Zig's Wheel (Part 1)

Zig's Wheel - Part 1

Some wheels help
you become a box
turtle.

We, as humans, are complex beings (no duh, you're saying, and rightfully so).  Our complex selves,
when we get married and have children multiply that complexity.  As we try to make sense of ourselves, our interactions, and our totalities, it can be important to seek first to understand in the words of Steven Covey.  One way that many smart folks have suggested looking at these complexities is through our roles.  Towards the front of this journey in time was motivational speaker Zig Ziglar's and his Wheel of Life, where he proposed the various buckets (career, financial, spiritual, physical, intellectual, family, and social).  That may be a great starting point for you, or perhaps the more customized to your specific roles (husband, wife, father, mother, employer, employee, etc) as advocated by Covey and others.  

For today, we'll unpack a few paradigms of Ziglar's Wheel of Life of how we see it.  If you Google search the topic, you typically end up with a clean, segmented pie graph of sorts.  

Others have the take that you can grade yourself on a scale of, say 1-10 in each dimension, and we'll dive into that in another post, with another set of tools we've created.  In that example, you can get the sense that if you've got a few areas that are a "10", and a couple areas that are a "2," you end with a pretty bumpy ride on your misshapen wheel using the metaphor of the wheel as a balanced life to go down the road on.  You can see how if you graded, then plotted out and shaded in your various circles, it'd be surprising if they made a nicely shaped wheel based on our interests, seasons of life, investments, etc.  

Side note: (We took the liberty of adding in health to sort of round out more even, or at least easier to draw, pieces of pie).  Part of our push at Stand in the Arena is the idea that you build your systems, your wheels, your definitions.  For example, you may look at finance and define "a 10" (see below) as keeping up with the Jones, buried to your neck in debt but "looking rich" because society, through advertising, tells us that's the right answer.  You may also look at that same pie sector and define the same "10" as the exact opposite - living a frugal life where you spend very little, but have a great safety security net despite your hoopty car.  We'd encourage you to build your own pie, with your own roles, your own definitions of success, and your own grading scale rubric to make it the most meaningful to you and your family.   

For example, through college, I was a pretty serious and competitive runner.  My physical "score" would have been a near 10, and I was pretty focused on personal development (10 again).  At the same time, I was probably closer to a 2 on social, perhaps a 5 on family, and a 3 on spiritual.  The point is, that we almost always live out of balance.  We can also run "out of balance" for some time, for a sprint, or a season but not long term without some heavy wear and tear. 

Some wheels make mom cringe at the 
ingenuity before you even get started.

Without constant course correction and intentional, introspective "grading" on a fairly routine basis (monthly, quarterly, annually on your birthday, etc), we can slowly slip out of alignment and end up causing considerable friction for us and those around us.  As the old Indian proverb goes about the young boy asking his grandfather which wolf (the good one or the evil one) would win in a fight, the sage grandfather tells him, "Whichever one you feed."  In a similar fashion, we can inflate/deflate various sectors with intentional work.  At points in our lives, we've sprinted for some time to achieve a particular goal, get through a particular degree program or whatnot.  At other points in life, we've been on cruise control in certain sectors.  As long as you're intentionally doing it, that's okay.  

Some roles involve 
reading to dogs.

If you picture life as a low-altitude flight through the mountains, it paints a picture of the reality of the risk involved.  The flight can be spectacular as you take in the sweeping vistas, experience the adrenaline in your stomach, and generally enjoy your day...if you're actually flying between the peaks and valleys.  Take your hands off the yoke (airplane speak for steering wheel) to go make yourself a sandwich and you end up as a splattered omelet in a pretty place.  The same goes for life, if you take for granted, or neglect a particular sector of life, it's not long before you lose your efficiency and ultimately head for a crash and burn.  

We've generally subscribed to the scaled wheel model above, but in researching a bit for this post, an idea hit me that the clean segmentation of the pieces of pie above are probably a bit far from the reality of most of our lives.  

More likely, your actual pie looks more like a series of interconnected, overlapping, and competitive
circles.  Our time, unlike our money, is finite and therefore a "zero-sum game" where you end up robbing Peter to pay Paul, where, through our calendar, we can only "create" more time by investing it more intentionally, not actually warp it unless you have a Delorian in the garage.  In this example, some of the circles, just like the pie pieces, demand more attention for a season.  Some become islands off by themselves, unconnected to the others.  Others become misshapen egg forms that are getting compressed between different circles.  And, some are on fire due to an emergency (e.g. heart attack) and necessitate attention RIGHT NOW.  

Our last model starts to look like the old rocks, golf balls, pebbles, sand, and coffee skit, where we end up with a series of miniature circles interconnected to form the overall big circles, or Big Rocks (First Things according to Covey).  If you picture how messy real life is, you begin to get a sense of what your life might look like modeled out.  Various fires, various little circles in big circles, the occasionally spilled circles.  If we modeled this across the dimension of time, it can begin to look like juggling a 3D chess board while it is coated in lighter fluid.  

But...it doesn't have to be.  We'll continue to unpack some of the tools that we use (and have translated) from the frontlines of various disasters to helpfully help your family find some peace and serenity along the way.  

As we sort of wrap it up here in Part 1 of Zig's Wheel, we want you to think about the Arena you're building that you're committing to stand within.  We hope that the Ziglar Wheel model can serve as a bit of a guide to help you organize your thoughts, that we'll lead toward words, take those into actions, morph them into habits, and ultimately you'll end up living a much more intentional and likely fulfilling life through the process. 

With you in the arena, from ours to yours...Happy Trails!

Call to Action: 

• Pick out one role each day for a week and discuss with your family where you are at in that role right now and where you want to be.  Then pick out one action item in each role to commit to for a month.  
• 1 - ___________________ 
• 2 - ___________________
• 3 - ___________________
• Discussion: Consider what you/your family could/would/should (level of commitment) and start/stop/sustain (action) in each role.  

Further Reading, Motivation, and References:

- Zig's Wheel - https://www.ziglar.com/articles/the-wheel-of-life/ 

- Made for More Coaching - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w99LZ50vaUc