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Self-reflection and identifying the areas that need improvement in your life are essential to becoming happier and more successful. Lawrina created the wheel of life to improve every area of lawyers’ lives. Our team developed a pie chart template where each slice represents a significant category of a legal professional’s life under the meaningful slogan The Year of Care.
The wheel of life is a visual representation of how well different areas of your life are balanced. Looking at them, you can assess how you distribute your life energy among sectors. Sometimes the life balance wheel can show you that your focus lies in the wrong area, and you can think about what will help you find the right balance.
Before completing the exercise, it is essential to clear your mind from preconceived notions. Many people start to choose, considering what they think their life should be like. The exercise of wheel life assessment will be the most effective if you are honest with yourself.
Clearing your mind and seeing the real picture is a good place to start. These methods can assist you:
1. Adopting a beginner’s mind
It is no news that our mind creates boundaries to our creative potential. The way to overcome it is to look at your life as a beginner or develop divergent thinking. Creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson talked about the use of a divergent mindset in his TED Talk. The key is to look at ordinary objects or processes from a different perspective. This way, you can open your mind and refresh your mindset. When we learn something new and establish stability, we become complacent and lose the freshness of focus on the unique experience that beginners have. This method aims to return to your beginner state and look at the thing with fresh sight.
2. Finding your center
Surrounded by the stress of everyday life, we forget to concentrate on our inner selves and connect to the center of our well-being. However, there are methods to come back to your center. If you feel you are not centered, it is helpful to try mindfulness meditation to get still for a few moments and listen to yourself. To stay in this state of mindfulness for the entire day, you might want to find a space for short meditation sessions during work.
3. Grounding yourself
The grounding practice is common for reducing stress and increasing concentration. Most of the time, we feel ungrounded concerning ourselves with the things surrounding us, and we feel anxiety or struggle with accepting the things we cannot change. Even during the wheel assessment task, we can find ourselves unable to concentrate on the categories enough to measure them. The grounding practice can help you return to your physical body and concentrate on something consistently stable and still.
Breath exercise is a simple one you can do in any place. Close your eyes and feel the air entering your nose and coming to your lungs during the inhale. Then, when you exhale, notice how the air leaves your lungs and exits through your nose or mouth.
Being aware of your body can help you instantly get calmer. While you sit or stand, start to notice the sensations in the bottom of your feet, analyze them and concentrate on what you feel.
Placing the hand on the crown of your head also helps. And it is very simple. You can also close your eyes while you do that to avoid distractions.
Sometimes a cold shower can do wonders with your body and mind, so two to three minutes of standing under cold water can shake you and help you focus.
The wheel, also called a circle of life, is an exercise to measure our focus. For example, you can create your custom wheel of life and find you are putting too much energy into your career or, on the contrary, giving very little attention to your professional life. After seeing the results, you can ask yourself questions like whether this aligns with your goals or what you should improve to make your life more balanced and happy.
We wondered what the perfect energy distribution for lawyers would look like. How much do they pay attention to mental health, their approach to skills development, or how much time they spend with their family and friends. Like any professional, lawyers should pay enough attention to every area of life. Ideally, the wheel should look evenly balanced around the inside.
The categories on the wheel of life form the skeleton of your overall life areas segmentation. These categories’ names are Areas of Focus, the places where your life focus lies. Generally, all those areas are pretty similar because we all need very similar things to achieve balance. We decided to customize our wheel of life for lawyers and create categories specifically for them.
Productivity. Procrastination is not always evil, but when you put off important cases often, it is not good for your productivity. You could miss billable hours or court deadlines. Try to assess how productive you were last year, and you will see whether you should fight procrastination in 2022.
Mental Health. Physical health is important, but you shouldn’t forget about the state of your mental health. Try to remember how much time you paid for your mental well-being or whether you took care to stay calm and at ease.
Self-Branding. What have you done for the promotion of your brand as a lawyer in 2021? Self-branding nowadays isn’t a hard process at all. You only need to pay enough attention to your social media or create a blog.
Community. Being a member of a group and communicating with like-minded people is as important a part of life as anything else. Think of the way you interacted with your community in 2021, and maybe you will decide that next year you will fill it with more social events.
Friends and Family. We’re working so hard we often feel that postponing this evening with family isn’t a big problem. However, no matter how busy you are, always find a way to see your loved ones; they are more important than any work project.
Time Management. Managing time efficiently is a key to success and a balanced life. Do you think that in 2021 you distributed your time effectively?
Creativity. Working in law often may not seem creative, but you can always find a way to express your creativity with hobbies. Sometimes you can combine your hobbies with work and that will help you both with time management and self-branding, because social media and blogs open doors to a lot of creative deals.
New Skills. Development and self-improvement makes us better people and professionals. Maybe there’s something you wanted to learn for a long time but didn’t find time, the wheel of life will indicate whether you should pay it some attention.
Wheel of life balance is a powerful tool that can work magic for your time management and goal-achieving.
1. The wheel is a round chart with separate sections identified for every area of your life.
2. To fill the wheels out, simply put from 1 to 10 points in each category to identify how much effort you invested in it during the year (1 is the smallest effort, 10 is the largest).
3. The wheel’s goal is to make sure your life becomes balanced. This is a visualization of how you distribute your energy.
Anastasiia Pozynich - idea creator
Inna Ptitsyna - provides the community with a sense of belonging
Maryna Semchenko - social impact and spread of the word
Mariia Synytska - the master of meaningful content
Serhii Ludvichenko - design dreamer