By Phac Le Tuan, Certified Integrative Nutrition Coach, Breathing Science Evangelist.
Who wouldn't want to be happy?
We all want happiness, but ask ten people about their definitions of "Happiness" and you'll probably get twelve different answers or more, as being happy is a very personal feeling. Since Ed Diener, a.k.a."Dr. Happiness," who realized the elusiveness of trying to measure happiness and studied instead how to measure "Subjective Well-Being" (SWB), psychologists have defined SWB as a "broad concept, that includes experiencing high levels of pleasant emotions and moods, low levels of negative emotions and moods, and high life satisfaction."1
The Quest for a Life Balance Assessment Tool
The need for a tool to assess life balance within this SWB concept is not new, and there have been many attempts at such an assessment tool, with a variety of similar-sounding names: from "Wheel of Life" to "Wheel of Wellness" to Joshua Rosenthal's "Circle of Life" which is, based on my personal research, the most thought-through concept so far, with 12 areas covering concrete life activities. The Circle of Life tool is probably widely used by Integrative Nutrition Health Coaches to help clients assess areas of imbalance in their lives.
However, upon deeper analysis, there are some important limitations to the Circle of Life as it is currently defined: 1) There is no clear relationship between the 12 areas of life and Abraham Maslow's fundamental concept of Hierarchy of Needs; 2) There is no room to take into account a person's emotional attribution of relative importance for each of those 12 areas of life.
The Well-Being Compass™ Tool
The Well-Being Compass (WBC) was been developed as an extension to the Circle of Life to overcome such limitations and to ensure consistency, completeness, and structure to the whole set. It required rigorously mapping the 12 areas to the 6 layers of the Hierarchy of Needs, and taking into account the well-recognized Eastern philosophy duality concept of Yin-Yang within each layer, resulting in exactly 12 dimensions matching the 12 original areas of the Circle of Life.
The restructuring resulted in a different ordering of the 12 dimensions along the circle, with the two dimensions of the Physiological Needs at the base of Maslow's Hierarchy starting in the positions of 1 o'clock and 2 o'clock on a traditional clock face. From there, the successive dimensions mapping the upper layers of Maslow's Hierarchy follow in a clockwise fashion.
Example of a Well-Being Compass® In Use
As an example, let's look at the Belonging Needs layer of Maslow's Hierarchy in the diagram above. There are two dimensions in that layer, located at the 5 and 6 o'clock positions respectively in the example above: The Yin aspect, internally focused, is represented by Relationships, and the Yang aspect, externally focused, is represented by Social Life. All Yin dimensions are in a less saturated color than the Yang dimension within the same layer of Maslow's Hierarchy.
Relative Emotional Importance and Key Directions for Improvement
In addition to this strong structural foundation, the tool has been expanded into a compass, designed to provide the key directions where improvement priorities should be aimed. .Such directions are highlighted by the red needles at the center of the Compass in the hypothetical example above.
The red needles are computed by a proprietary algorithm taking into account not just the Satisfaction Score self-assigned by the user to each of the 12 dimensions, but also the emotional Importance Score they are assigning to each of the same 12 dimensions. This additional subjective attribute is critical to take into account a situation where, for example, a person has a low Satisfaction Score in the Finances dimension, but do not really care about it at that particular moment in their life. For such a person, it would not make sense yet to spend time and effort to find a better paying job if there are other areas that are more important to them and are low in satisfaction.
Personalized Compass
The Compass is further personalized to the specific situation of each user, who might prefer a different label for some dimensions, depending on where they are actually in their well-being journey. For example, a person struggling with lack of sleep would want to label the Functional Health dimension (at the 1 o'clock position) as Sleep instead, until they reach their own goal in that particular dimension.
In conclusion, the Well-Being Compass is a precious assessment tool designed to help health coaches assist their clients to quickly identify areas to focus on to bring back more balance in their lives and improve their well-being.