Measure Your Well-being To Manage It - Cantril's Ladder of Success

As the saying goes, “you can’t manage what you don’t measure” and our own health and well-being is no exception.

To know what progress looks like, we first need a starting line.

Hadley Cantril, a Princeton University psychologist, developed Cantril’s Ladder of Success, a self-anchoring scale, that measures general life satisfaction by using visualizations of your best life and worst life and then rating each for present and future.

Every person’s definition of well-being is unique to the individual. A self-anchoring scale allows you to determine the definition of your “best” life. Your vision of your best life varies wildly from your partner’s vision, your friend’s vision, your family’s vision. Only you can define your best life.

So, how do we use Cantril’s Ladder of Success?

Read through the below, imagine each scenario and rate based on the scale provided.

Imagine a ladder with steps numbered from zero at the bottom to 10 at the top. The top of the ladder (10) represents the best possible life for you and the bottom of the ladder (0) represents the worst possible life for you.

On which step of the ladder would you say you personally feel you stand at this time? (present)

On which step do you think you will stand about five years from now? (future)

Now that you have the two ratings, present and future, in your mind or written down, match your ratings with the result categories that Gallup developed based on hundreds of thousands of responses across their surveys.

This is just the starting line but it provides a simple and effective measurement for where we stand today.

Establishing a full well-being baseline requires more reflection on each of the five factors of well-being: physical, mental, social, professional, and financial.

The next article will dive into each factor of well-being and how it could be assessed. Cantril’s Ladder gives a high-level view of well-being whereas reflecting on the five factors will give us more detail. All of which is the discovery process that leads to developing small action steps to improve well-being which leads to better outcomes professionally and personally.

Well wishes,

Kayla

If you enjoy this content and feel that it would benefit others, I would love for you to pass along to friends, family, and colleagues. Thank you!

P.S. Our commitment to well-being extends to your inbox. No spam, no affiliate links, and your information will never ever be shared with a 3rd party.