by Sarah Haté (France)
In my experience as a performance coach, a successful tool is one that can be adapted to a wide range of situations. The clients that I have already had the privilege to coach belong to various socioeconomic backgrounds, have had diverse reasons for wanting to be coached and come to me at different stages in their life, yet all of them have needed to gain more visibility and prioritise at some point during our sessions. One of the tools that I regularly bring into my coaching activity is the Wheel of Life.
What is the Wheel of Life?
The name of this tool comes from the fact that life is represented as a wheel, and the important areas in a coachee’s life are the spokes of the wheel. Literature mentions between 8 and 10 areas, or spokes. It’s a very common coaching tool, and despite the fact that its origin is unknown, it can be likened to the symbol of the wheel of life that originated in the Middle Ages. This wheel represented 4 phases of life: happiness, loss, suffering, and hope.
The Wheel of Life is a physical tool, i.e. it either needs to be printed out and given to the client, or drawn on a piece of paper by the client. One of the reasons why I find it so effective is that it enables the coachee to see what is going on in her life, rather than simply talking about it. Mapping out her important areas very often leads to an “aha” moment, as things become a lot clearer.
Source: iCN Issue 23 (Coaching Tools, Tips & Techniques); pages 26-28
About Sarah Haté
Sarah Haté is a trainer, public speaker and certified professional life coach. She has a passion for giving her clients the space they need to reconnect with themselves and rediscover their authentic self, in order to create a magical, positive life for themselves and their loved ones.
Sarah created So Free Coaching, to offer one-to-one sessions, group sessions and workshops. As she lives in the south of France, her clients are both French and English-speaking. She trained in Development Coaching with NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming) with Simply Changing Limited, and recently obtained her Level-1 certificate in EFT (Emotional Freedom Techniques).
