Download the worksheet at https://momekh.com/oi/wheel/

Central Idea: It is best to know HOW to discover your own weakness. To do that, we must discover how to focus on all areas of life to have a full, complete life. When others tell us about our weakness, we tend to get more defensive. Our ego kicks in. But controlling our ego and having an “honest” conversation with ourselves is super beneficial inshAllah, in making us see our own weaknesses. And once we know our weakness, we can take steps to improve them. This guide helps you inshAllah do all of that.

Do you agree with the above statement?

If you say yes, then we can have a conversation. If no, you think you can imporve something without measuring it, we need another discussion altogether, about scorecards and the game of life.

But if you agree with this fundamental: to improve something, you have to measure it, then how do you improve yourself?

The Measurement of Self

This wheel of life gives us the tool to “measure” our life.

I lay down the steps in this video (comes with a worksheet, so you can really dive in and work ON yourself inshAllah – see the video and worksheet link above).

People have found this quite useful, and I am certain you will find a lot of value in this video.

You start with the a few areas of your life.

I have identified seven that make the most sense to me. I use those seven in the rest of the video to make a plan for self improvement (the video is in Urdu).

I have seen people make 12 areas of life, and I have seen people divide their life in as little as two cateogires of work and life.

I suggest having a minimum of four cateogires:

1. Body
2. Spirit
3. Family
4. Work

Based on these categories, you come up with different projects within each category.

What’s a project? Let us keep the definition fundamental: a project is set of activities with a deadline and a measurable end result.

So anything that has a desired end result, and you put a deadline on it, becomes a project.

The Steps to Finding Your Weakness

We use the Wheel of Life metaphor to explain the importance of each area of our life.

One way of gaining strength is to remove weaknesses.

The idea – as explained in the video lesson above – is:

1. Identify your areas of life you want to pay attention to
2. List down projects that will improve that area of life
3. Pick the most exciting, most needed or most useful project, and do that
4. It is recommended to pick one and let the other projects “rest”, you only do one project at a time. But sometimes you may need to do a few more at the same time, that is OK too.

Please note: knowing the steps means nothing. Nothing. The only thing matters is when you apply these steps. You do the work. You think about your areas, write them out, and then make projects and begin working on them.

As you can tell, this is not “fix your life in the next 20 minutes” kind of an exercise. But you can find out your next step to growth once you do this exercise, and that can take even less than 20 mintues if you do the above exercise. All the best, may God make it easier for us to fix our mistakes, aameen.

Frequently Asked Questions

When you begin the implementations, you run into different challenges. That is good. It means you are not just consuming information, you are applying it.

These questions address some common challenges one faces when they try to implement the Wheel of Life in their life.

Should I have one project per Area of Life? What about other areas of life, they wont be improving if I only do one project at at time?

This question was asked by a coaching client and member of the community. He also shared his “wheel of life” with me, and wanted this clarification.

You can do one project at a time, as long as you know you will come back to the other projects after you’re done with the active project. The other method is to have a list of “active projects” and you work on the on a weekly basis. Working on multiple projects daily, and that too on a long term basis, this becomes difficult and we tend to burnout and stop all projects. That’s a bad result, right? So it is best to work on one project at a time, and keep the other ones on a back burner if you need to. Hope this answers the question, if there are more, you can ask in the Community of course.