BUILT for Impact Ep. 21: The Inner Work Behind Lasting Change
In this solo episode of the Built for Impact podcast, Jake Burhans argues that chasing external achievements—more money, better relationships, bigger wins—fails to resolve the deep‑seated feeling of insufficiency that drives most people. He explains that the nervous system constantly seeks familiar, safe states, and because the external world is inherently uncertain, relying on external validation creates a fragile, sand‑based foundation for self‑worth. Burhans introduces his BUILD framework, which consists of four inter‑related inner‑work skills: (1) Awareness – metacognitive observation of thoughts, beliefs, and emotions; (2) Regulation – using breath and other physiological levers to shift the autonomic nervous system out of fight‑or‑flight; (3) Visualization – identity rehearsal that leverages neuroplasticity to create new neural pathways; and (4) Letting Go – consciously experiencing and releasing triggered emotions to enable memory reconsolidation. He details how each skill rewires subconscious conditioning, allowing a person to develop a stable internal identity that is not dependent on external circumstances. The episode concludes with a call to join the Built for Impact community to practice these skills, emphasizing that mastering the inner world leads to lasting peace, fulfillment, and authentic expression of success.
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Let me ask you something. Have you ever thought, if I just hit that next level, I'll finally feel settled? I'll finally feel enough. I just need a little bit more money, a better relationship, a bigger win, just some sort of more proof that I'm capable. And maybe you've even gotten some of those things, but the pressure didn't leave. The feeling of insufficiency didn't leave. The tension didn't dissolve. Your mind still found something to fix. That's the trap. We've been conditioned to solve internal problems with these external things, external upgrades. But you cannot fix an internal state with an external achievement. And the more you try, the more pressure piles on. Today I want to talk about what inner work actually is and why it's the only thing that changes the baseline that you're building from. Welcome back to Built for Impact. I am Jake Burhans, and this is the podcast where inner peace meets high performance and where building your dream life starts from the inside out. So inside the BUILD Framework, we're talking about a lot of things: identity, nervous system regulation, letting go of old patterns, understanding our subconscious patterns, our operating state. But underneath all of that is the inner work, or, or not underneath it, but I think encompassing all of that is what I would call the inner work. The inner work is your mindset. It's not just mindset alone isn't enough. I think that's where a lot of self-development fails, is it's just mindset. It's not, because your physiology is involved, your subconscious conditioning, your identity patterns, um, your emotional triggers and regulation. All of that combined together is what I would call your inner world. And the key to life is mastering your inner world. It's absolutely critical. One thing I want us to understand is that our nervous system is always trying to keep us in the familiar. Why? Because familiarity is associated with safety, and our nervous systems are always just asking, am I safe or not? That's all it cares about. Our nervous systems and brains are hundreds of millions of years old, right? The nervous system in particular. It doesn't speak English. You can't just tell it to calm down, right? You need to use physiological levers like your breath to do those things. But guess what is uncertain? The entire world. The world is always uncertain, right? And especially as you, you go to grow and become a new version of yourself, or you're starting a new business, everything is uncertain. So everything's like a perceived threat, and we're always trying to create certainty in our world. But there's really only one thing that's for certain, and that's everything is uncertain. It's an ever-changing world. I was just on live today on TikTok talking about this. I'm like, as long as we are building our foundation and tying our internal worth to external things, we're building our house on sand. Why? Because you are chasing these external things, folks, for a feeling. You think that this thing, this accolade, this job, this title, this money, this relationship is going to give you a feeling inside that you want. You think it's going to give you peace, love, joy, confidence, significance, whatever it is. It never will. And what you're trying to do is you're trying to create certainty in your life by latching on to this job or this relationship or this amount of money in your bank account or this achievement. And when the world changes, which inevitably does, because the only thing that's certain in this world is that everything is uncertain, what goes with it? Your sense of identity. And you're constantly trying to arrange your external world to meet your internal needs, and it's a futile effort. It's literally impossible because the world's always changing. So instead of tying all of our, our self-worth to things that are external, why don't we shift that to the internal game and build a rock-solid internal foundation so we don't have to worry about what happens in the external world? And it stops being this fight to keep everything the same so that you can feel okay on the inside. And it starts to be about building the internal skills, building your inner world so that you can, you can have a life of clarity and peace. Because I've mentioned this before, why are we chasing these external things? Why are we chasing them? We're chasing them for a feeling, folks. Unless you've done the internal work and you're truly acting out of abundance, which most of us are not, you're chasing these things, this job title, this amount of money, this relationship, because you do not feel enough on the inside without it. And as long as that's your association to external events, you've built your house on sand. Because as soon as that relationship goes away, that job goes away, that money goes away, you come tumbling down because your identity is tied up in external things. We need to do the inner work, right? To be able to have a solid foundation, understand that we are enough as we are. And the only reason we're doing things externally is because it's an expression of who we already are. I'm not saying don't make a lot of money, don't go build the business, don't have the love of your life and the best relationship ever. You should do all those things. Things, but you shouldn't be doing it to compensate for an internal lack, because as long as you're doing that, you are tying your worth again to uncertain things in the world. And as soon as those change, which they inevitably do, you come crashing down with it. Okay, so we need to begin to do the inner work, which is the Built Framework, right? It's basically 4 skills, 4 skills that if you master, you master your inner world. The first skill is awareness, right? Break limiting beliefs. Be aware of your old patterns, your old thoughts, your old beliefs, your emotions. You understand that you are not your thoughts or your emotion. You develop the skill of metacognition, of cognitive diffusion, understanding that you are not your thoughts or emotions. So when these, when these things come in, you have a negative thought or you feel anger, you're not getting lost in them. You're not lost in the tornado. You're not fused with them. And when you can be aware, then you can change because you can separate yourself from it. You can let it go. So awareness. The second step is regulation. You need to regulate yourself out of a survival state because the body is not in a condition to change if it feels threatened. So we need to regulate, learn to use our breath, right? The physiological levers that get us out of fight or flight. It's not talking to your system. Your state is like the Wi-Fi router, right? It's emitting a certain energy. It's, it's dictating everything. You can't just, you know, your Wi-Fi is bad, you can't sit there and yell at the Wi-Fi router. That's not going to do anything. That's you trying to talk your way out of a physiological state of fight or flight. It's like yelling at the Wi-Fi router. You got to go change the signal. How do we do that? With our breath. It's one of the few things in our body that's run by the autonomic nervous system below the conscious mind, but is also consciously available for control. So we can literally control our nervous system by slowing our breath down. It sends a physiological signal of safety to the nervous system. And when we're in a regulated state, what happens? We're able to turn our prefrontal cortex back on. We can think, we can, we can detect nuance, we can problem solve, and most importantly, our body feels safe enough to change. So we practice a skill of awareness. We're not wrapped up in these thoughts. We can regulate ourselves. We learn the skill of visualization. Visualization as identity rehearsal, meaning that your brain doesn't know the difference between a vividly imagined reality and a physical one. It doesn't know the difference. So as you begin to visualize what it's like to act in a certain way, when someone cuts you off or your spouse says this or your friends say that, or this happens in the business, you condition your body to learn how to respond a different way. And your neural connections in your brain, think about them like ruts, right? The most familiar ways of thinking and acting and behaving and responding and talking to yourself, those are the most familiar ruts in your brain. So your brain's always going to default to that. So when you're just like consciously trying to say, I'm going to be positive today, but the most familiar rut in your brain is being negative, well, what happens when you go into a dysregulated state? Your prefrontal cortex goes off, you revert to those subcortical systems, or you revert to the systems that are most ingrained in your body, right back into the negativity. So what we want to do is begin to, every time that we're aware and we regulate and we choose a new action, we're firing new neurons in new ways. As Donald Hebb would say, neurons that fire together wire together. So the more that you respond in a different way, you begin to ingrain new patterns into your brain, new default patterns. And that's ultimately how you, you create a new baseline identity., right? Because your identity is your most familiar ways of being, and we want to retrain those to be ways of being that are in alignment with how we want to live our lives. It doesn't mean you never get triggered. It doesn't mean you never have stress, right? It just means that you're always returning to this regulated state. That's the goal. Um, you know, being at peace isn't like you never get triggered. It just means that you return quickly, and for the majority, the vast majority of your day, you're in a regulated state. So the goal becomes not never getting triggered, but how quickly can you return to that regulated state? And we do that through awareness. Regulation, visualization of the new outcomes to familiarize our, our system with this new way of being so it doesn't perceive it as a threat. Because that's the other thing, because our system looks at the unfamiliar as a threat, your unfamiliar way of being that's peaceful and loving and grateful, your system perceives that as a, as a threat because it's unfamiliar. So we want to begin to familiarize our nervous system with this, with a state of peace, of calm, of gratitude, whatever that is. So that becomes the most easy thing to do. And then the fourth skill is letting go, right? Letting go of our thoughts and our emotions. I think we get so wrapped up in them, right? We get wrapped up in the thought or the emotion, right? We're fused with it. We haven't developed that skill of metacognition to be aware of those things. And what ends up happening is we're lost in that all day. It puts us into a dysregulated state. And then because we're acting in that way, those are the neural pathways we're ingraining in our body. Which makes it hard to change. So letting go and understanding that triggers, right? As we know, memories are stored in the brain as a story, in the body as an emotion. Triggers are past circumstances that made us feel not okay, basically, and we suppress the emotion instead of being relaxed and letting it— the biological process of an emotion complete. We suppressed it, and now we've created a trigger. So anytime we run into that external circumstance, that emotion comes up because it's trying to complete its process. We don't like the feeling, so we push it down. So the goal is— the art of letting go is being aware, feeling the emotion, feeling the anger, the guilt, the sadness, the depression, and just being with it and not labeling it good or bad, not making up a story about it, not trying to fight it, just being with it. And if you can be relaxed, the more time you face that trigger and you're relaxed, you are loosening its grip on you, right? You're loosening its grip. There's an area called memory reconsolidation research which talks about this. When a trigger comes up and you can meet it with a pattern interrupt, with a new state of being that's regulated, You could begin to re-encode that memory into the body so that it associates, you know, this external event with you responding from a peaceful state instead of an angry state. So that's what we want to do. So if we can practice those 4 skills, folks— awareness, regulation, visualization, letting go— that allows us to reprogram our subconscious conditioning, those subconscious patterns, so that change stops becoming so difficult. You rewire to a new 2.0 identity. Right? And this is exactly what we're doing in the Built for Impact community. And spend a lot of time, you know, last 5 years just like reading about this, and I finally put it all together into one coherent framework that allows you to be able to do this inner work. And again, this is not a magic pill. You got to show up and you got to do the work, and ultimately you have to want to change. But if you want to change, it's there. It's there, right? That's what I talk about on this podcast, and You know, the framework has been evolving. Like, you go back to the beginning episodes of the podcast, I'm talking about quantum physics and all this stuff. You know, we're really kind of dialing it in here, but that's what you're going to start to see me talk about a lot more often is teaching you how to master your inner world. Because mindset alone isn't enough. It's more than that. It's more than mindset. It's physiological. It's your nervous system. It's your identity patterns. It's your subconscious conditioning. All those things need to be addressed so that you can get to where you want to go, because ultimately like life is about— you're chasing a feeling. So much of us are chasing a feeling in the external, right? Our whole lives. It's like, you just need to master your inner world, and then you'll have the feeling you're looking for— the peace, the regulation, the love, the gratitude. And then everything becomes a natural expression, right? Then you chase the business because you want to, because you want to contribute to society, not because you need to fill an internal void. You go get to the relationship with someone because you want to just live life with them and you want to live a fuller expression of life and you want to contribute to their life, not because you're trying to fill some internal void because you don't feel loved. That's what we're trying to reframe here. You got to do the internal work first. And once you master your inner world, right, or you're on that path to mastery of it, you win. You win life. Because life is every day. Life is now. Life is you listening to this podcast. Life is me recording this podcast. We're so caught up in our heads, right? Caught up in our heads thinking about some future outcome. Why? Because we probably think that that outcome is going to give us what we want, that we're not even able to truly enjoy life. So these are some things I want you to think about going into the week here, is that these skills and how you can practice it. I think the best one that we can, we can practice is that skill of awareness. Be aware of your thoughts and your beliefs and your patterns, because if you can't be aware of them, you can't change. And once you develop that skill of metacognition, everything changes. But we got to show up, we got to do the work. If you're not in the Built for Impact community, get in there. There's a link in the description here, there's links on all my socials, right? TikTok is the, the main platform I'm growing right now. But you can get in there and we can start doing the inner work, start learning these skills so that you can build your life and your business from a place of peace instead of pressure, right? To eliminate the stress. Okay. Because the world is always going to be stressful, but we don't need to make it. Listen, life is already, you know, hard enough. We don't need to make it any harder than it needs to be. So if you got any value out of this, share it with someone who you think may also benefit. We're in this together, right? It's not about me. It's about all of us working together to get these concepts out and help people understand that we don't always have to live stress out of our freaking skulls. Okay, we can do the inner work, master our inner world, and live these incredibly fulfilling lives, build these businesses, be rich, do all this stuff, right? But do it because it's just an expression of who you are. And because just do it for like, why not? Like, why not get a Ferrari? Why not do this stuff? But you don't need these things to fill an internal void. And when we can act from that place in life, we're gonna be so much more fulfilled and just loving life so much more. So I appreciate y'all. Until next time, all the peace, all the power.
