Life can feel completely out of balance but do you know how it is out balance?

There are many different ways of looking at life balance, so much information out there to tell you what you should be doing to gain a work life-balance. But they are all generic and seem to suggest you should have equal time spent in so many areas of your life.

To make this personal to you, you can use a wheel of life diagram to make you own assessment. This way you score each area of life, I will come onto these in a second, relative to how you want them. Seeing as each area is scored out of ten, only you can select the score the represents how you feel how well you are achieving. There is no perfect selected by someone else, but you choose your own subjective score.

The areas on the wheel of life are also your choice. This can depend if you want to look at a whole life view or if you want to concentrate on one particular area, such as work, time, money, people.

A whole life view wheel of life would look at the following areas:

• Health- This is looking at how healthy you are, including diet, exercise, sleep, illness
• Wealth- Assessing you money situation, your spending habits and any debts that you have
• Work/career- Thinking about your current career and how happy you are, how fulfilled you feel and how you are performing
• Relationships- This is the amount of time you spend with friends, the balance between a love relationship and friends, and the quality of these relationships
• Leisure- This is looking at what you do outside of work, the hobbies you have and how much time you spend doing them
• Environment- Assessing your physical environment and the stressors you may be experiencing
• Personal growth- Time spent on personal development and how important it is for you
• Creativity/fun-

Once you have scored each out of ten, block out these on the diagram. Ideally, these could all be ten. However, they should all be approximately the same to be in balance. If you find that some areas are much less than others, it is more important to bring these to an equal level as the other areas than concentrating on the higher ones to make them tens. Some areas could be taking more time or energy than others and so retracting from other areas of your life that are important. Each of the above areas are important to help us feel connected to others and that we can part of a community, which is really important to us. Historically, we needed to be part of a community to survive from predators and so we are programmed to be with others. We need to feel that we have a purpose and are improving to feel valued and useful. Leisure and fun are vital to allow our system to relax and be healthy. Being balanced in all these areas helps support other each and leads to a healthy body and mind.

This tool can be utilised to review specific parts of your life in more detail, an example of this could be relationships. The six or eight segments could be romantic relationship, work relationships, friendships, family relationships, relationship with yourself and relationship with the community.

Alternatively, you can look at your values and see which you are living by and which you are not meeting. Using the commitments that you have in life on the wheel and seeing which are taking more effort than others can help you redistribute your priorities.