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Jim Wilder Ph.D. joins Stephen today to discuss the habits of RARE Mentors. The acronym comes from his book, Rare Leadership, and covers the importance of Remaining relational, Acting like yourself, Returning to joy, and Enduring hardship well.
Show Notes
Rev. Jim Wilder Ph.D.
Creators and Guests
What is You Can Mentor: A Christian Youth Mentoring Podcast?
You Can Mentor is a network that equips and encourages mentors and mentoring leaders through resources and relationships to love God, love others, and make disciples in their own community. We want to see Christian mentors thrive.
We want to hear from you! Send any mentoring questions to hello@youcanmentor.com, and we'll answer them on our podcast. We want to help you become the best possible mentor you can be. Also, if you are a mentoring organization, church, or non-profit, connect with us to join our mentoring network or to be spotlighted on our show.
Please find out more at www.youcanmentor.com or find us on social media. You will find more resources on our website to help equip and encourage mentors. We have downloadable resources, cohort opportunities, and an opportunity to build relationships with other Christian mentoring leaders.
You can mentor is a podcast about the power of building relationships with kids from hard places in the name of Jesus. Every episode will help you overcome common mentoring obstacles and give you the confidence you need to invest in the lives of others. You can mentor.
Speaker 2:Hey, guys. Today's episode is an interview with Jim Wilder, a neuro theologian. That's crazy. Author. He has a PhD in clinical psychology and trains leaders across the world.
Speaker 2:We hope today's episode gives you or your organization value. If so, we'd love to hear about it. Leave a review, rate the podcast, share this episode with someone you think would benefit from the content. Thanks for listening. Welcome back to the You Can Mentor podcast.
Speaker 2:My name is Steven, and I'm here with a very special guest, Reverend Jim Wilder. How are you doing this morning?
Speaker 3:I'm doing well. I'm glad to be with you.
Speaker 2:Hey. Well, you you were just saying that it was in the the negatives or close to negative degrees where you're at. So you can be honest with me if you want, Jim. We can we can share what it's like without without our heaters and our power going out. Yeah.
Speaker 2:I'm I'm I'm excited to be with you.
Speaker 3:Well, very good. We're having a rugged man moment here, aren't we?
Speaker 2:We're practically practically camping in the mountains right now, on this podcast. Well, hey, Jim. For for our listeners who who don't know you, I've I've recognized your influence in in my own life through Zach, my my boss. He anytime he hires someone onto our staff, he gives them your book, Rare Leadership. You've come out with a lot of books over the years and and even recently during the pandemic, you've come out with 2 books.
Speaker 2:You came out with Renovated, and you came out with another book called The Other Half of the Church. And so I'd love if you just kinda unpack even just just who you are. Are you an author? How do you how would you define yourself?
Speaker 3:Well, you know, I was a terrible speller in school, and, I was considered, you know, one of the dummies in my class because, you know, I just wasn't very good at writing. I didn't think. And so, oh, when you can't spell, I mean, you know, every paper gets turned back with all these red lines through it and, like, that's not how you spell said. But, you know, it's at some point in in school, one of my teachers actually said to me, hey. These are good ideas.
Speaker 3:You know, you you should be a writer. And, then I said, but I can't spell. And, he, you know, he said, well, you know, spelling can be corrected, but it's it's you know, there's something behind there. And so he saw something in me that I didn't know existed. And I sort of stayed in the background until, some place along the line, my wife said, had heard on some program, something like this podcast, but they weren't podcasts back then, that fathers should take their sons out during junior high age and prepare them for adolescence.
Speaker 3:You know, it's gonna be one of those really rough times coming up. Your emotions will kick up. And so he said, are you gonna do that for our boys? Because we had 2 boys. And I said, oh, well, sure.
Speaker 3:Because, you know, at that point, they were in preschool, and, you know, it was, like, real easy to say sure. So when they got to junior high, time came to take them for a trip. So I took them out into the country. We spent a weekend just talking about what it meant to grow up and be a man. And when it was done, I thought, you know, I need to write this down so I can remember it later.
Speaker 3:So I I wrote it up, not for anybody, but for the boys. You know? Just here's what, you know, here's what we talked about. Here's what we did, and here's what it means to grow up and be a a man with good character. And I started talking to my friends, and they said, you did?
Speaker 3:Really? I've never heard of anyone doing that. Could I read it? And I said, well, it was for them. You know?
Speaker 3:Well so to make a long story short, after about a year, they persuaded me I should send it in to a publisher. And, you know, I did. They picked it up, published it. And 6 months later, I get a letter from them. We're sending you to these conferences because you're one of the who's who of fathering advocates in America.
Speaker 3:And I went, what? You know, I was trying to figure this out, and I wrote something down for my boys. And now I'm a who's who. I mean, how how how long a journey is it from knowing nothing to being at the top of the heap? You know?
Speaker 3:And so that's kinda how I got into, writing. And it was about, you know, how to grow up and, become a an adult with good character, which is, I think, what every parent with a little bit of responsibility is trying to struggle with. You know? It's like, well, how do I raise these kids? You know?
Speaker 3:They, you know, we just got a new microwave. It came with a manual, but, you know, was nothing like that when it came to having kids.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. It's it's definitely kids are not microwaves and or IKEA furniture is probably a better they don't they don't come with even the illustrations to put an egg together.
Speaker 3:Yep.
Speaker 2:Well and I I love I mean, just just what you said about I I couldn't spell, but I could write. And and someone spoke that into you, and I I think that is a a perfect analogy for what we want our mentors to see in our kids. That there may may be some formative things that are are lacking or missing, but they have so much that they don't know about. And so I'd I'd love to to talk about the heart of a a mentor and the book that I was mentioning, Rare Leadership. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:It's not necessarily meant for mentors of kids from hard places, but the the concepts of of what it looks like to be a leader and be relationally healthy. All of those things are just spot on encouragements for mentors to hear. And and and I'd say even your your 2 newest books renovated in the other half of the church where you just talk about, I noticed a quote, character is shaped by whom we love more than what we believe. I I mean, there there's so much there when it comes to being a follower of Jesus and having our identity shaped and formed by just our love of him and that informing who we are and what we do. But just wanna say thank you on on the front end of this for for your investment in writing those things as your your sons were growing up.
Speaker 2:And and yeah. I'm excited. I'm excited to talk about rare leadership. So your your subtitle for this book is 4 Uncommon Habits for Increasing Joy, Trust, and Engagement in the People You Lead. And and that's just that's I mean, that's what mentors need.
Speaker 2:Those are those are the habits that we need to provide kids from hard places. The the things that they need. So let's let's start with remain relational. Let let's talk about relationships and and how remaining relational within a mentor relationship is is impactful. So one of the things you say in the book is that we're to we're to try to keep relationships bigger than the problems that we face.
Speaker 2:That emotionally mature leaders are always grateful. They have they have this gratefulness when they approach relationships. It's not just recognizing all the issues and feeling overwhelmed and getting into this problem solving mode. And so could you just talk about, what it takes to remain relational?
Speaker 3:Yeah. I'm glad to. I might make a comment since our audience is gonna be more men than women. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Relationships has always been sort of a bad word when when men hear it. You know? So I was a counselor. My background expertise is in brain science and theology.
Speaker 3:So I'm always putting together how the brain works with, how we're supposed to live. And that's why we're sort of updating in a sense, how do you actually make Christianity work? Because it was developed by people who had some screwy ideas along the way, you know, about how people are formed and how they work. You know, a 1000 years back when a lot of Christian theology was being developed, we had some strange ideas about, you know, how the world worked. And so some of the ideas, you know, they sound really great.
Speaker 3:Like, the the most common idea you hear is that, you know, you're just supposed to make better choices. The problem in the brain is that if the brain was a tree, choices would be way out by the leaves. You know, we need something that gets down where the roots are, you know, something solid we can depend on. Oh, you know, 1 or 2 beers and your choices are all screwed up. Right?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:But who you love, who you're attached to, who your people are, that is very foundational in the brain. It's like the central thing. So how do you stay relational is really another way to say, how do I stay human? And the first sign, by the way, the book that you mentioned about the other half of church, I co wrote that with a pastor who's also an engineer. So we like a very engineering approach to this.
Speaker 3:Like, you know, you understand the the basic things, and you can work your way out of any problem. So going back to staying relational, the the one the best signs that you're relational is you're still curious about the other person. So when, we start to get upset and there are 6 negative emotions wired into the brain, and when they start happening, what happens with most people is they lose their curiosity entirely. So let's say that you, Steven, were to make me angry for some reason. I'm sure that's never happened, but, you know, we'll just imagine
Speaker 2:Hope not. I've only known you for 10 minutes.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Right. What normally happens inside me is my relational circuits would go off. I stop being curious about why you're angry and what you're thinking and what's happening on your side. And I just start preparing what I'm gonna say as soon as you be quiet or trying to figure out some way to, you know, get out of this.
Speaker 3:So I've lost all interest in being connected with you. So being relational is exercising that part of the brain that says, you know, you're an important person to me. And, actually, if we could get this to work out well, it's gonna it's gonna be capital invested back in our relationship. We'll look back at that and say, yeah. We worked through this, and we worked through that, and we worked through that.
Speaker 3:We got a pretty good, you know, connection going here. So staying relational is very much the same as continuing to stay interested in the other person when we're feeling upset or cold or the heat goes out or whatever else goes wrong in our our lives. It doesn't always have to be connected. But if we're made in God's image, and God is relational, and the number one thing about God is that he loves us, then that loving connection should be the number one characteristic of being human.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And it's the first thing you lose when, you know, you're trying to get a job done or you're upset or something is going wrong. And so we're just bringing that back into focus, and saying, you know, really, it's the people around us that remind us. Right? Are you still curious? Are you still interested?
Speaker 3:How do you really want this to work out so that and here's the interesting thing. If you were getting videotaped, you would want everybody to see this videotape. Like, this is how I handled the problem. You know? I want everybody to learn this one because, you know, it's a pretty good example of how you work through this and you end up with a better relationship than when you started.
Speaker 3:And we have to learn that for each other. Like, I was a PhD psychologist out counseling people. And out of the 6 negative emotions that are programmed into the brain, I could only do 1. I still had to learn the other the other 5. And I learned it from the, you know, the people around me that helped me become good at what I had already started doing.
Speaker 3:I think your mentors will find the same thing. You know, you get into it because you have really good intentions, but it's the people around you that help you become the kind of person that actually, thrives taking on these, you know, these relational problems. And so one other bit of brain science that, I'll mention, and that is that at age 12, brain goes through an apoptotic period, which is programmed cell death. And it, actually kills off a bunch of itself. And if prior to that age, you have had joyful relationships with each other, with other people, you keep almost 4 times more relational brain structure in your brain that doesn't die off during that apoptotic period.
Speaker 3:Because your brain basically says this about at these periods. If I haven't used it, I'm gonna get rid of it. It's like the spring cleaning for the brain. So if you haven't used your relational brain, the brain goes through and goes, who needs this stuff? It's, you know, got all these old wires laying around in the in the brain, and what's the use of them?
Speaker 3:So exercising the relational capacity of children, especially under age 12, will save about 4 times as much of their self regulating. This is the stuff that gives you the emotional capacity to be connected with others, to to live life successfully, to work through problems. And to do that, you have to have some exercising for your brain working through a few problems. So, you know, the fun thing for being a mentor, you know, you think you're gonna go in there and, you know, suddenly kids are just gonna bloom and they'll never have a problem because you're around. But, actually, what makes the biggest difference is you have a few problems, a few relational.
Speaker 3:They're a little upset today. They're don't not interested. Something's going wrong in their life. You join in and go, hey. You know what?
Speaker 3:I might not know what to do about this, but I don't want you to be alone. Whatever else you should learn is a human being shouldn't be alone when something's going wrong. And if you can learn that somebody else still wants to be with you, this actually is very transforming, saves a huge amount of the child's brain capacity, and it's very, very good for the mentor. I mean, the more the better we get at this, the more we feel like, hey. This is what God made me for.
Speaker 3:I'm I'm finally doing something, you know, really impactful. The other thing I'd say is that all the studies indicate that the the child will be in their mid thirties before you really notice the difference. Mhmm. And that is short term, the measure is how well they'll do in school that year or the next year. None of those count, that really in the way that they distinguish.
Speaker 3:But how well they can manage life when they're in their thirties, that is a huge difference from the impact you're making right now. So, even if your mentors are a little discouraged, like, you know, this kid is still not doing well, you know, you're you're measuring your crop 20 years before it ripens. So I don't know if any of those things are interesting to you interesting to you, but
Speaker 2:Oh, no. Not interesting at all.
Speaker 3:Just got some questions.
Speaker 2:You know, just programmed cell death and and all of these, you know, neurological things going on. No. Not interesting at all.
Speaker 3:That's insane. And This is brain stuff. You know? Just people think it's boring.
Speaker 2:Oh, no. It's it's, it's super insightful. And I was about to cry while you were talking about the if a if a kid under the age of 12 does not have these relational joy connections that that that is is detrimental, and that should be even more of an encouragement to us to remain relational. And and I wanna hit on something just back on leadership is that a mentor is a leader. And Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And very much I mean, just what I see from my own boss. My boss, he is a leader. And one thing that he is not afraid of is conflict and Mhmm. Relational disruption, but it's not it's not that he just enjoys that. It's that he's willing to mend relationships and remain relational with the presence of conflict.
Speaker 2:And and and so I think for our mentors as we, like, go through the rest of these, it's it's kind of like we're we're just assuming that mentors understand that a leader a leader faces hardships. A mentor faces hardships with a kid and gives them these relational reps to walk through things that they're as they're developing, they're they're learning so much more. And and if we could just see it, if we could just realize how much remaining relational impacts them, I I think it would keep us in the game. And so
Speaker 3:Yeah. Now that you mentioned the game, I just would like maybe to mention another analogy. And I I understand that down there in Texas, you folks like your
Speaker 2:sports. It's true. Well, not not the cowboys right now. There's there's something going on. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:But but, yeah, keep going.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So let let's hope it's just a virus that goes away or something. But the, you know, if you're sitting part of the team or on the bench and it comes down to really crucial play, you're really up against it and the coach picks you and sends you in, you know, this is not gonna be the easiest play ever made. Is that a sign that the coach dislikes you, or is that a sign of faith on the on the coach's part that you, you know, he's sending you in when there's a, you know, tough play to make? And I think that's how we're looking at this with other other people's lives.
Speaker 3:If god is like our coach and he sends us in to make the play when it's kind of a rough moment, it isn't because he hates us and wants to put us in bad spots. It's because, you know, you're the player he would pick to, you know, basically operate when conditions aren't perfect. Yeah. And I think that's you know, if we go back to the most basic part of this being relational is that we're just looking at somebody and going, whether I know what to do or not here, the most important thing in the universe is that you know you're not alone. Now another thing going back to trauma, which we haven't really mentioned yet, and that your brain registers something as trauma if it made me go through it entirely alone.
Speaker 3:Otherwise, it's just suffering. It was a hard day. But I wasn't alone. And so where the difference between whether someone registers their childhood as trauma or not is, again, was I alone in it? No one cared?
Speaker 3:No one was involved? Or were there other people there? And if there are other people there, they wanted to be with me. It was just a hard childhood, but not a traumatic one. It's very important difference.
Speaker 3:So, again, this difference is, do I want you to be in this alone, or do I wanna be with you? And once that's done, it's the most important thing you could possibly do with as far as mentoring. So that's Yeah. That's very encouraging.
Speaker 2:And I think that relates with I I was reading a paper about PTSD, and it was relating the American military with the Israeli military and how the Israeli military you're much more likely to face significant conflict in in war while while if you're in the American military, you may be in Florida hanging out and maybe not even see any conflict, but still be more likely to to suffer PTSD. And and the the article was talking about how our culture is formed is very individualized. And so the the capacity to be alone is far greater in America than it is in Israel, where your your community is more interconnected fellowship and families are generationally connected. And and so I think the the aloneness is so much more prevalent in America and how much more prevalent for kids from hard places who who maybe not don't have a father figure around and and all of those things. So that's really insightful.
Speaker 2:To to move on to the next one, Jim, which we're actually spelling out rare. I don't I don't know if people are are recognizing that. So r remain relational. A is act like yourself. And so, what you say in in the book is that we usually define ourselves by what we lack, not by what we have.
Speaker 3:Can't spell.
Speaker 2:Exactly. That that's perfect. And so I think as a mentor, all of our mentors will approach mentoring from that place of of not acknowledging necessarily who they are. They're more focused on what they lack or what they don't have or what they can't give. And so if it's they don't have a traumatic experience or past or their dad was always around, there's some concern that I'm not gonna be able to help this kid.
Speaker 2:But I I think what was interesting at the end of that chapter is you you just started to talk about how much we don't recognize we're not acting like ourselves. We're trying to be someone else. And, I wonder if you could kinda unpack what are those things that would help us to recognize when we're not being ourselves, when we're not acting like ourselves. Are there any telltale signs?
Speaker 3:Yeah. The well, the greatest distinction between whether we're being ourselves and whether we're not really comes down to whether we're being relational. So for men, the biggest problem is we get task oriented. So I'm doing a job. And when I'm doing a job, I forget entirely that I have a relationship with somebody.
Speaker 3:And if you get in my way, you're just causing me trouble. And, you know, it can just happen to you without anything going wrong. You just get over focused. So that's just very, very, very common. So the question is, do my does being with this person matter, is probably the number one question with acting like ourselves.
Speaker 3:But as I mentioned before, there are these 6 negative emotions. And so we can actually figure it out pretty quickly. If someone is sad, that's one of the negative emotions, can I use that to get a better relationship with them?
Speaker 2:And
Speaker 3:it was interesting for me when I first started counseling back in the seventies, men would come in with their wives, the woman would start to cry, and he would get angry and get up, and she's trying to manipulate me. And I would say to them, no. I think maybe she's sad. Oh, no. She's trying to control me.
Speaker 3:I'd say, well, now let me just ask her just an opening. Are you sad? Oh, yeah. I'm sad. So then it would take me about 2 hours to convince the guy he should sit down, put his arm around her, and have her a tissue.
Speaker 3:I said, what do you do? Well, just sit, be with her, and she'll be sad, and and they'd be amazed that this would work out. Something changed in culture so that by the eighties, I didn't have to teach that to anybody. We knew that sadness is a way to get close to somebody. How about if they were scared?
Speaker 3:That's another emotion. When someone is scared or when I'm scared, can I use that to get close to somebody else? And if you, you know, taken on some challenges or been in, you know, dangerous things, you know that but, you know, when you're scared, you can still help people. You know, there's a storm going on. There's a tornado coming.
Speaker 3:We're all scared. Kinda we'd be close. Yeah. We have you know, we get into the bathroom. We'll get in the bathtub, and, you know, we'll hold on to each other.
Speaker 3:And, you know, it's better to be together than it would be to be apart. So we understand that. How about disgust? When you're disgusted or the other person is disgusted. Well, anyone who worked on a farm would know that there's all sort of disgusting things and run something disgusting.
Speaker 3:You know? And if you had a baby, you know the same thing. You know? Disgusting things, we can we can clean this up. I mean, it's a good time to be together.
Speaker 3:But now we get to the harder ones. How about anger? Have you seen anger be used to bring people closer together? And almost universally, people go, no. That wouldn't work.
Speaker 3:Anger always results in my turning into somebody else than I would I would be if I was happy because that's a test. Acting like yourself. Are you the same person when you're angry? Do you care about the same things? Do you protect the same things that you do when you're joyful when you're if someone was sad?
Speaker 3:And most people's brain completely melts down at that point. It goes like, oh, no. When you're angry, that's you go do damaging things. That's not acting like yourself. You weren't created to do that.
Speaker 3:What you have is a completely untrained brain when you hit this particular spot. Next one is ashamed. And, you know, shame is the opposite of joy. It's like, I don't think anybody will be glad to be with me now. And most people have no idea how to use shame.
Speaker 3:But, actually, you know, I would guess that a a number of kids coming into a mentoring program just feel ashamed to be there. You know? And so could you look at somebody go, you know, they're really feeling badly about themselves. They wanna hide. Do I still wanna be with them?
Speaker 3:You can see. And and that could be used. Actually, going back to anger, it was intended as a protective emotion. So the question is, if you ask yourself the question, what is it that really needs to be protected here, and do I wanna be a part of that? Anger switches around from causing damage to, being protective.
Speaker 3:And then the final one is hopeless despair. And hopeless despair is what your brain thinks when it cannot solve the or resolve the issue with the time and energy it's got. Now if you look at the problems of culture with any kind of realism, you'll realize, hey. I can't solve this with the time and energy I've got. Right?
Speaker 3:When Moses was standing by the Red Sea and pharaoh's army was behind him, did he say, I've got this baby licked. I'm on charge of this. Or did he say, you know, I cannot handle this with the time and energy I've got. When Jesus said to the disciples, look. There's 5,000 hungry people here, and then he said to them, you feed them.
Speaker 3:Did they go, hey. We're on top of this. We, you know, got when Jesus told the disciples, get in the boat and, you know, go across the lake on the storm. Did they say, hey. We're on top of this.
Speaker 3:You know, what's this? We're sailors. We've got this one licked. Or did they feel like we can't handle this? So God's forever putting us in a situation we can't handle because that's where he expects to show up.
Speaker 3:So, you know, Christians should be very familiar with this one. Like, oh, this looks like a place for God. I wanna be there because I wanna see the action when it happens. This is gonna be amazing. Right?
Speaker 3:Wow. So all these feelings can be used relationally. And acting like yourself by the way, you know, your brain remembers who you were in the past or what you couldn't do in the past. But all the identity circuits in the brain are mirror neurons. That is they cannot see themselves.
Speaker 3:So the brain is designed to become what other people see in me, and it may not never have been there before. So what will end up happening for both the mentors and the people you're mentoring is that you're gonna be discovering someone else will be seeing something in you that's never been there. And because you see it, it will come into being. And so we're basically calling something into existence within the brain. It was wired and prepared to become, but no one woke it up.
Speaker 3:No one no one exercised it. And, of course, when you start something new, you're always bad at it. Right? Someone says, hey. You could be a a writer.
Speaker 3:Word of my first writing is good? Nah. None of that got published. You know, if you say, wow. I think you could play the piano.
Speaker 3:Will that make you a good piano player? No. You'll start out pretty bad. And so here we go. No matter what it is that's growing in you, we need to be looking for the real you.
Speaker 3:And the real you, the best way I say is that's who you'll be in 500 years. But all of this is behind you. The eternal you is what we're calling out of people. We're seeing it because we see god sees something in you that you haven't seen in yourself yet. Yeah.
Speaker 3:And being there for that moment is worth all of the payoff in eternity.
Speaker 2:That's so good. So act act like yourself is, in in a sense, a prophetic statement saying
Speaker 3:It entirely. Yes. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Saying, mentor, you got this, and Mhmm. You need to act like yourself. And I I just love that. The the next one is return to joy. So we're we're crossing the the halfway mark here on on rare leadership or in this case rare mentorship.
Speaker 2:Yeah. And so re return to joy. I I think, the rest, of these, the next one as well are are fairly in the same vein, but there there's this emphasis upon trial, hardship, difficulty. And leaders are are the best at returning to joy and getting others to return to joy as well. And so I I wonder if you could unpack the the importance of joy and a mentor's role in that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. I think so. Because right now, we've got we're both lit in kind of cold rooms. Right? And, you know, it's very easy to start a heater, you know, get a little heater, but the heat escapes.
Speaker 2:Mhmm.
Speaker 3:And joy is like that. It doesn't take much. You just walk up to somebody, smile at them. You know, how many people fall in love? How many people are still together 5 years later?
Speaker 3:Starting some joy is super easy. But what is gonna make a difference is can you sustain that when something goes wrong? And I think one of the problems that most people develop is when something goes wrong, they start working really, really hard to prevent that from going wrong again. But preventing things from going wrong, first of all, doesn't work very long term. So the the actual solution is how fast can you recover?
Speaker 3:I remember my had this one uncle who was wealthy enough to have bought a new car. No one else in the family ever bought a new car. He's had a new car. I'm like, woah. Wow.
Speaker 3:Look at that. Hoo. Just off the showroom kind of thing. And and he wanted to go fishing. So he said, hey.
Speaker 3:Let's go to town to go. We'll get some bait. And I said, hey. But it just rained, and we're on a muddy road. This your car will get all dirty.
Speaker 3:And he looked at
Speaker 2:me and said, we could wash it. And I've never seen such thinking in my life. You know? Like, oh, something could go wrong, and we could recover. Wonderful.
Speaker 3:And we went off, and I'm sure it got muddy, and I never cared about it again. That kind of thing. It's like we can recover. This is what returning to joy is. You know?
Speaker 3:Oh, you're mad at me? Oh, well, good. This will give us practice getting back to joy. Oh, you're scared of that? Oh, good.
Speaker 3:Give us practice getting back to joy. Oh, you feel overwhelmed? This will give you give us some practice getting back to where we are. And, importantly, for me, maybe as a mentor, is, oh, I just lost my being relational. You know?
Speaker 3:I just got over focused. Oh, I just got mad. I just got annoyed. I just, like, I have to think to myself, I'm never gonna do this again. You know, they got the wrong guy for the job.
Speaker 3:Of course, all that stuff happens. Right? The question isn't how do you keep it from happening. The question is, will it take you 90 seconds or less to get back to joy, which is what a healthy brain will do, 90 seconds or less. Or will the the miserable feeling last for weeks months?
Speaker 3:Like, I'm just dreading and dreading and dreading and dreading this. Now the reason I mentioned the 90 seconds is that if we're having trouble, like, we stay scared or angry or something for longer than 90 seconds, basically, it means that no one really mentored us very well on how we get back to joy quickly. And the best way back to
Speaker 2:You said 90 seconds. 90 seconds.
Speaker 3:90 seconds. A healthy brain will get back to joy in 90 seconds. So you see, if someone gets mad and you're back to being glad to be together within 90 seconds, you know, not much to dread. If they get mad at you and you go, this will only last for weeks or months or will we ever get over it, that's awful. See, you wanna prevent that.
Speaker 3:The other one, it's like, hey. Whatever. You know? Like, you go skiing. You do do you never wanna fall, or do you wanna be able to get it back up and get going again?
Speaker 3:You know? Or you whatever your sport, whatever your thing is, it's how fast you recover that makes a difference, not whether they're gonna you're gonna get tackled, but how fast are you gonna be back in the game. Right? These are the, you know, these are the things that we're working on here, resilient skills. So 90 seconds is what a well trained brain will do.
Speaker 3:And if it's taking you longer than that, you're probably wasting energy trying to keep that thing from happening instead of looking at how do I get back connected, again when this, you know, when this thing went wrong. One of the good things to do is to connect with Jesus, who, by the way, doesn't lose his relational capacity, and I've never seen them happen. So connecting with him is very good. And if you can't, go with somebody else who like, I could come to you and go like, man, I'm too mad right now to connect with Jesus. Are you connected with him?
Speaker 3:So, yeah. Yeah. I'm feeling okay. Well, help me back. You know?
Speaker 3:Mhmm. And when we do that, as soon as you're helping me back, I'm not alone in it anyway. I'm on my way back to joy. It might take me a little longer, but I'm practicing. We're doing reps now.
Speaker 3:We're gonna we're gonna get this baby down. Then the next time I get mad, it'd be like, hey. Where's Steven? You know? He's gonna help pray me back.
Speaker 3:You know? Like, this is this is how we practice these things, and and you'll be teaching kids these things. So all you have to do is be slightly better than they are, and they'll be learning from you. Slightly better. You don't have to master it.
Speaker 3:You just have to be a little bit ahead. You know, one step, that'll work.
Speaker 2:That's really good. Yeah. I I heard pastor Greg Laurie say once that the the measure of a man is how easily he becomes discouraged. And how I take discouragement is the, I guess my definition would be the 90 seconds or or more, and the the thing that keeps us from returning to joy. And and I I I don't know if that's just a masculine thing where discouragement keeps us from reengaging.
Speaker 2:But, yeah, I I don't know if you could you could share any about that.
Speaker 3:Well, I think it's a combination of the expectation for men in a very individualized individualistic culture. You know, we're somehow we are supposed to do this by ourselves. Whereas returning to joy actually means returning to relationship. It's like I'm reconnecting with God and others. And I remember my parents saying to me when I would get angry, you know, go to your room and come back when you're ready to behave yourself.
Speaker 3:You know? So, you know, you fix it on your own in your room somehow or another. And I would usually manage to do that by the time, dinner came around. It came down. I'm still just as mad inside as I had been before, but at least I was gonna be faking it on the outside so I could get my dinner.
Speaker 3:You know, it didn't really work too well.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I I think we're we're slowly figuring that out as well as as that cutting people off for relationship is is the primary thing they need. I mean, we we'll run into mental relationships where maybe a kid's acting up. And so the the parent of the kid's like, well, sorry.
Speaker 2:They can't meet with you because they failed their test or or were disrespectful or something. And and so it the mentorship becomes a a bonus if you're you have good behavior. Or
Speaker 3:Yes. Some kind of reward instead of a training. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, going in going into the last one, endure hardship well. So so remain relational, act like yourself, return to joy, and endure hardship well. And in this one, you you talk a lot about trauma and just the result of being overloaded by the stress that we carry and that we all have limits, and enduring hardships can can overload us. And and I think the the idea of the kids that we're mentoring is that there has been a stress, there has been an overload in in their life.
Speaker 2:But then in the same way, mentors are are taking on stress as well as leaders. We have to learn how to endure hardship well. And I like how in this chapter, you you talk about how trauma isn't just the things that are done to us that traumatize us, but it it can actually be the things that are not done to us that can traumatize us. So, I wonder if you can unpack that.
Speaker 3:Yeah. There's there's, kinda 2 categories, of things that go wrong in our life. 1 is the bad things that happened to us, and that's what we usually think of in terms of trauma. But one of the problems in trying to decide what was a
Speaker 2:trauma was that the researchers found that
Speaker 3:what blew one person apart didn't take out the next person. So they found out, you know, some things were traumatic to one person, but not to another. Currently, the the generation, it's called the snowflake generation, some of them are traumatized by someone simply disagreeing with them. So you have a different opinion. Some of the schools now, including someone's in Europe, have a room you can go to, a quiet room, which you can go recover from such a terrible thing having happened that someone disagreed with you.
Speaker 3:So that's not very resilient. Where there's other people who, you can argue with them all day long, and they say, bring it on. You know, I guess, then stop me.
Speaker 2:So That's that's my boss.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Yeah. So there's you know, that's that's resilience, which is what we wanna build. But the thing that takes everybody out is when you don't get the necessary good things. So necessary good things start with joy.
Speaker 3:Someone's glad to be with me. That's what stimulates the brain to grow to such a degree that we can actually scan your brain and see how much joy you've had by how much strength is it's built up in in terms of brain function. So if you don't, everybody ends up with a weak brain. It's not not optional. So you see a bad thing can happen to you.
Speaker 3:And if you've got enough joy strength, it won't take you out. It won't become a trauma. It'll just become a hard thing. But if you don't get joy, that'll take everybody out, and nobody will develop a brain that that's resilient enough. And I think one of the com common mistakes we make is that whatever resilience has been built into us by these joyful experiences, we just wonder why other people can't do it.
Speaker 3:We often think of that as willpower, choices, or other stuff like that. It's actually a measure of how resilient we are. And so learning to endure hardship well is basically learning to do 2 things. 1 is to rest. That may strike you as strange.
Speaker 3:Learning to rest, and the other is learning to build joy. So joy is a high energy. Rest is a low energy state. So I used to live in California, and we had this one, hill out there. I think it was 18 miles or something like that in the desert.
Speaker 3:And they said, you know, turn off your air conditioners at the bottom of this hill, especially in days that were above a 110 degrees because you'll you'll boil your car over before you get to the top. Right? Resting is your body's ability to to cool itself emotionally. So, again, if I can get back to joy, which is basically how quickly can I cool off my upset within 90 seconds, I got a lot of resilience left? Whereas if I stay upset for 3 minutes, I've already used, you know, twice as much energy as the person who quieted themselves in under 90 seconds.
Speaker 3:If I this lasts for 3 hours, oh, man. I am burning resources like crazy. I'm overheating on my way up the hill. So being able to basically cool yourself is is one thing. And the other is building the the joy capacity that says, hey.
Speaker 3:I can still keep going. I I've got the energy to do it. My my son just did the rim to rim to rim over at the Grand Canyon. You know, you that's, 10000 feet of climbing, and I think it was, 14 hours of running going down the Grand Canyon up the other side, down the Grand Canyon up the other side. He had to build a lot of capacity to do that.
Speaker 3:And he also had to be able to keep himself cool. He had to keep hydrating and all these kinds of stuff. Because if you overheat, you're cooked. Right? You're done.
Speaker 3:So, emotionally, we wanna do this. We wanna be able to cool ourselves well. The 2 main things that get American men, one is debt. Men spend so much time paying off debt. It's the number reason number one reason that working men are not with their families.
Speaker 3:So if you're overspending, you're not, you're not living well within your budget, you'll have no energy for your family. You'll not be getting your sleep at night. You're up watching, you know, too many videos and stuff like that. All these things that take your rest away. That keeps you from being able to cool quickly.
Speaker 3:And the other thing is you wanna be building joyful relationships. How do I get how do I get even my cranky boss to give me at least a smile a couple of times a day? You know? The more of these little joyful things we build in, again, the more strength we have. So the 2 things give us this endurance, this ability to handle hardships well.
Speaker 3:And, if you really wanna get good at it, here's a simple thing. Ask the people in your life, which hardships are you not handling well? Which ones make you forget who you are? And then go get some guys to help you with it. You know?
Speaker 3:One of the things I noticed about young mothers, they would get together and talk about what a hard thing it was to be young mothers. You know? Like, this baby makes me so mad. I just wanna smack it. I thought to myself, if I said that, they'd throw me in jail.
Speaker 3:You know? What what guy can I talk to that says, you know, hey? What do you do when you get so mad at your kids you just wanna smack them? And I thought, I don't have a single friend I can talk about this with. So one day, just out of desperation, I said to one of my friends, you know, what do you like about being a father?
Speaker 3:Because we talked about sports. Hey. That was no problem. We talked about car engine. We could talk about better fishing lures.
Speaker 3:I mean, you name it. We could we could cover those topics. Gas mileage, now specialty right there in those days. You know? But, you know, not cell phones, but whatever.
Speaker 3:Can you talk about, hey. The this I'm having trouble with my wife, my child, my relationships, my boss. You know, how do I get better at this? Once we started sharing that, we all got better. None of us knew what to do, but just the fact that we're talking about it, we're getting better.
Speaker 3:And so, again, I just really encourage people. If you want to solve the problem, ask the people around you. They'll tell you what you're bad at. And then get together with some encouraging guys. You probably have even some ways of doing that with the guys that are are mentors.
Speaker 3:Right? You know, you're learning from each other.
Speaker 2:Mhmm. Yeah.
Speaker 3:Doesn't matter where you are. You'll get better at it.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. And I wanna I wanna ask you a couple questions on that, like, because we've had times where we we wanna create space for people to share their difficulties and the things they're going through in the mentor relationship or or just personally. And most of the time, I'm in those settings where it's kind of like this established, we're gonna talk about it. For some reason, most of the time, not not every time, but most of the time, it doesn't feel like we get there to actually talking about it. We just get to the surface.
Speaker 2:And it's like anytime I try to provoke that conversation rather than it coming from a place where it's just coming out naturally, would would you say there's a difference between those and, like, who's responsible for bringing that up?
Speaker 3:Well, I would say there's there's probably 2 things going on here. Every single culture that I've had a chance to study, and I've been in a quite a lot of them, has a negative reaction to weakness. You cannot show weakness. You you know. And so I think the first thing, you wanna have an open discussion.
Speaker 3:Just discuss have the the participants talk about what what do they anticipate would be the response if they were to show weakness? Like, would you like to have a weak pastor? Would you like to have a weak boss? Would you like to have a weak relationship with your wife? What what part of your life would you wanna bring out into the public if it was to be labeled as weak?
Speaker 3:Because almost all the world would go weak, bad. You're bad. You're insufficient. We're gonna get rid of you. So this whole idea of talking about it is so countercultural that it's really you know, you kinda have to break down the culture first a little bit.
Speaker 3:But every place I see it, it's always the leader, who comes out with the weakness. So it's basically leaders teaching others, I'm going to teach you how to have a tender response to my weakness. The basic logic of it. So one of the problems we had with our boys was when they went to school, they wouldn't put up their hands. They wouldn't do things because they didn't wanna make a mistake.
Speaker 3:So, you know, they're getting actually bad grades because they didn't wanna make a mistake. So it occurred to me I have to teach them how to make mistakes. So I said, well, you know, I want you to go to school and make more mistakes than you're making. And they looked at me like I was mad. And, you know, I came back that night.
Speaker 3:I said, hey. Well, did you make any mistakes at school today? Mm-mm. This went on for about a week or 2. Right?
Speaker 3:And so then my wife and I decided, you know what? We're gonna have to set a good example to them. So when we sit down to dinner, I want you to each of us is gonna bring 2 or 3 mistakes we made during the day, and we're gonna talk about the mistake we'd made and how we learned from it. Well, it didn't take 2 days after that before they were coming home with school stories about the mistakes they had made. And, of course, we clapped for them.
Speaker 3:Wow. Wonderful sort of thing. By the time they got to be adolescents, they had sorted out mistakes into 2 categories. 1 is the mistakes that'll kill you, and you really don't wanna make those. And what are the mistakes you can learn from?
Speaker 3:And so it was our way of saying, you know, it's okay to have weaknesses. We've got ours, and we use them for learning. But the leader has to teach other people how to do it. So and the fastest thing is you give them an example, and then you have them go out and teach that to the kids they're mentoring. And as soon as you're you're both the example and you're having an example, it's like the pipeline opens up.
Speaker 3:That's right. Still fighting culture.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Yeah. I love that. A couple more questions to follow-up just from from all four points. The the thing that stands out the most to me is the 90 second rule of gauging your healthiness and and recovering.
Speaker 2:So I don't think I'm at 90 seconds, so let me just start there. I I mean, that when you said that, I was like, oh gosh. I I need work on resilience and returning to relationship. But for for me or for anyone else who would say that, like, what's the next step? Do I just start measuring how long it takes me to recover within situations?
Speaker 2:Like, I say, oh, I was at 5 minutes there or that took me 3 days there, or, what what would be your your encouragement? Oh,
Speaker 3:yes. The it's definitely the case that if you start measuring your recovery time instead of trying to fight off, you know, keeping something from going wrong, 2 things will happen. 1 is, your recovery time will get shorter and shorter. But the second thing is you'll start noticing the problem sooner and sooner. So, like, let's say you don't recover very well from being angry.
Speaker 3:Well, what'll end up happening is your brain won't notice that you're angry until you're about a 9 90% saturation of angry because angry is a scale. You know? As soon as you start noticing how fast it takes you to recover, you'll start noticing you're angry earlier and earlier. And oddly enough, it's easier to recover the sooner you catch it. So you actually you're you're you're beating the system 2 different ways.
Speaker 3:But what keeps it from locking up in your head, you know, the final ingredient is you have someone to to talk to about it. So I have lots of people who have developed, you know, over time, sort of a joyful like, they're gonna tell me how long they've been upset. And just the fact that they know that they can talk to somebody about it, your brain goes, hey. Because this is a very interesting thing about, about your brain, and it's also very important for mentoring. As soon as your brain actually knows there's a solution, it sets about trying to figure out how to do it.
Speaker 3:And one of the things we found about kids that were really stuck in situations they couldn't get out of, if the counselors or mentors could show them effectively there is a way out, You may not be able to do this till you're 18 or 20 or 30, but there is a way out. Their brain starts working on, how do I get out of here? And it gives you a certain amount of resilience, which it might take you a long time to to actually put it into play. But, you know, we're basically activating that same system. Have someone you can tell about it, and then just, measure and observe.
Speaker 3:And as soon as you're measuring and observing, your brain is automatically learning and figuring it out. For instance, I had no one to talk to about anger. So I used to go to the grocery store. And when I was in the the checkout line, I talked to the clerk who was bored out of his or her skull just sitting there, you know, processing groceries. And I said, hey.
Speaker 3:What do you really like to do when you're angry that makes you just proud of yourself? And they like, Ron's asked me that one before. They gave me these answers. Every one of them was deplorable. But I would start thinking, you know, like, why don't I like that answer?
Speaker 3:What would be better than that? You know, the fact that we're just talking and problem solving. There's and there's one other thing you can do, and this would be the sort of the lucky one. You won the lottery if you did this. And that is find somebody like your boss who doesn't seem to, care.
Speaker 3:You know, he's like, hey. Bring it on. And and who gets a good outcome. You know? Don't bring don't figure out the person who gets mad and gets bad out outcomes.
Speaker 3:You know? Just pick somebody who doesn't go like, hey. I don't know how to do that. You know, you get over it really fast. How would you get over this?
Speaker 3:And and give them, for instance, the one you're stuck at. You know? It's we'll solve this together. So here's the interesting thing about the brain. Over age 12, one last little comment, and that is after age 12, the survival of your group becomes more important to your brain than your own individual survival.
Speaker 3:You are looking for somebody from your group that would tell you, what is it like us to do when we feel this way? So your brain is already set to hear this from from one of your peers. It's what it's looking for. So you're not giving it something, unusual or unnatural. Your brain's ready to absorb absorb a good example from a peer, if you can just find one.
Speaker 2:Wow. It's really good. My my final question for you, and I feel like I need to add a soundtrack behind all these moments. You took start talking about the brain. I feel I feel like it would add some elements to this interview.
Speaker 2:Because all of those are just so insightful to me. I was thinking about a situation where where the kid's not recovering. And, obviously, you would probably recommend comforting and acknowledging that I don't want you to be alone and and being with them. But would you make a distinction between I don't know how the best way to word this. Matching what the kid is feeling versus leading him out of it.
Speaker 2:And is are those mutually exclusive or are those just both together of of we we feel what they feel, but we also lead them out of it? Or do we just do we just meet them where they're at?
Speaker 3:Well, the brain is actually looking for there's a whole part of the brain called the cingulate cortex, which is looking for somebody that will match what I feel but will show me something that I don't know about it. So the the the brain sequence, and it's actually meant mentioned in rare leadership for people who wanna go back and read a little bit more, is you have to first validate, which is to say, this is how bad it is, how big it is. See, I'm gonna feel as badly as you do, but that isn't all there is to it. That's the comfort part. So I can feel this badly, and we can still look at these other things.
Speaker 3:So my uncle didn't say to me, no. The car won't get dirty. He said, yeah. It'll get dirty. It'll be a mess.
Speaker 3:We can clean it. See? So if he just said it wouldn't get dirty, I would have spent the rest of my life thinking my uncle was nuts. So, you know, he validated. That's how big it is.
Speaker 3:But then he moved us on to something more in the world. Comfort is really saying there's more to life than just this. This is as big as it is, but it's not all there is. Now if you go to the second part first, like, well, that's, yeah, that's not all there is. You won't get anywhere.
Speaker 3:The personal goal, you didn't get it. You don't understand how bad that you don't you know? So it talks about being hopeless, and that's really the one that the mentors are will have the hardest time with, I think, overall. It's like, is it that hopeless? Yeah.
Speaker 3:It is that hopeless. We cannot handle this with the time and energy we've got right now. But, you know, that isn't all there is because there's things about the world that we don't know and we don't have, and there's things about God and those you know? So, you know, that doesn't make the problem any smaller, but makes God and the rest of the world bigger. So first, yes, we join them.
Speaker 3:Now the one time this doesn't work is if someone is being triggered into a trauma. If your brain switches into a trauma, it switches out of the current moment and into some past moment. So in that case, you'll notice the problem seems bigger than this moment really, you know, would call for. So I have a fear of dogs. And that was because, where I grew up, the dogs were guard animals.
Speaker 3:And a lot of them would there were no vaccinations for rabies, so a dog could be rabid, and they all have to bite. So so, you know, when people say, oh, look at that dog. I go, dog. Right? Now the dog that we're looking at is somebody's little, you know, cozy golden retriever.
Speaker 3:You know? It's like, well, why am I reacting to that golden retriever as though it was gonna kill me? Well, that's not coming from the current moment, is it? Yeah. It is a dog, but, you know, your dangerous golden retrievers are a very small category.
Speaker 3:Right? So when you see the feeling is bigger than the moment, you're like, that is a dog, and dogs can be scary. But maybe there's more to it than just this dog. Maybe we're remembering some other something from the past. And, if you try to say that dog isn't scary, and, again, you get nowhere.
Speaker 3:You say, well, dog could be scary, but maybe there's more to the fear of dogs than the current moment. Could this be added could anything else be adding to what we're feeling right now? Now you validate it and say, yes. But there could be something more to this picture than what we're doing. And what I just mentioned there is it's tricky for most people to learn to do, but it's not really that complicated because we're constantly running into it.
Speaker 3:You know? If it's bigger than the current moment, you don't have to validate and go, yeah. That's what terrifying golden retriever. You're not validating. You're just saying, this is a huge fear.
Speaker 3:This is a huge reaction. Mhmm. Maybe there's more to it than just the current moment too as well. So we're just saying it's very big. And in addition, we here's how we're going to go about exploring that together.
Speaker 3:I just don't want you to be alone. Once that's the case, I don't want you to be alone. The main part of being human is is back in the equation. So and then there's a lot more other things we can learn.
Speaker 2:So good. So good. My my final question for you, Jim, is is related back to our our first of remaining relational.
Speaker 3:Mhmm.
Speaker 2:And, I think just some something that popped into my head was like the impact of vain imagination where we start drawing out a story or having conversations in our head with ourselves about how we feel about our our mentee. I've had a few times where my mentee has lied to me or upset me, and then I'll just have this conversation in my head of how I'm going to correct him or how I'm going to fix the the the solution. And and I wonder if you have any thoughts about how to how to cut off vain imagination as a mentor where I'm I'm drawing so many conclusions that really what I need to do is just believe the best about my mentee and and not have all these internal conversations that they're not connected to. So then now I'm approaching this relationship from a completely different like, we're not in the same spot anymore because I've been playing chess with him in my head. Mhmm.
Speaker 2:Well, I
Speaker 3:think human beings are the only one that has an as if circuit in their brain. At least we've got, of all creatures on earth, the most well developed as if circuit in which, we can say, well, what if this and what if that? And with a little creativity, that can run almost indefinitely. And I think that's probably what you're talking about. You're you're doing all these as if things.
Speaker 3:And it's really sort of an artificial way of trying to say, how do I expand who I am in this relationship by trying to anticipate everything that could possibly happen? But, you know, the truth is we've wandered away from the relationship now, haven't we? And so we have, one of the books that we write is called, Joyful Journey. It's about what we call Emmanuel Journaling, which is if I stop and I'm grateful and I connect with God and then I ask God, what do you want me to see about this thing? What ends up happening is that when you're imagining, you cannot pick out for sure what's the most important part.
Speaker 3:So you're running through every every one of 10,000 options. But which is the one that's gonna be important? And you might have even missed that one because when it actually happens, who knows? Right? So but we we stop, and we're thankful to Jesus.
Speaker 3:You know, I'm glad you're with me because, you know, what would we be thankful for? And so I'm glad you're with me, and I don't have to handle this particular unknown by myself. What do you find most important? What do you want me to notice that would matter the most right here? Now your brain moves out of shifting through every one of the possible options into, what does god want me to focus my attention on?
Speaker 3:And, you know, it's very much like making a good play as, in sports. You know? You stop running every possible scenario, and you're going, what do I what's really most important here? What do I focus on to get me to whatever the goal is? And doing that with with Jesus, connecting with him, helps us shift out of the running every possible option and into, let's, you know, let's get focused on what what's really most important here.
Speaker 3:Once you do that, you know, you may shift in back into it again. You might start you know, we used to call it running the Rolodex. Younger people won't even know what a Rolodex is. But
Speaker 2:Yeah. I'm I'm the snowflake in in this conversation. So I'm actually offended that you just said the word rolodex. So Yes. I just
Speaker 3:imagine. Yeah. You have to pick the the the the destination you want. And to do that with Jesus, really, you know if anyone else helps you do it, you go, well, what do they know? But, you know, something about working with Jesus when he says, well, here's what I want you to keep in mind.
Speaker 3:This is what's really important. You go, oh, I think that is important. Something in us just knows these things. And sometimes I have to do that several times in order to settle myself back down. But, that's the route I would recommend there.
Speaker 3:There's at least the first step.
Speaker 2:So good. Reverend Jim Wilder, so so great having you on the podcast and and hearing your thoughts about the brain and about mentors and lead leadership with kids from hard places. And I highly encourage you listeners to check out Jim's latest books, Renovated and the other half of the church and also Rare Leadership. And then you also said journey. Joyful journey.
Speaker 2:Joyful journey. Yes. It's awesome. And and I'll also mention a few websites for our people, but lifemodelworks.organdjoyfilledchurch.com. I wonder if you could unpack those for us, Jim, just for our listeners, if they wanna check out what you're doing.
Speaker 3:Yeah. Well, the general church pastor and engineer friend of mine, Michael Hendricks, we went decided, you know, how would we explain about the relational side of the brain and how that fits with Christianity to Christianity for 500 years has been focused really on what we believe. If we could just get all our beliefs right, we'd be okay. And, you know, the problem is that we repeatedly have people who believe in all the right things, but they're still you know, their character hasn't been changed the way we want it to. So how do how does that work?
Speaker 3:I went to the practical steps. So that was the the other half of church is is really the relational half of your brain that generally doesn't get a chance to become a Christian. It's got your character. And then life model works dot org. About 4 years back, we decided we really want to have a clear idea of what life should look like across the whole lifespan if we were actually fully alive the way Jesus meant us to be, which would mean getting our brain to run the way a Christian was supposed to operate, you know, on other things, on families and relationships.
Speaker 3:So, we've been collecting, well, you know, people who are interested in that topic and what we're learning and sharing it to that that spot and just love to have anybody else who, like yourself, is interested in seeing this kind of change in the world and in our own lives. And, you know, we'll encourage each other to get on with it.
Speaker 2:So good. Well, we'll leave those links in the show notes and just encourage you to to follow Reverend Jim Wilder. Thank you so much for your time today. Thanks for being on podcast.
Speaker 3:Great to be with you, Steven.