If you are a coach or a consultant, then a custom Wheel of Life that lives online on your website is an excellent tool to have. Your online and custom wheel helps your clients see where they stand on multiple dimensions of their life or business. That awareness becomes the first step towards working with you to make the needed changes and improve.
In this post we will show how to create a custom Wheel of Life. Please also create your account on Evalinator by signing up here. There is a 3 week, no-risk trial. There are also templates that will help you create your Wheel in as little as 30 minutes!
You can use your online Wheel of Life as a coaching or consulting tool, but also as a sales lead generation or follow up mechanism.
Some of the many different applications of Wheel are:
Try these example Wheels:
A Wheel of Life has multiple dimensions – generally 8-10 categories – that clients assess themselves on. The categories can cover both personal and professional aspects of one’s life or business. At the end of the exercise an individual can clearly see the areas of prioritization, and can decide how to make a change supported by their coach.
A typical Wheel of Life is made up of “rating scale” type questions. For example, respondents choose their score on each question from 1 to 10.
Then at the end, the respondent can see their scores plotted on a polar chart. This makes for a very powerful and visual way of looking at the entire subject area.
Evalinator provides a great way to create and customize your own wheel of life online and host it on your website. You can start with a Wheel of Life template and adjust it to your liking. This post has a few different variations of the Wheel of Life template.
There are templates available for:
Or you can start from scratch to give yourself complete flexibility. Here’s how you may want to customize your Wheel of Life to personalize your approach for optimal customer experience.
Tip: When you first start creating, it’s best to just breeze through the various steps without deliberating too much. Once you see your Wheel of Life live, then you can go back and adjust things (edit questions, add images, refine descriptions etc.) to make it ready for primetime.
After signing in, hit the “create assessment” button. The first thing you’ll enter is the title. Be sure to select the “Wheel of Life” option. You can always edit all this later. Put in a nice catchy title that your audience will identify with.
Once you get through this step, you’ll begin to see a whole range of menu options on the top. We’ll walk through them next!
A typical wheel of life, shows each question and its score on the polar chart. You can set up each question in the “Questions” section. All you have to do is to enter a short phrase and then the actual question itself. For example: “Career” and “How happy are you with your career growth trajectory?”. These questions will then show up as a “Wheel of Life”.
It’s recommended you keep between 8-12 questions so as not to overcrowd the wheel.
For many coaches, it’s enough to set up these questions because it gets them to a point where they can begin the process of introspection and discovery with their clients.
However, there are cases where you have many more questions to ask because you want to present a more comprehensive picture. So you will want to have multiple questions that roll up into a single dimension. For example, you may have 3 questions under career, and 4 questions under family. For business coaches or consultants, these could be 3 questions on marketing, and 3 on technology along with several other dimensions.
This is where dimensions help.
Doing this is easy. First, in the “options” section, select the option to show dimensions when the users see their results. Showing by dimensions means that questions will not be mapped to dimensions instead of their scores being shown on their own.
Now, in the “dimensions” section, set up your dimensions. These dimensions will show up on the polar chart, instead of each question.
Finally, when you set up your questions, select the dimension for each question. You can map more than one dimension to each question.
If there are multiple questions for a dimension, then an average of the scores will be taken.
This is a really nice feature because as a coach you can now give some personal advice to your respondents. This advice also serves to build rapport and trust with a respondent who is not yet a client.
You do that in the feedback text section of each question. For each of the scores 1-10 you can specify personalized feedback. Practically, you may just want to do it by ranges. For example, a specific feedback for those scoring between 8-10 on a question, a different feedback for those scoring between 4-7, and then finally a different feedback text for those scoring 1-3.
As you think about your Wheel, you have these additional options.
Customizing all this is fairly simple.
These 4 simple steps above should help you create your custom Wheel of Life for multiple purposes – business, personal, and life coaches. Of course there are other settings too. To see the configuration “options” available to you, please look at this post. This post on The Coaching Tools Company also covers a Wheel of Life pretty comprehensively.
Custom Wheel of Life assessments are a powerful way to help your customers. They are also useful in sales lead generation and sales follow up scenarios. Every successful engagement starts with self awareness and bench-marking.
If a Wheel of Life seems to be for you, then there is nothing better than testing it out! Get started for free and craft your first assessment. We are here to help you be successful.
