What if you had the time to do everything you wanted to do? 

Wouldn’t it be nice to feel relaxed and accomplished rather than rushed and overwhelmed? 

Imagine taking time for yourself to relax without telling yourself you “should” be doing something else. 

Maybe it’s not so much that you can’t get everything in and more that there are other ways you’d rather be spending your time? 

In this episode I’ll give you a new perspective on thinking about your time that will support you in understanding how to invest your time in ways that are the most valuable to you. 

Think about how wonderful it would be to plan your time in a way that intentionally left you with more white space to enjoy your life rather than planning it to figure out how much more you can get done. 

Listen now and consider how the way you think about time is impacting your life and your wellness. 

Referred to in this episode: 
Pre-enroll in the Four Pillars of Breast Cancer Recovery Coaching Experience. 

Give or get the gift of Coaching with a Gift Certificate 

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

You are listening to Episode 220 of the breast cancer recovery coach podcast. I am your host, Laura Lummer. Today, it's interesting, I have so many things going through my mind right now because I have so many exciting things happening, which really ties into the theme of what this podcast is going to be about. One of the pieces of great news that I want to share with you today is that I recently got some great results back on my bloodwork. One of the things that we always look at when we're doing blood work, right, and I say we meaning those of us going through a cancer experience is where are the tumor markers, what's going on with the tumor markers, because that is one indicator, that disease may be advancing. And I got some great news recently that my tumor markers had dropped substantially, which is super exciting news. And everything else has been stable for a long time. So it's all good, everything good. And as I think about that, I reflect back on the fact that almost two years ago, exactly just within a few days, was when I revealed on this podcast that I had been diagnosed with metastatic breast cancer with stage four cancer. And I struggled so much before I did that podcast before I did that show, because I felt like it would change the way I was perceived. You know, I had had this podcast, I had these coaching programs, I was the breast cancer recovery coach, right? My ideas were all about recovery and supporting women in recovery. And then here I am back in treatment, having metastatic disease, and telling myself all these stories about what that will mean what people will think what people will say how it will impact those who listen. And I had to do a lot of coaching, go to my coach and do self coaching, to work through what was true in that and what were just my ideas and what I had control over and what I didn't. And now two years later, as I sit here, and I record a podcast, and I talk very openly about having metastatic disease, I have many more clients who are in the counseling process and managing and supporting their body's ability to heal from metastatic disease. And I have had an incredible mindset shift when it comes to this issue. Because I think initially when we have a diagnosis of cancer, the fear that we go through so much while we're trying to heal our bodies is the fear of recurrence and the fear of metastatic disease. And trust me, I'd rather not have it, you know, I look forward to the day that I don't. But I love sharing the insight that it doesn't have to be a death sentence that bodies can heal. In there are so many treatments, there are conventional treatments, there are alternative treatments, there are complementary treatments, there's so many things we can do. That no matter where we're at, if it's a first diagnosis, if you're in treatment, if you're supporting your body's ability to heal and be its optimal self, after you complete breast cancer treatment and move forward in your life, or if you're still in the cancer process. There are so many things we can do. And I hope that by speaking openly about this, that it can just relieve a little bit of fear, relieve and give people a sense of time. That's really what that's about is that we have more time than we think we have more power than we think we have more options and more choices, then we think I look back. And I think you know, when you get an initial diagnosis, especially if breast cancer people with cancer, people having a cancer experience has not been a big part of your life. And you're the one that gets this diagnosis. It feels extremely urgent and terrifying. And I think that it's that urgency and that fear and that idea that time is of the essence. And we carry that with us even once we're beyond active treatment, or if we have a diagnosis of recurrence. And so, again, I just hope that by being open about sharing and talking about my own experience with metastatic disease and my My own experience and supporting my body's ability to heal from it, that it will relieve a little bit of the fear that's out there that people will know two things really one that even after you have completed treatment, you've been diagnosed, let's say you have early stage diagnosis, and you've completed that treatment and you've received that all clear. Know that you still have so many things you could do to support your body, its ability to heal from the treatment it's been through, and its ability to be optimally well, because we say to ourselves, so many times I have said this, and I've heard so many people say to me, I was so healthy before I got a diagnosis of cancer. But that's really not true. Because cancer doesn't pop up overnight. It's a process that's been happening in our bodies for some time before it has materialized to the point where it's creating symptoms, or we can see it, and it is then no treatable. I guess it's always treatable, but to the point where we realize we have active disease, and we need to treat it. And so I think it's important to understand that going back to normal, not only is not a realistic expectation, but my own mindset has shifted so much from my initial diagnosis on that desire to just be normal again, to a new belief that I carry with me, which is, why would you want to go back, the worst thing we could do is go back to normal. Because whatever that means to you, whatever you were doing before your diagnosis, something there was not working properly, something was going wrong. And you got cancer, right. So we don't want to go back to normal. We don't want to go back to not finding our voice. We don't want to go back to not regrouping relationships and having frenemies and talking down to ourselves and exhausting ourselves and working ourselves to death and living by other people's thoughts and expectations. Who wants to go back to that, we want to go forward to something that is so much better than that. And honestly, that's why I changed the name of my life coaching membership to better than before breast cancer, I realized, and it hit me really hard when I finally realized that when it really sunk in it was like, wow, we can talk about normalcy, and being normal, and not being normal. We can talk I can talk comfortably openly about that. Because I want women who goes through breast cancer to come out on this side, and be able to drop that expectation and be able to release that idea of going back to normal. Because with that release comes the release of so much anxiety and so much fear and so much self judgment and so much self criticism and guilt and blame and all that shit that does not serve us and does not help us to heal. And I want women to come out of that and say, How can I create a life that's even better than what it was before I had breast cancer. And I want you to know that it's possible. I was having conversation with someone the other night. And she had not heard the story of what had happened when I was originally diagnosed with stage four disease. And I shared with her what happened and some of the things that I worked through, not only in my personal life, but professionally as well. And with this business, and I just reflected back on that insight. I mean, think about it, I got a diagnosis of stage four breast cancer. And then I said to myself, next year, I'm growing this business, I'm changing this, I'm reaching more survivors, I'm even more passionate about my message. Now. I didn't go into my treatment thing, I hope I survive this, I hope I live. I went into it, saying I am going to do everything in my power to support this body's ability to heal. And I'm going to live the most amazing life every single day doing something to move closer to my dream. And being super intentional about that. Every single day. Well, I support my ability to heal. Because when I think about the time in my life, however much time that is and nobody ever knows how much time that is. But when I think about time in my life, I don't think about it from a point of scarcity. I don't think about time in my life from how little time I may have left. I think about time in my life from how I want to invest every single moment. What I want to experience with where I invest my time. I do approach my time with a sense of urgency but urgency from excitement or urgency from abundance, urgency from the mindset of Wow. So much, there's so much and life is so much, and there's so much I want to do. And I'm so excited to jump in and to make it happen. So I think that that message if we can shift our mentality from living with fear and worry about not having enough time, which really when we think of that way, we withdraw from life and spend less time enjoying it. If we can move away from that, and think, you know what, no matter what's going on, I'm here now. And I have this time today. How do I want to invest this time today? What do I want this to look like? So I talked about last week, how you can now pre enroll in the four pillars of breast cancer recovery coaching experience. And that was me going back to my original coaching program, the thing that really launched everything for me, and going back through it, renaming it, rebranding it, putting even more great stuff in it, adding to it with all of the experience and knowledge and everything that I've gained since I first and 2020 Clip people through this coaching program. And as I'm working on it, and as I'm recreating it, and as I'm making it even better, one of the things that I always start my courses with, is taking time to plan time to do it. Because when I see people who may leave my life coaching membership, or maybe who buy a course. And I see that they haven't even opened the course and I reach out to them. Oftentimes I hear, Oh, I just didn't have time. And then also when I'm coaching women, then they'll tell me about things that they're struggling with a lot of self care issues, maybe they're having a lot of anxiety, maybe they're having a lot of stress. And when we dig into what they're thinking about what's creating these emotions, what their thoughts are, I will often hear, I don't have time, I can't take time for myself. I don't want to take time away from work, kids husband, name it, whatever is on your mind. And I think back to early days, like early 2017, when I was studying on how do you create an online course right? Knowing I wanted to work with breast cancer survivors, an online environment that make it rich and robust and amazing. How do you do that, and the people that I was studying with and learning from told me, you have to start off with helping them to make time. And I thought,

Laura Lummer  12:38

That's so boring, I really start off with making time, who's gonna want to do that. But I trusted these people and their expertise. And so I went with that, and I went with, okay, there was got to be an element of planning for anytime you bring someone into a program to support them. And then I saw very, very clearly how important that was. And I saw how our thoughts about time, in every aspect of our lives, limited us so much. How our thoughts about time, brought up scarcity in ways that I really never was that much aware of in my own life, and then also saw in other people's lives, and I realized, wow, our thoughts about time, are so impactful to our wellness. He think about that. What does time have to do with supporting your wellness, with supporting you being able to support your body's ability to heal? Well, I'll share with you some of the things that I see when I'm working with people who are in treatment. And for myself, the first time I went through treatment, what some of my thoughts were, is we want to keep everything status quo, right, we want to keep everything normal, I referred to that a moment ago. So we don't want to take too much time off of work because we don't want other people to think we can't handle it. We don't want to look like a victim. When in reality, what we look like to other people is 100% out of your control. So even those thoughts, they're telling yourself, I don't have time to take care of myself. I won't take time off. I remember thinking this I would go in for chemotherapy, but I would schedule my chemotherapy so I could take the least amount of time off. And now I had paid sick time at the job. I was working when I was diagnosed in 2011. And when I look back now at all the sick time and all the vacation time that I had on the books, and yet I scheduled freaking chemo therapy so that I could take less time off so that I wouldn't look like I was putting a burden on someone else or I wouldn't look like the sick person. I'm pretty sure I looked like the sick person when I walked into work bald and flushed red I'm all the steroids and the chemotherapy. Come on. We're kidding ourselves. But we tell ourselves the stories about time. And it's so important for us to become aware of that in that space in treatment. Only thing that is the number one priority for your time in treatment is taking care of you, creating space for you. giving yourself the room that you need, and the time that you need to rest, to hydrate, to eat, to connect, to prepare food, to meditate, to find peace. That's what's important. When I teach people about time, I use the analogy of money, you have X amount of money, and we're generally very protective of our money, right? We've got our money, and we decide how much we're going to save how much we're going to spend, what is important enough to spend our money on who is important enough to spend our money on and can I just add that oftentimes, we put ourselves at the bottom of that list, sadly. But we take our money, and we say, Oh, this is valuable. So I must be careful with it. I want to treat it with respect, I want it to go to the things that are most important in my life, then we take our time, which truly is valuable, because I don't care how much money you have, if you don't have any time, that money is worthless, right? I know people who have quite a bit of money, and never take the time to enjoy their lives. Never take the time to enjoy that money they made. I know people who have had quite a bit of money and left this world, left it all behind and still didn't go out and do some of the things they wanted to do in this life. So what's more valuable the time or the money? You have to think about that? Because it depends on your thoughts. But when we look at that analogy about time and money, I want to offer to you a little reframing idea. We say this so often. I've said it already in this podcast. I don't have time. I don't have time for that. I don't have time for that. I don't have time for that. Or we ask how much time is that going to take? This is one of the things I address even in my FAQs. When people look at a new course how much time is that going to take? I'm currently in a program studying with nature winters in the terrain advocate program studying the metabolic approach to cancer. One of my questions was, how much time will I need to dedicate to this? But here's the difference. When we ask how much time from a place of scarcity, versus when we ask how much time from a place of planning. So oh, how much time will that take me as if I don't have the time to give to it? As if it's taking time from me here the scarcity in there? How much time will that take me? It's taking away versus how much time? Do I need to invest in that? Because now we're looking at time, from a more wise perspective, we're looking at it from more valuable perspective and investing I've 24 hours in a day, same as everybody else. How do I invest that? What's valuable to me. So the reframing thought, when you hear yourself say, I don't have time for that I want you to replace it with that is not valuable enough to me to invest my time in it. Because that's really what you're saying. If you decide that your time is gonna go to these 10 things, and those other five things are going to not get addressed or you're not going to do them. You're making a choice and a decision that the five things you're not investing your time in, are not important enough to switch that investment over to. So let's talk about how your thoughts about time affect you after treatment when you're in recovery. When you're in this space, where finally you have a moment to come up for air. When you really start to realize everything you've been through. All the emotions start to bubble up. All the trauma starts to surface. You start to look at your life and think whoa, what is happening here, what's working, what's not working, then you put the brakes on and you say I don't have time. I have to give back. Look how much time I've already taken. Look how much my spouse has already stepped in and taken on extra responsibilities to help me while I'm in treatment. Look how many rides my friends have given to the kids. I can't take more time for me. I have to jump back in and get things back on track the way they used to be. This is why it is so important to address that thought is going back to normal, what it really means and what it really entails. Because when you are in that space after treatment had one to three years, for sure the first one to three years, and oftentimes much longer than that. And you're struggling emotionally and you know it and you can feel that you're not feeling connected and you're feeling isolated, you're feeling alone, and you're in fear, and you have anxiety, and you don't know how to talk about it. And you don't give yourself time to work on it, space, to think through it, to connect with what your thoughts are, and even to design a plan or get support to deal with it and move forward in a happier and more joyful way you're robbing yourself on it all comes from the way that you're thinking. Because once again, everyone has the same 24 hours. So if you know or have seen any human being any other person who has figured out how to create time for themselves, to heal, put together a healing plan, make good food, begin an exercise program, do all the things to support themselves and be consistent with it. And they figured out that time, then it can be done. And it's only a matter of deciding that that's important enough to invest your time in. And that comes from your thoughts. It comes from the story you tell yourself of what has to be done, versus what you actually need to do for yourself.

Laura Lummer  21:29

Even when I work with women who have metastatic disease, whose single most important thing in life right now, to invest time in is healing, is learning to heal is learning to see what thoughts are supporting them learning to figure out what is the best thing for them to eat, learning to figure out how to move their body every day, how to find quiet time, all the things that we have power over. When it comes to anything but the medicine, the medicine, we leave to the oncologist, but the rest of that really big pie is up to us. Even then I hear women struggle to give themselves time, because they feel like it should go back to the way it was. And ladies, we've just got to get our arms around that we've got to step back and see you're in the place you're in because of everything that's led to this point. We don't want to stay there. So when I talk about creating time for you, it's not some self care thing. It's not just like a bubble bath. It is a critical factor in supporting your emotional, spiritual, psychological, physical healing, your health, your wellness, your ability to live an optimal life, to find and embrace joy, and to take care of yourself the same way you would take care of someone else you love. And isn't that worse, that sticky part comes in? Do you love yourself as much as or more than that person next to you, that you love like life itself. And if not, that may be the reason you're not willing to invest time in yourself. So I felt like this was an important thing to talk about now, because it's been on my mind so much not only just with recreating my creating time for you course, inside my memberships on my coaching plans, but also because this month with my clients, the major focus is slowing down. You know, a lot of times when we speak of time and managing time people being Oh, managing time means get more done. When I talked about managing time, I'm talking about making more time for you saying no to more things. So that you get to be in life engaged in life, being a part of this amazing flow of this beautiful gift. So I thought that since I'm working on that with all of my clients this month on just the slowing down, and the letting things go, when the taking time to be in a season where many things are happening. And you can still be fully present and engaged in them without feeling overwhelmed and anxious. And it's just such an important concept to address. So I hope this podcast has given you some good things to think about. And some of that may sound a little tough like a thing that's a little tough, Laura, and maybe it is but sometimes we may need people to be a little more tough with us so that we can be honest with ourselves. Because if you're going to choose not to invest the time into taking care of yourself the way that you deserve to be taken care of, at the very least be honest with yourself about it. Own it. Remember that reframing statement. This is an important enough for me need to invest my time in when you're not willing to block off time for yourself, to make fresh food for yourself to take a walk, to meditate for 10 minutes or to take that bubble bath. Remember to say that to yourself, This is not important enough for me to invest my time in, that may help you make some decisions to treat yourself a lot better. I hope that it does. And I hope that you will go to my website, the breast cancer recovery coach forward slash pillars and enroll in the four pillars of breast cancer recovery coaching experience, we will start that January 1 2023. It is a powerful, amazing experience. And we'll start off the year 2023 by releasing ideas, beliefs and thoughts that keep you from treating yourself with the love and priority that you deserve to be able to support your body's ability to heal and remain healthy and engaged in life. So when you pre enroll the big bonus is you get to go through the course live with me in the better than before breast cancer experience, which means you get the four pillars coaching experience. And you get the better than before breast cancer life coaching membership experience which is full of all kinds of amazing stuff. And after January 1 When you enroll you'll go through the four pillars of breast cancer recovery on its own, without the ability to see and experience all the things that are inside the life coaching membership as well which includes more live interaction with me more coaching calls, and the ability to have more private sessions. So do something for yourself. Invest the time in creating a life that is truly better than before breast cancer and forget that normal stuff who needs normal? Alright friends, I'll talk to you again next week and until then, Please be good to yourself and take time to take care of you.