The Life Pie and Finding Work You Love

Do you want to find work that makes you feel energized and excited instead of drained and exhausted?

If you answered “yes”, this exercise is the first step. It’s a great tool for beginning the process of becoming aware of what’s working in your life and what is not, and where you want to start making changes.

I call it the Life Pie Exercise.

The purpose of this short exercise is to help you take a step back from your life and gain some perspective to see where you want to focus your energy. It takes less than 10 minutes.

Get out a blank piece of paper.

Draw a big circle on the paper, about as big as your palm. Draw a horizontal line to divide the circle in two halves. Now draw a vertical line to divide the circle into 4 quadrants. Now draw a big X through the circle to divide it even further into 8 pieces.

It should look like this:

Next, in each of the 8 parts of the circle, write the 8 most important aspects of your life. Examples could include: “Romantic relationship”, “Family”, “Work”, “Being outside”, etc.

Once you have filled all 8 of the pieces with something that is important to you, rank each of those eight things on a scale from 0-10:

10 means “I am 100% satisfied with this aspect of my life, it brings me energy and a sense of fulfillment”

0 means “I am completely unfulfilled by this aspect of my life, it drains me”

5 means “I’m somewhat satisfied with this aspect of my life, it’s neutral”

Create a dot in each piece of the pie with the ranking, if it is a 0, the dot would be exactly in the center of the circle and if it’s a 10, the dot will be on the outside border of the circle. A ranking of 5 would create a dot that is in the middle of the triangle, halfway between the center of the circle and the outside border.

In this example, Family is ranked as a 5, while Health is ranked as a 1

Once you have ranked all 8 categories and have dots in each triangle, connect all the dots from one piece to the next like a spoke inside a bigger wheel. If you had ranked everything as exactly a 5, for example, then you would see a smaller circle halfway inside the larger circle.

If your life was filled with joy and fulfillment, you would see a pretty big circle inside the larger circle because most aspects of your life would be ranked as 8, 9 or 10. Instead, if you’re anything like I was when I first did this exercise, you may see one or two aspects of your life which are a lot lower than all the others. Before you start getting depressed about this and beating yourself up, I want you to pause for a minute and take a few deep breaths and change your body position so you’re sitting in a different way. Breath In and Out, long, deep breaths.

I want you to shut your eyes and take 3 more deep breaths and ask yourself the following question when you’re done breathing. Tell yourself the absolute truth when you answer this question. Ask this question out loud: “What is the ONE aspect of my life that I most want to improve? Which single part would have the greatest impact on my entire life if I were to enhance just that one area?” It doesn’t have to be the lowest ranking area that you most want to improve, be open to hearing a different answer and you might be surprised by the result.

Keep breathing in and out while you listen for the answer.

Once you’ve discovered this area, open your eyes.

Next, take whichever area you just identified and summarize, in the most empowered way possible, what is limiting that aspect of your life. What do I mean by “empowered”? I mean be honest and take responsibility. What this does NOT mean is going into victim/villain mode by complaining “oh, my relationships are awful because my mom never loved me the way I needed her to and she’s impossible to deal with”.

Instead, try to see the truth about how you really feel about that aspect of your life. Allow yourself to be vulnerable, sad, angry, lonely – whatever it is you’re actually feeling and turn that into a statement of truth. For example: “I have deep sadness about my relationship with my mom and believe it affects everything in my life.” Make a statement that has no blame or criticism of yourself or anyone else. Write that statement down underneath the circle.

GREAT WORK! You just put your entire life in perspective and discovered the one area that would most improve your overall happiness. Not a bad day’s work, done in 10 min!

Vanessa Loder