Earlier this year, the Program Chair for the Raleigh Chapter of the International Coach Federation asked me to be the theme coordinator for the Q3 programs. The Board selected themes for each quarter and with the third quarter’s focus on Tending Your Personal Landscape, she felt that aligned well with my background and interest. After some self-reflection, I agreed, seeing it as a mutually beneficial opportunity.

As I spent more time with the topic and talked to various people, I realized there were many different definitions of a “personal landscape” and they vary from person to person. Some referred to it as inner landscape, others chose the verbiage personal landscape. I absorbed all the viewpoints to focus my efforts on the Q3 programs.

I then looked back on my own healing and learning journey. I started to see that there are different facets to tending your personal landscape, and they create a framework within which a coach operates. In actuality, it is a framework within which we all operate.

I returned to a tool that coaches frequently use – the life wheel. It breaks our lives into a pie chart of key components including health, career, finances, home and surroundings, relationships, fun, and the like. Back in 2016, I had created a variation of the life wheel for corporate; one that paralleled a personal life wheel. Where the personal life wheel component was called health I considered the corporate equivalent to be morale, relationship could equal collaboration, and so on.

My personal journey started with physical health and with all the different approaches I experienced I found it difficult to contain it within one pie slice of the wheel. I realized that the same concept I used in creating a corporate life wheel could be applied to physical health. For instance, under physical body people are told to exercise, eat well, get plenty of rest, drink lots of water. Why not create a way of tracking all the various elements of working on our physical bodies? The results look like the picture in this blog.

Consider that we live in our physical body and are connected to our spirituality and soul. We then experience the world through the filters of our emotional and mental experiences and apply strategies and structures to manage the direct experience of our daily lives. Ultimately, there is more than one personal landscape with multiple facets contained in each, and it can be helpful to use a variation of the life wheel to understand your own experience.

Curious to learn more and explore how it applies in your life?  Please contact me for a complimentary consultation.

July 2020 © Systems of Change, LLC