Episode Overview

Have you ever told yourself you'd get to something later, when there was more time, more money, more room?

Most of us have. And most of us never stop to ask what that waiting is actually costing us.

There is a question your brain reaches for first when you think about changing something in your life, and it is almost always the wrong one. In this episode I offer you a different question, one that shifts the whole conversation from what you might lose to what you are willing to build.

We look at why healthy changes so often fail to stick, and it has nothing to do with willpower. I also share research on why women in particular stop investing in their own care, and a moment with a client living with stage four disease that changed how I think about planning a future.

If money is genuinely tight, I name real organizations that exist to help, and one resource almost no one uses.

Where did we learn that taking what we need means taking it from someone else? Your life is being built right now, between breakfast and lunch today.

Resources Mentioned:

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

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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 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 472 of Better Than Before Breast Cancer. I'm your host Laura Lummer, and I just got back from an amazing trip, too short of a trip, but an amazing trip to Colorado to spend some time with two of my children. And you know, it's an interesting thing. Here's the end of July, and for this month, I've been talking to you a lot about the things that are important to me and have been important to me in my healing process over the last 15 years since my first diagnosis of breast cancer, and I wanted to wrap it up with a bang. Right, I'm like, what do I want to end July with? And I just thought about all of these different things, like the most important lessons or what the three coolest things. And while I was traveling to Colorado, what really came to my mind was this: We have to be very intentional about the life we want to live, and it's available to us, right? The life we want is not impossible at all, but it does take intention. It can be expensive, and that's not only money. It can cost time. It does cost time. It costs attention. It costs energy. It costs intention, and I think that everything meaningful in life does. Everything has a cost or a price, but everything also has a value, and I think it's really important for us to think about that value, because I hear women say all the time that's hard. They'll come to me for coaching, they want to create a healthy life, whether they have disease that they're living with or they don't, they're already out of treatment. It doesn't matter across the board. When we talk about the changes that need to be made, they'll tell me that's hard, and I think it's important that we acknowledge that. What what does hard mean? I think is important to define because I think that hard means that's a change that requires an investment of time, money, intention, attention, all of the above, or some of it. But we know we want, and we say we want good health, close relationships, work that has a purpose, really space and time with the people that we love, and when it comes down to it, and we begin to talk about how to make that materialize in your life, people start to realize there's a cost, there's a payment, there's an investment, and we really have to want it bad enough to be willing to make whatever the investment is, and so I think that a better question, better than what is this going to cost me, in any of these areas of energetics, what is going to cost me seems to be the the first go to our brain does, and I think a better question is what am I willing to invest to make this happen in my life. So when two of my sons moved to Colorado, my second son was the first to leave, and then the youngest son followed him about a year later, just towards the end of that same year. And I'm happy for them, and I want to be happy for them because they're building their own lives and they're thriving adults, and that was my job, right, to teach them how to be thriving adults, successful adults, independent adults, and I said, "Great! It just gives me more reason to travel. And then somebody moves, and you realize that's not as easy as you think, right? Because there's an investment to go see them, plane tickets or long drives, money either way, eating out or investments in hotels or Airbnbs or something like that. So even spending time with the people we love, if they're not close by, requires intention, attention, and oftentimes an investment of money. Eating in a way that supports your body-it's not easy.

Laura Lummer 4:36
It requires planning. It requires shopping, standing, cooking, shopping. Right when we'd rather sit down and make it easy and call DoorDash, and we try to tell ourselves, "Well, that's that's not too bad. We can DoorDash it because we don't want to make the investment into it. Building this business over the years, doing this podcast consistently, weekly, and at one time twice. A week and just figuring it out, right? It costs. Oftentimes, it was weekends, especially in the beginning of my business. It was late nights and early mornings and uncomfortable moments of learning curves. And I think that all of us go through that, especially after we've come out of a breast cancer diagnosis and treatment. And for most of us, that's later in life. It's usually after our 50s. For me, it was in my 40s, and sadly, for a lot of people I work with, it's even younger than that. But it moves us into this next phase of life, where we may have a different perspective and see life through a different lens. And so we have to ask ourselves, what do I want this life to look like? If you decide that you want to change directions from where you were at before the diagnosis, it's going to require a lot of moments that are uncomfortable in learning something new or doing something different. But I do think that it's not necessarily going to feel like a sacrifice. Like to me, when I was working in the corporate world, and I had to have early mornings, late nights, long weekends, it felt like a sacrifice. Right? It felt like, oh God, I wanted to go home. I want to be home. When I do it for my own business and I do it for something I love and serving the community that I serve, it doesn't feel like a sacrifice. It feels like I'm building something. I'm having an impact. I'm doing the work that I want to do, but I I like to be honest about it. So when women come to me and they say, especially newly diagnosed women, right? If a newly diagnosed woman comes to me and she wants to embark in integrative care, I'm really honest with them about what that means, and the money that's involved in that, and the attention and intention, and time and planning and support that's needed. That's really important, but that doesn't change after treatment when we're living our own life and we're saying, "I want to be healthy, you know, "I don't want to live the same life I did before, I can see here where what I was doing before a diagnosis maybe needs a little bit of shifting, and I want to change that. And so I think it's important that we don't say, "Yeah, it's not that hard, it's not that bad, because it isn't that it's bad, but it is true that it takes real time out of an already full life, that it takes money when maybe bills have stacked up. It takes attention when maybe attention is a little scarce and a little difficult to come by. And I think that telling anybody other anything other than that is setting them up to feel like a failure when what they're embarking on turns out to be exactly that, it turns out to be challenging. It requires new tools and new skills to be able to make it happen, and it's got a learning curve. And I think it's very important for us to realize that and accept that. And when I look back at my last 15 years, it has been a lot about creating space so that I could invite those things in and make the things happen that I knew needed to happen to get me to the next step, and that's why my first pillar of breast cancer recovery is release. We have got to let a lot of things go that are not contributing to us being the person we want to be, to us feeling the way that we want to feel, and to us living the life and creating the future that we want for ourselves.

Laura Lummer 8:26
So when we don't acknowledge that something takes more space, more room, and and more money, more attention, more intention, and we try to squeeze it in to life as life is when there's no cracks left in life, and we feel like a failure because it didn't work. We wonder why it didn't stick. Well, it didn't stick because there was no space for it, and there was no acknowledgement of it. We weren't looking at it. We weren't like seeing. It was like I see you. I see the work you're going to be, and I'm ready to invite that in. And that's you know my own experience. That's the experience I see from the women I work with. But I love to bring the research in whenever I can to support it. For those of you who are like me, who like to hear research behind why we do what we do, and there is research on why women don't invest in their own health. And one of the studies was done by a researcher at Penn State. This researcher interviewed 100 men and women who had recently lost their jobs. So small sampling, 100 people, and what she found was that after the job loss, many of the women stopped seeking healthcare that they had kept up with for years, but very few of the men did, and most of the women, but almost none of the men talked about putting their family's health care ahead of their own when they made that decision. Money was absolutely part of it, but underneath the money was a belief these women had that a good woman was a selfless one. Here we go. Setting ourselves on fire to keep other people warm. I think it's really important to emphasize this point. A lot of research is centered on women who are mothers, or women who are caretakers, or mothers who obviously are caretakers of children. But I know that many of my clients and many women listening do not have children, and I think that it's important to point out that a caregiver doesn't have to be someone who has children. A caregiver is anyone who learns to put other people's comfort ahead of themselves. Okay, that's my opinion. That's my definition. There are women caring for aging parents. There are women who are supporting siblings or holding things together for siblings who can't get their act together for whatever reason. There are people who know that their partners have certain needs and they prioritize their partner's needs even before their partner in life asks them to prioritize that. Right? There are women who absorb any of the extra load at work, so that no one else has to pick up any slack for them. All of those women, in my opinion, are caretakers. We are taking care of other people, and so if you're the woman who has ever behaved like or told herself that you could not sit down at the table until everyone else was taken care of? You're a caretaker, and I'm talking about you when I talk about this topic. And I have real life clients that I work through this with across the spectrum with regard to their diagnosis. So we've got a diagnosis, right? We've got a cancer diagnosis, and I find myself saying this to people more and more, to my women, to my clients, to people who come to me for a consult more and more, and I say to them, "You have cancer. Sometimes I start to question, even, does the seriousness of that soak in, like, do you get it? You have cancer. I don't care if it's stage zero, stage one, stage two, stage three, stage four. You have cancer. You have something that can end your life, and is potentially growing inside of you. Like, I'm really stressing that right now on this show because we have to let that sink in. If something inside of us could end our life, what could be more important than making time to heal the body? And if we've come through that on the other side, what could be more important than continuing to support the health of the body, so that we never have reoccurrence of this thing?

Laura Lummer 12:49
And I say, when we come out on the other side, because oftentimes we slip right back into life, and the more time we have away from a diagnosis, the easier it is to slip back into old habits, the same habits we had that we got sick in in the first place, and I think it's really important for us to consider that. So when I'm talking to women and they've had a diagnosis, or even they're done with treatment now, and they're done with their medical leave, if they had medical leave, but they're still going through stuff, right? After we've been through treatment, or if we're living with treatment, we still have ongoing appointments and medications, but also the processing. I kind of think about this like I think about grieving. It's like when we get out of a diagnosis, when we get out of treatment, and I've talked about this so many times. It's shocking. It's difficult. It's finally a moment where we sit here and go, "Whoa, what just happened? I've got to grieve. What just happened to me? I've got to process what just happened to me. But it's almost like in the working world, especially in the Western world, it's like, "Okay, let's get back to it. Let's get back to life, and that's the same thing with like grieving. I think if if we lose someone who's close to us, what do we get? Three days, like three days to process the loss of someone you loved, a family member, and then boom, let's go back. And I think that that mentality bleeds over into I know it does into our own self care, and so what I see a lot of times with my clients is what weighs the heaviest on them isn't their need, isn't the fact that they've been diagnosed with the second leading cause of death in the United States. They're more concerned with their coworkers, they're more concerned that their teenagers are going to have to do their own laundry. They're more concerned that their husband never made dinner before, and that's going to be an inconvenience for him. That's how deep this rule of a woman, a good woman, right? A good woman is one. Who is self-sacrificing? It's so deep that when our survival is on the line, we are often worried about inconveniencing other people. But here's the interesting thing that always happens: when I have a client who has that story in her head, and we start to talk about why she thinks that, nobody, nobody has ever said that to her. Nobody has even asked do more. Nobody has said they couldn't do anything. Nobody has said she couldn't take more time off. Nobody has said, "Oh my God, really? You're going to go out for cancer treatment, and I might have to work more. Nobody ever. So the story that she had was about being judged for choosing herself. The story she had was being judged for retiring a year early, just because she had cancer. The story that she had was why should I have an easier life by leaving that job that was making me sick, by the way, when other people don't get to leave that job. So, so much of what stops us from caring for ourselves in the way we deserve, from living our life in the way that we want, from investing in ourselves the way that we desire and dream about is what we've decided other people will think about us, but the cool thing is that when we test that story, not only can we see that it truly is a story, right? It is a fiction novel in our mind, but when we look at the reality of it, the real people who we involved in our fiction story, they are way more generous than we judged them to be. They are way more kind and way more concerned, and have far less judgment of us than we have of ourselves. They want us to be happy. They want us to live, and so we have to think about where did you learn this story that your needs come last, and that your life is not worth investing the time, the money, the attention, the intention that it needs to be what you want it to be.

Laura Lummer 17:16
Because I will tell you what I'm going to share a story with you that just pops into my head, and this story exemplifies the way that I have learned to live. I have a client, and she had advanced stage four metastatic cancer. She was at a workshop, and we were talking about planning the upcoming year. And in the Q and A part of the workshop, she said, "How, how can I look forward and plan a future when I don't even know if I will have a future? And so I asked her, "Do you believe that you'll be here until lunchtime? And she said yes. And so I told her, "Then let's make the most of now until lunchtime, and I think about that every day because that's it, ladies. Being present today now-it's all we've got, and it doesn't matter if we've had a cancer diagnosis. A diagnosis doesn't make the the temporary state of living true. It just lights up what is already true. There's no promises of anything beyond right now, and we can spend a tremendous amount of energy worrying about what's coming and what's next and what might happen, and in doing so, miss actual living, or we can decide that as long as I have one more minute, then that's the minute I'm going to decide to share the fact with someone that I love, that I love them, that I'm going to decide to take that time that I'm still here breathing to watch something funny, to laugh, to call my kids, to record another podcast episode, to learn something, to walk outside, to cuddle with my dog, right? I don't want this. Is not cliche, and investing time in being present and in treating yourself well without guilt is to me the absolute most powerful thing that I've learned over 15 years, and that I can impart on other women that I work with. And the the great thing about it is the decision is in your hands. It's not how long we get to live. That decision isn't in our hands, but how you live, how you are spending the time you have, and I want to touch on money because I think money is important to talk about. For some women, financial resources are there, and the the things that stop them from creating the life they want to live is. Internal, right? It's not financial. It's the intention. It's the attention. It's the thoughts. It's the self doubt. It's the imposter syndrome. It's the I don't deserve this. All of those things. It's the fact that spending on yourself, even if it if you have the financial resources, feels indulgent, or it's in a way I've never done before. My family has never done this before. All internal thoughts, not external things, because money is available to you. For other women, money is genuinely stretched, right? Lost income is real. Bills are real. Here's another interesting study that I think captures that. There was a study of 150 breast cancer survivors, and when researchers asked what got in the way of them eating well. The most common answer was the cost of food. It wasn't that they didn't want to. It wasn't that they didn't know how to eat better. It was the cost. And when they asked about exercise, the number one answer was a lack of time. So when you feel like this is expensive, and you don't have room for it. That can feel very true when it comes to money. That can feel very true when it comes to time. That can feel very true. And so this is something that I think is really important. I think the first step in these situations where that's our story, we say I can't afford it and I don't have the time, is we've got to get honest about where we actually stand. There has been many, many times in the last 15 years where I've wanted something, believed something would be the thing I needed to support my healing, where I didn't know or I didn't think initially I have the time or I have the money for that. But fortunately, I was able to work through it and say I'm going to figure this out. And I think that a first great step is to be honest about where you actually stand.

Laura Lummer 21:44
I have a program creating a life you love in 168 hours a week. Which, by the way, when this podcast comes out, that program is 50 off, and it'll be 50 off through the end of July 2026. So if this resonates with you, go get it. But the important thing is to look at where you stand. How much time do you really have? How much money do you really have? Where is it all going? Where's the money going? Where's the time going? Because you can't make an intentional decision about priorities if you don't sit down and look at the specifics. If you're just so trained in telling yourself, I don't have the time or I don't have the money, rather than sitting down and looking where time is spent and looking where money is spent. But I do want to give a few resources for those women who, if you're out there and you're like, I know exactly where every penny goes, and there's not a spare one between keeping the lights on and a roof over my head. There's so many organizations out there that want to support you, and I think that another really important lesson for me over the past 15 years has been that many, many women who have been through this experience of cancer have come out on the other side and said, "I want to give back, and they've created fantastic nonprofits. One is the Pink Fund. It awards up to $3,000 to women who are in active treatment towards housing, transportation, utilities, insurance premiums, even paid to creditors. There's the Patient Advocate Foundation. It's a fund that is specifically for stage three and four cancer survivors, and it's there to help you financially. Living beyond breast cancer, they give one-time grants. Their applications open every other month. Breast Cancer Angels, that's a nonprofit here in Southern California. They provide money for housing, groceries, copays, transportation, utilities, and you apply for that money through an oncology social worker or a patient navigator. And I want to say to everyone across the board, you know, this is an interesting thing because recently I came across a nonprofit that is here in Southern California. Also, it's called Bling Bling Irene, and they give money to people who've had a cancer diagnosis. And an interesting thing that I hear across the board is people saying, on the one hand, if you need it, somebody else needs it more. On the other hand, oh, I I have enough. It's okay. I shouldn't lean into that when maybe you're you have more money than what you perceive, right? Maybe you're a higher income than a low income person, but your livelihood uses up that income, right? And you still need help to get the kind of services that you need and the kind of support that you need. So an interesting thing, and I think one of the most underused resources I've seen over the years is the hospital social worker, or the patient navigator. These are real people whose job is to help you find support and stack support. But most women never ask because they're not willing to make that investment. In themselves, and so I have to ask: Where did we decide that receiving and giving were zero sum games? Right? Where did we learn that the care someone has to give, there's only so much. The resources someone offers there's only so much, and if you use it, it's taking it away of someone else. So we don't use the resources that are available for ourselves, and then we call it love for someone else. But here's the truth, in my opinion, we're not exercising self-love, and we're setting the example for other people not to exercise self-love, and then nobody accesses the resources, and the resources go unused many times, and that's a damn shame. Taking what you need is not taking from anyone. It is setting the example that you're worth it for other people in your life, so that they know that they're worth it too because they're human beings. So when you rest, when you feed yourself well when you give yourself time and space and money to heal. You are not stealing. You are becoming someone with more to give, not less to give.

Laura Lummer 26:11
Because what's on the line for us, ladies, if you're listening to this, what's on the line for us is not just-it's not comfort. It's not convenience. It's our life, and it's our life. Whether you're like me, living with metastatic disease, or you're someone completely with no evidence of disease, but know that that is something that your body has been susceptible to, and health has to be a priority for you. And the people who love you, I promise you, will choose your life over their convenience every single time. So receive that, learn to receive that. Let's do the work and practice receiving that. Right? We don't get to choose whether life costs us something. We only get to choose which costs we're willing to pay. And yes, there is a price to do the work to support ourselves, but there's also a price for not doing it. And what does it cost to wait? What does it cost to wait to take the trip? What does it cost to keep the thing you want on hold for a different season and a different time? What does it take? I always think about this with my mom because we want her to travel more. We want to do things with her, and she says, "Oh no, no, no, no! You know, whatever she has, that's for you kids. But she's got a bunch of kids who are perfectly capable. They're grown adults. My God, I'm in my 60s, right? And I think about my mom when I think about this, like when I think about investing in the life you want to have, the time we want to have with each other, the joy and the adventures, and what we're willing to pay for that, but then we never really stop to think, what am I paying if I don't do it, right? What is the cost of not investing in my life, and I don't think that cancer necessarily taught me that life is fragile. There were examples of that around me before I had a diagnosis. I think most of us know that, and most of us have seen examples of that. But what cancer has changed was how seriously I take that truth, and how seriously I hope for you to take that truth-that we can stop assuming that we have forever, and ask what really matters to me, and why am I waiting to invest in that? Right, a year from now, six months from now, one month from now, what kind of life do you hope you're living, and are your calendar, your spending, and your daily habits already making payments towards that life, or are they making payments towards a different one? Because, like my client at that workshop, the future that we see, whether it's a month from now or it's at lunchtime. It gets built right now, right? That's the only place where it can be built. So that's what I want to leave you with at the end of this month of celebrating 15 years of life since a breast cancer diagnosis, five and a half years of life since a widespread stage four diagnosis. The life. life we love is getting built right now between breakfast and lunch, between lunch and dinner today, and so think about what you're willing to invest in that and what you are investing in that, because I want you to have a life that's better than before breast cancer, and I know that it's possible. Thank you so much for supporting the work that I do. And if you are interested in any of the self-paced programs I have out and available to you, they're 50% off right now until july 31 2026 in celebration of life. And you can get them at my website, the Breast Cancer Recovery. Coach.com. We've got several selections in several different areas that are all helpful and been very successful programs inside my membership for my clients. All right, friends. I will talk to you again next week. And until then, be good to yourself and expect other people to be good to you as well. Do something good for yourself today. Take care.

Speaker 1 30:20
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.