I am now in my sixties. In my forties my partner Bindi and I discovered some simple but profound and incredibly practical ways to help people who struggle with anxiety, depression, anger and addiction.
At first we were very excited – we thought we could “change the world”! By adopting this new perspective, our own lives became simpler and far less stressed. But the world continued to turn regardless and mostly ignored us and our new talents.
- So we tried advertising.
- We tried giving free public talks.
- We created a non-for-profit company.
- We rented business premises.
- We ran workshops.
- We ran evening classes.
- We offered “free drop-in sessions” on Thursday afternoons.
- We did mail-shots to 15,000 people in Wiltshire.
- We wrote to every GP practice in Wiltshire.
- We gave free talks to GPs.
In short, we did everything we could think of to raise the flag about these simple, practical and effective ways to improve well-being.
In our work as human givens therapists we continued to help hundreds of private clients to improve their lives. But we wanted to reach more people. Far more people.
For one of our evening classes, we laminated some crude images to create some cards to represent innate human needs and resources. Our rough, improvised set of cards went down incredibly well with the dozen people on our six week programme.
Everything kind of worked – a little bit. But nothing really “took off”.
… until …
We took a big leap of faith!
We needed something which was beautiful, simple, effective – and crucially: scaleable.
… something that other people could use to spread these ideas to help others after only a few hours of training.
My daughter Laurie is a talented illustrator and has been immersed in these ideas her whole life. We enlisted her help, wrote a book, set up “in8 publishing”, then invested all of our savings in having 1300 sets of in8 Cards printed, 1000 book printed and 1000 boxes made.
Then we travelled all over the country showing people what we had created.
We noticed that whenever we showed others how to actually use these sets of cards, about half those present would want to buy a set..
So we listed them on Amazon and received 5 star reviews.
Then we ran workshops from our kitchen for half a dozen people at a time. We showed people how easily they could apply these ideas in their own work.
But we discovered that a lot of people who were interested, could not afford the time and money to get to our workshops in Wiltshire.
We realised that in order to get the message out we would need to get “modern”…
So over the past few years we have learned the skills required to share information effectively in the modern, digital world.
We developed the in8 Cards Online Workshop. It is our contribution towards making a massive positive impact on emotional and mental health. The first one runs this Friday morning (15th Feb 2019). I really hope that you can join us! And if you can’t, but you would like to be informed when we run the next one – please click the button below:
Please let me know when the next online workshop will run
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