(00:02) Stephanie Warner: Welcome everyone to Season 4, episode 51. Hello, Father.
(00:07) Marcus: Hello, Daughter. I didn’t make it home between sessions, but here we are.
(00:11) Stephanie Warner: Good to be with you. Here we are. You’re almost to me. You’re almost to me. Oh, my goodness. Yes, we are starting a new series today and we’ve got a lot to get into. So I am going to toss us straight in there. I’m very, very delighted to say we are going to be walking through your book, Rare Leadership. You co-authored this with Jim Wilder, and it is very, very important. I think everybody needs to read it, whether they’re a leader or not. It’s all about maturity and just how we interact with each other and grow and all the things. So I’m excited to get into it.
So the goal of this series is to equip you to live and lead with more emotional intelligence and resilience on your walk with God. And for this book study as we have for our other book studies, you can find a free discussion guide in the description, that if you want to go through this with a group or a book buddy, we want to equip you for that.
And I also just want to say a quick shout out to Greg Neumeyer is going to be hosting a six-week Rare Leadership Boot Camp, I think starting in October. Yeah starting in October And I’m going to put a link there in the description if you already know, I need more training in this. I need more than just, you know, a weekly little On the Trail dose as I go through this book. Look into that. And that’s what I’ll say for there.
Father, this is a good book. You’re like, yep, yep, thanks. Before we dive into chapter one, my first line of questioning for you is I want to linger a little bit in the preface. Setting the framework, what was your heart behind writing Rare Leadership? You’re the Understanding the Wounded Heart and What Every Believer Should Know About Spiritual Warfare guy, and the, you know, all these things. You’re Discipleship and Heart-Focused Discipleship. Why RARE Leadership?
(02:28) Marcus: Well, there’s actually multiple facets to this answer, right? One of them is, I was a pastor, and my first day on the job as an interim pastor, I blocked out two hours for church administration, and realized I had no idea what to do. I had no preparation, never had a class on leadership. I did not know there were books on leadership. I didn’t know there were seminars and things you could attend. I didn’t know. I was like so unprepared for leadership and management when I became a pastor, that I just began diving into that area a little bit more intentionally, because I realized that I couldn’t do my job well without it.
And then along the way in there, I came across Dr. Wilder’s material on maturity, and he had a chart in there like assessing personal maturity. And I went, well, no wonder I feel overwhelmed so much. I feel like I am an emotional child trying to function at elder level maturity. At the time I got the book, I was just turned 40, maybe late 30s or something like that. And it just was so revolutionary. Like, oh okay, I can see how my maturity level directly impacts my ability to be a leader in the church. And how people’s trust in me is directly proportional to my maturity. And I began to realize that I had grown up with a view of maturity as being kind of stoic.
And this was a view of maturity that said, no, it actually creates joy. And the picture that kind of came with me was, I wanted to be the sort of leader that, when you came to me with a problem, you didn’t just leave with a solution. You left feeling energized, like, okay, I can do this. And so that’s what mature people do. You leave feeling greater joy in your capacity to handle the things you’ve got to handle than you did before. And they can find a way to help infuse joy in the scenario. It doesn’t mean they’re optimists who only see the bright side of life.
But it means that they are really good at this themselves, and they help you with it as well. So writing this book was kind of like, I want all these aha moments that I had gotten from both my own journey in becoming a leader, and the things that I had learned from Jim and Life Model. I wanted to fuse those together, and something that I thought would be helpful to others.
(05:08) Stephanie Warner: Yeah, yeah, well and no one will be shocked to know that RARE is an acrostic, if you know my father. So as you were, you know, processing through a lot of this material for yourself, you created the RARE acrostic to help you remember things. And would you talk just a little bit more about how you came to ask Jim to write with you, and where some of this comes from?
(05:32) Marcus: Yeah, so I started using RARE before I wrote the book as a way to try to explain what Jim taught over at Life Model. So I’m at Deeper Walk; he’s at Life Model, and we have a lot of overlap in the kind of things that we work with, and the people that we are connected to. And so people were constantly asking me, can you explain, you know, Jim? Like in as simple as you can make it, what is it that he’s saying over there? And RARE was what I came up with to try to explain what Life Model was teaching.
And it was four phrases that I just routinely heard the people at Life Model Works use on a regular basis, that I had never heard anywhere else. And so I put them together as: Remain relational. That’s the first R of RARE, Remain relational. A: Act like yourself. And I remember the first time that you know, Jim said that to be mature meant acting like yourself, I thought he was nuts, because everybody I knew who said, hey, I’m just being me, was doing something really stupid. They were, you know, using “I’m just being me” to justify all kinds of crazy behavior.
And I was like, what do you mean you’re just acting like yourself? But once you unpack the brain science underneath how your brain forms an identity, and how we want the identity our brain forms to be consistent with the identity that God has given us. And how do you discover these things? It became this fascinating journey to understanding who am I really, and what does it mean to be that person? And that a lot of what people say when they claim, I’m just acting like myself, is they’re actually being their false self.
And so this is an opportunity to describe, I want to be my true self and not my false self, is another way of looking at Act like yourself as a second habit. Mature leaders act like their true self and don’t project a false self to others. That’s the second habit. The third one is Return to joy. And I had never heard this expression before either, but Return to joy, again, once you understand the brain science, it just jumps off the page, because what I realized was that when I lose joy, I tend to go to the back of my brain with brain function.
(07:51) Marcus: And when I return to joy, I’m returning to the front part of my brain. So there’s literally a journey that kind of has to take place there. And it’s really a synonym for resilience that we bounce back from things well. And we don’t stay overwhelmed. But we can get overwhelmed, we can feel a lot of things, but we bounce back from it. That’s a core sign of maturity. So I remain relational, I keep relationships bigger than problems, number one. Two, I act like my true self. Three, I’m resilient. I return to joy from overwhelming things.
And then the last one was just was kind of the heart of the whole thing. And that is that maturity is suffering well. I was at a gathering once where we were all asked in a kind of a leadership gathering circle, you know, what is your core mission in life? And do you have a personal mission statement? And I was like, well thankfully I did. I didn’t want to be like, I’m the only person here who doesn’t, but I did in this case. So mine is equipping people to win life’s battles, right? That’s kind of what drives what I do and who I am and who God has asked me to be.
Jim got up, he said, My mission is to equip the church to suffer well. And I remember the first time I heard that, I was a little shocked. I’m like, wow, equipping the church to suffer well. And I kind of remember blurting out to him, You don’t have many friends, do you? It’s like nobody wants to suffer well. Everybody wants to know how to make their suffering end, not how to suffer well.
And I came to understand that that’s actually the heartbeat of what maturity is, is that we can go through hard things in life, and still find joy, and still be resilient, and still be a relational person, and not lose our true self, right? If you can go through hardship and pain and all those things, and bounce back and not lose your joy, and not lose your relational, you know, capacity, and not turn into a different person. That’s what maturity is all about.
And so you measure your maturity by how much suffering it takes, how much hardship it takes, for you to stop being relational, stop acting like yourself, and not be able to recover. And so that’s how the model kind of connects together. So RARE is the way I remember it. And that’s where that came from.
(10:27) Stephanie Warner: Amazing. And so since you were dealing with so much Jim content, you were like, “Hey Jim, you want to write this book?”
(10:31) Marcus: Yeah, exactly. It was. I was essentially presenting my understanding of Jim’s philosophy and applying it to leadership, and realized I was just a few chapters into the book and realized, this is so much Jim content in here. I really should see if he wants to write it with me. And at first he didn’t, honestly. But I think his board changed his mind for him.
But he came back and wrote the book and I’m really glad that he did. It helped us form a much closer relationship and partnership since then. And his content is unbelievable. I tell people all the time when I teach this, I say, Jim is the genius, I am the communicator. Right? His gift is coming up with original thought and original ideas. And I tell people, I’m just smart enough to understand him. And then my job is to try to make this as simple and transferable and accessible as possible.
(11:28) Stephanie Warner: Mm-hmm. Yeah, well, and on that note, so just as a heads up, I guess, on the structure of this book, so we’re going to unpack the RARE acrostic in the second half of the book. And we’re going to get a lot of brain science and just awesome like framework stuff in toward the beginning. We’re actually, in this episode, we’re going to get into some brain science and it’s going to be fun, guys. It’s going to be fun.
And so just as we’re going, you can be aware we’re going to keep coming back to a lot of these key principles over and over again in different ways or at different layers, and adding more. If you’ve read the book, you know there’s a fire hose here. If you think this episode turns into a fire hose, read the book. it’s amazing and you’ll want to sit with it.
So, let’s see. I guess on that note, I’ll go into officially chapter one is called “Leadership at the Speed of Joy: Wisdom from the Bible, Discoveries from Brain Science.” So maybe just unpack that title real quick of Leadership. What does leadership at the speed of joy mean?
(12:42) Marcus: Yeah, that’s almost a pun, right? Because the idea is that there are two engines in the brain. And one is largely on the right side of the brain, one’s largely on the left side of the brain, and it’s led to a lot of conversation about right brain versus left brain kind of stuff. But technically, it isn’t just one hemisphere versus another hemisphere. There are engines that overlap the hemispheres, though they’re dominant activities on one side or the other.
So to try to communicate this, Jim coined the terms fast track and slow track. And the idea is that the fast track operates faster than the slow track. Shocking, you know, analogy there. Faster. And so that’s where you get this idea of leadership at the speed, right, of joy. Because the fast track of the brain wants to run on the fuel of joy. And if it gets the fuel of joy, then it will operate smoothly, it will operate at a peak efficiency, you will get the best version of yourself, you will get your best problem-solving, you’ll get your best relational self. Everything operates best when my fast track is operating on the fuel of joy.
The problems come because if I don’t provide joy as the fuel for this part of my brain, I will use the fuel of fear. And it has the opposite reaction. So whereas joy kind of makes everything run smooth, you know. I picture a car engine that’s just humming quietly, right? When fear becomes the fuel, everything starts shaking a little bit. It’s like, you know, loud and shaky, and this is not smooth at all, and things aren’t working the way they’re supposed to work, and it’s harder to be yourself, and it’s harder to navigate problems, and everything gets harder because God designed us to run on the fuel of joy. And the devil constantly wants us running on fear instead.
And so that’s the foundational premise. The fast track versus the slow track also introduces this idea, the fuel of joy versus the fuel of fear, and that we need a brain that’s running on joy, because if our brains run on fear too much, we’re going to burn out and we’re not going to act like ourselves. We lose all of these habits. It’s harder to be relational, harder to act like ourselves, harder to return to joy, much harder to endure hardship, if you’re running on fear. So speed of joy, that’s the idea. And the speed of joy is the idea of let’s use joy as the fuel that runs the vast track.
(15:19) Stephanie Warner: Mm-hmm. So let’s linger on these terms. Again, we’ll continue unpacking them throughout the series, but fast track versus slow track, what is the slow track?
(15:29) Marcus: So the slow track is connected to the left side of my brain is usually the thing is associated with. It’s the part of my brain that is good at focusing on things. And what it focuses on is problem-solving. It’s also good at putting words to things, and so it’s the part of my brain that comes up with narratives to explain my reality. And so in the slow track is where conscious thought takes place. So it’s where I am consciously thinking about a problem. How to put that problem into words, how to solve that problem, how to articulate that to other things, and it comes up with narratives. So that is a problem-solving engine.
What this part of my brain is not good at is relationship. It’s not the part of my brain that’s designed to do relationship. I’ve got a different engine that is focused on relationship. That’s the fast track. So the fast track part of my brain is so fast that it is doing its tasks faster than I can think about them. And so I will have a reaction to something at the speed of the fast track that is so much faster than conscious thought, I couldn’t even tell you that I experienced it in many cases until I stop and think about it for a little bit. And then maybe I can put it into words.
But for example, you know, it’s like you meet a person, you have an instant reaction to them, way faster than you can think about it, analyze it, and put it into words. You just have this sense. That’s happening in the fast track and your conscious thought can never catch up with it. It just doesn’t operate fast. Now conscious thought’s fast, right? It’s still incredibly fast. It’s going like six cycles per second. It’s processing data. But the fast track of the brain is doing it at seven cycles and
(17:20) Stephanie Warner: Slow is five and fast is six.
(17:23) Marcus: Five and six. Okay. Yeah, it’s been a minute since I looked at this. That makes sense. I knew it was like one degree of separation between them, but it’s just enough that you can’t quite ever catch up. So that’s why we call them fast and slow. One of the reasons this is important is especially in the evangelical world, we have tended to make everything about the slow track and managing the slow track.
(17:52) Marcus: We’ve made everything about our narrative, everything about our choices, everything about the problems that we’re solving. And what we’ve done is we’ve tried to turn relationship into a series of choices that we make. But when you take relationship and you turn it into a series of choices that you make, what you’re really doing with those relationships is you’re making them transactional.
They now become: how do I get this person to behave a certain way? How do I get this person to interact with me in the way that I want them to. It can turn into manipulation pretty quickly because I’m solving a problem. I’m not actually bonding to a person. And so in my slow track, I can’t do relationship well. I will turn the relationship into a problem that needs to be solved rather than actually bonding to the person. That is a fast track task.
And so that’s why this is so important because, if my walk with God, for example, is all left brain, it’s all in this slow track, conscious thought part of my brain. I will tend to, by default, turn into a fear-bonded connection with God because my walk with God is always based on a problem, that God is a problem I’m trying to solve, rather than a person I’m actually enjoying relating to. And so, joyful relationship is an activity of the fast track, and it has a separate system of training besides just believing correct things and doing good problem-solving and making good choices.
(19:25) Stephanie Warner: And both are very important for all the things, the slow track and the fast track.
(19:30) Marcus: Yeah, it’s not that the choices and things like that are irrelevant to our relationships, but if that’s all that’s going on there, we actually can create problems.
(19:40) Stephanie Warner: I grabbed this sentence to quote from the chapter that says, “The fast track system controls how we regulate our emotions, how we remember who we are, who our people are, and how it is like us that is acting like the self God gave us. In other words, it is our identity center.” Man, trying to figure out where to go. There’s so many things that we can cover. We’re going cover them. So both the fast track and the slow track, both you can create habits in those, you can shape things in those. If your fast track is going so fast that it’s like faster than you can think about it, how do you change it? How do you affect it? What do you do? Like…
(20:33) Marcus: Yeah. So, just to help people get a handle on, all right. Well, how do you train something that is going faster than thought? And you do it by building habits. And for example, one habit would be quieting. So the number one predictor of stable emotional health is the ability to quiet your racing thoughts. And quiet your body because every emotion that we feel, we feel through our bodies.
And so emotional regulation is a big part of what we’re talking about here. How do I feel emotions without letting them control me and take over my life? And so I’ve got to learn how to quiet my body, and I’ve got to learn how to quiet my racing thoughts. And I don’t do that by thinking and choosing. Now there are choices that I make that contribute to it, but it is an experience that I need to cultivate.
The other with that is appreciation. And appreciation, again, you can turn it into this left brain, conscious thought activity, wherein you turn thank gratitude into a series of choices that you make. God, I thank you for my daughter, I thank you for my son, I thank you for my ministry, I thank you for the things you do. And it’s just a checklist of tasks that you’re doing.
Or Like I could think about a memory, like of sometime that we did and what it was like when I took you to work with me when you were three years old, and you were building things with your little tools, and we had a fan, and I can re-enter into that memory, and now I’m feeling joy, until the point where your hand went in the fan. But anyway,
(22:15) Stephanie Warner: That you mentioned the fan. No.
(22:18) Marcus Warner: It was a, yeah, trauma. Oh no. So it was – your hand’s there. Yeah, so we’re good. But you see the difference, right? So a left brain thing’s going to tend to be just getting tasks done and the right brain fast track part of this is going to tend to be entering into the experience of things. And so you’re trying to build the habit of giving yourself permission to enter into those joy experiences on a more regular basis. You know, quieting yourself.
And so if I get to this rhythm of quieting and joy, my brain learns that that is normal and that it’s my default. What my brain also realizes I don’t have to be afraid of these other emotions because I can recover, but I’m going to get back from there. What I’m not doing is, I’m not saying, when you feel this emotion, you should recover. Choose to recover, right? That doesn’t work.
So you’ve got to work on building the habits that allow those recoveries to happen, and the habits that allow your best self to show up the most automatically, without having to think about it. Because let’s think, it’s like if every time you and I had an interaction, if I had to go, oh it’s Stephanie, all right, I should do this, I ought to do that, I really ought to feel this, I really ought to experience it that way. And I have to think about everything. We’re going to have a very bad relationship, because it’s all encumbered by constant analysis and constant, you know, trying to figure everything out.
Whereas I want to just be able to show up. You want to be able to show up. And so what happens is a lot of this happens through the eyes, as we interact with each other and see, oh you know, I can tell when you’re happy, I can tell when something’s a little bit off. You’re the same way. It’s like you pick up really quickly when something’s a little bit off, right? You’re reading body language and all that.
Those are all skills that we develop and habits that need to be developed because again, if I’m running on fear, I’m going to tend to do those badly. I still do them, but I’m going to tend to do them badly. There’s a lot of habits that go into this. That’s why we recall these four habits that build rare leadership or mature leadership.
(24:44) Stephanie Warner: Mm-hmm. Well, I guess I’ll just say one other thing that is, you know, this is RARE leadership. And I think that there’s a case to be made for… leadership. I think God calls all of us to be leaders in certain areas of our life, and in certain and even just in owning your own self in terms of leading yourself through life. There are many levels and layers of leadership. And this book, like we said, is very much on maturity and how you interact with other people, and also how your own brain is wired and stuff.
So I encourage everyone to stick with us. And even if you don’t self-identify as a leader or, you know, aren’t in that role, I think that this is going to be very rich with a lot of, how does my brain work? How do I interpersonally connect with people in mature ways? And all of these things. I don’t know. I’m probably babbling. I’m not going to explain this very well. Father, would you pitch for people why this is a fun series to stick with us on?
(26:01) Marcus: So let’s just define what leadership is, and maybe this will help. So John Maxwell, you know, has the simplest definition of leadership ever, and that is leadership is influence, nothing more, nothing less. And it’s like, so if you exercise influence in somebody else’s life, you’re a leader, right? You’re exercising leadership through your influence in that person’s life. So that’s one level of it.
The definition of leadership that we use in this book – it reflects the fast track, slow track part of this. And it is the idea that I create engagement. That is, I can gather people and motivate them and clarify for them tasks in such a way, that the things that really matter are getting done. So I can create engagement around what matters.
(26:59) Marcus: So that’s our definition of leadership, creating engagement around what matters. So you think about this. I tell people all the time, the most leadership-intensive job I know is parenting. Because what you’re trying to do is you desperately want this child to learn how to focus on what matters, and to not spend their whole life, you know, on things that don’t matter. And so you have to create engagement around that. Well, how do you create engagement? It’s largely motivation. And our motivations are going to bring us back to fear and joy.
And that is, way too many leaders are trying to create engagement and motivate people with fear and anger and shame. And it’s their go-to motivational strategy. And they don’t know how and don’t have really well developed skills for how to motivate with joy. And so it takes work to do all these things. So just to put it in perspective, right?
The most leadership-intensive thing I know is parenting. So if you’re a parent or grandparent, you’re a leader. Lots of leadership things going on. But even if you’re a brother or a sister and you’re exercising influence in somebody’s life, there’s a leadership element there. So hopefully that helps.
(28:11) Stephanie Warner: Mm-hmm. All this to say, we’re excited to be on the trail with you for this series. We’re glad you’re here. And thank you for being here with us. Thank you to everybody who supports Deeper Walk International, so that we can get this podcast out around the world for free. Thank you for everyone who prays for us and shares this podcast with friends and joins us on the trail. We’re here for you. And we love you. So thank you for being here. Father, any final thoughts for this episode?
(28:48) Marcus: Yeah, you know, the content that’s in this book in some ways was life-changing for me. And I’ve had a lot of people tell me that it was life-changing for them. And because it’s laying out a path not to suddenly be a different person tomorrow, but what is the big picture here of what we’re after in life and how do I get there? So I’m hoping this will be a journey like that for you as well, and that you’ll have a lot of aha moments along the way to help you go, ah, I see now. That’s kind of what needs my focus.
(29:22) Stephanie Warner: Awesome. See you back next week.
