Episode Overview

In this episode of Better Than Before Breast Cancer, we’ll talk about the often-overlooked relationship we have with ourselves.

Inspired by the upcoming season of love, let’s explore how this foundational connection influences our health, healing, and overall well-being.

From navigating the emotional weight of caregiving to reclaiming your power through self-compassion, this episode offers valuable insights and actionable steps to help you nurture the most important relationship of all—your relationship with yourself.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode:

• How to reframe your perspective on self-care and see it as a daily commitment rather than an occasional indulgence.
• The importance of recognizing the power of choice in your health and lifestyle decisions, even in the face of cancer treatment.
• Why releasing self-judgment and embracing curiosity is the key to breaking down mental barriers that block healing.
• How prioritizing your own needs positively impacts your relationships with others.
• Practical strategies to cultivate self-love and honor your body's needs every day.

Free Resource:
Download my 31 Days of Self-Care Journal for small, meaningful ways to practice self-care daily. Get started on your journey to a healthier, happier you!

Links and Resources Mentioned in This Episode:

• Join the Better Than Before Breast Cancer Life Coaching Membership
• Learn more about the 31 Days of Self-Care Journal

Quotes to Inspire You:

• “The most important relationship you’ll ever have is the one with yourself. How are you nurturing it?”
• “Curiosity will kill self-judgment. Allow yourself to see the gaps without beating yourself up.”
• “When you take care of yourself every day, you teach others how to treat you too.”

Connect With Laura:

• Website: The Breast Cancer Recovery Coach
• Instagram: @thebreastcancerrecoverycoach
• Facebook: The Breast Cancer Recovery Coach Community

Call to Action:
Don’t wait for a special occasion to treat yourself with love and care. Take the first step toward creating a life you love today by downloading the 31 Days of Self-Care Journal and committing to one small act of self-care daily.

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 Lemmer. I'm a certified life coach and I'm a breast cancer thriver. In this podcast, I will give you the skills on the insides 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.

0:33
Hey there, my beautiful friends. Welcome to episode 396 of better than before breast cancer. I'm your host. Laura lummer, I am really happy to be here today and I talk about something that's just really, I don't know, just been on my mind a lot lately. This show is going to come out towards the end of January, and I am getting bombarded already with Valentine's Day ads for gifts and whatnot. And of course, I think about relationships. What this means. I was actually picking up some flowers for a friend the other day, and the shop was just, there's a adorable little flower shop right across the street from where I live. It's all decorated for Valentine's Day. And I said to I asked the salesperson, there is Valentine's Day, your biggest day of the year? And she said, No, actually, it's Mother's Day. She says, because almost everyone has a mom or a mother figure in their life, but not everybody has a Valentine, true. And for people who do have a Valentine, not everybody is on good terms with who you would think of as a Valentine, relationships are so complex, and I remember thinking in my previous marriage, I remember just getting to that point of not wanting anything, right? Don't bring gifts, chocolate candy, don't go out to dinner on the anniversary, because all year long has been a living hell. So why would I want these one off celebrations when everything has been crap for so long? So what I'm actually trying to get to is that we need to look at relationships also in terms of ourself. How do you treat yourself? And what brings this up to me is that I really encourage my clients to look at everything we're doing in life as a relationship. We are in a relationship with ourself. We are in a relationship with our body. We're in a relationship with food. We're in a relationship with the earth. We're in a relationship with our job, our business, the people around us. Things aren't just happening to us. We're making choices on a regular basis, and if we don't stop and recognize those choices, then it feels very powerless. It feels like we're not making choices. I even talk about this in terms of cancer treatment, where there is a lot that I see of bitterness, resentment, of things that you had to do right things that were forced upon us as far as treatment is concerned. And I do think it's important for us to kind of take back our power and own that we make those choices. We always have a choice not to do chemo or not to do a surgery or not to do radiation or not to take a certain drug. The choice is always available. The consequence of the choice is maybe not something we want to deal with. So we make the choice, we feel forced into it because the consequence is unacceptable, which is potentially death. So we feel like we're forced into a choice, and that doesn't help us, right? We make a choice, and it's actually to sit and acknowledge that and say, I made that choice, and acknowledge the reasons that you made it, I think, is very empowering. So when we're in these relationships, and the reason I bring it up is because I coach a lot of people who are really suffering because of their relationship with their work, their job. They're miserable. It's a toxic relationship, but they have a lot of thoughts in their minds of why they must stay in that position, why they have to be there, whether it's I've been here so long I'm this close to retirement, it has good benefits. Whatever their reasons are, they're their reasons, and it's totally fine, but I think it's important to view that as a relationship, and ask yourself, What are you doing in this relationship? How are you showing up in this relationship? How are you supporting yourself in this relationship? What do you need out of this relationship? Are you speaking up for what you need. Are you using your voice, if not? Why? Why are you choosing to hold that in? Why are you choosing to stay in a place where maybe you feel like you are not treated well? So lots of important questions, and even though I'm not encouraging people to leave their jobs, but I think when we ask ourselves those questions, and we see that we. Have power and we understand we're making choices, we can start to do things to feel better. We can show up differently in that relationship, meaning that. And I think back on the last job that I had before I left to do my own business, and I think about it in terms of, you know, I liked the people there. The job wasn't a bad job, but the job didn't serve me anymore. This is kind of something I tell my kids when they've dated people and they say, oh, you know, they really want to break up, but this is a nice person. They're not a bad person. And I always say, why do we think people have to be bad people? You know, we don't have to demonize someone to acknowledge that they're not right for us in our life, that that season is gone, that that relationship has served its purpose, and we purpose, and we can leave it with kindness and compassion and understanding, and when we apply that same thought to work, to food, to anything in our life, I think it gives us so much more awareness, so much more power and so much more ownership for the choices that we're making. So as I think about Valentine's Day and relationships, one of the most meaningful things that comes up to me is the relationship with ourself. Now, one of the things that I often see in women, that I know, in clients that I coach, is the kind of predisposition to take care of everybody else first, to not prioritize their needs. In fact, it's so predominant that there's even a talk that I give. When I do speaking, there's a talk that I give that's The Giving Tree talk, and it talks about how we're so good at taking care of others, but we give and give and give even when we have really nothing left to give. And so we exhaust ourselves, and we we drain ourselves to the very last drop of any kind of vitality we have. And then maybe, maybe we exist in that place for a long time, or maybe we see it recognized and say, I need a spa day. And we go do something for ourselves, and then we come back and we just allow ourselves to be run over and taken from again and again and again, until you're so exhausted and so upset and so emotionally distraught that you take another spa day. So this is kind of like the Valentine story, right? We have to learn to be good to ourselves all the time, every day. We have to really look at the relationship we have with ourself, with our own body, with our own emotions, with our own mind. This relationship is is critical, because when you can look at this relationship, and you can see the things that have opportunity for improvement in them without judgment, and you can start to put some energy into that, you can understand that there are little, tiny things you can do for yourself every single day to support having a super healthy relationship with yourself. And once you do that, once you start to have a really healthy relationship with yourself, then the relationships around you start to become healthier. I love this. And in fact, this came up at a recent group call in my life, coaching membership, that someone said, you know, after my diagnosis, I looked around me and said, You know what relationships in my life really fill me up, and there were much fewer than this person had thought to begin with. And I think that's really important. Are we putting a lot of energy into relationships that don't serve us, and in doing that, taking away from our own relationship with ourselves, are we intentional about making space for ourselves every single day, for whatever it is, five minutes of breath work a walk out in The sunshine every day, journaling for 10 minutes, something small, inexpensive. In fact, I have a download that goes with this podcast, and it's my 31 days of self care. It's free download, and it's 31 days of very small things you can do for yourself. And here's the thing that's interesting, it isn't so much that I tell my clients this all the time, it isn't so much what you're doing, getting it right and being perfect. In fact, I think that that is actually less important than allowing yourself to see what you're not doing. So let's take this, this download, for example. Let's say you download 31 days of self care, and you look at the very first day, and it's one little, tiny thing you can do for yourself. And you say to yourself, you know what? I'm going to do this. I'm going to commit I'm going to do this for 31 days. I'm going to take a small step every single day and see how that feels, and see which ones resonate with me, and see which ones I want to keep in my life and and kind of develop this self care habit for myself. And then the first day. You don't do it. Okay, the second day you don't do it, a week goes by and you realize I haven't done any of those steps. Now we have to stop ourselves before we go into judgment. We have to stop ourselves before we go into well, because I didn't have time, because all of the things, we have to stop ourself and get very curious here, because Curiosity will kill self judgment, and that's what we want to do. We want to get that self judgment out when we can look at it and say, Wow. You know what? I really believed I wanted to do this. I said I was going to do this for a reason, right? If you take the effort to download something, then in your mind, it must have some kind of value to you. It must be important in some way. And then if you don't do it, the best thing I think you can do is look at it and ask yourself, that's so interesting, why didn't I do that? And allow yourself to see the thoughts that come up that stopped you from doing it, and maybe some of those thoughts will be, well, I told myself I didn't have time. Okay, that's interesting. Wow, if I don't have five minutes for myself, that's maybe something I need to take a deeper look at. Why do I tell myself I can't take five minutes for myself on a daily basis? That's very interesting, when we look at it this way, we start to develop more awareness of the choices we're making, to not take care of ourselves, the choices we're making, to not prioritize our needs, to not use our voice. And in doing that, we increase that awareness, and we start to work on that relationship with ourselves, right? So as in any other relationship, someone is important to you. Maybe something is bothering you. You feel you need something. You sit down with that person. It can go a bunch of ways, but let's say that this other person, they have these options. They can stay open and hold space to hear what you have to say and what you need. Or they can get very defensive and shut down instead of hearing what you're saying and looking at and saying, Oh, wow. Okay, maybe I didn't realize I was doing or not doing these things, and I'll be more mindful of it. I'll try to pay more attention. Or maybe we can discuss this openly. I have a different opinion than you have, right? We can have an exchange in a really healthy conversation or and I think we see this a lot more that someone just like shuts down and starts saying, Well, that's because this, this, this and a whole list of reasons why they did or didn't do this thing that's bothering you. That's the same thing with us, when we notice we are not taking good care of ourselves in the way you want to good care. I don't mean good care is this list, right? There's no list. It's what you believe you need. It's how you believe you need to be treated. When you find yourself feeling like I'm not doing the things I want to be doing to take care of myself, and then the brain goes, well, you don't have time, you don't have money, you don't have space, no one will support you. When we start going down that road, that's kind of that same dynamic as trying to have a conversation with someone else, and they get defensive and shut down. We're safe with ourselves. We get to be safe with ourselves. We get to say to ourselves, I'm not going to beat me up. I'm not going to judge me, I'm not going to berate myself, right? We get to decide that it's safe to be open with ourself instead of defending ourself, because defending actions are never going to help you move forward, but allowing curiosity to come in as you examine your relationship with yourself, that is the game changer. So it seems weird when I say to people like, let the bad stuff come up, allow yourself to see the blocks that are keeping you from living the life you want, that are keeping you from having the relationship with yourself that you want to have that is the most important step, because my first pillar of breast cancer recovery, release is critical. If you don't see the thoughts that are stopping you from doing the things you want to have, the relationship with yourself you want to have, you can't let them go. You can't redirect the mind. If you defend those actions, they're never going to change. If you you feel like you, you go into judgment of yourself, then those things are never going to change. And if they don't change, here's kind of a cascade of things you can expect to happen if you don't treat yourself well, and I'll use some of the most popular things in our relationship with ourself and our relationship with our body, if we don't choose to make good nutrition choices, if we don't choose to get the right amount of sleep or address the things that keep us from getting that sleep, if we don't choose to be very. Collective about the people that we give our energy to and bring into our space. If we don't look at the thoughts that we have right, if we don't have that relationship with ourselves, then the cascade you see are all these other toxic behaviors, a lot of uncomfortable emotions and feelings that here we are, that these two people sitting on the couch and sit the one us saying to our body, it just, I'm defending myself, right? I don't have time for this, and I'm time for this. We go get a ding dong, right? And we keep deteriorating that relationship until what? What happens? We get to the point where we're just so tired of it, all right? Maybe we just want to escape and we do the one offs, right? I need time for myself. I'm going to go away for the weekend. I'm going to shut down, go to the spa, go to the beach, go to the park, whatever you want to run away. And running away never helps, because you're still there wherever you go, right? So whatever is around us, this is an important thing in the coaching that I do, the relationships, the activities, everything we see around us is circumstances, and when we view those circumstances as neutral, we can start to shift our life tremendously. And what I mean by that is we are taught throughout our lives to say that makes me mad, that makes me unhappy. I feel sick when I go there. I can't stand being around that person. And we're looking at that from the outside, thinking that these outside things are creating this feeling. But when we look at these things as neutral, circumstances, which they all are. Every circumstance is neutral. We give it the value, we assign to it with our thoughts. So when we see these things like, let's say, a relationship, you're not being treated well, a relationship with a spouse, a sibling, a friend, whatever, and you're feeling uncomfortable instead of viewing it as neutral. Like, for instance, my job requires me to work 65 hours a week. Okay, just a fact, neutral. What do you what does that mean to you for some people, and this is why circumstances neutral. For some people, that might mean that's what I have to do to climb the corporate ladder. For some people, they might say, Yeah, but I love it like I love work. I would work 100 hours a week if I could. For some people, they might say, This is exhausting. I don't have enough time with my family, my friends, the people I love. It's killing me. I hate this, right? So the thought that we assign to it is very important, because that's going to create the emotion and any relationship, whether it's with ourself or anything outside of us, is going to create the feelings we feel based on the way we think about it. So when we're in these relationships with ourselves, I'm coming back to the running away piece of it, and we feel like we want to run away, because this person is always doing this thing. This person is always doing that thing. If we look at them and say, This person says these words, these PERS, this person takes these actions. Now we can look at it and ask ourselves, How am I showing up here? Am I showing up in a way that supports me? Am I showing up in a way that that cares for me? When we do that, it's different than saying, How much longer can I put up with this? How much do I have to take? How do I avoid this person? Right? It's not at all uncommon that I'm coaching people who are having circumstances in their lives that they do not like, that they wish were different, that they want different. They want people to speak differently, act differently, jobs to be different. They don't want to see things for what they are. And so in response to being uncomfortable, not enjoying the space they're in, they just want to get away. I want to get away. I want to go on a trip. I want to I stay at work for 6070, hours a week so that I don't have to go home and deal with what I don't want to deal with. So when we start to look at that and say, ask ourselves, How am I supporting myself in this relationship? Then the power changes, and the tables turn, and people say, well, that's hard, yeah, but isn't it also hard to live in an uncomfortable space where you give more than you have to give, where you feel exhausted, emotionally, physically, mentally, all the things, where you buffer with outside things that don't serve you because you're not in a good relationship with yourself. So maybe you over, drink over, sleep, overspend over, eat over, sit right over. Scroll. We do these things to try to get some feeling of joy, which is just very temporary because we're not actually addressing the issue in our life, which is we don't have a good relationship with ourself. We don't have a good enough relationship that we're willing to take care of ourselves, that we're willing to make time for ourself, that we're willing to. To make food for ourself, to nourish ourself. So when it comes to thinking about Valentine's Day, that kind of thing, you know, relationship, not necessarily speaking about the Hallmark holiday, but just the theory, the idea, right, the day of giving love to each other, the day of acknowledging love through whatever some kind of gift. I want you to just think about. How is that relationship with yourself? Are you that person who only is good to yourself on the special occasions here and there throughout the year, or when you're so depleted you just can't take it anymore? Or are you the person who, every day thinks this person me is someone I love? You know, in The Giving Tree talk that I spoke about, one of the things, I kind of open it with a trick question, and I ask because I usually give this talk to people who have cancer or supporting or a combination of the two. And I asked the room if you're here because you love somebody who has had a cancer diagnosis, raise your hand. An interesting thing happens. The people in the room who are the people who've been diagnosed with cancer, never raise their hand. The people who are there to support them, raise their hand. Why doesn't it automatically register with us that I am a person who's had cancer and I love me. I love myself. Why doesn't everyone in that room raise their hand when I ask, Are you here because you love someone who's had a cancer diagnosis? Why don't we come to our own mind? This is so wild, right? It's so important. And I wonder right now, even as you hear me say that, what thoughts are coming up in your head that's arrogant, that's stuck up, that's selfish, that's narcissistic, what's coming up in your mind right now? Or, holy cow, yeah, that's right. I don't think about myself as someone that I love. So I want to put that out there and offer that to you. And I want to offer you to go to my website, the breast cancer recovery coach.com, and download the 31 days of self care journal. I think you might get a lot of value out of it. And because it's the beginning of the year, I think there's no better time than to this, to evaluate the relationship you have with yourself. So start to let things go that stop you from being good to yourself, and to start to incorporate small daily habits that serve you. What a great time to start developing the habit of daily self care, and I don't just mean brushing your teeth, I mean really knowing yourself and understanding what your needs are and why you do or do not serve them. What's important to you such an important practice. There's also a link here, if you're watching this on YouTube or listening to it on any podcast channel. There's a link in the show notes, so you can find that at the breast cancer recovery coach.com forward slash 396 download that journal, commit to yourself to do one self care action every day. These are simple guys. These are as easy as watch the sunrise, watch the sunset, just taking that time to check out for a few minutes in a day to see how it feels. Download that guide and commit to yourself. You know, I'm going to really establish a wonderful relationship with myself and then see what comes up. And remember, hear my voice when you notice that you download the guide and you haven't touched it for a week. No judgment, curiosity. Ask yourself, well, that's so interesting. Why did I download it and didn't print it out? Why did I download it and even look at it? Why did I download it, print it out, set it aside and never do a single step. It's in the knowing what's there in that gap, there's so much value, as long as you don't judge it or don't get defensive about it, just start to understand those stories you tell yourself that stop yourself from having an excellent relationship with the most important person in your life you so you can take care of this body in the way that you want to and need to, which usually means it takes a lot of attention and energy and money too, right? I mean, I spend a lot of money on myself for the treatments and the care and the support that I need in order to accomplish my goal of healing, and I don't feel bad about it, right? It's very important to me, because, hey, if I don't support my healing, I'm not going to be here, right? So I have to look at anything that comes up in my mind that blocks me from taking a step that I believe is important to support my healing. All right? I hope that helps you. So as we go into February, I want you to be your own person that you love, right? How are you going to take care of this? Person that you love, who's your best Valentine, regardless of, like, the official Valentine's Day, and your thoughts on that. This is the theory of love. We're just talking about the idea in general, that you're the person who's going to be your Valentine every single day. If you were that person, how would your life look different? Now,

25:20
if you need help with that, you can find me at the breast cancer recovery coach.com you can come join my better than before breast cancer life coaching program, which, this is what we do. This is the work we do. This is all about, how do you create a life you love? How do you create a relationship with yourself that you love and that is meaningful to you, it is possible, my friends, all right, I hope you find that helpful, and I'll talk to you again next week. Take care.

25:51
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.