You Can Do Hard Things, Part 1

Good morning, my friend. I hope you're doing well. It's Dr. Lee Warren here

with you on Wildcard Wednesday.

I've got a short little thing to share with you this morning,

and then I'm going to give you back an episode from October 16th called Look

Hard at Your Internal Stories.

I'm giving you back this episode because I'm not sure if you've heard it,

and I want to make sure you get this in your mind before we do Theology Thursday tomorrow.

Tomorrow we're going to have a brand new episode called You Can Do Hard Things,

and I need you to have this information about your brain and how you wire yourself

to handle hard times and hard things by going back to here, October 16th episode,

you can do hard things. We're in the hope week of Advent.

It's a time of year when a lot of people are dealing with traumas and tragedies

and massive things of their past.

And I just want to remind you what Advent is all about. Here's what Tish Harrison

Warren said on the podcast a few weeks ago about this time of year and what it's all about.

Here's what she said. we intuitively desire before we run into the holidays

to have some space to reflect on.

You know, before we say, peace on earth, goodwill to men, to be really honest

about how there is not peace on earth, and how there is not goodwill toward men.

And so it's, I mean, ultimately what repentance begins with is just honesty.

And so Advent is a season of being really honest about where we are.

And the great thing is you don't have to just be honest as an individual,

but we can be honest together as a church.

It's not just you that suffer in a broken world, it's we suffer in a broken world together.

That was a powerful reminder. This is the Hope Week of Advent.

And today we're going to go back in time a few weeks and get you the look hard

at your Internal Stories episode so that tomorrow you'll be ready when I tell

you and you'll believe me that you can do hard things.

And before we do any of that, my friend, I just have one question for you.

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

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.

What if I told you that you are a storyteller?

You might say, wait a minute, I'm not a storyteller, I'm a veterinarian,

or I'm a physicist, or I'm a homemaker, I'm an insurance agent, I'm not a storyteller.

You're the guy telling stories. What if I told you though, that you spend an

incredible amount of time telling yourself a set of stories that you have carried

with you your entire life, or since some massive thing occurred,

or since somebody did something to you, that you are telling stories constantly,

You have an internal narrative and so what if on Mind Change Monday,

what if we looked at the internal stories that we're telling ourselves and just

became editors instead of storytellers for just today and we learned how over

time to edit those internal stories to where that they were pointing us towards

something helpful and not something harmful.

What if we could do that? Well today on Mind Change Monday, we're going

to look at the internal stories that we tell ourselves and how to switch from

our role as writers and readers of our own story to being editors of our own

story to be our own agent to advocate for the best outcome to this story that

we can have. We're gonna talk about stories today.

Now this might surprise you. I have an internal story that I tell myself.

I don't consciously think of it but when I'm when I'm self-aware when I pay

attention to the thoughts that float around in my head. I have some things that happen.

Lisa and I had a conversation in Virginia this week when we were traveling for

the 700 Club and I don't know how it came up, but I shared some things with

her that I had never shared with her before.

And one of those stories that I tell myself that I hear in my head is that I

don't measure up, that I'm not enough. I have an incredible.

Sort of lifelong state of an imposter syndrome.

Imposter syndrome is where you feel sort of subconsciously or consciously that

you don't belong in a situation that you're in.

That you're the one in the room that doesn't really belong there.

This happens a lot when people get promoted or people get drafted into professional

sports or people get an opportunity to to somehow become part of something larger

than themselves or a dream that they've chased for a long time and somehow they

don't feel like they should actually belong that they don't feel like they deserve to be there.

Well let me tell you with me I grew up in a very small town and a nobody town

in Oklahoma and I love my hometown but but if you grew up in New York City you

wouldn't think much of my little hometown 2,000 people Broken Bow Oklahoma just

a little community of honest hard-working people.

Now before we go any further I want to remind you about our sponsors for this

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These are two products that Lisa and I use every day.

I mix them up in my athletic greens. It's a nutrient probiotic,

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I'm not a paid affiliate of athletic greens, but I do drink it every day.

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If you're gonna build new synapses and change the way you think and become more

resilient you got to have a good building block.

Because if you build a house out of terrible materials, then you're going to

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the show notes, then it helps us to grow the podcast and all that stuff.

So check out the links in the show notes for Peak and Armor,

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so Peak and Armour helping us to get the podcast out there even farther and

then help you become healthier and feel better and be happier.

Okay. And that's where I came from.

A long line of people who worked as ranchers and pipeliners and cattlemen and

great hard working blue collar people in my line, but somehow I was called into science.

I kept feeling that I was supposed to be a doctor and somehow that became this

identifying thing for me as a young boy that I was supposed to be a doctor and

my dad was a schoolteacher.

Storekeeper, owned a bunch of five and dime stores and then transitioned into

life insurance and insurance.

My mother was a Mary Kay lady who drove a pink Cadillac.

Imagine that, her great success as a Mary Kay agent in this small town and I

was the kid that got dropped off to junior high in the pink Cadillac so I was

kind of notorious for that.

Mom was very successful as a Mary Kay agent, really proud of that.

And my parents just worked hard and did great things, but we were just normal

people from a really small town, right, so then due to our association with our church.

I didn't really have a choice in where I went to college. And I never thought

really much of it because I knew my whole life where exactly where I was gonna go to college.

I was gonna go to Oklahoma Christian College, which then while I was there became

Oklahoma Christian University.

This is a small private Church of Christ school in Oklahoma.

And it turned out to be a great educational environment for me.

But it's a little school that nobody had ever heard of.

If you compare it to Harvard and Yale and Penn State and big schools like that,

right again, Again coming from a small place to another small place and doing

well in an environment where I wasn't surrounded by a whole lot of competition.

I get to medical school and again I go to a state school, the University of

Oklahoma which turned out to be a great medical education.

I did very well there and always along the way somehow found myself at or near

the top of my class, right.

But while doing that I constantly had this sense, yeah I might have made the

A here but Boy, I did it by the skin of my teeth.

And yeah, there were only six other people in that physical chemistry class,

and I just barely made it.

And then I get accepted to medical school, and I'm like, man,

I must've been the last kid they chose.

Like, I don't know how I got in. Like, all these other kids are coming out of,

you know, bigger schools and bigger towns, and they've done better on the MCATs

than I did, and all this stuff.

And I constantly had this idea

running in my head that I don't know how I managed to get to this place.

I don't, somebody's gonna come along and say, oh, we made a mistake,

we weren't supposed to let you in, you're not supposed to be here.

That constantly had that fear.

And I'm just sharing this with you. I'm not trying to make excuses for it.

I'm not trying to say I can understand it.

I'm just telling you the truth. And if it resonates with you,

maybe you've got some stories like this in your heart too.

Well, then I get through medical school and somehow get accepted to neurosurgery

training, which is at the time was the hardest program to get into.

There were 400 applicants for the one spot in Pittsburgh that I got.

And I still, the day I get there, I'm convinced that they made some kind of

terrible mistake and I'm the one who's there that doesn't belong and doesn't deserve to be there.

All the other people, literally everybody else in my training program did undergrad

at some Ivy League school, did med school at some place like USC or Duke or

Stanford or some big known place.

And here I am from Broken Bow High School and Oklahoma Christian University

and the University of Oklahoma College of Medicine. I'm on scholarship from

the Air Force because I really couldn't afford to pay for medical school by myself.

So I'm military from a state school, from a private small Christian school,

from a very small town in a Midwestern state.

I'm a nobody compared to these guys who are Ivy League big-time people, right?

And one of my senior residents who has gone

on to be notorious for some

of the things that he's done in his life used to call me state school like we

would be making rounds and when he was the chief resident he would point me

out and say what do you think state school and what he meant by that was just

to remind me that I was the one in the room who didn't have the pedigree the

Ivy League the blue chip,

the big famous program that I came from.

I was the one from the stable in a manger somewhere, from the small town,

the inauspicious beginning.

And I had that narrative. Now, later in my life, had the opportunity to look

back and say, you know what?

It might've been a gift that God gave me to come from such seemingly humble

beginnings because I constantly had this fear that I wasn't gonna make it,

And that made me work harder.

And if you look underneath the layer of why I thought I wasn't gonna make it,

I've shared with you before, I had this internal narrative of label that I put

on myself of being dumb, that I picked up somewhere that somehow I thought I wasn't very smart.

And yet I continued to succeed. Why? Because I worked so hard.

And the reason I worked so hard is because I was so afraid of failure.

And somehow I thought if I failed, it would prove all those people right.

And so I had this narrative, this story, and that story has carried with me

all the way through even writing books.

I've realized now Lisa and I and my agent were talking about it one time at dinner.

And I was, I realized that I think part of the reason that I chose to write memoir,

besides the fact that I had these stories that were amazing,

you know, impactful stories of my time in the military and my time dealing with

brain tumors and all that,

I had natural gift of storytelling that I

worked really hard to learn how to write so I could share with

you but the reason I chose memoir is because

when you're when you're writing memoir and not self-help you're

coming from a place of hey this happened to me

and maybe you can learn some things from it and when you're writing self-help

or personal development you're positioned as an expert who's telling somebody

else how they can do something and so when you write memoir you're coming from

this humble place of hey here's a story and perhaps you can find some help in it.

When you're right, self-help, you're coming from this place of authority.

And I never felt comfortable with that. And Lisa said, with Hope is the First

Dose, she said, now's the time that you need to teach people how to do these

things that can change their lives.

And that's why, if you read Hope is the First Dose, it starts out and it sounds

kind of like memoir, but right from the first page, I'm telling you,

this is gonna, by the end here, I'm gonna transition and I'm gonna teach you

some stuff that's gonna help you.

And it was very uncomfortable for me to ease myself into that authority space.

But the fact is, when we have something that we know, we can help other people

with it if we come by saying, hey, here's something I know, and I know it will

help you because it helped me.

So I've had to learn. I'm just sharing this with you, friend.

I'm sharing an internal narrative with you that just so you know that you're

not the only one that has a story in their head.

Let me share another example with you. Kurt Thompson, who's a psychiatrist and

a writer of several amazing books, the most recent of which is called The Deepest Place.

He's this incredibly successful, well-known, A-list podcast guest.

Everybody knows Kurt Thompson, and he's an impact player in the mental health space.

Right now, he's got the hot hand, and his books are successful. He's doing very well.

And yet, in the deepest place, he shares this narrative that he's carrying in

his heart, this internal story that he has.

I'm going to read you some of his work here. To put it simply,

a part of me believes that I am unwantable. This is Kurt Thompson.

This part does not just believe he is unwanted by others, which puts the onus on someone else.

Rather, he believes he is unwantable, which in the way I tell the story means

that even if people, especially those whom I deeply desire to be close to, would want to want me,

eventually they would see that there is something inherently malignant about me.

I don't know all the details of exactly what that is or where it came from,

although it's some conflation of my being uninteresting and unattractive.

But once others see this cancer, I believe they will leave. Do you hear what he's saying?

He has an internal story that nobody would really want him if they could actually

see him, that nobody would really want to be his friend,

that no one would really want to love him, that no one would really want to

come along inside him in life if they really knew what he knew about himself

because he believes he is unwantable.

He goes on to say, I worry at a primal level that to allow people to come too

close will inevitably lead to their leaving.

And it is the anticipated leaving that I sense in my abdomen and upper left

chest that feels claustrophobic.

He talks about this sense that he gets where he's sure that people are gonna

leave and abandon him and he starts to get hyper, almost this painful sort of

breathlessness in his chest on the left side and in his abdomen,

and this feeling of anxiety that develops with him.

And he goes on to say, and so without even knowing that I am doing it,

I have developed ways to keep people at the very least at a slight distance.

Better for me never to allow people to become too close so that I can protect

myself from the experience of being left.

You see what he's doing there? He's describing this beautifully. I feel unwantable.

And if I let somebody get close to me, I'll start to get my hopes up that they're

going to love me and then they'll see who I really am and they'll leave me and

that will hurt more than just not being with them in the first place and therefore

I'm gonna keep them away.

I'm gonna sabotage any chance of relationship so that I avoid the inevitable

hurting when they figure out that I'm really unwantable. That's my summation.

He goes on to say this, the result of course is that this part of me remains

alone, alone and in the perpetual state of sensing that I am being left,

which only reinforces that part of my narrative.

That tells me I am unwantable.

And he goes on to say this, this storyline has been like a shard of broken glass

in my soul, and I have developed a number of coping strategies,

idols, if you will, to numb that pain.

Mind you, it did not begin as a storyline.

It did not begin with me consciously thinking as a very young boy that I am unwantable.

As we have seen, first we sense and then we make sense of what we sense.

It began rather as an amalgam of my temperament, my parents' unhealed wounds

that they passed on to me epigenetically, and my attachment patterns that I formed with them.

I want you to get this, friend. We're here on Mind Change Monday.

We've been talking a lot lately about interpersonal neurobiology and directed

neuroplasticity and epigenetics. Those three big words.

And what they mean is we have.

A biological reaction that happens when we get around other people.

Our biology affects theirs. Our electromagnetic fields affects theirs.

Our mood and our state affects the other people around us.

And you know this is true already because if you walk into a room and somebody's

in a really bad mood, you don't have to have them tell you that they're in a

bad mood because you can feel it.

When somebody's anxious or scared, your heart rate goes up. When somebody is

obviously sad or very angry, you immediately develop a change in your emotional state. Why?

Because your state is affected by and affects the state of other people.

That's interpersonal neurobiology, okay?

Epigenetics, as we talked about in my newsletter yesterday, and by the way,

if you're not getting my newsletter, please check out wlewarrenmd.com slash

newsletter, wlewarrenmd.com slash newsletter.

Every Sunday since 2014, shortly after we lost Mitch, I've written this letter

to try to make sense of the things that are going on in life.

And it turns out to be pretty helpful to people all over the world.

So if you're not getting that, check it out and I can send you the one from yesterday.

If you haven't gotten it, send me an email, lee at drleewarren.com and I'll

send you a copy of yesterday's email.

You don't even have to sign up. I'll just send it to you. Then you can see if you like it.

But we talked about epigenetics. and what epigenetics are.

Is this science that understands how it's not about the genes that you inherit

that necessarily determines how you turn out.

Now you inherit genes for eye color and hair color and height and some things

that are hardwired that you can't change. That you're going to have.

But there's a lot, a huge amount, in fact the vast majority of what happens

to us genetically in our life depends on what we turn on and off.

What which genes get switched on and switched off and that happens in real-time

all the time based on our environment our thought life our experiences our relationships

Our diets toxins weather sunlight sleep all that stuff affects what happens to us.

Epigenetically and that turns out to be way more important than the genetic

baseline that we get So what we've also learned is the thing that had the things

that happen to our parents like Kurt Thompson just said,

this idea that the things that happens to our parents in their lives,

when he said that his sense of being unwantable started as an amalgam of his

temperament, his parents' unhealed wounds that they passed on to him epigenetically.

That means, like we learned with the study of Holocaust survivors and Vietnam

veterans who had PTSD, when your parents are afraid of something,

that changes their genetics and those genetic changes get passed on to you.

And you're born being uncomfortable, nervous, excited by, interested in,

or hurt by some things even though you've never experienced them.

And I heard a woman say it well the other day. She said genetics might load

the gun, but our decisions often pull the trigger.

So what she means by that is exactly what TD Jakes said, which is a really well

summarized statement that he said, you are born looking like your parents,

but you die looking like your decisions.

Your decisions determine what happens in your life, not your parents and the

genetics that you inherit to some degree.

Now, obviously, cystic fibrosis and some of those diseases are inherited and

you can't do anything about them.

But whether or not you spend your life suffering at the hands of a story.

Depends on whether you ever take the time to understand that story and start

to unwind it so you can tell your own story And not just live in the shadow of your parents story.

Let that sink in for a second Okay.

Now I want to go to you now We've talked about me then my sense of not being

enough my great sense of imposter syndrome that I've dealt with my whole life

That I still deal with every time I get in front of this microphone say a little

prayer or ask God to arm me to say something that's gonna be helpful to you,

and I'm still shocked that anybody's listening out there.

Honestly, I don't understand why you'd wanna listen to me, but I know I've got

some information that can help you.

At the same time, you have this quantum level disagreement with yourself,

where why would anybody listen to me, and at the same time, man,

I've learned some stuff that can be so helpful to people.

This could save lives, this could make an impact, this could change somebody's

destiny, this could unload the gun of some things that they've inherited.

And I have that constant tension between, should I even bother to do this?

Is anybody listening out there?

Is anybody willing to share this episode with somebody else so we can get the

information out to more people?

Or is this just gonna fade away and does it even matter? Or there's a constant tension.

Why? Because we're always telling ourselves a story.

Now, somebody I love hasn't sort of inhabited this story that she tells herself

that she's too much, that she's too difficult, that she's hard.

And the reason she tells herself that story is because somebody in her past,

or maybe multiple somebodies, said that to her.

You are too difficult. You are too much. I don't even know how to deal with you.

And so even though she's been in a safe emotional state for many years now,

that's where she still falls back when she's frustrated.

Is that the problem is not that the other people aren't behaving well the problem

is that she's just too difficult She's too much.

It's too. She's too hard And that's a story that has limited and hurt her in

many ways in her life Because somebody else put a label on her and as we talked

about a few days ago Labels lack the inherent power to change what's inside

the labeled thing unless you believe them You decide,

you assign the value and the meaning to the label and whether or not you're

gonna live as if that label is true.

And we talked about if you've got a jar full of flour and somebody puts a label

on it that says it's sugar, if you try to cook like that's sugar,

but it's really flour, it's not gonna work out very well for you, right?

It's just not. So you gotta learn to live according to what's actually in the

container and not what the label says.

So, I just want to encourage you today, friend, to spend a little bit of time

looking at, critically looking at your story.

When I write a book, a lot of my time, most of my time is spent in the writing mode, right?

I sit down and I put pen to paper, I don't really use a pen, I use a keyboard.

So I put my hands on the keyboard and I clack out words and I write and I just

start to build a story that's a way to convey information so that it will help you,

believe something true so that you can make some changes in your life, right?

Well in the same way I spend a lot of my internal thought

life writing and rereading and revisiting a story that says I'm not enough I

have an imposter syndrome that somehow everybody's gonna come along and say

yep I knew it that guy's a fake like that he doesn't belong here because I don't

think I belong there, right? I've got that internal story.

But when I write a book, at some point I have to stop writing,

I have to say the end, this is the story, and I have to send it off to my agent, Kathy Helmers.

Had a good conversation on the phone with Kathy last night. Shout out,

Kathy, if you're listening.

And Kathy will read the story and she'll say, you know, that needs a little editing.

There's some places where you're not as clear as you should be.

You're not conveying the truth as well as you could. The story's not landing

as effectively as it could because it needs some editing.

There's some places where you contradicted yourself or there's some places where

you left some things out that would have shed more light on what the truth is

or there's some places where you're being too hard on the subject matter.

And you need some editing.

And then she'll call Susan Jaden, who's my editor at Waterbrook,

and Susan will get the manuscript and she'll say, hey,

let's take this manuscript apart a little bit and let's go into the story and

let's dig around and see if we can make the truth a little more clear and let's

see if we can get rid of some of the fluff and some places where you've worked too hard to cover up.

Maybe you've put too many words on top of something and it's hard to find what's

really true and let's make it better.

And Susan, with her great skill, like a surgeon with a knife will begin to carve

into that story and will work back and forth for a few months.

And eventually what you get in your hands is a much more effective document

than where it started because it's been critically edited and some things have been removed.

And oftentimes there's whole chapters of all three of my major books that have

come out that never got published because a smart editor said,

you know what, this piece of the document does not advance the story.

It's great, you wrote it well, it's very well written, but it doesn't help you

tell this story very well and you need to cut it. And it's really hard, friend.

It is so hard to cut pieces of your own story out and discard them because you

believe they need to be in there.

It's really hard. But a good editor has the ability to keep their eye on the

ball and see what the story really is about.

Help get rid of anything that's keeping the real story from coming out in a

way that will be the most beneficial to the reader Right.

I hope you can understand the metaphor. I'm trying to say here,

Inside you you've got some stories that you you have spent your entire life

Carefully crafting that you believe about yourself and parts of those are precious

to you This is gonna be hard to hear if you've been through some massive things

some hard thing And especially if it came at the hands of someone else, some abuse,

or you've been victimized in some way, or you've been hurt by someone else,

there's a part of your story that you wrote to explain your present behavior

by placing blame on the people who did the thing to you.

That you're currently behaving the way that you are. You're currently living

the way that you are with whatever limitations and powers and holdbacks and holdups that you have.

You're currently living by placing blame on somebody for some part of your story in the past.

And if you look critically at the fact that what you do now...

Is only defined by what you do now, that your next move can truly be your next move.

And it does not have to be filtered through that entire story and what somebody

did or said to you in the past. Somebody told you you were too much.

Somebody told you you weren't enough. Somebody told you that you were unwantable.

And what you're doing now, if it's still being defined by and influenced by

what those people did in the past or what that person said in the past or that

person who touched you that wasn't supposed to,

or that person that cheated on you or left you or got cancer and died on you,

if that's still holding you back.

Then today it's time to get some editing skills.

And it's time to say, wait a minute, I feel this because of what happened.

I feel this because of what those people did.

I feel this because of losing my son 10 years ago. But the fact is what I do

today needs to be determined by what God is calling me to today.

It needs to be determined by what the story needs to tell for me to make the

most impact on the world today.

It needs to be told in the context of how can I move forward today.

Now sometimes we're stuck. Now sometimes we really get stuck in a part of a story.

And there's a part of your brain called the cingulate gyrus.

And that anterior cingulate cortex, that little part in the very middle of the

front of your brain, we've talked about a few times, and it keeps coming back

to me in different ways recently.

Daniel Lehman has described the cingulate as the gear shift.

All this information comes in from all these different parts of your brain,

and there's all this possibility of what you do next, and the cingulate is the gear shift.

You look at the road ahead of you, and there's snow, and there's ice,

and there's a ditch, and you say, boy, I need to shift down into low gear,

I need to put it in four-wheel drive.

You make a decision and you change gears on the truck so that you can get through what's coming next.

But if you keep the truck in neutral.

Then it doesn't matter how hard you push on the gas, that truck's not going

anywhere until you shift gears and put it in forward and into the proper gear.

Or if you put it in reverse, it doesn't matter how much you're looking ahead,

you're going to go backwards when you push on the gas, right?

If you shift gears to the wrong place or fail to shift gears at all,

you will never be able to move forward to where you need to go.

And that's kind of what the cingulate does when it's not behaving properly.

When you're stuck in a story, it's like you put the gear shift in neutral.

That part of your brain isn't acting properly.

Now, interestingly, we learned from Mary Frances O'Connor and her brain imaging

research that people who are stuck in complex grief, people who have made their

whole life be about this thing that happened, or the mourning,

or the yearning for that lost person, or relationship, or dream,

or whatever it was that they lost,

those people have significant dysfunction in the subgenual anterior cingulate

cortex, a little tiny part of the cingulate, and they are stuck. They can't get in gear.

And then just this last week, Andrew Huberman on his Huberman Lab podcast pointed

to some research that I actually read before from 2020 from a group that looked

at the cingulate and its role in willpower and resolve and grit and tenacity and things like that.

And it turns out that it's the cingulate that if you can learn to improve the

function of your cingulate gyrus, specifically the anterior mid cingulate cortex,

a little different part of the cingulate,

is involved in will power, tenacity, grit, drive, things like that.

And we have this belief that will power is kind of a limited resource,

but what Huberman talked about and the research found that other people did,

is that will power can actually be increased by increasing the tenacity of the

anterior mid-cingulate and that happens when you make hard decisions of things

that you specifically don't want to do.

That learning how to sort of embrace the difficulty or embrace trials,

embrace suffering, embrace struggling by learning how to say yes to things that seem hard,

your cingulate actually gets stronger and then you begin to be able to shift

that gear even when it feels unnatural or feels scary or feels like you don't want to.

And what they learn by studying people that can increase their tenacity or grit

or willpower or whatever you want to call it, ego depletion,

avoid ego depletion, all those things that the scientists say.

That the way you do that is you specifically make yourself engage in hard things.

You don't feel like going to the gym, you do it anyway.

And you get to the gym and instead of just lollygagging around,

you don't skip leg day or you make that phone call that you've been avoiding

because it's uncomfortable or you make yourself get up and take a walk after you lose your son.

For example, Lisa and I had many days when we did not feel like getting up and

putting on our clothes and getting out of bed and doing anything.

Most of the time we did them because we still had a child, Kaylin,

living at home and we had to, we literally could not just evaporate in that

grief because we had to take care of Kaylin.

Fortunately she was there to sort of provide motion

and emotional need for us to move

and we did but what it turns out in the

brain research side is the more you engage in

embracing things that seem uncomfortable to you and

you say yes anyway and do them that your brain is very powerful but it's not

particularly specific which means that if you improve your resilience and your

ability to say yes to hard things in one area that will spread and you will

suddenly become more able to engage in hard things.

Across the board so for example

if you are limited in your decision-making in

terms of Relationships by a story on the inside that

you're too much or you're not enough or you're unwantable and

you make yourself go To that small group

meeting you make yourself get on and engage with somebody and work you make

yourself Date again after you've been alone for a long time you make yourself

try something that seems uncomfortable then all of a sudden you'll start finding

it easier to engage that muscle.

The next time you'll find it easier to make the decision to move the next day.

And by engaging that, embracing that discomfort and being able to move forward,

you actually improve the health of your cingulate, you improve the ability to

shift gears and start moving forward.

And that's one of the secrets to getting unstuck in whatever area.

So this process of learning to look back and being willing to edit our stories and say, you know what?

This is uncomfortable for me to go back in the past and look and ask questions

about why I feel the way that I do.

And this is, by the way, this is where some people need therapy and some people need help, okay?

Because it can be a black box that's so scary for you to open,

to go back and look at the past and understand what Kurt Thompson said. He said it beautifully.

He didn't say, I need to go back and find out why I'm unwantable and it's because

my parents screwed me up. He didn't say that.

He said he recognized with great compassion that his parents loved him and they

took good care of him, but he was born when they were in their mid-40s,

in the 1960s, and they couldn't afford another child, but suddenly they had one.

And his parents had some unhealed wounds from their childhood.

If you were born in the 60s, that means your parents were born probably in the

30s or early 40s. They were born to parents who had just gone through a Great

Depression and two world wars and those parents, your parents, probably.

Were born to parents who had gone through some extraordinarily difficult times,

and they had some wounds.

And in those times, they weren't taught to understand.

They didn't know about brain science. They didn't know how to look at their

wounds and their stories and to understand what they were passing on to their kids epigenetically.

They were just like you are, doing the best they could with what they had.

So Kurt Thompson says, go back and look at your parents and look at their parents

and look at what wounds they might've had and how that can start to then help

you to unlock your story.

Because remember, remember as Gabbermonte said so beautifully,

trauma my friend is not what happened to you.

Trauma is your response to what happened to you.

Trauma is not what happened because if you were injured in a war,

if you were a prisoner of a war, if you were abused by someone,

if you've lost a child, if you had a car accident,

if you're a cancer survivor, or that trauma has happened and nothing that you

do or say will make it ever true that it did not happen because it did.

So if trauma then is what happened, you would truly be hopeless because you

can't unwind that clock. It's done, it happened.

But trauma is not what happened. Trauma is the way that your body and your mind

and your life moves forward as a result of what happened.

It's your response to what happened and you can do something about that.

So the point of today, here on Minds Change Monday, is I want you to switch

from writing that story mode to editing mode.

And just like Susan Jaden and Kathy Helmers have this compassionate,

loving heart, they love my story, and they want you to hear it,

and they want that story to be the most effective and powerful story that it can be,

they go back and they help me see the places where I need to say yes to something

uncomfortable, which sometimes is being willing to edit out parts of my story

that are not helpful to me or to you.

And by doing that, I end up with a story that's more helpful,

that's more true, that's more powerful, that's more effective.

And that can begin then to help me to live my story in a way that's more consistent with who I am.

And in order to do all that, you've gotta be willing to bring some light into some dark places.

And that's the good news. The little bit of gospel news that I'll give you today

comes from John chapter one in the New Living Translation.

What happened when Jesus showed up in the beginning the word capital W word

That's Jesus in the beginning the word already existed.

The word was with God and the word

was God He existed in the beginning with God God created everything through

him and nothing was created Except through him the word gave life to everything

that was created and his life brought light to everyone.

The light shines in the darkness and the darkness can never extinguish it.

Listen friend, Jesus will come as the

editor of your story and he will go into those dark

places with you and he will turn a light on and

he will shine a light into those places that need editing and

he will help you to bring light into those dark places and he'll help remind

you that the reason he came was so that you could stop living that life that's

limited by the things that have happened to you and start living a life that's

empowered by the things that he wants to help you with.

Titus 3, 4 and 6, but when the kindness and love of God our Savior appeared,

he saved us not because of righteous things we had done, but because of his mercy.

He saved us through the Washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit.

Listen friend if you are born again if you know him.

You're not the same person that you were. You're not living the same life that you were.

And so the stories and things that

have happened to you in your past don't have to live in this new life.

You don't have to keep reading them to yourself over and over.

You can edit them and tell a better story because he came and he brought that

light into those dark places.

Friend, it's Mind Change Monday and it's time to get after understanding how

unlocking the way that your brain works can help you live a more empowered life.

You don't have to conform anymore to these stories and events that have happened,

the way they're making you try to live.

But you can rather be transformed by the renewing of your mind.

You can do self-brain surgery.

And here on Mind Change Monday, I'm just gonna ask you to spend some time today

and begin to do this every day, looking at the stories that you tell yourself,

and being kind enough to edit them so that you can live out a better story going forward.

And if you're willing to do that, my friend, then you can truly change your

mind and you can truly change your life and you can truly start today.

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Hey, thanks for listening. The Dr. Lee Warren podcast is brought to you by my brand new book.

Hope is the first dose. It's a treatment plan for recovering from trauma,

tragedy and other massive things.

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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.