How much of your life is created by what you believe or more importantly, by what you don’t believe? 

Disbelief can seep into our lives with thoughts like: 

• I can never do that. 
• I‘ll never be the same again. 
• Things will never be as good as they used to be. 

• I could never find someone that nice. 
• I’ll never lose this weight. 
• I can’t eat that healthy. 
• I’ll never be able to afford that. 

How many thoughts do you have that are like this? 

Where do you hold on to the disbelief that you can live the life you desire? 

In this episode, we’ll explore the possibilities that exist when you allow yourself to suspend disbelief. 

Referred to in this episode: 

Better Than Before Breast Cancer Life Coaching Membership 

Becoming You -Eight weeks to reinventing life after breast cancer 

Read the full transcript below:

Laura Lummer  00:00

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, and welcome to another episode of the breast cancer recovery coach podcast. I am your host, Laura Lummer. I'm so happy to be here today. I today is just not just today, today's a good day, you know, but things are just good. And that's just such a great feeling, isn't it? Today, I'm recording this, it is October 26. It's a couple of days before the podcast will come out. And October is one of my most favorite months living in Southern California because the weather is literally perfect. You know, it's waking up in the morning. It's the high 50s. And then it's the mid 70s in the afternoon. It's cool, it's crisp, you can wear a jacket or a sweater but the sun is out. It's absolutely beautiful. I love love, love this weather. And then there's the fact that this month, a lot is on my mind about being alive. You know, not only just being alive to enjoy this beautiful weather and this beautiful month of October, but two years ago, at this time, I was just starting radiation. I had just been diagnosed October 11 of 2020, I was diagnosed with stage four widespread metastatic cancer. And I didn't know what the hell was going to happen. That was a really, I don't even know the word for it. I honestly don't know the right word to use for it. It was a time in my life where I felt like I had to make a really intentional and deliberate decision

Laura Lummer  02:19

on what I was going to believe. I think that's it on what I was going to believe. And based on that, how my life was going to proceed, what my life was going to look like I really had to decide. In that moment. I had to think about what role am I going to allow cancer to play in my life? What role am I going to allow healing to play my life? What am I going to decide. And I tell you, I decided and I've shared the story on here before on October 11 was the day that I had just finished the last webinar, I was opening my 10 week coaching program. This was the round three that I had run in 2020. And I'd literally just gotten off of that webinar and got the call about my diagnosis. And I decided in that moment that I was going to keep moving forward. And I felt this really strong connection to the women who had decided to join enroll in my program, because to me that meant These are women who know they need something and know they need support. And they're reaching out and they're saying I need help. And I had to decide if I was going to show up to be what they needed, right to give them the guidance and the coaching and the insights they needed to do the work they had to do to decide what their life was going to look like. And I did decide to do that. And it's so impactful right now as I look back because not only did I finish that 10 week program for them and with them that I went on in 2021. As soon as I finished radiation, I decided what would work best for my life and how that would fit into the treatment I was doing for cancer. You know what work I would be doing, what hours I were doing, how what my routines around healing would be doing there was a lot going on. And that's when I opened the better than before breast cancer membership. So I'm telling you all this now it's actually leading somewhere because I'm sitting here in 2022 Looking back and thanking him. He was huge. And here I am today and I've got the life coaching membership. I've still got my Empower members. I've got the new becoming you program. I've developed so many things that are a big part of what I believe is my healing to be able to give back to the breast cancer community. And in this last month I participated on boards and in podcasts and a couple weeks for that and summits and now today I just found out and I'm super excited about this. I have been X opted into a program where I will be studying with Nisha winters, who's the author of the metabolic approach to cancer. And that book has been very impactful for me. And I love her approach in that book, if you've never read it before, I highly recommend it. She goes through what's called the terrain 10. And that is, how do you treat your body, dealing with toxic burden dealing with nutrition, dealing with emotions, processing emotions, what are the things that you do to get your body as healthy as it can be? So that that terrain, your body itself is something that's not hospitable to cancer, right? So that by getting your body in this healthy place, through addressing all the levels of mental, emotional, spiritual, nutritional, environmental, all 10 prospects, that your body has this power to heal itself, even better, and I love her approach, I've been an follower and a fan girl of hers for a long time. So I'm thrilled to have been accepted in this program. And I'll get to start studying with her in November. And then in addition to that, I have become a coach. So I'm super excited about this, through the University of South Carolina, they are doing a study on breast cancer survivors. And that study, I have been accepted as a coach in that study. And what we'll be doing is coaching breast cancer survivors, on how to increase the physical activity in their lives. So I'm going through the whole training portion with them and learning what this clinical study is going to look like and what all of the criteria is for me as a coach. And it's super exciting. So as I sit here, I take this in like, everything is great, like, it's exciting and growing. And I'm learning and I've got these amazing opportunities. And I think back to two years ago, where it was pivotal, Pivotal, kind of a tongue twister, a pivotal moment where I decided, I'm not done here. Like life is big and wonderful and amazing. And yes, I just got a cancer diagnosis. And that serious, and I'm going to put a lot of attention into it. But I'm not going to stop living. And I've been giving it a lot of thought recently, especially because this month as a part of the 90 days of wellness that I'm working on with my members in the better than before breast cancer membership. This week, we're looking at the joy of wellness, the joy of living a healthy lifestyle, you know, so often when we think about having a healthy lifestyle, we think of it from the perspective of a drudgery, Oh, I gotta eat more vegetables, I gotta exercise, I gotta go to bed early, you know, all these things. And we let our brain kind of go off on a tangent and thinking this way, because we've heard it so much. And we believe it, you know, we've come to believe that the things that don't actually support our wellness are somehow a treat. Somehow those bring more joy to us than the feeling of waking up and feeling well and feeling energetic and feeling like engaging fully in life. And I think that's a fascinating thing to explore why we think that life. And so this week, we're working on this intentionally looking at the joy of wellness and the joy of making choices that create a healthy lifestyle for you. And as we're doing that, I get this message from a friend of mine. And I gotta tell you, this is another thing that I think about an aspect of wellness, it's actually one of the four pillars of breast cancer recovery, regroup. And in that regroup pillar, is the idea of your support system, your champions in life, what do you surround yourself with? Because when we're creating healthy life, when we're releasing toxic emotions and beliefs that don't serve us, when we're renewing our body with the things that truly nourish it, mind, body, soul spirit to everything. And then we regroup and we say, well, what belongs here and what doesn't, what vibrates at the same energy as me, what helps me be better, be more and engage even more joyously? And in doing that, oftentimes, we have to look at the people that surround us and the relationships that we're in. And we have to ask ourselves, does this relationship need work? Does this person serve me? Does this person being in my life make my life better? Do I need to do work here? Or is this a relationship that I can let go up? There's so many questions about it. And so I feel so blessed as I sit here and I am about to tell you the story and I think about the people in my life and I am so fortunate to have really incredible people in my life. And I mean that from just my family. I friends, I looked at these people. And I think these are just such amazing quality, wonderful people. Even all the women that I work with that they're just they amaze me. And they inspire me. And they motivate me. And I think of many of them as friends of mine. Like, I can't imagine not having these people in my life, right? They they just bring so much to the table. And they want, they make me want to bring more as well. So I have this one friend she is so thought, build, thought filming. She's constantly thinking at this level of corn, oh, connection, emotional. I think she has two PhDs and they're in like sexuality and behaviors and just amazing things in the way that she thinks about human beings interact, how human beings interact. And I love, love listening to her, like she and I go out to lunch, and we close the place down after dinner. Like I can just listen to her for hours. She's so amazing. And so she sends me this text message. She had a wedding anniversary, a landmark wedding anniversary a couple weeks ago, and I sent her a message wishing her happy anniversary. And I just said it's amazing, right? It was like 37 years of marriage. And she responds, and she says, every day, Laura, I wake up and I say suspend disbelief. Hmm. I read that. And I thought, that's really cool. suspend disbelief. And I started thinking about that. How does that tie in with what I've shared with you at the beginning of this podcast is that we have things that we think so frequently, that they become beliefs. And we think beliefs are truths. But they're not necessarily. So if I flashback two years ago, and I go with the belief, what people say and believe and tell me about someone who's diagnosed with stage four cancer at the level that mine was, if I go with what that belief is, I don't know that I would be here today. I don't know that I will be doing the things I'm doing engaged in the projects that I am engaged in. And when I made that decision, of how my life was going to look, I had to suspend disbelief. The disbelief that things going forward could be different from what most people say they are, from what most people believe, they're going to look like, just suspend the disbelief that it could be different. It could be better, it could be rich, it could be exciting.

Laura Lummer  12:41

When you suspend that disbelief for a sec, like think about it, I think that's just such a beautiful thought. I don't believe this person can change. I don't believe I can make that happen. I don't believe I can have that in my life. How many times have thoughts like that? Limited? You? How are they limiting you right now in your life, because you don't believe someone can change or someone can be the person you need them to be. Or you can have the ability or the time or the skills or whatever, to accomplish that thing that you think would be so freakin cool in your life. Right? Suspend the disbelief that you could change the way that you treat your body that you could change the way that you think about your body. And you could change the way that you feel about yourself. You could change the way you talk to yourself. And so many people say to me, oh, but I've just do that forever. And that's just the way that my brain works. And again, then we feel the belief, right? And what is the belief, thinking the same thing over and over and over again until you tell yourself? It's true, right? I believe it. But if you suspend the disbelief, if you stop telling yourself it can't happen. Maybe you can believe something different. And maybe in believing something different. That could change your life. I know it's changed my life. I know it continues to change my life every single day. I when I saw this program available to study with Dr. Winters. I mean, I would have never when I read her book, and I've followed her and been to summits where she's speaking I would have never thought one day I get to work with this woman. She's amazing, right? But then I decided, You know what, let go of that disbelief. There was time involved. There's a big investment involved. And there were definitely some big roadblocks there for how that would fit into my life. But I said, you know, what, if I could work with her, that would add so much to my ability to heal myself and so much to my ability to support the people that I work with and who listened to this podcast, and that would be amazing. And so just for a second you know what But let's not go this disbelief that I'm not going to be one that gets chosen for this program. And I'm just gonna go for it. And I'm just going to put in an application. And I'm just going to figure it out. If I get accepted, I'm just going to figure out how to make this happen in my life, right? Let go for just a moment of that disbelief and freaking frack here I am. And it's going to happen. It is happening. And it's amazing. And so when we think about, can I stop telling myself that certain things can't happen? The certain things are not possible in my life, right? That I'll never be happy again. And I'll never feel as happy again, as I felt before, like these words have so much power, what we tell ourselves what we allow ourselves to believe, makes or breaks us in this life, right? If you could just let go listen to yourself, learn the things that you say, you don't believe this could happen for you, and let go of them and ask yourself this question. But what if I did believe that? What if I let myself believe that for a second? What if I let myself believe I could lose 30 pounds? What if I let myself believe I could write a book. What if I let myself believe I could have a loving, Rich, Happy, harmonious relationship? What if I let myself believe that for just a minute, right, and I explored it, if I let myself believe that, how would that feel? And you may notice that right away, your brain will jump in to say but but but but but hold on, and your brain will take you back to the past and say you can't believe that. Because look at the past, it hasn't happened, right. And in the past, you haven't been person you are now. And you have to remember that. And you had to say, but I'm not going to live by the past. And I'm going to show up differently. With a different belief. I'm going to let go of the disbelief, I'm going to let go of this thing I do to myself all the time telling myself, I can't have that I can't be that that won't happen for me. And when I hear that, I'm gonna say, You know what, hold

Laura Lummer  17:29

1. What if it did? What if I could let go of disbelief? And just play with this for a sec? Just leave myself a space here and say, what if I believed it would be different? How would I act differently? What would I do differently? How would I show up differently? Because, friend, when you show up differently, that right there is different than what's happened in the past. What's happened in the past was you thinking in a different way. So whatever it is, in your life, right now, when you're deciding what you want to become what you want to create how you want your life to look, you have to leave yourself space to believe that it's possible. Once you do that, then you start having this little pathway, I think of this pathway, like a pathway on a really foggy day. Because you can kind of see just maybe one or two steps in front of you sometimes just the next step, because the pathway, you know, it's there, the pathways there, because you've heard people have told you, other people have walked the pathway. Other people have accomplished this thing. And therefore you look at it, you say, Gosh, I would like to have that in my life. So I would like to create that for myself. So you know, the path is there, but it's really foggy. So you can't really see the whole thing. It's like, oh, it's all scary here. Because to me, fog is scary, because I can't see shit and fog, and I don't like it when I can't see around me, right? So it's uncomfortable. And it's scary. And you can say to yourself, I can't do it, I can't do it. I don't believe I can get down that path because it's too foggy. And it's too scary. And I'm too uncomfortable. But what if you stopped and said, You know what, someone else has gone down this path before. And if they can do it, I might be able to do it too. So instead of telling myself I can't, I'm going to let that go. I'm going to suspend their disbelief for a moment. And I'm going to say what if I could? What's the next step? When you step out and then the fog clears a little when we take the next step and then the fog clears a little. And as we take the steps and we go on that journey, we keep letting go of the this belief that our life cannot be what we want it to be. Then our life starts to take shape. We start to get clarity, and we get to the end That path one day and we look back on like, holy cow. Look how much I learned. Look how much I've grown. Look, what an amazing trip, this pathway has been. Holy cow, what's in front of me? I don't know, because it's too foggy, I can't see. But I'm going to let go of the disbelief that it isn't wonderful, right? Because that's where our brain goes when you think about the future. And I say, hey, you know, you got this diagnosis of cancer, hey, you're in this relationship, hey, you're in this job and you want something else. And you're like, you know, I've got to sit here for these reasons like that nothing else could be better, right? Our brain doesn't go to you know what? My intuition is telling me I'm not happy here. My intuition is telling me something's not right here. But then my brain kicks in and says it's good enough, it's good enough. Because who knows what's out there in the fog? It could be way worse, right? But if we let go of the disbelief that it could be amazing, and we can ask ourselves. But what if it's way better? Right? All that if it's amazing. So I love that thought. And I want to leave you with that thought today. Where in your life? Could you suspend disbelief? Near Can you let go of disbelief and create some space that you could show up differently. And that you can believe something different for yourself.

Laura Lummer  21:35

And if you need help with that, you can find me at the breast cancer recovery coach.com You can join my life coaching membership, where I support and coach you through all those thoughts that keep us from stepping into the fog. Or you can join the becoming you program eight weeks, where you go step by step through getting some clarity on where you are now and where you want to be. And I'll be there too, in that program, commenting and coaching and you get to work with me also. And I want you to know that it is all possible that if you decide to suspend disbelief and create some space for yourself, it won't be easy, right? So let's all go into going well, that's not going to be easy. Okay? That's fine. Not everything is easy. But that doesn't mean it isn't doable. Alright, so take care of my friends and I'll talk to you again next week. Until then, Please be good to yourself and expect others to be good to you as well. Take care.