Life Areas
Life Areas are a mental starting point for helping us define what is important to us, and help us maintain balance in life.
Some life coaches use the concept of building support pillars as a metaphor for Life Areas, in that they help to keep our lives stable.
This article on the site dumblittleman.com makes a great analogy that you may have a number of pillars in life, and may even get along with one or two missing. But if you have too many low pillars, or too many missing pillars your house is in danger of falling down around you.
Breaking down our lives into a few high level pillars, gives us a relatively simple list to keep an eye on, to pay attention to. These Life Area pillars give us a base on which to define the goals we want and need to set, in order to progress in life in a balanced way.
A good list of Life Areas helps to balance our lives, so it’s good practice to ensure your list of Life Areas includes suggestions by the experts. In doing so, you will begin to think about areas you may not have considered before . . . and that’s a GOOD THING!
Starting from a position that our whole being is made up of our Body, our Mind and our Spirit, we suggest the following life areas to cover all 3 of these bases.
Our top 10 Life Areas
| Life Area: | Body/Mind/Spirit | Why? |
| 1. Health & fitness | Body | Lead a healthy lifestyle |
| 2. Well-being | Mind and Spirit | Look after our mental needs |
| 3. Relationships | Body, Mind and Spirit | For our relatedness, emotional and intimacy needs |
| 4. Family | Mind and Spirit | Relatedness, guidance and care of others |
| 5. Career | Mind and Spirit | Finding meaning in the work we do |
| 6. Finances | Body and Mind | Stability and security |
| 7. Spiritual / Religion | Spirit | Morals, values, and guidance |
| 8. Environment | Body and Spirit | Connect with mother earth and looking after the world around us |
| 9. Giving back | Mind and Spirit | Relatedness, and helping those around us |
| 10. Social | Body, Mind & Spirit | For life balance and interaction with others, relatedness, and having fun along the way |
Why is “Relatedness” a thing?
Relatedness is one of the core elements of Self-Determination Theory. Relatedness is our inherent will & desire to interact, connected and care for, other people.
For this reason we refer to Relatedness in the Family, Giving Back, and Social life areas, as each of these is about us and our connections with other people.
Here, we discuss Life Areas in more detail, starting with how to define your life areas and moving to a useful tool – the Wheel of Life – which can also be used to assess your Satisfaction Level and life Balance.
Define your Life Areas
In the previous section we discusses the reason and benefits for using Life Areas to break down our lives into sections Each ‘section’ allows us to mentally focus on one at a time in helping to define the :- Vision of the future you Your Values and Why A high level
