I remember when I was a kid, I couldn’t hang out with my friends until I cleaned my room.  I hated cleaning my room, so I’d fight with my mom, I’d get grounded, and I always thought it was her fault because she was so mean. 

Then I became a parent, and I had a mind-blowing moment when I realized the facts were if my kids stopped crying and fighting, the room would be clean in 25 minutes, and they could have what they wanted. 

But, because they thought the fact was I was being mean, they made life so much harder on themselves. 

Another mind-blowing moment…we still do that as adults! 

We get caught up in our own emotions, stories, and interpretations of life and other people, creating stress for ourselves. 

In today's show, I'll help you change that. 

I'll offer you a simple way to see the difference between the facts you're dealing with and the story about them that's making your life so much harder. 

Listen in now and start making life easier on yourself today. 

Referred to in this episode: 

Gift Certificates 

Pre-enroll in The Four Pillars of Breast Cancer Recovery Coaching Experience

Read the full transcript here:

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.

Laura Lummer  00:32

Hello, and welcome to episode 219 of the breast cancer recovery coach Podcast. I'm Laura Lummer. I'm so happy to be here with you today. This episode will air on Friday, December 2. So we are kicking off the last month of 2022. And one I have a great surprise for you the perfect gift idea and to what is what is support you and really enjoying this month, I want to support you in letting go of stress, I want to support you in giving yourself a break. Because stress does not support our wellness. Stress does not support our health, stress does not support our well being. And most of the time, stress comes from the way we think about what's happening around us. And so I'm going to jump into that in just a minute. And hopefully you'll leave this show today, feeling calmer, having a tool that you can use throughout this month and all the coming months to just give yourself some space to allow yourself to breathe, and to allow yourself to take things easy and just enjoy life. All right, before we get into this show, I want to tell you that you can now send people who have your Christmas wish list your holiday wish list your Hanukkah wish list, whatever it is, to the breast cancer recovery coach.com forward slash gift, and they can get you a gift certificate to either enroll in one of my coaching programs, or to get personal coaching with me, or to enroll in the better than before breast cancer life coaching membership. And the really exciting thing. Well, there's a couple of really exciting, a lot of really exciting things. But a couple of things I want to point out about that is that when you get a gift certificate, you activate it when you're ready. So you don't have to worry or you don't have to think I'll start it after I'm done shopping or I'll started after the holidays, you can just tell someone, Hey, I'd really like a gift certificate. Because I want to jump into this coaching thing I want to make 2023 the best year ever for me. And the best way to do that is to get support in managing your mind managing your thoughts strengthening your relationship, nourishing your body from a place of love and self compassion. And working with a coach that can help you get clarity on all of that. And that's me, of course. So just go to the breast cancer recovery coach.com forward slash gift, or go to my website and click on work with Laura at the top, send your people there, let them get you a gift certificate. And here's another really exciting thing. When I decided to start doing group coaching, online group coaching, I created this program, I thought it was great. I thought the stuff in it was great. I wanted to put it out into the world. And I called it Reba vibe, the word Reba the five means to breathe life back into. I really wanted that to be the promise of my coaching programs, I wanted people who had had a breast cancer diagnosis who had been through breast cancer treatment, who were feeling depleted, exhausted, lonely, lost, scared all the crappy things we feel after breast cancer treatment, to be able to come to this coaching program and feel like life had been breathed back into them back into their life, and that they were able to step back in and really engage in this gift of life. So I put that program out there. And I was so blessed to have an amazing group of women join me. And what I asked from them when I initially put this group out there was Will you come through this program with me in exchange for just telling me what you think. Let me give you this guidance and you tell me what you think. Did it work for you? Did it not work for you? How could it be better? How can I make it better for people and that incredible group of women most who are still with me today in my Empower membership, which is something no one could get into. It's kind of like my VIP group of people have been with me from the very, very beginning and I absolutely friggin adore them and love them and value everything that they give to me. And they gave me great insights, great feedback and I evolved that program, it was still called RE vivify. At the time, it became a 10 week coaching program that I launched several times during 2020. And the very last time I opened the doors to revivify, I got off the last webinar, I did a series of webinars, and then people joined me and enrolled in my coaching program. After those webinars, I got off the phone. And I had text messages and phone calls from my physician. And that was when I got my diagnosis of stage four cancer. And at that time, I didn't really know what my treatment was going to look like. And so I took re vivify. And I kind of just put it on the shelf for a little while, I put it away, because it required a tremendous amount of attention for I released, it didn't require let me put that differently. I offered it with a lot of energy and coaching and guidance and attention. And I wasn't sure I'd be able to offer that level of attention to the women who needed that program while I was in treatment, so I changed everything around I opened the better than before breast cancer membership, which also has been phenomenal for you love it. And it's hard to believe that it's going to be two years already, that has been a part of my life coming up in 2023. It's just amazing. And the women who are in it, I just love them. So in the last few months, I've been thinking, there's so much good stuff in revivify, I mean an incredible amount of great stuff. And I've also learned and evolved and added to the way that I coach and what I offer since having offered it last in 2020. So I went back, I dusted revivify off, I took it off the shelf, I started to go back through it. And I gave it a little bit of a facelift. And it changed its name for the four pillars of breast cancer recovery. And I left some of the great stuff in and I added in even more great stuff ran beginning in January of 2023. I will be taking everyone in my membership through the four pillars of breast cancer recovery coaching program is going to last for three months. It's a 12 week program. And if you go and you tell someone give me that gift certificate, you can join me in January in the better than before breast cancer life coaching membership. And I will guide you through the four pillars of breast cancer recovery coaching program, it's going to be life changing. Amazing. I know it was life changing. For the first three groups of women that went through it with me in 2020. I know that my coaching programs as they are offered tremendous transformative value for people's lives. And I'm super excited to be offering this program it will start in January 2023. So you have a couple of ways you can join me, you can re enroll in it. Now, by going to breast cancer recovery coach.com forward slash pillars, you can get a three month gift certificate and activate that gift certificate in January and join me for three months. Or you can just go straight to my website now. And enroll in the better than before breast cancer life coaching, membership, all those ways you can join me. And if you enrolled there today, you get to spend December with me too. And in December, we are working on just chilling out. We are working on giving ourselves a break. Taking a breath, taking things off of our plate and allowing life to be easy. Isn't that a lovely thought? That's what we're going to talk about here in today's podcast. Because we make life so hard on ourselves. There are so many things in life that do not have to be as hard as they are, they do not have to be stressful. They do not have to just be buttoned through like I'm just even get through this. They can be enjoyed. But the way we approach things and the way we think about things can make almost anything in life harder than it has to be. So I want to share a couple of stories with you. To help illustrate that. The tool that I want you to leave today's show with is the ability to identify when you're making something harder, and it has to be okay. So let me go back and give you a foundation here. When I went through my training at the Life Coach School, we work with a tool called the model. If you're really worked with me or my coaching programs, you're very familiar with the model. I use it all the time. It is an incredibly powerful tool. If you listen to the Life Coach School podcast or you're familiar with Brooke Castillo and her work you you must have heard about the model. She talks about it all the time. And the beautiful thing about the model is that it gives us clarity on what's really happening in our life, versus what we tell ourselves is happening in our life. And sometimes there is a huge gap between what is actually happening, what we tell ourselves is happening, and the result of what we tell ourselves as the experience of life that we're having. So if that's stressful, if that's overwhelming, if that's calm, if that's beautiful, whatever it is, is going to come from what we're telling ourselves about our current circumstance in life. So let me talk about the circumstances of life. That's the very first line in the model, the ceilin. C line is the circumstance. And in the model, the circumstances of life, are always neutral. So let me give you some examples of how getting clear on the circumstances in your life can be very different. From the story, you tell yourself about life, okay, let's use the holidays. Let's say you tell yourself, I have so many things I have to do before Christmas, when you say that, it feels like a fact, right? Because in your mind, you're thinking about everything that you would like to get done, that you're choosing to get done. Because remember, you don't have to do anything. You don't have to buy a single gift, you don't have to put up a tree, you don't have to go to a party, you choosing all of these things. So when you're thinking about all the things you're choosing to do for the holiday season, the way you want your holiday to look, the food, you're going to make all those things in your mind, it starts to feel like a fact I have so much to do. And if we take a step back, and we ask ourselves, what are the actual circumstances here, and we get down to just the facts, it starts to take a little pressure off of the way that having so much to do can make you feel, let me give you an example. Let's say I have 23 gifts to buy. That could be a fact, if you wrote a list, and of the list of people you want to gift during the holiday season, there are 23 people, then the fact is, there are 23 gifts you have chosen to buy before whatever date. That's a fact, when we stop and look at and say okay, there's 23 gifts that I'm choosing to buy before, let's say December 23. Now we've got a fact. And now we've got something to work with. Because what's the next thing that comes to mind that causes stress when we talk about making purchases, money, and we say, oh my god, I have to spend so much money, oh my gosh, this is really, I'm really strapped this season. Oh my gosh, this is causing me so much stress, I have to get all of these things. Even hearing me say that even me hearing me say that makes me feel a little stressed out. But if we step back and we look at things we say, I'm going to buy 23 gifts between now on December 23. Now I can look at how much money do I have that's allotted for these gifts. Now, I was having a conversation the other day, and a woman was very stressed out. And she was saying I don't have a lot of money. Now, you may think again, that sounds like a fact, I don't have a lot of money. But a lot of money is really just a thought. Because what is a lot of money to you may not be a lot of money, to me may be a tremendous amount of money to someone else. So when we say I don't have a lot of money, think about how that makes you feel. For me, I feel very stressed when I say I don't have a lot of money. But if we look and we say I have $700 to spend on 23 gifts, then it's just math. And you can read that system. Like if some of those 23 or more of your favorites are going to spend a little more on them, then you can do the math right, then it comes down to just math. But isn't that a little less stressful than saying I don't have a lot of money, and I have so many things to buy. I have 23 gifts to buy. And I have this much money in my account allotted for those things. And if that number is zero, then friend, that's okay. Because you just write a card. You just bake a cupcake, you make some homemade bread, and that's okay too. When we look at the facts, the actual circumstances of what we have going on, in we can work with them. And then life becomes a little bit easier. If you say I have six meals to make, I have three holiday parties to attend. I have X amount of gifts to buy. And I have for other adult or semi adult or people with driver's licenses in my family. How many of those people can I assign to help me? Oh, that's the Big one, right? Because what do women hate to do? Ask for help? Well, how do we make life easier on ourselves? We look at our resources, we look at our circumstances, and we say, I have this many things to do. And I have this many people that I can ask for help. Now, you got to work through your own shit of why you're not asking for a golf, right? We have to look at the stories of why I don't want to ask Rob, they won't do it. Right, they are not doing it the way I want to, they will complain about it. I hate to ask for help, I should be able to do it all myself. Right there, those thoughts are exactly what I'm talking about. When I say we make life harder than it has to be. Think about your support system. Think about the people in your life. Think about the resources available to you resources, like paid time off from your job, if you have it, hey, I have X amount of paid time off from my job, I will take this many hours. And I will take care of this many errands during that hours. Imagine that. Imagine you take time off? Just because you need a little bit of space. How nice is that? how much easier does that make your life? What are the stories that just came into your head when I said that, oh my God, but then the people at work will be stressed. And then they need this. And I hate to ask my boss and I don't want to look lazy and I don't want to look like I'm not I don't have a good work ethic. Those are where you're making life harder on yourself. So what we have to do, is to step back and look at the circumstances of our life, without the emotions without the skewed perception without the lifelong belief systems that we've conditioned into these things. And we need to step back and be able to state them very forcefully, on by stating your life circumstances actually, you make life easier on yourself. You reduce the amount of stress because now you've got tangibles, you've got things to work with. This even applies where people say certain words. So let's say I have four kids. So I know what it's like to ask a teenager for help. I have an amazing husband who would help me with anything hands down. So I don't ever have to think about that. But I've had husbands before him. And trust me asking for help was like sticking a hot needle in your eye. Right? So I get it, I understand. But I also thought of things differently then. So when we ask people for help now, let's say someone, you ask someone for help, and you say, hey, I need you to run by the Amazon locker and pick those things up for me. Or, hey, I have five boxes that I need you to wrap on put under the Christmas tree, or hey, I need you to stop at the post office and put these things in the mail for me today. And that person looks at us. Oh, seriously? Do I have to? What will we tend to think? We would think I don't need to deal with this. You have attitude? I don't need to put up with that attitude. Nevermind, I'll just do it myself. And in doing it yourself, you make life harder on yourself. But what if you step back and you said, Oh, my 17 year old said these words? Are you serious? Do I have to do that? What if you think about it that way? My 17 year old said, Are you serious? Do I have to do that? The answer is yes you do. I asked for it and you have to do it. Right. We take the emotion out of it by just looking at only the facts. And then we can choose to think about things differently. Right? It doesn't, it doesn't trigger so much in us. We don't look at the heavy sigh in the eyeroll. We just say this person said these words. This person said Is there anything else before I go? Because I don't want to be inconvenient. And you know what? When we hear that, and we have a tendency to say I'm just not going to ask that person, you know, look at you, I don't need this. But if we say what's the truth here for me? Actually, yes, there are there are three more things that I need for you to do. Because when we're only thinking about the facts, which are the words that are stated, rather than getting ourselves caught up in the emotions in the face, as in the body language and all the things that we wrap a story around, we make our life easier on ourselves. So this is the tool that I want you to walk away with and think about how you can apply this in your life. What are the circumstances and dealing with what are the actual facts and dealing with and I'm also going to definitely of course touch on breast cancer, breast cancer treatment, breast cancer recovery. Maybe you have two chemotherapy treatments between now and the holiday. Maybe you have Have 12 radiation treatments between now and the holiday. Maybe you have a surgery coming up. Maybe you just finished treatment, and you are exhausted. And you just need time. Right, I finished my last chemotherapy treatment and 2011 my IV chemotherapy on December 30. In so we went through Thanksgiving and Christmas. And in my head, it was like, let's just keep it normal, quote unquote, seriously, like nobody noticed I was bald and busting my ass to make Thanksgiving dinner like Who was I kidding? Myself? kidding myself, and undermining what I needed to support my wellness. So we ask ourselves, what are the actual circumstances here? I feel very tired, I need time off, right, we need to just look at what is actually needed. Or this much time is committed for treatments. And so in looking at that, and then how much time there isn't a day, and what resources are available to you. Now, it's kinda like project planning, right? We're looking at our life. And we're saying, Here's everything that I would like to see happen between now and a certain date. Is it even possible? Does it fit? Does it fit in the time I see people who want to get 18 hours worth of stuff done every day, in 12 hours worth of waking time, and eight hours, or six hours or four hours worth of even having the mental clarity and physical energy to accomplish these things? So are you making life harder on yourself? By telling yourself the story? Everything has to be the same law, everything has to be special? Everything has to be extra? Or are you stopping and saying here are the circumstances? Here are the facts that I'm dealing with? Today? Here are the facts, as I see them coming up without the stories, when we use that tool, when we use that first line of the model the circumstances. And we just put a lot of energy into unraveling the emotion and the story from the facts of life. We make our lives easier. So I offer that to you, my friend for the month of December. What are the actual circumstances? Minus the emotions minus the stories? Minus the guilt minus the pressure? Just the actual circumstances? When you look at those circumstances, what do you tell yourself about them? What do you make them mean to you? And is what you're making them mean to you creating stress, pressure, anxiety, overwhelm, sleeplessness, all the things that do not support your health, your healing, and your wellness. All right. When you see that, step back, get a pencil, get a piece of paper, and write it out as many times as you can. It's like putting things through a sieve, you may have to put them through a sieve multiple times before you get all the impurities out when we are used to using emotional language, when we are used to responding to people's eye emotions and body movements. And when we have been in relationships with people for a long time, and we expect an attitude or we already have a story around their attitude. It may take several renditions of writing out what the actual circumstances are, before you get your story out of it. And then just look at the facts. But it's so important, and it will help you so much. Take your emotions down a notch, take stress down a notch will make your life a little easier. So that is my hope for you, for this month of December. Use this tool. Use this skill of extracting out only the facts from your circumstances in life and see that those facts in and of themselves are just neutral. And all the power we give to them comes from our own story and thoughts about them. See what you can do with that. And you know what, if you have questions via me, you can find me on Facebook, the breast cancer recovery coach Laura Lummer, the breast cancer recovery coach, you can find me on Instagram, the breast cancer recovery coach, you can join my free Facebook group, the breast cancer recovery group, or you come and join one of my programs and work with me on get coaching and I will help you get clarity on finding the neutrality and the circumstances of your life and making your life so much less stressful. All right, so May you find peace. May December Be easy on you. And I will talk to you again next week. Until then, be good to yourself. Take care