IS IT A MID-LIFE CRISIS?

Hello everybody. 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. How are you doing? How are things? I can tell you I’m feeling a little bit chesty today. For whatever reason I woke up in the middle of the night with a dry cough and it’s just really landed heavy on my chest. I think it’s because we’re starting to put all the heating back on, although it’s not going on for very long and it’s not going on very high, it’s still going on and I think it’s drying the air out. So, I’m going to try to not cough and splutter down the mic at you today.

I hope you are well. I hope everything in your life is going well, and if it’s not, you know what I’m always going to say to you, I’m always going to say, if you are struggling, please do not struggle alone. You can reach out to somebody. I promise you someone will always reach back, but people can’t reach back if you don’t let someone know that you are struggling. And I know it sounds crazy to say that to people, it sounds crazy to say that if you are the one struggling, you are the one who needs to do the work and I don’t mean it like that, I just mean it like everybody’s so wrapped up in their own lives, they’re not really paying a great deal of attention sometimes to what’s going on around them. It doesn’t mean they don’t care, it just might mean that things that are very obvious to you might not be as obvious to other people so sometimes you need to make things obvious to other people so you can get the support that you need as well.

But on that note, if you are somebody who has identified that your friend or your family member or your colleague might be, I don’t know, behaving in a slightly different way, a way that isn’t normal for them, isn’t a standard way that they would behave then, you know what, it’s not just down to them to reach out to you if they’re struggling, open the conversation. Open the reality that you are approachable to talk about any issues that they might have. Let’s start building our communities better, let’s start building our society better by being there for each other rather than just keep putting it on each other and almost giving the responsibility away to different people all the time.

I always say it’s my responsibility to look after my mental health, but at the end of the day I’d like some help and support to do that, and I’m sure everybody else out there would as well and we can only all get that help and support if A, we are willing to go and ask for it and access that support or B, that support makes it very clear that it exists to us so we feel safe and secure enough to go and access it. So that is a little bit of a recommendation for you if you are struggling right now, or if you’ve got a sense that someone in your life might be struggling right now. But today we are all about the midlife crisis.

So, if this is your first episode, thank you so much for joining. I’m really, really glad that you found us, and I hope you get what you want from this episode but more importantly, hopefully what you’ll do is you’re going to love this episode, you’re going to like it, you’re going to share it, you’re going to comment on it. You’re going to do all of the stuff that we need you to do in order to get as many people access to this information as possible. But what I’d really love you to do is go back to episode one and really listen in from everything we’ve been talking about so far because if this is your first episode, then the last 21 episodes have talked about what the model is, how 8Wise^TM can help you, or how you can learn to Live the 8Wise^TM Way step by step, day by day, week by week, month by month. The aim of it has been to help you develop a strategy for managing your mental health and wellbeing moving forward, hopefully in a way that is realistic for you in your life.

Now today, as I said, we are going to be talking about is it a midlife crisis. I’ve got to be honest with you, it’s one of the most common things that I get asked about when people come to work with me, or as most of you now know, I offer a consultation for free for an awful lot of people to work out if I’m the right person for them to work with and if they’re the right person for me to work with. You know therapy is a very, very intimate process, you’ve got to make sure that who you are working with is the right fit, is the right mix and I appreciate I’m not the right mix for everybody, and people out there have got to understand they’re not the right mix for me so I offer a free consultation that helps people identify if I’m the right person and vice versa.

But during those consultations, some of the most common things I hear are linked to people thinking they’re having a midlife crisis. So I thought it would be useful to touch upon the subject of a midlife crisis and give you some idea, or help you have some idea, if you think that is something you might be experiencing. So you might hear a slight change in my voice when I mention the word midlife crisis, and that’s because I have very specific beliefs around what a midlife crisis is, or even if there is such a thing that exists. But let’s start off with the basics. Ultimately, a midlife crisis means it’s a transition of identity and self-confidence that tends to occur when you are middle-aged, so usually around the ages of 45 to 64 years old.

What it means is basically you are transitioning from one period of your life into another period of your life, and that can cause you some issues with regards to identity and your self-confidence and so it can feel like a crisis. Now, there’s not a great deal of evidence to suggest that such a thing does exist. It’s definitely a shift in identity that sometimes affects people, no doubt about it. There is definitely evidence to support that this shift happens, but it’s not really a medical condition. There is no single cure for it. There’s no evidence to demonstrate that it is a genuine, genuine medical condition. In fact, in the studies that have happened, only about 10% to 20% of adults have claimed to ever experienced one. So it’s more of an idea that we have than an actual reality to what that might be.

So is this concept of a midlife crisis real? Is it true? Are we having them? Well, you are the only one who can really identify that for yourself ultimately, it’s not my job or anybody else’s job to tell you what is or what isn’t happening in your life, but I think it’s really important for you to think about what might be happening. So, to give you some idea of the kind of emotions that might take place or the types of things that might be happening, if you think you are having a midlife crisis or this transition in that middle age stage of your life, you might find that you are declining in your happiness or life satisfaction might be taking a dip. You might find suddenly that life has become a little bit aimless or you’re finding that you are losing that sense of purpose, this could be for lots of reasons, self-doubt could be creeping in. You might find that you are getting frustrated with the changing roles that you’ve got and the responsibilities that you have in your life. Boredom or dissatisfaction with your relationship, your career or your life in general might be happening. You might have some concerns about your appearance, how others might start to look at you. You might suddenly start to have those thoughts about death, the meaning of life and other existential concepts that are suddenly flooding into your mind. You might notice that you’ve got some changes in your energy levels, increased levels of restlessness. You might find that you’re a little bit more fatigued, or you might even find that your sleep patterns change quite dramatically. You might find that you’re less motivated or your interest in pursuing goals and activities that you used to enjoy has just gone, and then you might find that your mood changes. You might find more anger, irritability, and sadness, and maybe some changes in your sexual desire as well.

So these are quite common for those people who feel like they might be having a midlife crisis of sorts. Now, is that you? Are you somebody who is experiencing those things? Now other studies have claimed that there are some different stages to the midlife crisis.  Three being the main ones to focus on. The first stage would be the trigger, the trigger of the midlife crisis and this can be when you just hit a certain age, life has changed in some way. You might find that a major thing has happened, like your children have left home changing your role in life. Your job may have changed, you might have hit a big milestone birthday. So there’s always a trigger point to what gets you to start looking at life slightly differently. Then you’ve got the crisis period. This is usually the stage that typically involves you examining everything that’s going on. Your doubts come in, you start to pay more attention to your doubts. You might start to examine your relationship, your values, a sense of self. All of that stuff’s going on, and that’s why it feels like such a crisis because you’re ultimately questioning everything.

Then you’ve got the resolution. The resolution is that you have to suddenly come to some resolution of where you go to of what’s happening. You’ve got to question yourself on so many levels, you need to find the answers. When you find those answers, those answers provide you with a resolution. What tends to happen the most in this period of life, this period of time, is unhappiness. This dissatisfaction, this unfulfillment, this unhappiness that comes, and that’s ultimately what leads to us feeling like we are in some form of crisis.

Now, how long does it last? Who knows, because everybody’s different and everybody has it at a different age and it’s like anything, if you are experiencing unfulfillment, unhappiness on such levels and you do nothing about it, that period will last longer. But if you are doing something about it, then you can change it quite easily and quite quickly. And obviously I’m going to say, if you use 8Wise^TM as a model, then you can actually turn it around very quickly indeed and reduce all of those signs and symptom. Now this is if, of course, if you have this concept of a midlife crisis. But personally, I am not the firmest believer that such a thing as a midlife crisis exists because I have lots of clients who have those exact same experiences, that exact same list of thought processes, issues, emotions, etc, at different stages in their life. I’ve got a lot of people in their mid to late twenties coming to me, experiencing all of those things to the extent where people are calling it the quarter life crisis. And I think when we start calling everything a crisis and we start looking at everything going ‘it’s the quarter life crisis, it’s the half-life crisis’, what other crisis are we going to call it when it’s the same set of thoughts, the same set of behaviours, the same set of emotions coming onto people.

So for me, if there’s the same set of things happening to people at different times in their life, then that’s not necessarily an age thing, maybe that’s more of an awareness thing, or an awakening thing, or a self-reflection thing. And this is more about what I believe the midlife crisis to be if there is such a thing.

So I would like to remove the concept of midlife crisis, and I would like to turn it into a phase of awakening. And this is what I think happens, and I could be wrong. You do not have to agree with me in any way, shape or form. You are allowed your own set of beliefs on this very topic, but this is what my belief is from the work that I do and all of the people that I have worked with throughout my career.

So, from the moment we are born, we are told what to do. And I mean that by society has been created to tell us how to live life in order to function within the society that’s been created for us. So, from birth, we are told we must learn to walk, we must learn to talk, we must learn to look after ourselves and we must learn to be able to go to school. When we get to school, we are told and taught we must learn how to make friends, we must be good at our subjects, we must get good grades, and we must become a really good member of society.

We’re told if that happens, then we have a really good chance of having a wonderful future and a wonderful career. For some people, we’re told if we do great at school, we can go off and do things like university and get great grades and get great qualifications, and employers are going to lap us up because we’re this special bunch of people who are really clever at school. For other people, we’re not going to go down that route, we’re going to go down the route of thinking that academia isn’t for us and we’re going to find a different way, but most of the ways lead to the same outcome and those outcomes are always going to take us into, can we go to work. Then we’re told if we get a job, be good at your job, make money, make money so that you can afford to do the things that you want to do, to have a great life for you.

But what we’re really told to do is finish school, get the best job you can get, get the best money you can get so you can start contributing to society economically. Then what you’re advised to do is meet somebody, settle down, start a family if you can so that we can continue as a human race through evolution. We are then told that if you can do all of that, you can then go and buy your house, be settled. Have a nice, settled family life. And then society tells us that if we abide by all the of these rules and all of these regulations, that there is some form of utopia at the end of it. That we will be happy, we will be fulfilled, we will have achieved everything we ever wanted in our lives, and life will then somehow become better. That the struggles that we experience in our twenties and our thirties will all lead to something that is a settled, happy, fulfilled life in our forties and fifties. Making it easy for us to roll nicely towards retirement that we have earned after working from the time that most of us are in our early twenties, if not earlier for many.

And then what happens? Because after that, society hasn’t told us anything. Up until that society hasn’t told us what we’re supposed to do next. We’re supposed to just work it out ourselves and we’re supposed to work it out ourselves even though at not one stage in our life, has society really taught us how to think for ourselves.

Now, don’t get me wrong, many people do think for themselves, but when you think about it, almost every thought that we have is geared up towards those things I’ve just mentioned. Fair play to you if you’re somebody who thinks so freely that you don’t think like that, and sometimes I’m very jealous of you. I really, really am. But most of us, every day, every thought we have, every decision we make, every life change we make, every life decision we make is all geared up towards those things. It’s about getting a good job, it’s about getting a good house, it’s about being a good person, it’s about getting the right things you want to buy. And most of the world, especially with the marketing world, is constantly telling us what we don’t have and what we should have so we’ll do all of those things. It basically means that since birth we haven’t really ever had to look at things closely. We haven’t had to question things closely because society provided everything for us. That’s been great, we didn’t have to think about it, we just got up, we went to school because that’s what everybody was doing, went and got a job because that’s what everybody was doing. We all worked hard because that’s what everybody was doing and then those people that weren’t doing those things, we judged them, didn’t we? We judged all of them as if there was something wrong with them.

But then what happens? Why do we have a crisis? My theory is that we hit midlife, we hit those midlife ages, and we start to go ‘why have I not reached that moment where I do feel happy, why have I not reached that time in my life where I feel fulfilled, where I’ve got this sense of purpose, why don’t I feel settled, why am I still struggling, why am I still striving for things the way I have done for the last 10, 20, 30 years in some cases. Why do I not have the utopia I was promised in my youth?’ And I think really what happens to a lot of people is for the first time when society has stopped promising everything and people are at an age where they can actually have some really good knowledge and experience for themselves, they stop and they go ‘something isn’t right, I’m not happy’, and they start to look around at all of those things. They start to question everything, they go ‘well, I did this job, I did this career for the last 30 years, and I was supposed to get something from it more than just a salary. Why am I not getting that thing? Why am I not fulfilled? I married this person because that’s what I was supposed to do. I was supposed to get married and have children, have a family, and I’ve done all of that so why am I not happy and why am I not fulfilled. I’ve done the good citizen thing, I’ve been a good member of society. Where is my reward for this? Why am I not happy and why am I not fulfilled?’ And I think that’s ultimately what happens, we get to a stage in our life when that freedom of thought really starts to kick in. And because of that, it feels strange. We’re going against an entire way of behaving and thinking and believing. We’re questioning things for the very, very first time on a level that we’ve never questioned it about before, we’ve never thought about it before. And a lot of that starts with us because what happens is we look around and we go ‘well, he’s happy and she’s fulfilled and they’re happy and they’re fulfilled so there must be something wrong with me if I’m not, because they’re doing it all. They’ve got the house and the kids and the family and the good job, and they’ve got everything we’re supposed to have, and they’re doing okay. So why aren’t I?’ And so we start to question ourselves as if there’s something wrong with us, rather than looking at maybe the problem isn’t us, maybe trying to get millions and millions and billions of people to conform to the same processes, the same thinking pattern actually causes some unhappiness and fulfilment for people, which is why not everybody experiences what we call the midlife crisis, because not everybody cares. Not everybody feels unfulfilled. Some people are genuinely happy about that path that they’ve taken, and some people are really fulfilled by the path that they’ve taken and what society mapped out for them.

And so that’s what I put to you, I put to you to look at yourself and actually say ‘right, with the life that I’ve lived, why did I choose those things?’ Do the self-reflection. ‘Why did I choose those things? Did I fall into my career because that’s what you’re supposed to do. Did I become a senior manager because that’s what you’re supposed to do? Did I get married because that’s what I was supposed to do? Did I have a family because that’s what I was supposed to do’ and I want you to think about the question with regards to ‘did I do it because that’s what I was supposed to. Did I do it because that’s what I really wanted to do’ and get really honest with yourself. Get really, really honest with yourself, especially if you are someone who thinks you’re in a midlife crisis. If you are at that stage in your life when you are questioning everything and you are really unhappy, you are unfulfilled, and you’re looking at your life going ‘why? Why am I feeling like this? I’ve got everything I ever should have had. I’ve got a great job. I’m a CEO, I’m a senior leader. I own a business. I’ve got this amazing family. I’ve got these amazing kids. My friendship group’s amazing’. If everything in your life’s amazing, yet you are feeling unhappy and unfulfilled, everything’s not amazing. That’s as simple as it is.

And so if you think you are at that midlife crisis stage, I invite you to ask yourself that question. I invite you to do that piece of work to actually look at yourself and go ‘am I living my life or am I living a life society planned out for me’. Now this is not me turning around to say we all start going off the rails and we start living life in a completely different way. But I think it’s about understanding why you made the choices you made, why you’ve made the decisions you made, and how many of them were based on what was right for you, and how many of them were based on what you thought was going to be right for somebody else. And sometimes this is when our lack of selfishness through life, and of course we can’t always be selfish in life, we have to make sure that we live in a great society and build a great strong community and society together and that does rely on us to not be selfish all the time, but in our own lives, sometimes if we want the best in our life for ourselves, we have to be willing to be selfish.

So I do, I invite you to question yourself. I invite you to question the decisions you’ve made in your life. I invite you to question the path you’ve had in your life, and have you really made decisions that were right for you, or have you just fell into them because that is kind of how society pushed you. It forced you or it guided you towards those things.

Now, as I said earlier, not everybody’s experiencing the midlife crisis. I’m having a lot more people in their mid to late twenties coming to me demonstrating the exact same symptoms and signs that somebody would have as a midlife crisis, and we’re starting to call it the quarter life crisis. And again, because I’m an inquisitive person and I ask the why, and I do a lot of observation and do a lot of self-reflection, and I do an awful lot of analysis of the people I work with, I started to look at people and go ‘look, why? Why are they experiencing it now?’ And then I realized, the pressure that is on young people now is very different to the level of pressure that I certainly experienced in my early twenties and the generation before me experienced in their early twenties. There’s this concept that you’re supposed to have your life together when you are in your mid-twenties now, that your career is supposed to be sorted, that you’re supposed to be owning your own home, that you are supposed to know who you are and what you want, and how you’re going to get it and if you don’t know all of that, then there must be something wrong with you.

And the worst thing in the modern world is obviously social media is giving us access to millions and millions and millions and millions of people telling us they’re thriving and striving in this life, whether it’s real or not. And so, in your mid-twenties to late twenties, you’re looking at life going ‘but they’ve got their stuff together, they’ve got their stuff together, they’ve got their stuff together, why haven’t I, why haven’t I got the right career path yet? Why aren’t I leading in that? Why haven’t I met my partner? Why haven’t I bought my house? Why I don’t I know who I am and where I’m going’. And this isn’t for everybody. Again, not everybody thinks like this, not everybody feels like this, which is why the numbers don’t suggest it’s everybody, the stats don’t suggest it’s everybody, but for those people that are experiencing it, they’re unhappy and they’re unfulfilled. Why are they unhappy and why are they unfulfilled? And I had a beautiful client say it to me only a few weeks ago. They said, I did everything right. I was the good person at school, I was the good kid. I was the one I didn’t cause my family any trouble. I didn’t cause any problems for everybody and got my head down, I got on with it. I got through school, I got my grades, I got my degree, I got a job. I’ve done everything I was supposed to do. Where is my reward?’ and their reward in this case, the reward they were looking for was happiness and fulfilment, and they still didn’t have it. Why didn’t they feel fulfilled by the career that had been mapped out for them in the last 10 years of their life? Why weren’t they fulfilled in the life they’d developed because they did everything the right way. Why have they not reached that utopia that is dangled like a big, fat orange character people if they do things the way that society recommends that they do them. Like I said, this does not have to be your belief, this is not necessarily a fact. This is my belief system, my opinions and belief system based on my observations and my experience in my own life, and also with the client base that I work with, both one to one and in my training room. These are my observations and that’s how I’m seeing things, this is what’s led to my belief.

But ultimately what it means is I don’t necessarily believe that there is such a thing as a midlife crisis or a quarter life crisis. What I believe is there is an awakening. It’s when somebody understands that ‘I am not happy, I am not fulfilled. I don’t know why that is, and that’s what causes me some form of crisis. What that means is I’m starting to question who I am, why I am, what I want, and without having answers to those questions, I feel unsafe, I feel insecure, I feel lost’. And that for me is what that crisis really is, that identity crisis of ‘I don’t know why I’m not where I should be. I don’t know why I’m not who I wanted to be, but I’m not, and I’m unhappy and I’m unfulfilled and I want to change that. ‘ And they’re my favourite people. They are absolutely my favourite people. If you come to me and you say to me ‘I am unhappy, I am unfulfilled. I don’t know what to do about it, but I want to do something about it, and I’m committed’, then you are my people because they’re the people I want in my room because they’re the people I know are saying something’s not right, life’s not working for me the way I wanted it to, and I want to change it. I want to make the life I want. I’m committed to creating something better for me to make me happy and make me fulfilled. Because they’re the people who are going to Live the 8Wise^TM Way and they’re going to live it well, and it’s going to have a brilliant, brilliant impact on them.

And the reason for that is ultimately if you come to me and say you’re unhappy and fulfilled, the likelihood is there’s got a lot of emotions going on there. So straight away I know, okay, you’ve got a lot of emotions going on, we’re going to have to start regulating those emotions, reading those emotions, reading those thought patterns, and understand what’s going on. That’s your emotional wellness right there. I know in order to be able to really do things well, to get that motivation running, I’m going to have to do some work around the physical wellness area so we’re going to have to make sure that the body’s functioning well, people are sleeping really well, they’re looking after themselves really well, so we know the body and the mind is functioning at its best.

Somebody who’s coming to me in some form of crisis, then I know it’s an identity element, so we know spiritual wellness needs to be addressed now. So we are looking at what are my values, what are my beliefs, what is my purpose, what do I identify as, how is that going to implement a really good level of self-esteem that I need to move myself forward. And then we go, I know I’m stuck in life. I’m lost, I don’t know what I want, I’ve been living the same way for a long time. Sounds like a comfort zone to me. So I now know intellectual wellness is going to have to help them smash out of that comfort zone in order to create the life that they want. If you’ve been living that life and you’re unfulfilled, you’ve got to start looking at the environments you spend time in. Are you in the right place, are you living in the right place. All of those things, is your environmental wellness where it needs to be, do you really have the environment that bring out the best in you, that motivate you, that make you feel safe, secure, happy? So we know we have to do some work around that.

And then I know social wellness is going to play a part because a lot of the time, if we are living a life that is not our life because we have been doing what other people have been telling us for so long and not necessarily allowing ourselves to think for ourselves, then we know there’s some social wellness work to be done there. And a lot of people come and a lot of it is they’ve dedicated a long time, a lot of life, to a career that does not make them happy, does not fulfil them. So we know some work around occupational wellness is going to have to happen and then a lot of the change that we want to experience in life comes with a financial burden. Do we retrain, do we have to end our relationship. All of these things lead to financial burdens, so we have to look at the financial wellness side of things as well.

So, from my perspective, the people who believe that they are experiencing a midlife crisis or a quarterlife crisis or a crisis of any form with regards to those types of things, then you are perfect for Living the 8Wise^TM Way because what the 8Wise^TM Way will do is it will give you a strategy to look at each of those eight elements one by one, building you back up bit by bit by bit, understanding who you are, what you want, why you want it, why you function the way that you function, how you can manage that moving forward, how you can look after yourself, how you can carve out a great, great life in this world if you start to do it authentically. And that ultimately comes down to what I think, I think, the core element of a midlife crisis is. It’s about the awakening that maybe you are not living your life, your way. Meaning you’re not living authentically. And if we are not living authentically, things just feel out of sorts. We’re never going to be quite aligned with who we are. And if our life isn’t aligned with the person that we are, then of course that’s always going to feel like we are in crisis.

For me, if you are experiencing the quarter life crisis or the midlife crisis, then Living the 8Wise^TM Way really helps you to rebuild an authentic life that meets your needs. It’s true to you. It lets you live the life that’s true to you, and it doesn’t mean that you go against what society wants for us all because what society wants for us all is a healthy world for us all to live in together because there’s a lot of us and we’ve got to get along and we don’t always do that. So obviously there has to be some rules and regulations and some generalizations in order to help us do that. But within that it’s a framework and within that societal framework, we’ve got to find our way. We’ve got to own our way, we’ve got to be ourselves, live our authentic life, and Living the 8Wise^TM Way helps you do that, which is why Living the 8Wise^TM Way helps you to develop better mental health and also better mental wellbeing because ultimately, by Living the 8Wise^TM Way and living a life that’s true to you, you become healthier and happier and let’s be honest, when we’re healthier and we’re happier, that’s the quality of life we really, really want to achieve.

I know that’s what I want for myself, and that’s what I want for everybody that I know in my life, and I hope that’s what you want for yourself as well. So, like I said, if you find, or think, if that those words have been popping around your head ‘Oh my God, I’m in crisis, I’m in a midlife crisis’ or ‘I’m in a quarterlife crisis’, then I invite you to stop, self-reflect, not just on how you’re thinking of feeling right now, but how has your life got you to where you are at? Why did you make the decisions you made? When did you make the decisions you made? Who influenced the decisions you made? Why did they influence the decisions? Ask yourself those questions and then ask yourself ‘am I really living a life that was authentic to me?’ and if you are not, I welcome you to Live the 8Wise^TM Way to find a life that suits you better.

So, if you are struggling with any of this, as always you know you can reach out. You can contact me directly at [email protected]. If you are interested in booking in for a consultation, for us to have a chat and to see, especially if you’re thinking of what you’d like to work with me, then feel free to message me, again you can email me or go to the website www.8wise.co.uk and you can actually register there to have a consultation with me. They’re all done by Zoom and we can have a quick chat and you can tell me a bit about you, what you’re looking for and all of that kind of stuff, and I can give you some idea if I’m the right person for you. And I might not be, I’m not even going to pretend okay. I might not be the right person for you. That is okay. Okay. That is okay, but I might be the right person then we’ll have some fun together.

Now I am really, really excited that obviously when it comes to one-to-one work, there’s only so many people I can see, but in January I will be launching the new curriculum for 8Wise^TM , so we’re take on the new delegates, it’s a new cohort, and there will be three options for you. You will have the option to join me on the 8Wise^TM Discovery course. Now the 8Wise^TM Discovery course is a short course that allows you to start looking at developing your strategy for Living the 8Wise^TM Way. So I will take you through it step by step, tool by tool to help you so you have the power, you have the information to be able to go away and develop your own 8Wise^TM action plan, I call the transition plan, for you to be able to follow in order to implement a strategy that really works for you and will help you develop that healthier, happier mind.

If you are somebody who feels like you almost need therapy but can’t financially or timewise you can’t afford to do the one hour intense regularly, then you might be suited to the 8Wise^TM Accelerator course. The 8Wise^TM Accelerator course is literally the full 8Wise^TM program in 12 modules, module by module. Not only do we take you through how to develop your action plan, I will work with you to develop an action plan that works for you, so your transition plan, your 8Wise^TM transition plan, will be personal to you, bespoke to you, and I will make sure that when you leave that course you have a very specific plan that we have created together so you know what to do moving forward.

And the third course is the one that I’m very excited about. I get contacted by an awful lot of therapists, a lot of therapists, and a lot of wellness coaches who say ‘Kim, is there any chance that you can train me up on 8Wise^TM so I can share this with my clients?’ and the answer is, as of 2023, yes. If you are already a therapist, if you are already a qualified counsellor, then you can come and learn how to use the 8Wise^TM method to work with your clients, and I will demonstrate to you how it links up with the psychological theories and practices that you are possibly already using so that it adds a string to your bow.

Now if you are a coach and you’re a wellness coach and you’re thinking ‘do you know what, I wouldn’t mind learning this 8Wise^TM approach as well, because I think it’s going to be really good for me helping my clients’ then you are welcome as well. I would always recommend to every single therapist out there and every single coach out there to try and get both sets of knowledge. If you are a therapist, go and get some coaching skills. If you are a coach, go and get some counselling skills because the two together work really, really well with helping clients. So again, if you are a therapist or a wellness coach, I invite you. I do actually invite you, to come and learn to be an 8Wise^TM practitioner in 2023.

The information will be going up on my website in the next month, and so please keep an eye out for that and definitely get in touch if you want more information. I would love, I would love to be working with you in the training or in any of the 8Wise^TM training in 2023. The training will predominantly be online because I want to be able to cater for as many people as possible. And I know you all like working from home these days, so by all means, please book on but I will do a couple of face to faces as well so that you can come and learn with me directly in a lovely intimate environment too. So that is what is coming very, very soon so I’m very excited to offer that out to you alongside everything as normal. So as per normal, if you want a copy of the book, if you haven’t yet listened to all the podcasts and you want to be able to implement this podcast as your mental health strategy, maybe you are looking for therapy in some way and you can’t afford it yet, then this podcast series can really help you and you can go and access the book 8Wise^TM Ways to a Healthier, Happier Mind alongside the journal and the planner and together with the podcast, what you can really do is use them to implement your own therapy program and help you boost your mental health and wellbeing with 8Wise^TM as well.

So that is the end of today. I hope, I hope, I hope you have learnt something from it. Like I said, this is based on my experiences, my observations with the work that I’ve done over the years that I’ve done it and that’s not to take it away from this concept of a midlife crisis, but I think the concept of a midlife crisis become more of a tagline. It’s become more of a label that we give ourselves, and I think maybe we should stop giving ourselves the label and start really looking at what’s happening to us, which is we are intelligent human beings, and we are starting to question things and there’s nothing wrong with that. Absolutely nothing wrong with that. It’s just that a lot of those questions are going against what we’ve always been led to believe is accurate or fact or what we should be doing, and that can cause us to feel a little bit unstable, a little bit wobbly, and that’s what makes us feel like we’re in crisis.

But again, if you are struggling, please reach out. If you’re not going to reach out to me, then please feel free to reach out to people in your community who will be more, more than happy to help you. So if you’ve liked this episode, please, you know what I’m going to say to you, I’m going to say, go and hit the like button, hit the subscribe button so you know when a new episode launches.

Please, please, please share, put anything you want in the comments. I say it all the time, but I really, really did develop 8Wise^TM so that we could help as many people as possible because we know that when you’re struggling with your mental health, you can feel really isolated. Or sometimes you’re fearful of I was fearful, of developing mental health issues so you really want something that helps you to manage your wellbeing better. I want 8Wise^TM to be able to be something that as many people can use as possible and that can only happen if we get this information out to them.

So please like, share, comment, subscribe. Let’s get this message out to as many people as we can, that you do not have to suffer alone. There are people out there who are willing to talk to you, willing to listen to you, and there is a way that you can change your life and it doesn’t have to be complicated. You just have to commit to the process. And that’s what I call Living the 8Wise^TM Way.

So thank you for joining me today. I look forward to chatting with you again next time. Until then, take care and look after yourselves. Bye for now.