#378 Deciding to Do The Work to Transform Your Health and Your Life

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In this episode of the Better Than Before Breast Cancer podcast, I invite you to join me in challenging the habits and beliefs that may be holding you back from living the life you truly want.

I’ll share my personal experience of embracing change and making intentional choices that led me to a more fulfilling and balanced life after breast cancer.

We’ll explore the power of connection, the importance of slowing down, and the courage it takes to break free from the routines and societal pressures that no longer serve you.

As you listen, I encourage you to reflect on your own life and consider why we often return to the same routines that leave us unfulfilled.

In this episode, I’ll help you uncover ways to create more space for joy, connection, and self-care. If you’re feeling stuck or overwhelmed, this conversation is for you.

It’s not just about inspiration—it’s about giving you the tools and motivation to take real steps toward living more mindfully, more presently, and more aligned with your desires.

Join me and discover how small shifts in thinking can lead to big transformations.

I want you to feel empowered to live a life that’s truly better than before breast cancer™, and I know this episode will help you take that next step.

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Read the full transcript:

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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. Hello, hello. Welcome to episode 378, of better than before breast cancer, with the breast cancer recovery coach, and that's me, Laura lummer, and I am so excited for you to listen to this episode, because when you hear it, when you're listening to this episode, I will be hosting my very first live retreat. Let me share a story with you, and this story is going to tie into this podcast I want, I want to kind of share this evolution with you, and then I'm going to share some ideas with you about why I think we do what we do and we don't do what we know is good for us. So first, the story now the very first time. So after my let's start here. After my first breast cancer diagnosis, I was released from treatment. I had finished chemo, lumpectomy, bilateral mastectomy, I don't all the things reconstruction, all the things right? I had been going through treatment for a year and a half. I was diagnosed july 11, 2011 I finished everything, literally at the end of December. So it was a full year and a half. Then I was so ready to go back to life. And you guys, if you listen to this podcast, you know the story, things didn't work out that way. I didn't go back to normal. My body didn't return to normal. Things didn't heal the way I told. I was told they were going to heal, and I'm wasn't the same person, emotionally and mentally. Now you might think that from that time to today, 2024 that having two different diagnoses of breast cancer, learning how to support my healing from a stage four diagnosis and completely changing my life, going from a corporate job to my own business just to creating coaching programs for people. You think there was a lot of lessons in that, and there have been, but there are a couple of really big, important ones, and I'm going to share them here with you on this podcast. So I decide to go back to college. I decide that the space after breast cancer is not supported in the way that it needs to be. I realize that all of these women finishing cancer treatment are just kind of left to hang out to dry, and I'm not okay with it, right? Something has to change. I'm searching for support. I don't find what I want, which isn't to learn more about cancer, is to learn more about how do you create a life after cancer? What happens? How do you deal with everything that doesn't make sense in your mind and your body and your life anymore? So I go back to college, I get a degree in Health Sciences and healthy lifestyle coaching, and then I start going to conferences and hiring coaches and saying, Listen, I don't know exactly what I want this to look like, but I know what I wanted to accomplish. I know this is who I want to support. I know I want it to be online, because I want to have freedom in my life. I realized after this experience of breast cancer that one of the most important things to me is flexibility with my time, freedom of my time. As I said, I was working for a corporation at that time, nonprofit corporation, doing good work, doing good things, but I was, let's see, after when I was diagnosed with stage four breast cancer, I was 56 I think, I think it was 56 and I just remember that for several years prior to that, thinking, what is this bullshit that I have to request time off? Right? I'm thinking, I'm too old for this. I don't need permission to go live my life. I don't want to request time off. I want to let you know, hey, my job is done. I do what I need to do. I make sure everything's taken care of, and I'll see you in two weeks, because I'm leaving right, but I'll make sure things are taken care of. So that whole concept that I grew up with as was conditioned with and and adhered to for my whole life, of requesting time off and hoping someone else would approve for you to go spend a week with your family. I was just over it, so I knew one thing I wanted for sure in my life was flexibility and ownership of my own time. That was like number one thing I needed to have. So anyway, I decided this. I hire these people. I. Go to these courses, I learned this stuff, and in 2018 I put out my very first coaching program. It's a DIY program. I wrote it all out. It's like a Workbook format. I think it's good. I have no idea if it's really good or not. I think it's good. Hopefully people understand it. And I put out there in the world, and I say, Hey, I'm offering 12 people a chance to do this coaching experience in exchange for your feedback. It's all I wanted. I just wanted feedback. I wanted to know, is it good? Do you like it? What would you like to be different? And a lot more than 12 people took me up on that offer. And maybe five people actually gave me feedback and told me what they thought and what they needed and what they'd like more of. But overall, it was really good feedback. So I continued to take that feedback, redo the program, put it back out and say, Now, what do you think? Finally, in March of 2020, what I had put out initially as a downloadable PDF workbook, do it yourself kind of thing was now a 10 week live group coaching program, right? A big deal for me. And I launched that program just a few days before the world locked down in 2020 in March of 2020 and ironically, that lockdown was actually beneficial. As far as you know, the way that this program worked, because I did 10 weeks with my first group of women, and then they said, We're not done here. We don't want to leave you, and we don't want to leave each other. And so from that experience, I created a membership, and it was called the Empower experience, because that's all I wanted. I wanted to empower people to take charge of their life, to empower them to take charge of their health, to just feel like they had some power after coming out of breast cancer, which I perceived as an extremely powerless experience. So not only did we create the Empower experience, but then I went on to do that program two more times in 2020, and the day that, the day before I opened the third time, the day before, that is when I got the call that I had stage four metastatic cancer. So those three groups of women, the ones from March, and then I think it was again in July, and then again in December, those three groups of women, most of them all moved into that empower membership. Some of them that were from my first enrollment in March, were people who were actually the original ones who gave me feedback on that 2018 PDF download today. Some of those women are still here working with me, and the majority of the ones who came to me in 2020, after 2020 when my life changed with the stage four diagnosis, and my treatment plan changed, and the way I looked at life changed, and a whole bunch of stuff changed. That's for another show. I started a different membership, the better than before breast cancer, one which I did in a different way. So the empower women, eight of those women who've been with me, some since 2018 some Since 2020 right? So from four to six years are coming together live. And when you hear this, I will be in a beach house that we all rented together an Airbnb, and we will be having a live experience. The first time the entire group of us has come together live and in person. Now I'm so excited for this experience. I've had the honor of getting to meet three of those members of mine in person over the years, through my travels, but this is the first time we will all be together, live and in person. And the energy that I'm so excited to feel of everybody being together and to just feel them in person. It I can't even there's no words for that. This is something that I shared with you earlier, that I brought forward with me from Maldives. Was that that energetic power of connection and being with people, connecting to people, connecting to yourself, connecting to this earth

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again, no words for how much that means. We are a people, a species, that need each other, and I think in this world today, we need each other more than ever. And I think it's one thing that we're neglecting more than ever. So I'm so excited to take this step towards being together and having this group of people together. And there's actually some other people who are in my life who are amazing human beings who are coming to support that retreat with different things like photography and cooking and sound bouts and cacao ceremonies, is going to be. Amazing. But what it makes me think about, and I can tell you, because I've received a lot of messages once this got out into the public that, why couldn't I come? I would have been there. There's another one coming in May. All right, you're gonna get a chance to come and join me for a future retreat. And in fact, I'll probably just attach a little I want to go wishlist link right here where you're either watching or listening to this podcast, and you could let me know, would you like to come to a live retreat in Southern California on the beach with me? And then I'll have an idea. So anyway, that's besides the point. So what I started thinking about as I was doing this retreat, and what I want to talk about on this podcast is not only the beauty and the excitement of connection, the energy of making a decision to make something happen, like when I decided, Okay, I'm gonna do this live retreat, that was a big step for me. This is, like, a really big undertaking, and something that has been intimidating, something I'm like, Did I do the right thing? Can I do this? Will they have fun? Will they enjoy it. What am I thinking, right? So so many things have come up that I've had to work through. So in effect, since I've announced that, I've become a slightly different person, right? I've gained some new skills. I've gained some new perspectives. But today, as I'm recording this, it's a couple of days before the retreat, and I'm going over all the details, and I'm following up with all of the people who are going to be providing support, and I'm reflecting back on what I originally thought about this retreat and what it's become. And because of my experience at Maldives, I think there's a new energy coming to this retreat, and this is what I want to share with y'all, the energy of slowing down, of being connected and thinking in a new way of why do I tell myself I have to do so much, right? I talk to people all the time who take vacations and then either on the way back, I get a text, or if they're a client, I hear, Oh, back to the grind now, I have to go back. Oh, if only and, and after coming back from Maldives, and I've been there, I've done that so many times. I've been honestly, I'm on my own from vacations, in tears, going, I don't want I don't want to, I don't want to. And I didn't think about it then, as I do now, I didn't think about what I want isn't to live on vacation. Well, I mean, hell, I wouldn't say no to that. And what I want is the energy I experience. That's what finally sunk in when I was in male deeds. It was like the energy of slowing down, not doing nothing, not being non productive, but being present in life and being connected to other people, of intentionally holding space, to be together, to be in nature, to listen to me, you know, inside of me, To know what I want, know what I like. And I really hope that from this retreat, that the people who attend this retreat carry that with them, that they carry this thought with them, that this was not five days out of my life, and now I go back to a regular life, that what you get when you're here, is an energy that you could take forward with you, but you've got to do it intentionally. And this comes back. How does this tie into you? You're like, what the heck? What are you talking about? What does this mean to you in your life? Where are you overdoing it? Where are you telling yourself, I want to go back to the life that made me sick to begin with. Where are you telling yourself and why? Why do we do that? Why do we think we have to go back to something that when we leave it, even if it's just for a weekend, our bodies lighten, our energy lightens, our hearts lighten, and we say, I don't want to go back. And then we go back and we make the same thing that we wanted to escape from happen again. Why do we do that? Instead of switching around the way we're thinking a little and go, ooh, that felt good. And again, I'm not saying living on vacation. I'm saying the overall energetic of it, right? The overall slowing down felt good. Spending time being present and connected to people felt good. And I'll tell you what, when I first was planning this retreat, I was like, I'm going to do all this, right? I'm going to cook the food for them, I'm going to make the experiences for them. I'm going to lead the experiences for them. I'm going to teach the classes for them. And then as I would write the plans out, and I'm that kind of person who I write stuff out, I let it sit, I go back, I look at it again, I'm like, okay, evolved, right? And I'll let it evolve, and I'll come back, and the picture will. Get clearer and clearer, and as it got clearer, I thought, hold on. The intention for this. And I was planning it long before I went to Maltese. The intention of this is to connect, to be together, to talk, to experience each other. I can't be doing that while I'm running around cooking for everybody and doing all of the, you know, teaching classes. So I brought other people in for support, right? When do we realize if I don't, if I'm not living the way I want to live? Are there areas where I could bring in support? I looked at the plan that I had, and I was like, hold on. I literally got these people scheduled from back to back to back to back. That's not the point. It's not to do more and keep you so busy that you never even have time to think. The point is to slow down. So I took a bunch of stuff out, and I thought, we don't need to be doing things. We need to be together, connecting. Where in your life are you doing so much that you're not being in your life, and what can come off your plate that you're telling yourself, that your thoughts are saying, Oh, God, I have to do that, and I have to do this, and I have to do that. What if you did it? Would life fall apart if you did it right? Where can you get support? Where can you let go and work through these ideas that you have to do everything for all the people? Where do you circle back? Stop, check in with yourself and really get it that you're living your life by other people's thoughts and expectations, or by your own thoughts of what other people need for you to do. Instead of coming back and saying, I don't know how much life I have ever, not because of breast cancer, ever? No one ever knows that, but I know what I want in this life, and what I want is more time with the people I love. What I want is more time for learning about things, for experiencing things, for checking out different cultures, for sewing quilts, whatever the heck it is that you enjoy and you want. Where are you intentionally making space for that? So I started thinking about, why don't we do it right? Why? Why do we have any kind of break at all, even if it's a staycation, and you stayed at home, and you sat in your backyard watching hummingbirds and butterflies, and you thought, This is everything I can remember when I was super busy with work and raising my kids, one of the most joyful things that left such an impression with me was watering my plants, there was something so peaceful about being out in my backyard, watering my plants, the smell of the water on the soil, the birds, the butterflies, because I was I was always very intentional about planting things that attracted butterflies and hummingbirds, because I love them. But I just remember feeling like I've checked out, right? I'm out in nature. My feet are in the grass. I'm watering plants. I usually grew vegetables and fruits and things. Always kind of had a garden going on, growing food, and I just was so happy there. Why didn't it occur to me that I could carry that energy forward, instead of thinking, Okay, here's a break from peacefulness. Now I have to go back. So I came up with seven ideas. I'm going to share them with you. These are the reasons I think we don't live the life we want to live, because we don't work through thinking in these ways. You ready? The number one thing is cognitive dissonance, right? Our brain separates these two things. So when we return from vacation, we have this conflict between the peace and calm and beauty we just experienced and the demands of daily routine, and then this conflict creates this cognitive dissonance where we recognize life is so fast paced, and I don't like it's not serving me, but we continue it because we're ingrained to do so. We have ingrained habits. We are rooted in societal expectations or responsibilities. I have even had, on so many occasions, clients of mine who, after a breast cancer diagnosis, have known like they're in tears talking to me. They know that the job they're thinking now of going back to is part of why they got sick. They're like, this job is killing me, and yet, because of these ingrained habits, beliefs and expectations, they're going to go back. They want a freer life. Some of them are ready to retire. Some of them go can go on permanent disability and have stage four cancer and have every reason to do so, or other things right? Or some of them are financial. Really okay to just move on and not have to work. Maybe they have a spouse that can support them, and one of the things that stops them is the fear of the thoughts that other people might have if they live their best life, seriously that they stop and they say to me, like, but who am I to get to live that way? Why should I have that? What will other people think? Won't they think? Why should you get to do that? Why shouldn't you have had to come back to work and be miserable with the rest of us? Hmm, something to think about. Another thing I think kind of aligns with this, but it's conditioning, a routine, right? Our brains love predictability. They thrive on a routine and predictability, and that makes it super hard to break through established patterns. It even makes it hard to realize and become aware that we're addicted to predictability. So when we're on vacation and we're free from responsibilities and pressures and the dishwasher and the laundry, we come home and we fall right back into those familiar habits because our brain is comfortable and those habits are automatic, even though they don't align with our desire to slow life down and align it more with our needs. We fall back into those patterns because we're not stopping to recognize them, or we're telling ourselves it's not possible, right? Vacation is one thing. Life is another thing. The two cannot come together. Energies can't be combined. We can't do both. And again, I'm not saying living on vacation. I'm saying change and shift the energy of life to something that's more aligned with your needs to support your happiness, your joy and your health, then we have external pressure and Expectation number three, kind of alluded to that already, right? The pressures at work, social obligations, family commitments that we tell ourselves, people, I'm going to come back again, that you tell yourself, this is the pressure. Now maybe you know, like my boss has, there's pressures at work. This is the expectation. But when it comes to social obligations, I'll give you an example. I was so proud of one of my clients the other day, and she said to me, and one of the pieces of work she's been really focused on is establishing healthy boundaries so that she can create space to take care of herself, prepare her food, eat the right way, just be connected to herself, spend time learning to know and love herself. And she has been invited to lots of things. She's a great lady. She gets to do a lot of activities. And she said, You know, I got back from this great experience. And then somebody else, they they called me and they said, Hey, we're doing this thing for the weekend. And she had this decision to make, and it was, Do I say no to that? Because in her heart and in her body, she said, My heart said, I need to be home now. I need to slow down. I need to make sure my home is in order. I need to make sure that everything is ready for me to support me as I go through next week. Would it have been fun? Yes. And what she had to struggle with is, what will the people who invited me think of me if I say no? Because I'm not saying no, because I have some other big commitment on the books, I'm saying no because I'm going to take care of me. And she did right? That was a big step, and it's a big step for a lot of us. So while we're on vacation, we have this luxury of setting things aside, and then when we return home, we bring those pressures right back to the forefront, and we feel compelled to meet the demands of other people and to stay as busy as other people think we should be. And we don't pull ourselves back. We pull it. Let ourselves be pulled away from the pace of life that we enjoy, and when it comes to fun things number four, FOMO, right? We got the fear of missing out. We have this culture that is just like Do, do, do, do be on and be doing at all times. We glorify being busy and being productive. I saw this obscene story the other day. I don't even know if it's 100% true, so I'm just gonna tell you like this was the story. It made me think this, whether or not the story is true, I don't know. It was a person who's leading a major corporation, and this person was being interviewed publicly, and this person said that after 6pm unless something is very urgent, I'm not available, that's my time for family. And then there were a lot of other people who had seen this interview, and they were commenting on it, and they were saying, That's ridiculous. How can this person be an executive in charge of things. What irresponsible way to think? And I thought, What the heck? What is I don't understand. And this guy didn't say, Hey, I don't work from 6am to 6pm he said, after 6pm and he didn't say, I'm not available for anything. He said, it better be urgent, because that's time for family, right? So you. This belief that we've got to always be doing something, always be working, always be productive. Or for the client, example that I gave you, that she'd be missing out on something that was happening over a week and then coming back, and she would have created more stress for herself, and she would not have had time to prepare and take care of herself, right? So this fear of missing out and being a part of this productive culture, lest we go back to number three and be judged by somebody else who cares what someone else thinks about the fact that spending time with the people you love is important to you. Let it go. Right? Number five, resistance to change.

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Oh, man, have you guys ever read the book? Think again by Adam Grant if you haven't a link to it in the show notes here. And it just talks about how hard it is to change a human being's mind. And that's what I do, right? That's as a coach, I'm helping people to adopt a new way of thinking, and it takes work and energy and attention. Emotionally, we have a very strong resistance to change because it requires effort. It requires conscious thought. And when I'm working with clients, I hear all the time, but that's hard, okay, it's true, but it's worth it. So slowing down your life living more mindfully, it requires us to really think about and confront and these these ideas and structures we've built in our own mind and in our own life, it requires us to reevaluate what's important, what are our priorities? How do I make different choices? And that can feel overwhelming, right? The emotional comfort of familiar routine way overrides the discomfort of making change, right? It's hard, and you've got to be willing to be uncomfortable, to move into the life you want to create, then we have this lack of mindful action, right? So when we're on vacation, when we're away from our daily routine, we're temporarily experiencing, literally, a different way of life, but we don't take the time to think about how we can integrate that into our lives. I've already kind of commented on that, right? We don't consciously plan to make specific change, so that's why it's so easy to fall back into these old patterns. Emotionally. We have this gap. It kind of goes back to the cognitive dissonance. There's this gap between knowing what we need and then actually doing it right. So the lack of carrying that forward and then putting the energy into thinking about, how can I integrate this, how can I bring this together, and how can I be very intentional about it, right? And then finally, and I think this goes back a lot also to just what other people's expectations are, but we have societal norms. So for the clients who share with me, like, what will other people think if I don't work? Let's say you're in your early 50s, right? And our idea of when people are allowed to retire is 65 but you got a breast cancer diagnosis and you're 52 and you're thinking, Hmm, I don't want to go back to that job. I want to do another business, go to another job, not work, retire, whatever it is that you want to do, right? But we have societal norms that reinforce these ideas that it's not okay to slow down, that that's lazy, that that's irresponsible, that in the real world, it doesn't work like that, right? And so we feel this pull to conform and be busy and be fast paced, and this causes a real emotional conflict between our ability to just accept that life can be the way we want it to be, and in being the way we want it to be. We can still make the money we need to support ourselves and take care of our family. We're still responsible people. We're not sitting around doing nothing but binging on Netflix. That everything can be everything we want and desire. We can figure out a way to build that life, if we're willing to put in the mindful intention and we're committed to carrying forth that energy. So as you listen to this, then you think about Laura's out at a beach in Sunset Beach in Southern California right now, with a group of eight amazing human beings who are all connecting and taking space for themselves and their lives and each other, and know it's available for you too, that you can create a life that supports mental, emotional, physical wellness, a life where you are important, where you are a priority, and by you being a priority doesn't mean other people are neglected, right? That there is a way to do this, and I'll tell you. So for this quarter. So it started September, September, October, November, the focus in my membership is creating a life you love in 168 hours a week, because the concepts I'm sharing with you now on this are so vitally important, and we only have 168 hours in a week. Think about that, you guys. That's not a lot. And if you're a working person, and 40 or 50 of those hours are spent at work to Ching, that's cashing out a lot of valuable hours, what do you want to do with the rest of them? What kind of energy do you want to bring forward into your life? And then don't forget, you're asleep for part of that too. Right? It takes intention, it takes focus. And that's what I'm working with everybody on, is, how do we be intentional, even if? And again, it's not to get more in. Being intentional isn't about squeezing in more. It's about what can come off the plate, so there's more white space for life, for the real living, right? That's the important thing. And if you want to know more about that, work with me. If you want to meet me up at the next retreat, you can get all the details about the better than before, breast cancer life coaching membership or how to do private sessions with me on my website, the breast cancer recovery coach com. And if you're interested in joining me for a live retreat. Check the link below and let me know. All right, friend, take care of yourself. Slow down. Have an amazing weekend full of joy, full of people that you love, full of taking care of your needs, and I'll talk to you next week.

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