If you are a coach or a consultant, then a Wheel of Life is an excellent tool to have your clients see where they stand on multiple dimensions of their life or business. That awareness becomes the first step towards making changes and / or improving.
You can use it as a coaching or consulting tool, but also as a sales lead generation or sales follow up mechanism. A typical Wheel of Life is made up of “rating scale” type questions. For example, respondents choose their score on each question from 1 to 10.
Then at the end, the respondent can see their scores plotted on a polar chart. This makes for a very powerful and visual way of looking at the entire subject area.
Customizing this Wheel of Life Setup
In many cases, you may want to customize this basic wheel of life set up to personalize your approach for optimal customer experience. For example:
- Showing multiple choice questions instead of a horizontal slider.
- Rolling up scores by dimensions, instead of per question – for example, two or more questions may roll up into career.
- Showing comparison benchmarks to users. This is typically used for business assessments and interactive content. For example, here’s how other CEOs rated in your industry.
Customizing is fairly simple. In this post we will walk you through this process.
Step 1: Update Your Rating Bands
In case you want to use multiple choice questions, then you will need to update your rating bands. That’s because a typical rating setup allows for scores ranging from 1 to 10. But for a multiple choice question, you’ll probably have 3, 4 or 5 choices to select from. That means you need to hide some rating bands from showing up. Go into your rating bands section, and click on the “Scoring Details” button. 
Then, modify the mapped points for the rating bands as needed. For example, if you decide to have 4 response for each question, but want to still show the scores on a 10 tick polar chart, then select the scores of 4 of the bands as 1, 3, 7, 10, and select zero (0) for the other bands.
That’s because, the number of bands you have is the number of circles on your polar chart. That’s why the top score on your bands should not be more than the number of bands (in our case that’s 10).
That’s pretty much it. No need to change anything else at all for the rating bands.
Step 2: Rolling Up Scores by Dimensions
A typical wheel of life, shows each question and its score on the polar chart.
However, there are cases where you may want to have multiple questions that roll up into a single dimension. For example, you may have 3 questions under career, and 2 questions under family. For business coaches or consultants, these could be 3 questions on marketing, and 3 on technology among other dimensions.
Doing this is easy. First, in the options section, select the option to show dimensions when the users see their results. Showing by dimensions means that questions will not be mapped to dimensions instead of their scores being shown on their own.
Now, in the dimensions section, set up your dimensions. These dimensions will show up on the polar chart, instead of each question.
Finally, when you set up your questions, select the dimension for each question, and of course, select the type of the question as a multiple choice question.
You can leave the question type as horizontal slider as well if you just want the default scoring from 1 to 10. (don’ change the scoring details of the rating bands in that case.) If there are multiple questions for a dimension, then an average of the scores will be taken.
Step 3: Setting Up Your Answer Choices
The final step is to now map your answer choices to each band. That’s very simple too.
When you create a new answer choice, just map them to the right rating band. These results will automatically roll up to the right dimensions.
Conclusion
These 3 simple steps should help you customize your Wheel of Life for both business, personal, and life coaches.
Wheel of Life assessments are a powerful way to help your customers. They are also useful in sales lead generation and sales follow up scenarios. Every successful engagement starts with self awareness and bench-marking.
Next steps
If a Wheel of Life seems to be for you, then there is nothing better than testing it out! Get started for free and craft your first assessment. We are here to help you be successful.
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