Three Powerful Exercises for Cultivating a Hopeful Attitude Against Cancer

[00:00:00] Deb Krier: Hey there, Lifter Uppers. I'm Deb Krier, the co-host of Cancer in Comedy, where our mission is to heal cancer-impacted people through hope and humor, something we like to call turning the grim into a grin. But today on Cancer in Comedy, we're going to be talking about attitude, specifically three exercises you can do to change your attitude to help you cope with cancer. Now! Here's the host of the Cancer and Comedy Podcast, Dr. Brad Miller.

[00:00:29] Dr. Brad Miller: Hey, thank you, Deb. What a joy, a pleasure, and a privilege it is to be with you and all of our Lifter Uppers as we look to kind of, uh, change the tune of how people deal with cancer and the bad things that happen with cancer.

[00:00:45] Dr. Brad Miller: We like to call it, uh, changing the grim of cancer to the grin of a fulfilled, happy life, no matter what's going on in your life. And so we are here on the Cancer and Comedy Podcast to help people to cope with hope. And we hope that people will get connected with our community at cancerandcomedy.com/follow.

[00:01:07] Dr. Brad Miller: If you do, good things are going to happen. I tell you what, if you contact us on the contact page at cancerandcomedy.com/follow, I can guarantee you that either myself or Deb, or maybe both of us, are going to reach out to you and make a connection with you. So, but hey Deb, one of the things we love to do here is tell dumb dad jokes, you know, and I know some people get tired of them.

[00:01:30] Dr. Brad Miller: Well, some people—I'm talking about my adult children—get tired of them. Yeah, yeah. They, they, they're tired. But here's—I'm going to lay a couple on you here. Are you ready for these? How are false teeth like stars?

[00:01:44] Deb Krier: I have no idea.

[00:01:45] Dr. Brad Miller: They come out at night.

[00:01:48] Deb Krier: Okay. Cute, cute.

[00:01:49] Dr. Brad Miller: One more. We're in October, Halloween's coming around before too long.

[00:01:53] Dr. Brad Miller: How can you tell a vampire has a cold?

[00:01:57] Deb Krier: I have no idea.

[00:01:59] Dr. Brad Miller: She starts coffin.

[00:02:02] Deb Krier: That's a groaner.

[00:02:04] Dr. Brad Miller: Oh boy. Well...

[00:02:07] Deb Krier: You know, following our conversation, don’t say that I’m not warning you—we are going to have another one of Dr. Brad's bad jokes of the day. But then we will have our very important Faith it or Break it segment.

[00:02:22] Deb Krier: Well, as we mentioned, we would love for you to be part of our Cancer and Comedy community, where together we crush cancer with a message of how to cope with hope and humor. Please follow us at cancerandcomedy.com/follow.

[00:02:38] Dr. Brad Miller: Indeed. We would love for you to do just that. And today, let's talk a little bit about attitude. You ever heard the phrase, "Hey man, you need an attitude adjustment," you know, or, "You got a bad attitude about that. You need to get that together." Well, I think when it comes to cancer, when bad things happen to us, that is kind of—that is like a kick in the rear, isn’t it? It’s like a splash of cold water in the face.

[00:03:04] Dr. Brad Miller: It gets your attention. It can also kind of knock you back on your heels a little bit. And a tendency, when that happens, is to be a little sour, be a little upset about it, to have kind of a bad attitude about it. And so what we try to do here a lot is to kind of change that around, at least give us some tools to do that.

[00:03:25] Dr. Brad Miller: So, let me ask you first of all, Deb, has there been a time in your life when you—I know you’re basically an upbeat person—but has there been a time in your life when you've kind of needed to have a little bit of a change from a bad attitude to something a little bit better to make things go better for you?

[00:03:39] Dr. Brad Miller: Has there ever been that time?

[00:03:40] Deb Krier: Always. And I think, you know, one of the things that we need to remember is, it is perfectly normal and natural to be a little gloom and doomy—or a lot gloom and doomy, right? You know, this is, you know, something that is very serious. And you know, people have said that I’m Pollyanna and all of these things. And, you know, what I tell them is, "Well, I just don’t tell people when I’m not feeling most upbeat," and things like that.

[00:04:07] Deb Krier: But you know, I still remember, many years ago, I worked for an oncologist—absolutely fabulous man. And he would tell his new patients, "You know what you think about what’s going to happen is 99 percent of what will happen. If you think you’re going to die, you will die. If you think you’re going to survive, then you will survive."

[00:04:30] Deb Krier: Now, you know, some people might not have survived very long, but it was all in their attitude as to what their quality of life was during that time.

[00:04:39] Dr. Brad Miller: Yeah, absolutely. And, uh, if you—it’s kind of a turn of that phrase, "If you think things are bad, if you think things are good, you’re right." You know, I’ve heard kind of a turn of that phrase that way.

[00:04:52] Dr. Brad Miller: And so, one of the things that we really try to work on here is, yeah, we need to accept that, uh, when bad things happen, it is okay, perfectly legit, to be a little bit upset and depressed and everything else about it. But we have choices in this matter about how we carry through. And the idea here, I think, is to not get stuck—don’t get stuck in a bad place because that’s not going to serve you, your family, or anyone else.

[00:05:16] Dr. Brad Miller: Whatever your circumstances are, whether you’re the cancer victim, part of the family, or a caretaker, or anything of that nature. And so what we try to do here is provide tools and methodologies to help people to cope with hope, as we say. And so, you know, I know you do spend a lot of time researching and reading, thinking about this type of thing.

[00:05:37] Dr. Brad Miller: And I do too. And a book I’ve been reading quite a bit here recently is a book called Healing Power of Humor by Alan Klein. He—there's a couple of concepts in his book I wanted us to chat about today, and I think they’re going to apply to our Lifter Uppers. He has this whole section here about attitude, and the subtitle is Whistle a Happy Tune.

[00:06:01] Dr. Brad Miller: But he has a section here about an autobiography in five chapters. It’s just a couple of paragraphs long, but I want to read it to you and get your reaction to this. It’s titled An Autobiography in Five Chapters. Chapter one: I walk down the street. There’s a deep hole in the sidewalk. I fall in.

[00:06:25] Dr. Brad Miller: I am lost. I am helpless. It isn’t my fault. It takes forever to find a way out. Chapter two: I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I pretend I don’t see it. I fall in again. I can’t believe I’m in the same place. But it isn’t my fault. It still takes a long time to get out.

[00:06:52] Dr. Brad Miller: Chapter three: I walk down the same street. There is a deep hole in the sidewalk. I see it there. I fall in. It’s a habit, but my eyes are open. I know where I am. It is my fault. I get out immediately. Chapter four: I walk down the same street. There’s a deep hole in the sidewalk. I walk around it. Chapter five: I walk down a different street.

[00:07:22] Deb Krier: I love that.

[00:07:23] Dr. Brad Miller: Let me just let you react to that for a minute.

[00:07:26] Deb Krier: Well, I mean, there are several things in there. The first is, are we taking responsibility for our own actions? You know, I think that’s probably one of the big things. And, you know, then we really can think, "How can we do this differently?" You know, kind of, we see something coming—how can we avoid it?

[00:07:43] Deb Krier: You know, and I think that’s very much what he’s talking about.

[00:07:47] Dr. Brad Miller: Yeah. I think taking responsibility and how we view things makes a difference. You know, you can take the "Poor me, I’m stuck in a hole, what am I going to do? It takes forever to get out of here." Or you can kind of see another level—that is, kind of see the reality.

[00:08:03] Dr. Brad Miller: You know, "I’m in a hole. I’m in a bad place. I have cancer, whatever it is. It may take a long time, but I’m going to get out of it." Or, kind of the third basic phase of his five chapters was, "I’m going to either go around it, or take a whole different pathway." So, what are some ways maybe you’ve taken a little different pathway than what might’ve been expected, either with cancer or something else in your life, where you’re kind of going down one route, and maybe you think, "Let’s try something completely different"?

[00:08:33] Dr. Brad Miller: Tell me about something like that in your life.

[00:08:37] Deb Krier: Well, you know, I’ve never been known for taking the path that, you know, should be taken. I like Frost’s comment about, you know, taking a different fork in the path. And in fact, I have that poem on my wall about, you know, The Road Not Taken. You know, I mean, it started when I was very young, you know. I am at the tail end of the baby boomer generation.

[00:09:01] Deb Krier: And we, as women, were expected to start families and, you know, maybe have a career, but it was, it was, you know, the family was the most important thing. And, you know, I went to school. I was going to become a lawyer. Now, you know, obviously I didn’t, because part of it is I thought, "Look, don’t want to do that."

[00:09:19] Deb Krier: But, you know, I’ve always kind of done the thing that people are not expecting. And, you know, let’s be honest—people expected me to die. And I took a different path, and was—you know, I remember very distinctly thinking, "Wait a minute, I get to vote in this." I didn’t accept what the doctor said. And I took a different path.

[00:09:39] Dr. Brad Miller: And here you are. You’re still doing it, aren’t you?

[00:09:44] Deb Krier: I’m a ghost. So, sorry. As you mentioned, we’re aiming toward Halloween. But, um, but yeah.

[00:09:53] Dr. Brad Miller: You’re a very friendly, joyful ghost, I’ll say it that way. If you are, if you are.

[00:09:59] Deb Krier: That’s true. Yep, yep.

[00:10:00] Dr. Brad Miller: You know, I think I would just echo that sentiment, that when you take a path less traveled—to quote Frost there—I was going to reference that.

[00:10:11] Dr. Brad Miller: It is a bit scary, it’s a bit different, and it is certainly not the path others have taken. But it is certainly one that, although it has some painful moments, although it has some moments of just being scared, most of the time it pays off, doesn’t it? It pays off in some regard. It gives us some sense of fulfillment, a bit of adventure, and that type of thing.

[00:10:40] Dr. Brad Miller: I’m going to go off on a little bit of a tangent here. I remember several years ago, our family took a big vacation in Arizona. We were going from Phoenix up to Sedona, Arizona, which is, I don’t know, an hour or two drive. And I saw on the map—it said something like "shortcut" on the map.

[00:10:58] Dr. Brad Miller: And so I took that road, but we’d rented—my family, which in that case was two of my three kids, were with us and they were small—but we’d rented like a Dodge Challenger, just a regular kind of, sort of, sedan car. The road—the shortcut—ended up being a road that was designed for four-wheel-drive vehicles to go through a canyon to get to Sedona, Arizona.

[00:11:22] Dr. Brad Miller: Anyhow, we almost wrecked several times, and it was a lot of—it was crazy. And we were in with all these—the only other vehicles out there were these four-wheel-drive big old Jeep things. And we’re in this kind of, this little sedan—Dodge Challenger. And, uh, and people were looking at us like we’re crazy, which we were. And my kids—but my point is, none of us will ever forget that trip.

[00:11:45] Dr. Brad Miller: We had a big, uh, a big adventure that way. And our attitude—here’s the thing: we choose what pathway to take, don’t we? We choose.

[00:11:58] Deb Krier: Mm-hmm. Right.

[00:11:59] Dr. Brad Miller: And, uh, I think that’s something for us to keep in mind. And, you know, one of the stories that, uh, Klein tells in his book—and I’ve used it as kind of a preacher story many times—is about the two brothers.

[00:12:14] Dr. Brad Miller: One was an optimist, and one was a pessimist. And Christmas was rolling around, and both the boys wanted a pony. And their parents kind of did a bad trick on them. They said, "Go out on Christmas Day, go out and look in the barn." And they went out to the barn, and they flung the doors open.

[00:12:34] Dr. Brad Miller: And there was nothing there at the barn but an enormous pile of horse manure. And, uh, the pessimistic brother ran back into the house in tears. "Oh, you did this, you know?" So the optimistic one got a shovel and started, uh, digging through the horse manure, saying, "Hey, there’s got to be a pony in here somewhere."

[00:12:53] Dr. Brad Miller: You know, "There’s got to be." So how we look at it makes a big difference. And so let’s be specific and kind of granular for a minute. What were some of the ways that you—you know, both of us had very serious cancer diagnoses, life-threatening cancer diagnoses. In my case, you know, you went through surgery and came out in pretty good shape and not a lot of discomfort.

[00:13:19] Dr. Brad Miller: You had a much tougher road to travel and everything like that. But tell me a time where you were able to very intentionally kind of change the story in your cancer journey from something that was kind of pessimistic or bad to something with at least some optimistic view of it.

[00:13:38] Deb Krier: Right. Well, you know, one of the things that Alan talks about is kind of that visualization.

[00:13:43] Dr. Brad Miller: Yeah.

[00:13:43] Deb Krier: And I have no idea where this has come from, but in my head, I see myself as a little 97-year-old woman.

[00:13:53] Dr. Brad Miller: Okay.

[00:13:53] Deb Krier: Like, I have no idea where—I mean, it’s just—and it’s, it’s been there for quite some time. And so—and this also goes with his concept of treasure mapping—I see her. And so what I’m doing is I have to get to her, to be her.

[00:14:09] Deb Krier: And like I said, I have no idea. I have no idea why 97. I mean, it’s just this very weird thing, but it is very distinct in my brain that I will be a little 97-year-old woman at some point.

[00:14:21] Dr. Brad Miller: And you’re not going to get to 97 if you stay stuck at wherever you were at and just kind of gave up, that kind of thing.

[00:14:28] Dr. Brad Miller: Well, I think that leads us into one of the things that Klein does talk about in his book—some practical things people can do to help change their attitude. The idea here is that changing your attitude is a choice that we make. It doesn’t usually happen to us. Somebody can’t force you to change your attitude, but he gives us three tools in his book. He calls them learn to laugh exercises.

[00:14:52] Dr. Brad Miller: And we’ve touched on a little bit here. One’s called treasure mapping, which is kind of where you basically have a picture, or maybe even a photograph or a drawing, of somewhere you want to be. You kind of mentioned visualization of the 97-year-old woman, but, you know, the pot of gold or the pirate map to get to the treasure.

[00:15:14] Dr. Brad Miller: And I’ve done some of that, you know, where you actually—I’ll give you a couple of examples. In my mind, I keep in my office—and if people see this on YouTube someday, they’ll see I have a balloon theme in my life, and I have a little balloon behind me because my granddaughter gave me a balloon

[00:15:34] Dr. Brad Miller: as a gift right after, uh, you know, when I was diagnosed with cancer and when I was in the hospital and so on. And so that balloon is a tangible, physical symbol of life for me, right? And, uh, that’s a good thing. I know other people have had vision boards, where they put on a board, you know, like a new house or, uh, you know, speaking before a group of people and things like that, but I think something tangible can be helpful to us.

[00:15:59] Dr. Brad Miller: Do you think maybe something tangible can be helpful, either in your life or maybe something done for you? It could be a card, it could be anything. Do you think something tangible can be helpful here?

[00:16:08] Deb Krier: I did create a vision board based on all of this, and, you know, took magazines and cut pictures out and things like that.

[00:16:17] Deb Krier: And, you know, some of the things say, "I will be healthy," you know, "I am in charge," things like that. And I think it just—it’s kind of, you know, one of those things where it does help reinforce that, you know. And Alan talks about, you know, maybe you do that, or maybe you put little stickies on your mirror.

[00:16:34] Deb Krier: You know, we’ve all seen lots of things like that, where people have said, you know, for affirmations, "Put it on your mirror so that you see it first thing in the morning," you know, whatever it is. To kind of remind yourself on those days where you’re thinking, "Today is not a fun day."

[00:16:50] Dr. Brad Miller: Yeah.

[00:16:50] Deb Krier: But you can, you know, you can get forward and, or, you know, go forward and get out of it.

[00:16:55] Dr. Brad Miller: Yeah. And you mentioned there kind of the—one of the second things that Klein talks about, you know, which is affirmations, which is kind of, you know, not kind of—it is either saying out loud or reading or someone affirming something to be better. And that’s one of the things that I like to teach in my own. Things I like to teach is to develop—I call it your cancer coping credo.

[00:17:22] Dr. Brad Miller: You know, your statement of faith, your statement of life that says, you know, in my case, I have this posted in my office here, and I just say that cancer will not define me. I will be refined by it, and I will live a full and complete life, however long I live. And so, that’s—and I say that or read that virtually every day.

[00:17:38] Dr. Brad Miller: And I think it’s important to have an affirmation, and you mentioned post-it notes and things like that. Is there anything that you have, a particular affirmation that is important to you? Either a saying or a phrase that might be important to you?

[00:17:52] Deb Krier: You know, so we do have a Facebook group for Trying Not to Die dot live.

[00:17:57] Deb Krier: And I have daily affirmations that are posted every day. And so today, as we’re recording this, my daily affirmation says, "I will continue showing gratitude to my body." You know, and it’s interesting the feedback that I get from people when these are posted, you know. And there’s a different one for every day.

[00:18:16] Deb Krier: And I’ll be honest, I start over, you know. They recycle. The one that’s on the first day of the month will always be on the first day of the month, but there are—you know, I really like them because, you know, things like, "I visualize myself free from illness." "I move my body, and I strengthen it."

[00:18:33] Deb Krier: "I am free from pain." You know, and sometimes when I see these, I think, "Well, not today." But tomorrow is another day. You know, I am here in the South, so as Scarlett would say, "Tomorrow is another day."

[00:18:48] Dr. Brad Miller: I love it. Love it. Well, you know, I think it’s so important that we have those types of things. And then that leads us—you know, these three exercises he talks about kind of overlap some, but visualization is the third one.

[00:19:05] Dr. Brad Miller: You know, treasure mapping is the first one, affirmations is the second, and visualization is the third one. And certainly, you mentioned, you know, about your visualization of being a little 97-year-old—well, not grandma—little 97-year-old woman who has a lot, a lot to live for even then.

[00:19:23] Dr. Brad Miller: So—and that’s a great visualization. In my case, my visualization was very, very vivid. And I think if you can make your visualization vivid, it can be the case that—and I’ve shared about it before, but I was thinking about it recently because I will be spending some time with my two granddaughters pretty soon.

[00:19:44] Dr. Brad Miller: My two granddaughters—when I was diagnosed with cancer, it was right around Christmas time of 2022. And anyhow, we got together with our two granddaughters at that time, who were ages four and two, at a McDonald’s restaurant, and just did the grandpa and grandma thing with our granddaughters a couple days after Christmas, after I’d been diagnosed.

[00:20:06] Dr. Brad Miller: With pretty serious cancer. And so, my little granddaughters had no clue, no idea about what was the drama going on with me and their grandmother and, you know, the kind of things going on in our heads. They’re just having fun, you know—they’re having Happy Meals, and they’re playing in the, you know, the ball pit and all that kind of stuff, having a great, great time.

[00:20:26] Dr. Brad Miller: No idea. But I could look at them, Deb, as they were sitting there, you know, playing with their little toys and eating their, you know, chicken nuggets and things. I could try to visualize them not as little girls of four and two but as young women of, like, 21 and 19.

[00:20:45] Dr. Brad Miller: And I thought, you know, I’m gonna do whatever I can to see them that way, right? So I want to see them in that light. So I think visualization, however we do it—and there are different ways of doing this, you know, you can get quiet and breathe deep. There are breathing exercises, there’s meditative practices, journaling, all kinds of things.

[00:21:04] Dr. Brad Miller: But I do think visualization is an important thing that we can do. Can you say more about that from your perspective?

[00:21:11] Deb Krier: You know, to me, it’s kind of like goal setting. And I think of it from a business perspective.

[00:21:18] Deb Krier: Where, you know, you might say, "I want to be successful." Well, that’s really hard to define. And so your goal needs to be, "I will make X number of dollars by X date," you know? Because if you don’t set those specific goals and visualizations, how do you know when you get there, you know? And so, yeah, I mean, you were very specific with your granddaughters. You wanted to see them at a certain age.

[00:21:47] Deb Krier: And I think that’s one of the things that so many people do—they visualize very specifically. They visualize seeing somebody graduate from high school, from college. They visualize holding grandchildren, you know, all of those things. And that does give you something to be going towards. You know, it’s kind of like the GPS on our car, right?

[00:22:08] Deb Krier: You know, or on our phones—we don’t just get in and say, "Take us somewhere." We have to tell it where to take us before it can actually go. Now, you can be a little general, but you’ve got to give it some parameters because if you don’t, how do you know when you get there?

[00:22:25] Dr. Brad Miller: Yeah, I think that’s well said. And the more vivid and more specific you can make it, at least from my perspective, I think that helps us to have something really—it kind of goes back a little bit to the treasure mapping thing.

[00:22:36] Dr. Brad Miller: It gives us something tangible to go for, you know, something really specific.

[00:22:41] Deb Krier: You know, as a minister, you know, a perfect thing to visualize would be, you know, visualizing serving as the officiant at your granddaughter’s wedding.

[00:22:57] Deb Krier: Or, you know, the baptism of the great-grandchildren.

[00:22:57] Deb Krier: All of those things. I mean, those are very specific things that you can be aiming toward.

[00:23:03] Dr. Brad Miller: I will say this, just—you happen to mention that. And I was able to baptize my youngest grandchild. I have two grandchildren, and right now, they are, uh, seven and five—seven—or almost seven, and, uh, four is what they are right now, I guess. I should remember; I was having trouble with my daughter. But I know very specifically, after I was diagnosed with cancer, that I really, really wanted to have the baptism of my youngest granddaughter.

[00:23:24] Dr. Brad Miller: And so, we were able to do that because that was important to me, and it became important to my daughter and her husband.

[00:23:43] Dr. Brad Miller: And, uh, and you’re right—to have those moments to look forward to. And I guess I just—you know, let’s just be clear with our Lifter Uppers, our audience: Hey, find your own thing, right? Find whatever it is for you. Find your treasure map. Try and have your story. Have something big to look forward to.

[00:24:03] Dr. Brad Miller: Affirm that you’ve got some good things in your life, and then visualize where you want to go. And we’re here to help, aren’t we? We’re here to help here in our community.

[00:24:11] Deb Krier: We are. You know, and we want to emphasize, too, it doesn’t have to be something years in the future. Maybe it’s tomorrow, you know. And so, just as long as we’re kind of forward thinking and forward looking.

[00:24:26] Dr. Brad Miller: Well, it just is not some case—I know in some for some folks—I’ll include even myself in this—because sometimes that visualization is how to, after surgery, get out of bed and take some steps to the bathroom, you know, whatever, you know—that’s—you’ve got to visualize just that there. So, some great things here.

[00:24:44] Dr. Brad Miller: I appreciate you sharing here, Deb. You always have some great stories to tell. I love that about you—you always have some great stories to tell. And I think it’s helpful to our audience as we build our community here at cancerandcomedy.com. Thank you.

[00:24:57] Deb Krier: I love it. I love it. Well, part of stories are jokes. And as I said, it’s now time for another one of Dr. Brad’s Bad Jokes of the Day.