Your Body Just Did Something Extraordinary. So Why Are You Trying to Go Back to “Normal”?
Episode 35: Patricia Muir
You’re cleared by your oncologist. Scans are clean. Body is technically ready. So you walk back into your office, your boardroom, your client meeting, and you sit down.
And you don’t recognize yourself.
Not physically. Patricia Muir looked the same. Three decades building her consulting business, at the absolute peak of her career, and breast cancer hit in 2013. She caught it early. She powered through surgery and radiation. She was back at her desk within weeks.
But sitting alone in a boardroom with a client, she froze. “I don’t even know what I’m doing here.” Not because she’d lost her skills. Because something had shifted in her heart, and no one on her medical team had prepared her for that.
Returning to work and returning to performance are two completely different things. Your doctor has cleared you to return. Your employer expects you to perform. And the people around you say some version of “It’s all over now. Let’s get back to work.” As if cancer is a head cold you shook off over the weekend.
It’s never all over for a cancer patient.
So what do you actually do with that gap between “cleared to work” and “thriving again”?
Patricia draws a sharp line between self-confidence and self-trust. Women have been told their entire careers that they just need “a little more confidence.” She thinks that advice is a trap, because it means you’re never enough. Self-trust is different. It’s making small promises to yourself and keeping them. It’s evidence you collect about your own capability, one kept commitment at a time.
Patricia doesn’t think your body failed you. Neither do I. We think your body did something extraordinary by surviving treatment. Stop chasing the old version of yourself and start creating the next one.
Two things you can do right now.
First, stop measuring yourself against your pre-cancer performance. That version of you faced different things. This version handled cancer.
Second, make one small promise to yourself today — something only you will know about — and keep it. Make it the first piece of evidence in your self-trust portfolio.
In this week’s episode, Patricia and I go deep on why the “confidence” advice fails after cancer, the year-long emotional intelligence framework she built for executive women, and what it actually takes to redesign your career instead of trying to rewind it.
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