Get Your Hands Back on the Controls: All-In August #3

Good morning, my friend. Dr. Lee Warren here with you. It is Self-Brain Surgery

Saturday, and we're on the third day of all in August for 2024.

I'm so grateful and excited to be here with you. I have one short little thought

for you today. I hope you're taking a Sabbath. I hope you have some time off.

I hope you're not doing a tremendous amount of work today so you can get your

mind reset, get your body reset, do some physical exercise, engage in some creativity

and wonder and awe of the universe and the beautiful nature around you.

I hope you have some time to decompress and take a minute.

But it's all in August. We've got to stop looking back at then.

We have to stop daydreaming about when.

We have to live now, because now is when we have, friend.

No matter what you're going through, the only thing you can control is what

you do in the next breath, the next moment, the next minute, the next hour.

You can control how you use your mind to tell your brain who's boss and decide

that you're not going to live in fear anymore.

You're not going to be stuck anymore, that you are ready to go all in and what

got you here won't get you there.

If there is the place that your heart is calling you, where your Lord is calling

you, where your life is calling you, you're supposed to be there. It's time to go all in.

Before we go on, I would love it if you would do me the one favor.

It sounds like a three-part favor, but it's one favor, really.

We want to help other people find We want to find out about all in August.

We want to get other people on our team, in our community.

We want to put our arms around folks that are hurting or stuck or suffering

in some way or have found themselves bumping into the glass ceiling of their own life.

We want to gather community and gather momentum and really try to break through

and have a huge group of people all around the world pulling for each other,

the great cloud of witnesses helping each other.

So share this episode with a friend. I think the most effective way to do that

would be to copy the link and text it to somebody you love and say,

hey, I'm doing this. I'm going all in.

I'm ready to make a change. I want you to do it with me. Send it to 10 friends.

Build a little group. Get a little listening group together,

a workout group, a small group, a group of people who text message each other

every day and say, hey, I'm all in.

I'm going to do self-brains for you. We're going to change our minds and change

our lives. So share it with your friends, okay?

Share it with your family. Share it with your kids, with your grandkids.

Share it with your parents.

Share it with somebody who doesn't know what they believe or somebody who's

gone through something hard and has lost their faith at their feet.

Share it, okay? Share it today. Stop what you're doing right now and say,

hey, I'm about to listen to this. I'd love it if you'd listen to it with me.

I'd love to know that you're out there listening to this. We're getting oriented

in the same direction. We're drawing our bow strings back.

We're getting ready to launch ourselves into all in August. It's only day three, okay?

You're not behind. It's time to get after it. It's time to go. So share it.

Second thing, if you could sign

up for my newsletter, the website is drleewarren, D-R-L-E-E-W-A-R-E-N,

drleewarren.substack, S-U-B-S-T-A-C-K, drleewarren.substack.com.

Drleewarren.substack.com The newsletter is free.

I don't really know why I call it a newsletter. We're doing the School of Self-Brain

Surgery here every week.

You're getting a specific type of self-brain surgery procedure that you can do.

We usually write a contemplation phase where we go through the science and the

philosophy and the understanding of what it is that we're trying to get after.

We did a whole series on anxiety recently. And then after we do the contemplate

phase, then we go to the operate phase.

Because at some point, you got to stop thinking about the surgery you need to

perform. You need to pick up the scalpel and you need to get it done.

So we contemplate, we learn, and then we put it into action.

So we give mindset and then we do tactics. And I'm going to go really deep with

you, very specific things you can do to start getting traction on your own life.

So the newsletter is the place where that gets done every Sunday since 2014.

I haven't missed a week of giving people self-brain surgery,

giving people hope and power of something you can do to make things different.

To help you remember you're fearfully and wonderfully made. You are designed to heal.

You're not designed to be stuck. Your brain will listen to your mind if you

remind it who's boss. and you can get better, friend. You can.

Start with the newsletter, drleewarren.substack.com and share it with your friends.

I have a paid subscriber program.

The paid subscribers get access to the whole back archive and they get an episode,

a bonus episode almost every week. It's going to be every week going forward.

And they're starting soon. We're going to have some live Q&A Zoom type calls

with the paid subscribers.

We'll have some face-to-face time where I can teach you more.

We can go deeper. if you share the newsletter with three of your friends and

they sign up you can get some free time.

All access as a paid subscriber without having to pay for it.

That's how you can help me spread the word and spread the mission.

So you get into Substack, you sign up for the newsletter, you share it with your friends.

If they sign up too, you'll get bonus time as a paid subscriber without having to spend any money.

So you're spending capital, you're spending your credibility with your friends

to say, hey, this is valuable.

It's going to help get after it with me.

And the third thing, if you haven't read my book, Hope is the First Dose,

that's the curriculum it's the foundation for

how we go through something hard land on

our feet somehow fight through the muck and the

pain and the darkness of grief and find a treatment plan for going forward when

things hurt it's how we break through when things get hard when we face inertia

when life is heavy or when it's just frustrating when it's trauma or tragedy

or massive things or sometimes it's just drama and we're just tired of being

so tired hope is the first dose is the curriculum.

It's the treatment plan. It's the beginning of how you can get that done.

And it's our story of what we did after we lost our son, Mitch,

and how we found our way again.

And it'll help you. If you know somebody who's hurting, somebody who's frustrated,

somebody who's chronically stuck for whatever reason, hope is the first dose

will help. I promise. So check it out. So those are the three things.

Share this podcast, sign up for the newsletter, share that with your friends,

and read hope is the first dose. That's the beginning.

That's the place to start. Now it's all in August. And today I have one little

thought exercise for you and we're going to get after it right now.

Okay, friend, I want you to imagine something. I want you to get in your mind with me.

Just get in your mind and see yourself driving a car. Okay. You're driving down the road.

It's dark. It's raining. The road is twisty and turning. You're up in the mountains somewhere.

There's not a guardrail on the side of the road. Okay.

And all of a sudden, you come around a corner and the road is washed out and

you hit this huge pothole and

the crash is so violent that it rips your hands off the steering wheel.

It throws you back in your seat and the car is lurched sideways and it's out of your control.

And you go off the cliff and you crash your car.

Now imagine that. If anybody had done a post-crash analysis,

they would have said, it's not her fault.

It wasn't his fault. He hit a big hole. That hole wasn't visible.

There wasn't a sign that said that hole was coming. It was just a massive thing

in the middle of the road.

It's not their fault that they drove into it.

And it was so violent and so devastating that it threw their hands off the steering

wheel, and there was no way they could control where that car went,

and it went off the mountain. And yeah, that's a tragedy. It's devastating.

It was a terrible accident, but it wasn't their fault.

Their hands got knocked off the steering wheel. There's nothing they could have

done to prevent that crash from happening.

My friend, I want you to realize that there's some of the massive things that happen in our lives.

You find out you have glioblastoma, your husband drops dead of a heart attack

in front of you. That happened to one of our friends.

Your child dies and you get that phone call. That wasn't your fault, okay?

You hit a massive pothole in your life and it threw your hands off the steering

wheel and your life went off the rails, okay?

That wasn't your fault. You didn't have any control over that.

So this idea that you should feel ashamed of being sad or being struck and stricken

by grief, or you should be somehow able to control yourself differently.

That, that idea isn't true. This wasn't your fault. Okay.

If your life today is different than it was before you hit that massive pothole

and you feel like you've been crashed off the cliff and you can't get your way back and all of that,

you need to recognize that the moment you hit that pothole and your car veered

off the cliff, that wasn't your fault.

Okay it wasn't your fault you couldn't

have avoided that and sometimes things happen that are so devastating and so

hard that they throw us off they knock our hands off the steering wheel and

we can't control what happens next okay nobody blames you for that you shouldn't

blame yourself for it either but now let's imagine a different scenario okay.

Let's imagine that you're driving a steamroller, okay, really slow-moving,

big, massive steamroller down a flat road,

okay, a flat road, and the road is wide, and there are huge shoulders,

and there's lots of room, and there's even guardrails up on the side.

There's lots of room, okay, and you're driving the steamroller along,

and you hit a pothole in the steamroller, and it's a pretty big piece of equipment.

And it's a pretty big hole.

So it's, yeah, it jolts you pretty hard and your hands get knocked off the controls,

but your steamroller keeps going. Okay.

It gets through the pothole and your hands are off the control and it starts

to just very slightly turn to the right.

And it takes three or four miles.

Like the steering of the steamroller is such, is so subtly adjusted by

the pothole that the steamroller just slowly drifts

to the right and slowly moves farther off the center line and slowly but surely

approaches the guardrail and slowly but surely finally makes contact with the

guardrail and plows through it and drives off the cliff three or four or five

or ten miles down from the pothole that knocked your hands off the controls.

That pothole was big and it was violent. It was a big deal. And it knocked your

hands off the controls. That wasn't your fault.

But what if somebody was watching that and they said, wow, he got his hands

knocked off the controls, but he had a lot of time to readjust.

He had a tremendous opportunity to change the direction of the steamroller back onto the road.

He just sat there with his hands in his lap after that massive pothole.

And he watched his steamroller drive off the cliff miles down the road from

when the actual trauma happened, from when the actual event occurred.

And it seems to the observer like there was plenty of time for the driver,

for you, to have readjusted, to have found a way to overcome that pothole.

The pothole wasn't your fault. The steamroller hitting the hole wasn't your

fault. You didn't see it was dark. Nobody marked it. Wasn't your fault.

But it didn't immediately knock you off the cliff.

You just never put your hands back on the steering wheel.

You never resumed control. You never stepped back into your role as the commander

of the ship driving your life. You never said, I'm going to pilot this thing.

Yeah, it's been knocked off course, but I'm going to steer it back on course.

I'm going to do whatever I need to do. I've got several miles at this vector

before this thing is going to go off the cliff.

I'm going to get on my cell phone and Google how to steer.

I'm going to research. I'm going to take a course. I'm going to call somebody

who's been through this before.

I'm going to find out how to re-engage the controls of this thing,

and I'm going to get it back on the road.

Now, just those two scenarios. Imagine your trauma, your tragedy,

your massive thing, your frustration, your business frustration,

your whatever it is, has knocked you off course.

And sometimes it's violent and sometimes it's devastating and sometimes you

crash off the road immediately.

You just can't survive it. It's just too much. It wrecked you. Okay.

It just wipes you out and you can't get back up and nobody blames you for that. Okay.

But the truth is, unless you died, unless you died after that massive thing,

we had a friend who lost a child that they waited for years for their child

to have a heart transplant.

They finally got a heart transplant and didn't survive the operation.

We were all there together in the waiting room in this ICU. The heart surgeon

came out. There was so much hope. They'd been waiting for years for the heart.

And they got the heart. And then the operation didn't go well.

And the heart never started. And the child died.

And our friend just broke.

And our friend died, like physically

died, a short while after that event occurred of a broken heart.

Just gave up. Just sat down in their life and never recovered.

It was too devastating. It was too much. And everybody understood.

They just had their heart broken. And sometimes that happens. Okay.

But let's just say for the sake of argument that your massive thing happened

and you didn't die. Okay. You didn't die.

And now you're here sometime later, maybe it's a month, maybe it's six months,

maybe it's 10 years, maybe it's 30 years after this massive thing has happened.

And you just, for the first time are realizing, because you're hearing me say

it, that you never Never put your hands back on the steering wheel of your own life.

That you've been veering towards the cliff, you've been driving off the edge

ever since that massive thing happened, ever since you hit that pothole,

ever since the violence of the crash knocked your hands off the wheel,

you have never regained control.

You've never sat back down and said, I am going to decide today that I'm going

to regain control of this ship.

Well, friend, that's what all in August is for, okay?

All in August is saying, I had my hands knocked off the steering wheel.

I haven't been steering my own life. I'm at some place at some point where things

haven't been working and I'm ready for it to get back on the road.

I'm tired of letting my life be defined by this thing that happened,

by the pothole having the massive thing, the trauma, the tragedy,

the drama, the stress, the strain,

the alcoholism, the habits, whatever it is that has happened in response to

me losing control of my own life or just not deciding to steer it in a particular

direction, that I realize now that I can't keep going this direction.

I am not driving in the right way for me, for where I've been called to,

for what my purpose is, for the people who depend on me, for those around me,

for the people behind me who are also on the same road, who I could go back

and warn, hey, don't let this knock you off course.

I could become a person who's holding this sign that says, hey,

massive things are coming.

And when they do, there's a way to stay on the road, okay?

You don't have to crash off into the abyss. There's a way to get it back.

And I think about Dana Gage.

There's a woman who listens to this podcast. Shout out to Dana if you're listening.

And she had a son who drowned.

And that could have been the devastating event. But instead,

she got passionate about water safety.

She started doing research and she found out that there's a lot of people who

drown because they're unaware of some of the dangers of what open water swimming is about.

There's a lot of people who drown because they don't realize how dangerous it

is to dive into water you can't see the bottom of and all that sort of thing.

And she got passionate about this and she is making a huge difference in saving

lives and honoring her son and raising awareness about the dangers of drowning.

And she's making a difference. She's holding up the sign.

But that event, losing her son, could have just knocked her off the street right

away and she could have crashed and burned.

And most of us, nobody would have really blamed her. This devastating thing

happened. It wasn't your fault. And that's the kind of voices you'll hear, friend.

If you're not careful, You'll hear people coming alongside you after your massive

thing and pat you on the back and say, yeah, you're right.

It's just too much. And it's okay. I think about people like Kristen Smedley,

our friend in Philadelphia.

She had two sons born blind. Husband left her. She's a young,

single mom with two blind sons.

That's devastating. She could have just given up and taken some Valium and put

them in schools and just dealt with that.

And her life could have been wrecked by that whole thing. and she could have

been bitter and angry, but instead she got passionate.

When she realized that when her first son was ready to go to kindergarten,

the public schools didn't have any resources for kids who were visually impaired.

They were just expected not to make anything out of themselves.

And Kristen said, no, no, that's not right. Blind kids need to have resources.

Blind kids need to have education.

Blind kids need to have hope. Blind kids need to be taught braille.

They need to understand that they can, they still have a brain.

They still have a mind. They still have a life to live. Maybe they can go to

school and go to college. that can be expected to achieve just like kids who can see.

And she said, no, my sons are not going to go through that and not going to

be abandoned by the state.

And guess what? Her first son was the marshal of his graduating class as the

top graduate of the Pennsylvania State University and led his classmates into graduation.

Her other sons accomplished college graduate disc jockey. Her sons have made

a difference. They're doing great things in the world.

And then she had a third child, a girl who was born with vision.

And she raised that kid to see the possibilities in

the world ahead of her that nothing can limit you and kristen

is making a huge difference around the world she's made a

huge difference best-selling book she's made a movie she's led lots of people

to show them that there is hope even when you can't see literally when you can't

see that she didn't let that pothole knock her off into oblivion i think about

jill and brad sullivan they lost a daughter a teenage daughter

took glioblastoma, devastating brain cancer.

And they could have just been wiped out. That could have knocked them off the

cliff and nobody would have blamed them. Okay.

But instead they said, Hey, we need to make some resources. We're not finding

any resources for grieving couples. We want to fight for our marriages.

We want to learn how to get back on our feet. We want to learn how to minister

to our other kids and how to help other people see hope when they go through such hard things.

So they started this mission, this ministry to grieving people.

They started ministering to other people who are hurting.

Their ministry and their podcast is called While We're Waiting.

They just passed their 3,000th person that attended one of their events.

They're not famous people. They're not people with unlimited resources.

They're just a normal couple who went through something devastating and said,

hey, we're not going to let this knock us off the cliff.

We are going to put our hands back on the steering wheel, and we're going to

use everything in our power to make sure that other people find out that they can keep going too.

My point in telling you these three stories, these are three people who listened to this podcast.

These are three real people from this community of self-brain surgery who said,

I hit a devastating hole in my life and it wasn't my fault.

And it knocked my hands off the controls for a while. And I could have just

driven off the cliff, but I didn't because I had hope because I decided to believe

what God says that I have a plan for you and a purpose for you.

And as long as you're drawing breath, friend, there's a reason for you that you're still here.

Okay. There's a reason that you're still here. And it's not to keep letting

the steamroller slowly veer off the cliff and keep drinking every night and

keep engaging in those numbing behaviors and keep

going until you finally just fall off the cliff at the end of your life and

you never made it back onto the road and everybody just stands around at your funeral and says,

yeah, it's not really their fault that bad thing happened and they were just never the same again.

We all know people like that. I've talked about a woman in Hope is the First

Dose who I knew who had a nephew that almost died 20 years ago and it just messed

her up so bad she got into a support group for grieving people,

bereaved people, even though she hadn't even lost somebody and that became her identity.

Like she was the one that showed up with the donuts every night at the support

group for 20 years after this devastating thing that almost happened in her life.

And she became defined by it. She never evolved through, she never learned how

to process and heal from that scary thing. Yeah, it was devastating. It was terrible.

Somebody almost dying, committing suicide, that's devastating,

but it doesn't have to define the rest of your life.

Okay. It doesn't have to.

And the reason I know it doesn't have to is because I've seen so many other

people who made it through.

One of the ways that we made it through losing our son Mitch is that we saw

that other people could make it through.

My friend Pastor John, my in-laws, Nanny and Tata, Dennis and Patty,

had lost two children and they made it through.

How'd they make it through? They decided that God had a plan for them,

that they had everything they needed for life and godliness that they remembered

the promise of Scripture, that God was on their side, that God was close to

the brokenhearted, that God had a plan and a hope for their future,

and that the things that come along in your life are designed to help you gain

character and resilience and

hope so that you can shine the light back on the path for other people,

that you can help them find the hope and the meaning and the purpose in life

again when life has been really hard. That's the point of it.

I just wanted to bring this to you this morning. It's all in August.

We're on day three. This is when it's going to get hard, okay?

It's going to get hard because when you try to make a change,

there's always resistance. When you try to make a change, there's always inertia,

and it's going to get hard.

There's going to be days when the siren call of the old way that you've been

managing this ever since you hit that pothole says, hey, take your hands off

the wheel. It's not worth it.

It's too hard to steer your life back on track. It's too hard.

Just give up. That's what you're going to hear. You're going to hear it.

Or you just forget that you're trying to make a change and you're going to forget

that you need to be purposeful and disciplined in making these effort to get things back on track.

Okay. And we're going to be here for you, giving you the tools,

showing you the self-brain surgery operations.

But the most important thing is that you have to realize that no trauma, no event,

no hardship can break your brain in a way that it is irrecoverable because you

have mind down control and you can tell your brain who's boss and you can use

your thinking to connect your creator, your great physician who wants to help you heal.

You can use your thinking to structurally change your brain,

structurally change your body and make things better and more hopeful.

There is a path forward and it starts with changing your mind.

That's why I tell you every day, you can't change your life until you change your mind.

It's all in August, it's time to get your hands back on the steering wheel of

your own life, my friend.

And the good news is you can start today.