Wheel of life assessment: Free template and 10 domains

Key takeaways

The wheel of life assessment asks clients to rate their satisfaction in 10 life domains on a 1 to 10 scale.

This template covers family and friends, partners and love, growth and learning, spirituality, and money and finance. The other five are career and growth, health and fitness, fun and recreation, environment, and community.

Community is the one domain a standard eight-spoke wheel rarely asks about, which is what makes the 10-domain version worth printing.

Run the sheet at intake to set priorities, then repeat it every three months to show the client what has moved.

Practice management software like Pabau lets coaches send the sheet before the first session and store every result beside the notes.

A wheel of life assessment asks clients to rate 10 areas of their life from 1 to 10. The unevenness is the point. Someone can be thriving at work while their friendships quietly thin out, and one page makes that visible.

Clients rarely name their lowest-scoring area out loud, because they arrive talking about the loudest problem instead. The sheet gets past that in about 15 minutes.

Below you will find what the free template covers and how to run it in session. You will also see how its 10 domains differ from the eight-spoke wheel most coaches trained on.

What the wheel of life assessment actually measures

It measures satisfaction, not achievement. Clients score how content they feel in each area of life right now, from 1 to 10. A high earner with an empty calendar can still rate money and finance a 4, and that is the point of asking.

Paul J. Meyer popularized the exercise in the 1960s, and it has been standard intake material in coaching ever since. Clients rate every domain, then plot the scores on a circle to see the shape their life makes.

The metaphor does the work. A wheel carrying a 9 beside a 2 is not round, and a wheel that is not round does not roll. That plain image is why the tool has outlasted most coaching fads. It still turns up in therapy intakes and wellness consultations for the same reason.

The International Coaching Federation lists evoking awareness among the core competencies it expects from credentialed coaches. A wheel session is one of the plainest ways to do it, and the form itself is deliberately plain too.

One page, 10 rows, and no printed wheel

The template is a single page, and it carries no printed circle. Plan for that before the session. Draw the wheel on a whiteboard or a second sheet once the ratings are in.

The page is headed Clinical Form Template, with fields for the client’s name and the date. One instruction line sits under the header. It asks the client to rate each aspect of their life from 1 to 10. A 1 means least satisfied, a 10 means most satisfied.

Under that come the 10 domains, each with its own row of numbers to circle. A notes area closes the page, and that is where the actions you agree in session belong.

The 10 domains, and what a low score usually means

Each domain covers a slice of life that clients tend to keep in a separate mental box. Rating them side by side is what stops one box hiding another.

Nine of those 10 will look familiar to anyone who has run a wheel before. One will not.

Community is the domain most standard wheels skip

Community is the genuine addition here. Standard eight-spoke wheels cover career, money, health, relationships, growth, fun, and physical environment. Belonging rarely gets a spoke of its own.

That absence matters more than it sounds. A client can score family and friends a 7 and community a 2. The distance between those two numbers explains a loneliness that neither work nor a partner accounts for. Coaches working with people who have recently moved or changed careers see it constantly.

Environment is on the classic wheel too, usually as a single home-and-work line. It still repays attention, because a client rating environment a 3 is normally describing something specific.

That might be a home that never feels clean, a desk in a hallway, or an hour each way on a bus. Those problems are fixable in weeks rather than quarters, which makes environment a fair first target for a client who needs an early win.

Set the two lists side by side and the difference is narrower than the marketing around 10-domain wheels suggests.

Run the sheet in 15 minutes, in five steps

The sheet takes 10 to 15 minutes and needs no special training to administer. Work through it in five steps.

1. Read the 10 domains out loud. Clients hear labels like spirituality and community very differently, so say what each one covers before anyone scores it.
2. Ask for a number on each row, first instinct. The question is how satisfied they feel in that area right now. Clients who deliberate tend to score how they think they should feel.
3. Plot the 10 scores on a circle. Draw a wheel with 10 segments, mark each score along its spoke, and join the marks. The lopsided shape does the persuading.
4. Ask what surprises them. Useful follow-ups are which number they hesitated over, and what a 7 would look like in their lowest domain.
5. Pick one or two domains, not 10. Use the notes area at the bottom to write down what the client agrees to do, and by when.

Store the completed sheet in your client record system beside the session notes. The next conversation then starts from the numbers rather than from memory.

Where a wheel session goes wrong

Four mistakes account for most disappointing sessions. None of them are about the form itself.

• Scoring against an ideal. Clients who pause over a row usually rate how they think they should feel. Ask for the first number that comes to mind.
• Skipping the definitions. Community means a neighborhood to one client and a professional network to another. Say what each domain covers first.
• Working on every low domain at once. Pick one or two. Clients who chase five low scores tend to move none of them.
• Filing the sheet and forgetting it. Without a dated copy to compare against, the second wheel tells you very little.

Avoid those four and the exercise starts paying off at the point most coaches use it: the first session.

Why coaches start with it at intake

At intake, the wheel surfaces priorities before a client settles into a story about what is wrong. Someone who booked to talk about work stress often turns out to be scoring 2s in health and community. That reframes the engagement inside 20 minutes.

It also hands you a defensible agenda. Rather than picking a topic yourself, you point at the two lowest numbers the client wrote down and ask which one to start with. Clients rarely argue with their own handwriting.

Be straight about what the tool is, though. The wheel is a conversation starter rather than a validated instrument, and clients who ask deserve that answer. If you need a scored measure alongside it, this rundown of life satisfaction scales compares the Satisfaction With Life Scale and similar questionnaires.

Relabeling domains for athletes, new parents, and teams

Yes, you can rename any of the 10 domains. Keep the count and the 1 to 10 scale, so results stay comparable between sessions.

A therapist working with burnout might rename fun and recreation as rest and recovery, because clients in that state hear fun as one more demand. An athlete might swap career and growth for training and competition. A practice supporting new parents could split family and friends into partner support and childcare load.

A team version works the same way. Rate collaboration, communication, psychological safety, workload, goal clarity, recognition, growth opportunity, and rest instead. Whatever labels you land on, freeze them, because comparison is where the sheet earns its keep.

Repeat it quarterly, and watch for the wheel that gets rounder

Three months is the right interval. It is long enough for a domain to move, and short enough that the client still remembers what they agreed to.

Keep both sheets side by side rather than only the newest one. Note which domains improved, which stalled, and what the client was doing in each case. If health climbed from 4 to 7 while community stayed at 2, the next quarter has written itself.

Then watch for the wheel that gets rounder because expectations dropped. A client who rates career a 6 after giving up on a promotion has not improved. The notes area is where you catch it, which is the main reason it is worth filling in.

Therapists use it to give a vague problem edges

Therapists reach for the sheet when a presenting problem has no shape yet. A client describing general anxiety who scores 2s in money and finance, environment, and community has handed you three specific places to work.

It also carries a one-off session well. A client weighing a relocation or a career change can rate the 10 domains as they stand today. Then they rate the same domains as they expect them to be afterward. The two sets side by side usually flush out the worry they had not mentioned.

A therapy practice running the sheet usually has three or four other intake forms in play. Software built for therapists keeps every one of them in the same client file, rather than four separate folders.

How Pabau keeps completed wheels beside the session notes

Plenty of coaches print the sheet, fill it in by hand, and then lose track of it. The scores go into a folder, and the quarterly comparison never happens, because nobody wants to dig out a piece of paper from March.

Pabau closes that loop. You can attach the wheel of life assessment PDF to a digital intake form, so the client completes it before the first session. By the time they walk in, the numbers are already in front of you.

From there the result sits in the client’s record beside the session notes and the appointment history. You can schedule an automated reminder three months out, so the reassessment gets booked rather than remembered. That keeps your coaching client management workflow current without anyone chasing paper.

That turns a 15-minute exercise into a progress record you can put in front of a client a year later.

Ready to streamline client assessments?

See how Pabau’s digital forms and client records hold every completed wheel. Automated reminders bring the client back for the three-month reassessment.

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Conclusion

The wheel earns its keep because it makes something diffuse countable in 15 minutes. Ten numbers in a client’s own handwriting are harder to argue with than any amount of discussion about balance.

The judgment call is what happens next. Pick one domain rather than five, and let the neighboring scores rise on their own. Environment tends to move fastest, which makes it a fair place to start with a client who needs an early win.

The second wheel is where the value lands, and that only happens if the first one is still findable in three months. Book a demo to see how Pabau files each completed assessment in the client record and schedules the reassessment for you.

Continue your research

Want a reflection sheet rather than a rating scale? The self-care wheel asks two open questions in each of eight sections, which suits clients who freeze when asked for a number.

Need to know what is driving the low scores? The personal values list helps a client name the five to ten values a wheel session keeps circling around.

Looking for something to build on after the wheel? The strengths list gives clients the vocabulary to describe what already works, which balances a sheet full of low ratings.

Ready to turn the low domains into a plan? The life coaching template structures goals, actions, and review dates once the wheel has told you where to start.

Frequently asked questions