HOW TO MAKE YOUR HABITS WORK FOR YOU

Welcome everybody. Hello, my name is Kim Rutherford and I’ll be with you through this podcast. This is the Live The 8Wise^TM Way podcast and you have joined me today at episode 11, where we are talking about how you can make your habits work for you.

How are you all doing? How are you enjoying the Live The 8Wise^TM Ways podcast?

Definitely, please do get in touch and let me know if you are liking the podcast or how you are using it, or if you’ve made any major decisions in your life based on some of the content that we’ve talked about so far. Every single episode so far, we have been talking you through the core four dimensions of the 8Wise^TM model and also each of the elements within those four dimensions, which leads us to the eight, hence the name 8Wise^TM.

So, as I said at the beginning, my name is Kim Rutherford. I’m a psychotherapist, I’m an author and I am obviously a podcast host as well, and I am the person who developed the 8Wise^TM methodology for better mental health and wellbeing. So, if this is your first episode and you’re joining us for the very first time, welcome. Thank you very much, great to have you with us. Why don’t you click on the like button, click on the subscribe button, so you never have to miss out on another episode. Share this with people if you think it’s going to be useful to them, just get involved and let the world know if you think this is a good podcast for people to listen to and, as soon as you finish this one, why don’t you head straight back to episode one and listen to each of the episodes in order, which will then give you a really good, clear understanding of what 8Wise^TM is all about and the different key elements that you need to be focusing on in order to improve your mental health and wellbeing, and just basically live a healthier, happier life and get a better quality of life from doing that as well.

Today we are talking about habits because, from my perspective, we’ve been talking about all of the things that you need to look at in your life and how you need to change it. So, we’ve looked at how do we improve our emotional and physical wellness, how do we look at improving spiritual wellness, intellectual wellness, be better with our environment, create better social systems, create that occupational wellness that works for us and develop those financial wellness elements as well. We’ve also been talking about how we manage stress by using that 8Wise^TM model and how you implement different strategies for managing stress by using 8Wise^TM. But sometimes what really matters, and what we really need to do if we want to change our life and we want to have a happier, healthier life and all of the wonderful things that can come with that, is we need to be willing to make some changes and change in itself isn’t easy. It’s definitely, definitely harder to change some of the habits that are leading us into a life that we are not happy with, or we are unsettled with, or are causing us problems or issues. Whether that be with our mental health, our physical health, or you can just feel like things are just going in the wrong direction for yourself. So really what I want to talk about today is understanding your habits a bit better and understanding how you need to make them start working better for you.

Now, I’m not just talking about the bad habits, you know the biting nails, the having one too many on the weekend, I’m also really asking you to look at some of the really good habits that you’ve got and start using those as evidence really, to support knowing that you can, if you’ve got one good habit, you’ve got the skills to create others. One of the things that is definitely worth remembering as I’m talking about all of this today, is that I don’t want you to beat yourself up too much if you’ve tried making changes in the past and it hasn’t worked out. I know we can go down that route of “oh my God, I failed, I failed, I failed, I failed, I’ve tried all this before, and I failed and I failed and I failed”. I think the key that you keep trying indicates to you that you’re not failing and it’s like I said to you in a previous episode, it’s about being able to fail forward.

What that means is if you haven’t been able to accomplish something before, it’s about learning from that experience and making sure that the next time you do something, you’ve learned something a bit differently and you move that forward with you. We only truly fail if something doesn’t go according to plan and we let that stop us from ever trying again and that’s definitely what happens when it comes to habits. Sometimes we can try things and then when it doesn’t work out for us, we think that we’ve done something wrong, we’ve failed in some way. I’m that classic person, I’m an overeater, I’m a binge eater and an emotional eater and I’ve struggled with my weight quite severely because of it and I’ve done that whole… I’ve beat myself up because my habits around eating aren’t good enough and I’ve never really looked at it from the perspective of, “well, maybe the choices I was making weren’t the right choices for me to make the changes with I needed. Maybe I didn’t fail. Maybe what I’ve learned is enough now to do it a different way and maybe that’s what makes it positive and maybe that’s how I’m learning to make my habits work for me”. You’ve got to think about how you are going to make your habits work for you and if you’ve been following the 8Wise^TM plan, it’s about looking at your habits, linked to those core eight elements of wellbeing and looking at them and going “okay, where are my habits right now with regards to managing my emotions or my communication with regards to the relationships I have, or with regards to looking after my money, what are my habits really like, are they working for me or are they working against me” and if you’re like, “they’re working for me” then go, “all right, I’m doing all right. Can I tweak them, can I improve them, do I need to”? But if they’re not working for you, then maybe it’s time that we made some changes, some positive changes, whether that be to create some new habits or just make some changes to the ones that aren’t working for you quite as much.

What I want you to understand today is that research has shown us that over 40% of what we do is determined by the habits that we have and not conscious decisions that we make. Ultimately habits are these parts of our brains where we are just doing things without much thinking to it, it’s deep, it’s part of us, it’s really deep in part of us with regards to our habits and it’s almost when our subconscious mind and unconscious mind has taken over those behaviours for us. We don’t have to think about it anymore. We don’t have to consciously think about it, so we can focus on consciously thinking about other things. I mean, the principle of it’s fantastic, isn’t it? That we could use different parts of our brain at different times, and they can make us do different things. Pretty awesome when we think of it like that, apart from the fact that when, you know, I’m at midnight and I’m sneaking to the fridge in order to get more food, because that’s the habit I have rather than the fact that I’m sleeping soundly because my new habit led me to better sleep patterns… there’s a little bit of insight into my history for you right there.

So, habits, that’s what we need to look at. We need to start looking at how can we take something that is being used in a part of our brain that we don’t consciously access and how can we make it conscious so we can make it work better for us.

So, to make it clear, the decisions that we make every day, they are made from the prefrontal cortex part of our brain. That’s the bit that sits just behind the front of our skull and our behaviours become automatic and the decision-making part of our brain goes into sleep mode when we don’t need to think about things as much. Again, isn’t that brilliant that sometimes our brain could just go “you know what I could still do all of this and have a little nap at the same time”. Great. Now the positives of that are obviously what it does is it gives us more mental activity to be devoted to other areas of our lives. So you can remember to breathe, for example, it’s a good habit to have, breathing, you can remember to breathe whilst also consciously having to focus on work, but it’s not so great when the negatives are making us behave in a way completely outside of our knowledge that is hurting us, is damaging our life or is definitely not helping us to live the life that we want.

The tool that I want to teach you today with regards to how to manage your habits, how to create habits or how to change habits is called the Four Stage Habit Loop and I recommend my clients use this with regards to 8Wise^TM, with regards to managing anxiety, with regards to managing depression and with regards to trying to push out of their comfort zones as well. Now the four stages of the loop habit, or the habit loop, are que, craving, response, and reward. So, I just think about those four things.

Now think of the que. The que is something that’s in our environment, it’s going to trigger us and it makes us behave in a certain way. So something that happens and then triggers us. The craving part of the loop, this is the energy that’s behind the habit, it provides us with that yearning to respond to whatever that trigger or that que was. Now the response relates to the actual performance of the behaviour of that particular habit that we may have, and the reward is the payoff at the end of the habit. So, the four stages of the loop are the que, the craving, the response and the reward.

We start with the que, and so the que is those triggers and behaviours that are repeatedly happening all of the time, so we are repeating them, repeating them, repeating them and then that’s what creates the habit. There are five different types of ques and these different types of things, our emotions are a que, how we feel, so whether we are bored or habitually going on social media, for example, our emotions are a big que for us. Our location, so where we are, for example, like having a specific routine, when you go to your gym, the time, so like a morning routine that might start at a certain time. The people that we’re with, so that behaviour that we have, or with a particular friend, and also that immediately preceding event to something, so something that happens before we want something else, so, again, going back to my eating habits, I’m really giving you some insight into my eating habits tonight. We’re basically saying that an immediately preceding event, like switching on the TV can lead to habit such as wanting alcohol or wanting food, like going the cinema might make you want to have popcorn, that is an example of a que. It’s either emotion, it’s something linked to location, something linked to time, something linked to people or a preceding event. All of the ques work in slightly different ways so there’s no structured way that they work, but they all initiate the habit loop and bring us to the next stage. No matter what habit we experience, the reason we’re experiencing that habit is because there was a que in the first place that triggered that process.

The second stage of the process is that craving, that desire, that need to be satisfied for something. So, for example, let’s take it back to the food because it’s one that we all share a lot of the time, craving for chocolate. So, the que and the craving are wired together. For me, for example, if I switch on the TV, the motion of the TV, the sound of the TV, the feeling of the TV, the sitting in my favourite part of the sofa that triggers me wanting the chocolate. Then that inspires the action, which takes us to the next stage to satisfy the craving. For me, if my que is I’ve just switched on the TV, now I fancy a bit of chocolate because that’s what my craving is, my next action is I’ve got to satisfy, the response is to satisfy the craving so I’m going to satisfy my craving by getting myself some chocolate. I’d love to hear what your favourite chocolate bars are by the way.

Now, stage three, that response. The response becomes the routine, the routine that we suddenly become connected to when it becomes part of the habit. The routine is the part of the habit we are familiar with the most. It’s the activity that we want to get in the habit of doing. So, in this case, it’s I don’t want to get into the habit of wanting chocolate, I don’t want to get in the habit of thinking about chocolate, I want to get in the habit of loving and tasting the chocolate because loving and tasting the chocolate, that’s what takes me to my next bit, giving my brain chemicals floating around, making me feel good. I feel satisfied that I’ve achieved it. I get an emotional release from it. It’s fantastic. Let’s not mess around, when we get that response to those cravings and those ques, it makes us feel really great and that greatness is the reward that we feel and the reward is what makes all of these habits worthwhile. It tells our brain that the routine that led us to this moment in time, this reward is worth remembering and to repeat it when we experience the same que. So, for me, the next time I switch on the TV, and I might be watching a bit of Peaky Blinders, for example, the first thing that’s going to happen is I’m going to go “oh yeah I want me some chocolate”. My craving kicks in. I want my chocolate. I want my chocolate now and I’m going to make that happen, so I’m going to respond by getting me some chocolate. When I’ve had that chocolate, I’ve tasted that chocolate, my reward is that I feel satisfied with that chocolate and then next time I switch on the TV I will do the same. So, what happens is we get a dopamine hit in our brains and that dopamine hit, that’s what helps us solidify this habit loop.

When all of these stages come together and create this loop, it becomes trickier and trickier and trickier over time for us to identify whether the habit is really good for us and what we have to do if it’s not good for us is we have to learn to either change it by taking something out of the loop, or we need to create a different habit that is stronger than the one that we keep following through on.

Sometimes I work with my clients on this and we talk about “oh my God, I’ve got so many bad habits, how do I change them all” and I go “well, let’s not bother, why bother, why don’t we just start with creating some newer habits, some habits that become good for you, that become strong for you, that actually, over time, because you are using them more, you use the bad habits less”.

So of course, it’s a lot easier to create a new habit than it is to actually get rid of some of the older one. When you are building a good habit, and I was taking into consideration something, for example, if you experience anxiety, you might be experiencing certain ques in your life that trigger your anxiety, so it’s about making your que obvious if you are trying to have a good habit.

Now with anxiety, your que might be it depends on what you know triggers your anxiety. So, for example, when I suffered my anxiety really, really badly, a lot of the time my anxiety was being triggered through things like having to drive a car and having to go to places because I wasn’t in the right head space to be doing that. So, for me, I had to start making my habit change. I used to have to drive to work. I couldn’t stop driving so I had to change my que. So my que suddenly wasn’t about getting into the car, what I suddenly changed was the first thing I did when I got into the car was find the radio station that I really enjoyed and I found listening to the radio show really good and really positive for me. So, I changed my que and I made my que obvious. What didn’t happen anymore is I didn’t go “oh my God I’ve just sat in the car, Oh my God, Oh my God, Oh my God”. I go “I’m sitting in the car to put my radio show on”. Now my radio show is on I’m in a slightly different frame of mind because I’ve missed out those first few seconds of anxiety now, it hasn’t shot up and I’m listening to my radio show and it’s a better que for me. And I needed to create that que to be something that could be a craving for me, making it really, really attractive and that’s why it was specific to find a certain radio show for me because I needed it to be at a very certain time of the day and I needed to get something out of it, so I found a radio show that at that particular, certain time that they had a really fun thing that every single day I wanted to listen to. I created a new craving, an almost the, what if craving, what’s going to happen today, what are they going to talk about today because suddenly I’m in the car and I’m finding my radio show, what are they going to talk about today, what am I thinking today? All of that thought process, all of those thinking elements in my mind, take me away from what my original triggers were, my original ques were with regards to the anxiety I was feeling. Then I make it easy to respond and I make it easy to respond because my que is “I want to listen to the radio show”, my craving is “I want to know what’s going on on the radio show”, so how do I respond to it, I put the radio show on. By that I started to create a new habit and that leads to that reward, and I make that reward satisfying. I don’t get in and switch the engine on straight away, I listen to what’s going on in that thing. I’m sat there on my driveway at 6:00am in the morning, because that’s what time I used to have to leave, 6:00am in the morning, I’ve got my radio show on and I’m listening to that and that’s 5-10 minutes just for me in the car that used to trigger anxiety for me and I created a different habit. That new habit stopped me thinking that every time I get in a car, I’m going to have to drive and every time I drive, I’m going to crash.

What that did was it actually calmed me down first thing in the morning, it prevented me from going straight into anxiety and it was about creating a coping mechanism for me in a situation I knew I was always going to have to be in by creating a new habit that helped me manage my anxiety.

If you are completely different and you want to break those bad habits, then kudos to you for going in on the hard stuff straight away. But when breaking bad habits, you’ve got to make the que not visible. If we take you back to my chocolate cravings, for example, the only way to not be wanting chocolate at certain times is I don’t watch TV at certain times. That’s as simple as it is. I know certain TV is not going to be good for me because it’s going to make me want chocolate. I’m also that person, if I see somebody drinking red wine on TV, I also want a glass of red wine. It’s very, very crazy, but that’s a fact, that’s where I’m at in my life.

For me, sometimes watching TV is not a really good place for me, especially if I’m tired, especially if I’m not able to make great conscious decisions for myself so I choose in those moments to find something else to do. My other options, I can remove the craving and the desire by making it unattractive. I’ve got to make chocolate or red wine unattractive and the way that I do that is I try to go down the route of “well I’ve actually got to work tomorrow so red wine’s going to hurt my head, I won’t be able to do all of those things I want to do”. So I try to go down that route and kind of create something different or it.

I also make it very, very difficult to respond, for example with chocolate, I don’t have it in the house. If I had it in the house, it’s easier to respond to it and get that satisfaction that leads to a new habit loop. So instead, if I don’t have it in the house, I can’t have it. I can want it all alike, but I break the habit loop by taking out one of the four elements to it. And then I can make it unsatisfying by removing it and it’s not in the house, so I never become satisfied by the chocolate bar, for example, if it’s never in the house to be satisfied by. So that’s how I manage it, but you’ve got to find a way to manage it for yourself. Sometimes it means that you’ve got to try it and repeat it over and over and over again, and there will be failures and it’s okay to fail. In fact, you should want to fail because failing means that you can try it again and try it again and try it again. And the way that our brain works, repetition, repetition, repetition, repetition. So don’t be scared to fail. Pick yourself up, learn what didn’t work for you and put something else in place that does

If you are going to go and have a look at the habits in your life, if you are going to sit there and go “okay, I’ve looked at my 8Wise^TM areas, I know what my model is, I’ve done all my evaluations, I’ve been on the website, I’ve done all of that and I know that I’ve got some really bad habits with regards to certain elements of my wellness spectrum that I need to change and to improve my self-care I’m going to have to start looking at those habits”. What you want to do is make sure you understand the habit loop. You want to isolate the que, so isolate those triggers, understand them, know why they’re there. Change the routine that you are in. Have a plan to have a different thing that you’re going to do and reward yourself for the new thing that you do and then finally, if you track your progress, you’re always going to have that encouraging reminder of how far you’ve come. So if you are ever going to start making changes in your life, or you’re going to start changing habits, then I do really recommend that you start journaling and actually recording that process and recording that information for yourself so that you can actually know what the best way is for you to move forward, what you’ve learned, what you’ve liked, what you don’t like.

It’s very easy to just say “today I’m going to give up chocolate”, but there’s so many different components, for example, that led to the habit that you have, don’t think it’s going to be simple. It won’t be simple. It’s a commitment to small changes that has an impact on the big change. But if you are somebody who is suffering with mental health or you know that your wellbeing isn’t where you want it to be, or you just want to look after these things, then you really do need to have a look at the things in your life, the habits in your life that are affecting your self-care, and they are potentially affecting how your brain is functioning or how your thought process are or how you feel and you have to be brave and make that decision “do you know what, I’m the only person who can change this, I’m going to change it”. It’s no one else’s job guys, I’m sorry to say this and I have to say this to an awful lot of people with regards to their mental health and wellbeing overall, and it’s my tough love moment to everybody and it’s my tough love moment to you as well, it is nobody else’s responsibility to look after your mental health and wellbeing, but yours.

Don’t get me wrong, there are things in life and there are behaviours of other people in life and things that might trigger you, but it’s still your mental health and wellbeing, it’s nobody else’s responsibility. If you know there’s behaviours of yours, thought patterns of yours, habits of yours that are actually impacting you in a negative way and affecting your quality of life or affecting how you think or how you feel about things, then the only place you need to look for the answer is in the mirror. There are lots of people like me out there and books, like my 8Wise^TM Ways to a Healthier, Happier Mind, or this podcast, or lots of other great work by other people that can provide you with tools and techniques to do the work, but no one else can do it, it really is down to you.

If you know you’ve got to break some habits, get out there and break the habits. I recommend if you haven’t done so already, what I would recommend that you do is go to my website www.8wise.co.uk, head straight to the free resources tab at the top of the page. In the free resources tab you are going to find all of the evaluations for 8Wise^TM. Do the evaluations, find out where your current wellness levels are against each of those eight elements of the method. Then have a really good, strong, honest conversation with yourself. When it comes to how you are with regards to each of those, your behaviours, your thought patterns, your habits, take accountability, what can you change today, what can you change tomorrow to help either create a new habit or slightly tweak and change the old one so it works better for you. Because that’s what’s going to work better for you in the long run.

Now I want you to be thinking about doing this because really making healthy choices, mentally, physically, and making healthy choices with regards to how you’re going to change your own life is a really, really positive way to start managing your self-care much, much better. It’s your responsibility to say “okay, I’m not living life as happy as I want to. I’m not living life as healthy as I want to. I’ve listened to this woman talk about this 8Wise^TM methodology, I’m going to give that a go”. But if you’re going to give it a go, give it a real go. As I said, go and do those evaluations, assess yourself against each of those elements and then what you need to do is start to have a think about “I need to look after myself better. I need to implement a self-care plan that works best for me, that works right for me and I need to commit to doing that every single day of my life”. Not just for the next couple of days or the next couple of weeks or for a couple of hours so you can tell all your friends that’s what you’re doing. I mean actually make the decision that you are important enough that you never want to be unhappy, or you never want to be suffering with your mental health, or you don’t want your wellbeing and wellness to deteriorate dramatically.

What you want to do is invest good quality time in yourself, implement self-care strategies that will help boost each of the eight elements of your wellness spectrum so that you can start making really good positive changes for a healthier, happier mind, a better quality of life and that means being willing to change your behaviours and change your habits. Actually, the really wonderful thing about doing the habits thing, is by making changes to your habits and implementing a self-care routine, you’re actually tackling one of the really big dimensions with regards to 8Wise^TM just through doing that alone. Because by doing that, you’re making a decision to tackle your intellectual wellness and push out of your comfort zone and create something new for yourself and what that does is that boosts your spiritual wellness because, suddenly, you know yourself differently. Your purpose has changed. Your values have changed because your behaviours and your beliefs have changed about yourself. That then boosts your emotional wellness because now suddenly you know that you can change. You suddenly have a higher level of self-esteem because you’ve got this new evidence to say that “I can change. I’m worth it. I’m committing to doing something different today that just looks after me”. By looking after yourself in that one day, by changing that one habit, not only do you boost your intellectual wellness, not only do you boost your spiritual wellness and your emotional wellness, but you’re also going to feel physically better as well, because we know that if something affects us mentally or emotionally, it affects us physically.

So straight away by starting to tackle some habits, you start to improve or boost four core areas of your wellness spectrum and depending on where those habits sit, so for example, it might be a bad habit of going back to an ex-partner, even though you know that ex-partner is no longer good for you, that might be a habit you’ve now got yourself into, and you might say “I’m going to make a change to that habit and not only am I going to improve my physical, spiritual, emotional, intellectual wellness, I’m going to now improve my social wellness as well”. Boom. Now we’re looking at five out of the eight have changed, just because you chose to tackle your self-care with changing your habit. You might have other things going on, you might be someone who is a bit of a shopaholic, someone who whenever they’re a bit stressed, tends to spend a lot of money going on eBay, going on all the online shopping and you might say “well, actually I’m going to change that habit and by changing that habit I now have more money to spend quality time with my friends. So now I’m in a situation where physical, spiritual, emotional, intellectual, social and financial wellness are now improved by changing one habit”. Boom. Now six out of eight, just by changing one habit linked to something.

That is the key to this. The key to it all is if you want to improve your wellness, if you want to improve your wellbeing, if you want to improve your mental health, if you want to improve your psychological wellbeing and have a healthier, happier mind, 8Wise^TM can help you do it. Go and do the assessments, work out where you are with regards to each of the different eight across your whole wellness spectrum and then have a look at how you could improve your self-care and maybe tweak or change or improve or create some different habits within each of those to start boosting how you are coping now.

Now I’ve said all the way through this, I have genuine issues when it comes to food. I have genuine, genuine issues and it’s something that I’ve had to tackle head on. I have had to create a lot of new habits. I’ve had to change a lot of old habits. But this is how I did it. I didn’t listen to loads of different things because my head was getting too clogged up with too much information. I made the decision that actually, if I change one habit, if I make the decision that actually I am going to cut certain foods out of my life, I knew that not only straight away I was going to feel physically better, but I was also going to feel emotionally better because I was going to have less emotional responses to food.

It was going to make me feel good about myself, which means that my identity was changing. My spiritual wellness was changing. I was stretching my comfort zone. I was coming right out of my comfort zone. I was stretching, stretching, stretching, stretching, it was going a good direction. It also meant I was spending less money on really rubbish foods for myself. I still go out and spend quality time with my friends, but now it’s around spending quality time with them. I choose different environments, environments that don’t make me want some of the bad stuff that was giving me all of these problems in the first place. So I’ve changed lots of different elements of my own wellness spectrum by making some small changes and changing some of those habits and improving my overall mental health and wellbeing.

You might be sat there going well, why was your mental health so bad just because you ate chocolate? My mental health was so bad because I ate so much chocolate I was extremely obese and I was extremely obese for a wide range of reasons, not just because I overate, although overeating is what tends to lead to it. But my trigger points were lots of my other issues that were going on and I was genuinely self-healing and self-medicating through food and it made me very, very ill, made me very, very sick and I sit here today with my mental health a lot, lot better for many different reasons, but because I used 8Wise^TM to get me there and I’ve explained this in previous episodes, but I also sit here nearly a hundred pound lighter because I made those changes. I believe now firmly, at the beginning of this I didn’t think I could change anything. I was one of those people, my habits were so strong, I didn’t think I could change it. My self-esteem was so low I couldn’t think I could change things, but I did, and I know that you can, and it doesn’t matter what the habit is. It doesn’t matter what it’s linked to. You can change it. It doesn’t have to be as small as just not eating chocolate anymore, but equally it doesn’t need to be as big as moving on from a toxic relationship. It’s you make the decision on what habits and behaviours in your life that you have control over, that you are accountable for, that you identify the ones for yourself that are triggering your mental health, that are triggering your wellbeing, that are triggering your wellness and make the change, do it for you. There is no body coming in to do it for you. I wish I could do it for you, I’d love to be able to take all of that away for you, but I just can’t and I had to do it for me and you’ve got to do it for you and it’s why I developed 8Wise^TM. Because I wanted to make sure that those people out there who were wanting to make major changes in their lives, or small changes in their lives, to help with their own recovery or help with their prevention plans, that they had tools that they had techniques to do it and that’s what 8Wise^TM is about.

8Wise^TM gives you the tools and techniques to understand and identify where your triggers are, and not only where your triggers are, how that’s implementing, how that’s affecting, how that’s causing you problems on your wellness spectrum and I promise you when I say, you have got the power to change it. You can change it. You’ve just got to have some faith in yourself and follow a process that will help you do that.

I hope listening to this episode today has given you some motivation to do that, I believe in you. I truly believe in you. I know you can do it. I know I could do it. I’ve got the evidence, I can fit into skinny jeans, there’s my evidence. But, more importantly, I don’t sit on a sofa anymore petrified of going out and I can drive anywhere because I no longer have burnout, anxiety, depression, agoraphobia, and I still work on the binge eating.

So, I hope today has been useful for you, but trust in yourself, trust that you have the power to make the change, trust that you have the power to commit to those changes and trust that you have and deserve to use your power to be happier, healthier with a better quality of life and more importantly, a really, really happy, healthy mind as well.

This has been the Live the 8Wise^TM Way podcast with me, Kim Rutherford, psychotherapist, author of 8Wise^TM Ways to a Healthier, Happier Mind, plus the journal and the planner and the pocketbook as well, obviously this podcast too.

Now, if you are liking listening to 8Wise^TM and you’d like to learn more about it, then I’ve got some good news coming your way my friends, because as of autumn, I will be launching our new training courses. We will be offering and opening up our new training courses, we’ve been closed for the summer just so we can have a bit of a break, but as of autumn, we will be opening the doors to our 8Wise^TM Discovery Program, which is a training program all about 8Wise^TM and specifically how you can go through 8Wise^TM and learn how to create your own self-care action plan, your own 8Wise^TM transition plan and how you can start developing those tools and techniques to help take control of your life and start helping you to manage your mental health and wellbeing down the line. So that is our short course, the 8Wise^TM Discovery course, and I am really excited to be bringing back the much more in depth course, the 8Wise^TM Accelerator, which really is like having your own 8Wise^TM therapy, but in a course process.

We take you through each of the core eight elements of the model in a lot more detail with regards to, very specifically, all the different elements of psychology that’s linked to them. We talk about how you develop, how you assess yourself. We help you to understand what self-care elements you need to implement so you not only leave with a very fully detailed strategic plan for how to manage your mental health and wellbeing forward, but you’ve got very clear actions on there on how to do that as well. It really is like having intense psychotherapy over a period of time, but in a lovely group of people who understand what you’re going through and want to share with you everything and motivate you as well.

If you are interested in that, then please do make sure you are following me on all the different social medias. You can get me on Facebook, you can get me on Instagram, you can get me on LinkedIn, you can get me on Twitter, just find @8Wise anywhere, I’m either @8Wise, @8WiseKim or @8WiseTherapy and all of the information will be there in the next few weeks, but we are going live with all the new courses in the autumn term so I’m really looking forward to seeing you. (Scroll down to view all social media link buttons).

Many of those courses will be online so you can join me online and get to know each other a lot better and I can use my model to help you to develop the life you want and improve quality of your life. So, keep an eye out for that.

Thank you for joining today. Thank you very much. As I said, if this is your first episode, thank you so much, I hope it’s been beneficial, I hope you’ve learned something. Please click the like button, please click subscribe so you won’t miss out on any of the new episodes. They come out every week and please share this. I mean, we know one in four people at the moment are struggling with their mental health and wouldn’t it be great if we could share some love and help one of those, two of those, three of those, twenty of those, a hundred of those, a million of those people, so that they feel that they have the tools to take control and become accountable for looking after their own mental health and wellbeing, as well as the other support systems that they might have in their place as well.

Share if you can, subscribe if you can. Most importantly, I really hope that you listen to our next episode where I’m going to be going through start to finish how you use 8Wise^TM in order to create a strategy for yourself moving forward. I hope you would join me then but, until then, take care, look after yourselves and enjoy Living the 8Wise^TM Way.

Bye for now.