Ep 11: Peace is Your Natural State of Being

Have you ever noticed that the moments when you're not anxious, not stressed, not overthinking, you actually feel kind of peaceful? It's almost strange when it happens. You're like, oh, this is what it feels like to just exist without carrying around all these negative thoughts, this fear, this doubt, this guilt, this worry, this anger. What if I told you that that feeling of peace is actually your natural state? It's not something you have to work hard to earn, not even something that's rare or mystical. But who you already are when you stop clinging to this emotional noise. Today we're going to talk about what happens when you stop gripping from fear, stop feeding worry, and stop rehearsing the same emotional patterns and you let them pass through you instead. Because when you do, something powerful happens. You return to the real you. Welcome back to the Built for Impact Podcast. I'm Jake Burhans, and this is the podcast where inner peace meets high performance and where building your dream life starts from the inside out. If you are new here, the BUILD Framework is simple but incredibly transformative. You're breaking limiting beliefs, upgrading your operating system, imagining your future, letting go of the past, and transcending into the 2.0 version of yourself. We're always breaking the limiting beliefs that we have, upgrading our capacity to hold energy, raising our frequency, letting go of these lower-level emotions, regulating our nervous system, visualizing and using our— the power of visualization to imagine where we're going, imagine the vision for what we want. Everything starts in the mind. First Hermetic Law: all is mental. The observer effect in quantum physics: when the awareness is placed on a potential future outcome, long enough, it begins to collapse into reality. We need to imagine our future. You need to let go of the past, that old self that's pulling you back, pulling you back into the fear, the worry, the doubt, the negativity. You got to let that old self go, and then you're transcending into the 2.0 version of yourself. And this is a constant loop, a perpetual loop. If you want to think about the 1.0 version of yourself in the bottom left of the image, the 2.0 version of yourself in the top right of the image, you're doing this perpetual, you know, circle upwards of these 5 things. You're doing it every day, every week, every month, and you're on this perpetual journey of becoming your best self until the day you die. But today we're diving into one of the most liberating parts of this process is letting go of these lower-level emotions so you can return to your natural state of peace and operate from your highest self. So I talk a lot about letting go. And it's just such an important concept. And my goal is to just hit you with it in a bunch of different ways. Maybe one episode resonates with you more than the next, and that's great. The biggest thing— and I had this realization today, I was like, I got to make a podcast about this— peace is your default setting. Most people think that peace is something you earn by fixing your life, right? But it's actually what's underneath everything once you stop feeding the stress and the fear. So when you have these negative thoughts and these negative emotions, whether they're frustration, anger, worry, anxiety, guilt. These things are objects to the awareness. We've talked about this. Thoughts and emotions are objects to the awareness, just like a phone is or a mouse is, just like a flashlight illuminating a park bench. Just because the flashlight shines on the park bench doesn't mean that it is the park bench. In the same way that just because your awareness is aware of these thoughts and these emotions, it doesn't mean that you are those thoughts or emotions. It doesn't mean that they're true. But when we get so consumed in these thoughts, these negative thoughts of fear, doubt, worry, anger, whatever it is, and so consumed in the emotion, we think we are those emotions, but we're not. We say, you know, I am angry, I am frustrated, and you're identifying with the emotion. When you can create that separation and understand that you're just experiencing anger and you can be aware in the moment when you are angry, you create separation. Viktor Frankl talks about it in "A Man's Search for Meaning." You know, there's a pause between the stimulus and the response, meaning an event happens, there's a space in between, you get to decide how you wanna respond. So if something happens, you feel the anger, instead of getting wrapped up in it, you recognize that you're angry, you literally relax, you breathe, you do whatever you need to do in the moment to let that go. 'Cause what happens is we, our natural state is peace. Events happen in our life and we feel, and we're meant to feel emotions, anger and frustration and doubt and worry and all this stuff, but we cling onto it, right? A negative thought comes in our mind. Oh my gosh, what's gonna happen if this deal doesn't go through tomorrow? Or what's gonna happen if, you know, I had this conversation with my boss? And that thought comes into your head at 10:00 AM on Tuesday and you think about it all day long. And by consuming it and by staying in that thought pattern, what does it do? It's a negative thought, which leads to a negative emotion of worry, fear, guilt, or whatever the case may be. And then you're in that thought pattern emotion all day long. Why? Because you're holding on to it. You're not letting the thought go. You think that by somehow holding on to the thought and the emotion, it's— the ego thinks by holding on to the thought and the emotion that it's going to protect you somehow. It's making you safe because you're worrying about it. So you're You know, you're like kind of figuring out a plan, but you're not figuring out a plan. You're just putting yourself in a negative state of being. And when you're in these lower level emotions, you cut yourself off from peace, from love, from joy, from abundance, from all the creative thoughts. And you really put yourself into more of a fight or flight state of being. So you activate the sympathetic part of your nervous system, which is responsible for fight or flight. Prefrontal cortex in your brain shuts off. You can't think. Your body is primed to fight flight, which is run or hide, basically. And we're not meant to be like that. We're meant to be like that for a little bit if we're in danger, but not for 8 hours at a time. So you can understand how by holding on to these thoughts and emotions, you're putting yourself into that fight or flight. You're literally shutting off parts of your brain and you're cutting yourself off from the creative state, which is the state that allows you to think clearly. Ideas flow effortlessly. Action is effortless. You're able to overcome challenges so easily because you're in this peaceful state. Now, when you let go of all that stuff and you have the awareness to consciously stop and recognize you're in these negative thought patterns and these negative emotions and you choose to let them go, then you realize, oh yeah, this is actually so peaceful now. And I had this realization too, like, I used to be so caught up in just worrying about things. All the time, all the time in the business. I would just worry, worry, worry, worry for hours on end after the day. It doesn't get you anywhere. It doesn't get you anywhere. And the more that I've reprogrammed my body to trust peace and trust love and joy in these states of being that, hey, you can just relax, the business has done even better. I can't even make it up. Salespeople are doing better. Everyone's doing better, right? So it's like all these things that I used to do, the worry, and that never really contributed to anything but my own misery. Everyone's still doing the exact same when I'm in this new state of being, actually even better, because I'm able to respond to situations better throughout the day. And when I get on a call to handle a challenge and I'm in a higher frequency, a higher state of being, the team feels that and they respond in a certain way. Maybe they're coming in and they're nervous about something or chaotic, whatever, but having a peaceful presence literally resonates with them and then they go off into their day in a higher frequency. And you were literally the baseline, baseline for everything. And it's just a profound moment for me to realize that, hey, you know, you don't have to hold on to these things. You actually are going to be okay. You're going to be safe. You actually put yourself in a better position. And the crux of all of this is that true high performance, true high performance comes from a relaxed, creative state. Even the highest performing athletes, the F1 drivers, the Olympic Olympians, all this stuff, Even in those pressure situations, they're able to remain relaxed. Why? Because that's how they're going to give their best performance. They got to stay out of fight or flight, right? They might be a little bit aroused, you know, a little bit of adrenaline going, but they're peaceful. Because how are they going to think about the best move? If you're a hockey player, how are you going to think about the right pass or the right shot or how to do anything if you're just stressed out of your mind in this fight or flight state? You can't. You have to remain in a creative state. That's where breathwork comes into play. It is a muscle that you have to exercise, being able to learn how to let go. Letting go is like a muscle, just like anything, like learning how to have discipline, learning how to focus, learning how to go to the gym, learning a new skill. It's a muscle you exercise. So every time you exercise your awareness, catching yourself in a negative thought pattern or negative emotion and deciding to let it go, you strengthen that muscle. And over time, it gets easier and easier and easier. And every time that you're going unconscious into this behavior pattern, you catch yourself, right? And you become conscious again, you switch out of it. And that is the work. We don't get upset at ourselves for falling off the horse, right? We kick, we know we get up, dust ourselves off and get back on the horse and keep going. But that is our highest performance state when we're in that creative state, because ideas come to us effortlessly. We're able to execute effortlessly. We have so much more energy. We're not draining our bodies because we're not in a fight or flight state. It's absolutely incredible. It's like you can have your cake and freaking eat it too. You can live peace and you can live love. You can live joy and you can have all the external results that you want. You're actually gonna do better because why are we chasing the external results in the first place? Because we think it's gonna give us the feeling inside. And what ends up happening? We get neither. We don't get the external result because we're forcing and we're in this fight or flight, and we don't get the internal state of being either. So if we flip-flop it, choose the internal state of peace, let go of the stuff, you're gonna get the feeling that you want and you're gonna get the external results. So thought I would share that. I'm gonna keep it brief in this episode, but exercising— the biggest thing here is to exercise your muscle of letting go. I want you to practice this week your awareness. And practice being aware of when you're in these negative thought patterns, in these negative emotions, and be like, oh, you know, catch and release, right? So I was like, oh, caught it, caught the emotion, now I'm gonna release. And you have to like physically relax your body, okay? Physically relax your body. Breathe. The breath is so important. If you want to box breathe, 4 seconds in, 4 seconds hold, 4 seconds out, 4 seconds hold, you can do that. Any sort of thing to breathe. Breath, breath is the, is the, the quickest way to regulate your nervous system, basically. Um, and that, that'll kick your brain down a few gears. So slow breathing, whatever, is a tactical tool you can use when you are all worked up about something. But, but remember what Viktor Frankl talked to, to us about and taught us is that there is a space between stimulus and response, meaning an event happens. And you, your awareness, has the opportunity to decide how they want to react to that and not get caught up in the thought and the emotion. That's all until next time. Um, if you got any value out of the, out of the episode here, I would appreciate a rating just to help get that out to other people. If you think anyone else could benefit from this episode, please share it. Till next time, all the peace, all the power.