Finding the One Change That Changes Everything
How an ancient circle can show you where to focus for the biggest difference in your health, relationships, and happiness
By Kevin Brough, M.A., MAMFT
When You Want to Feel Better but Don’t Know Where to Start
Have you ever stood in your own life and thought, Something needs to change—I just don’t know what?
Maybe you’re sleeping fine but feel disconnected from the people you love. Maybe your relationships are rich but your body is running on empty. Maybe everything looks “fine” on the outside, yet a quiet restlessness tells you that you’re surviving rather than thriving. When that feeling shows up, most of us do one of two things: we try to fix everything at once and burn out, or we freeze and fix nothing at all.
I’m Kevin Brough, a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist at Ascend Counseling & Wellness in St. George, Utah. In more than twenty years of working with people in recovery, families in crisis, and adults seeking deeper healing, I’ve learned something simple but powerful: you cannot transform what you cannot see. Before you can change your life, you need a clear, honest map of it. That’s exactly what the Sacred Balance Wheel™ is designed to give you.
Health Was Never Just About the Body
For a long time, our culture treated health as a problem of the body alone, & as something you only “fix” at the doctor’s office. But the research has been telling a different story for decades. The World Health Organization (1948) defined health not as the mere absence of disease, but as a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being. The biopsychosocial model that followed made the case that biology, psychology, and our social world are inseparable—and that treating one while ignoring the others rarely works for long (Engel, 1977).
This matters enormously for mental and behavioral health. Psychiatrist Roger Walsh (2011) reviewed the evidence and concluded that “therapeutic lifestyle changes”—things like exercise, nutrition, relationships, recreation, relaxation, time in nature, and spiritual involvement—can be as effective as medication or psychotherapy for many people, yet remain underused. In other words, the ordinary, everyday domains of your life are not separate from your mental health. They are your mental health, working quietly in the background.
When I sit with a client who is anxious or depleted, we rarely find the answer in a single place. We find it in the relationships among the parts of their lives. A person sleeping four hours a night will struggle to regulate emotion, no matter how much insight they gain in session. Someone starved for genuine connection will feel a flatness that no productivity hack can touch. Everything is related—which is precisely the wisdom at the heart of the Sacred Balance Wheel.
An Ancient Circle, Offered as a Gift
The Sacred Balance Wheel grows out of the teachings of the Medicine Wheel, a sacred symbol held by many Indigenous nations of North America. I want to honor where this comes from. The framework I draw on was shaped especially by The Sacred Tree, created by the Four Worlds Development Project as a handbook of Native spirituality and self-discovery (Bopp, Bopp, Brown, & Lane, 1989). It was first developed to support healing in tribal communities and was later offered, in the authors’ words, to all members of the human family seeking personal growth.
The Medicine Wheel teaches that a whole human being has four aspects—spiritual, emotional, physical, and mental—and that we flourish only when we tend to all four. Different nations order the four directions and their meanings differently; the teachings are living, not uniform. The version built into the Sacred Balance Wheel organizes them this way:
- East — Spiritual (the dawn, illumination, vision)
- South — Emotional (the heart, growth, relationship)
- West — Physical (the body, introspection, embodiment)
- North — Mental (clarity, learning, the wisdom of the elders)
Like the Sacred Tree with its roots, trunk, branches, and leaves all working together, you are not a collection of separate problems to be solved one at a time. You are one whole soul—and the goal is not perfection, but balance and harmony among the parts.
The Four Elements and Twelve Categories
To make this practical, the Sacred Balance Wheel divides each of the four elements into three life categories, creating twelve areas to honestly assess:
Spiritual (East): Spiritual Practices · Higher Purpose · Inner Peace
Emotional (South): Relationships · Emotional Health · Self-Expression
Physical (West): Nutrition · Movement · Rest & Renewal
Mental (North): Critical Thinking · Learning & Growth · Mindfulness
You rate yourself in each category from 0 to 100—not against anyone else, and not against some ideal of who you “should” be, but simply where you honestly are today. The wheel then draws the shape of your life back to you.
Reading Your Wheel: Where the Real Insight Lives
Here is where the assessment becomes a guide rather than just a quiz. When your twelve scores are plotted, they form a wheel—and the shape of that wheel is the message.
A round, full wheel rolls smoothly. A wheel with flat spots—areas scored low while others run high—is bumpy and exhausting to travel on, no matter how strong your high points are. This is why trying to optimize your strengths often doesn’t make you feel better: it’s the flat spots that determine how the whole wheel rides.
So instead of asking, What am I already good at? the Sacred Balance Wheel invites a more useful question: Which area, if I gave it loving attention, would make the biggest difference to everything else?
Often the answer surprises people. The exhausted executive discovers that the lowest point isn’t work or money—it’s Rest & Renewal, and restoring it lifts mood, patience, and relationships all at once. The devoted parent finds that years of pouring out have left Self-Expression and Inner Peace nearly empty, and that filling them makes them more present, not less. Because the elements influence one another—physical depletion clouds mental clarity, spiritual disconnection dims emotional well-being—a single well-chosen change tends to ripple outward across the wheel. This is the leverage point. This is the one change that changes everything.
How to Use the Wheel for Lasting Change
When clients work with this tool, I encourage a simple, gentle process:
- Set a sacred intention. Take a breath. This is not about judgment; it’s about seeing yourself clearly, with compassion.
- Rate each of the twelve categories honestly. Am I neglecting this area? Surviving? Thriving?
- Observe the shape of your wheel. Notice the flat spots. Notice which whole elements are strong and which are quietly starving.
- Reflect on the connections. Ask how your lowest areas might be affecting the rest.
- Choose just one focus area. Not twelve. One. Small, consistent change is what actually lasts—and protecting your most depleted resource first, rather than squeezing it in last, is what keeps it from being crowded out entirely.
- Return every quarter. Re-take the assessment every ninety days to see real, visible evidence of growth.
This last point is close to my heart. There is deep encouragement in watching a flat spot fill in over a season. Balance is not a destination you arrive at once; it is a practice you return to, like tending a garden through its seasons. Naming what you’ll work toward, then choosing it on purpose, is the difference between a life that happens to you and a life you design. That is the whole idea behind the LifeScaping™ system this assessment belongs to—moving from reactive survival to intentional living.
You’re Not Behind—You’re Just Getting Honest
In my years doing this work, I’ve sat with so many people who felt the way you might feel right now: stretched thin, vaguely “off,” unsure where to begin. Many have felt exactly that. They found that a single honest look at the whole wheel cut through the overwhelm and showed them where to put their energy. And I believe you will find the same: clarity is closer than it seems, and that the most meaningful change usually starts with one well-chosen step.
Self-determination research indicates that lasting motivation grows when change feels like your choice and is connected to what genuinely matters to you (Ryan & Deci, 2000). The Sacred Balance Wheel is built to give you exactly that: not a prescription handed down, but a clear map you read for yourself, so the next step feels like coming home to your own priorities.
Take Your First Look
You can complete the Sacred Balance Wheel™ assessment for free, right now, at www.visionlogic.org/balance.html. Give yourself fifteen quiet minutes, answer honestly, and let your wheel show you where the most impactful difference is waiting.
If what you discover stirs something deeper—if the flat spots point to old wounds, hard seasons, or patterns you’ve carried a long time—you don’t have to walk it alone. At Ascend Counseling & Wellness, we help people turn that first map into real, supported, lasting change.
Ready to talk? Reach out to Ascend Counseling & Wellness at 435-688-1111 or kevin@ascendcw.com.
Your life is yours to design. Let’s start by seeing it clearly.
Kevin Brough, MAMFT, is a licensed Marriage and Family Therapist at Ascend Counseling & Wellness in St. George, Utah, and the founder of the LifeScaping™ Therapeutic System. With more than twenty years of clinical experience, he specializes in trauma-informed care, addiction recovery, and helping people move from reactive survival to intentional, balanced living.
References
Bopp, J., Bopp, M., Brown, L., & Lane, P. (1989). The sacred tree: Reflections on Native American spirituality (3rd ed.). Lotus Press.
Engel, G. L. (1977). The need for a new medical model: A challenge for biomedicine. Science, 196(4286), 129–136. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.847460
Ryan, R. M., & Deci, E. L. (2000). Self-determination theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being. American Psychologist, 55(1), 68–78. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.1.68
Walsh, R. (2011). Lifestyle and mental health. American Psychologist, 66(7), 579–592. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021769
World Health Organization. (1948). Constitution of the World Health Organization. World Health Organization.
© 2025 VisionLogic, LLC. The Sacred Balance Wheel™ and LifeScaping™ are part of the VisionLogic assessment suite. “Clarity, Balance & Meaning.”
Balance Your Health 