HELLO 2023

Hello everybody. Welcome to 2023 and welcome 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. We did it. We survived 2022 and we have entered the next year, and I am so excited. I’ve explained this before, I do get excited at the beginning of something, I just get filled with so much hope. But if anybody listened to my last episode, then you’ll know that normally I’m a planner, but normally I’ve been doing that in the most dangerous way for myself by setting all of these New Year resolutions that I always knew I would never fulfil, whereas this year I just entered 2023 a bit more realistic, which has left me feeling very optimistic and filled and fuelled with hope about how many things that I can achieve in my own life and how I can support others to do the same. So, I am really excited.

If this is your first time with me, welcome, thank you for joining. It’ll be great if you put your comments below, hit the share button, the subscribe button, so you don’t miss anything and if you’ve got the time, go back and start from episode one. From there, what you’ll do is be able to understand what the 8Wise^TM method is and how you can implement it into your own life to make some really, really good positive changes.

So, what on earth could I possibly be covering in the first episode of the New Year? Well, I’m not going to go into a great load of detail for the first episode of the New Year, what I’m going to do is give you a quick recap. So, if you are somebody who’s going “right, I’m going to make 2023 the year that I put some more effort and focus into my own mental health and wellbeing” and you’ve made the decision that 2023 is the year for you to start Living the 8Wise^TM Way so you can have that better mental health and wellbeing and you can improve the quality of your own life, then I thought, well, maybe now is a good time to do a bit of a recap. Reintroduce myself to all of you new listeners, remind all of my longer standing listeners of who I am and what I do and why I do it. Give a bit of an overview of what 8Wise^TM is, short and sharp, and then also give you some idea of what is happening in the episodes to come so you can get excited, and you can get prepped. Especially if, like so many people who listen to this use this as their own psychotherapy, then what it does, it gives you some idea of what we’re going to be planning for, what we’re going to be prepping for, so that you can get yourself planned, prepped, notepads, pens, everything that you want to do to start making some of the changes in your life that you want to change for better mental health and wellbeing.

So let us begin. Let us start at the very, very beginning. I’m going to reintroduce myself. My name, as I said, is Kim Rutherford. I live in merry old Liverpool in England, city of the Beatles. I am a Psychotherapist but spent 20 years working in the corporate world focusing more on things like leadership development, personal development and I worked on an international scale. I worked in the UK on government funded contracts, I worked in health and social care, I worked in education, I worked in welfare to work and employability. I worked in the UK, I worked in Australia, I worked in Poland for a time. So, for me, I always called myself a Social Welfare Practitioner, somebody who has spent their entire career working with all walks of life from all of the areas that need social support. That’s what I’ve dedicated my life to and like a lot of other driven, ambitious, conscientious people I worked really, really, really, really hard for a very long time and managed to secure roles at top level. I was hierarchy, I was in senior management and getting to travel the world. It was great, I loved it. And on paper it made a lot of sense but just like so many other people, I was juggling a lot of responsibilities on top of suppressing a lot of issues that I had had in my younger years, and I’d had in my own childhood and my high levels of stress developed into dysfunctional stress. My dysfunctional stress developed into burnout, which then, after a car crash, took me to high levels of anxiety, specifically health anxiety, depression, and then agoraphobia.

As I’ve said before many, many times when I wanted to see somebody, about that support, the support that I might need to help with those mental health issues, the waiting list was 16 weeks, and I’m far too impatient for that so I started to do my own research. I’d originally gone to university and studied criminology and sociology and so as part of that I’d done quite a lot of psychology and decided, right, well, I’ve got enough tools already to start doing extra research and maybe help myself a bit more. From that I developed the 8Wise^TM model of methodology, and the 8Wise^TM model is built on some of the key principles of the eight dimensions of wellness. If you don’t know what they are, go and check them out. But what this does, what the actual 8Wise^TM model does is takes the core concept of what those wellbeing areas are, what those wellness areas are, and actually turns them into a very practical, tangible model for supporting you in prevention and recovery with regards to your mental health and wellbeing. Meaning that, basically if you are suffering with your mental health, you can use the method, you can use all the practical tools and tips of the methodology of 8Wise^TM to help you recover and start boosting your mental health again. If you are not yet experiencing mental health issues and you want to be able to improve your mental wellbeing in order to continue to prevent mental health issues or to protect your mental health, then you can use 8Wise^TM for exactly that reason as well. And the way that I developed it is I took, looked at, all of these eight areas and thought, well, actually, if you were to implement them in different ways, in different stages, and you started to look at them from the perspective of if these are pressure points and trigger points and how can we link them to different psychological elements, then what you’ve got is a model. And that’s what I did. I’m not going to lie, this is it. It’s out there now. That’s how I did it. So, the 8Wise^TM model is built from four core dimensions with eight specific elements that create the pressure points of what is your wellness spectrum. That’s nice and simple as it is.

Dimension number one is the foundation dimension, and the foundation dimension is built from your emotional wellness and your physical wellness. Your emotional wellness is about being able to cope effectively with life itself and creating satisfying relationships in everything you do, and that means satisfying relationships with other people and yourself. This is about having a really good balance of emotions so that you can interact with people, interact with the world, interact with life, and also interact with yourself on a very honest level. Your physical wellness is about recognizing the need for those physical core activities that keep us healthy, so diet, sleep, nutrition, and also keeping up to speed with those health checks as well. Ultimately, dimension one, the foundation dimension, is all about keep a healthy body, keep a healthy mind, and that gives you that solid foundation to then move forward in the other areas of your life.

After dimension one, we move on to dimension two, which is the internal dimension. This is where we focus on the world that lives inside of us, our world, the one that we don’t share with everybody. This is built from our spiritual wellness, which is all about expanding your sense of meaning and purpose in life, and also your intellectual wellness, which is all about recognizing your creative abilities and finding ways to expand your knowledge and skills and break free from your comfort zone. When you understand your internal world, it’s then time for you to start experiencing the external world.

The external dimension of 8Wise^TM is all about your environmental wellness and your social wellness. Your environmental wellness is about really having good health by occupying pleasant, safe, and stimulating environments that bring out the best in you and your wellbeing, and your social wellness is all about developing a sense of connection, a sense of belonging, and a well-developed support system with those people that you have in your life.

Now, when you put all of these together and you’ve got this really strong foundation of health and you’ve got this really good strong connection to your internal world, and then you know how to navigate the external world for really optimal wellbeing, you are then in a position to develop a lifestyle that gives you a good quality of life to meet all of those other needs. This is built from your occupational wellness and your financial wellness.

Your occupational wellness is how much you are personally satisfied and enriched from the work that you do because you spend so much time at work, it needs to fulfil you in some ways, and then your financial wellness is all about your satisfaction with your current and your financial future situations because, let’s be honest, the majority of the stress in our life, especially in adult life, comes from finances.

So that’s the core concept of 8Wise^TM, and obviously there’s a lot more to it than that, but I’m not going to go into it in this podcast because you can find it in everywhere else that I’ve talked about 8Wise^TM.

So, when I was in lockdown and couldn’t do much else, what I did was actually turned 8Wise^TM into a book. It’s now been published, and it’s called 8Wise^TM Ways to a Healthier, Happier Mind and the book is broken into three core areas. One talks about some basic theories of psychology and philosophy that link to mental health and wellbeing. Section two of the book talks about 8Wise^TM in a lot of detail and a lot of information backed by science, backed by psychology so your data’s there, your stats are there explaining the model in a lot more detail. Then the third section of the book is really the self-help section of the book. It helps gives you the tools and the techniques that you need to make changes in your life, make changes in your thought patterns, make changes in your behaviours that help you to improve your mental health and wellbeing, and it gives you access to a lot of free tools that help you to do that.

After I developed the book, I thought, well actually, I talk an awful lot about helping people to achieve their goals and how you do that and I talk a lot in 8Wise^TM about setting these three core goals, this short-term goal, this mid-term goal, and this long-term goal and the short-term goal is something that you can achieve in 12 weeks. So, to help people really start to Live the 8Wise^TM Way in that way, short, sharp, and straight to the point, what I actually then did was develop the 12 week journal just to help people get into the process, help people get into the flow, so you can also then buy, alongside the book, the 8Wise^TM 12 week journal if you are somebody who’s looking to just get their foot in the door and start changing the way that they want to live to make it more of an 8Wise^TM approach to life.

Then I thought, well, okay, that’s great, but some people like to plan a bit bigger than that. Let’s plan a little bit longer than that and so instead of just a 12-week journal, why not create a 12 month planner. So those people who are really looking to commit some major changes and Live the 8Wise^TM Way moving forward, they can really have one place to record their short-term, their mid-term, and their long-term goals. And so along with the 8Wise^TM Ways to a Healthier, Happier Mind, which so many people call, and I just love the fact that it gets called this, “The Mental Health Guide for the modern world” and that’s a brilliant thing to be told that’s what your book’s being called. So, 8Wise^TM Ways to a Healthier, Happier Mind, the mental health guide for the modern world. You can also get the 12-week journal, as I said, and the 12-month planner as well.

Sometimes we just need some little helping hands with regards to things that we can do in our lives, some tools and some tips to do things with and so I created the Little Pocketbook of Wellbeing as well, which is a few different tangible activities that you can implement with regards to each of the eight elements of the model so you can Live the 8Wise^TM Way and, ultimately, that package together becomes like having a psychotherapist in your pocket.

So, if you are somebody who’s always wanted to try therapy, but financially you’re not in the position, then you can actually buy the full 8Wise^TM package, the books, free access to all of the extra resources, you can put them all together and follow the process as it’s laid out in front of you, and you basically develop your own approach. You will be able to follow 8Wise^TM, develop your 8Wise^TM Ways of Living the 8Wise^TM Way and it’s like therapy. It’s like having someone like me work through the whole process with you in a one-to-one, but you’re doing it from the comfort of your own home. So that’s ultimately what 8Wise^TM is all about and like I said, I developed it to help with my own mental health and wellbeing.

Now, mental health and wellbeing is not as simple as you read a book and it changes your life and you will never have issues again. Well, that’d be great. Crikey. Sadly, that’s not how it works. The way that it works is, you have to consciously continue to make an effort to stay involved with yourself, meaning you need to have that daily self-reflection and check in with yourself. Who am I? How am I? How is my life at the moment? How am I coping? Am I using the most effective coping skills in order to manage my life effectively? And that is where I want to spend 2023 with you. So, if you are somebody who is saying “yeah, definitely I want to start Living the 8Wise^TM Way, I want to start improving my mental health and wellbeing throughout 2023, but I’m not sure where to start”, then the podcast can help you alongside the books and if you really want more support, then you are welcome to join me on some of the 8Wise^TM training that is coming this year as well.

If you want a little bit of extra support and actually get more of a detailed approach on how you can Live the 8Wise^TM Way using your life and your life experience exactly like having me as your therapist, then come along to the training as well, and there’ll be some details below with regards to that. When I say below, I talk as if I’m watching a video and then the comments are below, that’s why I say that but when I say below, I really mean check out the comments on any of the platforms that you are listening to me on right now, and there will be some information with regards to everything there.

As of our very next episode, we are going to start talking about coping skills. I said in my last episode that so many of us try to change our life or change who we are and by telling ourselves we need to change who we are we’re constantly telling ourselves that we are not good enough at who we are, there’s something wrong with us and I don’t believe that. I believe that we’re all pretty fabulous in who we are, we’re just surviving the world the best way we can. But sometimes we develop behaviours and we develop thought patterns that don’t work for us, and it’s those thought patterns and those behaviours that we have some control over, and therefore, instead of changing everything about ourselves and trying to change who we are, if we can actually start to change some of those behaviours and change some of those thought patterns, we can actually develop better coping mechanisms for life. When we develop better coping mechanisms for life, it means that we feel less overwhelmed and when we feel less overwhelmed, we feel more positive about things and that’s when we feel better about ourselves as well.

To start January off, what I want these episodes to focus on is exactly that. I want to be focusing on developing better coping skills. So that’s what next week’s episode is going to be about. We’re going to go into coping skills in a bit of detail and really start to look at what coping skills don’t work for us, what do work for us, and work on what changes you might need to make to your behaviours to implement better coping mechanisms for yourself. Then I’m really looking forward to introducing you to a dear friend of mine, Joel Jelen, who is a breathwork guru from my perspective, he knows everything about how you can use your breathing to maintain optimal mental health and mental wellbeing, how you can implement breathing strategies to really improve your coping mechanisms. Then after that, I’m bringing on another great friend, the wonderful Claire Morton, who is fantastic in so many different areas but I have always loved listening to her meditation. She does these amazing meditations, and she really knows her stuff when it comes to the importance of meditation and how that can be used to help you to manage your mental health and wellbeing as well. So, we’re going to be talking to Joel about breath work and Claire about meditation.

Then we’ve got to face facts that a lot of our coping mechanisms, and this comes from my perspective, a lot of people are like me, and their coping mechanisms are dysfunctional because they use very specific substances to help them do that and diet and exercise, if used properly, can be a really, really good coping mechanism for us. So we’re going to do some work on how diet works with 8Wise^TM to help you implement better coping mechanisms. We’re going to talk about nutrition a lot and I’ve got a wonderful nutritionist going to be coming on and joining us for an interview. Her name is Lisa Smith, she is phenomenal when it comes to nutrition, and she’s going to be talking all about how and what we should be eating to help develop better coping mechanisms and how food can really support with our mental health and wellbeing as well. Then we can’t talk about nutrition, we can’t talk about food, if we’re not talking about exercise. So I’ve got a wonderful, wonderful PT, I used to work with her a couple of years ago, Gemma Aldcroft. She is phenomenal and she is spending a lot of her time at the moment working with specifically menopausal women and hormone imbalance with regards to how exercise can help, with regards to hormones and how the importance of exercise can really work with our mental health and our mental wellbeing. Gemma is fantastic with regards to strength training and things like that. I work with Gemma, she writes my programs for me actually  with regards to my strength training, because for those of you who didn’t know, I had bariatric surgery over a year ago, I’ve lost an awful lot of weight which has meant that I’ve lost a lot of muscle mass. And that muscle mass just makes me feel a bit lethargic. So Gemma has been working with me on how I can build my muscle mass back up, how that’s going to help with my body feeling physically stronger, how it’s going to help my metabolism. Therefore, how I’m going to help with my digestion and then how I can help with working through my own coping mechanisms of using healthier approaches to food and exercise than the ones that I used to use.

Then we’re going to talk about the anti-diet culture, because many of the coping mechanisms we use, as I said, are around food and some of them are really unhealthy. A lot of unhealthy elements of diet culture can lead to eating disorders and disordered eating so we are going to be talking to the wonderful, wonderful Mel Wakeman. Now, Mel Wakeman is another registered nutritionist, but she supports people from healing from recovery with regards to eating disorders that come from this diet culture. She’s an anti- diet campaigner if anything, and if you ever get the chance, check out Mel Wakeman on Instagram and things like that. Her videos are amazing and they’re really, really clear. So we’re going to have some fantastic conversations with Mel over a few episodes with regards to anti- diet culture, the dangers of how we use diet to cope with certain things in our life and how they can actually trigger and lead us into other areas that cause us problems with our mental health and wellbeing, such as disordered eating and eating disorders.

Now, again, if you’ve listened to me talk before, it is very easy for our coping mechanisms to take us into some dangerous areas and, for me, I used food as a coping mechanism for a very long time, which led me into areas such as binge eating disorder and food addiction so, moving forward, I am trying to cope with those, I’m trying to change my eating habits to make sure that I can’t do that. And I’ve done that by attending some training with the very, very, very amazing Bernie Wright who is definitely a very important voice when it comes to anything linked to disordered eating and eating disorders specifically as well if you have them, or if you are neurodivergent, Bernie specializes in all of these things. So I’m going to be bringing you some wonderful interviews with Bernie as well.

Now, there are just some core coping mechanisms to start with that will take us through, ultimately, your first 12 weeks. So, if you are somebody who is wanting to really set some short-term goals on how to manage their mental health and mental wellbeing effectively, then you need to start looking at “do the coping mechanisms I have in place, are they effective? Are they efficient? Are they bringing the best out in me? And if they’re not, I need to change them. I need to create some new ones”. This links into things like habits, and obviously if we’re talking about coping mechanisms, what we’re trying to do is create new, healthier habits that help us to cope with the stress in life, to prevent that stress from escalating like it did for me, escalating into mental health issues.

Now, we’re not going to stop there. We’re going to be talking to an awful lot more people. I’ve got some amazing people coming on to talk about addiction. I’ve got some amazing people coming on to talk about their own journey with regards to how they’ve used 8Wise^TM to change their life, to help them overcome their mental health issues, to help them navigate through life when life’s been really throwing some stuff at them. I’m going to be talking to some people who are going through 12 step programs right now with regards to different parts of addiction as well so we’re going to be talking to a lot of people who can share real life experiences with you on how they have used 8Wise^TM to improve their quality of their life and really start to gain optimal mental health and wellbeing.

That is my plan for everybody for 2023. It’s how do we create better mental health and wellbeing and have the best quality of life that we can possibly have, take control in our lives where we can take control and develop these healthier, happier minds using 8Wise^TM. That’s what I call Living the 8Wise^TM Way. That’s what I want to help you do in 2023. So, we’re bringing that to you each episode covering slightly different topics, but helping you specifically over the next 12 episodes in developing some better coping mechanisms to make you really, really strong at your core, at your foundation so you can handle what life is going to throw at you in 2023.

If you want to know more about 8Wise^TM before you throw yourself into these podcasts and you throw yourself into Living the 8Wise^TM Way, then option one, go back to episode one of this podcast and learn everything you need to know about 8Wise^TM, option two, go out and get the book 8Wise^TM Ways to a Healthier, Happier Mind. You can get them pretty much from any of the major online book retailers, you don’t need me to say who they are, you know who they are, but you can get them from everywhere. You can get them from your local book retailers as well, they’ll probably just order it in. Some of them have got them in the store, but some of them will just order them in for you as well. If you are UK based and you would like signed copies or anything like that, then feel free to go to my website www.8Wise.co.uk.co.uk to the store and you can message me there. You can buy the books there directly and if you ask for it to be signed, I will happily sign it and happily send it out to you as well. So that is the 8Wise^TM Ways to a Healthier, Happier Mind book, the 12 Week Journal, the 12 month Planner, or the Pocketbook.

Now, when it comes to 8Wise^TM, if you find you are not the best person at doing things on your own and you need some guidance more than a book and a podcast, then you are welcome to join me on my training courses. The first training course I do is a short course called The 8Wise^TM Masterclass which really is an introduction to 8Wise^TM. They are going to be happening throughout 2023, and you can book onto those via Eventbrite or, again, come on board. We’re just uploading all of that information as we speak onto my website, and you’ll be able to get the information there and book it there as well.

If you are wanting to take your 8Wise^TM journey to the next level and start to understand more about yourself with regards to 8Wise^TM so that you are able to implement your own strategy and your own wellness plan, then you can come along to the 8Wise^TM Discovery course and the 8Wise^TM Discovery course is pretty much what it tells you on the tin. It is a self-discovery program. It’s all about you understanding more about yourself against all of the elements of the 8Wise^TM model, knowing where your key pressure points are, knowing what certain things in your life have triggered you in the past and continue to trigger you so that you know what you need to focus on moving forward. That’s the 8Wise^TM Discovery course.

Then there is the 8Wise^TM Accelerator course. This is what accelerates you through the Full 8Wise^TM program so, not only do you get a really good in-depth level of information about 8Wise^TM, you then also get to go through the full process that I would go through with you if I was working one-to-one with you as your therapist. We would go through it, we would start to understand you with regards to each of these core eight elements, and then what we would then do is implement a very bespoke personalized wellness plan that is relevant to you and your life and your history, so you can move forward. What 8Wise^TM is really all about, is about helping you to heal from the past, manage the challenges of the present, and create a healthier, happier quality of life for your future and the 8Wise^TM Accelerator takes you through each of those three core stages.

Now all of the courses are going to either be online, so you can come and join me via Zoom and we’ll do those live, or if you know you can’t attend live courses, then what you can do is purchase the recording only element of the course. You will get exactly the same course as somebody who attended live, but you will get the live recordings instead. So, there are two options. You can learn all of these from the comfort of your own home, no matter what country you live in across the globe. So, you can either come online and do those courses with me live, or you can just purchase the recordings of the live courses, which will always be available after the live courses go live or finished going live and so you will get exactly the same support, exactly the same product, exactly the same service.

If you are really looking to make 2023 the year that you Live the 8Wise^TM Way, then there are many routes to suit you and there are many routes to suit your budget. If your budget is really low, then you can use this podcast and the previous episodes. If you know you need to do a little bit of investment to get a little bit more information and you like self-study, then the books are your option. If you know that actually you need a little bit more support and a little bit more guidance with regards to what you need to do and almost a community to help you do that in, then the training courses are available for you as well. So, there are lots of options to suit your way of learning, your way of developing, your therapeutic needs and your budget.

I created 8Wise^TM to help as many people as I possibly could, and the only way I can do that is if as many people as possible can access it. So, they are the ways that you can access it. Podcast for free, low budget through the books, and obviously a little bit more financial investment if you’re doing the training. There are lots of people who choose to do all of it. You are welcome. I’d love to see you at everything. You can pick and drop at different things at different stages, it’s entirely up to you. If you are still unsure what might be the best way for you then get in touch with me, email me directly at [email protected] or you can go to my website. If you’re somebody who doesn’t like contacting people directly, I get it, don’t worry about it. Go to my website and you can fill out the form on there and it’ll come through and we’ll come back to you as soon as we can. Nice and simple. Live the 8Wise^TM Way, whatever way works for you in all the different formats, from all the different platforms.

Based on that, this is why I ask every single episode, can you please comment, can you please like, can you please share, can you please subscribe because I want to help as many people as possible. I know not everybody can access therapy even though they might need it. I know not everybody can afford therapy even though they might need it. I’ve created a process, a product, a way that you can implement really good strategies for the rest of your life to maintain optimal mental health and optimal mental wellbeing, but people can’t use it if they don’t know it exists, and that’s why I trust on you to help spread the 8Wise^TM words so that more and more people can access it, can listen to it, can learn from it, and start Living the 8Wise^TM Way for a better quality of life for themselves.

So, it’s here, congratulations, we’ve survived 2022. We are now heading into 2023. It’s remembering that we are awesome. It’s remembering that we can achieve anything. It’s remembering that it’s okay not to feel good, be good, be the best you are every minute of every day but it’s really important to remember that all the answers you have yourself, all the power to make the changes you want in your life you have yourself. Small changes make big impacts. 8Wise^TM Ways to wellness is about breaking down life, giving you opportunities and knowledge about where in your life to make those small changes so you have that big impact so you really do have a healthier, happier mind to not just live successfully and happily through 2023 but for the rest of your life. I look forward to being with you on your 8Wise^TM journey and supporting you to Live the 8Wise^TM Way for better mental health and wellbeing.

Thank you for joining me for this very first podcast of 2023. I look forward to you joining me on all of the others because that’s me, Kim Rutherford, Psychotherapist, author, your podcast host, and also the creator of 8Wise^TM Ways to a Healthier, Happier Mind, and I look forward to spending more time with you as the week’s roll on. So, until then, take care and bye for now.