There’s a question I ask every guest on my podcast, Inspired with Alexa von Tobel. It comes near the end of every conversation, after we’ve gone deep on business models, hard pivots, and the relentless grind of building something from nothing. The question is simple: What’s a mantra that runs through your head?
I started asking it on a hunch. After years as a founder, dropping out of Harvard Business School to launch LearnVest during the height of the financial crisis, scaling it to acquisition, and then building Inspired Capital, I had come to believe that mindset wasn’t a soft variable. It was a hard one. The words we repeat to ourselves shape the decisions we make, the risks we take, and how quickly we get back up when things go sideways.
What I didn’t expect was how consistent the pattern would be. Seven seasons and more than 300 conversations with some of the most ambitious founders and leaders in the world later, nearly every single person has one. A phrase. A word. A sentence they return to, especially when it’s hard. And the science tells us why that matters more than we think.
The neuroscience of positive self-talk
Researchers have studied positive self-talk for decades, and the findings are striking. According to psychologist Ethan Kross, people who engage in intentional self-talk, particularly using second or third person (“You can do this” rather than “I can do this”), demonstrate measurably better emotional regulation and higher persistence under stress. Referring to yourself by name or in the third person creates psychological distance, allowing you to process difficulty the way you would coach a close friend through it. This isn’t motivation-poster territory. It’s behavioral science with real implications for how leaders operate.
What founders have figured out intuitively, researchers have been proving empirically: the mind responds to repetition. When you return to the same phrase under pressure, you’re essentially training a neural shortcut, a mental circuit that fires automatically when you need it most.
What exceptional founders say to themselves
Mine is get up, dress up, show up. Get up early to own the morning. Get dressed because how you present yourself signals something to your own brain before it signals anything to the world. And show up with 150% energy, with intention, with a positive attitude — every single day, regardless of what happened yesterday. It’s a three-beat rhythm I return to constantly. And when that’s not enough, I have a second one: onwards and upwards. Because sometimes the most powerful thing you can do is simply keep going.
May Habib, founder and CEO of Writer, has a single word: forward. “On the tough days,” she told me, “my brain beats to that drum. Forward, forward, forward.” There’s something almost physical about the way she described it, a drumbeat rather than a thought. Repetition, especially under stress, converts conscious mantras into something closer to instinct. For founders navigating the relentless uncertainty of building a company, that kind of automatic anchor is invaluable.
Mikey Shulman, founder of Suno, the AI music platform changing who gets to make music, shared a mantra he borrowed from a grad school colleague: go team. He first heard it after accidentally destroying a month’s worth of work. His colleague gave him a high five and said, simply, “go team.” What struck me was its intentional inclusivity. The mantra reframes both wins and losses as collective rather than individual. For anyone building a company, that shift matters enormously. Mistakes don’t belong to one person. Neither does progress.
And then there’s Dr. Becky Kennedy, the child psychologist and founder of Good Inside, who shared a mantra she borrowed from her second-grade teacher: if something feels too hard, it just means the first step isn’t small enough. Stop staring at the mountain. Find the smallest possible step. Take it. It’s one of the most actionable pieces of advice I’ve encountered across seven seasons of this podcast, and it applies as much in the boardroom as it does in parenting.
Why this matters for leaders
I used to think strategy drove performance. Seven seasons and 300 conversations have largely convinced me otherwise, and I believe the internal architecture comes first. The words you repeat to yourself shape how you show up to every meeting, every hard conversation, every moment when the easier path is to slow down or stop.
The research backs this up. Martin Seligman, the father of positive psychology and author of the landmark Harvard Business Review piece “Building Resilience,” found that people who maintain an optimistic explanatory style, treating setbacks as temporary and specific rather than permanent and sweeping, demonstrate measurably greater resilience and persistence over time. That’s not wishful thinking. It’s a trainable cognitive habit, and the founders I’ve spoken with have built exactly that, one repeated phrase at a time.
The best founders don’t wait for the right conditions to feel confident or resilient. They manufacture those states daily, deliberately and repeatedly, through the simple act of returning to a phrase that anchors them. It’s not magic. It’s discipline that looks like magic from the outside.
The question I’d leave you with is the same one I ask every guest: What’s yours? If you don’t have an answer, that might be the most important thing you work on this week. Not the roadmap. Not the deck. The words you say to yourself when no one else is listening, because those are the ones that shape everything.