Episode Overview

This week’s episode is a little different.

It wasn’t planned. It wasn’t outlined. And honestly, it came from a really hard week.

Physical discomfort. Pain. The kind that makes it difficult to sleep. The kind that quietly changes how you move through your day.

And it brought up a question.

Why don’t we talk about that more?

Not just the physical side of what we go through after a diagnosis, but the internal rules we carry about how we are supposed to show up while we’re going through it.

In this episode, we talk about something called “manuals.”

The invisible rulebooks we all carry.

The expectations we have for ourselves.
The expectations we have for others.
The rules we didn’t even realize we were following.

Because so often, the suffering we feel isn’t just coming from what’s happening.

It’s coming from the rules we believe should be happening instead.

And most of the time, we didn’t even write those rules.

They were handed to us.

So what happens when we start to question them?

What happens when we notice them?

What happens when we decide we don’t want to follow them anymore?

That’s what this conversation is about.

If you’ve ever felt frustrated, overwhelmed, disconnected, or like something just isn’t working in your life, this episode will help you start asking a different kind of question.

Not “what’s wrong?”

But “what rule am I following right now?”

Because awareness creates space.

And space creates change.

💌 Want weekly support, new episodes, and wellness tips in your inbox?

💌 Join my email list for weekly wellness tips & podcast updates → The Breast Cancer Recovery Coach

💌 Join the Better Than Before Breast Cancer Life Coaching Membership → Life Coaching

💌 Join the Living Well After Breast Cancer Community → The Living Well After Breast Cancer Community

👩‍💻 Follow me on Instagram for daily inspiration → @thebreastcancerrecoverycoach

👩‍💻 Follow me on Facebook → The Breast Cancer Recovery Coach

🎙 Subscribe & leave a review on Apple Podcasts → Better Than Before Breast Cancer with The Breast Cancer Recovery Coach

🎥 Watch on YouTube → @BetterThanBeforeBreastCancer

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 and the insights 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.

0:33
Hey there, friends, welcome to episode 456

0:37
I'm your host, Laura Lummer, and you're listening to better than before breast cancer. You know, I hear myself say it's episode 456 and I can't believe it. It's like when you have a little kid and then all of a sudden you're looking at this kid and it's grown, and you're saying their age. You're like, how did we get here? I think about this podcast, and I mean, it's my baby, right? It's my little project. It's one of my loves. And when I started it, there wasn't a single listener out there, right? I just knew in my heart of hearts, I had a message I wanted to get out into the world. And I just honestly, in the first several dozen episodes, opened up my computer and sat on the floor in my closet and just started talking about, I don't know, I don't even know what those first episodes are about. Honestly, I don't ever go back and listen to myself, because it's kind of got a cringe factor to it, and I definitely would not want to go back and listen to it. I very first started, had no idea what I was doing. But all that being said, it's really cool to see how much this message has gotten out there, and how much this community of amazing women has built, and how many hundreds of 1000s of times now the podcast has been listened to. It's just just fills my heart. And so today, on this episode, I want to talk about something it's actually very personal, but applies to all of us. You know, a lot of times I don't go into

2:03
the really deep personal stuff that goes on with me, as far as what I'm experiencing in my healing treatment, right, what I go through. And I was thinking about that today, because it's been a little bit of a rough week, a little over a week now, and I was thinking about something that a coach said to me at one point. So several years ago, I was talking to this coach who was helping me, you know, develop my business and move past all of my limiting thoughts and all of my fears. And I was saying to her, what about the podcast? I'm so afraid I'm going to run out of things to talk about. You know, it's kind of like writer's block, like podcast block, what if I run out of things to talk about? And she said to me, just talk about what you're going through. Just talk about your life. Just share your experiences or what's interesting to you, what's fascinating to you at that point in time. And it was such helpful advice. And many, many times over the course of 456 episodes, I've had a plan for something, and then in my heart, I felt like I needed to shift direction. Something else needed to be talked about. And that's actually what happened with this episode, because I have a series, a three part series, that I had actually written and was going to bring out and publish this week, but I'm putting that off so it'll be the either next week or the week after that, because I don't know something happened, and I just felt like I needed to talk about this today. So what's been happening with me is that I have lymphedema in my right arm. I also have a tumor with active disease in an auxiliary lymph node on the right side of my body, on the right side of my shoulder here. So I'm touching it, because I can feel it. I can feel the lump that it makes here. And when you combine those two active tumor and lymphedema, it's uncomfortable. It can be very uncomfortable. Even though I manage it. I'm very careful about it, but there's discomfort if you have lymphedema. You know what I'm talking about. You know when you have a swollen arm, the arm is heavier, and compression sleeves are not comfortable. But when I mix together the situation that's created by having a tumor in my chest and then also having lymphedema, it can sometimes get way more than just uncomfortable. It can be extremely painful, like I can't sleep at night, kind of pain. And it's funny I don't talk about that. I mean, this isn't the first time it's happened. I'm five and a half years into this stage four diagnosis now, but when I don't talk about it, here's the thing that that we're going to talk about on today's episode. It's like, why not? Why not talk about something like that? Well, it's because I have these internal rules for myself, right? Just like you do. We all have them. We all have rules for ourselves. We have rules for people around us. We have ideas of how people should talk, how people should dress, what people should do, especially depending on the role they fill in life. Is that a child are they younger than me, they shouldn't do this. They should be able to do that. And we call them manuals. When I was training at the Life Coach School, Brooke Castillo said, this is our manual. I never thought about it that way. Our manuals for life. It's like a rule book. It's like an SOP, right? The policies and procedures for life that we've written, and that we continue to write like you. You may be adding a line into your manual right now, and your manual may say, Yeah, Laura, you should be talking more about stuff that goes on or No, Laura, you shouldn't be talking about that's not professional. I don't know, because I don't know your manual, and that's part of the problem. We have manuals we have written, and nobody else knows what's written in them. So when we go through life and people don't follow the rules we've written in our rule book, in our manual specifically for them, then we attach an emotion to it, and we decide we're going to be angry, embarrassed, whatever, whatever it is we choose. So for me, for my manual, let's go back to this. I'm thinking about, Oh, well, I don't really talk about some of the side effects, some of the really difficult days that I have, because they just seem I don't know, like, who wants to hear that, right? And I realized that, like, who wants to hear about whether or not I'm in pain. But then when I thought about it again, I thought about what my coach had said to me, and I realized, you know, it's okay to share things like that, because you may be going through that, and you may feel very alone, and that's why I started this podcast, right? That's why I started doing this business. I started talking to women who had had breast cancer diagnoses because I felt so alone. And I had met this group of women, and they shared with me that they felt alone with everything they were going through. And so when we talk about to share the experience you have, share what you're going through, it is so important because somebody else is most likely going through that and feeling maybe like they're the only one. So when we share with each other, it isn't so much about, oh, I don't want people to feel bad for me. I don't want to look weak, right? I don't want anybody's pity. I don't need sympathy. These are all in the manual. They're all rule books, right? Because why do I want to choose that thought? Maybe nobody would think anything like that, but maybe someone else out there who's trying to manage lymphedema or who's trying to manage active disease is struggling in their life and experiencing a lot of pain and finding it challenging, and they need to hear it right. So the reason I want to talk about manuals today is one of the reasons obviously I just shared with you, but I think that it's so important to us, not only with respect to the world around us and what we expect from other people, but first we've got to get straight on our manuals with ourselves, just like the one I just shared with you, how do I behave? How do I interact with the world? What do I share? What do I not share? And you get to decide for yourself what you feel safe with, what feels good to you. What doesn't feel good to you? It's your manual. It's your rule book, right? You get to write it, and you should write it in the way that feels good to you. But while you're writing it, I think you should edit it also, because I think you should be considering, if I write this in my manual, does it limit me? If I write this in my manual. Does it make me feel bad? And if so, why am I choosing it? Because our manuals are just made up of thoughts, many, many, many of them, and this is the deep work. Are written before we even know we have them. And they were like co authored. They were written by other people for us, and we just went ahead and put them in the manual. And that's because we had no agency. We were young, we were children. We didn't know better, all all the things, right? So a manual starts getting written from the time we can understand language and record a memory in our head that, hey, mom said, if you do this, she gets embarrassed. Dad said, if you do that, he gets angry. So my actions now are impacting other people's lives, and the rule is, when I'm around Mom, don't do this, because it will embarrass her. When I'm around Dad, don't do that. It'll make him mad. You see, we start writing the book. We're writing, we're writing, we're writing, so then we carry that forward with us, right? So let's use the example of mom and dad. Now maybe I'm a mom, well, I've got a rule in my book that. Says my children should behave that way so I don't feel embarrassed, right? I'm allowing their behavior to influence what I decide to think and feel. And I didn't realize that that rule was in my manual, because it's been there for a really long time. And I just thought it was true. I just thought it was real. I thought I had to be upset or worried or embarrassed about anything my children do based on the rules that were written in my manual when I was a kid. For me, I watched relationships right? Watch my parents relationships, watched how they interacted with each other, and rules got written in my manual. This is how a wife should behave. This is how a mother should behave. This is how a husband behaves. And then I grew up, and was my only exposure being my mom and dad for an example of relationship. I mean, there's others around you, but primarily you're saying your parents right then, I have a lot of rules in my manual about how people should behave, and so rather than seeing who the people are in my relationships, I'm thinking people will behave this way because that's the way my rule book is written.

11:24
Manuals get us into a whole hell of a lot of trouble. They can cause a whole hell of a lot of suffering. And the bigger problem than just the rules that are written in them is that most of the time we don't know we have them. We don't realize we have manuals. And what inspired me to talk about manuals right now is I just got off a call with a long term client of mine, and we were just talking about how much more calm and peace is in her life since she has burned her manuals. Right? We talked about, just burn the damn manual, throw the rule book in the fire, burn it now. That's not simple, and that's not easy. And what it requires us to do is to say, instead of looking at the world based on the rules I've written of how the world should be, I'm going to look at the world for how it is. I'm going to look at people for who they are. I'm going to accept me for who I am. I'm going to allow me to be myself. I'm going to start to think about the rules in the manual that was written for me that I wasn't even aware of that now guide me as a 62 year old woman, what rules were put in my manual when I was six that I'm carrying with me and adhering to at 62 and unaware of. And how are they making me feel this is such important work, because until we're aware of something, we can never change it. We cannot change what we don't know. So we go through life upsetting ourselves so often, and I say upsetting ourselves because it's not what somebody else did that upset us. Now, please don't think that doesn't mean if somebody did something horribly violent or abusive or something that their behavior is okay. That's not what I'm saying at all.

13:30
It is always what I'm saying is, how are we choosing to think? How are the thoughts we're choosing causing us to feel? Because every emotion is based on a thought, and how is that then creating the results we're living in our lives? And if we can go back and see like, Why do I have that thought? How did that get written in my manual? So let's say this. For instance, my husband does the laundry. So me true. This is true. This is real life. My husband has the laundry every Sunday. He does the laundry for both of us. He enjoys doing the laundry. When we had kids at home, he did their laundry if they wanted him to. He enjoys doing the laundry. I kind of think that he doesn't trust me to do the laundry, which is understandable as well. I'm not great at doing laundry. But the fact is, he does the laundry. My husband's a very independent man. He cooks. He cooks for me somewhere. He cooks for him. He being my third husband is one that has never sat around and waited for me to get home or get done with work before he would eat and say, What are you making? Right? That's never happened, ever in our relationship, which is why he's my third time is the charm husband. So what happens is a lot of people will hear that and say, Wait, what your husband does the laundry, because in their rule book, the woman does the laundry right? Do? I know that was in my rule book for a long time. The woman does the laundry. Isn't that interesting? Such a simple little thought, right? Such a simple little thing. How did that get written in that book? When you look around your life right now and you think to yourself about, what are the things that upset you? What are the things that you worry about? What are the things that frustrate you? I want you to ask yourself, Do I have a rule I'm unaware of about this? So if you're angry with your child, and I see this a lot, I'll give you an example. You had a kid, and in your mind, you had a vision for that kid, right? Who are going to be amazing. They're going to have this great life. They're going to be such a sweetheart. They're going to take care of mom when they got old. I mean, whatever, right? You had a vision for your child to have a wonderful life and be happy and be a good human being, whatever the version of good human being is in your mind, and to be, I'm sure, respectful, and not talk back and all that kind of stuff. And then your child started to grow into the independent human that they were, and doing stuff that suddenly was not in your manual. This is not the rules for kids. Kids cannot behave this way, and yet they are behaving that way. And I'm not saying that we're not going to teach our children how to behave the right way. That's not what I'm saying at all. But what I'm saying is when we see that they behave in a way that doesn't align with a manual, we choose a thought that creates anger, bitterness, resentment, suffering inside of us. That's the tricky part. That's the part that when we can start to see the manual and separate our manual from the person we're dealing with, now we create space. Now we can think before we react. Now we can say, I see you. I see who you are for the good and for the not so good, but whatever it is, especially when we're dealing with adults like I gave you an example of kids, little kids, we obviously have to be more engaged in littles lives, but now so I have four adult children, it's not my job anymore, to tell them what to do, that I'm so conditioned to do it that it's a natural impulse that I better work really hard on for a lot of years, to just stop and say, How do you feel about that? Why are you choosing that? Does that seem like it's going to work for you, right? And create that space so that I actually create a space to have a healthier relationship with them, rather than me saying, that's not what was in my manual, right in my head, without even knowing it, that's not the way you're supposed to act. That's not the choices you're supposed to make, and therefore, I'm frustrated with you, which then pushes our loved ones away from us. So I'm using the example of a child, but this could be anybody. It could be a sibling, it could be a friend, it could be a spouse, it could be a life partner, right? It's just whenever we go to our manuals, we create suffering for ourselves if we're not aware of them. And the very strongest one that I think deserves the most attention first is the one we've written for ourselves, because that's the one that stops us from treating ourselves most of the time in the amazing way we deserve to be treated because we've got these rules that say I should give up my time, my space, my peace, my energy, maybe my money, maybe anything I own for this other person, because I don't know. That's the way it is. A lot of times when I'll hear something, a situation, a story, someone's sharing with me that they're very beside themselves, they're very upset about, they're very confused about, and I'll ask, Well, why? Tell me why you make that choice. Tell me why you're taking that action. And most of the time, there's not a lot of clarity. So in a lot of things that create suffering from us, for us, we don't have a lot of clarity around why we're choosing that action. So if you're going through treatment, why do we say I want to stay as normal as possible? What's the rule book behind that? I don't want to look like a victim. What? What does that even mean? What is a victim? How would you look like a victim? I don't want to appear weak. What does weak mean? What makes someone look weak? If someone else were doing that, if someone else were taking time off because they just simply needed to rest, would you look at them and say they're so weak most of the time, not because we write a very different manual for ourselves than we do. For other people. So the point is not to judge the manual. The point is to stop and say, Hmm, do I have a manual? What? Where's that coming? How do I know? How do you know if you have a manual? Well, you ask yourself, why? When you find yourself upset, when you find yourself worrying, when you find any of these emotions you don't want to be experiencing, you say, What am I telling myself? What's the story here? And if the story is this isn't the way it should be, ask yourself, why? Why not? Who said that? Where did that come from? Right? Who decided on that rule, and when did you decide you would attach that emotion to it? I think that one of the most powerful things there, there's no question. It's not that. I think there's no question in my mind that in this journey of 14 years, and especially the last five and a half of putting, of researching, reading, following, learning. How do people heal? How do you support your ability to heal? There's no question in my mind that the most powerful thing is to look at our thoughts. It is wild. How much pain we create for ourselves because of the thoughts we choose. And I don't know percentage wise, what percentage of those thoughts were not even ours to begin with, but I'm telling you, it's a lot. I heard at one point that the human brain has over 60,000 thoughts in a day. That's pretty amazing. Judgments, ideas, creative, just thoughts of everything we see. But how many of those thoughts would we intentionally choose to guide our life today. That's the point here, intention. So when I say that the most powerful thing is to look at our thoughts, is because when we start to see these thoughts and we say, like, what am I thinking here? Why am I choosing this? What is this creating? Like, Curiosity is such a powerful healer, right? It's such a powerful tool for clarity. And we ask ourselves, why am I thinking that? What do I even want? And if what I want is a great relationship, but what I'm doing is being mean, because something, somebody did something that upset me, then is the action I'm taking now, getting me towards that great relationship I want to have, if not, well, that's pretty fascinating. Why am I choosing the action I'm choosing? Right? If we just get so curious about everything we do, we start to see the manual. It's almost like our manuals are written in invisible ink, right? We don't know they're there. We don't know they exist. We don't even understand how many of the rules or what the rules are, until we start to practice awareness, until we start to say to ourselves, so this is interesting. How come I'm not sharing that? This is interesting. Why don't I talk about that? This is interesting. Why don't I want anyone to know this about me, right? No judgment. And maybe sometimes you'll come and say, oh, okay, I've asked myself why I've been very curious, and I'm good with it. I want to keep this rule in my manual, but as we practice awareness, and as we start to ask ourselves, where is that thought coming from? And the ink starts to become visible, and we start to get to read our own manual, and we start to see the expectations we put on ourselves and the expectations we put on other people. Now we get to decide, are those rules still working for me? Do I want them in my life? Now I get to choose with intention, whether or not to keep them and rewrite this book. And not only do I encourage rewriting it by editing it down to its absolute minimum, but I encourage also just freaking burn it and let people be who they're going to be, and let you be who you're going to be. Because I think that we find that that's where we really connect to compassion and empathy, right when we say, I see you for who you are, we're not always going to love that. We're going to say sometimes, I see people for who they are, and that person may have some really bad or unacceptable habits, but how many times in life has our manual taught us to let people like that keep coming back and doing more harm. When we decide to look at the manual and we see, wow, I have this rule in my manual that says, well, they were just tired. Well, I've known them for a long time. Well, I don't want to be a bitch. I don't want them to think I mean, those are our rules. Those are our rules that keep allowing people to behave towards us in unacceptable ways. When we start seeing those rules and we say, well, who said and where did that come from? Then again, we can decide, are we going to delete that rule? All Out of the manual, and in doing so, can we say, I see you, I see you, and because I see you and I burn the manual, I'm no longer going to pretend you're not who I see. I'm no longer going to tell myself, it's my job to change you. I'm no longer going to tell myself, I'll just keep putting up with it, and some point they're going to learn, right? I'm going to stop and say, I see you, and I see how you behave, and I see the choices you make, and I know how that feels when you're around me. And then you get to make a decision for what works best in your life, without animosity, without anger, you just get to let go. You get a release. You see how awareness brings us to that first pillar of breast cancer recovery, release. We must let shit go like there's creating space on an energetic, on a physical, on an emotional, on every level. Is so amazing, because when we let all this stuff go, when we become aware of it, when we see what we're doing for ourselves, we can drop barriers. We can drop toxic relationships. But when we do that, we create space to bring in goodness. So if I don't let anybody know, if I don't say to anyone in my family, I need help, or I'm really not feeling well, so I'm going to skip that. Or, you know what, I'm not up to, making dinner tonight. Can you help me out? Or, you know, can we go buy a ready made salad, or one of those roasted chickens they always have at the grocery store, because I'm not up to it. When we when we don't do that, and we push through and we pretend, because we have a manual with a rule that's written in there says I'm the one that's supposed to take care of feeding everybody right? What we do is we don't bring people closer to us. That's what I call the protective barrier. We build walls. We build barriers. We say, I don't want you to see me. You know, I don't want you to see me for who I really am. Maybe I don't trust you, right? Maybe I don't like who I really am. Maybe I'm afraid if you see who I really am. I'm not that person I've been pretending to be because I'm following the rules in the invisible ink in this manual that was partially written by somebody else, it doesn't work for me. It makes me uncomfortable. I know that it makes me uncomfortable, but I didn't know that it was there, and now I do now I know it's there, and now I can start reading it. I can start looking at this manual. I can start looking at the rules that are in it, and I can start asking, Is that my guideline, or does somebody else put that in there? And I just accepted it, right? So in essence, this episode is not about me sharing with you that I've been struggling with a lot of physical discomfort and pain from lymphedema. It's about me sharing with you that because of that, it caused me to look at what rules do I have around this for myself, because God knows that when we're suffering physically, we have a lot of rules for ourselves. I shouldn't do this. I shouldn't rest. God knows that's a big one, right? I shouldn't rest without feeling guilty. But what if we said, you know, if I feel like this, I'm just going to give myself space, you know, I'm going to take it easy on myself. What are the rules there that say you have to push harder than anyone else? And why do you have them? And are they serving you? This is so important, if you could just sit down and take this one lesson, which could be years and years worth of work, in fact, a lifetime worth of work, because we're constantly writing in this manual, so even as we're editing it, we may be taking some stuff out and putting other stuff in, but it's such great work when we can allow ourselves to be curious about why we're choosing the thoughts and why those that cause emotions that create suffering in our life. It's like mind blowing when you stop and you realize I have power over this, I can drop it. I can let go of things that are causing suffering in my life. And that doesn't mean I can continue to accept the toxic behavior. I could just let go. I could let it go. I could release and I could just be me, and I can just show up as me, and I can look around my life, and I can decide whether or not any of these things work in my life. And if they don't, I can say, You know what? That just doesn't work for me, even if it did at some point, but it doesn't. Now, this is the beauty of doing the work on your manuals, of seeing how is. It written up here in your brain. How is it wired into your brain that you behave the way you behave towards yourself and how you interact with the world? And is it written the way you want, or do you want to come out with a new edition of the manual? So I will leave you with this. Try to make it a practice of just having a little more awareness throughout the day of the automatic things you do in your life or expect in your life, and asking yourself, that's curious. Why do I expect that? Why do I do that? Is it reasonable to me? Not reasonable from the fact that the rule was written that is it? What I want now is this person I'm expecting it from capable? Do they have the capacity to follow my rule book even? And if not, well, that's interesting too. Should I let them know what's written in the rule book for them? Should we talk about it, or should I decide to see them for who they are and meet people where they're at and understand that some people don't have the capacity to show up in the way you've written their role in your manual, and that it's up to you to see that, and when you see that, your relationship will change. I don't know how it will change, but if you commit yourself to letting people be who they are without forcing your manual on them, including yourself. I promise you things will change. I would love, love to hear your thoughts on that. I would love to hear your questions on that. So come to my website, the breast cancer recovery coach.com join my free community, living well after breast cancer, and let's talk about it. Let's hear your thoughts and share with me what you've discovered is in your manual that maybe isn't allowing you to live life as joyfully and fully as you want. All right, friends, I'll talk to you again next week, and until then, be good to yourself and expect others to be good to you as well. Take care.

32:04
You've tamed the voices in your head. You've put your courage to the test, laid all your doubts to rest. Your mind is clearer than before, your heart is full and wanting more. Your Future's at the door.

32:20
Lord, give it all. You got no hesitating.

32:26
You've been waiting all your life. This is your

32:34
moment. This is your moment. This is your

32:53
moment.