6: Unleash Your Beliefs

[00:00] Stephanie: Season three, episode six. Today, we are continuing our breakthrough series going into engine number two: Unleash Your Beliefs.

Hello, Father.

[00:10] Marcus: Hello, Daughter.

[00:12] Stephanie: Good to be with you.

[00:13] Marcus: Yeah, we’re back at it.

[00:14] Stephanie: Are you feeling a little bit better?

[00:16] Marcus: Am I feeling a little bit better? Yeah, sort of.

[00:19] Stephanie: Yeah.

[00:21] Marcus: It lingers.

[00:25] Stephanie: Yes.

[00:26] Marcus: Yeah, I’ve had bronchitis. It’s just lingering. Still feeling a little tired, but we’re good here.

[00:32] Stephanie: Glad to be with you. All right, before we start — last episode, I shared one of our podcast reviews, and that was fun, so I thought I’d do it again.

This listener, Denise, shared this review titled Love the Interaction and Wisdom. “I have thoroughly enjoyed this refreshing podcast. I love the interaction between father and daughter and the incredible amount of wisdom shared in a little bit of time. Marcus makes understanding how our brains work in regards to our relationships and how God has created us in such an easy way that I find myself listening to these podcasts over and over again. Thank you so much for this information.”

So thank you so much for leaving that review. Thanks to everybody who has been an encouragement to us personally and also to others who are exploring if this is a podcast they might be interested in. So that’s really, really helpful. We really appreciate it.

[01:26] Marcus: That was a good review. I’m always very honored to hear things like that. That’s really nice.

[01:33] Stephanie: Yeah.

[01:33] Marcus: I always find myself going, now, which one of us is the wisdom and which one of us is — we’ll just take it collectively.

[01:40] Stephanie: I’m just here to facilitate your wisdom coming to the people here. But yeah. All right. This week, the theme is Grandpa.

[01:49] Marcus: Grandpa. Yes.

[01:51] Stephanie: Your dad was really good at talking about beliefs and worldview. And whenever I think about Grandpa teaching, I think about worldview.

[01:59] Marcus: Yes.

[02:00] Stephanie: And, you know, I grew up with him saying, and you quoting, “People may not always practice what they say they believe, but they will always practice what they really believe.” And do you want to unpack that thought?

[02:13] Marcus: Yeah. It’s a pretty profound idea. And the idea comes back to, again, how many times have we heard of pastors who preach really good things on Sundays, and then you find out that behind the scenes, they are not living it, that they’re almost living a double life.

And it’s not just pastors. We know of Christians. You hear this all the time in the business community, that some of the worst people to do business with are Christians. And you’re like, how can that be? And it’s because they say they believe something with their mouth, but then what comes out in their behavior reflects what they really believe.

And so my dad was like, if I was able to follow you around and see what you do, I would find out what you really believe because that’s what’s going to guide and drive your behavior. And that’s where that was coming from.

[03:02] Stephanie: Yeah. The thing with beliefs and breakthrough is that our emotions can’t tell the difference between what is really true and what is not true. That’s one of the reasons why fiction is such a powerful engine or, you know, your imagination. Because if you — yeah, there’s a fine line between knowing something is real and feeling something is real.

[03:27] Marcus: Yeah. And so you just think about propaganda, right? And that is there is no such thing as warfare without propaganda. Because before you can go to war, you’ve got to convince people that these other people are worth killing. Okay? So you have to have a narrative that says these people are so bad and they have to be stopped so decisively that we are willing to go kill them to make this stop.

So to do that, you’ve got to have — you’ve got to get people’s emotions really, really riled up, like, let’s go do this. And so what happens is both sides of the war believe that. So both of them believe that they are fighting for what is right, and they’re fighting, you know, for what is honorable and for their side. So your beliefs can’t tell the difference. And just because you really feel something strongly doesn’t mean you’re right.

And so what you believe is so integral to how you feel. And it works both ways. We said the body’s a two-way street. Well, beliefs are a two-way street. So once I get worked up — like I’m really worked up against my enemy, and I want to see them go down. Now that I am in that mental state of that enemy mode against my enemy, it’s much easier for me to believe anything about them. And so now that I’m in that state, it actually makes it easier for me to believe things that I wouldn’t have believed otherwise because my emotions are now engaged.

It’s also true that I might feel neutral about somebody, hear something, and now that I believe that is true, well now my emotions are all riled up about that person. How many times though have we thought something about a person, and we’re just convinced that they were the devil, only to find out later we were wrong, and they weren’t actually guilty of what we thought they were guilty of.

And, you can feel kind of sheepishly, going, why in the world was I so worked up? I feel ashamed. And a lot of people are so afraid of feeling shame, they don’t want to admit, and it’s hard to back your way out of that.

[05:40] Stephanie: I feel like you’re about to take a deep dive into like, enemy mode and narcissism right now.

[05:44] Marcus: I’m trying not to very badly right now so we can get onto the rest of it.

[05:50] Stephanie: Well, I will just step in there and say that it’s one of the reasons why it is so radical that Jesus says, ‘Love your enemies.’ Because we are called to love people even when we feel they are our enemy, whether they are or not. If we were feeling like, ah, you’re my enemy, like, what does love look like? How do we love like Christ, even if somebody is my enemy and not just justify doing bad things to people because we think of them as enemy.

[06:20] Marcus: Yeah, well, and that’s why beliefs are such a powerful engine when it comes to our emotions because once I believe a narrative, the emotions automatically follow that narrative. And it’s also true that once I have those emotions in place, that narrative tends to feel reinforced and just get stronger.

You just take something like the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and no matter who you talk to — if you talk to the Palestinian side, they are all in on their narrative and all in on their emotions. You talk to the Israeli side, all in on their narrative, all in on their emotions. The point here is that you can’t tell what is true just based on how intense your feelings are.

[07:06] Stephanie: Well, and I would just also add, you know we’re talking about beliefs right now in the context of breakthrough, and there are multiple areas that can affect emotions and change in emotions, but beliefs are often woven into things for sure. I’m thinking even last week when we were talking about best practices and like, just because we have individual letters for the acrostic doesn’t mean that they’re not all in play.

You know, like, sometimes it’s just the one thing. Sometimes you just need to solve your beliefs, and sometimes you’re needing to have a complex approach to things. So talk to us a little bit about unleashing your belief. Like what does it mean? What do you mean by unleash your beliefs, which is the B.U.I.L.D. acrostic.

[07:55] Marcus: Yeah. So in unleashing, the idea here is that one of the things that holds us in bondage is a faulty belief system. So, most of us know John 8:32, “… the truth will set you free.” And the corollary to that is if the truth sets free, lies create bondage. And so if we want to be set free, we have to unleash our beliefs.

So unleashing our beliefs means we’ve got to get them unlocked, if you will, from beliefs that hold us back. Now that’s sometimes used as let’s think positive. Let’s be, you know, motivational thinking and positive thinking. There’s some truth to that. But what we’re talking about here is getting rid of lies that are holding us back and embracing truth that can set us free. And it’s a very powerful engine.

[08:44] Stephanie: Yeah. And as Christians, we believe in submitting our beliefs and our thoughts to Christ and trying to get as in sync with God thoughts as we can and uproot worldly, fleshly devil thoughts. Yeah, okay, let’s zoom out and talk philosophically about just like an example of how it is so powerful, how unleashing your beliefs can be so powerful. And I said the theme of today was Grandpa because I want you to talk about your Little League story.

[09:18] Marcus: Yeah. You know, thinking about my dad, I’m realizing — his birthday was Christmas Eve, and he grew up in the Depression and it was not uncommon for Christmas morning to be, hey, you get an orange. Happy Christmas. Right? It was like a very different world than we live in. And he’d have been 100 years old this year on his birthday. So, yeah, missing my dad.

But one of his great loves was baseball. And when he was young, one of the best teams in baseball was the Chicago Cubs. A lot of people know the story of Babe Ruth calling a shot, pointing the finger, and that was the World Series of the Yankees versus the Cubs. And I remember when my dad, toward the end of his life, as his short term memory was going, he could still recite the entire starting lineup of the 1936 Chicago Cubs. It was pretty cool.

[10:17] Stephanie: Oh my goodness. You just threw me back into that memory. I can picture having a Christmas tree in the living room and you’re like sitting next to him and he’s smiling as he’s thinking through that.

[10:27] Marcus: Yeah, so because of that, one of the things that my dad and my brother and I bonded over was baseball, right? So we all love that game. And I was in Little League, and I was normally a very good hitter. I had one of the best batting averages in the league. Yeah, I’ll brag. But I went into this slump where it was just like I wasn’t — something was off, and I knew it and I couldn’t figure it out.

And so my dad said, well, I have something that might help. And I thought he was going to take me out to pitch and batting practice. And instead he handed me a cassette tape. And the name — I still remember it to this day — the name of it was Psycho-Cybernetics by Maxwell Maltz. And I think you can still find it on YouTube — Maxwell Maltz, Psycho-Cybernetics. And the idea was how he helped train athletes to picture themselves performing things perfectly as a way to improve their performance. And they gave examples.

Like there was a prisoner of war who, to keep himself sane — he was a prisoner for seven years — he played a round of golf in his head every day for that seven years. And when he returned, when the war was finally over, he was released, he went home, and he set foot on a golf course. After not touching a club for seven years, he actually improved his score by 20 strokes. So he had improved his golf game by 20 strokes without touching a club just by getting his thought life correct. And so all those years of picturing himself doing things perfectly and hitting the ball exactly right was doing something that equipped him.

And so he had story after story after story like this, of people who, by getting their thinking correct, were able to transform their performance. And so my dad had me close my eyes and picture myself hitting a baseball. What I realized was I couldn’t do it even in my imagination. I felt off balance, and I couldn’t get myself to hit the ball solidly or squarely.

So he did take me to a baseball field, took a bucket of baseballs and said, “Okay, I’m going to pitch them to you, but don’t swing. Watch the ball go by and picture yourself hitting it.” And he said, “As soon as you can picture yourself hitting the ball hard and solidly three times, then you can swing.” And I did.

And I remember the first four pitches, I still felt kind of off balance as I even pictured myself trying to do it. And then all of a sudden something clicked, and I was like, oh, wait, it feels like this. And I could picture myself hitting it. I could picture myself hitting it. And finally I was like, okay, swing. And I hit the next three balls in a row over the fence. It was like all of a sudden hitting a baseball felt like the easiest thing in the world.

[13:24] Stephanie: And you couldn’t imagine not doing it.

[13:25] Marcus: I couldn’t imagine not hitting it. Yeah. So the next day I had a game, and I remember I hit home runs on the first two pitches thrown to me in that game. And the third time I was so anxious to hit again, I actually swung at a ball that bounced in the dirt and hit a line drive off the fence that was six inches for being another home run. It was just like getting the thoughts right in your head just changed everything.

And so there’s a principle there, right? And that principle is, this is the power of our thought life. That’s the power of our beliefs. It’s the power of picturing things. I went to Dale Carnegie Training several years ago. They had an interesting motto there where they said, practice doesn’t make perfect, because you hear that all the time. They said, “Practice doesn’t make perfect, practice makes permanent.”

And so if you are routinely picturing yourself in a flawed manner, performing in a flawed way, and you’re practicing that, then that becomes the permanent thought pattern. And you’ve got to change that and practice a new thought pattern. And for a lot of us, that’s what’s going on. We’ve had such negative thought patterns about God, such negative thought patterns about ourselves, such negative thought patterns about other things in life that we have practiced them to perfection.

And so this engine has to get rebuilt, retransformed, because in transforming our thinking, we can transform our behavior.

[14:50] Stephanie: Can you dig a little bit more into the brain science of that? Like white matter and such?

[14:56] Marcus: So white matter is formed by a process called myelinization. And what happens is that neurons in the brain connect, and they link together as you do things. And then the more often you do those things, the stronger that link gets. And then eventually they start getting coated through the myelinization process with something called white matter.

And so this can happen both with activities like ping pong. Like to play ping pong well, you’ve got to react. You can’t be thinking constantly about what you’re doing. So your brain has to calculate things at such speed that you can’t do it unless you have developed a certain amount of white matter. And so white matter enables your brain to function up to 200 times faster than it normally does.

And we can develop that kind of habit both in terms of our emotional life, but also in terms of our thought life and our beliefs. And so some of us have developed white matter around negative beliefs at such a point that in order to tear that down, you’ve got to build a new thought chain, if you will. You’ve got to build a new pathway. And as that one gets stronger and you get better at saying no to this one and yes to the other one, gradually then the new pathway can become the habit. And that’s the goal.

[16:19] Stephanie: That flows nicely. I don’t think we’re going to talk about anteater thoughts, but do you want to talk about automatic negative thoughts and press further into that idea?

[16:30] Marcus: Sure. So Dr. Amen is well known on YouTube, was on PBS many times, and he’s got some things about him that are controversial, but his core research — he’s got some pretty solid stuff in there. One of them is he tells a story of having a seven or eight-year old client who was having all kinds of anxiety, and he had several clients that day who were all battling something similar, and he came home after a long day dealing with these anxious people.

And when he got home, he got home to an ant infestation in his kitchen. Ants were everywhere, just swarming. And so he had to suddenly clean this all up, get rid of these things, clean things up. And as he’s going through the process of getting rid of these ants, he started thinking, you know, the swarm of these ants is kind of like the swarm of these thoughts in my clients’ lives. They have this swarm of thinking.

He said, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could find a way to turn their brain into an anteater so their brain starts eating these thoughts instead of living off of these thoughts?’ And all of a sudden it occurred to him — A.N.T. — that’s automatic negative thoughts. And he said that what happens is these thoughts come rushing into your brain so fast, probably because there’s white matter built up around them, that they’re swarming your brain before you have a chance to even realize that they’re happening. And that’s why they’re called automatic.

And so some of us, as soon as any emotion gets triggered, that emotion will bring with it all these automatic negative thoughts. And so he’s like, ‘What if we could train our brains to be anteaters so that we recognize the pattern?’ And the way that we do this is you take one emotion, and let’s say that emotion is anxiety. And you’re like, okay when I feel anxiety, what are those thoughts that automatically come to my mind that support my anxiety? Let’s write those down and identify them so that the next time it happens I recognize, oh, this is happening again. That’s that same thought, right? These are those same thoughts that always happen.

And now let’s make a game plan for what we’re going to do to take those thoughts captive and replace them with something else. So let’s have a replacement thought for every one of them so that I’ve already got a battle strategy set up so that the next time that I’m feeling anxious and these automatic negative thoughts come, I recognize them when they come and recognize them and go,  oh, all right, I gotta activate the plan now. Let’s replace those thoughts with these thoughts over there.

So that’s the idea of anteaters that comes from Dr. Amen. I think it’s a great strategy, and it’s right in line with what the Bible calls taking thoughts captive.

[19:21] Stephanie: So I’m going to encourage our listeners. If you notice that you have racing thoughts, take out your notes app on your phone or paper or whatever and do that today. Try creating like a T-bar and thinking through and praying through what some of your negative thoughts are and strategies for replacing them. That’s my challenge to you.

[19:45] Marcus: Yeah, and I will go on and say you can do this with each thought that you struggle with or each emotion that you struggle with. And so you can have a different game plan for every emotion that gets triggered and by doing the same thing with it. When I feel shame, what are the thoughts that come? Let’s make a game plan for that. When I feel anger and so on. And as you do that and you work at those, you can begin to strengthen your ability to take those thoughts captive.

[20:11] Stephanie: And return to joy from each of your negative emotions. Very good.

Well, next week we are going to continue pressing into beliefs, and we’re going to look at how we perceive God and also ourselves and kind of the double-sided nature of that. Any final thoughts for this episode?

[20:30] Marcus: You know, when we talk about the engine of beliefs, I will say that I honestly built my whole pastoral counseling ministry on this engine for a long time. I was like, we just need to address this engine. And what I found is that the majority of people I worked with were helped just by tweaking their beliefs.

Along the way. I realized there were people who didn’t get help this way or they found it impossible to maintain the change because there were other issues going on, whether it was the body or whether it was their bonding and attachment issues. And so I just say, while this continues to be an extremely important engine, this is why we have a whole model so that we understand that they all work together.

[21:17] Stephanie: Very good. Thanks for joining us on the trail today. Did you like this episode? Would you like more people to see it? This is the part where I ask you to like, comment, subscribe, share with a friend.

And do you love this channel? One of the best ways that you can support us is by becoming a Deeper Walk Trailblazer. Thanks again. We’ll see you back on the trail next week.