Welcome to the Own Your Health Podcast.
I'm Cyndi Lynne and I can't wait to
help you step into your health power.
Now, today we're going to talk about maybe
a curious topic, but private versus secret. Why this?
Why now?
Well, this week I've had not once, but twice
people say to me, I feel so guilty because
I'm keeping this diagnosis secret from my family.
Or I feel so bad.
Do you think I have to tell everybody about
this particular event that happened in their health?
And I look at folks like that and we talk
about it and I realize it's coming from the fact
that they don't really identify or understand the difference between
something that is private and something that is secret.
And in our culture, we have kind of
a negative connotation to having a secret.
Now, benign secrets aside, like, I'm making you a
secret dessert for tonight or I know what you're
getting for Christmas, those are kind of benign secrets.
I'm talking about real secrets that can be
harmful or secrets that are intended to keep
information away from people who may need it.
Private is something very different.
Private is when you have information that
others are not entitled to in colloquialism.
It's none of your darn business, right?
So with this podcast, I want to help sort those two
things out for you when it comes to your health.
And first of all, I want to
give you permission to consider your health
and your medical history and information private.
I want to help you figure out who you might
want to share information with, whose business it might be,
and then finally, I'm going to give you a really
super tool to help you communicate what you want to
on the exact level that you want to communicate with.
So let's dive in.
You have permission.
Your health, your body, your experience as you go
through life in your body is very private.
It's very personal, and you are under no obligation
to share all of this with the world.
And this will come as a shock because the
last few years have had this overwhelming impact in
sharing everybody's private information, everybody's what used to be
confidential health information very, very publicly.
And that's become the norm.
And I think that's where a lot of this guilt
about wanting to keep private things private has come from.
So let me give you an example outside of the
health world that might make things a little bit clearer.
So I sit on a couple of different boards, and
one of them I am on, or was on for
quite a number of years was for a school.
And another board member within that community, within that
board, made a statement one night after we were
discussing some upcoming changes to the school.
And the changes weren't all fleshed out yet,
and all the decisions weren't made yet, and
we needed to do some more investigation.
And so at the meeting, I
reminded folks that, you know what?
This is all private.
It's all confidential until the decisions
are made, and it's communicated officially
across the entire school community.
Well, one of the members said very quickly,
well, I have to tell my husband.
I can't keep secrets from my husband.
And I said, well, this isn't a secret.
This is confidential information that
applies to the board specifically.
And when all of the information is finalized,
then it will be shared in the appropriate
format at the appropriate time with the community
at large, which includes your husband.
And she actually separated herself from the
group because she couldn't conceive of holding
confidential, private conversations within a board without
going home and telling her husband.
Now, the alarming part to me was she also worked
for a Fortune 100 company that handled a lot of
intellectual property, a lot of information that was to be
shared only within the confines of that company.
And I really wondered what she was sharing with
her husband with regards to that as well.
So not understanding, it was very clear she
didn't understand anything that she had and knew
she felt compelled to share with her husband.
Otherwise she would be keeping a secret.
And she felt that this was really a big threat
to her marriage if she were to keep secrets.
Now, when it comes to these kind of situations, for most
of you listening, it probably makes a lot of sense.
It was none of her husband's business
what was going on at her company.
It was none of her husband's business
what was going on in the board
meeting, and yet she couldn't separate that.
The same is true.
And I look at what I do on a day to day basis.
I work with clients, and they share a
tremendous amount of personal information with me.
I don't come home and share that information.
My husband is not entitled to that,
or my son is not entitled.
It's none of their business, if you will.
And frankly, I'm sure they have no interest in it.
But that information, that holding private information,
holding confidential information is not the same
as keeping secrets from my family.
And that's where that confusion comes in when we
apply it very often to our health conditions, because
we're like, okay, this is the family,
these are the people I work with,
I can't imagine keeping a secret from them.
Well, it's not a secret.
It's your private information.
And the reason that this is so important
is not because I'm advocating that you don't
tell your husband if you have an illness.
I'm advocating the concept of privacy,
so then that what comes out of that is very
conscious decisions about what to share and with whom.
So if you view all of this as a
big secret and keeping a secret is bad, then
you have to tell everything to everybody.
And that's not the case.
You can choose what you want to share, who you
want to share it with, and also as something that
is considered private, you can ask those that you share
it with to keep your information private as well.
So, as an example, if we go back to
the individual on the board that I was talking
about, this is obviously not someone that I would
want to share private information with, knowing that she
was automatically going to share it with others.
And having the concept of privacy for your own
health, for owning your health, allows you to be
better at vetting who you can share it with.
And I would even go so far as it
allows you to be a better, more compassionate listener
when it comes to other people sharing their information.
And when you think about it, this
is really the basis of strong relationships.
Rather than having secrets that undermine
relationships, having the ability to maintain
private information appropriately is a foundation
for very strong relationships with others.
So let's work from that premise.
You've got the permission, you've decided,
okay, my health decisions, my health
circumstances are my private information.
Now I can stop and I can think about what
I want to share with whom and what the value
of that sharing is. That information becomes more critical in
your thinking and your decision making processes, right?
So when you identify someone who could
be of assistance to you, a healthcare
provider, you may choose to share more.
You may not still choose to share everything, depending
on who the provider is and what you are
looking for them to do for you.
And this is very different than walking into a
situation and just dumping your entire health history.
And I say this again, not because you
should keep secrets from your healthcare provider.
Obviously you want them to have the information they need, but
you don't also want to do a massive health dump in
a very short period of time when you want focus, by
both yourself and your healthcare provider, on what it is you're
looking for and what it is you're asking for.
So that's one section and that's something that
we can talk about more in future podcasts
when we talk about having a very effective
appointment, a very effective interaction with your healthcare
providers, and what comprises those kinds of visits.
For this episode, I want to talk more about managing
your information, or as I like to call it, managing
your PR when it comes to your health.
Now, when I first started this journey, I focused
primarily on folks who are coming out of diagnosis
and/or managing their diagnosis, whatever it may be, cancer
or autoimmune disorders or MS, just a whole variety
of issues that women deal with in particular.
And I would say, okay, how are you managing your PR?
Meaning, how are you sharing your story in a way
that you want to and still maintaining your privacy?
Notice I didn't say secrecy.
I said privacy because we have a right to privacy.
And so I actually created a tool, and this
is the tool that I want to share with
you, and it's called "Life Beyond Diagnosis:
Manage your PR, share your
story, and maintain your privacy".
Okay, five simple steps.
And it's an ebook.
It's absolutely free.
I'll put a link in the show notes so
that you can download it, and it gives a
very specific information about how you can communicate, just
what you choose to communicate, and how you start
to think about who may want or need to
know what information when it comes to your health.
Because unless you're dealing with something specific right
now, it might be hard to think about,
okay, what kind of instance would this be?
Or what kind of circumstances would this be?
So within this guide, I talk about
from the time you would get a
diagnosis, I talk about managing chronic diagnosis.
So if you have something ongoing if
you have ongoing diabetes, for example, or
ongoing treatment for an autoimmune disorder, how
do you communicate with people about that?
How do you let them know what's going on in your life?
Because there's people who care about you or there's
changes that you have going on in your life,
and you may want to provide an explanation or
some insight to people who care about you.
This guide gives you a really thorough
way to think about who needs what
information, who you want to tell what.
It includes very specific examples of drafting
ready responses if you're making changes to
your health, making changes to your diet,
making changes to your activity levels.
And as we know, people, especially those who care about
us, have a lot of opinions about these things.
And so this tool I've created is to
help you communicate and yet still maintain control
and a level of privacy that you want.
So I highly encourage you to check it out.
I highly encourage you to take that step of
having a sense of privacy, having it without any
guilt, and checking into this whole process, checking into
how you feel about sharing information.
So if this still seems to you, like, it's kind
of come out of left field, because I know there's
going to be a huge number of people who are
like, oh my gosh, this is what's going on.
This is what's happening.
And I know that what happens in my office and
the things that I hear from my clients seem to
be very timely and a huge representation of what's going
on to my listeners and folks in general.
If this is coming out of left field, drop me
a note and I can provide some more clarification.
And if you're saying, oh, yeah, I know exactly
what you're talking about, I am done feeling guilty,
I am done feeling like I'm keeping secrets
when all I really want is some privacy.
Go ahead, grab the show notes.
Download the guide, this ebook and
let me know what you think.
I am looking forward to seeing you next week.
And until then, let's own it.
