Goodbye Part 2 – Take Care of Your Internal Dimension

Hi everybody, and welcome to the Live the 8Wise^TM Way podcast with me Kim Rutherford, Psychotherapist, author, and creator of the 8Wise^TM method for better mental health and wellbeing and it was recently called actually, which I loved hearing and I’m using it everywhere now so I’m going to talk about it here as well, 8Wise^TM has been called the blueprint for better mental health or better optimal mental health and wellbeing as well, which is lovely. It’s lovely when other people are experiencing it and doing training and reading the book and realizing that this is providing them with the blueprint for managing their own mental health and wellbeing, it’s really, really important for me that people are able to use it and understand it so it’s great that the feedback is coming back like that. Who wouldn’t want their book, their theory, to be called a blueprint for managing mental health and wellbeing. Ultimately it’s a fantastic accolade and thank you to the person who sent that through to me.

As I have said, we are bringing this series of Live the 8Wise^TM Ways to a closure and we have three episodes left, and what I’m doing in these final episodes is really just bringing you back to the model, reminding you of what the four core dimensions are and giving you some ideas of what you should be doing, or could be doing, with regards to each of those four areas in order to look at your mental health and wellbeing, whether you are looking at recovery or you are looking at prevention.

In the last episode we talked about your foundation level, the foundation level of the 8Wise^TM model, which covers your emotional wellbeing and your physical wellbeing and the importance of looking after those in order to have really good strong mental health and physical health. And the key to it really is when it comes to the foundation, it’s like anything’s like building a house, if you do not have a strong foundation in place, you are then unable, unable, to then build things upon it and that’s why it’s so important to have the foundation level in place first. Now, unlike building a house, where you would build the foundation first, then you’d build the external structure, and then you’d put the internal stuff together, and then you’d start living with it, with 8Wise^TM we have to flip that around slightly and that’s because, when you’ve got your foundation in place, you then have to build yourself on an internal level first. And so, the next dimension is our internal dimension.

Our internal dimension is about the inner world, the world that exists inside of us that only we know. So, it’s the internal world, that world that is inside of our mind, that world that we don’t always share with everybody else, but tends to be navigating us, it tends to be leading us, it tends to be driving us. And this is built from two core elements. The first element of the internal dimension is your spiritual wellness. This doesn’t necessarily have to have anything to do with religion, but for some people it will do, and for some people it won’t do and that’s absolutely fine. What it’s really about, we talk about your spiritual wellness is your own personal spiritual connection to yourself and the world. Ultimately, it’s about your value base. What do you value in this world? What is your belief system? How do you identify those for yourself? How do you live a life that’s true to those and manifest them into the life that you’re living? This is about what is your purpose and are you living a life to your purpose and feeling fulfilled in the life that you’re living? This element is about your identity. And it’s also therefore about your self-esteem and how you see yourself and your belief in yourself as well as things around you. And it’s really, really, really important for us to have a really good solid spiritual wellness. You hear it a lot when you talk about wellness and wellbeing, it’s healthy body healthy mind, but that belief system that you have is everything, it’s linked to every thought you have. It’s linked to every behaviour you have, it’s linked to every feeling you have, who you are, who you are in this moment, in this moment in time, it’s based on those core values, those core belief systems. And so it’s really, really important that you are aligned to them. And therefore it’s really important for you to understand that you develop and you grow throughout your life and therefore your values will change, your beliefs will change, your responses and reactions to things will change. And that’s perfectly normal.

If you’ve ever experienced that concept of “we just grew apart”, whether that be an intimate relationship or a friendship, that’s usually what’s happened is as we’ve grown, and as we’ve developed, our values have changed, our beliefs have changed and therefore our behaviours in life have changed. And sometimes they change alongside the others that change but sometimes they lead us into a different direction to those people we’ve had in our lives. So if you’re really wanting to understand why you think the way you think, why you feel the way you feel, why you react to things the way you do, why you respond to things the way you do, why you have the certain relationships that you do, then really what you need to understand is, what are your core values? What are your core belief systems? How are you manifesting them into a life? How do you feel about yourself? How do you think about yourself? Do you have that core purpose? Are you working towards things in your life or are you just almost numb and just going with it? And as I said, in the early days a lot of the clients that I work with come to me with this, this is that moment, this crisis moment for them, of not really knowing who they are, at this moment in time, feeling like they’re in a crossroads in their life and a lot of that time has come from, we spend so much of our life living our life, according to the values and the belief systems that our society, our community, or our culture, force upon us it doesn’t always have to be a negative forcing, society has to work, we have to function as a big community and therefore there are regulations that need to be in place. But the reality of that means that sometimes we don’t bother to take the time out to think for ourselves, what our own values are, what our own beliefs are, sometimes we’re living life to the purpose set by others. How many people are in a career that they didn’t choose but it was something their parents really wanted them to do, for example. That’s what it’s really all about when it comes to spiritual wellness, is understanding who you are at your core, understanding why you’re the way you are. I mean, one of the activities I get my clients to do with me is exactly this, is a three step approach.

Step one is identify what your top 10 values are, I’m not cruel, because we expect you to be able to state those from a blank canvas is really, really difficult and what tends to happen is so many people just come up with these words that they think are supposed to be their values, kindness being the number one. I’m not saying kindness isn’t an important value, it really, really is. But a lot of the time, the first time people do these exercises with me, they’re not really being true to themselves. They’re stating things they think they’re supposed to do, that they think they’re supposed to say and therein itself lies some of the biggest issues when it comes to our own spirituality, about the connecting with ourselves. We’re so busy trying to be something that the world expects of us, that sometimes we’re not living, not living an authentic life, not a life that’s true to who we are. We’re living a life that suits other people. And obviously, if we’re living a life that isn’t true to ourselves, at some stage that life will make us unhappy. At some stage that life will make us feel unfulfilled, at some stage that life can make us feel resentful. And so it really is important to stop and identify for yourself what your core values are in this world, what your beliefs are in this world, how you identify in this world, and how you’re manifesting all of those things into a life that is true to you, that is authentic for you. That gives you a sense of worth, that allows you to feel proud of who you are, that allows you to feel confident in the decisions that you make, because at least you will always know they are true for you.

We get so wrapped up in what’s right and what’s wrong, and whose opinion states what is right and what’s wrong and we have a moral compass, we all have a moral compass, we know what the morals of our societies are. And a lot of the time, the morals that we’re forced to live upon aren’t necessarily the ones that society are asking us. It’s what our friends are expecting, it’s what our family is expecting, it’s what our employer is expecting. And they’re not bad to live by, but again, what you want to be doing is trying to surround yourself with people and a life that is more authentic to you. So, for example, it is highly unlikely, highly unlikely, that someone who is vegan, who has a very true core value base moral compass and belief system linked to the entire structure of what veganism is built on, they’re never going to go and work in a slaughterhouse just because that’s the only job available to them. That’s not going to happen. Even on paper it wouldn’t happen, yet so many of us, and I know that’s an extreme, vast extreme, but sometimes that’s what we’re doing. We are doing this exact work, we are living a life or being forced to live in a world or in a life or create a lifestyle, that isn’t true to who we are. And can you imagine if you spend years and years and years living a life that isn’t true to who you are, that goes against what your inner thoughts are, that goes against what your inner feelings are, goes against what your belief system is, eventually that chips and chips and it chips away at you. And you get to a stage where it either can break you or you get to that crossroad and you feel incredibly lost and you feel incredibly alone and you feel confused. And in some cases, you feel like a failure. And what’s crazy is you feel like a failure because you haven’t achieved what the world has told you to achieve, is based on the box it’s telling you to live in, where actually so many of us achieve greatness in our own world, in our own life and what greatness is to us, when we start to acknowledge who we truly are, when we start to acknowledge what we truly want, when we start to acknowledge the life that means something to us, what values means something to us, what beliefs means something to us, it’s only then can we really carve out a life that leads to a purpose, represents who we want to be in this world, what legacy we want to live and leave behind in this world.

And so, it’s really, really important to stop and get to know yourself again on that level, to understand yourself on that level, to connect with yourself on that level. And the only way to do that is through self-reflection. There is no other way to do that. You have to put the time and effort in, you have to allow yourself to sit and think and connect and review the things that you’ve done. If you go to my website, for example, because an awful lot of what I do on this podcast is so that you can follow the concept of the book and you can follow the process of the book in order to create your own mental health and wellbeing program for yourself, like I said I appreciate not everybody wants to write in the books, all the worksheets that are in the book are available on the website for download. And one of the big ones is the timeline and the timeline activity can be used in so many different ways. I get people to use it with regards to identifying what they would say their core negative and positive memories are, just so we can start to see if there’s a pattern. We start to look at people whose perceived their life on failures and successes and see what pops up. But you can also do it on that with regards to your belief system and start to understand which periods of your life were you living by your values and beliefs or were you living by somebody else’s, and it gives you some indication of how happy you are doing that.

So I would definitely recommend to you if you know that you need to start looking at your values and your beliefs, you need to start building that self-esteem, you need to start building that confidence level in yourself and who you are and what you believe in, then go and have a look at that piece of work, go and have a look at that chapter in the book and do some of the exercises that are in there, start to identify your core values, start to understand where your values have developed from, start to understand how those values impact your life in a positive way and in a negative way. Understand how those values impact the lives of others so you can see how they have built you as a member of this society and built you as a member of your local communities and your family and your friendships, have a look at how those values connect to your belief systems. A good way of doing this, one of the most popular and common ways that I work with is if you’re not sure what your values and beliefs are, have a think of the things that really upset you in this world, have a look at the big picture, have a look at the global issues that bother you, have a look at conversations that have bothered you. What that will tell you is the types of things that don’t sit well with you, things that go against what you believe in. And that starts to help you understand what your core values and your core belief system are and that alone will then help you to start identifying what you want your purpose in this world to be.

But if you want to be a happy, healthy person, mentally and physically, then you really do need to spend some time doing the self-reflection on that in a world regarding your spiritual wellness. Who am I? What do I believe in? What do I value in this world? What is my purpose? Why am I here? What do I want my life to represent? What do I think about myself? What do I like about myself? What do I dislike about myself, and can I change that? The key is to get to self-acceptance, to know yourself, to love yourself, to acknowledge yourself on every level, the good, the bad, and the ugly and understand that you’re doing the best you can.

Then that links to those bigger spiritual elements that go outside of that and that might be religion for you. It could be other spiritual behaviors, other spiritual activities that mean something to you. But if you don’t know who you are at your baseline, if you don’t know who you are at your core, you will always struggle to navigate this life and you’ll struggle to navigate it because you’re always looking for someone else to captain your ship. You’re always looking and asking someone else to move you in a direction and when you put that much faith in other people, you’re always going to be let down somewhere. Every single time you look for someone else to navigate you and you look for someone else to make the decisions in your life and you look for someone else for all the answers, you’re actually undermining your own power, your own strength. So really focus on developing your spiritual wellness to help you develop a really good internal dimension from the 8Wise^TM perspective.

With all of these, we look at it from the perspective of emotional wellness. And physical wellness is about building this really healthy mind and this really healthy body and the spiritual wellness element is all about really getting to know who you are, understanding who you are from that inner deep element is, Who am I? It’s the Who am I question and the who am I and what I want question really is ultimately it.

When you’ve got that right, then you know it’s about, I need to understand myself on a next level now, I need to understand what drives me, I need to understand what stimulates me. And that’s the second element of the internal dimension and that’s your intellectual wellness. Your intellectual wellness doesn’t come down to an IQ number. In so many ways that IQ number means absolutely nothing in the real world. Nothing at all. Most people with these IQ numbers only share them when they feel the need to tell somebody that they are cleverer than them because those IQ numbers don’t mean anything. Because IQ numbers ultimately are based on a system that was built many moons ago by certain types of people for certain types of people. Our true intellect comes from how we stimulate our own mind, how we stimulate our own brain. And I talk in the book about the difference between change and evolution and the meaning of life with regards to humans. And one of the big elements that I talk about is the two meanings of life, it’s at our core, our main aim as a human species to survive. So one of the meanings of life is to survive as a human race. And the second one is therefore to ensure that we can survive we have to evolve, and we have to adapt. And so we have these two inbuilt systems that we are using and we do use every single day. Our stress system, our fear, fight, flight, freeze process is our internal system for helping us to survive as a human race. As uncomfortable as stress can be, sometimes stress is a really important factor for us to help let us know that we could be in danger, or we need to get ourselves out of a situation and what it really then does is trigger the second stage, which is that learning element is how do we change? How do we adapt? How do we problem solve? How do we move forward? How do we get out of this danger? And that’s what the intellectual wellness element is really all about. It’s how do we stop living in a comfort zone that enforces us to be trapped in a life that isn’t healthy for us long term.

We are built for evolution, we are built to keep developing and growing, our brain is a tool for learning. It’s why you have the ability to learn and to retain information and to hold on to memory and it’s why different brains do that in different ways. Now, for example, I am horrific at math’s, horrific at math’s, numbers is not my thing. It’s like a foreign language to me. Yet I’m really good at other things. And those people that are great at math’s in some worlds they’re seen as the most intelligent people in the world. Now in another world where you’re with a musician, for example, and they can speak the language of music, and they can express themselves through music, and they’ve got that amazing ear where they can hear music. They’re a genius in their world. And suddenly you start to realize that intelligence is not about reading a book and remembering everything, it’s not going to school and passing a test or passing an exam, it’s about working with your own internal communicators, understanding how you connect with the world and how you learn from it and allow yourself to do the learning that takes place.

So for you, it’s really important that you keep continuing to evolve, that you keep stimulating your brain, that you keep your brain functioning and healthy and you keep growing and you keep learning and that you push out of your comfort zones. Comfort zones really are the prisons that stop us living our life and most of the time we’re in comfort zones because we are scared. We are scared to try something new. We are scared to try something different. That’s when anxiety takes hold. Anxiety takes hold when you’re so scared of what might be, you’re so scared of what could happen, rather than be willing to experience what will happen in the moment you do it. And that’s intellectual wellness, stimulating your brain, learning new things, trying new things, breaking free of your comfort zone, facing your fears and doing it anyway. becoming the best version of yourself in the moment you are living rather than remaining the person you’ve been for the last 10 years because you’re scared of what if. What if it doesn’t go right? What if it’s different? It’s always going to be different. But the mad thing is if we try something new and it doesn’t work out we still succeed, we still achieved something, we tried something and we learnt from something and that learning has helped us to evolve as a human and as a member of the human race.

So it is really important that after you have developed your foundation levels of wellness, your emotional wellness and your physical wellness, that you go from healthy body healthy mind to knowing who I am, what stimulates me, and how I move forward with that, how I navigate my life with that, how I create greatness in my own existence from that. No one else can give you that, no one else can develop that for you, you have to do that for yourself, you have to learn that for yourself, you have to develop that for yourself, you have to build that for yourself, you have to want that for yourself. If you are unhappy in your life, you need to understand why. And a lot of that will be based on these two elements so spend some time doing self-reflection pieces, look internally, understand who you are, understand your values, understand your beliefs, understand your purpose, understand your identity, understand how you think and feel about yourself, your self-worth, your self-esteem, your self-confidence. Move towards accepting who you are, learn to understand how to use your brain in the most effective way for you, what stimulates you, what is the best way of learning for you, what is your learning style?

What is your internal communication modality, for example, I’m a visual learner, I need to learn with diagrams, just talking at me in an auditory fashion does not work. That’s why I had to write a book. That’s why I had to create something that had images, that had pictures that I could work with that made more sense. If you come on any training that I do its diagram lead, there’ll be discussions, there will be lecture based stuff, there will be discussions, there’ll be activity, but there’ll be lots and lots of visuals, making sure that I am catering for everybody’s learning style so everybody can learn the best that they can from it. So if you are really looking to develop a world and a life for yourself that is healthy for you, and really does help you to boost your mental health and achieve optimal psychological wellbeing, then take some time out to focus on your spiritual wellness and your intellectual wellness and develop a really, really good, strong internal foundation of your overall wellness. That is what keeps you with a healthier, happier mind.

So that’s it, that’s where we’re at so far, we’ve done foundation dimension, that’s your emotional wellness and your physical wellness, we’ve done the internal dimension, which represents your internal world, the world you don’t necessarily share with everybody else what’s going on inside of you, that is your spiritual wellness, that is your intellectual wellness. With those four elements and those two dimensions you now know how to look after your mind, look after your body. Learn to know yourself and get to know yourself and accept yourself and learn what stimulates you and what navigates you to move forward. Now you’re really on your way to Living the 8Wise^TM Way for a healthier, happier mind, and a better and improved quality of life.

In the next episode we are going to talk about the third dimension, which is your external dimension, when we’ve gone from the internal dimension to the external dimension, the internal world, how we navigate life through our internal world, we move towards how we are navigating the external world with everything we’ve got in place so far. So I hope you will join me for that. If this is the first time you have joined me and listened to me, I hope this has been useful for you. I hope it’s going to help you in some way. I hope it’s going to move you forward in your own life in some way. It’d be great if you could comment, leave a comment below, like, subscribe, share and then you won’t miss the final few. Then obviously go back and listen, go back and listen to all of the other episodes right the way from number one right the way through to this one. And if you haven’t done so yet, and you would like to learn how to Live the 8Wise^TM Way with the full program, then you are more than welcome to buy the book. You can buy the book with the planner, or the book with the journal that will help you go through each stage and you can access them from pretty much anywhere, anywhere that sells books online. If you are in the UK, you can also access them directly from me at www.8wise.co.uk. Just head to the store.

Now, if you’re someone who learns better through training courses, then the great news is the 8Wise^TM Accelerator course and the 8Wise^TM Discovery course are both available now as online courses done as pre-recorded modules. The way that these work is very simple, after payment you then get access to the Facebook group, which is where all of those videos will be housed. Each module will be uploaded into the private Facebook group on a weekly basis on a Saturday for you to watch and work through at a time and at a pace that suits you. There will be videos in there, there’ll be worksheets in there and I will be popping in there as well to provide some extras as we go along. The 8Wise^TM Accelerator is a 12-week course, it covers the full program of 8Wise^TM, it’s going live on Saturday the 11^th March, but because it’s virtual, its done as pre-recorded, if you can’t start then, that’s absolutely fine. So, if you’re listening to this and it’s after that date, don’t worry. You can join at any time and you can catch up at a pace that works for you no problem whatsoever.

The week after that, if you are not wanting to do the full program but just to have a better understanding of these four dimensions and how you might implement them into your own life, then you can do the 8Wise^TM Discovery course. That is a shorter course that is four weeks long and that will take you into these dimensions in a lot more detail and help you to work out what you need to focus on to improve your life in those four dimensions. So, they’re available for you right now. Again, if you head to www.8wise.co.uk, head to the store and you will see access to all of the training courses that you can book onto right now and I look forward to seeing you in those in the future.

If you have any questions or queries about any of this whatsoever, and you’d like to work with me or book yourself onto a free consultation, please feel free to message me. You can DM me through any of the normal social media platforms, I’m everywhere. You can usually find me as @8wisekim or you can go on to @8wisetherapy, or feel free to email me directly at [email protected] and I will happily have a chat with you and talk you through how you can access different support systems using the 8Wise^TM method moving forward.

So that is today’s episode, I hope you find that useful. I hope you’re finding ways that you can implement 8Wise^TM into your own life and boost your own mental health and wellbeing. Remember, Rome wasn’t built in a day, you don’t have to get this perfect, you just need to start making an effort to make changes as you move forward. And if you’ve got questions and queries, then please do please feel free to reach out for some additional support. Now, as I said, I started 8Wise^TM in the first place to try and help as many people with their mental health and wellbeing as I possibly can simply on the back of my own personal experiences and watching other people with their experiences. And I know that there’s somebody right now feeling very alone, and not knowing what to do and maybe they don’t have the funds to go out and get some support and maybe this podcast might give them some of the support tools that can help them to recover from some of the mental health issues they might be having or prevent themselves from going into that route in the first place. So it is really important that you can share if you can and point people in this direction, share, like, comment and all the usual stuff that everyone is always asking you to do. I would really, really appreciate it if you could do that and we can try to reach as many people as we can. Let’s try and stop people suffering if we can. We don’t have the power to change everybody in the world but if we can just get tools to them, then people can help for themselves, then maybe we could just change someone’s life today, wouldn’t that’d be a wonderful thing between us.

So, thank you so much for joining me today on the Live the 8Wise^TM Way podcast. I look forward to having a chat with you in the next one when we talk about the external dimension. So, thank you very much. That’s me signing off. Kim Rutherford, Psychotherapist, author, creator of the 8Wise^TM methodology, which you have now identified is the blueprint for optimal mental health and wellbeing. Take care and I will chat to you soon.