Wheel of Life - or of frustration?
Posted on August 25, 2009 by Lisa Sansom, One of Thousands of Leadership Coaches on Noomii.
How a coach used the Wheel of Life to help a client through a general feeling of frustration
A client recently expressed a general feeling of frustration – with life, with work, with colleagues, with family – even with an upcoming, and highly anticipated, vacation. I am not typically prone to using coaching tools, but for some reason, The Wheel of Life sprang to mind and, as I have learned to listen to my inner voice of instinct, I went with it.
I instructed the client in the use of The Wheel of Life, and we divided the Wheel in to eight sections which she labelled, not with areas of her life where she wanted to work on balance or enrichment, but the several areas where she was feeling frustration. Then, instead of ranking the areas from 1 to 10 based on fulfillment, she ranked them based on frustration, where 10 was maximal frustration.
At the end of the exercise, the client had a very bumpy Wheel indeed! The one area that, initially, she felt was causing her the most frustration was in face quite small compared to one committee which was causing her great amounts of grief – and that feeling had been spilling over into other areas, making it feel like the frustration was more pervasive than it really was. And the best news? The committee was highly task-focused and the deliverable was due in another two months, at which time the committee would be permanently disbanded!
My client was thrilled – her frustration could be compartamentalized and it was temporary. Just doing The Wheel of Life made her feel much lighter, and she took the Wheel home with her as a visual reminder that “this too shall pass”. And the entire coaching session was a great reminder for me of the power and flexibility of The Wheel of Life tool.
