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Mental toughness, mental clarity, and mental health all have one thing in common: The journey begins in your mind. In this radical guide, the award-winning author of The Last Arrow illuminates a surprising path toward personal fulfillment and optimal performance. (from Amazon.com review
Neurosurgeon and award-winning author Dr. W. Lee Warren, MD delivers daily prescriptions from neuroscience, faith, and common sense on how to lead a healthier, better, happier life. You can’t change your life until you change your mind, and Dr. Warren will teach you the art of self brain surgery to get it done. His new book, Hope Is the First Dose, is available everywhere books are sold.
Good morning, my friend. Dr. Lee Warren here with you for some self-brain surgery
today. It is wildcard Wednesday.
And Wednesday is a day that I often bring you back something from the past with
a specific intention in mind. Today is one of those days.
Remember, starting next week, for a while until I finish my new book,
the Self-Brain Surgery Handbook, we're going to have just one new episode a week most of the time.
And so during those weeks, you'll have some content that I'll bring to you that'll
be from the past or an interview that I've done elsewhere, something useful
to you, but it'll be useful.
Every day will be useful. Don't skip over it just because it isn't brand new.
I just always like to label things if they're not brand new so that you know.
And here's a good example.
Last week on Friday, we had Dr. Josh Axe. His book, Think This,
Not That, is all about mind shift, all about the kinds of things that we talk
about on this show every day.
Well, last Last October, I had another conversation about mind shift with Erwin
Raphael McManus, one of my favorite writers.
And Erwin and I talked in October about his book that just came out back then called Mind Shift.
And Erwin actually shows up in Josh Axe's audio book. They have a conversation
about shifting your mind.
So I thought it'd be a perfect episode to bring back to you to look at this
idea of how you can benefit in your life when you learn how to think about the
things you're thinking and choose healthier things to think about.
Shift your mind in different ways.
Exactly the stuff that we talk about here all the time. Just as a reminder,
when we present an older episode, you may hear me talk about free copies.
Those have been given away a long time ago, so there's no new copies of the book to give away.
But if you haven't read Erwin McManus' book, Mind Shift, I think it's very valuable.
I think it would help you, and I would encourage you to go do it.
Listen, we talked about the 2024 first annual podcast awards we're going to
give away. By the way, we're going to give a little something back to some of
our guests that have been so helpful on the show.
In this first quarter, the two leaders are Maddie Jackson-Smith and Jenny Allen.
So if you listened to those two episodes on the last two Wednesdays,
you go back and listen to them. If you haven't, send me an email,
lee at drleewarren.com.
Lee at drleewarren.com. Let me know who you think the first quarter best interview
was, the interview that inspired you the most, that taught you the most,
that helped you reframe your thinking about something. Was it Jenny Allen?
Was it Maddie Jackson-Smith? I gained so much from both of those.
And what we're going to do basically is pick the favorite episode of the first
quarter, second quarter, third quarter, and fourth quarter.
We'll compete the first quarter and the second quarter winners,
and then the third quarter and fourth quarter winners. And then late in December,
we'll have a championship.
You can vote for your favorite episode of the whole year. And that person will
receive the first annual inaugural, if you will, 2024 Dr. Lee Warren Podcast Awards.
We're going to do something special for our best fan favorite episode of the
year. So be sure and go check out those episodes.
Send me an email. Let me know who you think. I'll probably run a poll on Instagram.
If you're not following me on Instagram, it's at Dr. Lee Warren.
Check out at Dr. Lee Warren on Instagram.
We'll probably do it on Facebook too. who will total those votes and choose
who your choice for first quarter 2024 podcast award candidate is.
So make sure you do that. Follow me at Dr. Lee Warren on Facebook and Instagram.
Send me an email. Get your vote in there somehow. In the next few days,
we'll choose that first quarter winner.
And more on that later. We'll do that each quarter for the year.
And finally, crown the champion of the 2024 Dr. Lee Warren podcast awards.
We'll do that every year, Lord willing, and try to honor the guests and the
time that they spend helping us change our minds.
And change our lives. Okay, it's Wild Card Wednesday. We got Erwin McManus to
continue our thinking about mind shift.
You're going to really enjoy this episode. Let's get after it.
Good morning, my friend.
I am so excited to be with you today. I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and we're going to
do some self-brain surgery today and change our minds.
I want to tell you a personal story. I was on the treadmill looking out over
the North Platte River on a snowy, cold day in late 2022.
And I was listening to the audio book of a book called The Genius of Jesus by Erwin Raphael McManus.
And Erwin said something in that book that was so profound, I stopped the treadmill
and went over to my desk and with my sweaty hand, made a bunch of notes and wrote some things down.
It's one of only three times I can think of in my life when I've stopped a car
or stopped working out because something shook my brain so hard that I had to
record it or write it down right that moment.
Erwin Raphael McManus' books do that kind of thing to me. The Genghis of Jesus blew me away.
I immediately reached out to the publicist, and he unfortunately was already
done with interviews for that book.
Wasn't available. So I thought, man, I missed my chance to have Erwin McManus.
I had read one of his previous books called The Last Arrow, which is also equally profound.
Longtime fan of his work. Erwin McManus is a mind architect.
He's an award-winning author. He's an artist. His books have sold over 1 million copies.
He's the pastor of a church on Hollywood Boulevard in Los Angeles called Mosaic.
His books have been translated into more than a dozen languages.
And he's the guy that CEOs and high net worth individuals reach out to,
professional athletes, world leaders, celebrities.
People reach out to him for coaching when they're stuck with something related to their mindset.
Erwin is the guy that's known as the passionate person who can help you unlock
your internal limitations and your personal genius.
He talks about mental toughness, mental clarity, and mental health,
and how they all have one thing in common.
The journey begins in your mind.
Can Can you think of a better guest for the Dr. Lee Warren Self-Brain Surgery
Podcast than somebody who talks about the importance of changing your mind?
Well, lo and behold, his new book is called Mind Shift.
And I got an email from his publicist at Penguin Random House who said,
Hey, your platforms are lining up around this mind change idea.
You tried to get Erwin on the show for his last book, and we want to give you
an advanced copy of Mind Shift.
It doesn't take a genius to think like one. I read it in two days,
and then he agreed to be on the podcast.
We actually recorded this a couple of months ago that he wanted me to hold it
for his book launch, which is happening on Tuesday, October 3rd.
And I couldn't be more excited to share this incredible book with you.
It is basically a condensed guide to how you can change your mind and how you
can change your life and all the things we talk about on this show every day.
You can get a lot of that same kind of mind-blowing, life-transforming information
from the genius that is Erwin Raphael McManus.
Friend, I can't wait for you to meet him. I encourage you to go read his books.
The Genius of Jesus and MindShift particularly have made a huge difference in
my thinking, my clarity of thought, and have made a difference in my life.
And I'm excited and really happy to introduce you to a new friend today, Erwin Raphael McManus.
And that really leaves us, my friend, with only one question.
Hey, are you ready to change your life? If the answer is yes, there's only one rule.
You have to change your mind first. And my friend, there's a place where the
neuroscience of how your mind works smashes together with faith and everything
starts to make sense. Are you ready to change your life?
Well, this is the place. Self-Brain Surgery School.
I'm Dr. Lee Warren, and this is where we go deep into how we're wired.
Take control of our thinking and find real hope. This is where we learn to become
healthier, feel better, and be happier. This is where we leave the past behind
and transform our minds.
This is where we start today. Are you ready? This is your podcast.
This is your place. This is your time, my friend. Let's get after it.
Music.
So before we start, would you mind saying a prayer for us, Erwin? Sure.
Father, thank you so much for Lee. I just pray your blessing on his life and
that you would expand his influence, expand his message.
And thank God that you'd get his book in the hands of so many people.
I'm so grateful for you, Father. Pray that this moment would just be honoring
to you. We pray in Jesus' name. Amen.
Amen. Thank you, friend. We're back, and I'm so excited to introduce you to
pastor, author, mind architect, Erwin Raphael McManus. Welcome to the show, Erwin.
I'm so glad to meet you, Lee. I'm excited about today's conversation.
It's going to be fun. Tell us a little bit about, first of all,
what in the world is a mind architect? I love that. What is that?
I have a feeling that we work in very similar genres, but it's interesting.
A lot of people are interested in the brain, and right now there's so much brain science out there.
I'm really interested in the mind, which is a little different.
In fact, we were working on some images, and they brought me the images of the
brain. Both sides of the brain. I said, no, you got the wrong thing.
I need an image of universe because I'm not interested in the physical mechanism of the brain.
I'm interested in the universe that actually expands within us and allows us
to have, in many ways, unlimited capacity.
So for me, a mind architect is really a person who understands that every human
being has mental structures.
And those mental structures will either move them toward
failure or move them towards success will actually either limit
their capacity potential or will unlock that
capacity and potential and i know you have
been going through mind shift because you got one of the early copies of
it one of the things i talk about in mind shift is that and i remember the day
october 26 1990 i heard someone say this phrase on sports radio about buster
douglas that and why he lost to evander holyfield is that some people are simply
structured for failure failure.
And when I heard that statement, it shook me. And I remember thinking to myself.
Do I have internal structures for failure and or am I internally structured for success?
And do I have a combination of those? Is my brain like a maze that some days
moves toward failure, some days moves for success that I haven't really paid
attention to which path I'm actually choosing each day.
And so I all the way back to really when I was 10 years old,
I ended up in a psychiatric chair.
They ended up testing me for neurodiversity, as they would say now.
And back then they would just tell me I was retarded.
It's a different world. I do some of the new language better.
And frankly, I don't normally share this, but you're like in a different space.
I'm 10 years old. I'm a straight D student.
I'm having a hard time connecting to the outside world, to reality.
And one of the things that saved my life was this psychiatrist who gave me all
these IQ tests and came back and told me that I had the basic structure of a genius.
And there was no tangible proof of that. And if anything, it felt like to me
I was broken and that I didn't lack, I lacked the tools to actually connect to the human race.
And so what it did for me was it created an intense value in me because I thought
to myself, if there is genius in me, and I wasn't sure, but it was wonderful
to have someone tell me that.
But if there is genius in me, it's trapped under a lot of rubble of my own brokenness
and insecurity and uncertainty and pain.
And I may never actualize that.
And so a huge value in my life has been this deep conviction that there's genius
inside of every human being.
I could have come out going, oh, I'm different. I'm special.
I have genius. What I came out of is I think everyone's like this.
And some people are able to access that genius and some people are able to actualize
that genius and other people sadly die never having known their own genius.
And so I felt like it gave me my mission in life.
And yeah, and then when I started studying philosophy and psychology at the
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, it had one of the top three psychology
departments in the world.
And I just instantly began studying neurodiversity from psychosis to neurosis
to I was really fascinated with narcissistic and sociopathic behaviors.
And so I spend a huge amount of my time trying to understand the nuances of the human brain.
And I've been to three neuro clinics in the world that I went as a patient.
I didn't go as a teacher. Yeah.
That's why people are you a doctor? No, I'm a patient, which gives me far more expertise.
And in several clinics, I ended up becoming a test mouse. and when they did research in my brain.
And so I ended up learning a lot about the neurological dynamics that I had
to face with. And I have slow shutter speed.
And so I have a hard time keeping out data. And so I get flooded with mass of amounts.
And so I don't have a sense of chronology like other people do.
And because when you have normal rapid shutter speed, your brain categorizes time.
And mine doesn't. And I have either, I either have no filter to stop information
or all information blocks out at the same time.
And so my kids laugh because I'll say, oh, we should go see this movie.
And they go, dad, we were with you yesterday and in that movie,
and I'll have no memory of it.
It's the weirdest thing, but then I'll meet someone.
And I, an example, I was at this dinner like 15 years ago and the guy sitting
next to me was a guy named Johnny Musso.
And he introduced himself and I said, I remember McManus and never met this guy my whole life.
And I said, wait a minute, Johnny Musso. And I said, you played running back
at the University of Alabama.
He goes, yeah, I did. I said, give me a second. And I wrote down in my book
and my notepad, his number.
And I said, your number was number 22.
And he goes, yeah, how could you know that? And I literally went through my
mind. I found a newspaper.
I saw the photograph. I looked at the jersey and I saw the number there.
And so my memorization skills are cheating.
I don't remember the way like normal people remember. I remember differently than other people.
And so I'm only giving you all this extensive background because when you ask
me what's a mind architect, I had to spend my entire life learning how to take
my liabilities and turn them into assets.
Wow. I had to learn how to take what I was essentially told most of my life
were inadequacies and flip them and turn them into superpowers.
And I'm convinced that maybe not everyone can do it at the same level,
but I think everyone has a capacity to redesign their mind in such a way where
they optimize who they are.
Wow. That's amazing. There's a little point that we didn't hit as you were telling
that story about how important it is to say things to people that are empowering.
We all accept these labels in our lives, but that psychiatrist,
when you were 10 years old, told you that you were a genius.
What if he had said, hey, kid, you're a moron? What would your life have been like?
Yeah, it didn't even matter if he was right.
That's powerful, isn't it? Yeah. The power wasn't in the accuracy of it.
The power was in how it began to reshape my own identity of myself.
Wow. It says a lot about what we say to our kids and our spouses and everybody
around us, doesn't it? No, absolutely.
And just even the negative input. That's why growing up, I've been married 40 years to my wife, Kim.
And one of the things we really focused on was you don't ever tell a kid he's a liar.
You tell him he lied and you don't call him a liar. That's right.
You don't tell your child they're a thief. They stole, but they're not a thief.
And a lot of times we have the tendency to define people by their worst behavior
rather than by their best behavior.
That's right. And I think it's so much identify bad behavior by identify by best behavior.
Wow. Yeah, I read a few years ago a book by Bryan Stevenson called Just Mercy.
And he talked about and they made a movie out of it later. He was working in
people who had been wrongfully convicted of crimes and given death sentences
and all that. And he said he was made an argument against capital punishment.
And he said something similar to what you just said. He said that we should all be defined.
We should never be defined by our worst decision.
Our whole life should never be defined by our worst decision.
I agree 100%. And frankly, for me, that was something that was reinforced to
me when I began reading, of all things, the Bible.
I was an adult when I first saw a Bible. And so I'm devouring it and reading it.
And I find the story of this woman named Rahab, who ends up being in the genealogy of Jesus.
And I go, wait a minute, this, I think you're like this prostitute ends up being
in the genealogy of Jesus.
And I go, wow, there's such a small story of her, but one One positive choice
redefined her entire life.
And so I just noted for myself, you are always one choice away from the best version of you.
Wow. And I remember just writing that down and going, it doesn't matter if I'm Rahab.
What matters is the choice I make right now. And that choice can redefine who I am.
And I just love that kind of hope. And I feel like that's a huge part of why I get up in the morning.
What I'm passionate about is helping people destroy internal limitations and
begin to recreate a new architecture instead of their own minds.
That's the mind architect. Yeah, you actually, your new book,
and we'll get to your new book in a minute, Mind Shift.
You started it, it startled me when I read this, like you said,
the purpose, let me say it exactly right. right?
The aim of this book is to destroy your internal limitations.
Is that right? Yeah. Is that what you said? I was like, wow.
Come right out and just, I'm going to tear up what you think about yourself
and the limits you put on yourself.
And you did just a masterful job. But before we get to mind shift,
I want to just give us a 30,000 foot view, Erwin, of who you are and what you
do and the kind of work that you do, a little bit of your background and that
kind of thing. Give us the big picture of who you are.
Yeah, you've caught me in an interesting phase of my life. And I've had so many
different phases. Every 10 years, I start a new career.
And both purposely and accidentally, both at the same time. And so people who
know me real closely, I kind of work in a lot of different worlds.
But my faith experience has been that I started a church in LA called Mosaic.
And I started really in a nightclub the Prince used to own.
It was for all my friends who were irreligious and my atheist, Buddhist,
Hindu, Muslim, agnostic friends who or there were ones who grew up in some kind
of like Christianity or Catholicism who were angry because the church really
left them jaded and just created a space for them. And it was a very different kind of space.
And Mosaic has grown and become a positive spiritual influence across the world.
But I've also in the past 20 years, I've worked as a filmmaker and a fashion
designer and I write books.
I coach geniuses, which is basically what I do in my life.
And so whether it's somebody, you know, coaching the NFL or a fashion designer
who would be one of the best designers in the world or someone in the music
industry or the business world.
And I only really coach people who want to or are aspiring to be the best in
the world, the best of the best.
And for mosaic i can give away for free everything you need to go from average to good.
And when people say hey how come you don't code just i go most
people right now are just sitting in average and everything i
create at mosaic can move you from average to good and moving from good to great
is a different level of work but moving from great to a level of genius that's
that That requires a level of ruthlessness that most people aren't willing to bear in their own soul.
And so it's a different level of coaching.
And so that's what I do. I write books.
I've been writing books for over 20 years. I have a graphic novel.
That's not his way. I've worked with films. I've worked with music.
And I have a couple of fashion brands over the years. and then just in a practical
way, also creating this online learning community called The Arena that will
focus on communication, leadership, character, and big ideas.
I really think communication is an art form,
And that we've lost the beauty of and power of words.
And so I just have a real passion to help people become extraordinary communicators
and to not only make it effective and efficient, but also make it elegant and beautiful.
Wow, that's powerful. And the arena is going to be like an app that people can sign up for.
It's an online community that requires like a monthly membership.
And I put all the content we create. I have a master class called the Art of
Communication and another class called the Seven Frequencies of Communication.
And by themselves, those are thousands of dollars. But in the community,
you get access to them for free.
And I'm always creating new resources, new ways to redefine the architecture of your brain.
And I just thought, I don't like to sell. I hate to sell. It's like my worst thing in the world.
And so I thought, if I create a community of learners, I think it's the future of education.
If I create a learning community, I can just keep Keep putting things in there
and helping people access what they need. And so I'm excited.
This August, we're launching the arena, and I think it's going to be the future of education.
Amazing. You can follow Erwin on Instagram and find out more about that.
I've been following your posts and keeping up with that. That's an exciting,
you're on to something there. I think that's going to be really exciting.
So you'll probably see me sign up for that at some point, too.
And right behind me, I don't know if you see Daredevil. Yeah.
And I love graphic novels and mythologies. And one of the things I love about
Daredevil is that he's a kid through a tragic accident, went blind,
and he redefined a liability into an asset. Wow.
And other people saw him as disabled. And but the true story was that it was a superpower.
Wow. That's so cool. Hey, give us just for a second.
So the first time I ever heard of you was with a book that you wrote called The Last Arrow.
Oh, yeah. And I don't know if any of the listeners here have read that book
yet. No, they've heard me mention it before.
Tell us a little bit about The Last Arrow and the concept because it's such
a cool, the way you started that book and why you started it.
Really, a really powerful image there. So let us hear about The Last Arrow for a sec.
Yeah, I wrote The Last Arrow, I think it might have been like seven years ago
because, and the reason I remember
that is because it's right when I found out I had stage four cancer.
I had just finished editing the book, just got it back from the publisher,
and I was going to my final editing.
And it was right before my wife's birthday, around I think December 17th,
that I was told I had cancer and that I had stage four cancer,
that it metastasized from my prostate to my bladder to my lymph nodes.
And so the the likelihood that i would survive that was not extraordinarily high i don't think.
Um and i was here finishing this book called the last arrow that's about how
to live a life without regret and how most people think they failed but actually what they did was quit,
yeah and i had three weeks between being told i had cancer and having surgery
that was going to last six and a half hours or so and so i made sure i finished
that book before that surgery in case I didn't come out of it.
And what to me was so almost like mystical was the night they told me I had
cancer and my wife and kids, obviously it was a really tough night and they
were profoundly emotional.
And after they went to sleep, I opened up the manuscript and I thought,
I've got three weeks to finish this book.
So I went right to work that night after everybody went to sleep.
And the first line I read in my manuscript was this one.
I'll never forget it. It said, I need to tell you before you hear from someone else that I'm dying.
I wrote that phrase a year before I knew I had cancer.
And when I read that, it just set me back. But it was almost like a shifting in my soul going.
You're okay. You've already written the story and you didn't even know it. Wow.
And but right after that line, right after the line where I write,
I need to tell you before you hear it from someone else, I'm dying.
I wrote the most important line in the book.
But so are you. That's right.
And powerful. That was the point of the last arrow is that if you can begin
to live your life as if you're on borrowed time,
and develop that level of urgency and intention, you will be able to look back without regret.
And I finished the book. I thought maybe this is the perfect metaphor.
My last book is literally called The Last Arrow. I didn't know I would live.
But I can tell you that in those three weeks, I never felt bitter.
I never felt angry. And what surprised me the most is I never felt afraid. Great.
And I gave myself permission to feel anything I needed to feel.
I didn't want to have to fake it. If you don't know if you're going to live,
there's no point in faking.
You might as well just be your most authentic self. That's right.
And what I discovered to my own surprise was that there was a deep sense of
courage and peace inside of me that I didn't know I had and that I know is available to everyone.
And so when I wrote The Last Arrow, and I'm so happy that I got to live and
grateful that I got to see its impact around the world.
And yeah, so it doesn't surprise me that's the first book that you heard from
me because I'm a little eccentric.
So I disappeared from the world of writing for six years and the world of public speaking.
I just went anonymous and worked in fashion and film and then I reemerge and
step back out into the world.
And frankly, my whole business world, all the mentoring I do,
all the masterminds, all the coaching, all the development, personal development
stuff I do, mindset stuff.
I've always did it really privately. This is the first year I've ever gone public.
And it's because August 28th is my 65th birthday.
And I told myself, I made a 15-year commitment to pastor Mosaic from scratch.
And I've been there 30 years.
And I've always been really very careful to try to keep my public life very
much in the space of Jesus and my private life in the business space.
And now I'm taking my private work and making it public.
And because I actually think that there are principles I need to give the world
and that there are frameworks that I need to pass on to the world.
And I don't want people to have to, quote, go to church to access that insight.
I don't want them to feel like, oh, I have to believe like you to learn from you.
And so I feel like at this stage in my life, I'm trying to make my life a gift
to people and to pass on the things I've learned to help people destroy those internal limitations.
Wow. That's so inspiring. This podcast, we haven't really talked about this yet,
but this podcast started out of pain and most
of the people listening or have come to my writing
and my work because they've gone through something hard in
fact the subtitle of my book which i mailed you a copy by the way but
the subtitle is about trauma tragedies and massive things that happen in our
life and so you certainly have that massive thing that came along with cancer
most of the people listening here are have dealt with brokenness and pain in
some way we lost a child in 2013 that's when i I started writing and podcasting,
trying to process that stuff.
And you know, the, the big thing is when you face that challenge,
that very well could have been the death sentence for you, Erwin,
what was your, what was the relationship between how you decided you were going
to move forward and your faith?
What were those two things? How did they relate to one another?
Honestly, I don't even know how to think about life outside of my faith.
And it's like asking me, what do you do when you're not breathing?
When you're not breathing, you're dying.
You're suffocating. And for me, I had a life-changing encounter with Jesus when
I was around 20 years old in the middle of college and a very irreligious person.
I wasn't against religion.
It just wasn't for it. I wasn't against God. I just wasn't aware of him.
But for me, it was a very significant shift. It wasn't about religion.
It wasn't about belief systems. And I really didn't care less about heaven and
was never worried about hell. So it wasn't anything like that.
It was a shift in my understanding of,
my significance as a human being, that if I were actually created by God,
then I had intention and calling and destiny.
And that there was a spark of the divine genius in every human being.
And that needs to be treasured and valued.
And, and so it redirected my life because I had a reason to live because I felt
like humanity was desperate, drowning in loneliness and and insignificance, and doubt, and despair.
And if I could bring hope to the world, it would, in a sense, fill me with hope.
And yeah, my faith has always been central to my whole journey.
But I wrote a book called The Genius of Jesus.
And a part of the reason I wrote that book is going, I can't believe I believe
in Jesus. It shocks me. I can't believe I believe in God.
I'm still the guy that's really confused that he believes all this stuff so deeply.
And so I wrote this book going, okay, if I didn't believe in God,
and if I didn't believe Jesus was God, how would I see Jesus?
Would I see him as a genius? I have a high value for those sparks of human genius.
And so I began doing this ruthless analysis of Jesus, asking the question,
is Jesus a historic genius? Does he qualify?
If he does qualify, then what is his genius?
And if he has a genius, how does that affect me?
Does it have any need transferable nature at all because
Picasso's genius is not transferable and Mozart's genius
was not transferable and Einstein's genius
was not transferable even to their own children it wasn't
transferable and yet what I find to be very unique is that the genius of Jesus
is transferable and that's what his genius is that somehow he moves us to becoming
more beautifully human and that book really led to this next book called Mind
Shift going all right I know that if somebody reads the genius of Jesus,
it will explode in their brain and unlock their own personal genius.
But for a lot of people that go, wait a minute, I don't believe in God,
I don't believe in Jesus.
So then they don't access what is available to them there.
That how do I write a book that is really from the framework of social science?
How do I write a book that's accessible to everyone in the world,
no matter what their beliefs or non-beliefs are?
And then if they have greater interest and they want to explore further,
they can go backwards and pick up the genius of Jesus and begin to ask those
deeper questions as well.
You did that very well. And you know, it's interesting when we write,
as Christians who write books, it's always, is it a Christian book or is it just a book?
And it's unfortunate that they're separate, but you lead off,
you don't hide from it. Your book is dedicated to Jesus.
You wrote beautifully, to Jesus who created in me a mind shift that transformed
my life from the inside out.
You changed my heart, changed my mind, and changed my life.
You lead right with it. And all through the book, you sprinkle in little bits
of your faith. So there's no hiding from it, but you're right.
It's very accessible to anyone.
I told the people that listened to this podcast last year, I thought Genius
for Jesus was in my top five books of the year last year, maybe ever.
And I've got, I probably sold a few hundred copies for you.
These people, these folks that listen to this podcast are readers.
They always buy books and listen to them. But I want to shift into mind shift.
You did shift into mind shift. You did that very well.
Segwayed into your own work. And earlier you said you wanted to talk about the mind and not the brain.
And of course, from a neuroscience perspective, that's been hotly debated forever.
The pure materialist scientists want to believe that the mind is purely generated by the brain, right?
It's just an artifact of electrons and chemical events in the brain that create the mind.
And Christians would say, no, it's God communicating with us.
That's how we he gave us our internal compass as a separate part of the organ
of the brain so first of all how do you see that dichotomy mind brain problem
and where does that sit with you,
yeah i think i probably strangely enough fit more with the first group and i
think the mind's extension of the brain but i don't but i think the brain is
a work of genius by the hand of god Yep.
And so I tend to not bifurcate the way that a lot of times Christians do.
And I, I, I don't separate my soul from the essence of who I am as a human being.
And I think my body is also sacred. So I don't go, well, my body doesn't matter,
but my soul matters. And I go, no, your body matters.
And, and because if you believe you're created by God, then everything that
is a part of who you are, it matters.
And if you get brain damage, you get mind damage, whether you realize it or not.
So to me to go, oh, your mind is something different. Your brain is,
I think, naive and maybe even superstitious because if you are intimately connected,
but then to say, oh, all you have is a brain.
There isn't this thing called the mind. I think it's unrealistic because I know
it sounds a little mystical, but there's clearly a higher consciousness.
And I called my brother yesterday. I hadn't talked to him in ages and I got really sick in Mexico.
And I ended up getting this water poisoning. My brother lives in another city.
He lives in Detroit. I live in LA.
And he happened to call me yesterday and he goes, I told him,
I said, I was really sick on Sunday. I got water poisoning.
He goes, that's so weird. I was at work.
And all of a sudden my stomach got so sick, I had to go home.
And he goes, could you not get sick again? Because you're having a negative
impact on my work. I actually think that there's such transcendent connections
between human beings, even if you don't believe in God.
Just when you look at dynamics of physics and that human perception on an object
changes the reality of that object.
And look, when Einstein said that energy and mass are the same thing,
that seemed like superstition.
Yeah. Like the idea that matter is energy would have been superstition just a few generations ago.
Science feels more like magic now.
So it's like we left magic, went to science, and now science is magic again.
That's right. Quantum physics blew that up. We understand quantum entanglement now.
That's why your brother's stomach hurts when yours doesn't. We know that electrons
that are entangled with one another, you can split them and separate them across
the whole world. and they still behave as if they're tied together.
That explains a lot of things on the human side of how we can stand next to
somebody who's in a bad mood and we get in a bad mood too. That's all about
quantum physics, right?
Yeah, in fact, I was just in this Q&A at a business conference and someone asked
me about how deeply they're grieving for someone that just passed away in their life.
And I walked them through quantum entanglement and I said, your grief is actually
proof of their existence. That's right.
Because what you know is that your particles are still entangled,
even though the distance seems to you insurmountable.
And so what you're calling eternity, the particles in your being are so connected to them.
The grief is actually the recognition of the space between you and them and
the connection between you and them, because it's still there.
That's right. And I, yeah.
And I look at, cause I did a talk at a community at Mosaic.
I talk about things like fractals and quantum entanglement and black holes and
no it's in fact this past week i and the last time i spoke i talked about epiphanies
and how to have breakthrough ideas and so it's a little different kind of space
and but some of this because that's what's fascinating to me but i but again
it's because i think science.
Creates the best environment for faith exactly if you have a superficial view
of science you can be an atheist,
But if you actually have a developed, complex understanding of science,
you can at best be an agnostic.
And because I can understand being agnostic, you can go, wow,
the mysteries of this universe are just too big for me. I cannot comprehend how all this happens.
And in fact, I talked to someone this morning in an earlier meeting.
And because he was saying he was agnostic, so that's so much better than being
an atheist. And he goes, yeah, I just don't know. And I said,
no, it's not even just that. It's the mental structures.
He goes, what do you mean? I said, once you become an atheist,
you create self-limiting boundaries.
Because what you're saying is the things that you do not understand cannot exist.
And that framework will actually transfer to other aspects, other domains of thinking.
And so even if I didn't believe in God, I would never say that I'm an atheist
because I refuse to allow arbitrary boundaries to limit my thinking.
Wow, that's exactly right. Right. And quantum physics has blown up. Biology has blown up.
Astrology. It's just it's changed the whole game. And anybody who's really honest,
who understands what's happening at the quantum level, starts asking questions
about God or at least origins.
There's an amazing book Stephen Myers wrote, The Return of the God Hypothesis,
that you ought to check out. It's just right up your alley.
Let's talk about mind shift for a minute. I promised you about 45 minutes and
we're running up against. I don't want to take too much of your time today,
Erwin, but tell us about MindShift. It's so right in my alley and right in the
lane of things that the listeners in this show will be familiar with.
So I want you to just tell us a little bit about MindShift and I'm going to make people read it.
I feel like we've been talking about MindShift the whole time.
You're right. We just haven't said it.
And I would say writing the book was quite a conversation with my publisher
because the house I'm in is a Penguin Random House.
And with the imprint being convergent and convincing them that this is the kind
of book I needed to write and the approach toward a book.
Because when it's a very refined book, it's only, I think, maybe 30,000 words.
And so it's really short.
And I put incredibly dense concepts in a very short book.
And I cut out all the fat.
This is not a ribeye. this is a fillet there there's just no fat on this book
that's right and i because i wanted the concepts to explode fast in a person's
mind and because i was and i know men don't read a lot.
And women read more than men and even like super busy entrepreneurs that I know,
10 of them, they don't oftentimes take the time to read.
And so I wanted to write this book with almost like with a Red Bull kind of
concept of just 12 explosive ideas that will erupt in a person's mind and then
force them through interest to go back and then begin to activate these in their lives.
And so just the way the book is written was really important to me.
And then also making it a social science book and not creating the faith barrier for people.
And so in the first few chapters, I don't even use really a faith example to maybe chapter three.
And a lot of this because I'm going, you don't have to agree with me for these
concepts to revolutionize your life.
And I really want to help you live the life you're created to live.
And I'm convinced that as you move toward that, you're going to become more
open toward God. I'm not worried about that.
And then also realizing, and this is what my publisher is concerned going,
you're going to alienate all the Christians when your book is a social science
book. And I go, you know what?
I want everyone who has a friend who doesn't believe in God,
who has a friend who needs help and needs new internal structures,
needs to overcome these self-limiting boundaries.
Boundaries I want them to be able to give them this book even if
they're atheist agnostics whatever they are and so I
was really very intentional about how I wrote this book and who I wrote it for
and yes the first page of the book it's it the whole chapter says this the intention
of this book is to destroy internal limitations and that is what every single chapter chapter does.
It attacks a very subtle internal limitation and breaks you free from it.
And one of the chapters is called Talent is a Hallucinogen.
And it really is an important chapter because if you're born with a lot of talent, it's a curse.
Because what happens is that when you have talent at an early age,
society, family, institutions build external structures around you so that they
can extricate all that talent out of you. But they don't care about you.
They care about your talent.
That's right. And then the moment that...
Talent is no longer beneficial. They remove those external structures and you self-destruct.
That's what happened. That's why 75% of professional athletes are bankrupt within
five years after they finished playing pro football.
It's because all the structures for success were external, built around their talent.
Once their talent has been extricated, the structures are gone, their life collapsed.
And then if you grow up without obvious talent, which would be me.
I grew up with no clear, obvious talent.
You end up, if you succeed, building internal structures for success.
And you're oftentimes completely unaware of what those structures are.
And so it's a hit and miss. You hit the right structure, three times you hit
the wrong structure. You go back to the right structure, two times you hit the wrong structure.
And depending on your ability to recognize patterns, the faster you begin to
to realize, oh, this works, this doesn't work.
This works, this doesn't work. This works better. This works with less efficiency.
And so what I want to do is I want to accelerate people's learning and help
them move toward their optimal performance as fast as possible.
For me, MindShift is a cheat code for how to get to the best version of yourself.
I love it. And I think you hit the target. You really did.
Let's take one example, imposter syndrome. Give us a thought process about that.
It's one of my favorite parts of the book, imposter syndrome.
Were you going to tell me what you saw? My favorite part, this paragraph right
here, I was just pulling up my iPad.
There's a part of us that feels as if we are faking it to some degree. All of us feel that.
Even brain surgeons feel it. We still feel like we're going to walk in a room
and other brain surgeons say, you shouldn't be here.
We still do. It's true. It has become known as imposter syndrome.
I certainly am no different.
I never feel as if I deserve to be in the rooms I'm invited into.
I'm always surprised when I'm invited to speak. If you never feel good enough
or talented enough or prepared enough, welcome to the party.
Still, it's different from faking
it. So what's the difference between imposter syndrome and faking it?
That's funny. That's in the chapter called no one knows what they're doing.
And that was one of the most liberating shifts in my mind.
When I finally realized I'm not the only one who doesn't know what they're doing. That's right.
Because everything I've ever done, whether it was in fashion design or in filmmaking
or whether it was writing books or working as a mindset expert, I always felt like,
do I really know what I'm doing? Or everyone else knows what they're doing.
Everyone is great at this. And I'm just trying to get great at this.
And one of the most liberating things in my life is to realize that the best
place you're ever at is when you're an amateur.
And it's when you think you've achieved expertise that you're actually in danger
because you're no longer willing to learn or think you need to learn.
But I think the difference between imposter syndrome and faking
it is that faking it is really
about your image management it's that
you spend all your energy trying to convince other people
that you are something you're not that's right and imposter syndrome is actually
about if i go this way is giving yourself grace where you realize this is who
i'm committed to becoming but i'm in process so of course i'm imperfect of course there's enough
evidence in me to say, I'm not good enough for this.
But there's also enough evidence in me to say, I'm committed to becoming the best at this.
And I think the best way to overcome imposter syndrome is don't focus on who you are.
Focus on who you're becoming. Yeah.
That's the line. That's the line I was hoping you were going to say.
I love it. Erwin, you've done a beautiful job at this,
and it is going to hit the target that you shot at, which is going to appeal
to everybody regardless of our faith or lack thereof because we've come upon
this idea that the thing that is limiting the most is how we think about our lives.
And as you said, you can't change your life until you change your mind.
So somebody that's listening to this show today has just gotten that news like
you did, has just gone through the hardest thing they've ever going to go through.
They've lost a child. They've gotten a bad diagnosis.
What does Erwin McManus say they ought to do next? Erwin McManus.
Whenever you've gotten bad news, one, I hope you have people in your life that
you can share the weight of that pain or that burden or that disappointment,
which I do. I've been married for 40 years and I have Kim.
I have two kids that are 35 and 31. They've become my best friends, not just my children.
I have a community of friends and people in my life that if I call them, they show up.
Yeah. And I actually think people who have sustained success make relationships
their highest value because relationships are really the most important commodity for true wealth.
And, but if you lack that in your life, one of the things I would do is I would
step back and realize that no matter what you're facing, it's not your whole story.
It's not as learned to optimism says the failure isn't permanent.
It's not personal and it's not pervasive. And I think Zelligman talks about that.
And so I step back and always look at everything good in my life.
I step back and look at things that I'm really grateful for.
I step back and make sure the environment from which I'm absorbing this pain is gratitude.
Because what I've discovered is that gratitude is far more powerful than disappointment.
And when I am thin on gratitude, the smallest difficulty or tragedy or hardship brings me down.
And when I'm rich in gratitude, I'm incredibly resilient and I can face pretty
much anything in the world.
Wow. Amen. Erwin, thank you so much for your time.
I pray you've rich blessings on your work and in your life. You're doing good
things. Just a great honor to have a few minutes to talk to you today.
Hey, thank you so much. It's great to meet you and get to know you.
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