Daily choices affect many areas in a
person’s life and by understanding how one food choice may affect both diet and sleep or fitness or mindset or stress levels, a person can begin to make better choices.
By assessing where one is on the wellness continuum and which health dimensions are lacking, a coachee and coach create an action plan to practice thoughtful choices on their wellness journey.
Health dimensions include many pieces of a life: self-responsibility, intellect, physical fitness, nutrition, environment, spiritual, purpose, communication, occupation, financial, family, self-care, connections …, play. Many of these combine to make an action plan more manageable (e.g. physical fitness, nutrition and play become diet& exercise or family, communication, connections become relationships. Regardless of the dimensions, an assessment of those pieces is necessary in order to create new movement towards wellness.
Health & Wellness coaches have many tools to help coachees assess their lives. One tool is a Wheel of Life – a circle is divided into equal pie parts based on dimensions representing a coachee’s life and they rank their pieces from 1-10 (1 being low).
Coloring the pieces illustrates various levels of wellness for the coachee’s wellness pie. The discrepancies in rankings for certain pieces, (e.g. physical – 9 but financial – 3, family -4 and play -10…) provides a glimpse of the bumps in life and becomes a conversation starter in deciding where to begin. One may argue having a 5 for all pieces would represent a life without bumps, however, the goal is to constantly strive for a personal best in integrated health & wellness.
Wellness is not the absence of illness or disease, rather a way to focus living a lifestyle of improvement in every dimension. Those with chronic disease, family strife, or environmental difficulties can move towards the positive end of well-being by assessing their wheel of life and enhancing pieces in small or big ways.
Improving one health piece improves all other pieces. If a goal is to build better family relationships, other outcomes result; such as personal growth, physical health, and possibly fun and recreation.
The pieces of life affect each other – assessing wellness can guide one in understanding where the wheel is in need of repair.