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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. It is wildcard Wednesday.
You're going to hear this on Wednesday, August 28th, 2024.
It is the 28th day of all in August.
I'm going to give you a story today that comes right out of my book, Hope is the First Dose.
Hope is the First Dose is a treatment plan for trauma, tragedy,
and other massive things. How do you recover?
What do you do when life gets hard? In order to do that, you've got to prehab yourself.
We talked the other day about prehabbing your suffering, about having a plan in place.
When your pressure's on, you don't rise to the occasion, as Chris Voss has said.
You fall to your level of preparation.
So today I'm going to tell you a story that comes from Hope is the First Dose
about a guy named Anthony Walker. And he got hit in the face with a hammer.
And it caused him some real trouble. And you're going to learn something from Anthony.
If you've not read Hope is the First Dose, friend, I highly encourage you.
For the rest of this year, you're going to need a plan, okay?
You don't know what's coming. We don't know who's going to win the election.
We don't know if you're a guy or somebody else's guy or the person that you
like, the woman that you are voting for, the man that you're voting for is going
to win. You might be frustrated by that.
It might be devastating to you. I hope it's not because you're not a citizen
just of a country. You're a citizen of the kingdom of heaven.
The Bible tells you that your God is in control of kings and princes and queens
and what happens in the world. So our job is not to be stressed.
Our job is to pray and vote and follow our laws and move forward under God's
direction or the banner of his kingdom and be good citizens of the kingdom of
heaven and of our earthly kingdom. So don't stress.
I'm just saying something's going to happen this year, next year,
five years, 10 years. There's going to be massive things that happen.
Sometimes they'll just be issues of frustration. You can't break through a barrier.
You can't push through a level of performance.
You can't quite get that relationship working the way you want it to.
And whatever it is that you've decided you need to go all in on.
Anthony Walker's story is gonna help you and learn how to change what you pay
attention to, how to look at one thing and not another thing,
how to think differently about what you're going through.
This is an episode I recorded a while back before the release of Hope is the First Dose.
It tells one story from the book and I hope that it'll help you.
Anthony Walker got hammered, not hammered drunk.
He got literally hammered with a hammer and this is a fascinating story that
I learned a lot from. Don't forget to read Mark Batterson's book, All In.
If you haven't done it, I promise you it'll help you. Read it for September.
Read Hope is the First Dose. Between now and the end of the year,
if you just read those two books, I think it will make a huge difference in
your life. But today, hey, send me a voicemail.
Speakpipe.com slash Dr. Lee Warren. Speakpipe.com slash Dr.
Lee Warren. Let me hear from you. Before we get through all in August,
let me know. Did you make it? Did you start?
Are you thinking about starting? Are you going to use September and use all
these episodes to go all in in September?
What's your story? What's happening? Where are you listening from?
We'd love to hear from you. We're praying for you. God bless you, my friend.
I hope that you remember that you can't change your life until you change your mind.
And one good way to do that would be to get yourself a little community,
a group of people who are going all in with you. Share this episode.
Leave a review. Leave a rating.
Subscribe to the podcast. All that stuff. You can be part of this community.
Join the team. But get some people to go along with you. Say,
hey, Dr. Warren's teaching us how to go all in with self-brain surgery. Let's do it together.
Let's get after it, friend. And let's do it today. Let's start today.
Listen, I'm going to tell you one story today that comes out of Hope is the First Dose.
One story because I think it illustrates a big thing that is important in recovering
from the massive things that come along in life.
If you've had something big happen, if you haven't, you will.
So just file this away for later.
But if you've gone through something big, then you basically come to a choice
in your life. And we're going to talk about that choice in a minute.
And then we're going to talk about a kid named Anthony Walker.
And I told his story in the book. And I just want to give you a little preview
of one of the stories that's in the book.
And we're going to do all that in an attempt to learn how to change our minds
so that we can change our lives, because Lisa's always telling us the good news,
and that is we can start today.
Okay, so after we lost Mitch, and over the course of my career studying people
who've gone through hard things, glioblastomas, brain injuries,
spinal cord injuries, and then seeing people with non-medical massive things, divorce, loss.
Things that happen in life, all these big things that happen.
I've discovered something that the people who have a resilience about them,
but one of the podcasts I'm going to be on later today is called Brilliantly Resilient.
And their show's all about resilience and why it's so important.
But one of the key factors I've noticed in resilience is our ability to understand
this quantum physics thing that I'm always telling you about,
that two things can be true at the same time and it doesn't make either of them less true.
And here's an example. We'll go to my grave being really sad about losing my son, Mitch.
There won't come a day in my life when that doesn't make me sad.
Just yesterday, I was walking out of the hospital. I picked up my phone and
I opened my contacts as I was gonna call Lisa.
And somehow my thumb must've hit the wrong one. It pulled up Mitch's phone number.
I've never taken him out of my contacts.
And there was this picture and there was his phone number and there was the
last text message he sent me. And I just started crying on my walk back to the truck.
And it just, it comes out of nowhere, right? Right. If you've lost someone or
you've lost something in your life that's real important to you,
then you'll know that those kinds of things never really stop.
So it's true that I'll die someday and I'll still be sad about losing my boy.
But at the same time, it's also true that I have an amazing life and an incredible
wife and family and grandchildren and neurosurgery practice and this podcast
and all of you listening and all the readers and this just incredible life that
I'm extremely grateful for.
And I'm happy about that. And I've got a good life. And I'm not sad.
I'm not only sad. And what I noticed in looking at people who are going through
hard things and what we had to decide for ourselves is this concept that both
of those things can be true at the same time, that it doesn't have to be but.
It doesn't have to be, I used to be happy, but my son died and now I can't be happy anymore.
It doesn't have to be, I used to be happy, but my husband got glioblastoma.
I used to be happy, but my wife cheated on me.
I used to be happy, but the economy crashed and I lost my business.
And I used to be happy, but. but, right? Or I thought I could be happy if this
happened, but it didn't happen.
Or I thought I would be happy as long as this set of things occurred,
but they didn't. And so now I can't be happy.
If you can get rid of that but and substitute it for and, I was happy and I
lost my son and I found hope again and I found faith again and I'm happy again.
It's a different kind of happy, but I'm happy again.
I lost someone, but I still have an incredible life.
If you can get rid of the but and say, I've lost someone and I still have an
incredible life, then you can learn to find hope and happiness again.
There's a kid that I took care of in Wyoming a long time ago.
And in the book, I called him Anthony Walker. That's not his real name.
I got a call from the ER, my friend, Johnna Cuban, who's in the book.
And she said, this kid is hammered and drunk and he's hurt and I need you to come see him.
And as I was driving, as I was walking to the car, I realized most people say
hammered, drunk, but she said drunk and hammered.
She didn't say hammered, drunk. I think I said it incorrectly a while ago.
She didn't say he's hammered, drunk.
She said he's drunk and hammered. And I thought she made a mistake.
And when I got to the hospital, I was going to ask her about it.
But it turned out he was drunk, but he had been assaulted by what he said were
two dudes who had hammers and they hit him in the head with a hammer.
And he had a whole bunch of little skull fractures. It looks like little perfect
round hammerheads on the x-ray.
And he also was unable to move the right side of his face.
And it turned out one of the hammer blows had hit him right in front of the
right ear and crushed his facial nerve. Your facial nerve is the nerve that
gives you facial expression.
It lifts your eye. It closes your eye. It lifts your forehead. It allows you to smile.
All the little amazing things that you can do with your face to show people
the emotion and feeling that you're feeling come from the facial nerve.
And his had been crushed on the right side. So the right side was flaccid like he'd had a stroke.
And he couldn't close his eye because the seventh cranial nerve,
the facial nerve, is the nerve that closes your eyelid.
And the problem with that is, so Anthony had this injury before.
That did not allow him to close his eye. And what happens if you can't close
your eye over time is the cornea will begin to be abraded and they'll start
to scar down and eventually you'll go blind if you can't close your eye.
And so the metaphor that I realized is that's a pretty good thing about what
happens to us after the massive thing occurs is we can't stop looking at it.
We can't stop focusing on the massive thing. It becomes the only thing we can see.
And I'm just here to tell you, friend, in this short little episode this morning
is if you don't learn how to look away from the massive thing,
if you don't learn how to turn it into a but instead of an and instead of a but,
if you don't learn how to close your eye and stop focusing on that one thing,
over time, your heart, your mind, your eye will scar.
And the last thing you'll remember seeing in your life when you thought you
were still happy is that thing that you can't stop looking at.
And I've seen people who went to support groups for the rest of their lives
and never made any progress.
I've seen people who were broken by their spouse getting glioblastoma.
I've seen people who were so bitter and angry that they got cancer that even
when they were cured of it, they were still wrecked emotionally and they were
never secure and comfortable and safe and happy again because they realized that they were mortal.
I see it all the time when people have some kind of injury and it's the first
time they've ever been in the hospital and I see them three months later and
they're depressed depressed, because they just realized that they were humans,
that they thought they would never be sick.
And now they realize, hey, I'm getting older and someday I'm going to die.
And I see it all the time in older people after back surgery,
they need a walker for a while.
And they're just so unable to accept that limitation that they refuse to use
it. And then guess what happens?
They fall and then they break their hip and then they really have trouble.
And it becomes the beginning of the end because they can't accept the fact that
something's changed or has been been taken away from them, and they can't stop
looking at it, and over time it becomes the only thing they can think about.
And so Anthony Walker's story, I'm not going to tell you how it turns out in
the book, but that's an example of this idea that I just want to give you today,
that you've got to learn to turn the massive thing into something that happened
to you, but not the thing that happened to you.
It has to become a thing and not the thing if you're going to be happy again.
And that's the message for today. We're in season eight. I told you it's going
to be a hundred doses of hope.
And it's been a couple of days since I played Tommy's song, I Have a Hope.
And I think it's time again.
I'm going to bring it back to you this morning because I want you to go out
today with I have a hope. I have a future.
I have a destiny that is yet prepared for me. So here's the thing,
yet awaiting me. Here's the thing, friend.
If you can't stop looking at the massive thing, you won't be able to see the
destiny that is yet awaiting you.
You won't be able to see all the other
beautiful things that are still true in your life You've
got to learn how to blink your eye And close your eye and turn your vision and
look on something else look on jesus look on the author and perfecter of your
faith And he'll give you this deal that this peace this hope this happiness
again That looks different than it used to look before tmt came along,
but it's still perfect and beautiful beautiful.
I'll be an old man someday, and I'll still be caught by surprise sometimes with memories of Mitch.
I'm looking at a picture of him right now. I'm not trying to cry on you,
but I'll never stop being sad about that.
But if Mitch was the only thing I could think about, then I wouldn't be able
to see Scarlett and George and Riker and Jace, my beautiful,
perfect grandchildren.
I wouldn't be able to see Josh and Katie and Kimber and Kaylin,
my four perfect living children and their families and all the amazing things.
I wouldn't be able to see Lisa and how much she loves me and how much she perfects me.
I wouldn't be able to see Moon River Ranch and the incredible river outside
my window because all I could see was that thing that was taken from me.
And friend, I want you to learn how to close your eye and change what you see
again and have that TMT not be the only thing that you can see.
Have it turn into a thing that happened to you.
Devastating, yes. Crushing, yes.
Perilous, yes. But not the only thing because you still have a lot of other
things to live for, my friend.
And the good news is you can change your mind about that and you can do some
self-brain surgery and you can learn how to think differently about the massive thing.
Because guess what? It probably won't be the only massive thing that happens
to you in your life. So you better get ready and develop a treatment plan.
And that's what hope is the first dose is going to do for you.
I'm going to go out now and I'm going to go for a run and try to get my body in shape.
And I just wanted to give you this idea, Learn how to turn the massive thing
into a thing that happened, not the thing that happened.
Because you can't change your life until you change your mind.
And the good news is, you can start today.