Good morning, my friend. Dr. Lee Warren here with you. We are getting close to the end of the year and today we're going to have a walk through a whole bunch of fascinating stuff to get us ready. for you to have the best year of your life in 2025. Listen, I'm confident that whatever's going to happen in 2025, there's going to be some highs and some lows, some joys, some tragedies, some traumas, some triumphs.
There's going to be some difficulties. There's going to be some people that hear my voice that go through some incredibly difficult things. And there's going to be some people that are hearing this episode that have the biggest breakthrough, the moment of personal triumph. The great insight that changes everything. And what I want to say to you today, friend, is wherever you are and whatever you're doing, 2025 has the potential to be the best year of your life regardless.
of the circumstances that you will face. Here's the difference. If you learn how to change your mind, you will learn how to change your life. If you learn how to perform what we call self-brain surgery, and we're going to go deep today into that. If you learn how to perform self-brain surgery as a lifestyle, then you will change the way that everything that happens lands in your lap, the way that everything that happens appears to your eyes and feels in your heart.
and sounds in your ears. And if you can learn to see the world through the lens of understanding that you have the capacity to choose your response and you are not obligated to react to anything or anybody. in a particular way, then you will find the breakthrough power that God created you to live in when Jesus said that you can either be overwhelmed with the steal and kill and destroy that the enemy wants for you.
Or I've always thought it was important that if you get the same idea from multiple sources, maybe God's trying to tell you something. Maybe you're supposed to pay attention to that idea. Maybe you're supposed to think about it. There's an idea that keeps coming back to me that I first heard from Brendan Burchard, a motivational coach, author, seminar leader. I've learned a lot from him about how to put together ideas and present them to people in a way that makes sense.
a long time ago, talked about how so many people spend their whole life trying to find gold by digging in a field. If you can see the metaphor, trying to find the business that works. The thing that's going to make them successful, the breakthrough, the profitable venture, they keep trying new things. And he said, think about your life like a big field.
And you keep trying to find gold and you take a shovel and you go and dig a hole six inches deep and you don't find gold. So you start digging a different hole. And by the end of your life, you've dug thousands of six inch deep holes, but you never found gold. And now think about another person in the same field that spends their life digging one hole. And they dig and dig and dig until finally they strike gold. And they dug a hole that took them a long time to dig.
the gold was four or five or six feet down. And so even though you were in the right field and even though you had the shovel in your hand and even though you'd been given the gift of the ability to dig, you didn't have the perseverance, didn't have the right mindset. And so you kept switching from one hole to another hole, and you never found the gold that you were standing right on top of. So I heard that story years ago. He said, don't let your life be a series of...
Half dug holes like dig for the gold and keep after it until you find the goal in your life. I heard that and it always stuck with me. And then a few years ago, I read a book called Acres of Diamonds by Jensen Franklin. Acres of Diamonds. Jensen Franklin's a pastor in the Atlanta area. He's written some incredible books. He wrote the best book about fasting that I've ever read. It's called Fasting. That one's hard to remember. And he wrote another book called Love Like You've Never Been Hurt.
which is one of the most important books you could ever read if you've been wounded or hurt in some way and you have a problem learning how to love or trust again. Love Like You've Never Been Hurt, tremendous book, made a huge difference for me and Lisa.
in the past but jensen wrote another book called acres of diamonds and that book starts with a story something that happened in 1869 there's a guy named Russell Conwell, who was traveling around the Tigris River in the Middle East, and he met a man who told him a story. And the story was about a guy called Ali Hafed. And Ali Hafed, the story says, a long time ago, owned a large farm.
And he was plowing and working his farm and he was happy. He had a family. He was blessed. He was content until one day a stranger stopped by his home. An old priest came by to visit. And while they were sitting by the fire chatting. the priest told Ali that diamonds had been discovered in a faraway land. And after he told him that, the priest said, a handful of diamonds, you could buy a whole country in a...
If you had a whole diamond mine, you could place your children upon thrones. Like you could change the world if you had a diamond mine. And after the priest left, Ali began to ponder what his life would look like if he had diamonds. And he became...
discontent with the things he had. It began to eat at him that he didn't have this wealth that would change everything for his family. And finally, he couldn't live with himself anymore if he didn't have diamonds. And so he went out to find the priest and he said, hey, tell me where I can find
Diamonds. And the priest said, we have to find a river that runs between high mountains that runs through white sands. And in the white sand, you'll find diamonds. And all of a sudden, Ali Hafed's life became about the pursuit of finding diamonds. And he got to the point where he had to go away to search the world to try to find a diamond mine. He told his wife, I'll be back. I'm going to sell the farm. I'm going to take the money and travel the world until I find us a diamond mine.
And I'll be able to make us wealthy and I'll be able to set us up for life. And all you have to do is just wait and I'll be back with the diamonds someday. And he said goodbye to his wife and kids and sold the farm and left. And he spent the rest of his life hunting for diamonds. He went to Africa. Palestine, Europe, never found diamonds. And finally in Spain, one day, he became so discontent and so overwhelmed and so distraught that he walked out into the ocean and drowned himself.
Now the story continues because the man who bought Ali Hafed's farm was walking the farm one day next to the stream and a little glint of sunlight hit something in the water. And he reached down and picked up what he thought was just a beautiful rock that he then set on the counter in his house for his wife to admire. And a few days later, there was a knock on the door and the old priest showed up.
He wanted to introduce himself to the man who had bought the farm. And he said, hey, what's that? And the man said, oh, it's a stone I found in the stream. And the priest said, this looks like a diamond. And he said, where did you find this? And the man walked the priest out. to the stream where he found the stone and the priest reached down into the white sand at the bottom of the stream and found a handful of diamonds and before long that began to be mined and they found out
that Ali Hafed's farm was sitting on top of the largest diamond mine in the entire world. It's now known as the Diamond Mine of Golconda. This is the place where Queen's Jewels came from now. Royalty all over the world wears diamonds as jewelry that were mined in Ali Hafed's backyard. Ali Hafed had traveled the world to find what he'd been sitting on top of his whole life. He never realized.
the potential of the place where he was. He never realized that he was living on acres of diamonds. He was thinking, if I could go to Africa, if I could go to Palestine, if I could go to Europe, if I could go to Spain, if the circumstances lined up. For me, I would be greatly wealthy, but all the while, he had the diamonds right underneath his feet. Now, that story is a true story. It was actually in Ripley's Believe It or Not. It turned out to be...
a book that was called Acres of Diamonds that that man Conwell wrote and gave that speech over 6,000 times in his life. He became well-known as a public speaker and a best-selling author. because he told the story of Ali Hafez' Acres of Diamonds all over the world. By the time Jensen Franklin wrote the book, Acres of Diamonds, more than 40,000 students were enrolled at the school.
that Conwell started with the profits he made from selling his book. Guess what that school is? Temple University. So the profit of the story of Ali Hafez Diamond Mine. was enough to found the institution that is today known as Temple University. That's how powerful the potential of mining the diamonds under your feet are, friend.
So this isn't a diamond mining podcast. It's not a podcast about digging for gold. But I hope you can see the concept I'm trying to get at here. There's a lot of things available to us in our lives that are inside of us. The Bible says it, but Peter says, God has given you everything you need for life. The Bible further says that God didn't give you a spirit of fear, but of power and of love and of a sound mind. So here on this...
Neuroscience Meets Faith podcast. We're always talking about weird things like quantum physics and self-brain surgery and all that kind of stuff. This is where we're going to start to understand the incredible gift that we've been given of what I call mind down control.
of our life self brain surgery friend will change everything that's what we're going to talk about today as we get ready to start 2025 i want to prepare you i want to arm you one more time and give you the big picture of what we're talking about when we say self brain surgery so we can get ready
to go deep and get after it in 2025. And if you're new around here, today we're going to cover some ground that's going to really help you change your mind and change your life. I'm going to explain to you why self-brain surgery is real surgery.
Just like I do in the operating room when I cut somebody's head open and perform physical brain surgery. You're doing the same thing when you learn how to manage your mind from a top-down perspective, from a mind-down perspective. That's what we're going to talk about today. But before we do, I want to talk about...
Winners and losers for a minute. Now, this is going to sound a little bit off topic for a second. It might sound a little bit harsh because you're not used to hearing me say this, but I heard... Andrew Huberman on his podcast say, there's only two kinds of people in the world. There's winners and losers. And that sounds bad when you first hear it. It sounds like, oh, some people are losers.
I don't mean that. I don't mean in the way that it sounds on the surface that, oh, this guy's a born loser and he'll never accomplish anything and all of that. The world wants you to think.
that you can be born with a certain brain or into a certain family or with a certain set of genetics that predisposes you or predetermines you to not be successful. And that leads to all kinds of weird... progressive social engineering things where they talk about stuff like equity give everybody the same outcome it takes things away from some people and give things to other people so we all end up in the same place that stuff never works and it doesn't work because fundamentally intrinsically
Winning and losing is not as much about the opportunities you're given. It's not as much about the head start you may have or the quote unquote privilege that you may have. Winning and losing ultimately. has more to do with mindset than it does about anything else. I'm just telling you the truth. My job as a doctor is to look you in the eye and give you the diagnosis, okay?
So I'm just telling you, when Huberman said that, there's two kinds of people in the world, winners and losers. What he's saying is not that some people are intrinsically losers. How you look at the things that happen to you in your life will determine whether you win or lose far more than any kind of opportunity somebody may give you or any kind of head start you may have or any kind of rich family or proper genetics.
Any of that sort of thing. And what he means, and what I'm going to say right now is this. If you think that your ultimate success or your ultimate... ability to recover from something, your ultimate ability to overcome some challenge or trauma or difficulty, your ultimate ability to break through to a higher level of performance. If you think that it has to do with other people or particular circumstances,
more than it has to do with yourself and the decisions that you make and the way that you think about things and the way that you decide to take mind down control of your mind brain body life and epigenetics and all the stuff we talk about here on this podcast if you think that the winning formula has to come from outside of you, we call that having an external locus of control, then you're going to lose even if you manage to succeed in some ways. So there are people who are...
going to be losers. And what that means is, again, we're not being harsh or being harmful to people with our words here. What I'm saying is, if you think that certain things have to happen, certain circumstances have to occur, Certain people have to do certain things or give you a proper amount of respect or whatever in order for you to feel like you're winning in your life. You're never going to win. And that's because the target will move.
Because if it's outside of you, then it's never going to be enough to change you on the inside. Anne Lamott in one of her books that I love is called Almost everything, that little book, I read it frequently, especially when I'm going to start a new book project. I read Anne Lamott's book, Almost Everything Notes on Hope, to just give me kind of a mindset boost before I write.
But in that book, she said almost nothing outside of you can help you in any kind of lasting way unless you're waiting for a donor organ. And what she means by that, if you need a kidney, obviously somebody's got to give you a kidney. You can't do that yourself. But most of the things that are really going to change you and your life are going to come from decisions that you make inside your own mind and brain. Now, Christians might balk up here and say, wait a second.
God is the source of our power. God is the source of our strength. That's true. But if you think about it, where's the Holy Spirit? He's inside you. You communicate with God internally in your mind, right? It's not that God comes into your bedroom and dumps a billion dollars at the end of your bed and gives you the new job and makes the person fall in love with you. He doesn't work in that realm most of the time. The change that needs to happen happens inside you.
And so when we talk about self-brain surgery then, we're talking about this set of tools and abilities that God gave you and the system that he put inside you. that is designed to improve your way of life, your quality of life, your resilience, your hope, your ability to recover from things, your ability to pursue and capitalize on opportunities. All of that stuff is internal to the way you are wired.
And so then when Huberman says there's winners and losers, he says what winners are people who, regardless of what they face, they recognize that they have to be the one to do the work. to take advantage of the opportunity, to make the decision, to change habits, to add discipline to their lives. The difference between where you are and where you want to be doesn't come down to things that people will do for you. It comes down to your habits.
and your discipline it comes down to your willingness to take command of the process of how your brain and your mind and your life are integrated and designed to work together okay as we get ready for next year one of the things that you can do that would make the biggest difference in your whole life is to decide, I'm going to view everything that happens to me through the lens of using it to pivot my mindset towards personal growth.
towards resilience, towards hope, towards recovery, towards becoming a champion of my own processes or whatever I have to deal with. You're going to recognize, I have an internal locus of control, that the things that really will move the needle in my life have more to do with me than they do with the people around me.
because I've got to see them the right way. I've got to think about them the right way. I've got to decide how to react and respond to them in the right way, or I will never be able to become healthier, feel better, and be happier. Let me tell you a story. about a professional football player that will emphasize this and make it real. So I heard a story that came to light recently about an old defensive player who's a defensive back.
named Mark Gastineau that played for the New York Jets in the NFL. Tremendous player, well-respected pro bowler kind of guy, and everybody knew his name back in the day when he played. But recently, he had a run-in with a quarterback named Brett Favre, who's a Hall of Fame NFL quarterback, about something that happened 20 years ago.
Mark Gastineau had the record for NFL sacks in a single season. He had sacked the quarterback more than anybody else had. And that was the thing he was known for was this record. Apparently, there's another player named Michael Strahan. who at the end of a game rushed the quarterback, and Brett Favre apparently didn't make a very athletic move. The game was already determined they were going to win, and Favre just folded up and Strahan sacked him.
And that play led to Strahan overcoming Mark Gastineau and achieving the single season sack record. Here, 20-something years later... There was a sports memorabilia show where Brett Favre was signing autographs, and Mark Gastineau came up to him and basically threatened him. Like, you ruined my life. You took a dive. You didn't make a good attempt to get away from Michael Strahan. You let him break my record.
And that destroyed my life. That was my record. And so here, 20 some odd years later, you've got an NFL football player who achieved very high proficiency, who was one of the best players that ever played. whose life has been ruined, in his estimation, by somebody else breaking a record that he held. Now, I'm not judging him. I don't know Mark Gastineau from Adam, but what I know about this, what I can tell you, is that...
He had an entire career of playing football at the highest level, being one of the best athletes that ever played the game. And his focus and what's driving the quality of his life now is that he... doesn't have his name on a record anymore, okay? And this is really easy for this to happen in any of our lives, okay? In the club of people who are bereaved parents, you can easily find someone.
who lost a child 20 years ago, and that's still all they can think about. It's all they focus on. It has become the defining moment of their life, that loss. And yet they still have a marriage. They still have other children. They still have a career. They still have a whole life. And they had a whole life with that child before the child passed that they could choose to focus on, this loss to legacy change that we talked about last week.
So if you have an external locus of control, something can happen to you that can break you in a way that you feel is impossible from which to recover. That can really mess your life up. If you think... that external events or the behavior of somebody else or the result of one play or your name on a plaque or not or whether you're in the Hall of Fame or not, all those things external to you can become the defining things of your life.
then you will never be able, my friend, to be happy. I'm just telling you how sad is that, okay? How sad is it? Because you could also look at it like this. Let's say that you're a tremendous athlete. Let's say you're a basketball player, okay?
And you're the best in your junior high. You're the best in your high school. You're the best in your college. Everybody thinks you're the best player they've ever seen. And the NBA draft comes. And you get chosen the second pick in the NBA draft. You're the second name called.
You sign a multi-million dollar contract with some team, San Antonio Spurs or whoever, okay? But what if that night, instead of reveling with your family in the fact that you made it to the highest level of professional basketball, that you were the... highest paid point guard or whatever that ever signed a contract coming out of college? What if instead of being really happy and grateful and thankful about that, what if you were burning up inside because you weren't the first pick?
because that other guy was two inches taller and he was a center and he got a little bit more money than you did and he was picked first. Of all the players in the NBA draft, you were picked second. You had a huge contract. You've made it to the highest level of your profession. That should be something that would really be an exciting internal win for you. But what if you were burning up with jealousy that were not being picked first? That's the kind of thing that happens that separates...
What Huberman is talking about when he says there's two kinds of people, there's winners and losers. It doesn't matter how much money you make. It doesn't matter how much fame you accumulate. It doesn't matter how many records you smash or how many victories you post.
If your mindset is on the thing that you didn't get, if your mindset is on the thing that somebody did to you or said about you or somebody texted you and... and you didn't like the way it was worded and it hurt your feelings and all you can focus on is that thing, then you can't win in your own life if you're allowing external circumstances.
or other people to define what winning looks like or feels like to you. So this guy, this fictional guy that we're talking about, could be on top of the world that he made it to the NBA. He could be amazed that he grew up in some small town with all these disadvantages and somehow he made it to the second pick in the NBA draft. And his grandkids someday will tell the story, look, my grandfather was picked second in the NBA draft and had this huge career. But instead...
The story in that family is going to be my grandfather got shafted. He got cheated. He should have been first. He should have been picked first. It was somebody's bias or racism or X, Y, Z or whatever that he wasn't picked first. That's what they could focus on.
And that would change epigenetically the way that family looks at success, the way that family looks at their history, their line. Not, I'm so proud that my grandfather, look, we grew up in this little town and we can accomplish anything. We can do anything. Look what happened to us. How great is that? Or it could be 20 years ago, my grandfather got shafted and that led to him being frustrated and he drank too much and his career didn't pan out the way they thought. He was abusive to my dad.
And my dad was abusive to me and now I'm going to be abusive to my children because that's epigenetic staying a generational curse on my family. You see what I'm saying? If you set your mind the right way, then whatever happens can become a boost to your future success. or it can become something that leads to your destruction. It's all about winning and losing, but not because of control or circumstances or other people or any of that stuff or fortune or chance. It's about how you respond.
to the things that come along in your life. The way that you set your mind, your mindset for the mission that you have will determine whether you become healthier and feel better and are happy. That's what I'm talking about. And now we're going to talk about what self brain surgery.
has to do with all that stuff. This might be a good time, by the way, to take a little break. It's a long episode. If you want to take a break, sit down and write some things down about how different situations or times in your life in the past went.
You had a choice between deciding on making a winning choice or a losing choice in terms of your own mindset or some things that have happened in your life that you blamed your own ability to move forward based on what happened or what somebody else did. If you're still... Feeling like you can't make progress because somebody left you or somebody hurt you or somebody did this to you. Is that actually what's holding you back in your life now? Or could you make a mindset pivot to redefine?
what happens next in your life. I got to tell you a story in a minute about a time that God communicated with me about that. It'll be relevant here, but take a break, write some things down, think about it. If you're the kind of person that... wants to break these episodes up into several days, this would be a good opportunity to offer him. And now we're going to move forward and we're going to talk about self brain surgery and we give you some ground rules. Let's get after that.
Okay, especially if you're new, if this happens to be the first time you've ever heard my voice or listened to this podcast, let me just give you a few things that are kind of foundational principles for what we talk about here. I'm a neurosurgeon. I perform real-life brain and spine surgery. And so in my world, when I talk about brain surgery is when I intentionally perform a procedure on my patient to make an incision in their brain, to do something structural.
to change how their brain functions for the purpose of helping them become healthier, feeling better, being happier, overcoming something, surviving something sometimes. It's life or death sometimes. And I'm intentionally using my tools, my training, and appropriate techniques to do something good on behalf of my patient. Okay, that's brain surgery. It's intentional. It's purposeful.
relies on good training and good application of techniques to do something on behalf of my patient to help them in some way. So then when we talk about self-brain surgery, we understand that neuroscience has proven conclusively That when you choose, when you make a choice to think about one thing and not another thing, that your brain makes structural changes that result in synapses being broken, connections between neurons and neural networks.
being broken and new ones being formed in real time, almost within seconds of you making a decision to think about one thing and not another thing. Microtubules begin to be laid down, new train tracks, if you will, new synapses and connections between circuits and cells start to happen.
And over time, if you keep repeating the new thought, the new behavior, the new pattern, the new habit, then those old train tracks die away and you eventually can form a hardwired new circuit. OK, so that your decision to think about something. changes the structure of your brain. So then in a very real and in a real sense with no metaphor, self-brain surgery then is when you choose based on your training, your intention, your practice, your application of good techniques.
You choose to structurally change the brain of your patient, which is yourself, in a way to help yourself become healthier, feel better, and be happier, and sometimes maybe not die, to help you overcome challenges, resist, break down. resist failure and accomplish breakthrough okay that's self-brain surgery and it is not this is so important friend the ground rules around here when we talk about self-brain surgery this is not a positivity
It's not self-help trick. It's not metaphor. It's not some kind of object lesson. It's not a neat analogy between surgery in the operating room and quote unquote self-brain surgery. It's structurally real. as if I'm doing it in the operating room. Okay? So then self-brain surgery is not a metaphor. It's not a magic trick. It's not a mental sort of, it's not a mental gymnastics trick that you're playing.
Self-brain surgery is not metaphor. It's mechanism of what happens in your brain when you choose to take charge of your thinking. The scriptural basis of it is 2 Corinthians 10.5. Take every thought captive. It's the idea that you look at your thinking before you react to your thinking. And we have a set of 10 self-brain surgery commandments that will help you understand the neuroscience and the faith and how they smash together.
and the 10 principles for how you can live your life in this lifestyle of self-brain surgery. One of those commandments, the second commandment and the third commandment go hand in hand. Feelings are not facts, they're chemical events in your brain and not every thought that you think is true.
You need to go back and listen to the episodes about the Ten Commandments to unpack those. I won't cover them again here. But the bottom line is that the things that we feel and the things that we initially think that pop up into our head in our own voice are generally not true.
and they are generally negative, and if we learn to discern, to put a little space in between stimulus and response, and that's what taking every thought captive is, we call it the thought biopsy, then you can decide to be in charge of your responses. rather than feeling like you have to react all the time to the things that happen in your life. You shift that locus of control from external to internal. You operate like a surgeon, intentionally taking care of your patient, okay?
So that's the gist of it. We don't believe that our brains are who we are. We believe that our mind is in charge of our brain. We believe that we can take mind to down control and that we can go mind up to communicate with our creator.
And you don't have to believe in God to get benefit out of neuroplasticity and self-brain surgery, by the way. Okay? You can operate this system. You can read Dan Harris's book, 10% Happier. You can read all kinds of books about neuroplasticity and applying that top-down control idea.
Even if you don't believe that there's anything supernatural about it, okay? But I believe the highest level of performance is when you connect your mind to creator. And the science is starting to show this, actually bear this out. How could...
thoughts communicate with god how could god's thoughts enter our brains how can our thoughts turn into physical things in our brain that science is starting to populate okay starting to figure some stuff out in terms of the physics of how an electrical event can become a chemical event in your brain
how you can think something and it turns into something real. There's some science starting to bubble up about that. And I've always said that I love it that science ultimately shows what the Bible said about the best ways for humans to flourish. It always ultimately comes out to be true.
That's what Philippians 4, 2,000 years ago said, don't be anxious. If you want to stop being anxious, be grateful instead. And now the neuroscience has shown, hey, guess what? You can't be anxious and grateful at the same time. I'm just saying that the ground rules here as we get into how do we sort out.
How we can find those diamonds in our lives that we're standing on top of. How can we get the resilience and the perseverance to dig those holes and find that goal and go all in on our own lives. All that stuff. How do we set up ourselves to have the best year of our life in 2025, even though we know there's going to be some traumas and tragedies and hardship and adversity and difficulties and all that? How do we set ourselves up for that? It's self-brain surgery.
OK, we're getting ourselves to the position of knowing that no matter what happens, knowing that the things we can't control, we didn't get drafted first. Somebody sacked another guy and broke our record. Whatever happened, knowing that whatever happens. We are going to choose our response to it. We're going to manage our mind. We're going to decide how we respond, what our brains do, what neurotransmitter we allow to release, what epigenetic switches we allow to be turned on or turned off.
what decisions we make will turn into real effects in our lives, our bodies, our families, our generations. We're going to be in charge of that because we're surgeons. We're not just waiting for our patient to pass out and expire. We're not just hopelessly.
flailing ourselves against the wishes that it would turn out a different way. We're going to take action. We're going to pick up the scalpel. We're going to operate instead of just contemplating. That's what self-brain surgery is. And that's what's going to set us up for 2025.
Now, I told you I was going to tell you a personal story. I've told this before on the podcast a while back, so you may have heard this. Most of you probably have not because it's been a while. But just so you don't think that I'm preaching and I'm actually...
Instead, coming at you from the perspective of somebody who's lived this and had to make these decisions too, and constantly having to live it, by the way. And when you're a bereaved father, when you have been through the war, when you've had PTSD, when you've been through a divorce, those kinds of things that we have.
That sort of imprint of that trauma doesn't go away. It flares up once in a while and it affects how you think about yourself. And if you're not careful, you can go back down some of those old roads. And one of them for me is relational. So I have a relative who my relationship with him has always been defined by his virtue. He was, especially when I was a child, this person.
Just this virtuous, noble person who I always look up to and whose kind of reputation in the world was based on him always telling the truth. Like he really was widely known for truth telling. than virtue. And so we had an encounter, Lisa and I, with this family member a few years ago where there was a business deal. There was some...
This is probably not a good idea to do business with your family members, by the way, for stuff like this. I've heard that before. But for reasons like this, it may not be the best idea to do business with your family members. We had a business engagement with this person. And as it played out, we realized that they had told us a lie or sort of a half truth, something misleading in the negotiations or in the deal.
It became really crystal clear that the person had spoken something that was absolutely not true, and it wasn't just an accident because it was designed. to change our thinking about the encounter that we were having. It was designed to pivot us away from a train track of thought that we were on and think about something different that was advantageous to them.
And it didn't matter in the end. It wasn't like they were cheating us or it cost us a lot of money or anything, but it just became apparent. And Lisa and I both realized it to our shock that this person had misled us and it was willful and it was purposeful. to try to make us not think a particular way, which was advantageous to them in the business dealing. And I was just really emotionally wrecked by that for a few days. Lisa got on to me about it. It was really tearing me up.
Because this person's relationship with me had always been built on this sort of honesty and integrity first model. It was really, in fact, had been formative for me in the way that I thought about myself of always trying to tell the truth and do the right thing and all that stuff. So I remember one night in particular, going to bed, frustrated and feeling, thinking about this and being all offended that this person had told me a lie and all that stuff.
And God, I'm not a charismatic person, by the way, don't go around saying, hey, God told me this or God said that or I heard God's voice. When I say this, I'm being very careful to say I literally heard in the form of a dream, a voice that. that presented itself to be that of God. Hey, I'm talking to you, kid, like coming at me. And so you can say it was some kind of neuroscience dream or something or whatever, but it felt like God.
The instructions were consistent with scripture, which is one of the tests that you should use if you think you hear God's voice. God's voice will never tell you something that's inconsistent with his written word. He's not going to give you an instruction. That of all the people in the world violates something he already wrote down for everybody else. So I heard this voice that said, hey, that lie, that decision that person made.
to tell you something that wasn't true, that was their fault and it was wrong and it was right for it to feel hurtful to you. But if you wake up tomorrow and let that hurt affect how you live your life tomorrow, that's your fault, Lee. You've got to move forward, okay? Mark that person. Be aware that they're capable, like you are, of telling a lie. Be aware that they sometimes aren't perfect, like you're not sometimes perfect. Be aware.
That you have a long body of work with them where they did the right thing, said the right thing, behaved the right way. That your entire relationship with them has been noble and good. And this is a one-off event that you should recognize and be aware of. That person has the capability.
of making the wrong decision. Yes, that's all true. But you've got to live your life in accordance with your integrity and your knowledge of what's true and right and good. And you've got to carry yourself in a way going forward. that continues to value and represent who you are. Okay? So God told me, yes, it's sometimes other people do things that hurt you. Sometimes you don't get picked first. Sometimes the guy doesn't make a good play and you lose your record.
You don't make it to the Hall of Fame because of that. But you've got to move forward in your life because if that happened yesterday, it's not your fault. It's not their fault if you let it wreck you today. You've got to be in charge. You've got to make a mind down decision of how you're going to live your life. And ultimately, you can make your life better out of that experience because you can say, you know what? I've got to be careful. Even if I tell the truth.
a thousand times in a row, even if that's my reputation and I'm known for that, I can make the wrong decision when I'm under stress and I can tell a lie or do something bad that might harm my entire reputation. So let this person's encounter with you teach you a lesson.
that you've got to be extra vigilant, even when it would help you to tell a lie. Don't tell a lie, because lies have consequences. Even when it would benefit you in the business deal, to be dishonest, don't be dishonest, because it will affect your relationships, okay? So... I'm just saying, friend, that you have a choice to make here as you go into 2025, knowing that some people are going to let you down, knowing that some circumstances are going to happen that aren't.
The best knowing that somebody might die or a diagnosis might recur or some money stuff might not play out the way you wanted or the president on January 20th that gets inaugurated isn't the one you voted for. Knowing all of that stuff's going to happen. that's going to hurt you or wound you in some way. What next is the question? And what next happens when you decide to become a self-brain surgeon if you want to become healthier and feel better and be happier?
So what then do we do? How do we prepare ourselves to have this mindset of being resilient and ready for whatever might come along and knowing that we have the inherent internal tool set to change our minds in response to these things? and not react to them anymore so that we can become healthier, feel better, be happier, all that stuff. How do we do it? I said before, the difference between where you are and where you want to be in your life doesn't come down.
to external circumstances or outside people it comes down to your habits and your discipline okay if you want to get your weight under control it doesn't have to do with The Western health care system, it doesn't have to do with somebody putting the wrong stuff in your food. Yes, there's processed food and there's problems with that and seed oils are bad and all that stuff. Yes, it's true. But what you choose to put in your mouth and how much of it that you choose to put in your mouth.
versus how much you choose to burn off with activity and exercise, that's what's going to move the needle on your personal health, right? If you say, what are my, what's keeping me from where I want to be in my physical fitness? compared to where I am now, guess what? It's not the red dye in your food. It's the habits and disciplines that you have. That's what it is. It's the habits and discipline. If you say, left me, cheated on me, abused me, I'm sorry. That's true.
And it's terrible and it's devastating. But if that happened 10 years ago, five years ago, two days ago, and you're looking at what you're going to do tomorrow, you can make decisions, friend, to get yourself in a safe place, to change your... The way that you make decisions about relationships. I met a woman one time, Lisa and I did, who'd had five ex-husbands, and she was dating somebody else.
And I said, where'd you meet this person? She said, in a bar. And I said, where'd you meet your four ex-husband or five ex-husband? She said, I met them all in bars. If you keep meeting people in the wrong place and the relationship turns out the wrong way, maybe try meeting the next person in a different place, maybe church.
instead of the bar. Maybe a different set of circumstances and thought processes and decisions and habits and discipline would lead you to a different outcome. So what happens is you start thinking if you had I'm using that as an example again. If you had five consecutive failed relationships, you would start thinking that maybe you were just unlovable, right? Maybe you're going to places where the people define love.
based on different things than what you're wanting to look for in a partner for the rest of your life right habits and discipline determine what happens in your life more than external circumstances now obviously you can't control it If you develop autoimmune kidney failure and need a transplant, if you develop glioblastoma, if you have diabetes that's wrecking your...
endocrine axis type 1 diabetes you inherited that or you got it when you were a child from some kind of autoimmune problem you can't help that there's some external things that define certain things that are going to be true about your life okay I'm not saying
that you can have habits and discipline that will change your kidney function if you've lost your kidneys. I'm not saying that. What I'm saying is for the vast swath of the things that happen to everyone hearing my voice right now, the vast swath of them. can be influenced or at least your response to them and how you allow it to to restore your future life or labels that you allow to put on yourself come down to your habits and your discipline
and the way that you think about the challenges that you're facing. You can recognize that with me. So, habits and discipline. So, if we're going to have different habits and different discipline, what do we do? Like, obviously, we have to implement different ways of thinking about what we go through.
And we have to choose then different ways to decide what we're going to pursue in our life. And to that end, I've developed this framework that I call brain goals. It's natural at the end of every year.
people start setting New Year's resolutions. And the problem with New Year's resolutions is that about 85% of them are abandoned by the end of January. And the reason that's the case is because we either set... goals that are unrealistic and unreachable and we recognize this and we give up on them or we set goals that we don't really care about and we're just checking the box because we're supposed to make resolutions or
We don't have the habits and disciplines to implement to actually achieve the things that we wish we had. And then we can blame it on somebody else or some other thing or some external thing that we didn't accomplish it this year because X, Y, or Z. But let's just get real with you and me as if I'm your self-brain surgery coach, your professor of self-brain surgery, we're in the exam room together and I'm giving you the news. Let's at least be honest with each other, okay?
That if you choose to pursue something in 2025 and you don't accomplish it, if the reason you don't accomplish it is because you allowed some external circumstance to knock you off course or you allowed an old habit.
to fall back into place, to override the new one you were trying to develop, or you didn't have the habit or discipline to really implement something. Because remember, it takes about 21 days to break all those old synaptic pathways down and start making new ones. It takes some work.
to get to where you want to go. So if you just aren't willing to do the work, then let's just be honest about that, okay? So what I'm saying here today, so if you're hearing my voice, I'm saying to myself and you're saying to you, That if we want 2025 to be the best year we've ever had, regardless of what may come along in it, okay, then we're going to have to implement some new habits. We're going to have to apply a new level of discipline. And we're going to have to be better at setting goals.
that help us to get these things accomplished. So if New Year's resolutions don't tend to work out, let's have a revolution and let's make it different. So to that end, I've given you this brains framework for setting different... kinds of goals that will be a little more likely to be successful so what are brain goals then by the way i'll put a link in the show notes i made a little guide that you can download
You just put your email in. It'll sign you up for my newsletter. If you're not getting the newsletter, then when you put the email in, you'll get signed up to the newsletter. And that's our weekly walkthrough self-brain surgery. This will really be helpful. It's very helpful.
as part of the the program here on the podcast and the newsletter work hand in hand to help you change your mind and change your life okay so i'm going to give you this brain pdf that i made brain goals it'll help you walk through this
help you know how to journal, help you know how to keep track of your new habits and disciplines that you're trying to implement so that you set your mindset on the mission of what you're really trying to accomplish. So what's a brain goal? First, it needs to be bold. That's the B. Because breakthroughs don't come from playing it safe. You've got to...
Set a goal that actually matters to you, that's bold, okay? Not, I want to eat one less Cheeto every week. That's easy, but it wouldn't actually change your life in any meaningful way. So you're going to say, hey, my brain thrives on challenge and novelty.
And my goals need to stretch me or I won't pursue it. Ephesians 3.20 says, God is able to do immeasurably more than all we can ask or imagine according to his power that is at work within us. So God's put these tools in your heart, in your mind, in your body. then you can do more than you think you can do. So make your goal a little bit stretching. Make a bold goal. What would excite you to the point that you couldn't wait to see it come true in your life? Okay? Bold doesn't mean reckless.
It means doing something beyond your comfort zone and trusting that God will give you the tools to get it done, that your mind and your brain will come through for you. What's the R? Relevant, okay? You have to have a mission in your life.
So spend a little time between now and the end of the year figuring out what your mission is. What is it that you want out of 2025? Not I want to be 20 pounds lighter and $20 million richer and all that. Not that stuff. What's your mission? Who are you? What are you about?
What is your life being called to? What did God put you on the planet to do that nobody else can do? Like I can look at Lisa and see she's got 20 different things that are unique to her that nobody else can do. And that combination of those 20 facets of Lisa Warren.
are phenomenal. And when she gets things lined up and going the right direction, there's nobody like her. So think about that. What is it that God made me able to do or accomplish or be or role to play or any of those things? What's my mission?
And once you get your mindset on the mission, then starting to set these goals, bold goals, but also relevant. OK, I want to make sure the goal that I have is going to help me accomplish the mission for which I'm on this planet. OK, so make sure your goal. is relevant does it serve the person i'm trying to become does it align with my calling my mission my values proverbs 16 3 says commit to the lord whatever you do and he will establish your plan so figure that out what's your mission
How do you set your mindset to it? How do you have your habits and discipline? Serve that mission. Choose a bold but also a relevant goal and you'll be more likely to make it work. Then it needs to be... Actionable. Everybody's heard about SMART goals, and the A in SMART goals is actionable. And I chose that word for this one, too, because if you're going to take action, there needs to be some steps that you can break this goal down into that are reasonable.
You can take action. You can stop contemplating and start operating. It's not impossible. It's not mysterious. It's actionable steps that you can write down and say, if I want to get to this place, I've got to take these steps. in order to do it okay because if it's impossible if there's no path to it the definition of hope according to the social sciences is you have to have agency and pathways you have to have the ability to do something
And you have to have a pathway to do it. Actionable then means that there's some steps that you can lay out that if you followed those steps, you would reach your goal. So take your brain goals and map them out into discernible, specific. Clear steps. Break it down. Don't just say I want to get healthier. Say I'm going to walk 30 minutes five times a week. Don't just say I want to lose weight. Say I'm going to have a 500 calorie deficit every day.
I want to have less soda, less french fries, less Cheetos, less alcohol, whatever. So that in combination with my activity, I'm going to have a 500 calorie deficit. Because if you do a 500 calorie deficit every day, guess what? You're going to lose one pound a week. That's the biochemistry of it.
If you have a caloric deficit, you set that, build your life to where you're going to be in caloric deficit. By 500 calories a day, you'll lose a pound a week. And if you do that for 30 weeks, you're going to lose 30 pounds. That's the biochemistry. OK, so take your steps and break it down into actionable steps to do the thing that you want to do. These are specific, purposeful, willful steps that will begin to develop habits. And if you apply discipline to continue them, then you will make.
You'll make progress in taking action on your goal. Specificity activates your brain's reward system. And you start getting momentum by gaining that reward of dopamine when you accomplish a little task. James 2.17 says, faith by itself, if it is not accompanied by action, is dead. You've got to work out your salvation. You've got to work out your plan. You've got to take action to get traction.
and it land on satisfaction i love that rhyming that wasn't scripted by the way okay so one way to keep track of your progress is journaling so if you write down what are my goals What habits would I need to enforce and achieve that goal? What kind of discipline in my life would I need? Don't go buy the Cheetos if I don't want to find myself waking up in the evening with dust on my fingers and my fingers are orange.
because I ate them before I realized I was eating them, but I only ate them because I had bought them. So make a decision in the grocery store so it's not so hard to make it on the couch. Journaling will help you with that. I use a journal called the Productive Weeks Journal. I'll put a link in the show notes to Amazon if you want to look at it. I use it every day. I use it to map out book projects. I use it to map out podcasts. I use it to map out habits.
And the Productive Weeks Journal just works for me. It's a planner. It's a five-day-a-week planner. It's this idea that if you make 1% progress every day, you'll make 37% progress in a year. And if you said on the outset, how much progress do I want to make? I want to make 100% progress. That's great. But if you think about it, if you were 37% better a month from now, a year from now, at your finances, at your marriage, at your...
drinking at your activity, if you're whatever, if you were 37% better at the end of 2024 than you were at the start, would you think that was a tremendously successful year? I think so. So I think sometimes when we shoot for 100 and we only get 20.
We feel like we failed. But if you shoot for 1% per day and you develop that habit and that discipline, then you're going to find some action starting to happen. You're going to make some progress. So I use that Productive Weeks Planner for that purpose. Download your brain guide. Click on the link. Download the brain guide. Get this whole framework that we're talking about. It'll help you. Next, the I. We've done bold. We've done relevant.
We've done actionable. The next one is I, important. So not all goals are created equal. And if what you choose to pursue isn't important to you, if it's one of these things that you say you want to do, just sort of get caught up in the idea that you need to do something.
and so you choose a goal that's not that important, then you won't really stick with it. The most powerful goals align with your core values that help you set your mindset to the mission. They're going to have big impact on your health, your relationship, your purpose, your spirituality.
Focus on what matters most, not what's going to look impressive on social media or not what's going to make your friends say, oh, look at the goal you're setting is so great. It needs to be important to you. Matthew 633 says, seek first.
the kingdom and his righteousness, and all these things will be given to you. Make some goals that are going to move the needle on your relationship with God, on your marriage, on your family, on your legacy, on your profession. Make some decisions for something important.
that matters, and then align your goal with God's priorities for your life. It'll be easier to persist in these changes if your goal is important to you. And finally, nurturing. So remember, I always talk about the two-patient rule. Self-brain surgery is not just about you. Because when you change your brain, you change the brains and the hearts and the lives of the people around you and everybody after you through epigenetics, through quantum entanglement, through limbic resonance.
through mirror neurons. Like when you choose to make a change, it affects other people. Brain goals then, when you're changing yourself, when you're making yourself better, you're going to help lift the tide for everybody around you. Rising tide lifts all the boats. So you choosing the proper goals and the discipline and habits to implement them is going to help you nurture other people because you're not here to serve yourself.
Best goals aren't just about you. They're about adding value to the world around you. When you improve yourself, you become a better leader, a better parent, a better friend, a better spouse, a better partner, a better servant of God, a better employee, a better boss.
So your goal shouldn't be just to grow yourself, but to also help grow others. This is where you decide you're going to volunteer, you're going to mentor, you're going to start a nonprofit like Tommy Walker Ministries. You're going to decide that self-improvement... enhances your capacity to bless others and fulfill your purpose in the kingdom and the world and neuroscience shows that acts of kindness and service boost our own well-being so when you serve other people
You serve yourself. You make yourself better too. Galatians 6.2 says, bear each other's burdens. And in this way, you fulfill the law of Christ. These brain goals will activate your mind's incredible design. Boldness sparks creativity. Relevance keeps you on mission. Action drives results. Importance fuels commitment and nurturing connects us to something bigger than ourselves. These principles align with God's calling on our lives to live abundantly.
even in the face of the fact that the enemy is going to continue to steal, kill, and destroy. We're living a purpose-filled, purpose-driven life. We're going to look forward to 2025, and we're going to take a moment here. at the end of the year to just reflect, to journal, to plan, to chart out the path of what kinds of habits and how can you apply discipline to making these goals stick to help you become healthier and feel better.
and be happier to stop digging six-inch deep holes and moving on to the next thing, to dig for the gold, to find the diamonds right under your feet, because God has planted you, Acts 17 says, in the exact time and place where he wanted you to be so that you could seek him and perhaps find him, though he's not far from any one of us. Friend, life is hard, okay?
I'm the first one to say it. I've lost a son. My precious son, Mitch, died in 2013. I've been through war. I still have nightmares about some of the things that I saw. I met a woman this week in the office. Her and her husband were there, and we were talking about her medical problem. And she said something that made me perk up a little bit. She said something about the military and she started crying that she'd injured herself in the Iraq war is when she first started hurting.
And by the end of the conversation, we realized that we were both at the same base in Iraq at the same time. She had a very different job than I did. She didn't work in the hospital. But she was military, and she got injured over there. And we had this kind of connection because we'd both been in the same place at the same time. And I could see that the impact of that trauma was still affecting her here 20 years later. And it is me too.
But it hadn't defined her. It hadn't destroyed her. She chose to allow that experience to influence and inform her and to make it part of her story, but continue to tell a good story going forward in her life. That's the choice that lies before all of us, friend. You can't control what other people do. You can't control whether the bombs go off, whether the cancer comes back. You can't control all that stuff. But you can decide ahead of time that you know who you are. You know how you're wired.
You know how your creator put you together, that you have a connection in your mind to God and to his help and to his power, his divine power that has given, as Peter said, everything you need, that the spirit of fear can't win out over the spirit of power and of love and of a sound mind.
that you can take your thoughts captive, that you can transform yourself instead of conforming yourself to these traumas and tragedies and massive things. And the way you do that is from what we call self-brain surgery. It's deciding that the difference between where you are...
And where you want to be comes down to your habits and your discipline. And if you're going to achieve better habits and apply the discipline to get them there, you need some goals that will help you. And those goals can look like brains. They can be bold.
and they can be relevant, and they can be actionable, and they can be important, and they can be nurturing so that you're not just helping yourself. You're making a difference in the world to those around you. Friend, there's acres of diamonds. right underneath your feet. You don't have to keep digging six inch holes and you don't have to wander the whole world looking for meaning and purpose because it's right in front of you. God put you where he put you.
for the purpose of helping you help other people find the light of hope, the path forward, no matter what happens. You can change your mind and you can change your life. And if you implement these brain goals, You have better habits and implement better discipline. You will make progress in your life, even if it's only 1% a day. That will change you 37% over the course of a year. And who wouldn't want to be 37% more happy or healthy?
or better, at everything we're called to do. Life's hard. It's really hard when you feel like you can't make progress. It's almost impossible when you feel like everything outside of you can control what happens to you. Friend, move that locus of control internal.
Get yourself some brain goals. As we get close to the end of the year, start journaling and thinking about what you're going to do and how next year can be different than this year was. This long failure of staying put is done. It's time to move forward. It's scary. It's scary to make a step, but you can do it because you decided that this is the year that you're going to change your mind and you are going to change your life. And the good news, friend, you can make that decision starting today.
Hey, if you like this podcast, please subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and invite your friends to listen along with you. We're trying to change the world one mind and one brain at a time. It's self-brain surgery. I'm your host, Dr. Lee Warren. We'll talk to you next week, friend. God bless.
Hey, so I'm launching a new season on the podcast, The Doctor and the Nurse. World-renowned brain coach, Dr. Daniel Amen, joins me as a co-host as we dive deep into the mind and the brain of everything. high performance. I've been fascinated for years as I've worked with top athletes, high-powered CEOs, Hollywood actors, and all high performers in all types of different fields of how they break through pressure, ignite drive.
how they overcome distractions, how they put fear on the bench, how they tap into flow state and just dominate all these different areas of high performance. So on this season, my good friend, Dr. Daniel Lehman will break down what is actually going on. on in the brain in these different areas. And I will give actionable tools to be able to use and apply in your life. So buckle up the doctor and the nurse on the David Nurse Show coming at you.
Greetings and God bless. This is Tyler Burns. And this is Dr. Jamar Tisby. And we want to invite you to check out our podcast, Pass the Mic. dynamic voices for a diverse church. Pass the Mic has been speaking directly to the core concerns of Black Christians for over a decade. On our show, we've got interviews from theologians, historians, actors, activists, and so much more.
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