The Wheel of Life is a great opportunity to develop and implement your own vision of life step by step.
But why should you even think about what your own vision of life can look like?
Why We Need Our Own Vision of Life
The term "vision" comes from the Latin "videre" and means "to see". Having your own vision of life ultimately means nothing more than getting an idea of how you want to live.
What is important to you? What do you want to achieve in your life? What do you want to experience in your life? What makes you happy? What fulfills you?
These are all questions that are at stake in one's own vision of life.
If we don't care about what our vision (version!) of life should look like, we live for the day and are carried away by the things of everyday life.
At some point we wake up and ask ourselves where all these years have gone. And perhaps we only dimly remember that we actually wanted to lead a life full of adventures and "experience" a thousand things.
In addition:
If you know what is important to you in life and take time for these things, you will automatically strengthen your Resilience and can better deal with the stress that life often brings.
And for this it is important to think about your own vision of life.
A great tool for this is the wheel of life.
But before we take a closer look, let's take a moment to think about what is part of your own vision of life – because it not only concerns the big things in life, but also and above all includes the things we do every day.
What is part of the vision of life
Many years ago, my girlfriend at the time once asked me how I would imagine my life 5 or 10 years later. That was pretty much the first time that I seriously thought about such a question. My answer to her question was correspondingly poor.
My girlfriend at the time, on the other hand, had a pretty clear idea of what her life should look like later on. A house in the countryside with a cottage garden. A large table in the garden so that the many children could sit down at it if there was to be a joint breakfast in the garden on Sunday.
This is a vision of life.
When we talk about a vision for life, we quickly think of the big things. How we can save the world and do our part. How we can follow our soul plan and find and live our calling.
The topic of vocation in particular has almost been a hype topic in recent years.
And of course, this is also a vision of life.
But I believe that the vision of one's own life begins much earlier. Basically, everything I imagine of and about my life (of which I form an image) is already the vision of my life.
Because that's exactly what vision means: To get a picture of something or to see a picture of something.
You can ask yourself these questions
Your own vision of life starts with the question of where and how I actually want to live and work and extends to the question of how and with whom I want to spend my day.
And of course, then the first concerns come very quickly: "I can't choose all that, I can be happy if I have a job, no matter where I have to move and when I have to get up for it!".
However, such concerns are not part of the vision of life.
To imagine the many reasons why you can't live your own vision, you can think about that later, if you want to.
But first it's about getting an idea of what your own life should ideally look like.
This includes questions such as:
- What kind of people do I want to surround myself with?
- What should my everyday life look like?
- How much money do I want to have?
- What else do I want to do in life besides and in addition to my job?
- What skills do I want to learn? Do I want to play an instrument? Speak one or more foreign languages?
- What do I want to see of the world?
- Where do I want to do something good?
- How healthy do I actually want to be?
- Do I still want to go through life with strength and energy at an advanced age and enjoy my life?
You should think about the last two questions at the latest when you have reached 40. Because: While we can cope with a lot of things relatively unscathed at a young age, our lifestyle has an increasing impact from around 40 onwards our later health from.
By the way, original cultures all over the world have always recognized the importance of their own vision of life and consciously dealt with the search for such a vision ("Vision Quest").
And they have very often gone into nature to find such a vision of their own lives.
Because nature is the best way to get back in touch with our core and inner wisdom. And they know very well what our vision of life looks like and what is really important to us in life.
Life Vision and Goals
Your own vision of life has a lot to do with the goals you want to achieve for yourself in life. And that's important, because without goals you just wander around aimlessly.
"If you don't know the port, no wind is favorable for you," says the Roman philosopher Seneca suitable.
Behind these goals are the own values – what we consider valuable in our lives.
For the design of one's own vision of life, it is therefore important to think about one's own values in life.
In the second step, you can then derive your own personal life goals from this and thus develop your vision of life.
A wonderful help for this is the wheel of life.
What is the Wheel of Life?
The Wheel of Life is a circular representation of the different areas of your life. In addition to the outer circle with the different living areas, there are smaller circles that divide the individual sectors into sections.
In most cases, the areas of life are divided into:
- Bless you
- Relationship
- Family
- Finances
- Occupation
- Personal development
- Spirituality
- Friends
Here I have for you the picture with the Wheel of Life as Pdf Template Linked. This version of the Wheel of Life contains a few more areas of life. Either use the template for yourself or use it as inspiration for your own wheel of life.
After all, the areas of life of the Wheel of Life reflect your own personal values. So you might want to replace some of the areas of life in the template with other areas that seem more important to you.
Just experiment with the template and create your own personal shape of the wheel of life that feels right for you.
How to work with the Wheel of Life
The Wheel of Life is a great tool to make it clear where you are in life. In other words, whether one's own life is still going in the direction one had actually imagined.
You can do this, for example, wonderfully as part of an annual plan at the end of the old year.
If you repeat this at regular intervals, the Wheel of Life is a great way to pursue your own development and thus really live the vision of your life.
How exactly does it work now?
Print out the template from above or create your own template (you can also do this by hand or – if you want it to look very neat – with a compass on a piece of paper).
Take half an hour, make sure that you are not disturbed during this time and look at the wheel of life in front of you.
Or you can look for a nice place somewhere in the great outdoors. Your own garden can also be such a place.
Now think about where you are for each of the areas of life of your wheel of life.
Where on a scale of 1-10 do you see yourself in the respective area of life? A 1 means that this area of life in your life is leading an absolute shadowy existence, a 10 means that you are already living this area of life to the fullest in your life.
Now use a pencil to color in exactly as many fields of the sector of the respective area of life as you have received as a value on the scale. So, for example, if you see the Finance section at a value of 6 in your life, you will color 6 spaces in the Finance sector on your wheel of life.
Once you have done this for all areas of life, you will receive your very own personal wheel of life, which shows you exactly where you are now in your life.
What is the point of all this now?
With the Wheel of Life, you can see at first glance in which areas of your life there is "a need to catch up".
You can imagine that your own life only really runs smoothly if all areas of your life get the necessary attention from you.
Otherwise, the wheel of life would not be a wheel, but an angular structure. And angular tires don't run smoothly.
However, it is often the case that we concentrate on certain areas of our lives and forget about the other areas.
A classic example: the career person who neglects his relationship or family for the sake of professional success.
Or someone concentrates on earning as much money as possible and forgets the question of meaning and their own spirituality – and then finds themselves in a serious crisis of meaning at 50.
Or the other way around: the esotericist who forgets that life also has a material component and that money is also a form of energy that wants to flow freely in life.
Ultimately, as always, it is about balance and harmony. It is precisely about keeping the areas of life in a balanced balance.
If you have determined in this way with the Wheel of Life that certain areas of life deserve more attention, you can go there in the next step and strengthen these areas in a targeted manner.
By consciously reserving time in your weekly or monthly planning to plan activities in these areas of life.
Maybe you're finally planning that long-promised trip with the family. Or you can resolve to read a few pages of an inspirational book three times a week. Or maybe you decide to go out into nature as often as possible to bring your own energy back into balance. Or you want to cook a healthy meal yourself twice a week instead of always eating ready-made meals.
All these small steps and activities contribute to the fact that your wheel of life becomes more and more balanced and that you can always develop, refine and implement your life vision.
And that is exactly the task of the wheel of life.