Ep 2: You Are Not Your Thoughts

Have you ever noticed that your mind never really stops talking? What if I told you that you are not the voice in your head, you're the one listening to it? Have you ever woken up in the morning and your mind instantly starts racing? This little voice in your head is like, "Why I gotta do this, I gotta do that, I gotta get up, I gotta brush my teeth, I'm gonna have to work out, and then after that I'm gonna go to a meeting with the team, and after that I have a seller call. What's gonna happen on that seller call? Is it gonna go good? Yeah, it's probably gonna go good. Eh, I don't know, it's kind of a difficult situation, you've never really handled it before, I don't know if you will be able to get it. And then you have that meeting with the external business vendor at 3:00 PM. Interesting, I wonder what He's going to be like. I heard from John that he's actually a pretty nice guy. And your mind is just going off on a tangent instantly, right? And it doesn't have any real logic to it. Kind of, it kind of fights in your favor and against your favor. If someone were to make that into a real person, we would call that person certified insanity, right? Insane. Welcome 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. Quick reminder of the BUILD Framework: break limiting beliefs, upgrade your operating system, imagine your new life, let go of the past and transcend into your new self. Today's topic, we're going to explore a huge shift. It's a fundamental shift for everyone who is really looking to take control of their lives and be able to choose the thoughts that empower their new self. This falls under the first pillar of break limiting beliefs. It's this idea that you are not your thoughts. It's a foundational concept that I first heard from the incredible book by the incredible Michael Singer, The Untethered Soul, a New York Times bestseller. I highly recommend picking it up and reading it. Changed my life, changed my perspective. It was a complete paradigm shift on everything that I thought was true. But he basically talks about in there, he calls it your inner roommate, but that voice that is constantly in your head, like if you stop talking right now, And that voice that's talking in your head, that's the voice I'm talking about. It's constantly going and you'll notice it all the time, talking, talking, talking, talking. So when you understand that, right, thoughts are like a stream, they're like a river, they're just constantly going in and out of your head at all given times. You are really just the awareness that is observing that thought. Okay? I want you to think about a flashlight. All right? A flashlight shining on a park bench. Because the flashlight is shining on the park bench, does that mean that the flashlight is the park bench? No, it's just shining on the park bench. It's the same thing with your awareness, right? Your awareness is observing the thought as it comes in and as it goes. And it's the same thing with emotions, okay? You are not your thoughts or your emotions. Emotions are the same thing. You're experiencing anger, you're experiencing sadness, frustration, guilt, jealousy, shame, excitement, joy, love. Right? You are experiencing these emotions and this gives us incredible power to choose what we want to hold onto. And the problem is that we, we cling onto these things. These thoughts come in, we think they're truth, and maybe it's a limiting belief or a negative thought because of the way we were programmed and we cling onto it and it, and then that creates an emotion which creates a behavior which creates an action and runs our entire life. Okay? So understanding that we are the awareness and that this stream of thoughts coming in, we can choose which ones want to empower us. So when we sit down and think about the person that we want to become and we visualize that and we do all those things, when these thoughts come up on a day-to-day basis, just pause. I just want you to pause and be aware of the thought. Be aware of the emotion. Hey, is this thought, is this emotion in alignment with who I want to be? If it's not, you gotta let it go. And that can be difficult for people letting those thoughts go and just moving on with life. We get, we get hung onto these things, right? So you are the observer within. It's like the movie theater. Another analogy is the movie versus sitting in the theater, right? Most people forget that they're in the theater and they get lost in the movie of their mind. The images coming in, the emotions coming in, that, that's the movie playing and you're just observing it. Don't get lost in it. Don't get sucked into it. Something happens in the morning and you get frustrated because you had a meeting or a conversation with your spouse or this or that. Listen, that happened, it's gone. You got to let that go and not get wrapped up in that all day, right? As soon as you start identifying with objective things— I am anger, I am sad, I am frustrated, I am poor— that is a slippery slope, and that's a dangerous game to be playing because you're gonna bring more of that into your reality. Your thoughts, your emotions, they're objects, just like a tree or a water bottle or the phone that's sitting next to you or your bed that you slept on last night. Those are all objects to your consciousness, which is the subject. So understanding that gives you incredible power, like I said, to choose the reality that you want to live in, the thoughts that serve your highest self, the emotions that serve your highest self. And the real goal is the art of detachment, and it's letting go, right? It's not— the goal isn't to stop thinking. You're never going to stop thinking. This is what people think, oh, I can't meditate because I can't stop thinking. Hey, listen, you're always going to be thinking thoughts. But you have to just let them go. Let them go. Let them go. Let them go. Like when you sit down in meditation for 5 minutes and 10 minutes and you've never done it before, you're gonna sit down and your mind's gonna be racing. But if you sit there long enough, 5, 10, 15, 20 minutes— right now it seems like a long time, but just practice letting your thoughts go. The second that you realize— because when you sit down for meditation, you're gonna say, you know, okay, I'm gonna clear my mind, I'm gonna clear my mind, and then a thought's gonna come in, you're gonna get off on a tangent in your mind, and then like 5 minutes later you're gonna realize, oh, 'Oh crap, I was off on a tangent.' Most people beat themselves up for that, which is a negative frequency in and of itself. We can't be beating ourselves up for that. We just need to relax and let the thought go. Okay, that's literally like— listen, we go to the gym for our bodies all the time. We go on a run. We never go to the gym for our mind. This is the gym for your mind. Do a rep, do a curl, do a rep, right? Do a squat. This is what that is. So every time that you recognize in your meditations that you're clinging on to a thought, you let it go. That's a rep. You're exercising the awareness muscle. Okay? The awareness muscle, you're exercising it. So every pause instead of reacting is a victory. I tell my team all the time, the difference between responding and reacting is one thing. It's a pause. Or we can say, you know, the difference between reacting and responding is one thing. It's a pause. Reacting is something comes into your your awareness. It's a thought or emotion. Boom. We are reacting split second and we're not thinking about it, right? We're just reacting. That's emotional. It's a trigger. It's our programming. We don't want to do that. We just want to pause, take one breath, just 2, 3 seconds, 4 seconds. Just that split second of awareness of, ah, this event's happening. It's frustrating me. Okay, let's acknowledge that. What should I do about it? And that single pause, I think it was Viktor Frankl in his book A Man's Search for Meaning says, we can't control our environment, but we can control our response to our environment. It's a simple thing, but an incredibly powerful practice. And as soon as you put that pause in between an event and your response, you are now literally responding instead of reacting, and you're gonna be so much more intentional and powerful in your life because when you pause, you can analyze the situation and say, hey, is this in alignment with the future self that I want to be? And if it's not, you can choose what is in alignment. So very, very important thing. And how do I know though? How do you know that you're not your thoughts or your awareness? What are you talking about, Jake? What do you mean you're not your thoughts and awareness? Well, then who's the one experiencing them? How do you know that you're experiencing sadness or anger or frustration or joy? How do you know that? Because your awareness is observing it, right? How do you know the thoughts that you've been thinking? Who's the one observing the thoughts, right? It's you. It's your awareness. It's your deepest self. You know, the Buddha talks about it, all these spiritual teachers, uh, It's the seat of self. Michael Singer calls it witness consciousness. You're just witnessing everything, and it's pure peace and love and all this stuff. So it's an incredibly powerful practice to, to pause and understand that you are not your thoughts or emotions. This doesn't have to be a long podcast. I just wanted to share that quick point with people. I think that's, that's enough. I think less information, more implementation. We do not have an information problem, folks. We have an implementation problem. So If you find one action item from this short little clip, I want you to go take action on it. And I don't need to belabor the point here for 30 minutes. The point is you are not your thoughts and emotions. So understand who you want to be, visualize that, write that down, and then every single day start to be aware of thoughts and emotions as they come into your field of awareness, into your experience, that are not in alignment with who you want to be. If you're sick of being worried all the time and you catch yourself worrying about a situation, recognize that, ah, I'm worrying. You can choose not to worry. You just got to let it go. That's it. Oh, well, no, Jake, I'm different. And I, you know, I have such tough situations. Listen, listen, you got to let it go. Stop fighting for your old beliefs. Stop fighting for the old you. I don't know why people do this. They fight for these things that don't serve them. They fight for their sadness and their anger and their victimhood and all these things. Why are you fighting for it? Just let it go. Move on. Choose the reality that you want to live in and just live it. It's really that simple, right? And I'm not saying people don't go through difficult things. Everyone has their own incredibly difficult path that they need to walk on this earth. I totally get it. That's part of your development here while you're, while you're alive. The beautiful thing though is that you have a choice. You have a choice of what path you do want to walk in spite of these challenges and these difficulties and all these things that happen to people. You get to choose how you respond. Think about Viktor Frankl. He was in a Nazi prison camp. Right? People were dying left and right. I mean, is there anything more intense than that? People just dying in literally a death camp, literally a death camp. And he said the only thing that got him through was the idea that you can't control your environment, but you control your response to the environment. I think it's a very important thing to understand. Again, this isn't mastery. This is mastery over time. This is not a one and done thing. It's a lifelong practice. So over time, You know, your peace becomes a baseline. And now this, this muscle for me is like automatic. Every single time I recognize emotion, and I'm still doing the work, an emotion that comes in and I don't— that is not in alignment with who I want to be, I recognize it, I pause, I breathe, I have to reset, I go for a walk, I do some push-ups, whatever I need to do to get out of that and get that energy back up, not stuck in those lower centers. Uh, I do it. So this week I want you just to ask yourself a couple key questions, really one key question. Actually, it's two. Where in your life are thoughts running the show? And where are you reacting without awareness? So this week, whenever you notice that you're lost in thought, you're gonna pause, breathe, and return to your awareness. And then see what changes when you do. I'd love to know if you want to comment in here about what's going on. I would love to hear. In closing here, just a reminder that you are not your thoughts or your emotions. You're the awareness behind them. And peace really comes— inner peace comes from shifting from, you know, identifying with these things to just observing them. That's where the power starts. And that's part of the B pillar, the Breaking Limiting Beliefs, right? Over time, you're going to also upgrade your operating system. And just to understand what the operating system is, right? It's your thoughts and beliefs, which dictate your emotions, which dictate your behaviors, which dictate your actions and ultimately create your reality. This is the key. This is the start. If you can observe the thought and think about it like a machine, right? Like that's the flow, that's the cycle. Thoughts, emotions, behaviors, actions, reality or results. So if you change the thought, everything else is going to change, right? This day is going to be terrible. That leads to the emotion of dread, anxiety, right? The behavior of being kind of reserved or you don't want to interact with people and then your actions are not decisive and you have poor results. Say you're in sales. Versus today's gonna be great, we're gonna crush it, it's gonna be easy. That leads to empowerment, confidence. You're taking decisive action, you're having good conversations, you're getting good results as a salesperson. So it all starts with the thought. And the beautiful thing is that you're the awareness and you can choose the thought that you want to embody, and that fits your new self. That is that. Share this with someone who feels stuck in their head. Share with someone who feels stuck in their head. Okay, let's get out of our heads, let's live our life, and let's move on. Subscribe so you don't miss the next BILT principle lesson. This is BILT for Impact. Thank you for listening.