In this episode, I invite you to explore the idea of trusting that the next step in your life will reveal itself at just the right time, even if it feels challenging or uncomfortable.

We all know how easy it is to get stuck in situations that no longer serve us—whether it’s a draining relationship, an unfulfilling job, or just a mental rut.

The fear of change or the unknown can make it hard to move forward, but staying stuck is often more painful than taking that first step toward something new.

We’ll talk about the importance of letting go of those things—both mental and physical—that you might be holding onto.

These are the things that take up space in your life, preventing you from welcoming new, positive experiences. When you cling to what no longer serves you, it’s a sign that you may not fully trust the universe to take care of you, or that you doubt you’ll be provided for when you need it most.

But here’s the good news: you don’t have to make huge, sweeping changes overnight. In this episode, I’ll guide you through breaking down the process into small, manageable steps. By taking it one step at a time, you can support yourself through the transition, making the journey less overwhelming and more empowering.

This episode is all about trusting yourself, trusting the process, and embracing the changes that will ultimately lead you to a life that’s more fulfilling and aligned with who you truly are. I can’t wait for you to listen!

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Read the full transcript:

0:00
You're listening to better than before breast cancer with the breast cancer recovery coach, I'm your host, Laura lummer. I'm a certified life coach, and I'm a breast cancer thriver. In this podcast, I will give you the skills on the insides and the tools to move past the emotional and physical trauma of a breast cancer diagnosis if you're looking for a way to create a life that's even better than before breast cancer, you've come to the right place. Let's get started. Hey, there you're listening to episode 375

0:37
of better than before breast cancer. I am your host. Laura lummer, I am excited to talk with you about this topic today. Let me start off with a little story. I followed this woman, Amanda Francis. She is a she's a motivational coach, kind of she works with other coaches. She's got many different programs, from money manifestation to creating digital courses, and so she supports a lot of entrepreneurs. But what I love about her, it and what first attracted me to her was doing my own work on manifestation and thinking abundantly and stepping into abundance, and it's going to tie in with what we're talking about here today on this episode. So that's what drew me to her. And what I liked about her is not only her focus on our ability to receive, our ability to manifest our dreams, but I also loved her approach towards money management. Most people that you encounter when they're teaching money management for there's a few exceptions, but primarily what I see are people who, in my opinion, are kind of rooted in scarcity. There's a lot of fear when it comes to money management, and I don't like that. I don't like scarcity on any level. To me, there's space to be responsible in all aspects of life, to be responsible and have fun at the same time. And so I'm not a big believer in anything that is fear based and scarcity based. So I loved Amanda Francis because her whole attitude towards life, towards money, towards business, everything is very abundant, very positive, very much like, yes, this takes hard work. Yes, this takes focus. Yes, you have to do uncomfortable things, and yes, you can enjoy it, and yes, you can have fun. So that being said, that's my background here, and I purchased her books, and I'll link to her book here in the podcast episode. And her book is actually, I think it's hilarious, and it's called riches F and I'm not going to use that because I won't be able to put this episode out on iHeartRadio, so, but I'll link to it here in the show notes. And I just, I love her approach. I think she's so cute and just very inspirational. So anyway, I'm on her email list, and she sends out these motivational sayings pretty much every day, and I got this one the other day. I i open it up in the morning, and I like to look at them and then just kind of write them while I'm doing my morning journaling practice. If there's something that resonates with me, and there was one she put out the other day, and I read it and it deeply resonated with me. In fact, I've written it multiple times since I saw it, and what that saying is is that I choose to believe that the next right steps are coming to me now that really spoke to me, because I am in somewhat of a transition phase, as I've shared since coming back from Maldives, feeling like there's a lot more I can offer to my People, to my clients, to the world and understanding how that's going to look. So I'm just kind of open to trusting in the next steps. And the reason why I think that is important for this audience and for humans in general, is because we have so much fear about what's coming next. We have a lot of fear about making decisions, making the wrong decisions, and a lot of difficulty, trusting ourselves, trusting our intuition, trusting that the universe has our back. And what that tends to result in is clinging, hanging on to things we no longer need. So for me, I'll give you an example right now. There are a few coaches and courses, kind of instructional lesson type of things that I became a part of early on in my business. And little by little, over the last few months, I've been letting go of those, and it's been difficult to let go, because they were very meaningful to me. They served me super well in the time that I needed them, but now I've grown and I'm ready to move on, but I love them dearly, and I'm thinking, oh gosh, do I really want to be without what this person is producing. But I realized that I've gotten everything I can get from that, and it's time for me to take a next step. So that's something. Comfortable to do, and in doing that, one thing I have to embrace is that I'm trusting myself, I'm making the right decision and knowing that I'm creating space for the next best thing to come to me, and believing that that's exactly what's going to happen. So this is one thing that comes from this fear, or even just the not trusting yourself and not believing that if you're following your intuition, if you're following your heart, if you're trusting yourself, if you're tuning into yourself and knowing yourself to know that you can believe that what's coming is right for you, doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be easy for you, doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be comfortable for you, but that it's right for you. Those are very different. Things right everything that's right for us, in fact, I'm going to go with most of the time, things that are right for us are not comfortable when we first step into them, because it's growing and growth is uncomfortable. I think, as I'm saying that out loud, I think about like we when we were young teenagers or young kids, and you get this random pain in your body, and people would say that's a growing pain, right? So even physically, our body has sometimes pain signals when we're growing. Growing can be uncomfortable. Developing can be uncomfortable. Let's think about that again, just in relation to our body. When our bodies change from that of a little child to that of a teenager, right from a teenager to that of an adult, the physical changes we go through from a young adult to an older adult to a very mature adult, there's physical changes, and often it's uncomfortable to deal with them, mentally and physically same thing. I think, with our emotional growth, it's uncomfortable oftentimes to step into what we need. So how do we know that? How do we know what we need? And why is this important? It's important because if we're not clear on what we need, or I'll go back to my example right now for myself, knowing that I'm open right now to growing in some other way, not knowing exactly what it is, right? I'm not super clear on it. I have some ideas, and I'm working towards them, and I'm testing them out. And I know, because of a long process of testing things out as I move along and grow, I know that that's the best way to do it for me, right? Test out what I think is going to work, test out what I think is going to fit, test out what I think is going to serve me, and see if it works and if it doesn't redirect. But what happens oftentimes is when we have fear that the next right thing is not coming to us, when we're afraid if we make a decision, and whether that is a treatment decision, a relationship decision, a business decision, a work decision, right, any aspect of your life where you feel a need or a desire to redirect and change, or you feel sometimes even just a discomfort in where we are right. Sometimes it's even just like, um, something's not right. I don't know exactly what it is, and we can go either into fear of exploring it, right? This feels uncomfortable. It doesn't feel right, and I don't want to go there. And we'll redirect our mind to saying, It's okay, it's fine, it's fine, right? That wonderful phrase, it's fine, it's fine, where we dismiss our feelings, we dismiss our intuition, we dismiss our gut, and we keep doing what doesn't feel right, okay? Or we can say this doesn't feel right, but I have to trust because I know something's not right, something needs to change, and I have to trust that what's coming is what's best for me, the best next steps will reveal themselves if I trust in myself. Now, in order to trust in yourself, you really have to tune in. You have to listen to yourself. Otherwise, what happens is you start listening to other people's decisions. And this is what I see a lot of, especially after we get a breast cancer diagnosis and we're deciding, like my third pillar of breast cancer recovery is regroup. And regroup is important. It's followed by two I mean, it's preceded by two steps, release, which is letting go of conditioned beliefs that are keeping you stuck, letting go of condition habits that aren't serving you renew, tuning into yourself and understanding how you can love yourself, how you can treat yourself with compassion, how you can nourish your body better, right? Really renewing these two steps are important because they're a process of learning about yourself. They're a process of learning to trust yourself. Regroup is the third pillar, because once you tune into that and you start to learn and understand and feel like this is what I need, this is what I don't need. This is what I'm happy with. This is what I'm not happy with. Now the hard work of implementing change begins, and that's the regrouping. That's the looking at everything. You know, if you listen to the show with any regularity, I am 100% against going back to normal after a breast cancer diagnosis. To me that life. We grieve that life that was before breast cancer, we examine that life. We're grateful for whatever it was that led us here, and all the beauty of it, but we're willing to be open and transparent about what wasn't serving us, or what we have opportunity to improve, and how we can recreate our life in the way we want to create this. You know, as I say that, it makes me think this is the end of August, in September, October, November, and my better than before, breast cancer membership are going to be very focused on the intentional creation of life in the small amount of time that we have every week, which is 168 hours, right? So when you're taking 168 hours in a week and you want to move your life forward. You want to regroup. You want to invest your time, energy, thoughts, all of that, into something. You want to create for yourself or heal for yourself. You've got to let go of stuff that's already clogging that time. We have to be able to release things to hold space. And that works, mentally, emotionally, physically, tangibly. In time we have to be able to let things go and things even in our environment, we hold on to so many things, like I see so many. I mean, storage facilities going up everywhere. I wonder sometimes, how much money is spent globally, let's just say how much money is spent in the United States every year of people storing stuff that they don't need. And when I say when they don't need because they're not using it, right, I know people who have multiple storage units, not because they need them, because they cannot emotionally release the stuff that's in them. Okay, how do we create space and invite more into our life? And how does this thought of I trust the next best steps are coming to me fit in with this. Because when we hold on to things, we're in scarcity. We're thinking, when I need something, it won't be there for me. So we hold on to it. We hold on with your life, whether it's a relationship, and we think this is as good as it's going to get, maybe nothing else will be better. And then if I try to talk about what I need here, then maybe this relationship won't last. A lot of times we think that. We think that if I'm honest about what I need, if I'm honest about what I want here, then this relationship is going to dissolve. Then we get scared, then we don't speak up for ourselves. We don't find our voice. Well, let's stop for a minute and think about being in this moment and realizing not resisting reality. But if you're in any relationship, work or so, it's professional or personal, any relationship that you know isn't working for you, and then your mind does this little trick of saying, Yeah, but we can't really address it, because the other person will get upset, and then maybe I won't have a relationship with that person on whatever level it is. You see the mind game there? It's a relationship that isn't serving you, that isn't maybe making your life Fuller, inviting more joy, maybe it's actually creating suffering and it needs to change, or maybe it needs to dissolve, but you're not ready yet. And when we don't trust that taking those steps of vocalize what's inside of us is the right next best thing, when we don't trust that we stay in emotional and physical discomfort, because when we're in emotional discomfort, we trigger chemical chain reactions in our body that create physical discomfort. I cannot have talked about so many times on this show, and you'll hear it a million more times, but the impact of stress and emotions on our physical health cannot be understated. I know it is all the time. I know it's dismissed. I know it's devalued all the time, because we can minimize it. We don't have these outward, maybe visual representations of our discomfort, right? So if we're sick and we're not dealing with it, if we've got a physical problem and we're not dealing with it, usually that manifests into something we see or something that affects our quality of life and that we can't function, or we can't go out places, we can't walk as much, or whatever it is, we can't participate in life. But emotionally, we become very expert at just stuffing things and then outwardly, when people are around us, it looks like we're totally functional. It looks like we're totally cool, and when we're home, we're a hot mess and we're not sleeping, and when we're alone, and when we're in our car, and our mind is going 100 miles an hour and we're totally stressing out our body, right? So letting go and trusting that what is coming for you is the right thing is important in every single aspect of our life, the physical, the mental, the emotional, letting go to hold space and trusting that the next right thing will be there when you need it. Now I say this to my clients often, and I hear that's hard. It makes sense to me intellectually, Laura, but it's really hard. Yep. I got you agree totally agree with you. It's hard, and we have to do hard things to create the life we want. That's why, even when I talk about food and a healthy lifestyle, and I'll do someone's genetics, right? I'll do their nutrition genome, we'll look at their labs, we'll see what's going on. I could say, here's a plan, here's a food program, here's the next step, and they're simple and they're easy, and they're laid out for you that won't necessarily change a person's lifestyle, because they've got to deal with all the things they believe, Oh, I'm going to give up croissants. I can't live without them. Right thoughts about Coca Cola, Pepsi, martinis, My life won't be as much fun, right? It's it's so much deeper everything we do in life, the discomfort is so much deeper than just what we see on the outside, and the growth is also so much deeper. It has to start with the way we're thinking and the way we're trusting ourselves that leads to incredible change. So how do you do that? How do you recognize and step into the regroup pillar? How do you recognize and be honest with yourself? Because a lot of times we'll recognize something's not right, and again, I can relate this to people's health, right? We may recognize I have extra body fat that I need to lose to support my health, but there's so many thoughts behind it that are so triggering, so many emotions, so many thoughts about social gatherings or holidays or anything else that we're just not ready or willing to step into beginning to process that. So one thing that I think is important that we remember is that we don't change from zero to 100 and a lot of times people adopt that. So I refer to people having multiple storage units, or any storage units. So zero to 100 thinking would be, I have to go today, clear out the storage unit and get rid of it. And that can be so overwhelming that there's no way in the world you're going to do it. Or you could say, You know what, I'm going to plan 30 minutes twice a month to go to that storage unit and commit to everything I touch. I'm either going to keep, donate or throw away, right? I'm going to make a decision about these things, and think about the money that you spend on the storage unit. It's like, oh. And then I can take that money and put it towards my own self care, right? Put it towards enjoyment in life. Put it towards the travel fund, something of that nature. But the process of letting go is important to do in small steps. If you look at even a closet at home, and the closet at home is full, and you say to yourself, I've got to make myself do that. I've got to make myself do that now, some will, some need to go in and take care of it all in one shot. But there's nothing wrong with saying I'm going to commit 30 minutes on two Sundays this month and every month until that closet is organized and done. Or I think that it's always a great idea to bring in an unbiased source right when we're clearing clutter from our environment, and the reason we're clearing that clutter is working through the emotional and mental attachments to that to believe and start to trust that what I need will be there when I need it, I don't have to hold on to everything, and that begins to translate into our emotional wellness. So bringing in an unbiased source. Who you commit I'm going to trust you. We're going to make decisions on letting go of these things together, and even though I will feel uncomfortable, and I know and acknowledge ahead of time it will feel uncomfortable, I'm committed to doing this for my own personal growth and health. When we create space in our physical environment, it impacts our mental and emotional environment as well. And these two go hand in hand, you'll start to see as we let go of mental and emotional conditioning, then clutter starts to bother us even more, right? And we're like, okay, I want to clear this space out, like, I need that flow of energy, right? That feng shui, the movement of energy. It works in the physical space. It works in the mental space. It works with the thought that I trust the next right steps will be there for me. And I see people struggle with this on every single step of the way, and it's understandable, no judgment there. I see the struggle. Well, we have the struggle before breast cancer diagnosis, but since that's the population we're talking about right now, us, I'm just going to go there. We I see that struggle from the minute of a diagnosis, right? What's the next right thing to do and and putting faith in a lot of things outside of you, more so than the faith and the trust that you put into yourself. So that's what I want to encourage, this learning to trust yourself. So how do you do it? First, we recognize the change. Then we take the big project and say, whatever the project is, if it's a relationship, if it's a closet, whatever it is, break it down into small, manageable pieces, the smallest possible piece that you could imagine your. Of being able to take on even though it's uncomfortable, not the smallest piece that you'd be comfortable doing, because it's probably not going to be comfortable, right? So even if it's a relationship, and you think this has got to change, maybe the first smallest step is just to commit to the next time something bothers me, I will mention it right away. I won't stuff it. I'll mention it in the most compassionate way, right? And maybe just working on that step is important. You know, a lot of people want to bring therapy and coaching into their relationships, which I am a huge advocate of. I think it is wonderful and amazing, but it's a frightening thing to them, because, again, they think I have all these issues in this relationship. If I go to therapy, if I go to coaching, they're all going to come out, and then this relationship is going to go away. Well, on a theoretical level, it's kind of what you want, right? You want the way it exists in time now to be different so we get to grieve it. It's understandable fear will be there. And it's understandable that there be fear in the letting go piece and in the trusting in the future piece. But if you love yourself and you're treating yourself with compassion and you honor what your body is telling you you need, this works towards trusting that next step, right? So I would suggest those things. I would suggest, first of all, acknowledging to yourself, because a lot of times we don't do that. I know that doesn't sound like a big step to a lot of people, but it is a big step. Being able to say out loud to yourself, This is not working for me, is a first step to change, and it's a big step, okay? Then the second thing, breaking it down into small pieces, and then the third thing, finding someone you really trust for support, right, finding someone picking that one champion that you can be completely transparent with, that might be your spouse, that might be a sibling, that might be your best friend, that might be a coach, that might be a therapist, but Someone that you can be completely transparent with and speak about this too, so that you can build the courage to speak about it openly to yourself and start to deal with these steps. I think all three of those are very important. So whether they apply to treatment, whether they apply to regrouping your life, whether they apply to creating something new, all three steps apply across the board, and the one overarching theme is trusting that what is going to be there for you is the right thing for you, and it will be there when you need it. It's a big step, right? It's like stepping off without a net, and that can be a scary thing, so we want to work on it a little bit at a time. We'll keep the net for a little while and take small steps out onto the tightrope and practice. And then, you know, take one step out and run right back to the building. And then take two steps out and then go, Hmm, I kind of got this right. So give yourself space to take things slowly, and, most importantly, establish that foundation of love and trust and self compassion, because that's going to be the driver in being able to trust yourself. All right, friends, if you would like help with that, come and join me and let's spend some time together in better than before breast cancer and membership over this next quarter, as we create the life we dream about, or you can also have personal coaching sessions with me. You can find all the information on my website, the breast cancer recovery coach.com take care of yourself, and I'll talk to you next week.