(00:00) Stephanie Warner: Fabulous. All right. Welcome everyone to Season 4, episode 53. And hello, Father.
(00:11) Marcus Warner: Hello, Daughter. We are back.
(00:13) Stephanie Warner: Welcome back. We are back. We’re back with more Rare Leadership. We are getting into this book that you wrote with Jim Wilder, and I’m enjoying it. I’m enjoying going through it with you. I’ve heard you teach it a lot, and I’ve read the book, but I don’t think we’ve ever just had a chapter by chapter discussion of it before. So this is fun.
(00:40) Marcus Warner: Yeah. No, this is good.
(00:42) Stephanie Warner: Yes, and 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. We have a free discussion guide for this book in the description that you can download and use with your group study, or, you know, book buddy reading or whatever, however you want to use that. And yeah, just want to encourage you to avail yourself of that as we go along.
Now, Father, this book, we are in chapter three. Which is very brain science-y, huzzah. We are going to learn about the elevator in your brain and building your emotional competence. You know, all the emotional intelligence, emotional resilience, emotional competence. We’re checking your emotional health here.
But before we jump into the brain science, I just wanted to take a moment for us to connect the brain science to… Our aim is to go deeper on our walks with God with this. So will you bring this brain science and the scriptures together a little bit here, and give us some context?
(01:54) Marcus Warner: Yeah, sure. So, you know, the heart of maturity in a sense is suffering well. And that’s the fourth habit, endure hardship well. And so how do you endure hardship well? It’s by remaining relational, acting like yourself, returning to joy from all the upsetting emotions.
The best example of this in the Bible is Jesus, shockingly, right? He is the most mature person in the Bible. And, yeah, I know. And you just think about through Passion Week and what happened at the crucifixion and ask the question: did he remain relational? Did he act like himself? Did he turn into somebody else, right? He not only returned to joy, he helped other people return to joy.
(02:42) Marcus Warner: And he endured the hardship well. And we’re told in Hebrews that it was for the joy set before him that he endured the cross. And so the motivation of joy is built into this. But for example, you just take the remaining relational aspects of it, while he’s carrying the cross, you know, these women are crying and he’s comforting them, right? He’s like, you know, weep for the city, don’t weep for me.
And he is on the cross. He’s relational with his mother and connects her to John to take care of her. He’s relational with the thieves on the cross. He’s acting like himself. It’s like in the middle of his pain, he opens up paradise to one of the thieves, right? In the middle of the pain, he acts like himself by taking care of his mother, taking care of the people around him. He’s quoting scripture, you know. And so you’re like, yeah, no, he’s a fantastic example here of somebody remaining relational, acting like himself, helping other people around them return to joy.
And at the same time, he’s an adult who doesn’t just roll over and become a doormat to everybody who wants to do things for him. You know, he’s on trial, they ask him questions, and there’s times he just doesn’t say anything, because you know what? That’s a stupid question. He’s not even going to honor it with an [answer]. Right, so there are times, when as an adult, you can drive a hard bargain, and you can draw lines in the sand, and you can do things that are hard, and you can treat people in a way that is appropriate to the situation.
And you think about how he was with the Pharisees, and called them hypocrites, and woe to you, and all of this stuff. That’s acting like himself. And he’s even thinking of them when he’s doing it, because they needed a shock treatment. They needed a wake up call because they were on their way to hell, right? It was like you guys need to wake up, because what you are about to do is going to destroy more than you realize. And so he was being an adult saying, I’m willing to say the hard thing, I’m willing to do the hard thing.
(05:03) Marcus Warner: In the midst of all this, he was still able to remain relational, do hard things, handle hard things, act like himself in the process of it. And that’s maturity. And so that’s kind of what we see in scripture. And there’s a lot more scriptures we could look at, but that one’s pretty straightforward.
(05:22) Stephanie Warner: Yes. No, I was just remembering when I first read Rare Leadership. I don’t remember off the top of my head which chapter it was, but in my head it opened the chapter. But I could just be totally wrong. As we get to it, I’ll probably find it. But I just remember you guys talking about Jesus on the cross, and Jesus acting like himself and yeah, that full picture of maturity and just mind being blown like, I already knew Jesus was cool, but just like seeing it through that lens and like walking through it is just, yeah, super awesome, super epic. Cool.
Well, let’s get into some brain science here. So one of the reasons why you’re talking about joy again is because the brain runs on the fuel of joy, and so it’s no accident that the Bible emphasizes joy, you know, throughout so often, and gratitude and different things that are helping us with our joy. So this chapter, the meat of this chapter, is walking through four levels of the brain. So would you kind of give us that snapshot of why these four levels, what’s the point, and then we’ll walk through them.
(06:38) Marcus Warner: Yeah, so Jim and I kind of settled on the metaphor of an elevator for a reason that there is a first floor, second floor, third floor, fourth floor. There’s a clear sequence to the brain functions that are involved in our emotions and in regulating our emotions. And a lot of this science was originally assembled by people like Allan Schore and Daniel Siegel, and it came out of the UCLA Med Center back in the, you know, 80s.
And Dr. Wilder was one of the first people to have access to all this information. He was practicing in Southern California at the time, and got a hold of some of this material before it was even published, and began putting together exercises for his clients based on it. People may not realize, but he’s like a medical journal reader. He really keeps up on all this stuff. Research is actually his, you know, one of his core passions.
And so what we’re trying to do is make simple and understandable what the steps are, what the sequence is of what’s going on in the brain, so that we can understand how all of this works. So I use not only the joy elevator concept, but four words that begin with the letter A, right, to try to help this. So the first floor is Attachment. And the idea here is that the deepest part of the brain. What it craves the most is attachment to another human being. And what it really craves is joyful attachment to another human being.
But that part of my brain can’t find joyful attachment with somebody, it will settle for fearful attachment with somebody. And so this is core because it means the deepest craving of the human, is this craving for attachment. And that plays out. So when infants are first born, what the first craving of an infant isn’t food, it’s actually attachment. They have just spent nine months inside of, you know, as attached as you can get to mom, and through an umbilical cord, and now they’re like looking to attach as quickly as possible. And it’s a deep, deep craving.
(08:57) Marcus Warner: There are a couple of things that grow out of this that are relevant. And one of them is that, it also means that the deepest pain that a human can feel is attachment pain. And that is where I really, really want to be with this person who we share joy together, but they are unavailable to me. Could be that they are just temporarily out of town, could be that they have rejected me for some reason, could be that, you know, that the relationship is over.
It could be that, a lot of different things, but for whatever reason, they’re unavailable. Maybe they’re just even shut down emotionally and they’re just not the same person that they were before. So attachment pain is really deep. And that’s why so many songs and poems and stories, you know, kind of focus on that, the pain that I feel when I can’t be with you, you know, and… yeah.
So my mind was going to a specific song that I remember from high school and, you know, not a just another day without you, kind of thing, and it’s all dark and depressing and rainy because that’s what we want. The other thing that it has a connection to besides attachment pain is addiction, and that is that when I can’t find the joyful attachment that I’m looking for, I will form attachments and bonds to non-relational substitutes.
(10:23) Marcus Warner: And these non-relational substitutes give me something like a counterfeit joy bond, because I temporarily feel really good. And so the problem with addictions is they work, to some extent. They do make me feel better. I do feel differently, and so I begin to form a bond or an attachment to experiences that do that for me, or to substances that do that for me, and sometimes even to people.
And when that’s happened, I’m doing this with people, it’s because I’m actually using that person for what they’re doing for me instead of just sharing a joyful attachment and connection together. So honestly we could spend our whole episode just on this level. It’s so profound, but attachment is the core motivator, the core craving that is driving the human condition is really, really a profound insight. And it comes from level one.
(11:18) Stephanie Warner: Mm-hmm. So the attachment center.
(11:22) Marcus Warner: So level two is the Assessment is the word. So when we attach to something, now we have to assess that attachment. And so you can think of it this way; it’s like a person or an object or an experience gets on the first floor elevator and then it goes up to the second floor. Whatever shows up at the second floor, the second floor will assess it.
And this part of my brain is called the amygdala. It can only give one of three assessments, because it’s not a super complex, you know, thing. It will either say this is good, in which case the elevator just keeps on going, everything’s smooth, or it will say this is bad, in which case it will send out an alarm to the body that says, get away from this, you know, stay away from this, and it will be de-energizing.
And so I get low energy emotions as a result of the signal that this is bad, and I will feel shame, like, oh this is bad. This person isn’t happy to see me. And I feel these emotions before I can put words to them. So these emotions are not being created by my thoughts. These emotions are actually preceding my thoughts, and they’re happening at a very deep part of the brain. I may later on be able to put words to them, but when they’re first happening, they’re happening at a level deeper than conscious thought. And so it’s good, it’s bad.
The last one is, it’s scary. And this is the one that most of us are familiar with. We call it the fight or flight reaction. If it sends a signal that it’s scary, then I get a high energy reaction in my body that makes me want to fight it or makes me want to flee and get away from it. Either way, I need a lot of energy in my body right now. And that’s what happens is the second floor.
And what Dr. Wilder said is that according to his studies, when once your brain learns that something is good, bad, or scary, it never changes its mind. And so the example he gives is growing up in Colombia, as he did, dogs were not cute family pets. They were like dangerous roaming the streets and whatever. So if your brain learns that dogs are scary, the amygdala is never going to change that.
(13:42) Marcus Warner: It will always, its first impulse at a very deep level will always be, ooh, a little bit of fear. However, as you mature and as you grow your capacity, you can overcome that more and more and more quickly. So that even though you have that initial fear reaction, you can still enjoy a dog. You can still pet the thing, you can enjoy it, you can still interact with it, you can overcome that initial impulse that’s in there. And sometimes you overcome it so quickly you don’t even sense that it’s happening.
But you know, that’s the idea that a lot of us have our brains programmed to have fight or flight reactions to a whole bunch of stuff, and the only solution to that to some extent is to mature beyond it. Now I’ve had people, you know, suggest that there is new science saying that these things can be changed, but I don’t know what that is. So we’ll just go with what Doctor Wilder told me.
(14:35) Stephanie Warner: Okay. Yes, I know. I always push into that a little bit more and try to get, I’m like, Wow, that feels intense but that’s…
(14:44) Marcus Warner: It is intense, but it’s also the idea of why emotional maturity is so important because that becomes the solution. The solution is to grow your capacity to where that doesn’t stop you from enjoying things.
(14:58) Stephanie Warner: Mm-hmm. Yeah. All right. So our amygdala is assessing what our attachment center sent up, and then once it goes through the amygdala through the assessment center, it goes to the attunement center.
(15:09) Marcus Warner: Attunement center. And let me say one last thing on assessment. And that is, so this bad and scary reaction is where we get what we call the six big negative emotions. And so there are four, big, low energy emotions, and there are two, big, high energy emotions. So those four, low, energy emotions are shame and sadness, disgust and despair. So that’s the SD, SD of the sad sad. And then the two high energy emotions are anger and fear.
(15:39) Marcus Warner: And so I think I put anxiety in there, which actually bothered Dr. Wilder a little bit because anxiety and fear aren’t actually the same thing. But it was just enough to get a handle on it, to remember what’s going on. So for people who are just confused by what I just said, fear is a reaction, and anxiety is based on what I am thinking about. So fear is a deeper brain experience than anxiety. Because anxiety is responding to my thoughts and my imaginations and the catastrophe that I imagine coming, whereas fear is about something I’m actually reacting to.
(16:18) Stephanie Warner: Mm-hmm. Good clarification.
(16:22) Marcus Warner: All right, now that brings us to level three, third floor, the joy elevator is the attunement center. Sometimes think of the attunement center like radar, and that it’s always running in the background. It’s the part of my brain that kind of reads the room. And it’s aware of when something scary is going on, and so what it does is, it tells my brain to focus on something. So it’s running constantly in the background, saying, wait, there’s a blip on the radar. We should look at that, focus. And then my left hemisphere kind of like, focuses in. It’s like, okay, that’s our job. We’ll focus in, and we’ll solve this problem.
So sometimes this radar will tell me, you know, that something’s scary. Sometimes it’ll tell me that something is good. But it’s going to show up and tell my brain what to focus on. So if that part of my brain isn’t working properly, I’m going to focus on all the wrong things. It’s going to create some problems. The other…
(17:17) Stephanie Warner: So how is, I’m sorry, a different level already assigns good or scary to it. So how is attunement different?
(17:26) Marcus Warner: Well, it’s recognizing things that are in the background. So here’s the example. Well, pastors have had this happen where they are preaching their sermon and somebody walks into the back of the room who wasn’t there before and your brain has to do an assessment very quickly. And so the radar picks up that this person did it, and it tells you to focus on it. Now once you focus on it, you’ll then do the assessment: is this good, bad, or scary? But it had to come to your attention first.
The other thing this part of the brain does is, it is reading body language. And so, this is the part of my brain that knows what you’re thinking before you actually say something, right? And it’s the part there, where you can almost carry on a conversation just by looking at the person and making eye contact, and you kind of know where the other person’s going with this. And that is all happening at this third level of the brain.
You can actually experience what Dr. Wilder described as a mutual mind. And mutual mind is where you and I are so in sync with what the other one’s thinking that we can finish each other’s sentences. We know exactly where this is going. And when you’re done, you almost can’t remember who said what in the conversation, because you were just sort of thinking together.
And this has application to our walk with God, because when you talk about sensing God wanting you to do things, as opposed to hearing a concrete statement from God, or seeing a concrete picture, you’re getting a sense of what God wants you to be thinking about, is happening at this level of the brain. And so trying to experience a mutual mind moment with God is actually a part of the listening prayer process.
(19:13) Stephanie Warner: Yeah, attunement is you’re reading others. It’s kind of another level of assessment, but it’s not the same as the assessment center. Like you’re tuning in…
(19:26) Marcus Warner: Yeah. I’m not assessing attachments. I am reading the environment and reading people.
(19:29) Stephanie Warner: Yep. Cool. Anything more you want to say about Attunement Center?
(19:45) Marcus Warner: Well, like when it comes to leadership, right, we are talking about rare leadership. So when it comes to leadership, one of the things that separates really good leaders from others, is they just seem to have a sense of what needs to get attention. And they just have this intuitive sense of, we really ought to be focused on this. This is the real issue here. And a lot of that is coming from their well-trained ability to read the environment, and read people’s reactions and kind of, you know, read the room in a bigger sense. And so that’s why a lot of these are like gut level decisions. Things are involving this part of the brain.
(20:25) Stephanie Warner: Hmm. Interesting. Interesting. So the next one you said had an A word in the book, at least from what I was refreshing on it, you say the identity center in this one. But what’s your fourth A word?
(20:38) Marcus Warner: Action Center. I call it the action center. So in Rare Leadership in the Workplace, at least, I call it the action center, and the…
(20:47) Stephanie Warner: This is the identity center, the action center…
(20:49) Marcus Warner: It’s been called about seven different things depending on the book. But it’s…
(20:47) Stephanie Warner: Or the prefrontal cortex. So what is this fourth level here?
(20:58) Marcus Warner: So this is the part of my brain that thinks of itself as me. Hence it’s the identity center. It is the part of my brain I want in charge. So it’s been called the command center, right? It is the part of the brain where joy is experienced and collects, so that it grows with the experience of joy. So it’s been called the joy center. It is the, you know, it’s the part of the brain that has those faces looking at it, that sees itself from the mind’s eye of the two faces.
So it’s where we experience group identity, right? I call it the action center because I needed an A word, but also because it’s the part of my brain I want in charge when it comes time to act. So if you think about it, that I’m going to remain relational and act like myself. Well, if I’m going to act like myself, that is a summary way of saying I want my identity center in charge when I am acting. I want this part of my brain to be what is calling the shots, so that I am doing this like I would do it, and not turning into a different person, not putting on a mask, not pretending, not living out of a false self. You know, that’s what we mean by that.
So where the term came from is that, remain relational means this whole joy elevator is functioning, that it doesn’t get stuck anywhere along the way. And as long as it is not getting stuck and it continues to flow and to function, I will remain relational because the whole joy elevator is a relational engine. That’s kind of its primary purpose is to keep my relational competency high.
This part of my brain is about acting like myself because it’s my identity center. Is this where my character shows up? It’s where my sense of who I am shows up. And I don’t have to think about it. It shows up faster than I could possibly think about it, which is a good thing, because I don’t want to always sit here and go, now how would it be like me to act? You know, you just want that to be there when you show up.
(23:12) Marcus Warner: And so that’s where the remain relational and act like yourself came from is the whole engine is helping me remain relational. And this part of my brain I want in charge is what helps me acting like myself. So where this goes wrong, right, is if the elevator gets stuck, I stop being relational. If the elevator gets stuck, I also don’t get access to the top part of my brain. So not only do I stop being relational, but I will stop acting like myself too.
And when that happens, my left brain, well, what we call the slow track, the slow track takes over and says, oh there’s a problem going on. I’ll take control of this. But it’s really good at problems, not at relationships. And so it tends to turn relationships into problems to be solved. And we don’t get the best version of ourself over there. So out of this problem-solving part of my brain, when it has to take over, that’s where I tend to get my false self. Some counterfeit identity – it’s where I wear masks and pretend to be somebody I’m not.
It’s also where I can slip into enemy mode and treat people like enemies instead of treating them like people to be related to. All kinds of bad things can come out of this. It can also temporarily be a good place to camp out while I do fix the problem, but the problem I want to fix isn’t you. The problem I want to fix is why is half of my brain offline.
(24:40) Marcus Warner: And how do I get my whole, my joy elevator moving again so that I can remain relational and act like myself. And that’s actually what we’re doing with that third habit, returning to joy, is I return to joy by going into the problem-solving part of my brain. But the problem I’m trying to solve is getting this joy elevator moving again so that I can remain relational and act like myself as soon as possible.
(25:03) Stephanie Warner: Mm-hmm. Because when you have the right brain, you get the left [brain], you know, when you have the fast track, you get the slow track. When you have the, you know, joy elevator, you get the narrative engine. But if you only have the narrative engine, things are going to be more broken. So we want to be whole brain. We’re not talking about being right brained or left brained. We’re talking about, we want to be whole brained.
(25:22) Marcus Warner: Yeah, exactly. This is not, am I a right-brain person? Am I a left-brain person? That is not part of brain science. That’s actually more like a metaphor. If your joy elevator is working, you are automatically getting your whole brain. But if something goes wrong in our processing, it almost always starts in this fast track on the right, which is dominantly on the right side of the brain. And to describe how the fast track works, we use the image of a joy elevator.
(25:57) Stephanie Warner: Mm-hmm. Now you did mention enemy mode and this chapter does get into a little bit on the, like we’re born predatory and you don’t really have to learn that, and part of maturing is learning not to be predatory. Can you just speak briefly about what enemy mode is?
(26:15) Marcus Warner: Yeah, so enemy mode is where I treat other people like someone to be defeated. And the problem is in my brain I only know that I have won, when I see you lose. And so my enemy mode part of the brain focuses on winning and losing, whereas the relational part of my brain is going to focus more on creating culture, creating joy, creating, you know, the atmosphere for effectiveness. And creating an atmosphere for effective problem-solving, for effective communication, for all the things that go with it.
Whereas if I slip into enemy mode, I will get lower and lower down to where the only thing that matters is winning and losing. And the deeper that goes, the more dark the behaviors can become. And so that’s what we mean by the enemy mode part of the brain. Now, when we say that infants are born predators and have to mature out of that, the idea is to a baby, everything is food until it’s proven not to be. Right? So they’re sticking everything in their mouths.
(27:31) Marcus Warner: Like, can I eat my foot? Can I eat this? Can I, you know, eat that? Is this rubber ball food? You know, they’re sticking everything in their mouths. And part of what’s going on there is they want to eat everything. and that’s essentially what it means to be a predator is I tend to treat people like they are food to be consumed.
And you can see that sexually, right? This person is food to be consumed, and you can see that in, used. I’m here to use you for what I can get out of you, whether that’s work or pleasure or whatever else. And that is enemy mode. And that is using people instead of actually attaching to them and relating to them.
(28:13) Stephanie Warner: Mm-hmm. Oh man. Next episode we’re going to get more into what happens when things are broken and running on fear and doing stuff and we’re going to look at, yeah, more of that. So for now I just want to pause and say thank you so much to everyone who keeps us on the trail, who is on the trail with us. We are so pleased to be able to offer this book study on this podcast free around the world, and so much of that is because of you. So thank you. Thank you for being here with us, Father. final thoughts for this episode and yeah, final thoughts for this episode.
(28:48) Marcus Warner: Yeah, understanding the idea of the Joy Elevator really helps a lot of people with every relationship that they have, because they begin to understand, oh, I see what the problem is now. And we just talk about communication. Most of us in a relationship are actually pretty good at communicating. The problem is that when our elevator gets stuck, I become really bad at communicating. And so what I need to fix isn’t always communication skills.
Sometimes what I need to fix is, how do I return to joy so that I can get back to acting like myself and being relational. Because when that’s happening, communication is easy. I find it easy to talk, I find it easy to listen. All those things flow out of me naturally. But when I get stuck, they all disappear. And when they disappear, I stop being my relational self. So my last thought is that a lot of our communication problems aren’t from an inability to know how to communicate. They’re because I’m emotionally stuck and I haven’t figured out how to return to joy enough to get back into that action identity joy part of my brain.
(29:57) Stephanie Warner: Wow. All right. To be continued next week.
