You know the old saying, "When the going gets tough, the tough get going.”? Well, that’s not always true. Sometimes when things get hard we just get through rather than get going. Maybe it’s the way we think about hard. Have you ever considered what hard means to you? Does it mean different things in different situations? What if being hard was an invitation to be curious? What if you could change your perspective and see hard things as opportunities to get closer to your potential? In this week’s episode, I’ll share an amazing story of a woman who changed her approach when the going got hard and I’ll offer you some insights to approach hard things differently in your future.

Read the full transcript below:

Laura Lummer 0:00
You're listening to the breast cancer recovery coach podcast. I'm your host, Laura Lummer. I'm a Certified Life health and nutrition coach, and I'm also a breast cancer thriver. If you're trying to figure out how to move past the trauma and the emotional toll of breast cancer, you've come to the right place. In this podcast, I will give you the tools and the insights to create a life that's even better than before breast cancer. Well, let's get started. Hello, Hello, friends. Welcome to Episode 195 for the breast cancer recovery coach podcast. So I'm starting the show today. And I'm literally starting the show with this glow in my heart, this glow in my chest. And it's that glow that I get when I'm sitting on the beach, my happy place and the sun is shining on me and I'm smelling the ocean. And I'm listening to the power of the waves. And I have that glow in me right now. Because I have this thought that this is awesome. And I'm thinking this is awesome about news that I heard this week that I keep going back and thinking about. And I am going to share that with you in just a sec. And I'm also going to dedicate this podcast to this very, very special person who has shared this very amazing and wonderful news. So I have a client and she has been with me for some time, I'm not going to invade her privacy by divulging her name. And since she gives me that feeling of being in the sunshine, I'm going to call her sunshine. And she knows exactly who she is. When sunshine came to me. She joined my 10 week coaching program revivify. And that was in October of 2020. She became a member of my Empower membership when she graduated, so to speak from revivify for my 10 week coaching program. And since then she has had another recurrence, she has had a stage four metastatic diagnosis and breast cancer move to her rib and to her sternum. As a result of that she had to go through more surgeries. And it was recommended that after she had been through some very intense, very invasive surgeries, that she goes through IV chemotherapy again. Now if you're listening to this and you've been through IV chemotherapy, you probably cringed or just felt your heart drop into your stomach. Because the idea of going through that more than once is more than any of us want to consider. But sunshine made a decision. She made a decision that she was going to show up for herself that she was going to do what she believed would save her life. And she came to me and said, How do I do this? What is this going to look like? And she worked so hard and showed up for herself so much. Because she made a decision what she wanted this IV chemotherapy treatment to look like. She made a decision on her health being the single most important thing in her life. And she made decisions to rearrange her life to support that commitment she made herself. She showed up for herself again and again. She showed up on the group coaching calls every time even the day after chemotherapy treatment two days after feeling like hell, but showing up with a smile on her face. In a commitment to create the experience she wanted to the best of her ability. She decided that this time around was going to be different. And it was different. And I'm sharing that story with you because the news that we have, that we as a group have heard from her is that she has completed her treatment and her PET scans show that there is no evidence of disease. And so for this podcast, sunshine, I celebrate you brings tears to my eyes. I am inspired by you. You inspire so many. And you are a living example of making a decision to live intentionally making a decision to feel the way you want to feel. Even when it's not only not easy, but it's friggin hard. And I want to talk about the story and dedicate this podcast today. Because I want to bring to your attention. three very important things to I've just talked about briefly. One is deciding making Have a decision for yourself on what you want your life to look like. Far too often we go through life, wondering what life is going to do to us, wondering what's going to happen next, putting things on hold, because we don't know what's coming. Instead of deciding this is the life I'm going to lead. This is what I want my life to look like, how do I have to think, to feel the way to motivate me to take the actions to do the things that will create this result this type of life. And yet, knowing in the back of our mind, that life may throw us a curveball here and there, and we may have to be flexible, and we may have to change things up. But when we make the decision, and this is a question, I asked my clients all the time when they come to me with something and I say, have you decided, are we Coaching here in order to get to the point where you can make a decision? Or have you made a decision. And now you're just trying to figure out how to commit. And that's number two, making a decision is awesome. I've decided, let's say that I want to have a healthier way of eating, I've decided that I want to start an exercise program, I've decided that I want my treatment to look a specific way, I've decided that physically, I want to feel this way. And notice my language there. I've decided I want this. Well, wanting is one thing. But making something happen is a whole nother step in that's where the commitment comes in. Once you decide what you want, once you decide to stop rolling around in the waves of life, and to start being in charge of the direction and the trajectory of your life. Then you make a commitment to it. Right? And you say, This is it. I don't want this, I am doing this. This is what I am doing. Because this is the person I am. This is the life that I am living. Right. It is the next step, making that commitment to yourself. And I'm so proud of her because it's that commitment that had her showing up for coaching, doing individual coaching calls, sharing her thoughts and feelings in the group doing her work before she'd go in for infusions setting up her life so that it's supported her health and her healing. That's making a commitment to yourself. And I'll tell you what, this is the meat and potatoes of the podcast. It's hard. People say to me all the time, oh, that's really hard. In fact, I have a free download the four pillars of breast cancer recovery. It's a video series, it's four short videos. And with each of those videos, there is a action sheet something that I give you to prompt your thoughts to ask yourself and explore for yourself, what you're thinking about that yourself or that area of your life. And taking charge and taking a step to write down what you want it to look like. I believe that's incredibly valuable. And those steps are actually something that came right out of my original 10 We agree vivify program. So I just extracted some of the action sheets out of there. And I created videos to talk about why they were a value what they mean to you in your recovery in living with breast cancer. And I put them out there and you can download them for free on my website. Somebody came to me a couple of weeks ago, somebody reached out to me and said, Wow, um, it just seems like a lot of work. Do you have something that's easier? Do you have something that's more simple?

Laura Lummer 8:53
And I thought, That's so interesting. Because why is it that we think we can change the experience of life without doing the work? You know, when I did my life coach certification, I did it through the Life Coach School, which was founded and is run by Brooke Castillo, an amazing life coach. And one of her mentors and inspiration for the work and the tools we use in Life Coach School, is Byron, Katie. And Byron, Katie came up with these steps to explore your emotions, your thoughts to take this approach to this really powerful approach to managing your thoughts and creating a better life for yourself. And then Brooke Castillo heard this work and then she expanded on it for herself. Now I bring that up because when Byron Katie published this process that she had, she gave it the name the work. It was called the work because it takes work to change our mind and change In your experience of life, and that work can feel hard. So I offer this for you to explore. What is wrong with hard? What does hard mean to you? Because there are many different ways to look at heart. How do you use? When you say, That sounds really hard? What does that mean to you? Does it mean? Oh, I've never done something like that before. So I don't have experience with it. I might need more support to do it. Does it mean, ooh, the way my life is going right? Now, I may have to rearrange things and put some more energy into this. Because I expect some challenges to come up. Does it mean? Ooh, that sounds like a lot of work. It's going to take time, but it's going to be worth it. I'm in, here's the resources I need, here are the changes I have to make to do it. Does it mean? I don't want to do that. It's more energy than I'm willing to put out for myself. It's more than I want to do. Can someone else do it for me? I don't believe that the outcome is going to be worth the amount of energy I have to put in. That sounds hard. When we use this word hard, that's so hard. What does that actually mean to you? And why are you going there? It's such a beautiful thing to get curious about. It's hard to get through breast cancer treatment. It's hard to live with breast cancer, right? These can be truths for people, but hard meaning what? Meaning I just get through, I hear this often, I just get through the day. That's all I can do. I just get through the day. And so sometimes we look at work that someone is offering and we say, Listen, this work has the potential to make your life a lot better. Sometimes we go to a place like if you're listening to this podcast, you either came here today or you originally came here, because there was something in your life, you felt the need to change, there was a place you were struggling, there was something that was creating suffering for you. And you wanted to understand how to move past it, you didn't either have the skill set or the tool or something that you needed to get past this experience. So you came here, or you downloaded a book somewhere, or you did some other research or you went to some other group. And you may have said, Wow, this is really hard. But it was also hard to be in the place you were in, before you found the work you could do to change it. And so here's an interesting thing. Sometimes we're in this place of suffering, which is hard, right? It's hard to be in suffering. It's not pleasant, it's uncomfortable. But when we're faced with doing work to get out of it, we say that's hard. And by that I mean, I'm not going to do it. I hear I'm just not ready to do something else. That's hard. But it's really this circular argument. Because you're staying in hard already. You're staying in suffering, maybe the suffering that you're in doesn't take as much energy because you're just in it, right? If you're in breast cancer treatment, if you're just getting out of breast cancer treatment and you feel lost, and you feel like you're suffering, you feel like you're alone, you feel like you're misunderstood. You're angry with your doctors, the medical system for everything that you've been through, you don't understand, you may be mad at the universe. That's a hard place to be friend. That is not easy. But we can fool ourselves into saying it's easier, as if it doesn't take energy. As if it doesn't take energy to be in suffering. Which is not true. It takes a tremendous amount of energy to be in suffering. That's why we say it's draining. That's why we say it's exhausting. So when we look at hard, we have to be really honest with ourselves. We have to really explore what does that mean, and why am I saying that it's not worth the investment of my energy. What is wrong with being hard? So many challenges in life are hard. But at the end after you've overcome the challenge, they're amazing. They're invigorating. They're inspiring, and there's tremendous growth to be had. But was it easy to do? Probably not When sunshine came to me and made a decision, she was going to do chemotherapy. And then wanted to create a plan for approaching chemotherapy and supporting herself so that she could feel hopeful and in control, and have an environment in her home and with her physicians that felt more peaceful, that felt calm, and that had an energy of healing. That was not easy, because we have to overcome what our brain tells us. And our brain is not going to look at IV chemotherapy or any other kind of treatment or living with cancer and say, yeah, no problem brace. That's easy. It takes work and intention on a daily basis. When I was diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer, I made a commitment to myself that I was going to reinvent what a person with metastatic breast cancer looked like, I was going to reinvent this idea that naturally popped into my head saying, Oh, shit, stage four breast cancer is a death sentence. You only have a couple of months, what's the prognosis? In just waiting for death fighting off death, I decided that is not the way that I was going to live. That was not what my healing was going to look like. And there been a lot of challenges in that, in some times, I have slipped back over the last almost 18 months, I've slipped back into this is hard. And I don't want to put out the energy today. And sometimes those slumps have lasted a few hours, sometimes a couple of days. And sometimes, a couple of weeks before I started to realize, whoa, hold on, I'm not putting enough intention into creating the momentum I need for the life that I'm building. I'm slipping into easy. And what is easy look like. For me in those situations, it looks like someone who's not being intentional about living the life she wants to live.

Laura Lummer 17:12
And this translates in to so much more than just breast cancer, it translates into more than living with cancer translates more into more than dealing with cancer treatment. It translates into any area, anything we're looking at in our life where we look at and we say I'm not okay with this. I don't like the way I feel in this in this relationship in this job in this place where I want something more, but I'm not doing the work for it. I don't like this, but it seems hard to get to the next place. And now when that happens, you have something to offer your brain back. You get to say your brain. Yeah, it does sound hard, because it probably will be. But it's also going to be worth it. Because on the other side of hard is the life I want to live. On the other side of hard is the business I want to create is the job I want for a career is the relationship I want in my life. And so we can stop looking at heart as a roadblock, and start looking at heart as an indication. We may need more support, more resources, more information. More times in our day, we're listening to people who inspire us, more people around us who fan our flame, like the quote from Rumi that says Set your life on fire and seek those that fan your flame. And maybe that's what we need. When life gets hard. Maybe we can have a spark. There's a spark within us that says I'm going to do this differently. I'm going to make this work for me. But we also need more support to turn that spark into a bigger flame and said shut on fire. So sunshine, here's to you because girl, you set shit on fire. And I'm so happy to have been there to fan your flame. And for anyone who's listening and you need your flame Vande This is the time to come and join me in the better than before breast cancer life coaching membership. You can find all the details at the breast cancer recovery coach.com forward slash live coaching and get ready because beginning in July for eight weeks, there is a very very special program coming members who are in better than before breast cancer are going to have that as a part of the membership. Y'all who listen this podcast and follow me on social media or you're on my email list are about to get all of the details of it in this is going to be a life changing event. perience so there is no better time than now to jump in and do something for yourself. If you've ever been on the fence about joining the life coaching membership, curious about what it's about. This is the time to learn because this is the time to reinvent our lives. There's no going back to normal so why don't we all move forward into something fabulous. I'll talk to you again next week and until then, Please be good to yourself and expect others to be good to you as well. Take care.

Speaker 2 20:32
Courage to the tears laid all your doubts. Your mind is clearer than before your heart is full and wanting more your futures even you know has you been waiting on