Become Untouchable (Frontal Lobe Friday)

Good morning, my friend. It's Dr. Lee Warren.

I'm so excited to be here with you on Frontal Lobe Friday, and we have a flashback episode for you.

I'm going to give you back an incredible episode about resilience and suffering

and a new way to shift your perspective that we did a couple of months ago for

the purpose of finishing Season 10 on a note where your mind is focused on where I want you to be.

We're going to have a final episode of Season 10 tomorrow for Self-Brain Surgery

Saturday. It'll be recorded on video and audio.

And then a whole new format for Season 11 that I'll be talking to you more about.

I'm so excited about all the things we have coming up. I think it's going to

make a difference for you and move the needle. But before we do any of that,

we've got to get into Frontal Lobe Friday.

So here is Lisa. Hey, Lisa. Hey, Lee.

It's good to see you today. It's good to see you too. Will you help me with something?

Of course. I can't remember what day it is. It's Frontal Lobe Friday.

Hey, friend, it's Frontal Lobe Friday. And I'm Dr. Lee Warren.

I'm so excited to be with you today.

Frontal Lobe Friday is the day of the week where we kind of focus on our ability

to selectively attend to one thing and not another thing.

It's our ability to switch from thinking about this to think about that.

And that's a gift that God gave humans that he didn't give to anything else that he created.

No other creature in all of creation has the gift of selective attention.

And that's because he made us in his image and we have the ability to think

about one thing and not another thing.

And that's the exact idea behind frontal lobe Friday is like the idea that we

can think about one thing and not another thing.

And when you do that, you're taking command of processes that your creator put

in place so you can do self brain circle. You can literally use your mind.

To make structural changes in your brain, to make your brain better.

And as we've talked about many times before, the Bible says that if you're saved,

if you have a relationship with Jesus, that you've been transformed.

You have a new mind, and you have the mind of Christ.

The problem is we often live as if our memories and feelings and experiences

and labels and stories and other people have given us a mind that we can't change.

And even though we have the mind of Christ, we're living like we don't.

And so part of my mission here is to help you move the needle where you live

closer to how your brain and your mind are designed to function so that you

can break free of the chains and limits that are holding you back.

Stories, labels, past experiences, traumas, tragedies, and massive things,

and give you the hope that you really can change your mind and you really can

change your life. That's what Frontal Lobe Friday is all about.

I'm so grateful that you're here today. day. I have incredible news to share with you today.

We're going to get into that in just a minute. I'm going to address one letter

that I got from a listener, and we're going to talk one more time just a little

bit about perspective and perception and how those two things are related,

but they're different, and how important it is to be able to shift from one to the other.

But before we do any of that today, my friend, here on Front of Lobe Friday, I have a question.

Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes, there's only one rule.

You have You have to change your mind first. And my friend, there's a place

where the neuroscience of how your mind works smashes together with faith and

everything starts to make sense.

Are you ready to change your life? Well, this is the place. Self-Brain Surgery School.

I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep into how we're wired.

Take control of our thinking and find real hope. This is where we learn to become

healthier, feel better, and be happier.

This is where we leave the past behind and transform our minds.

This is where we start today. Are you ready? This is your podcast.

This is your place. This is your time, my friend. Let's get after it.

Music.

All right, you ready to get after it? And here we go. It's Frontal Lobe Friday,

my friend, and we are going to change our minds about one thing today.

A woman named Becky wrote in about how much she enjoys the podcast.

She heard us first on Joni Table Talk, and she was journaling as she listened

to the podcast, and she heard me talk about the four different type of trauma

responses that I described in my book, Hope is the First Dose.

And in Hope is the First Dose, of course, we talked about these four different

patterns that I saw as I observed people with glioblastoma and families going

through difficult things and people who had lost loved ones.

And then even in our family after we lost Mitch, I noticed that there's kind

of four patterns that people tend to fall into.

And one of them is what we call crashers, these people that would have seemed

like they had a pretty solid faith.

And then something bad happens and their faith just sort of plummets.

They don't know what they believe. They get really mad at God or they give up

on him altogether and they just plummet.

And what's interesting about the crashers is even if the medical problem gets resolved,

even if the issue that they're facing works out and they don't die or the person

doesn't leave or the marriage comes back together, those people sometimes are

bitter and wrecked and their quality of life has gone, their peace of mind,

their faith, their hope.

All those things are dashed and they end up really miserable and sorrowful and

just not okay. hey, they're stuck for the rest of their lives,

even if the problem that they were concerned about seems to work out.

And we all know this person, somebody, something happened 20 years ago,

somebody died or they had a head injury or something happened and you meet them

on the street today and you say, hey, what's going on?

And they say, well, I'm just really still struggling with losing my mom 30 years ago.

The people that just seem to be stuck and those are the crashers.

And then there's a group that we call climbers, really surprising people that seem down and out.

They don't seem like they have anything to believe in, or nobody loves them,

or they don't know about God.

And then something hard happens, and that hard thing turns out to be the thing

that switches their perspective, and they end up discovering faith and discovering

peace and hope and a relationship with the Lord and how important community is.

And this story about a guy named Joey in my book I've seen in the interview

is the prototypical climber that you can go and read if you haven't heard this before.

But the climbers are surprising because they start out with nothing,

and then hardship turns out to motivate them to turn their lives around.

Joey told me during the year that he was dying from his glioblastoma that he

had met the Lord and fallen in love and reconnected with his family,

and he ended up telling me that his best year of his entire life was the last

year of his life while he was dying, and he knew he was dying.

So, it's a surprising contrast between crashers and climbers.

And then most of us are what we call dippers.

They're people that have things pretty solid. We know what we believe.

We have a faith. And then something hard happens. And for a while,

we're confused and we're sort of wrecked and we're not sure where we are.

But we land on something solid. We went through that prehab process.

We have our hearts and minds full of scriptural promises and knowledge of who we are.

We've got a good community of people around us. and we find our ability to plant

our feet on something solid so we don't crash all the way down and we can climb

back up to, even if it's a new and sort of redefined type of hope or happiness,

we find our way back again to a life that still has meaning and purpose and

we don't get wiped out by the circumstances of our lives.

Then there's the fourth category, and I call them untouchables in the book,

and hope is the first dose.

These are the people that seem like nothing that happens ever destroys their

faith. Nothing ever really stumbles them.

Nothing really ever trips them up. They seem to be able to kind of manage through

whatever happens and hold on to their faith and hold on to their hope and never

seem to be wiped out by anything that happens.

And unfortunately, when I called them untouchables, this lady,

Becky, wrote in, and she said that she had journaled through that part,

and she said, I don't agree with the title untouchable.

I consider it to be closer to unwavering because those of us who remain steadfast are not untouched.

In fact, we're deeply touched and broken in our trauma, but it's your faithfulness,

O Lord, that keeps us from stumbling.

So the idea is that I think the misperception here is Becky thinks that I meant

to say that untouchables don't hurt and that they don't cry and that they're not affected.

And that's not at all what I meant to say. In fact, if you read Hope is the

First Dose, I think you'll see that.

But the idea is that this is how those people are perceived from the outside.

If we look at what those people go through, it looks like they hold up a lot

better than anybody else does.

But that's not to say that life doesn't hurt them, that they're not injured or wounded.

And this is an interesting thing that we have to discuss that I wanted to bring up here today.

On frontal lobe Friday, and that's the idea that you can be devastatingly heard

and solid in your faith and still filled with indescribable joy and hope and

maybe even a type of happiness at the same time.

And that's what faith will do for you. That's the difference between a person

who has an understanding of how science works and how the neuroscience of how

your brain can create sort of feelings that are better,

different ways of thinking and patterns of behavior that will help you overcome

trauma and tragedy and all that.

You can use a science-based approach, a sort of brain-up approach,

and you can actually learn how to process trauma and handle things pretty well.

But untouchables are those people that have the final element. month.

And frankly, dippers and climbers figure it out too,

but untouchables just had it figured out from the beginning that your faith

gives you this superpower of being able to discern that your circumstance and

your hope aren't directly connected to one.

You can go through hard circumstances and it doesn't redefine what you thought your life was about.

It doesn't It doesn't redefine the trajectory of your heart.

And so when I say untouchables, you're right, Becky, maybe unwavering,

you know, unshatterables would have been a different way to look at that.

But what I mean to say is not that they're not touched or hurt by their trauma,

but that they don't waver. They don't crumble.

They don't stumble. They don't fall. And the reason they don't is because they separate.

In fact, I said this very clearly and talked about it ad nauseum in the book,

that the thing that separates these groups is their ability to untether circumstance

from emotional state, from hope, faith,

peace of mind, all that stuff that's on that y-axis of our quality of life scale if you graphed it out.

And so I want you to understand that the difference between a crasher, a climber, and a dipper,

and an untouchable ultimately comes down to how tightly tethered circumstance

is from our emotional life,

quality of life, peace, mind, faith, hope, all that stuff.

Does that make sense? So it's a perspective shift. We've been talking this week

all about perception and perspective.

Now, if you look up the definition for perspective and perception,

it almost seems a little opposite of how I'm using it, because perspective has

to do with the way that you're looking at something at a particular time, right?

Perception is the things that you're sensing, the things that you're feeling,

the things that are out there in the environment that are bringing in.

But I want you to understand when I'm trying to parse out here is that perception

is an in-the-moment type of thing that happens based on the filters and history

and past and relationships and mindset and genetics and everything else that you have.

The way that you perceive the things around you is tied up in all that stuff.

Of. And perspective is the particular way that you're looking at things in this moment.

And the thing about perspective is you can shift it. If you can mentally break

in your mind that I'm seeing what I'm seeing here with the left side of my brain,

I'm focusing on an object or a thing, or I'm turning this into a two-dimensional situation.

And I want to rather shift that. I want to turn my perspective a little bit.

If you ever watched golf, I don't know if if you've ever watched golf on television,

but yesterday we were, Tata's a big golf fan.

We were watching the Masters tournament and you can watch these golfers when

they get the ball up on the green and they're trying to figure out how to hit a putt.

They walk around the hole a long time. They look at that putt from multiple angles.

They stand over the ball. They stand behind the ball. They walk around and look

at it from behind the cup.

They look at it from the right side and the left side.

They get off the green and look at it. They change perspectives multiple times

before they decide which way that they're going to hit that putt. Why do they do that?

Because adding multiple perspectives rounds out your thought process.

It rounds out your ability to perceive what's happening and it changes your

perception because it's not just like, holy cow, that's a really long putt.

I'll never be able to make that. I missed the last time I tried to hit a putt like this.

Look at that green. It's horribly sloped. And when I hit this ball,

it's going to roll off into the pond and look at the five guys before me hit their ball in the pond.

That's what's going to happen to me. Those are perceptions. They're based on

experiences and feelings and all kinds of things that aren't necessarily objective.

We talked yesterday about trying to divide the subjective, squishy things from

the objective, data-driven things.

And not to say that we live our lives in this objective, data-driven,

rational place and we can't ever have emotion or feeling. That's not what I'm saying at all.

I'm just saying we need to be able to operate where both of those things are

important and we make decisions based on things that are true.

And then when we finally hit the ball, when we finally take action,

we stop contemplating and start operating,

we're doing it from a perspective that we've built out of looking around at the whole picture,

using that right half of our brain to add a lot of context and nuance to the

situation so that we can then make an informed decision and not just an emotional one.

We can get closer to the truth that way.

Does that make sense? So yeah, untouchable is this idea that you've got an ability

in your mind to separate circumstance from your emotional state, your hope, happiness,

peace of mind, joy, all that stuff is not tied directly to the circumstance

that you're in right now.

And that's the superpower that gives us this ability to become more untouchable.

Okay, does that make sense? Okay, now, Pete Gregg and I were talking yesterday,

and he said something that just was devastatingly simple, but incredibly powerful

and beautiful, and I'll leave you with this today.

He talked about suffering and the things that we go through that are really

hard and how to pray through them, and we had this incredible conversation that

I'll share with you in a few days.

But he basically said the big mindset shift that can turn you around if you're

suffering, if you're plunging, if you're one of those dippers or crashers,

if you're having a hard time holding on during a hard time. Here's the difference.

We want to pray. We always want to pray for a miracle.

We want to pray that God will just airlift us out of the problem,

that God will somehow the plane will show up and we can jump in the plane and

God will fly us out of there. and we'll land at some beautiful Hawaiian island

and everything will be perfect again.

That he will airlift us out, Pete said, of our problems.

But what usually happens, and this is scriptural, but Psalm 34,

18 said God is close to the brokenhearted.

It doesn't say God removes the situation that is breaking your heart and drives

your tears and makes you happy again and makes everything perfect.

That's not what scripture says. Psalm 34, 18 said God is close to the brokenhearted. it.

And I can tell you after losing a son and after being devastated by war and

going through divorce and all the other hard things that I've been through in

my life, that's what usually happens.

God doesn't usually just pull the trigger and all of a sudden you're out of

there and the situation is gone and everything's fine again.

Usually he shows up next to you.

So instead of airlifting you out of the problem, Pete said he parachutes in

and joins you in the problem.

And that's the mindset shift. And we're praying for a miracle.

What we usually get, though, and what we actually need is a colleague,

a person to come alongside us to help us, a medic to show up on the battlefield

at just the right time so we don't bleed out.

And that's what God has promised us, and that's what he does. He shows up.

In the midst of our pain, and walks alongside us, and helps us,

and carries us sometimes, and bandages us, and dries our tears,

and holds our hand, and helps us in those moments.

And then he has promised us, hey, you're in the middle of this fight right now,

but I've already won the war.

And there is a deliverance underway. There is a pathway, a process that's happening

that's going to result in all those Psalm 103 promises coming true. Remember Psalm 103.

This is a great place to start your prayer in the daytime, in the morning,

in your quiet time. It's a great place to start.

I look at the pictures of Jesus in my office. There's three of them.

One's a big, I guess it's four by six painting that Lisa bought of Jesus.

And he's walking away. He's looking over his shoulder, kind of like beckoning us to follow him.

And you can see that there's a nail hole still in his right hand.

So he's walking away, resurrected, but he still has his wounds.

Another picture is Jesus, this Akiani picture of the Prince of Peace,

where he's piercing, looking right in your eyes.

And I'll look at him sometimes, and I can't really bear his gaze very long because it's piercing.

When you look at him, the Prince of Peace, and you try to stand there,

you've got to start confessing, and you've got to start getting real with who

you are if you're going to look at him for very long. And I have another picture

that shows Jesus laughing.

My friend Jeff Nelson gave me 20 years ago.

And it's just so kind and loving. You can see his face, and you know he's probably

laughing at little children or something. He's just happy.

And I like to see Jesus being happy because I know it makes him happy when I

come to him with my issues and I'm with him.

But what I remember in these moments is that Jesus doesn't airlift me out of my problems.

He didn't even airlift himself out of his own problems. He still has his wounds.

He parachutes in to join us on the battlefield.

But he's in the middle of a long process that is going to deliver us from our troubles.

And when I pray Psalm 103 in the mornings, I look at these three pictures of

Jesus just to kind of ground me and remember who I'm talking to and who's made

these promises. And the Psalm 103 says, bless the Lord, O my soul,

let all that is within me bless his holy name.

Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all his benefits. He forgives all my sins.

He heals all my diseases. Now, understand, he's not going to necessarily come

down and take the tumor off of your brain.

He's not necessarily going to come down and fix your colon cancer.

He's not necessarily going to come down and touch your hands and make your rheumatoid

arthritis go away. But he has prepared a new body and a resurrected life and

a disease-free state for you. And that is coming.

It's coming. He's made a promise to you. He forgives your sins. He heals your diseases.

He redeems your life from the pit. He crowns you with love and compassion.

He satisfies your desires with good things so that your youth is restored like the eagle.

Those promises are going to come true for you. Okay? They're going to.

The matter is how they come true and when they come true and how you hold on

in the interim while we're in this already and not yet state that Christians live in.

That's why we have this hope that's unbelievable and hard to imagine for people

that don't have that hope.

That's why there's such a tension between the secular worldview and the Christian

worldview, is they think you're supposed to do everything you can to make yourself

feel good and be happy right now.

And we say, no, happiness isn't about the things that you have in your life.

Happiness is a relationship with the one person who can actually help you in this life.

And that's what creates this untouchability. You see, Becky, untouchable.

The reason I chose that word is that the Hebrew word for happy that shows up

all through the Old Testament is asher, and it doesn't mean blessedness.

It doesn't mean this sort of joyous state that we've created,

this word picture that we've created in Christendom.

It means happy, and the word that shows up in the Beatitudes is makarios,

and makarios is best translated, not blessed, but happy.

But what the difference is, is that the secular worldview has hijacked the word

happy and it's translated that word into turn that word into meaning something

that Jesus didn't mean when he said that he wants us to be happy.

It means nowadays happiness means that we get what we want, that we get the

thing that we feel like is going to make us feel good in the moment.

And that's what happiness means, that everything works out for us,

that our circumstances are good and all that.

That you can look around the world and you can see that people that pursue material

things and sexual pleasure and immediate release of dopamine and all that,

they don't turn out to be very happy for very long. Why?

Because if you pin your hopes on something that you could lose or that can decay

or be taken from you over time or on another person that might die or change

their mind about you or on money that might change or become less valuable because

of inflation or somebody might might steal it from you, or you might lose it in a bad investment.

If you pin your hopes on something temporal, transient, temporary,

you can find your hope dashed when the things you think you knew turn out not to be true anymore.

And that's not what Jesus means at all in the Beatitudes when he said,

blessed are those that actually should be translated, happy are those.

Because makarios means happy, but what happiness really means in God's economy

is this inability to be touched or fazed or destroyed by circumstance.

Because you've got your hopes pinned on something that can't be taken from you.

That's this happiness that Christians have, that this ability to have our eyes

up on the hills and we know where our help is coming from.

We know that there's a parachute opening above us and the guy who can actually

help us is about to land next to us because the Lord is close to the broken hearted.

That's the perspective shift that's going to change you from being trapped in

your perceptions and only able to look at this problem or this issue one way,

being able to change your position a little bit and look at it a different way

and know how you're going to hit that putt and be confident that it's going to go in the hole.

Okay. That's what I wanted to give you today. This little perspective shift,

this final episode about perception and perspective,

and it's all about how you use your frontal lobe, but how you use your frontal

lobe was given to you by your great physician creator who put that frontal lobe

in place so that you could use your

mind to direct its ability to shift your perception and shift your perspective

and not be trapped in this pure two-dimensional left side and not be trapped

in this ethereal context,

nuanced driven right side, but to integrate them and your corpus close them

so that you can actually tie two halves of your brain together so that you can make a good decision.

You can shift your perspective when you need to, and you can find your way to.

To being able to think this and not that and recognize that you have help even

in the midst of your troubles and you have victory that's already been guaranteed.

And that's how you can have hope and peace and yes, even happiness in the midst of your troubles.

That's what perspective and perception does. You shift out of the trap of perception

into the freedom of perspective.

And you do that with your frontal lobe And the good news is, you can start today.

Music.

Get Up by my friend Tommy Walker, available for free free at TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

They are supplying worship resources for worshipers all over the world to worship the Most High God.

And if you're interested in learning more, check out TommyWalkerMinistries.org.

If you need prayer, go to the prayer wall at WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer,

WLeeWarrenMD.com slash prayer, and go to my website and sign up for the newsletter,

Self-Brain Surgery, every Sunday since 2014, helping people in all 50 states

in 60 plus countries around the world. I'm Dr.

Lee Warren, and I'll talk to you soon. Remember, friend, you can't change your

life until you change your mind. And the good news is you can start today.

Music.