Stop Making An Operation Out of Everything

The Sixth Commandment of Self-Brain Surgery™

In my operating room, before we start each surgery, I ask my team a question: “Do you all want to make an operation out of this?”

They reply, in unison, robustly, “No!”

I have done this in OR’s in Texas, Alabama, Wyoming, Nebraska, Iraq, and Germany. But it started in Pittsburgh.

My former professor, the late Peter Jannetta, was a world-famous neurosurgeon who was a pioneer in cranial nerve surgery for devastating diseases such as trigeminal neuralgia. He would watch his trainees perform brain surgeries, and find things we were doing that made the procedures unnecessarily complex. He would lean over my shoulder and say, “Come on, Warren! Don’t make an operation out of it.”

It was his way of saying not to make things too hard. To be more efficient, to plan our moves ahead so we’d be safer and quicker while also being more effective surgeons.

And I’ve honored him by asking my team each time I operate the question, which has evolved in my practice as a joke for my team to remind me that they want me to get after it, and not make cases take longer than they should. (I told this story and many more in my latest book, Hope Is the First Dose).

Since we lost our son Mitch, I’ve been on a long journey of trying to figure out what happens to people who get stuck in some place in their lives. This is because I was stuck for so long in grief and hopelessness from the trauma of Mitch’s death. I needed to heal, and I needed (as a good doctor) to try to find ways to help others heal too, as Lisa and I both realized that Luke 12:48 (“To whom much is given, much is required.”) applies to both the blessings AND the burdens of our lives. God brought us up out of the furnace of suffering through his mercy, so we felt obligated to shine a light behind us on the path for others as well.

The path has led me to many amazing discoveries, as I’ve shared with you in my books and on the podcast, and here in this letter for the past decade, but perhaps none were more surprising than this one:

Sometimes part of why we get stuck in anything (grief, anxiety, depression, ADHD, or even just with performance barriers, habits we need to break, or flourishing in general) is simply that we’re making things harder than they have to be.

That’s why our sixth commandment is this:

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I must stop making an operation out of everything

(The Sixth Commandment of Self-Brain Surgery)

Read it out loud:

I must stop making an operation out of everything

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Here’s a whole podcast on this idea, but three of the many ways we can “make an operation” out of our healing or any type of barrier we’ve encountered in our lives are:

1. We forget that this massive thing is not the only thing that is still true in the world. Our TMT (The Massive Thing) is so big or so hard or so painful or so seemingly insurmountable that we forget to zoom out a little and see we still have people who love us, that there’s still some light and beauty in the world, the God is there helping us.

2. We focus excessively on the physical symptoms we associate with the issue (grief hurts our bodies, and we begin to believe that we’re broken, instead of remembering that we are designed to heal as in Psalm 103, or we fixate on our anxiety and believe that we’re “just anxious, and that’s how I am”). This focus on how we feel rather than on the fact that our minds are in charge of making our brains and our bodies work better can keep us stuck instead of moving forward.

3. We begin to worry that our lives are now going to be less than they should be, and we then focus on the past and mourn the future we thought we would have, and we forget that we are still living a story right now that will determine our future. Nothing in the past actually has the power to write that story, unless we put down the pen and stop writing the new one with our choices after TMT changed the title of the chapter we thought we were in.

(Read that last paragraph again. It gets better the more you think about it)

Look, friend, we all know that life is hard. Jesus promised us it would be (John 16:33, John 10:10). But self-brain surgery™ is the process of using the miracle of neuroplasticity and the foundation of faith to plant our feet on something solid and learn to stand again after life knocks us down. It’s letting two things be true at the same time, the devastations and frustrations are real, but so is the pernicious light and joy and meaning and purpose life is STILL full of, all at once.

So when it feels impossible to move forward with whatever has you stuck, zoom out and look for places where you’ve over-focused on the pain so much that you’ve forgotten that it’s not the only thing that’s still true.

Maybe you’re making an operation out of it. Take it easy on yourself, my friend. The healing will come, in time. Go through the process (you have to), but do not believe that you will always be there in the most painful parts of it. Your story isn’t over, you just need to remember that you get to keep writing.

It’s not just a good idea, it’s the sixth commandment of Self-Brain Surgery™:

I must stop making an operation out of everything.

Reply to this post and or leave a voicemail and tell me if you’re practicing self-brain surgery, and how it’s helping you.

Be sure to check out last week’s lesson if you missed it.

Announcement: We’re starting The School of Self-Brain Surgery™ soon. We’re testing the school with some volunteers now, and our second training session is soon. Once we work all the tech kinks out we’ll be ready to go live with students from all over the world! If you’re interested in knowing more about The School, click here to be notified when it’s ready to go live.

We’re going all in on believing that we have the tools to change our minds and change our lives. Living from a mind-down perspective changes everything, and it helps us harness the transforming changes to our lives that the Bible promises in Romans 12.

The neuroscience is on your side, my friend.

And the good news is, you can start today.

By the way, if you think these lessons are valuable, please consider sharing this with friends. If you share with three or more people and they sign up, you can get free access to my paid subscriber content!

Lisa and I are praying for you.

Dum spiro spero (While I breathe, I hope),

Lee

Psalm 71:14 ("As for me, I will always have hope.")

From the banks of the North Platte river on Moon River Ranch in Nebraska, USA