The importance in maximizing your brain function as an entrepreneur. 

Bite Size Talks 2019	

<p>The importance in maximizing your brain function as an entrepreneur. </p>

<p>Free sharing permitted under the Creative Commons <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/">BY-NC-ND 3.0 (US)</a> license.</p>

ASI Pacific Union

Wes Youngberg

Maximizing Executive Function	

As you notice here, the actual topic is maximizing executive function.

And we're talking about executives, all of us involved in entrepreneurial work, but also the executive function, which is the way the brain works, cognition in general.

I had a new patient just last week who I Skyped with in a consultation.

She was very, she was all alone in her room.

She didn't want any of her family to know that we were talking.

And she shared with me that she had 10 years before lost her business that she had started on her own.

It was a very successful home care business, that health care business that she lost because she had lost her executive function.

She had lost her ability to do what she was best at, and that is make decisions and remember what she needed to do next to be effective in communicating with clients, and she essentially lost that, and within a period of several years, because of her steady decline of cognitive function, she lost her entire business.

But see, it was during that talk that I realized that the most important job for me during that 1 hour long Skype phone conference was to help her get a sense that there was hope.

To give her a sense that something could change.

And because I knew unless she was hopeful that change could occur, she would never bring anybody else into that discussion.

She was afraid of bringing her sister in, a friend, a colleague, a neighbor.

And I know as somebody who's worked with hundreds and hundreds of patients who have had significant cognitive decline, unless they have a health partner that can work with them through, especially during the first 3 to 6 months until their executive function is improved so much that they can be successful more on their own.

Unless they have a health partner, they're not going to succeed.

So family becomes very integral in whether or not we're going to achieve success, especially when we're dealing with the number 1 health concern, not only in America, but in the world, which is diminishing cognitive reserve.

You know that in Europe, the number 1 cause of premature death, Alzheimer's.

Number 1, beating cancer and heart disease.

I believe it's number 1 in the US, we just don't have as good of statistics as the Europeans do, okay, for various reasons.

But in the United States, it's actually the number 3 cause of premature death.

That's not even the most important problem.

The real issue is that It is the number 1 cause of lost years of living.

While you're still alive, you dramatically decrease your ability to function, and that can last for 10 to 20 years.

But nobody's talking about it, especially within families, unless they're confiding with a close friend on what they're seeing in their own families.

But more and more people are going to be talking about it because there's actually great potential to reverse cognitive decline in many respects but only if the conditions are met.

Only if we do what is necessary to appropriately address the underlying triggers, the underlying causes of cognitive decline in Alzheimer's disease.

Well, I also appreciate the fact, Sebastian, that you talked about what constitutes opportunity.

Anybody who's in business for more than even a few years or even a few months knows that that failure, or what is considered by the world as failure, is oftentimes 1 of the best things that can happen to us because it generates opportunities that would otherwise never have happened.

It generates opportunities that otherwise would leave us in the state of constant mediocrity.

I will say that the 2 best things that happened to me as a professional was losing my job.

Both time it catapulted me to a much higher level than I would otherwise been.

The first time was I was on the full-time faculty right here at the School of Public Health at Lonely University.

I lost my job after just a year and a half of being an instructor and professor there, along with a whole bunch of my colleagues because of reorganization, politics, et cetera.

You know, I spent all this time and effort, and I was developing all these great programs, and it was just stripped away from me.

But looking back at it, even after about a year, I realized that that was the best thing that could have happened to me.

I've been on the clinical faculty now for the Loma Linda University, School of Medicine, School of Public Health, since I left, for the past 30 years almost.

And I found that I'm much more valuable to the university when I'm not being paid by the university.

When I'm generating my own revenues and I can do what I believe to be best, I don't have to worry about the politics of an institution.

So entrepreneurship is a wonderful thing that God wants more and more of us to be involved with.

The second time was when I had spent 14 years with My wife Betsy and my family in Guam is a medical missionary, had a wonderful experience there, learned a lot, and then I was recruited to come back to Southern California.

I persistently said, I'm not gonna do that, I'm not gonna come back to Southern California, why would I want to leave Guam anyways?

Why would I want to leave the paradise of Guam?

But when I started praying about it after a colleague of mine said, Wes, are you actually praying about this?

I knew God made sure that I went to Guam, so should I actually be praying whether God wants me to leave Guam?

You always pray about every opportunity or situation that comes up.

So we ended up coming back to Southern California, working for a large family practice medical group in Temecula, just an hour south of Loma Linda, an hour north of San Diego.

At the end of the 3 years of my contract, I thought, well, I got to negotiate a better contract here.

I'm bringing in over $400, 000 a year to this group.

And as I went into the negotiation, they said, hey, we want to thank you for your service over the last 3 years But we've decided not to retain your services.

I was shocked That was the best thing that ever happened to me professionally Because It forced me to pray and ask God for what is the next step.

I knew God had brought me back because I didn't want to come back.

It was God had created multiple experiences, those Gideon experiences, those fleece experiences to make it clear to me 100% that he wanted me to take that job.

But God wanted me to take that job not because he wanted me to stay there until I retired, but because it was the next step in something God was planning for me beyond that.

And that's what allowed me to, it forced me to become an entrepreneur.

It forced me to get into my own private practice where now I can go anywhere I want in the world without getting, you know, filling out forms in triplicate and waiting 3 months to get approved or not.

And I can set my own pace of what I need to do, and instead of being forced to see 20 patients a day, I see 6 patients a day, hour every time, because that's what's necessary, especially if we're going to be successful in reversing cognitive decline in a patient.

So Don't despair if you are trying to start up a new company and you're struggling along the way because those are opportunities for you to grow in a powerful, powerful way.

Just recently, Peter Versio, a young man who actually grew up in Guam, his parents were medical missionaries, lived right across the street from our family.

And He is now involved in a startup company.

He said, Uncle Wes, he calls me, Uncle Wes, he says, I need you to help us with this program.

Would you mind being 1 of our medical advisors?

We build profitable farms that grow fresh, healthy and local food in any climate.

They essentially have designed these pods where they can grow this.

It's a hydroponic system where they can develop jobs for our Adventist academies, colleges and hospitals and clinics all around the country.

At Serona Life, we believe that everyone should have access to healthy local-grown food in a way that is most profitable and sustainable.

We empower local communities to participate in the food systems in a way that brings jobs, money and access to healthy food for everyone.

Our partnerships with schools, hospitals, Upper Columbia Academy already has a working system.

Loma Linda University is working with them to establish the same things to provide these type of foods to patients and other organizations in your locality allowing us to build a model that fits the need of your area rather than a one-size-fits-all approach.

So, it's wonderful being able to work with entrepreneurs who see an opportunity, an opportunity that dramatically enhances the health of not just a few people, but everyone who is willing to listen and to participate.

Why do we care whenever I do presentations, regardless of the world view of that organization?

I always say because the Apostle John once wrote 2, 000 years ago, beloved I wish above all things that you would prosper and be in good health even as your soul prospered.

So recently I was asked to do a series of meetings up north, and we were talking about giving people hope.

People who have out of control diabetes, people who have Alzheimer's or who have mild cognitive impairment, and have been told by their doctors, I'm so sorry.

In fact, just a few days ago, actually on Thursday, I was Skyping with a physician who works with the VA system and he's a geriatrician, meaning he works primarily with elderly individuals and so most of what he does is diagnosing Alzheimer's.

He's an expert in diagnosing Alzheimer's and he had actually was consulting with me.

He was, we met at various medical conferences and he knows what I'm doing and so he was just consulting with me so that I can be his health partner to help guide him through some of his health issues that he has.

And he said to me, he says, you know, Wes, he teaches at 1 of the big universities in this country and medical schools, and he says, He says, what I train my residents, the 3 most important words that you need to learn to say to your patients and say it in a way that means something, that's empathetic, is, I'm so sorry.

In other words, if that's the last message that a patient hears or a client hears from you, they're basically hearing from you have nothing for them.

And the reality that we have been given a health message that has significant answers for most individuals.

We have opportunities to impact people in ways that we haven't even conceived of yet mostly because of our lack of faith.

I personally recognize from time to time my lack of faith when it takes somebody outside of Seventh-day Adventism, it takes somebody outside of Christianity to do a study or to present a concept that makes me feel somewhat ashamed because I think I should have known that all along.

I just simply didn't have the faith that this concept, that this construct could be applied in an effective way to people who had cognitive decline, to people who had significant cognitive impairment.

I just assumed that that was just too late.

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Maximizing Executive Function

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