Sometimes you know that something’s wrong – you feel just blah, but you’re not sure what’s wrong or what to do about it. One of my favorite tools is a self-assessment pie, which I first saw in Julia Cameron’s book, The Artist’s Way. The idea is to rate your fulfillment in several categories to see what areas of your life need addressing. This is not a remedy for depression, of course. For that you should seek professional help. But it can help if you’re just out of sorts. For instance, here’s an assessment I made on a rather down day:

The smallest circle represents unfulfillment, while the area of the outside circle represents complete fulfillment. As you can see, I feel pretty good about the relationship with my son, and with my work, and I feel I’ve been living in my life mission. I’m feeling rather low when it comes to my friends, fun & adventure, and my spirituality.

A note on the categories: These are the categories that are most important to me. You might choose other categories to look at, such as finances or extended family (Cameron’s includes play and romance).

So what do you do with this information? For each item that needs improvement, come up with two or three things that could help. In my example, I could be more fulfilled with friends if I called friends to talk, or invited them to coffee or lunch. For fun and adventure, I might go dancing with my wife or do something I’ve never done before. For spirituality, I wrote down meditate and walk in nature. The first thing I decided to do was call friends and invite them to go for a walk with me in the woods, at a trail I’d never been to before, thus taking care of all three areas, plus self-care, at the same time. As it turns out, the four friends I called were all busy that day, but I did go for a walk in the woods and felt better in the end.

Life Pie for Visioning Your Life
The pie can also be used in the long-term, to vision the life you want and to see where you need to spend time creating balance. Before spending time visioning each area, be sure to go through the mission discovery process. Then, with your life mission in hand, you can spend time visioning each area of your life. For instance in the area of self-care, I vision myself as healthy with an able body and mind into my nineties. At this point don’t spend too much time on the actions needed to fulfill this vision. The vision for the area should not go counter to your life mission, and when you get all the various visions down, you may find some areas that require compromise. For instance, a vision of a lawyer making partner in a firm may run counter to a vision of spending lots of time with family. That’s one of the main points of this exercise, to highlight conflicts, get clear on your values and priorities, and make a clear and conscious choice about the whole life that you will create for yourself. 

After getting the vision down in each area, you can work on general action steps needed to fulfill the vision, and break that down further into short-term steps you’re going to take.