Ep 18: Imagine Your Future - High Performance Without Burnout

Let me ask you something. Have you ever tried to picture your future and instead of feeling inspired, you felt tense? Like the vision was supposed to motivate you, but somehow it just made you feel behind. If that's happened to you, nothing is wrong with you. What's actually happening is your nervous system is hearing the future as a demand. And when the future feels like a demand, the body goes into reactive mode, into pressure, into threat mode. Today, I want to show you a different way to relate to your vision, not as motivation, not as something you have to earn, but as orientation, and how familiarity, not willpower, is what actually changes identity over time. Welcome back to Built for Impact. 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. So inside the BUILD Framework, this episode lives in the I pillar, identity. So I want to do a deep dive on identity. I'm kind of going through all the pillars right now. The last two episodes were B and U. So if you haven't checked those out, go back and listen to those, 16 and 17. Now we're talking about imagine your future, and it's really about identity conditioning. So not identity as a label or a goal, or something you have to chase, cuz that creates separation and puts you into survival mode, which we'll talk about. But identity is the internal baseline you're operating from every single day. So we're gonna talk about 3 things that quietly change who you're becoming, right? Vision as orientation, that's the reframe. Familiarity as the mechanism of change, and then rehearsing identity without all that pressure. So it's not about hyping yourself up and motivating yourself. It's about making the future feel safe enough to grow. Okay? So the first point, and this was mind-blowing to me, is using vision as orientation instead of motivation. What do we often do with our vision? We're taught, hey, visualize the car, visualize the outcome, visualize the future self. You're a CEO, you're a business owner, you're a super healthy person, you're married, whatever the vision is. It creates an identity gap between where you are and where you're trying to go. And we know that the nervous system in the brain isn't designed to make you happy or help you reach those goals. It's designed to keep you in the familiar. So inherently, this new version of yourself is unfamiliar to the nervous system. So what does it do when you create this massive identity gap? Well, it puts your system into fight or flight mode, into panic mode. It's like, oh my gosh, I have to get all the way over there. Right? It's so far away right now. Where I am is insufficient. It's a feeling of lack. It's a— and you feel all that pressure, right? So you might visualize like, yeah, I want to be a millionaire and I want to be a business owner and I want to start building my social media, whatever it is. And you feel this pressure and this tension, or I want to chase this career. It's because you're treating it as something to chase instead of a direction to orient yourself in. So this one insight like completely changed the game for me because I would always put so much pressure and fear and on myself when I was like, okay, we had a new direction in the business, right? It was like a new direction we had to go. And all of a sudden I just felt the crushing pressure of like, oh my gosh, this is going to take a while to get there. I'm not there yet. And then you feel that anxiety. I am not enough. We need to reframe it. And this kind of goes with the concept that Simon Sinek talks about, the infinite game. Infinite games in life are things that aren't won by reaching a destination, like business. Business is an infinite game because you don't win at business. Like, you win by staying in the game. That's how you win at business. Same thing with health. You don't win at being healthy. You just win by remaining healthy. Marriage. You don't win at marriage. You win by remaining married. So same thing with your goals. Like, we don't win by getting there. We win by just walking in that direction. And I want you to think about this analogy. Like, think about vision as a compass instead of a whip to crack at yourself until you get to this future version of yourself. Which creates all that pressure and misery, right? We're just walking in that direction. If we're walking north, we're winning. That's all we need to do. We just need to walk north. Think about like a, um, a sunset, right? It's like you trying to chase your vision. It's like sprinting at the sunset. You're like, oh my gosh, there's the sunset. It's so beautiful. I'm going to go catch it. I'm going to sprint at it. You're never going to catch it. You're never going to catch the sunset. Always, it's always just out of your reach. But instead you're standing on the path and it's like, hey, I can walk towards the sunset or I can walk Towards the darkness of the woods. Where do I want to walk? Well, I want to walk towards the sunset because it's just pretty pleasant to walk that way. That's how we need to look at our vision. It's not something to be attained to fill this internal lack. It's just a way of expansion, right? It's just a way that we can start walking and the walking is the reward. Especially as I grow my social media and I grow Built for Impact and I do this podcast, like there's no end goal. It's like I have this vision about where I want it, but the reward is in the everyday, me doing this stuff every day. Like I'm just moving in this direction because I like to. Because I want to, not because I need it, not because I need to get anywhere. It's like the 1% better every day is the reward. So if we can stop using motivation as, again, as something to be attained and just orient ourselves in that direction, just ask myself, am I walking north towards my vision? That's all we need to do. And that creates a lot more safety in the system, right? We don't go into survival and stress and fear and anxiety because there's no identity gap. The second thing is, leading into this, familiarity is the real mechanism of change. So like I had already mentioned, our nervous system always tries to keep us in the familiar because familiarity equals safety. That's the language of our nervous system. Familiarity equals safety. It would prefer a known hell to an unknown heaven because it knows the known hell, it sucks, but it keeps us alive. So I don't want to go into the uncertain heaven, which could be good because it could be dangerous and kill us. That's how your nervous system thinks. So by definition, this future vision of yourself is unknown to the nervous system. Right? It's completely unknown. So that's why you feel that fear and anxiety. I had someone on my TikTok live this morning who was like, I'm trying to build the confidence to post on social media. I'm like, yes, you need to start familiarizing your nervous system and your brain and your subconscious with this version of you who posts on social media. So we do that through familiarity and we do it through visualization. So your body doesn't know the difference between a vividly imagined reality and a physical reality. There was a study done where they had a person, they were scanning their brain activity, their neural activity. They showed a person an apple, certain section of neurons lit up in their head. Then they blindfolded the person, asked them to imagine what an apple looks like, the skin and the stem and all the stuff. And about 90% of those same neurons lit up in the brain. So it goes to show that the brain doesn't know the difference between a vividly imagined reality and a physical experience. So we can use this to build new neural pathways and condition this future identity. So vision is used as an identity rehearsal tool.. So you want to, like, let's say post on social media. You want to start to familiarize your system in a relaxed state. So you want to be in a relaxed state in the morning when you wake up or in the evening before you go to bed is a great time. Cause your brain is more geared probably in alpha brainwave states instead of beta brainwave states. But start familiarizing your nervous system with what does it feel like to be this version of you? Not the end outcome, but like stage rehearsal, right? It's just like athletes and Olympians. They're visualizing the ski run. They're not visualizing themselves holding the trophy so that when they get up and they do the run, there's not as much fear and anxiety because that situation has already been played in the mind a hundred times. The nervous system's already familiar with it and deems it safe, so they feel less fear and anxiety, and that's how they're able to perform under pressure. Same thing with like a surgeon. A surgeon is, how do they feel when they're doing the surgery? They're relaxed, they're calm, and you can do this with anything. Like you feel a lot of anxiety around sales calls. Okay, great. Let's visualize you getting on the phone, but make sure your body's in a relaxed state and you visualize yourself about to dial the phone and you feel relaxed and it's just another walk in the park and you get on the call and everything is going well and the prospect's yelling at you, but how are you remaining? You're remaining calm. You're familiarizing your neurons with this state of being so that under pressure you're gonna default this new state. A big thing to understand is that this resistance that you feel, again, it's because it's unfamiliar to your nervous system, so we can familiarize this version of ourselves through identity rehearsal, through visualization. It's a really powerful tool. And the way that your brain works is you have neural connections, right? So over time, as you think things and you feel emotions, you wire certain ways of thinking into your mind. So think about a force, right? You know, if, if your default reaction when you're about to pick up the phone to make a sales call is fear and anxiety, you've been thinking that way for 6 months, 8 months, a year, 2 years. When you consciously say, hey, I'm gonna be confident when I get— that's not enough to, to change. Right? Because under pressure, your prefrontal cortex goes offline, which is where all your higher order thinking happens, and you revert to your subcortical or your subconscious patterns of behaving. So if your subconscious pattern is to react in fear when you're about to make a sales call and you feel that anxiety, that's like a 6-lane superhighway in your brain. It's like, think about a forest, okay? This new thought of, in the moment, this new thought of you being calm on the phone, that's like trying to hack through the in the freaking woods with a machete, your brain's like, fuck that, I'm just gonna take this 6-lane superhighway of panic and anxiety that we've built over the last 5 years, right? So it just defaults to that because especially when you are under pressure and like a situation like a sales call, the prefrontal cortex takes up a lot of like metabolic resources for your body. So in a survival state, biologically, it doesn't make— like, if you're getting chased by a tiger, you're not trying to analyze the gait of the tiger and how it runs, or, you know, analyze its coat of fur. You're trying to save your life. So your system's like, okay, let's conserve all this energy that we use for our strategic thinking and our creative mind and our prefrontal cortex. Let's just take all that energy and just put it into fight or flight mode. So this is what happens when you're triggered, right? You pick up the phone, you default to those old patterns, and you lose the insight and the nuance. And that's why it's not enough to just know. It's not enough to just know what you want to do, right? That's cognitive. That's stored in the mind. What happens when you're under pressure? You default to your subconscious patterns. All that information that's in your mind, it evaporates, it's gone. And that's why you react in certain ways and you say, oh, I should have known better. Like, I know I should have done something better, but I reacted in this way. Of course you reacted in that way. You're half your brain's not working because you're in survival mode. So the goal becomes to, when we're in those pressure situations, we want to default to the ideal behavior. And we do that by familiarizing our nervous system with a new state of being. Through identity rehearsal. That's the second thing. And then third thing is rehearsing who you're becoming. We kind of already talked about that, but it's very interesting 'cause I used to think that you needed like a lot of energy to change. I've heard that here and there just from various people, but upon doing more research into it, it's really more like you want low emotional charge situations. And it does make sense. Like you don't want to hype yourself up and get all, you know, fired up 'cause your system perceives that as kind of like a threat state. It puts you into kind of a fight or flight response and your system is not open to change in that state of being. So We want to be in kind of like a neutral tone, just like very relaxed, neutral. Like you want your new identity to be boring. Like that's really what it is. It's like, I am this person now and it's like, whatever. I make this amount of money, whatever. I, I post on social media, I have 100,000 followers. Yep. It's literally whatever. It's another Tuesday. Like when you do that, that's like your system familiarizing yourself, right? It's like the statement is almost, um, you know, I get used to this, right? Like this is just normal. It's not even really exciting anymore. 'Cause think about it, if you have something, you're not really that excited about it. It's just normal for you. So visualizing the these versions of yourself that you want and doing it enough times where it's just like, just becomes normal. And you don't have to believe it at first. That's kind of a fallacy. It's like the belief will come after it's already ingrained into who you believe you are. So don't worry about believing it. The beautiful thing about rehearsing these states visually and being relaxed is you don't need to believe it for it to work. It's mechanistic. So if you just do the visualizations and feel and just imagine, over time it'll become familiar. And once it's familiar, then you'll believe it. So don't worry about not believing it. But this is what we're talking about. All right. So that is the, basically the essence of the I pillar. So here's a question I want you to sit with this week. Where are you treating your future like something you have to earn instead of a direction that you're just gently orienting yourself towards, right? Remember, we just want to be walking north. That's the goal. Just walk north because that's the direction you like to walk in, not because you have to get anywhere. So a simple practice we can do is just once a day, just for a minute, right? Don't picture the outcomes. Instead, notice how you'd like to operate. How your body feels, how you respond to pressure, how calm shows up. I mean, like, how do you respond, you know, when you're doing your work or you're at your desk in a calm sense? Like, one thing I had to realize about myself was like, and it's crazy how this thing called interoception, it's like how your mind is constantly looking at your body to determine what state we're in. It's like it's looking at your respiratory rate, how fast you're breathing, your muscle tone. Are you all tense, right? How quick your posture, are you slumped over? Are you like moving really quick throughout your day? So all these things you want to be aware about Right? You're at your desk, you're working. I notice like I'm, I'm always like tighten my shoulders, right? When I'm working. Cause I was so used to working in stress. That's like my, my subconscious program. So I need to be aware of that and make sure that I'm, what I'm doing, my, my visualizations about being at work and being calm and centered and having fun and doing the things I want to do, that my shoulders are relaxed and my shoulders are literally relaxed while I'm at my desk. Right? And that becomes your new defaults. You do it without even thinking about it. So in closing here, folks, identity does not change through pressure. You can't force it. Changes through safety, repetition, and familiarity. So vision isn't here to push you. It's here to orient you. Okay. If this episode provided you any value, if it landed for you in any way, please share it with someone who is tired of building from pressure. We are on a mission here. Okay. A global movement to redefine what success means. That's what it's about. Because you can have your cake and eat it too. We think that we need to sacrifice our internal well-being to chase some success. We think that's just the price we have to pay. And that's a belief we've all inherited that is just absolutely false. You can have inner peace. You can have a grounded, calm, regulated existence and state of being without driving yourself into the ground, grinding yourself to a pulp. We think it's noble to grind ourselves to a pulp. It's just not. It's absolutely not. So, and this is not your fault. This is the conditioning we've been taught, but let's change that for not only us, but for other people, right? Let's redefine what success means and how we can be on this mission, on this infinite game of building and not using things in the external world to make ourselves complete. We're already complete. We're building from ourselves, right? It's like a lot of times we're chasing jobs and goals and all these things to to try to build ourselves up because we're not enough. What if you are enough? And what if you're just building from your already whole self? So I want you to think about these things. If you have not joined the Built for Impact community, go ahead and do that. It's a school community spelled S-K-O-O-L. The link is in all my social media bios, but in there we are talking about this work. We are collaborating. I'm coming out with the Built for Impact full program soon. So it's basically a blueprint for your inner operating system. You'll be able to learn all these tactics and strategies and really change your life. And again, when I say you can have your cake and eat it too, I mean you can have the internal peace that you want and all the external results that you could ever imagine. Actually more external results than you could imagine because you perform better with an internal regulated state of being. So until next time, all the peace, all the power.