I'm Back After a Year Break - Introducing Build Your Power

After more than a year away, Brennan returns with a new name, a new direction, and a fresh perspective.

In this episode, he shares why he stepped away from podcasting, what led to the rebrand from Circumstantially Successful to Build Your Power, and how his understanding of burnout has evolved. What began as individual coaching has grown into helping organizations build healthier cultures where people can thrive.

Brennan also reflects on redefining success, breaking free from hustle culture, becoming completely substance-free, and learning to build a business without sacrificing himself in the process.

In This Episode

•  Why Brennan took a year off from podcasting 
•  The story behind the Build Your Power rebrand 
•  Why burnout is both personal and organizational 
•  Shifting from burnout coaching to culture consulting 
•  Quitting caffeine and becoming completely substance-free 
•  What to expect from the next chapter of the podcast

Transcript

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After a year hiatus, I am back. I'm creating a new episode for Circumstantially Successful. And not only that, I'm changing the name. So you may have noticed I have a new logo, and the name is no longer circumstantially successful. It is now Build Your Power. So let's talk about it. Let's talk about why I've taken almost over a year actually off of this podcast, what's changed in this past year, and why I decided to change the name. Well, why I took a year off is pretty simple. I was burning out. I had a ton of different priorities at the time, and I felt like the podcast was just another should. I was still very much so in the paradigm of forcing myself to do things that I didn't want to do. And it just got to this point where I had so many things going on in my life that I wanted to create space. And the first logical thing to do was to let go of the podcast because let's be real, it wasn't really one driving revenue for me. Not that that was the main point of me starting the podcast, but when I decided to quit, my business was very much so in survival mode. And I needed to learn how to serve my clients better and just be a more well-rounded person in general. And I felt like I kind of ran out of things to talk about. And also organizing the guests and getting other people to join. That was all a list of to-dos. And while I feel like I have the capacity to do that now, back then I didn't. So that's the main reason why. What's funny about that is I actually started another podcast called Whole Man out of mental initiation, out of another should, because let's be real, I love expressing myself. However, sometimes there's something that you have that's a good idea, but it's just not the right timing. So whole man was another situation of great idea, not the right timing. I even paid for this fancy podcast studio to go in and sit down and schedule me recording episodes and come to find out that's not really how I operate. I don't like to follow super rigid schedules like I was conditioned to back in my old corporate career and in the ring corps. I actually like to talk about things that inspire me. I like to follow the wave of creativity and talk from that place. And now that I'm speaking from my house right now, and I don't have to pay for the podcast studio, I feel like this is a better setup. And uh yeah, let's talk about all the changes that have happened this past year because there's been many of them. So back in July of 2025, looking back, I was living in a different place. So I was still living in Charlottesville, Virginia. I'm now Mechanicsville, Virginia. Um, I had just met my now girlfriend, Ashley. I met her at a talk, a burnout prevention panel talk that I did. We are still dating over a year now, and we are living together, which is super exciting. And my business has evolved quite a bit. One of the biggest challenges that I've had with my business has been what my niche is, what's my title, and how do I serve my people. And I feel like a lot of that came from this place of feeling the need to prove myself. And I don't know if you guys have ever heard of human design before. That's one rabbit hole that I've been into this past year. And I'm gonna full out say that this is an esoteric system. So if you guys look up human design, it's not really rooted necessarily in evidence or research, it's more so of an energetic esoteric system that was created by this person named uh Ram Das and doesn't always make a lot of logical sense. However, if you guys have listened to any of my past episodes, I'm not just all about logic. Part of my mission in this world is to bring emotion and energetics to life. So it's it's very much so may not be super logical, but it really resonated with me. Anyway, um, I have what's called an open center, and an open center is essentially I don't have a defined way of operating within that place. I'm not gonna go super into human design. If you guys want to check it out later, if you want me to talk about it more, just let me know. But there's this center called the G Center, and essentially it's what's called your identity center. And so mine is open, meaning it's not defined. And that's so interesting because my whole life, and maybe you can relate to this, I've felt like I've had to I've been looking for an identity, I've been looking for a place to belong. And for me, that manifested in a lot of different extremes. Extreme number one was the Marine Corps. I was like, man, that's it. I'm a Marine. If I'm a Marine, I can feel safe and I can feel secure and I can feel valuable with who I am. And then that also showed up in my career. If you guys are watching the video, or if you guys are listening to this, I'm showing the tattoo of the name of the company I used to work for in the camera because I was that hardcore. I literally tied my self-worth to my job title in the company I worked for. And it showed up even as a business owner. You know, I I've called myself a burnout prevention coach and a transformation coach and a life coach and a business consultant and a culture consultant and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And while I think it's great to have titles to easily explain what you do so you can make sense of it, it is not good to define yourself through it. And that's one of the biggest breakthroughs I've had with my business. And because of that, my model has changed drastically. And on the outside, I am feeling more successful in my business. However, I'm also feeling more fulfilled. And for me, that's the most important thing. And so what's happened in this past year is my business has made a transformation from one-on-one coaching, what I used to call burnout prevention coaching. I don't even remember what I talked about regarding my business this last episode. From what I remember, I was doing burnout prevention coaching for high achievers who felt like work for consuming their life. And that work was fulfilling and great. However, I kept seeing a pattern, and that pattern was even though people were working hard to change their inner reality and their life individually, they kept going back into these organizations that were reinforcing the same habits and behaviors that they were trying to break away from. And because of that, they were still ending up feeling trained. And I had a realization that burnout is not just individual, it's also systematic too. It may start individually. It may start by us placing our self-worth in some capacity towards what we do are things outside of us. But then what happens is that scales unconsciously into organizations and it actually creates the culture that the organization has. And so I'm going to be talking a lot about not just individual burnout in this new iteration of this podcast, but also how it shows up organizationally. And it's going to be from the perspective of the individual, but also as a whole, societal, of what hustle and grind culture has done to us, how it's extracted the life force from us, how it's really conditioned us to believe, especially in Western culture, but in other parts of the world too, that our worth is defined by what we do, our accomplishments, our external things, which is why so many people may have external material success, but feel miserable on the inside and feel a lack of fulfillment. And so that's what's been happening this past year. I went from really just barely being able to scrape by from my business to still not rich or anything like that. I want to be rich and I don't have any more guilt or shame around that because the more money we have, the more it can help people. But I went from that to I'm I'm okay. I don't really have to worry about money. And there's so many different stories I could tell you around why that happened. Long story short, what I'm currently doing, the current iteration of my business that will probably change, is I help fast growing companies develop their people to make up for the business growth. Meaning that whenever you do not develop your people, at the rate in which you're developing your business, burnout happens. And so I help owners and leaders challenge the hustle and grind cultures and narratives that cause people within businesses to burn out. And I do that practically through a lot of different ways. I do culture assessments, I do keynote talks, I do workshops, and I do group coaching. I call myself the heart partner of organizations. So the heart of a business is its people, its culture, its emotions, and its behavior. The head of a business is strategy, KPIs, profits, systems and processes, things like that. And trust me, I've experimented with both. I don't like the head stuff nearly as much. So I help people strengthen, I help strengthen the people behind the business. You can probably still know that I'm working on my messaging. Anyway, uh yeah, so that's that's been what's going on this past year. Um, some some other updates is that I'm completely caffeine free, which is crazy. And out of all the addictions I've had, if you guys are just so happened to be listening to this episode for the first time, I was addicted to opiates when I was 15 years old because of a lot of surgeries I had for my tumor. I was addicted to work and my corporate career, I was addicted to Adderall, to vibants, to edibles, and the constant substance that was also present through all this was caffeine. And caffeine is the most socially accepted drug in our society. And I'm gonna preface this by saying caffeine is not bad for everybody. In fact, I know a lot of people who caffeine really enhances their lives, and that's great for them. I'm just gonna talk about my experience. For me, caffeine was a way for me to ignore the signals that my body was telling me. I started drinking caffeine probably when I was eight or nine years old. I remember the first time I drank it, it was when I was with my grandma. And you know, those Starbucks Frappuccino drinks, the mocha ones and like the white chocolate ones. My grandma was drinking one of those mocha Starbucks Frappuccino drinks, and I said, Grandma, can I try that matcha? Because I didn't know that that's not how you pronounce it. She said, Sure. And I sipped a mocha when I was like eight years old. And ever since then, caffeine was always a part of my life. I had sodas when I was younger, I had this like off-brand soda called Dr. Thunder, had monster energy energy drinks when I went to the skating wreath with my friends. So yeah, it's always been prevalent in my life, and it became way more prevalent whenever I started my corporate career. I mean, I lived in a not lived in kind of, but I worked for a company that we would shotgun energy drinks, and we were in sales. We were cracked out of our minds all the time because it was important for us to be high energy for the customers that came in the store. And so I was heavily dependent on this stuff. And I got to a point towards the end of my time with them that I was doing Adderall, Vivants, and caffeine all in the same day. And the healthy, quote unquote, healthy recommended dose for caffeine a day is like 400 milligrams, and I was doing probably 800. And so, as you guys probably know at this point, I got off of stimulants a couple years ago as far as Adderall and Vivants, edibles as well. But the one thing I have not been able to kick is caffeine until now. And I have a lot of different perspectives on this. If you guys want me to do a whole episode on caffeine and my thoughts around it and how I quit, I can definitely do that. Just let me know. But long story short, I'm completely substance free. I don't take any medications, I don't do any mind-altering substance at all. And out of every single substance I've quit, caffeine has definitely been the hardest because of how socially accepted it is and just how much I relied on it to get through my day. Because building a business has not been a cakewalk for me because it's really forced me to look at the parts of myself that I abandoned while I was just working myself to death. And it's so common when you're a founder of a business to get wrapped up in Hells and Grind Culture. You're told by everybody that you should be working 10 to 12 hours a day. Alex Remozzi and his videos tell you that you're never doing enough. It's just everywhere I look, it's always you got to do more. And I just got to this point where I was doing not a ton of caffeine. I was doing like 200, 300 milligrams a day, but I just got to this point where I wasn't seeing the results I wanted financially in my business. I wasn't feeling super fulfilled in my business, and it felt like I was burning out for my corporate job all over again. And I was like, what is this? Why am I feeling as bad as I felt back when I was addicted to hardcore stimulants? And I just felt this pull to stop. And the way I did it, I would not recommend I quit at cold turkey. And about 30 days in now, I I can tell you that I don't remember the last time that I had this much mental clarity and this was energy in my life, which is counterproductive to what we're taught. We're taught that caffeine gives us energy, but turns out we it doesn't. And again, I'll go into that in different episodes. So completely substance-free. And yeah, I'm navigating a lot of stuff. I'm navigating how to be a really present partner. I am in love with the most beautiful woman on the planet, and we have an amazing house together, and we have a cat, and I'm just learning how to be okay with that. I'm so used to chaos and things going wrong, and just having a thousand things happening in my life at once that now I'm learning how to live more in slowness and stillness. I'm still learning how to navigate my emotions without any substances to numb me or cover me up. I'm learning how to be a business owner. I don't have a team with me or anything. However, I'm learning how to, you know, sell in an authentic way. I'm learning how to take the message that I have and talk about it in a way people understand. I'm learning how to convince these business owners that uh burning out our people is not worth it and that healthy numbers will hide dysfunctional culture. All of it. So I'm just, yeah, I'm navigating things as I go. And the reason why I'm bringing this podcast back now, the reason why this is the right time, is because I've really felt this desire to express myself more so than ever before. Because I feel like I have gotten to this place to where I want people to know that if they are sick and tired and burned out and disconnected from living a lifestyle that glorifies Huff Sorm Guy and culture, that they're not alone. And maybe me talking about my experiences and what I'm going through and giving some insights along the way will help somebody listening to this who is feeling burned out to feel more empowered, fulfilled, and to really practice personal sovereignty, which in my definition just means that you are living in accordance with the person that you came here to be. And that is not an easy process. And I'm here with you through it. So thank you guys so much for waiting. If you have been waiting for this past year for me to post a new episode, please share this episode with some friends. I'm really excited about this new version of it. And until next time. Thank you.