Episode Overview

What if growth didn’t have to come from crisis?

In this episode, I’m sharing a perspective shift that I’ve seen change everything for the women I work with and for myself. So often, we only reach for support when something is wrong. When we’re in pain. When we feel like we’re falling apart.

But what happens when life starts to feel good again?

Do we stop growing? Do we stop showing up for ourselves?

This conversation is about choosing a different way. One where support, growth, and self-care are not reserved for hard times, but become part of how you live every single week.

I share a personal story about stepping into public speaking and why choosing discomfort for growth is very different from the discomfort of crisis. We talk about the relationship between your mind and body, why your emotional state matters more than you may realize, and how having something to look forward to can shift not just your mindset, but your physiology.

Because this is not about fixing what is broken.
It is about continuing to build a life that feels like yours

Resources Mentioned:

Work with Laura:
https://www.thebreastcancerrecoverycoach.com/health 

Download the app:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/breast-cancer-recovery-coach/id6720763813

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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 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. Hey, friends, welcome to episode 461 of better than before breast cancer. I'm your host. Laura Lummer, super happy to be here with you today. Let me start off by sharing a little update, a little bit of a story. This past weekend, I spent in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, where I got to participate in an event with a woman that I hired to coach me on public speaking, and then with the whole community that I was working with. So it's an interesting thing. I think that when we start to tune into our intuition, we can tell we get pulled in different directions in life. And towards the end of last year, I started just really feeling this pull to speak more, do more public speaking, reach more audiences with the opportunities that we have in our life to heal ourselves and to heal our lives and to change our mindset and really live amazing lives. And so I decided to hire a speaking coach. And a lot of people said to me, you don't need to do that. You're a great speaker, but talking on a podcast is very different than talking from a stage, and I knew that. And I wanted to hear the intricacies. I wanted to be coached on what I could do better. I wanted to challenge myself, and that's really what we're talking about here today. Because most of the time when women come to me initially, it's because they're in pain, they've had a diagnosis, and they're scared, or maybe they just finished treatment and came across my podcast, they found me, and they're looking for someone that understands them and gets it, but they're typically when they come to me, they're in pain. Then we work together. They learn new ways of thinking. They learn new tools to help them align themselves with their life, to be able to use their voice, maybe that's a common thing that we work on, to be able to express themselves in constructive ways, and they start working on the things that are important to them. And as their lives become more aligned, they develop more of a sense of calmness, a sense of peace and a sense of joy. They start to cut out all the drama, really, and just because they're not available for it. And then their life gets really good. And then I hear things like, Well, I don't know what to talk about, because there's no problem. And here's what I think is so fascinating. Why is it that we only tell ourselves we deserve support when we think something is broken, when we think something needs fixing? Because it isn't just when we stop hurting that we stop supporting ourselves. We can do things and challenge ourselves in positive ways that still create some discomfort, but don't create necessarily drama, like, for instance, deciding to go do public speaking. But you know, not everybody's into that. For some people, it may be learning a new craft, learning a hobby, learning an instrument. We can challenge ourselves in growth ways, and we can support ourselves through that. Now, there's ups and downs and lives, and there may be some really tough, dark times that you really need support with. But what if we could look at our lives and say, I always want to be reaching out for support and teaching and growing, because I always want to be working more and more towards that future version of me, right? Most of us were taught that asking for help is something that we earn because we're in pain. We're suffering. It's an emergency, it's a crisis. Get support to get through it. But I like to ask, What if life doesn't have to be a series of peaks and valleys of crisis and rescue, then plateau, right? Crisis, rescue, I'm out of pain. Take a breath. Whoo, don't rock the boat. Let's keep it even. Let's wait for the other shoe to drop, and then we'll be back in a crisis, we'll rescue. We'll reach a plateau. What if that story is something we decide to toss, we want to burn that book? What if we decide that that's not how life has to go and that life could be more like a road with potholes here and there that you already know how to handle, because you never stop tending to yourself in the first place. And I think that's a really important idea in my membership with my clients, I talk about this with the community all the time. I talk about the relationship between our conscious self and our physical. Self, because these two are in a relationship, whether we've seen it that way or not, our mind and our body are in a marriage, in a close relationship. And here's the thing about marriages, and I know because I've had three of them, every relationship, marriages, friendships, even working in professional relationships, they don't survive on emergency interventions. They survive on small, steady, consistent attention, right, regular check ins, the willingness to keep showing up for each other, to keep learning about each other, to keep understanding each other, whichever that relationship is, it's a constant tending. You know, my husband and I, we don't make a big deal out of anniversaries and things like that. We go out to dinner and it's very nice. It's not a big huge deal, because what I said to him is, the anniversary doesn't mean anything. If the 12 months in between, is it wonderful. It's not just the Hallmark holiday, but we want to have joy and closeness and being good to each other every day that leads up to that annual celebration, and through that, challenges will still come up. We'll still have opportunities for growth as people and as couples or as friends or as professional colleagues right there. There will be tough moments that have to be worked through, but they don't have to be peaks and valleys. And so just in my life, as I choose to constantly be looking for something to grow into, another course, to take, another thing to learn, another thing to try, and this time, speaking from stages, it's uncomfortable, but it's a different kind of discomfort from a crisis, right? It's not the discomfort of something being wrong that has to be fixed, but the discomfort of reaching for something more. And that's a really cool distinction, because when we decide to live in a life where we're just waiting for the other shooter job, where we're just thinking, let's hold things together. Let's not rock the boat, let's hope nothing else goes wrong. That can be a really small life. But then there's the other kind of life where the hard part comes from growth and not from surviving. Both come with challenges. Both come with new, hard things that you have to face, but one is moving forward and one is bracing for impact. So we're always going to have some kind of discomfort in life, which I think we will because I think the human brain loves a challenge. Well, I know that it loves a challenge. It loves stimulation. If we're not giving it positive challenges and opportunities for growth, then that discomfort is going to come from something else. We'll maybe live in the discomfort of fear or anxiety or something like that, but there will always be some kind of a challenge. This is one of the things that I really became intentional about after my stage four diagnosis. So always have something on the calendar, and I talk about that in my creating a life you love in 168 hours a week. The reason why it's important to have a calendar to teach your brain that there's a future, and whether it's a workshop or a trip or time with family or a new skill or just intentionally spending time with friends on a regular basis, there's something to look forward to something to pull you forward in life, because if we don't have that, it's very easy to get stuck in what's wrong, especially if you're someone like me, and you're living with metastatic disease, and you're seeing lots of labs and lots of scans, and are the tumor markers elevated? Do we have pain in our body? Is there something wrong? We're always waiting for something wrong if we don't give our mind something positive to look forward to. And I'm not saying that we ignore what's wrong. Of course we tend to ourselves. Of course we pay attention to our bodies, no matter what stage of health or life we're in. Of course we take action on that. But two things can be true at the same time. I could be working through something hard, and I could still be looking forward to more in life. I can have a difficult skin day, and I can still be excited about a trip that is coming up, right? I can be in pain, but believe that this is going to resolve because I have other things I want to move on to, and that belief changes the physiology, right? The joy, the belief, the vision of something different in the future. The hard thing doesn't cancel the forward motion, but the forward motion doesn't require me to pretend that the hard thing isn't happening. Very important to realize that having something to reach toward, I think, has been one of the most powerful medicines I've had in my life. And it's not instead of medicine, it's a long side of it, because it keeps me from shrinking into a very small life, especially when that life is painful or they're scary circumstances. So it reminds. It's me that my body and my mind, that I am a whole person and that I have a whole life, right? Cancer, we can't let it take over our life. I'm not just a patient with a condition, and whether it's money or health or anything else that you find to be the limiting factor in your life, we've got to remember, there's a whole lot more of life going on. And I also think it's important to address this idea of just having a positive attitude. I think, you know, when we get down to the dumps, when we've had a scary diagnosis, things like that, people will just say, just, just have a positive attitude. And I think that that is really important, right? Having a positive attitude, having things to look forward to, but it's really important that we realize that just a positive attitude doesn't cure cancer, and I want to be really clear about that. I work with a lot of women who have a hyper focus on the way they think or the way they eat. And here's the distinction I want to make I want to cure from cancer? Of course, I want to be cancer free. I believe that all of the things I do in my life help to support my body and its ability to heal, but not any one lifestyle thing is a cure for cancer, because it's not about curing cancer. It's about living fully for me, right? It's about living fully because I think living fully helps the body to be as healthy as it can be. And this is why I take an integrative approach. The integrative approach is trusting one thing over here to treat a disease while the other thing over here, which, to me, is a bigger piece of the pie to be the best it can be. And I'll tell you. I'm going to share some research with you, but I want to share a personal story with you. My mom is 85 years old, and I have a sister who's 13 months older than me, and the other day, accidentally, my mom texts in the family chat, she says, alive, just the word alive. And I said, Good to know. Did we think something else was going on? Were you supposed to not be alive? And she says, Oh, sorry, that was for my sister. Every morning I let her know I'm still alive. And I said, Okay, why is there something I need to know? She goes, No, you just never know.

12:20
Well,

12:21
I can't argue with that. That's true. But nobody ever knows. I never know. It doesn't matter if you've had a cancer diagnosis or not. You never know. And the reason that I say that is, are we waiting around for life to end? Do we think that there's like, a certain amount of guaranteed of life. So we're just waiting for it to be happier. We're waiting, and I hear this, I wait for the time, you know, for until this is over, and then I'll be able to do that, or this is over, and then I'll be able to do that. But if we are conscious and intentional about those 168 hours we have in our week, then we're not waiting to live our life. And we're still doing uncomfortable things, we're challenging ourselves and we're growing, and that's so important to be in life and yet be able to let go of the expectation that the outcome will be disease free, because it may not, and it doesn't matter. It's about the fullness of life. So in the field of psychoneuroimmunology, researchers have studied the connection between our emotional state and our immune system for over 40 years, and there's been some really remarkable discoveries. Your brain is physically wired to your immune system, and your immune cells have receptors for the same chemicals your brain uses to communicate. This is not mind over here and body over here. We are in a relationship, and it is like best buds. When researchers look at what happens under chronic stress, they see that it suppresses parts of the immune system over the long term, and it leads to damaging levels of inflammation in the body. The reverse is also true. When researchers look at people experiencing positive emotional states, feeling hopeful, feeling connected, having meaning and purpose in their days, they find lower levels of inflammatory markers and measurable differences in which genes were being expressed inside their immune cells. And that's research from places like Ohio State, UCLA and Stanford in published, peer reviewed journals. So when we think about this from the terrain perspective, the lens I was trained through in the metabolic terrain Institute, it lines up exactly with what integrative oncologists talk about chronic emotional and psychological stress is one of the inflammatory drivers that contributes to the environment where cancer thrives. That does not say it's causing cancer, right? It that is not what I'm saying, but we just have to think of the relationship and the vulnerabilities that can happen in a. Body so we can choose joy. We look we are intentional about what we eat. We also have to be intentional about what we think and what we create in our life, right? So in the environment where we're very stressed, cortisol is dysregulated, and that's a problem oxytocin, which is what we produce when we experience connection and laughter and community and safety is really protective, and it's interesting thing to think about, like laughter. Really, really laughing. How much joy do you have in your life? How many times you just cut loose and laugh at things? We are biochemical creatures, and our emotional lives are part of that biochemistry. So when I tell you, put something on the calendar to look forward to, to reach for support while things are good, to keep learning, even if life is hard. I'm not just offering that as a cool idea. I'm really offering it to you as something that your body can feel, not a substitute for medical cure, but a real biological contribution to how well you live and how well you heal, because the relationship between your mind and your body is a physical connection. I'm going to reiterate that again and again, tending to it consistently over time is one of the best things you could do for your health. So when you're feeling good, fantastic, we can say, I feel good and I'm looking forward to more, because when we're in those really hard times where we're in those crisis periods, it's very difficult to challenge ourselves and grow from that right when we're tending to something where we feel like I'm overwhelmed, I'm in a lot of emotional pain, I'm having a hard time thinking straight, I'm having a hard time just feeling grounded. We need to establish that sense of safety, first in our own body and in our own life, but then, once we have that feeling of safety, now we can go ahead and invest that energy into growth. It's kind of like if you think about your dental health right. Hopefully you don't wait to schedule a dental appointment until you have pain in your teeth. You get your cleanings regularly. You get your X rays regularly. We don't wait to reach out to a friend until something horrible and dramatic has happened to that friend. We make regular appointments to see them for lunch or see them for dinner or have a cup of coffee or meet for a drink, because we tend to the relationship. And that's really what I'm saying here, is understand we're in a relationship with this body, and we need to tend to that relationship. We're in a relationship with our mind, right? There's a conscious part of us that looks at the way the mind works. I can say I can see my brain offering me this thought. I can see my brain had this idea. What does that even mean? How do we see that? So this is this really cool relationship going on that we're observing, and we can see it, and so we can tend to it, and we can put energy into it. And we don't want to just walk away and say, Okay, you're good. So you stay good. You stay good. Body, Mind, don't go out of balance. But we want to really be putting that energy into it on a regular basis. The women who I've watched thrive, consistent, consistently and the longest, really experienced fantastic transformations in their bodies are not the ones who only reach out when they're breaking and they're broken and they're a crisis. They're the ones who consistently show up and build support in their lives as a regular practice, supporting the way they think, working on the way they think, working on the way they treat themselves and allow themselves to be treated. So when you think about your week, ask yourself at the end of the week, what did I accomplish? What did I do this week that tended to the relationship between my mind and my body? Did I move? Did I rest? Did I nourish myself? Did I laugh? Did I connect with someone I love? Did I learn something? Did I put something on the calendar that I'm looking forward to? If you ask yourself that question every single week, you could really change your life over the course of a year, and when you you look at your calendar, make sure it's not just full of to do's right? This is something I have to do. This is something that needs to get done, but put the get to do's on there, the trips, lunch with a friend, the book you've been wanting to read the weekend, all to yourself. These are important, the things that pull you forward into life. Because when hard days come, as they will, and you know they will, you want to know something is already there waiting for you. So I want you to think about in your life right now, if you sat and you thought, What is one thing I would be reaching for right now if I didn't need a reason to do it right just because I think it would be cool and I want to try it, not because something's wrong, not because something needs to be fixed, just because I want to keep growing. I want to feel more alive. I deserve that, and I just want to have new experiences in my life. What would it be remind. Yourself that you don't have to earn support with suffering, you don't have to wait for a pothole, you don't have to wait for a crisis. I believe life could be a mostly smooth road. I really do, and it isn't because hard things stop coming. I don't think that they do. It's because you stop treating your own care as something you only access in emergencies. You start developing new tool sets so there's not so much freaking out when the hard things come, and there's longer and longer gaps between crisis, because you've learned how to regulate your immune system and you've learned how to challenge yourself in positive ways and deal with the feeling of discomfort. So give yourself the permission to know that you deserve to have support even when you're well. You do not have to be struggling to go out and get the support that helps you become more of what you want to be. So write yourself that permission slip and ask yourself that question, what is it? What's the one thing you want to do to feel like it would light you up, and then go check it out. And if one of those things has been you always wanted to come and get coaching, come and join the better than before, breast cancer, metabolic health and life coaching membership. Come and get coached by me. Come in and be in a community of some amazing women who are really always focused on creating lives that are better than before. Breast cancer. All right, friends, I will talk to you again next week, until then, be good to yourself and expect other people to be good to you as well. Take care

21:37
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. Give it all you got no hesitating. You've been waiting all your life. This is your moment. This is your

22:10
moment. This is your moment.