Episode Overview

July 2026 marks 15 years since my first breast cancer diagnosis, and five years and eight months since my stage four diagnosis. When I sat down to plan what I wanted to share for this milestone month, I had all these lovely, celebratory ideas. And then life happened, the way it always does.

I lost a few people I cared about in the metabolic health community. A couple of my clients passed. And then, right as I went to record this, our dog of 14 years died. I tried to record this episode five times because I kept crying. So I want to be honest with you from the very start. Life is hard, and life is wonderful, and most of the time, both are true at the same time.

That is really the heart of this episode. So many of us carry the belief that we shouldn't feel joy while something painful is happening, or that we shouldn't let anything heavy in while things are good. But everything is good and bad at once, every single day. On the day we lost our pet, my husband's daughter arrived to stay with us for a couple of weeks, and we were heartbroken and joyful in the very same breath.

I share a recent conversation with a newly diagnosed woman who told me she did not want cancer to become part of her identity. I understood what she meant, and I also felt called to gently say what I know to be true. Once you have had a diagnosis, it is already part of your story. Not your whole identity, but a real, meaningful thread woven into who you are and how you live going forward. Cutting it off, refusing to look at it, only makes it harder to process everything you are moving through.

This episode is also a look back at 15 years that were never a straight line. I walk through how my work evolved, from Let Your Lifestyle Be Your Medicine to the Breast Cancer Recovery Coach, through my second diagnosis, my studies with Dr. Nasha Winters and the metabolic approach, and the quiet heaviness I started to feel when I sensed people were coming to me hoping I could cure their cancer. That was never my message. My work has always been about wellness, about living, and about the future you are choosing to create right now.

Here is what I most want you to hear this month. We are never done living until we are done living. You are allowed to build the business, plan the trip, write the book, chase the dream, all of it, whatever your circumstances. And the foundation for all of it is not discipline or willpower. It is love. Loving yourself enough to care for your body through the hard things, to forgive yourself the way you would forgive someone you cherish, and to be willing to feel everything. Because when you are willing to feel it all, there is nothing you cannot do.

This July, my membership community is spending the first week giving ourselves credit, real credit, for everything we have carried and everything we have built. I hope you will do the same. Look at how far you have come. Look at how hard it has been. And give yourself the celebration you have earned.

Keep an eye out for July 11, because I have a very special announcement coming on the actual anniversary of my diagnosis.

Resources Mentioned:

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

Download for iPhone: 

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/kajabi/id1485646310

Download for Android: 

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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 Lum Erm. 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 friends, welcome to episode 469 of Better Than Before Breast Cancer. I am your host Laura Lum Er, and this is an exciting month. This podcast is going to come out the first week of July, and July 2026 is 15 years since my first diagnosis of breast cancer, and it's crazy, it's crazy how fast time goes by, and july 11 will be five years and eight months since my stage four diagnosis, and you know when I thought about what I want to do for July, and I thought about how do I want to, what do I want to put out into the world, what do I want people to know, what do I want to share, a lot of different things came up. I thought about, you know, and I was working, of course, with AI, and talking to Claude, and talking to Chad, and saying, like, what, what are some great celebratory, inspirational, like fun things to do, fun things to say, fun things to talk about, and they gave me some great ideas, and I was like, maybe this, maybe that, you know, this many lessons, this most important thing. And then what happened? His life, life started to happen, and I will tell you, as I was doing the planning for the month of July, which there will be lots of great stuff, and keep your eyes open for july 11, because I'm going to be making a really big announcement for some very special fun things coming up for you on the actual anniversary of my diagnosis. Seems kind of weird, right? Because, like, why would you celebrate getting diagnosed with cancer? But if you've had a diagnosis, you know what I'm talking about. It's not about getting diagnosed, it's about another year of life, right. It's about having something so traumatic happen to you that caused you to think, is this the end of my life? Will this be it for me? And then 15 years later, not only still be here, but I've done a whole lot of living, and this is what happened, right. So I was thinking about what I wanted to do for the month of July, and then stuff started to happen, and some sad things, some kind of heavy things were going on, and that's that's just the reality of life, right. I lost a couple of people in the metabolic health community that I'm a part of, they lost their lives to cancer. A couple of my clients also passed away. And then, okay, this is like the fifth time I'm trying to record this, because I couldn't record it without crying, so I might get a little choked up, because then, as I went to record it, our dog died, and I thought, you know, life is hard. You know, life is hard, and life is wonderful. And I had a great conversation with some of my members the other day on our group call. We were talking about this very same thing, and I think this is one of the most important things that I want to share with you, for my 15 years of celebration, you know, is that we have this mentality that I have seen over and over, and that I have had to work through myself, and it's almost like this is bad and I shouldn't feel good while this thing is going on, or this is good, and I don't want to think anything bad to bring me down while this is going on, but the truth is everything is good and bad at the same time, like every day, all the time, there's good and bad, you know, on the day we lost our pet of 14 years, my husband's daughter came to visit us, and she's staying with us for a couple of weeks, and that was a thrilling thing.

4:32
And so, of course, we're joyful to have her, and we're heartbroken at the loss, and this absolutely carries over in our lives, let me give you an example. In fact, I'm going to tell you a story. I had a consultation with a woman the other day, newly diagnosed with breast cancer, a woman who, her view of life is she lives a relatively healthy life, and as we started to talk about. What she looked for, what she wanted for support, what she was interested in. What she said is, I don't want this to become a part of my identity. I've seen a lot of people who get a diagnosis and then that becomes part of their identity. I don't want it to be part of my identity. And I thought that was really fascinating, because friend, you're too late. It's a part of your identity. You're someone who had a cancer diagnosis, and so, because she has this great life, and she's happy, and she's doing things that she loves, she's like, I just want to focus on this stuff, and I don't. I just kind of want to go through what the doctor tells me to go through, and I don't really want to give this that much attention, really was like the overall thought process, right, but the truth of it is this is happening at the same time, and this is very real, and it is a very real threat to the life that you love, and we have to be able to drop the resistance to the things we don't like in life, the things we don't want to deal with in life, and we have to be able to face them, look at them, and realize life is all one big integrated ball of wax, and a lot of it is wonderful, and a lot of it sucks, but all of it makes us who we are. All of it creates the experience we have in this life, and all of it is important to acknowledge. And this has really stood out for me lately, and in fact, the conversation I just shared with you about the first recite, want this to become my identity, it actually was a really meaningful statement she made to me, because it gave me a moment of clarity that I'll share with you here. So, if I look back over the last 15 years, what I see is not linear, it's not a straight line from when I got a diagnosis in July of 2011 to July of 2026 just like, oh yeah, I went through this stuff, and I just went straight ahead, and this is where I ended up. Oh no, no, no, no, no, no. Right ups, downs, peaks, valleys, challenges, successes all across the board. And for me, when I decided I wanted to serve this population of breast cancer survivors of women who had had breast cancer, and when I was starting my business, I said I want to serve women and support women after they finish breast cancer treatment, right after they finish it, because for me, in my mind, I had been through this, and I was like, when you're in it and you're in survival mode, one, there's a lot of services available to those of us who are in treatment when we're in treatment. Two, it's really hard to wrap your head around other things when you're in treatment for cancer. It's really challenging, not just because you're already processing a lot of fear and you're in the midst of trauma, but you're also taking a lot of medications that are hard on the brain, hard on the body. There's just a lot to go into it. And so, when I first started, I was really passionate about helping these women when they were released from their treatment, because that was like a drop off point, right? It's like, okay, you're done, see you.

8:17
And then they had all of this trauma to process and I really wanted to be there to support them, and so that's what I showed up to do, and as I showed up, and as I put a podcast out into the world, more and more women heard about me, and people would come to me, and they were still in treatment, they were still in radiation, or they were finishing chemotherapy, and you know, when I first started this business and this podcast, it was called Let Your Lifestyle Be Your Medicine, because I was trained for many years in Western health modalities in nutrition and fitness, and then I had also had training in Ayurveda, so that Eastern system of wellness and medicine, so I was kind of bringing them together, but the influence was very heavy on diet and nutrition and Western Western healing, or not healing, that's the wrong word, Western health modalities. Okay, then as I started to work with people and work through the podcast and continually learn from myself and go through my own journey, everything changed to the breast cancer recovery coach, because that really resonated with me. It's like, you know, what this is, I want to be really clear on what I do. I help people recover from breast cancer treatment, because I never wanted to be the person who is treating people, for lack of a better word, supporting people, helping people, getting confused right in that gray area, like, oh, she helps people who have cancer, and I don't know if that makes sense to you, but I never wanted to be misconstrued for that I was doing anything medical, right, because that is way beyond my scope of practice, education, and training, so I wanted to make it clear this is. Breast cancer recovery. Right, we've had a diagnosis, we've been through the trauma, we've been through, you know, the weeds, and we're coming out on the other side. And now we want to create a life we love. And the reason that spoke to me is because I'm always forward thinking, and I love forward thinking, not to be confused with not living in the present, but deciding what you're creating in this present moment the future you want to live into. Right, I love that. I love manifestation. I loved goal-oriented. I love writing down goals and journaling and looking at what's stopping you from becoming that version of you that you want to be. And so that was my focus, but then more and more I would find people saying, oh yeah, my cancer coach, and they never sat right with me, and I'd be like, I'm not a cancer coach, right? I'm an integrative life coach, meaning to me life coaching was all about our thoughts and our mindset and the way we look at how to move forward, and that was something I was really trying to do, right? A part of my healing was looking at the job I was in at the time I was diagnosed, and saying this job doesn't serve me, I'm miserable here, right? And I've talked about that on the podcast before, that I walk in there and I would say, oh my god, every time I step foot in this fluorescent light lit office with no windows, a little bit of me dies every day. And then I got a breast cancer diagnosis, right after years of that didn't happen just one time, but anyway, so then moving forward, part I knew that a part of my healing had to be doing something I love every day, and I knew what I loved, I knew I loved supporting and empowering women, I knew I loved everything about the way the human body functions, about diet and nutrition and mindset, and how to approach it without the old Western view of discipline that didn't land with me. Right, so as the breast cancer recovery coach, I felt like in the groove, like this is it, right, this is this is what I want to do. And then I got another diagnosis, I got a widespread stage for cancer diagnosis, and it was really one of the best points in my business. Right, everything was going great. I was super happy. I loved what I was bringing out into the world. I loved the people I was working with.

12:15
And then, holy shit, I have cancer again everywhere, and it rocked my world, really rocked my world. And I thought, just like the first time I was diagnosed, here I am trying to move into the health and fitness and wellness industry, and I have cancer. Who in the world is going to want to work with somebody as a health coach and a mindset coach when they have cancer? And then I found a lot of people that did women who had all also had cancer. Right now I get a diagnosis of metastatic disease, not everybody's nightmare. I'm my own nightmare right now, but everybody who's been through breast cancer and has no evidence of disease and is now trying to figure out how to move forward, really. They want to work with somebody as widespread stage four cancer. How scary is that? Right, that was what I thought. And so my story started to shift again, and I had to re-evaluate, like, what.. what does my life look like? What is it going to look like? How do I shift my life, my business, my healing, so that all of this fits, so that I'm aligned, living the life that I love and supporting the people that I want to support. And then it all started to fall into place. I found Dr. Nation Winters. I started studying with her the metabolic approach to cancer, such a so powerful, so empowering, and I started working with people, right, looking at your labs, looking at your nutrition genomics, really helping people understand the language of their body, and loving it so much. And because I had metastatic disease, more people started to come to me who also had metastatic disease, and something that was very meaningful to me is I felt like when it comes to breast cancer I've kind of run the gamut now, you know, I've had a stage 2b diagnosis, I've had the surgeries, the lum pectomy, the mastectomy, I've had radiation, I've had chemotherapy, I've had a recurrence, I've had widespread stage four, I felt like, girl, I've been through it all, so whatever you got, bring it to me, because I understand you, and then as I was doing that, I started realizing I was sinking a little more back into the cancer world, right, of working with people who were actively in treatment for late stage cancers, right, for advanced cancers, and it started to get pretty heavy, very heavy, because I started to lose clients, and that's really freaking hard, and that's not their fault or my fault, that's, you know, something that sadly and heartbreakingly comes along with some of this with this disease, but something else. I started to notice was that a lot of clients started to put a tremendous amount of wheat into nutrition, especially nutrition and just lifestyle, and what I mean by that is that they, in my opinion, from my lens, what I would see was they believed that making these lifestyle changes would cure them, and then if they had a progression, or if they weren't going into remission the way they had wanted to, regardless, and this wasn't just working with me, it was doing their plan, working with their naturopathic oncologist, doing all the things right, they were perceiving themselves as doing all the things, and then they would get really frustrated because they would be like, what, why am I not healed, why do we still have cancer, and I would think to myself, well, I mean, cancer is not going to be healed with diet, right? I mean, maybe there are some very fortunate people out in the world who just changed their diet and went into remission. Unbelievable, wonderful. Thank God. But changing your diet is for the purpose of supporting your body's ability to be well and to heal itself, and it's also supporting your ability to have the lifestyle you want to have, right, to have the energy you want to have, to feel good, to have a healthy digestion, to feel well, and be able to engage in your life, right.

16:31
That's why we do the lifestyle things, and they also can again support the immune system, right, support the detoxification pathway, support the body's ability to heal, which I really feel in my story as a big part of my story, right, that that has supported my ability to have the quality of life that I have while going through some very toxic treatments, but it started over the last few months to feel really, really happy with me, I started to pull back a little bit and think this doesn't feel good to me. What I want to do is empower women. I want women to dig into their lives, regardless of the state. Like, I have metastatic breast cancer. I'm still going to work on building my business, I'm going to work on traveling. I'm going to work on writing a book, if that's what I want. I'm going to do all the things I dream about, and if, for whatever reason, this life ends before I finish all of them, at least I was living the life I wanted to live. And then I started to just really feel over it's probably been the last year or so that people were looking to me again for healing cancer, and I get it, I get it. The breast cancer recovery coach, better than before breast cancer, I get how it could be misaligned, but I chose those words purposefully, right? The breast cancer recovery coach is like, okay, let's know that this treatment is now part of our life, let's see how it's going to assimilate into our life going forward, because again, if you've had a cancer diagnosis, you know it's not one and done, it's not treatments done and it's over, it goes on, it goes on for a very long time, and that means that we think about it, we wonder about it, we have blood tests, we have follow-ups, once cancer has been a part of our life. It continues to be a part of our life. So, going back to the story of the woman that I was speaking to, to cut yourself off from part of your life and to say I'm going to just do what I have to do and get through this, but this is not going to be a part of me is like cutting off a finger. I mean, it can't work, and you will not be able to process everything you're going through if you're not willing to be open and say this is a part of my life, right? This is a part of who I am. Every woman who's been through breast cancer, this is a meaningful, powerful, impactful part of your life that absolutely has shaped who you are and how you live moving forward in whatever ways, I don't know, maybe small ways, maybe big ways, maybe complete life transformation, but there's no way that a life-threatening diagnosis and the treatment you have to go through for it does not impact you and become a part of the person you are and the life that you live, right. That's why this is, this is very, very important. And so, when things don't fit the right way, as I was starting to feel, we have to sit back, and we have to go, you know, this isn't something I want to push away, this isn't something I want to resist. This feeling inside of me that says, hey, there's another calling, a different direction over here. We have to pay attention to that, because when it feels heavy, that's something there to look at, right. And so I started looking at it, and I started feeling like, you know what. But I feel a calling to be out to bring this message to more women who have had a diagnosis of what they can create in their lives, what they're capable of doing, and how we process everything we've been through, and how we bring that part of our life along with us in a way that works for us in a way that suits us while we're building the life we love the most. So, when this woman said to me, and she started talking about cancer, and I don't want cancer to be this big role in my life, Atlanta with me, because I thought, huh, is the how I'm perceived, right?

20:37
Is when people get a cancer diagnosis, am I perceived as that person who could give them tips or tricks to say, oh, here, do this, and then you won't have cancer, because if so, I need to change my messaging, because that was never the message that I wanted to put into the world, and it still isn't the message I want to put into the world. Is how can we support you? How can you do the best to optimize your wellness? It's always going to focus on wellness and future and life, right. So, when she said that to me, I thought, okay, I see my 15 years celebratory challenge here, I'm out of alignment, and that alignment needs to be a stronger message of one, we're never done living until we're done living. Right, life is challenging, and I think that if it isn't challenging, if we're just staying in our comfort zone, we're missing, we're missing out on part of life, we're missing out on growth, we're staying in our comfort zone, and we're not allowing ourselves to challenge ourselves in positive ways, and that's something I always want to do. I never want to stop growing or seeing what more could I achieve, what more could I accomplish, in what other ways can I grow and become more self-aware and give back to others and help them, that's really, really important to me. So I realized when this woman said that to me, I thought, okay, that's the heaviness I've been feeling, it's being pulled backwards into this idea that the work I do is for cancer, where, when the work I do is for health and living and the future, so I've had clients say to me, and they'll come to me after a diagnosis, we'll work through the stuff that's really tough for them, realign their lives, help them feel better in the ways that they want to feel better, deal with inflammation, deal with lots of issues, so they feel physically and mentally better. Help with communication skills, help with mindset, all of that. And then they'll say, like, okay, well, I've done this stuff now, and I don't have any evidence of disease, so I don't know, like, I guess we're done. Are we done? And I always think, well, that's so fascinating. Because are you done living? Have you created everything you want, right? Have you, have you checked every box on the vision board, and now you're just gonna hang around and wait, right? And so more and more I see that here at this 15 year mark is another opportunity for more growth, for clearer messaging about the work that I do in the world, which is to help people create better, happier, more fulfilling, more robust lives, to take their empowerment, their independence, their freedom of thought, and learn how to express themselves and learn how to really and truly live lives they love, while embracing and understanding how to process all the hard things that come along with it. I've said to people many, many times, and I've had many women come to me for coaching on how to get started in their own businesses, how to move forward. Maybe coaching also is something they wanted to do, and I'll say over and over that one of the best ways to grow is to start your own business, because we have to look at everything that blocks us, and we have to look at our own self-doubt, and we have to constantly get clarity and re-evaluate and reassess. So, as I come up to this 15 year mark, and I think about reflecting on 15 years, reflection can never just be the good things, right? The good things are awesome and wonderful, the growth typically comes from something challenging, and then the good comes from the growth. And so, as I reflect back, I couldn't just show up and say celebrate life, and I walk on the beach, and I'm doing so great, and I've started this business, and I've reached over a half a million.

24:59
Dealing women with my podcast, and hundreds and hundreds of women with my business, and all that is great, but if I don't acknowledge that none of it's been easy, and as I'm doing that, I'm dealing with my own life and health and healing and learning and belief systems and all of that stuff along with it, then I wouldn't be honest, I wouldn't be transparent, I wouldn't be authentically sharing the journey with you, because I'm not going to kid around with you. If you've had a breast cancer diagnosis, I mean, you think I'm full of shit. I just sat here and said everything's great, what a gift, right? But I absolutely do have gifts in my life, and I absolutely have blessings that are in my life because of the fact that I had a cancer diagnosis and two cancer diagnoses. Right, I wouldn't be sitting here today if I didn't have that. And there are many women that I work with who, I mean, they've just done amazing things for themselves, they develop so much and they have such great lives, and, and maybe they would still be there if they haven't gone into cancer diagnosis, but the cancer diagnosis was really the catalyst in, in them going down that pathway of figuring things out and doing the work, and so when it comes to the point where we are looking at our lives for whatever reflection, whatever celebration. I think it's so important to look at the whole thing, and not to judge it, and say, like, this is great, so don't talk about that, because that's not good, but to look at it and say, look at everything that you built, and look how hard that was, right? This give ourselves credit, so in my Better Than Before Breast Cancer membership, the first week of July, like we are looking at giving credit to ourselves, because so many times women accomplish so many things, and when someone says that's great, or you did that, or you got there, and they'll say, oh gosh, oh, it was fine, I wouldn't have been able to do it if not for so and so, and, and it was really that over there, you know, that got me to this place, and those things may be true, and we can always give acknowledgement and gratitude to the people that supported us through our life's path, but Dan, it take credit for what you've been through, because what you've been through has not been easy, right? So this is one thing that's so important to me, it's like, look at what you've done, right, look at what you've done, look at how you've gotten through really hard things, and things may be harder than you ever imagined, you know, even now, at this stage in my life, at this stage in my healing, when my oncologist will say something about IV chemotherapy, and I just think, oh, oh boy, my mind's not ready to go there. I don't, I don't see that as a part of my future. Maybe I'd say to myself at different times, I can't go through that again, but maybe that's not really true. If that ever becomes part of my choices, if that ever becomes an option, of course, I can get through it. If that's what I choose to do, I can get through anything if I decide I want to, and I see that in every single moment I work with. And so I think that's important, like you get to embrace that, you get to say, dang, this is July. We're not just celebrating in the United States the birth of a country, but let's make this month about celebrating you, who you are now, how you got here, what you accomplished along the way, and all you've done to get there, including the hard stuff, especially the hard stuff like what wonderful accomplishments, and here you are showing up for yourself.

28:44
So, yeah, I could sit here forever and tell you so many different things that I've done to support my health over the course of the last 15 years, but I think the one most important lesson is, and I learned this when I was going through life coach school training, really, in to be able to say it this way, is you must be willing to feel everything, and if you are willing to feel everything, there's nothing you cannot do. So, if you have an adventure, if you have a goal, if you have something in mind, and you think that is so, I would love to do that, but I'm scared. That's totally normal, and that's okay. The most important thing is, are you willing to feel the fear while you move forward? Right? Are we willing to feel the grief, the resistance. Look at it and say, ah, man, I'm really resisting this thing. Why? And look at our thoughts, so that we can get through and get to the next step. That's the really important thing, and the foundation of that. How you get there is you love yourself with all your heart, you love. Yourself, you love this body, you say to yourself, you know what, if you were my person I love most in the world, body, if you were my child, if you were my mom, if you're my sibling, if you're my life partner, whoever it is, this is what I would do for them to comfort you, to love you, to show up for you, and then you do that for yourself, that is something to celebrate, because when you can do that, when you're in your truth, this is this is authentically showing up as yourself, and I think one of the lessons that I've had to work on, and that I work with so many women on, is finding our voice from an authentic and compassionate place, being able to express ourselves from a place of love for us, from a place of healthy boundaries, but being able to express ourselves from a place of kindness and the overall good for everyone who's involved, rather than lighting ourselves on fire to keep people warm, that's huge, and we only do that when it comes back to love, because we start everything. In fact, you're going to get an option or opportunity to get your hands on my Lead with Love program later here in July, but I just wrapped that up with my clients, and I think it's so important, and I think that going through a process where you're like, I lead my relationship with myself with love, because I know that most people's thoughts go right to, isn't that selfish? If I put myself first, isn't that selfish? How could something that's being led with love be selfish? What is love selfish? No, it's kind, and so when we think about loving ourselves, self-love as the foundation to creating a life you love, and the foundation to treating yourself with the kindness that you deserve, and with that, I do not just mean bubble baths and bow of feather things, I mean supporting yourself through the hard stuff, I mean taking the time to make the food that nourishes this body, that helps this body feel well, right? That's what I mean when I say love yourself enough to care for yourself in the best possible way, that's that's everything, right, and you know, many, many times I've talked about on this podcast, I've talked about with my clients, life and pushing through and accomplishing things, in my opinion, is not about willpower and discipline, and people say to me all the time, God, you're so disciplined. No, I'm not, I'm certainly not disciplined, but I love myself, and I love this body, and I love this life, and over the years, and a lot of hard work, and a lot of working through mental blocks about things I didn't want to give up, I came to know that if there are certain things I do, this body will feel terrible, and I don't like it when it feels terrible, and so the choices I make that other people may perceive as discipline are choices of love. They're choices that say I'm doing this because I love to feel good and stay engaged in life and with the people that I love.

33:11
And so when I say that self love at 15 years out of a cancer diagnosis, I would never say to anybody, be disciplined. I would never say fight harder. I would never say just think positive and move forward. No, I would say stop and know yourself, know yourself, love yourself, give yourself grace, give yourself understanding. Look at the things that you judge as the bad right along with the good, and just again, like we would with someone we love more than anything in the world. Forgive yourself, you know. We have a child, a loved one, a mom, a sibling, or a life partner. You know, we, we forgive. You say you made a mistake or a bad choice or a poor decision, and it didn't end well, and I love you anyway, and it's okay. We're going to move forward, and you must be able to do that with yourself. So, what I could say, and what feels very true to me, is that getting a cancer diagnosis is something that can bring a tremendous amount of clarity to your life, if you're willing to listen to yourself, and if you're willing to hold space and sit with yourself and say, what does this mean, right? What is working in this life for me, and what isn't, and what does this mean? This is a very loud and clear message that I have no control over how long this life is, and that anything can be yanked away from me at any second. So, what do I want to embrace more? What do I want to love more? And I know that I want my message to be in this world: live more, no matter what, live more, love yourself more, think about the things that bring you. Join more and be able to move into them with a willingness to feel whatever you must feel to create it in your life, and a lot of friends, that's a lot of discomfort. Friends that we can get comfortable with the idea of having discomfort if we know that on the other side of that discomfort is something better than we probably ever imagined I was slipping right into it, and that was unintentional, something that's better than before breast cancer, because there's no doubt in my mind that my life today, 15 years after breast cancer diagnosis, five and a half years after stage four diagnosis, there's no question my life is better than before those diagnoses. Now, is my body been through a lot, and did my body probably feel physically better? Yeah, but at 63 years old, for all the years of all the chemo and all the radiation, everything has been through, I'll tell you what, it keeps showing up for me, it keeps healing, and I think that my body is absolutely remarkable and a miracle, and I am so grateful for it every single day, so I thank you for being here. Because anybody, everybody who shows up and who's listening to this podcast has been a part of this journey for me since 2017 when I started this podcast. So, coming up on 10 years, that's amazing to me, and every single one of you who tunes in, who listens, who calls, who comes to webinars, who comes to my master classes, who works with me in memberships and one on one coaching, like you're a part of why my life is better than before breast cancer, and I'm absolutely so grateful for every single one of you. So, if you know somebody else out there, and you think you know what this person had a breast cancer diagnosis, and, and maybe they're a little stuck, and maybe they don't think they can have everything amazing in life. Maybe they're really having a hard time changing their mentality and being able to move forward. Share this episode with them, so that hopefully it gives them some hope and some inspiration, and it helps them to see that no matter what the life circumstances are, as long as we're still here living and breathing, we have a choice to bring intentional joy into our life today, and we have a choice to decide that we want to think about what we want to create, because life is amazing and full of opportunities. So, thank you again. Keep showing up this month.

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If you don't follow me on social media, find me on Facebook and Instagram, The Breast Cancer Recovery Coach on Instagram, Laura Lum, or on Facebook. And I'm trying to move into the TikTok arena, but we'll see. I've got a lot on my plate, but come there, follow me, so you don't miss anything that's going to be happening in this month of July, where I am really going to be celebrating life, and my gratitude for all of you. So, thank you so much, and I will talk to you again next week. Until then, please be good to yourself and expect other people to be good to you as well. Take care.

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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

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life. This is your moment. This is your moment in time.