look how you imagine your ideal life would be.

The diagram below presents and empty Life Wheel that you can use for this exercise, in a follow up post I will publish a PDF with the questions and Life Wheel on it for easy print out.

To complete the Life Wheel you assess each spoke of the wheel (Health, Finance etc) with a score from 1 – 10, with a high score such as 10 indicating fulfilment and a low score like 1 indicating dissatisfaction. For each spoke mark your score with a dot on the line, as you can see 0 starts in the middle and radiates out to 10 on the outer circle. When you have marked your scores join from dot to dot with a straight line and that completes your Life Wheel!

Reviewing your Life Wheel

Your completed Life Wheel should graphically show those areas where you are feeling fulfilled and those where you aren’t, perhaps the majority of it looks pretty balanced with the exception of a few spokes? Or conversely it might show that you are directing a lot of focus and attention to one or two areas to the detriment of many others?

To complete the exercise you should now plot on the Life Wheel the score for each area that you believe would be the ideal for YOU. Do these in a different colour pen or pencil and once again connect the dots and you now have a very clear picture of your current situation and one of where you want to be.

Where there are gaps these can be considered to be the areas to START focus your attention, list them down, and then rank them order of importance to you. For each area answer the following questions:

Why do I want to be more satisfied in this area, and why is it important to me at this time in my life?

Are there things that I can do to improve things in this area? Or are there things that I can ask other people in my life to help me improve in this area?

When and how will I know that things have improved? What will I see, hear and feel that is changed and better?

Examples from my Life Wheel include making time to pursue my hobbies and improve my fitness, to see and talk to my family more often, and to assess where my career is taking me.

As mentioned above there maybe areas that are shown to be taking too much of your time and energy, areas where you should seek to STOP placing focus and attention on. Write these down as items to be rid of or stop doing. Some examples that I want stop is reflecting on the past too much, procrastinating on the internet, and getting involved in gossip and nonconstructive office chat.

Putting it into action

The final step is to construct a plan of action to address the areas that your Life Wheel has uncovered, this is often easier said than done, you really have to commit to following through with the improvements that you have identified. Try and set aside some time every week to work on them, maybe take yourself to your favourite coffee shop to reflect and contemplate on them, or go for a walk in the local park, or do whatever feels right for you to allow you the time and space to work on the areas you have identified.

As you can see, from being fairly vague about your life and what it is you truly want, in the space of an hour or two you have an informed view of where you are and already have identified some good and bad points to start setting some goals around, which will be the subject of my next post…

Remember though that this is a journey, and as you progress and gain new insight and experiences your Life Wheel will undoubtedly change, so in that respect it’s always good to revisit it after you have achieved a few goals as you will be able to note your progress.

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