Goodbye Part 1 – Take Care of Your Foundation Dimension

Welcome everybody to the Live the 8Wise^TM Way podcast with me, Kim Rutherford, Psychotherapist, author and creator of the 8Wise^TM methodology for better mental health and wellbeing. I was at an event recently, in the last few days actually, and I was asked to be on a panel. Whilst I was on the panel there was a journalist wanting to ask me some questions about how you can look after your mental health and wellbeing whilst in the workplace and how I can support employers to do that. What he turned around and said to me is “Kim, as I read your book, I thought that basically what you’ve done is created the blueprint for better mental health and wellbeing” and I thought, what a wonderful way to look at 8Wise^TM, 8Wise^TM being the blueprint for better mental health and wellbeing. What a wonderful way to look at it, so to that particular journalist, Tony, thank you very much, I’ll be using that moving forward. But it brings me to the next stage.

This is episode 36 of the Live the 8Wise^TM Way podcast and the aim of the podcast was always, always, to provide a free resource for people who were struggling with their mental health and wellbeing and needed some help with recovery when they couldn’t necessarily access their own therapist, whether that just be due to where they’re based, waiting lists, cost, all of those things, and also to help those people who are very prevention focused, provide them with a methodology that can help them embed really good psychological wellbeing so they can prevent those mental health issues from potentially developing. Because, as we know, we want to have something in our lives that we can live by that helps us with our recovery and helps us with our prevention because we go through this continuum with our mental health, and we swing between the thriving and excelling elements of our mental health. Also we go down to crisis points from now on and it was interesting, whilst I was talking on this panel discussion and they were saying to me, what signs should we be looking for with regards to our staff’s mental health and my point was, take it for granted. It is happening, guaranteed your staff are struggling with mental health. Somebody at some stage is always struggling with their mental health so, rather than looking for the signs that prove it, you should just be looking at the levels that those people are experiencing at that time and implement strategies to support them, to recover from that. And for everybody else implement strategies to help them prevent that from happening to them.

So, it brings me to where I’m at now with regards to, as I said, this whole process. The whole process was to offer something for free, to offer a service that anybody could access through the podcast, to offer a service that links to the book, so it could take somebody through the book as if you were working with me directly, the podcast then supported the book, etc, etc. And we’ve done that. So, for me now, I feel like it’s the right time to end this particular series of the podcast about Live the 8Wise^TM Way, so not today though. Not today.

What I’m going to do is provide four final episodes that tie everything up that we’ve talked about in the last 35 episodes so far since June, and actually go through everything, recap certain elements to it making sure that you have everything you need in place right now to move forward in your life, whether that be to look after your mental health because you have been struggling or been experiencing mental health issues and you are needing to recover in some way, or if you are looking to use that prevention model and start really making your mental health and wellbeing a priority moving forward, and therefore implementing a very beautiful and personalized prevention strategy for yourself.

So this episode is the episode called Goodbye Part One, where we talk about taking care of your foundation dimension of what is 8Wise^TM, the blueprint for better mental health and wellbeing. Now, for those of you who have been with me through the beginning, you understand now that you know we talk about these eight areas of wellness and wellbeing, and lots of people talk about these eight areas of wellness and wellbeing, lots of people jump on the bandwagon about them, and rightfully so, we should be looking at them in our lives. But the key to the 8Wise^TM ways is about understanding those key eight elements of wellbeing, understanding their importance, understanding the psychology behind them, understanding the science behind them, and understanding the importance of them. That’s what 8Wise^TM is really all about.

But the other big element of 8Wise^TM and Living the 8Wise^TM Way and mastering that blueprint for your mental health and wellbeing is ultimately understanding that each of those elements should be taken care of in their own rights but, actually, if you stack them, if you stack the self-care linked to them, or if you are starting that recovery model, where do you start with them? Or if you’re starting that prevention model, where do you start with them? And that’s where the core four dimensions of 8Wise^TM really come into play.

Today we’re talking about Dimension One, which is the foundation dimension. And what I want you to remember with the foundation dimension, this is about your foundation of mental health and physical health. To have a healthy life, you need a healthy body, and you need a healthy mind, and that’s what the foundation dimension is all about. When I first looked at all of these dimensions and I was looking at how do I develop them, how do I create them, and I’ve got all of these eight elements and they all link in, how do I do it? And I was like, it’s too chaotic. Where do I start? These eight elements, where do I start? How do I know what the best thing to focus on is? And then I realized, well, actually, before I can start doing any of that real detailed piece of work about who I am, what my life needs, I need to make sure that I’m looking after the basics, and that’s what the foundation dimension is all about. It’s about looking after the basics through looking after your emotional wellness and your physical wellness.

Now, which one of these you choose to start with is entirely up to you. The beauty of them is you can do them side by side quite easily. So, a recap of what they are. Your emotional wellness is your ability to regulate your emotions so that you can manage anything that life throws at you. It means having really good tools in place to help you to manage yourself, manage your responses, and take control of the elements of life you can take control in. It’s about understanding your trigger points for your stress and implementing really effective stress management strategies for you. It’s about understanding your trigger points for anxiety and your trigger points for depression, and not only understanding what sets these off for you, but how you personally respond to them. What are your signs? What are your symptoms? What do you need to keep an eye out so that you know, okay, yes, I’m suffering right now, but it’s okay. I’ve identified it because I’ve got these tools to look after myself well with. The emotional wellness element is really all about knowing yourself so well on a psychological basis, on a mental basis, that you are able to identify what’s causing you your issues. You understand why it causes you your issues. You don’t run away from those emotions and those thought processes, instead, what you do is understand them. You use them for what they are, which is the messages that are trying to tell you something. and you use them effectively to either move forward through something, to problem solve something, but always to process something. That is ultimately what your emotional element is all about. Your emotional wellness element is all about that.

I like to think of it as all about emotional regulation. That when you understand how to read those core messages that are coming through the feelings that you have, that are coming through the emotions that you have, instead of running away from them, instead of hiding from them, instead of suppressing them, you sit there, you acknowledge them, you understand what they are so you understand the difference between anger and the plethora of different emotions linked to it for example. You understand exactly which one, the specifics of those emotions, and you are able to then sit there and go, okay, this is what happened today. That is why this particular emotion has been triggered. Therefore, I need to focus on how do I take control or resolve this particular situation, and if I can’t control this situation, if I can’t resolve this situation, then I need to come to peace with this situation.

So, the tools that I’ve provided in the book 8Wise^TM Ways To a Healthier, Happier Mind, my favourite tool for this one is using a journal and also using the Emotions Wheel to help you to understand yourself better, to help you to understand what you are feeling, why you are feeling it, and how you can resolve it. Another brilliant tool and method I like to use with these is anything to do with distorted thinking and cognitive distortions and understanding what you are saying to yourself. What is the narrative in your head? What are those sentences that you find yourself telling yourself over and over again? It’s about understanding what’s developed as your conditioned mindset because your conditioned mindset has been developed over time and it is what navigates you and creates those thought processes.

And I’m a big fan of the conditioned mindset tools that I’ve got on my website www.8wise.co.uk for the 8Wise^TM Ways. What you can find out there is the tools that will help you to manage that narrative to make sure that, if that narrative internal voice isn’t working for you, learn whose voice it is. Where did those sentences come from? Where did those statements come from? And remember, just because we think it doesn’t mean it’s true, we don’t have to accept it, we are allowed to challenge it. We are allowed to push it away, we are allowed to reset that thinking, we are allowed to reset that narrative, and we are allowed to move forward with a new conditioned mindset. When we can do all of that, we’ve really mastered what emotional wellness is all about and that’s what it’s ultimately all about. How do we take care of ourselves, how do we look after our emotional wellbeing, through mastering the art of emotional regulation, mastering the art of overcoming, overriding, resetting our brain through those negative narratives, this distorted thinking that we have. How do we learn to manage our stress? How do we learn to manage our anxiety? How do we learn to manage our low mood, so they don’t take over for too long? It’s okay to experience these things, but we don’t want to live in these things. We don’t want to be defined as a person with anxiety, we want to be a human who experiences anxiety. We don’t want to be living with depression, we want to be a person, a human being, who experiences depression because that’s the truth of the human mind. We’re able to experience all of these things, but we don’t have to accept them as our norm. We can do something about it. We can make the changes that mean we can move forward from them. And that’s how we manage our mental health and wellbeing with emotional wellness.

Now, the other side of the foundation dimension is our physical wellness and in the beginning, and I say this a lot in a lot of the talks that I do, in a lot of the trainings that I do, and it can get me to talk about it anywhere, I always go, oh, you know, the physical wellness is about all the boring stuff. But as I’ve grown up a lot, and I’ve gone through my own journey and my own process, and for those of you who know, I’ve lost nearly a hundred pounds in weight due to going through my own journey with physical wellness, now I start to understand that physical wellness isn’t all the boring stuff at all. If anything, physical wellness is probably the most exciting one because it’s really where we ground ourselves, it is really where we say this body is worth protecting, this vessel that I’m here in, that I’m lucky enough to have been given, this I need to take care of it. And knowing that there are ways to do that, and I can appreciate for a lot of people it feels really confusing when it comes to our physical wellness when you look on the internet about physical wellness it’s all very much diet focused. Diet and exercise, diet and exercise, and it’s so much bigger than that. You are bigger than your body size. That sounds a bit strange when I say it like that, or should I say you are more than your body size. You are more than just the diet you choose to have. There are other elements of your physical wellness to take into consideration as well.

So, when we look at our physical wellness, what we are looking at, you shouldn’t move away from the number one, which has to be nutrition. We are human beings that function on energy, and the majority of our energy comes from the fuel that we feed our bodies with, which is our food. And so therefore, the nutrition is probably the most important one to be focusing on, mainly because we have to eat many times a day, and therefore we have many opportunities a day to provide ourselves with the best nutrition to fuel our bodies in order to be able to function effectively. Also, nutrition has such a knock-on effect to so many of the hormones and chemicals that we have in our body that then impacts our mind, and this is why physical wellness and emotional wellness comes so closely together, because your emotional wellness impacts your physical wellness, because when you feel something emotionally, you feel it physically. That’s why you get the tension in your shoulders, why you get palpitations, why you can’t breathe properly, etc, etc, but equally as much when you feel something physically, when something isn’t quite going right. So, for example, when you’re not giving yourself the correct amount of nutrition that you might need, or you’re not giving yourself the foods that work with your hormones well, or you’re giving yourself the foods that work with your hormones badly, for example, that can trigger mental health issues as well. So, if you think about eating foods that impact your serotonin levels and serotonin being a very, very important chemical with regards to mental health, you start to understand why it’s also important. You really do need to have to look after yourself nutritionally. This does come down to the importance of macros and understanding which ones our body needs, but it’s also about understanding that you are an individual, you are unique, you are special and unique in all the good ways, and that the world is generically telling you what to do in lots of different ways. But what your specific needs are nutritionally are specific to you because nobody knows what’s going on in the inside, so I do recommend if you ever do get the chance, go and get your blood work done to see what your nutrition’s about. Go and get it all done and give yourself a base level of understanding what your body responds well to, what it doesn’t respond well to. I’d also really highly recommend you do a food journal, do it for a couple of weeks and base it on food and mood with regards to what is making me want certain foods. Understand what triggers you towards certain foods, but also how you feel after having certain foods.

I learned this over time, that there’s certain foods that I just can’t eat or that I just don’t, or that have a really big impact on me and not in a great way. So, I can’t drink milk, I can’t drink lactose, for example. Now, I always knew I had issues with dairy, but I never really knew what it was. I just thought I couldn’t have any dairy at all. But really my main issue is lactose and so I try to stay away from it. I just want to give a shout out to all of the vegans who are listening to this right now. I’ve grown up with dairy issues my whole life, and nobody at that time was really developing any alternatives. When they did develop alternatives, it was so expensive, especially as I was a child my parents could not afford those alternatives, and so I really struggled going without an awful lot of things, and it really did lead to a lot of issues with food and some of the issues that led to my obesity. But since veganism has really taken off and, although I am not vegan, I do respect veganism, there are so many more options for me. So, every single time I go anywhere and they say to me, yes, we’ve got alternatives in milk, we’ve got alternatives in cheese, we’ve got all of these alternatives. I say out loud every single time, thank you vegans, because if it wasn’t for you, I would not be able to eat in such a way. I would not be part of what is the norm now. So, thank you very much for that, vegans, I appreciate it. I can eat healthy, I can eat in a way that’s happy for me, and I don’t feel like I’m missing out on life anymore. So, thank you very much. So, yeah, the key is there, you should, and need to, look after your nutrition. Think about what you’re eating, thinking about your macros, and make sure that you get a good balance of everything when it comes to good food versus bad food. I don’t believe there is such a thing. I just believe there is food and there’s food with higher nutrition in it, and food with lower nutrition in it, and you have to make a decision each meal which ones you choose to go for.

I work very closely with a team of eating disorder specialists, or disordered eating specialists, and I understand a lot better now than I ever did before the importance of a balanced diet and what that really looks like, and I don’t mean the word diet as in lose weight, I mean as long-term life eating plan. That’s what I mean when I say diet, and it really is important to have it balanced, to tell yourself all food is okay. All food is okay if it’s done in the moderation levels that that food is needed for the body. This is where that 80/20 comes in. So have your donut, have it? Have your chocolate if you need it, just don’t make it the majority of the food you’re eating, because it’s nutritional value in comparison to other things that are really good for you is limited. So, make sure you get your balance right but don’t say no to any foods. It’s no good foods or bad foods, there’s just food, they’ve just got different nutritional values in them. Stop looking at calories as something that is owned by the diet culture. It isn’t. It’s a form of energy. Look at it for what it is, get back to the truth. Get back to the hard cold facts of what it’s all about and understand it from that perspective. Don’t be scared of these things. Don’t be scared of these things ruling your life. They are all just tools to help you to manage your nutritional intake as effectively as you can to keep your human body, the vessel that carries you around every day, as healthy as it can. So, look after your nutrition.

Get your water intake in your hydration and try and keep as many clear liquids as you can every day. That’s not to say, I mean, I love a coffee, decaf, I’m a decaf girl. I love a cup of tea. I like a lot of things. I even like alcohol. I like a lot of things. But the reality of it is, again, with that, it’s all balance. Try and keep to as many of your clear fluids as you can if you want to keep your hydration levels high. So have your nice teas, have your water as much as you can but don’t stop yourself from having the other stuff as well. A little bit of what you fancy isn’t going to hurt you providing that little bit of what you fancy isn’t every hour on the hour, every single day, or even a little bit less than that.

So, make small changes, make small tweaks if that’s what you need to do, but focus on nutrition and hydration first of all. Then get your body moving, and you don’t have to become a gym bunny. You do not have to suddenly be going out there hardcore every day, having to work hard. You don’t have to do that. Gentle exercise has a huge impact on the health of your body. It’s all about movement and activity, keeping your lungs healthy and your heart healthy and your muscle’s healthy and your joint’s healthy. So doing any form of activity that keeps you moving is going to be really good for you. Anything that’s helping you build muscle, especially as you get older in life, keep your muscles strong, keep your joints strong. Anything that does that for you is going to be good. Anything that helps you to regulate your breathing is really good. That’s why I’m a really big fan of things like Pilates and yoga and swimming and tai chi and just walking because they get your body moving in each direction so they keep your mobility going really strong. They keep your muscles strong, they keep your joints loose, but what they also do is provide you with breath work and mindfulness through the meditation elements, and therefore you really are looking after yourself, healthy body healthy mind when you’re doing those levels of exercise and activity.

I have a wonderful, wonderful next-door neighbour, Vera. She’s an amazing woman and she’s in her eighties and she’s always doing something. To meet her you’d never think she was in her eighties and she says to me all the time, Kim, as you know, if you don’t use it, you’re going to lose it and nobody wants to lose their ability to move. So that’s it. If you are listening to this and you know that you spend most of your life sat down, then just spend a little bit more time stood up. Just spend a little bit more time walking. Just spend a little more time doing those things. You don’t have to go hardcore, you don’t have to get a gym membership, you don’t have to suddenly start training like an athlete. If you want to, all the power to you, quite jealous of you if that’s the case because I’ve never had that, I’ve never wanted to do that. But I do enjoy moving, I love going for a walk. I absolutely love it. I feel like a powerhouse. I realized recently one of the strengths I have is I can walk really, really fast. It annoys my husband and anybody else wants to try and walk with me. He just tells the world I’ve got one pace and it’s just, I go fast. That works in my favour because now I can get in an hour’s walk quite easily and get quite a good distance done in that hour and I come back, and I check out what I’ve done and my mobility and my exercise and everything. And that hour’s really good for me, just even just walking.

So, find your thing. Find something that you can do every single day that doesn’t make your life difficult, that doesn’t make it strenuous, that doesn’t put too much stress on your body or on your life or on your mind and do it because you want to keep your body, the vessel that you are in physically, healthy. You want to keep it moving, you want to keep it active, you want to keep it loose. You want to be able to keep moving. You want to keep moving as long as you can into old age. You want to keep it for as long as you can. So that’s the reason that exercise is really, really important. Then what you also want to start thinking about is potentially any supplements.

So, again, this is when you can go and get your health checks done, make sure that your body is as healthy as it possibly can be. This is about being preventative in your medical care rather than reactive. We tend to wait until we are sick and then we have to respond to that, we have to rely on some form of medical pill in order to help us or cure us. Whereas actually, if we can try and stay ahead of the game, if we can actually start looking after ourselves from the perspective of, okay, what is going on with my nutrition? What are my bloods telling me? What should I be focusing on? We might be able to get ahead of something. Wouldn’t that be great to not have to be at risk of something because we’ve mastered those symptoms early enough, that we’re taking care of ourselves early enough, that we are looking after ourselves from a prevention perspective rather than having to be sick and then looking after ourselves from a recovery perspective. So go and get your health checks done as often as you can and I know this is different for different countries on how this is offered, but this is the one thing I do recommend that you do, is you go and get your health checks done as often as you can and even when from a financial perspective, it’s the one thing worth investing in if you can, and I appreciate not everybody can, but if you can it is definitely the one thing worth investing in. So, look after your health through health checks, take the supplements if your body needs supplements.

Now, my body does need supplements these days mainly because I’m a bariatric patient because I had surgery, don’t judge me, it was a choice, that was right for my mental health and my physical health. But because of that, I take supplements and I take quite a lot of supplements and I’ve got to say the energy levels that I’ve had since doing that is absolutely fantastic. Obviously, my energy went up a lot as soon as I lost a hundred pounds, but my energy levels have gone up an awful lot because I take supplements, I feel different. I just feel different. And I can tell when I’ve been away, and I accidentally haven’t taken my supplements with me. I can tell the difference when I get back and start taking them again. So, if you can, if you need them, if you don’t need them don’t take them, but if you need them, take your supplements as well. So that way you’re looking after your nutrition, you’re looking after your hydration, you’re looking after your exercise, you’re getting the right supplements in, so you’re doing a more prevention model with regards to your overall health.

Then you need to make sure you are getting is plenty of sleep. It is the most important thing, it just really, really is and I’m at an age now, I’m at the peri-menopausal age, men listening to this didn’t really need to hear that, but there you go I just shared it with you and what comes with that is the magic of not always having good sleep and it’s so important. You always know when you’ve not had good sleep, you wake up cranky, you wake up not functioning properly, and it can lead to a really problematic day just because you’re not at your best. I suffered with insomnia for a very, very, very long time. I know the fear of not being able to sleep. I know what it’s like to, as soon as you lie down, you turn out that light, no matter how exhausted you are, your brain switches on. It’s like that’s the time it’s telling you that it wants to work so it is about mastering your sleep. If your issues with sleep are stress induced, then it is about learning to manage your stress in that, if they are anxiety induced then it’s about learning to manage your anxiety and understand it if they’re thought provoked. So just that thinking, your brain as soon as you are quiet, and this is what happens a lot sometimes, especially this is how it works for me.

For those of you who don’t know, I’m currently going through the process of identifying… it is firmly believed that I have ADHD, and I’ve met with two clinical psychologists who have told me this and had this conversation with them, so I’ve worked with people who specialize in this area, I just haven’t gone through the formal process of going through a formal diagnosis yet, that is going to be happening. But what I have identified is that because it’s highly likely that I have ADHD during the normal day, there’s lots of external stimulus that can keep my brain so focused, active and its pinging lots of different directions all the time. That the stimulus of everyday life can sometimes be the thing that just keeps me focused but as soon as I get to night-time and I turn off those lights and the sounds suddenly go, my brain comes awake in a very different way. It’s almost like that stimulus from the whole day is not focusing me anymore and so I’m just left with my own thoughts, and it can be really problematic and keep me awake for many hours. Sometimes when it’s a really stressful period of my life, just going through normal stuff like when I was planning my wedding and when I’m relocating, when I was moving house, all of these things are really stressful things in life. Even work sometimes is a really stressful thing in life and what I can find is I can go for 24 hours, 36 hours, 72 hours, wide awake quite easily, and then I crash. And I absolutely crash. And I wouldn’t recommend that for anybody. Lack of sleep on your physical body is not great. Having a couple of nights where you can’t sleep properly is okay, you’ll survive that, but having years of that is not so great. And I know there’s a lot of parents out there going, God, I haven’t had a good night sleep in like years and years and years and years. I do respect and appreciate it’s really not easy especially in the first five years when it’s up and down, up and down an awful lot through the night. But it’s about getting quality sleep where you can get it. It’s about managing your sleep within the life that you live. So, if you need to break up your sleep, break up your sleep, but do what you can to get that good quality of sleep. Do what you can to get those good cycles of sleep in and make as much of that as you possibly can. You’ll see, especially if you’ve got issues with your mental health, as soon as you start sleeping better, you will feel better. And I know this first-hand. I know this from experience, and I know this from my own personal experience and my professional experience of working with my clients. As soon as you can get better, good quality of sleep, it’s almost like you come alive again, it’s almost like a switch comes on in all the right ways. You need that rest, you need that reboot. You need your body to actually shut down so it can do all the updates it needs to do. You need your mind to shut down, so it does all the updates it needs to do. So don’t fight it. Find a way to overcome it.

For me personally, the only way that I can go to sleep, this is the truth, I have to take melatonin, 5mg melatonin every single night and two Kalms. That’s how I do it. What that does is it just calms me down. It slows me down. But before I even take those, I tend to have a good half an hour where I have what I call my chair of tranquillity, a beautiful, bright green chair, and I sit in a room that’s got very specific lighting in it, and I sit in a room that’s got very specific sense in it. That’s very specific aromatherapy. And I will just sit there for the half an hour before I go to bed where I switch off. I’m not looking at my phone anymore. I’m not looking at my TV and not thinking about work in any way, shape or form. I do really simple breath work as meditation, and it’s the one I always go to, which is a simple breath in for count of one, breathe out for a count of two and do that until you get up to 10 and then repeat again. And I just do that for as long as I can in this new space that I’ve created myself to try and relax myself. And then I will take my melatonin and my two Kalms, all natural products that help me then drift off and go to sleep. That has been my way and it has taken me a long time to learn what helps me. I tried all of the generic stuff that the world is telling you to do, and some of it worked well, some of it worked better, some of it didn’t work for me at all so it is an element of trial and error to find what works for you. 8Wise^TM is all about that, 8Wise^TM is about you finding your tool belt. This isn’t a quick win, this is about the rest of your life.

That’s why I quite like the fact that somebody calls it the blueprint for your mental health and wellbeing because a blueprint is something that is there forever. It’s the foundation of everything. The blueprint for a building stay there for as long as the building exists, the same with you, your 8Wise^TM should be the blueprint for your mental health and wellbeing because you need to look after both of those for as long as you live. That’s it for as long as you are here with us, you need to look after those. And the starting point of that is looking after your foundation dimension, looking after your emotional wellness, looking after your physical wellness, understanding yourself, understanding how your body moves, how it feels, how your mind works, what triggers you, why it triggers you, your psychological build-up, your psychological makeup, understanding that, working with it, being able to create a life that is healthy for you mentally and physically, so that you are strong mentally and physically.

When you’ve done that, you’ve built a strong foundation for yourself and, just like a really good building every blueprint has a really good, strong foundation in place. And that’s what you are doing through the foundation dimension of 8Wise^TM, you are building that mental and physical health foundation so that when you’ve mastered those, you are in a stronger position, a stronger position then to be able to tackle those other elements of your wellness that might be triggering you because if you don’t have that strong foundation, you won’t have the mental capacity to do the work you need to do. You won’t have the physical energy to do the work you need to do, the likelihood is you’ll be sick or ill, whether that’s physical or mentally, and therefore you won’t have the time, the effort, the energy, the capacity to do the other pieces of work that you need to do.

So, stage one of Living the 8Wise^TM Way of having that blueprint for better mental health and wellbeing is to focus on developing a really good dimension one, which is your foundation dimension. Having good health mentally and physically, looking after your mind, looking after your body, looking after your brain, looking after you. That is your starting point, my lovelies, and that’s what I’ve tried to share with you through this, the Live the 8Wise^TM Way podcast. So if you are a little bit sad that the podcast is coming to an end, do not worry. You can jump on some of the training that is happening over the next few months. We will be starting our 8Wise^TM Accelerator and 8Wise^TM Discovery training in the next few weeks. You should be able to go to my website right now www.8wise.co.uk, head to the store where you’ll find more information about that training, how to access that training, what days the training is going to be delivered on, and how you can do all of that. The great news is, it will be pre-recorded training, so it doesn’t matter where you are in the world, you’ll be able to access this training. You will be welcomed into a private Facebook group. As soon as you’ve paid for your training, you’ll be invited into a private Facebook group. That private Facebook group will house all of the training and a new module for completion will be uploaded every single week into the Facebook group. I’ll also be popping into the Facebook group to give information, help out a little bit, give some tutorials if that’s what’s needed, and it’s also where you can ask any questions with regards to anything that you might need to understand or focus on a little bit more with regards to your mental health in that particular area.

What you will also do is meet the other wonderful, wonderful community of people who are also doing that training with you. So, you can do it virtually, you can do it at a time that works for you, you can do it in a way that works for you, but you can still have access to me as if I am delivering it directly to you. So that is going to be starting in the next few weeks so head to the website www.8wise.co.uk where you can access that training. You will be able to use the book 8Wise^TM Ways to a Healthier, Happier Mind plus the journal, the 12-Week Journal, or the 12-month Planner with those courses as well. If you’re wanting to do the course and you haven’t got the books yet, go and get yourself the books. It’ll make life a lot easier for you. Think of 8Wise^TM Ways to a Healthier, Happier Mind as a manual, it has a workbook element to it. But if you do not like writing in books, don’t worry, I’ve got your back, because that’s how I used to feel, which is why every single worksheet that is in the book itself is also available as a free download on my website so that you can just print off as many versions of that as you need and make as many changes to it as you need without ruining any of your books.

If you want your journey with me to continue past the podcast, you want to continue to Live the 8Wise^TM Way and just want a little bit of extra resource, some support, some tools, and, more importantly some help developing your strategy for managing your mental health and wellbeing moving forward, then jump onto one of the courses. They’re there, they’re available, and the way that we’re going to run them is, although they will have a start date because they’ll be pre-recorded, the Facebook group will stay open for a whole month after the final module is delivered so that you have at least an extra four weeks to complete anything. It means that, if you haven’t been able to start on the start date, not a problem, you will still have access to all of the previous recordings, all of the previous modules, and you can do them at your own pace, and you have an extra few weeks to do them before we close down that particular cohort and open up the next training cohort. So if you’re interested, pop along to www.8wise.co.uk, head to the store and all the information is in there.

So, this is the first goodbye episode of the Live the 8Wise^TM Way podcast, talking to you all about your foundation dimension and if you are really looking to develop your mental health and wellbeing, if you are really looking to develop a really strong strategy for looking after your mental health and wellbeing and having an improved quality of life for the rest of your life, then the foundation dimension is where you need to start. So, crack on with that and start making your life, the life you really want to live as of right this minute.

Thank you very much for joining me. If this is your first episode, thank you, please head back and listen to the others and really learn how to Live the 8Wise^TM Way from the beginning. It would be great if you can comment below, if you can like, if you can subscribe, if you can share. I said all along, I wanted to create this podcast as a free option to help people with their mental health and wellbeing. The only way it helps people is if it reaches those people. There are people right now struggling, they don’t have friends, they don’t have family, they don’t have the support system that they need in order to help themselves. We are it, right now we are it. So please get this message out there, please get this podcast out there as much as you can. Let’s help as many people as we can, no matter where they are with what they might be struggling with.

Thank you very much for joining me on my first goodbye session, it has been an absolute pleasure. Start looking after your foundation dimension, and I hope you will enjoy joining me for the next one where we talk about the next dimension, which is your internal dimension. So, until then, thanks for joining me, Kim Rutherford, Psychotherapist, author and creator of 8Wise^TM, the blueprint for better mental health and wellbeing, and I look forward to seeing you, speaking to you at least, at our next episode next week. Until then, take care of yourselves and bye for now.