The Language You Repeat Becomes the Pace You Work At

This post pulls from Episode 68 of the Choose Courage Inc. podcast, where I walk through five phrases I keep close, not affirmations, more like operating instructions for the moments when I'm about to make a decision I can't take back. Note: this post may have affiliate links and we donate 100% of those funds to non-profits and a children's group home🫶🏾 

I keep a short list of phrases in my head. Not affirmations taped to a mirror, and not the kind of thing you'd find cross-stitched on a pillow. They show up when I'm afraid, when I need to remember why I'm doing any of this, or when I'm standing at a decision I won't get to make twice. A client noticed it first. She told me I always seem to have "these phrases, these quotes" ready, like I'm quoting myself. I am. I learned this habit in counseling training, long before design or entrepreneurship entered the picture, because the six-word stories a client told themselves did more to shape their choices than any plan we built together in a session ever did.

Scarcity culture hands us its own phrases, and most of us absorbed them without ever agreeing to. Move fast and break things. Sleep when you're dead. Always be closing. These aren't neutral. They're instructions for a nervous system, and they're usually extractive ones. Choosing your own phrases on purpose, the ones that actually run underneath your business and your days, is a real act of design. It's also a real act of healing. The language we repeat to ourselves becomes the pace we work at, and most people never choose that language. It gets chosen for them, by whoever was loudest first.

Little by little, and why patience isn't the opposite of momentum

The first phrase is the smallest, and it might be the most load-bearing. Poco a poco. Little by little. I picked it up after I permanently relocated to Mexico last year, and what I love about it is that nobody says it while pointing at a KPI dashboard. It's what you hear when you're learning something, recovering from something, or building something that genuinely cannot be rushed. It asks for patience and momentum in the same breath, which is a rarer combination than it sounds. Most inherited language gives you one or the other.

This is why I trust a five-hour workday. Every day, those five hours are the only hours I take meetings, meet with clients, or do the deep work, and everything else is not negotiable against it. It's also why I'd rather send one honest newsletter every Sunday for three years than run a ninety-day content blitz and vanish. Growth that arrives little by little is the growth you actually get to keep. Creatively, the phrase functions as permission: today only has to be a little further along than yesterday.

Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast

The second phrase comes from the Navy SEALs, and I sat with whether I wanted language from that world anywhere near my personal canon before I kept it, because of what it's actually describing under the surface. Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. Under pressure, rushing creates errors, errors create rework, and rework is slower in the end than moving deliberately the first time. Anyone who has shipped a design under deadline knows this in their body. The sloppy handoff rushed out on a Friday becomes a three-day cleanup by Monday.

Nowhere does this show up more than in the exit itself. Burnout makes everything in you want to move fast: quit tomorrow, launch next week, replace the salary by summer. I understand the urge and I won't shame it, because the fear of staying stuck is real. But the people I've watched build durable businesses moved smooth, not fast. They ran the numbers before they resigned. They tested the offer before they printed the business card. I've even built my seasons around this. My falls and winters are slow-is-smooth seasons, and my springs and summers are smooth-is-fast ones. A nervous system usually can't tell the difference between hustle and danger, and smooth is what gives it the chance to recognize it's actually safe.

You fall to the level of your systems

The third phrase belongs to James Clear, from Atomic Habits: you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. I resisted this one too, for a while, because "systems" has been colonized by bro marketing and corporate structure decks. Every guy with a whiteboard wants to sell you one. Strip the packaging off, though, and Clear is naming something I watched play out for a decade of organizational culture work. When things get hard, and they will, intentions evaporate and defaults take over. Whatever you've made automatic is what you'll actually do.

So the honest question isn't what you want to do this year. It's what happens by default when you're tired. If the default is checking your phone at 6 a.m. and reacting to whatever's loudest, that's the business getting built, no matter what the vision doc says. If the default is a Sunday newsletter that goes out whether you feel inspired or not, that's the business too. There's a tenderness folded into this reframe that people miss: falling to the level of your systems means you get to stop blaming your character. The problem was never that you're undisciplined. It's that you were under-systemed, in a way that never set you up to flourish.

Fortune favors the bold

The fourth phrase is the oldest one on the list, tracing back to Virgil, and it's the one I have the most complicated relationship with. Fortune favors the bold. Hustle culture loves this phrase because it flattens boldness into recklessness: bet it all, burn the boats, quit with no savings, let the pressure make you great. For the people I work with, that version of bold isn't inspiring. It's expensive, and the people selling burn-the-boats usually had a boat waiting for them on the other side.

I can't throw the phrase out, though, because underneath it, something in it is true. The opportunities that changed my life didn't arrive while I was being careful. They came from being bold enough to try, to get curious, to build something new. Boldness, held this way, isn't the absence of fear. It's the willingness to find out what's possible, and the trust that in the pursuit of it, you won't die. This is the year I hit our annual revenue goal in June, and it came from being experimental and more intentional in conversations, not from a five-year plan. It's also the year I decided I didn't want to live in Trump's America and permanently relocated to Mexico instead. I have a kidney disease, and my kidney function has improved since I've been here. I weaned off my antidepressants. I found love. None of it was easy and some of it was genuinely scary, but fortune does favor the bold, and I believe that more than I believed it a year ago.

I hold the phrase carefully now, though. Boldness is a decision made on top of a floor, not instead of one. You need to know your number, your runway, what enough actually looks like for you. Then you get to be daring above that line: bold in your point of view, bold in your pricing, bold in saying in public what everyone else is only willing to say in the DMs.

Choose courage over comfort

The fifth phrase is the one on the front door of this whole company. A lot of the language here traces back to Brené Brown, and I've never pretended otherwise. Her work gave me words for something I'd been circling for years, and it became the thing I anchor most of the last five or six years of my life to. What does it look like to choose courage over comfort in a relationship, in a hard conversation, in the ongoing work of healing? Healing gets zero out of five stars as an experience. It isn't fun or cute. It takes courage over comfort to do it anyway, and I had a real reckoning in 2023 when I realized I'd been mistaking being busy for being healed.

In business, choosing courage over comfort means turning down a check from a client who could cut you a nice one, because the cost of that relationship, emotionally, physically, relationally, isn't worth what's in the invoice. What I'd add to the phrase now, after living inside it for a while, is that courage and comfort were never actually enemies. The point was never to make your life uncomfortable on purpose. I built this entire company to protect my peace. The point is that at certain forks, the comfortable option and the honest one split, and you have to already know which one you're going to take before you get there. Staying in the job that's slowly hollowing you out is comfortable. It might not feel good, but it's familiar, and you know how to endure it. Courage is choosing the unknown thing on purpose, at a pace your life can actually hold, with a system underneath your feet so the choice is repeatable and not just a single act of bravery you can't sustain.

The other four phrases all fold into this one, if you look closely. Little by little is courage at a pace you can sustain. Slow is smooth is courage without panic. Falling to the level of your systems is courage made repeatable instead of a one-time act of will. And fortune favoring the bold, held the right way, is just courage with a floor underneath it.

"Boldness is a decision you make on top of a floor, not instead of one." — Vivianne

This week, notice the phrase you say to yourself most often, in traffic, before a hard email, at 2 a.m. when the doubt shows up. Ask whether you'd say that same phrase to someone you love and are rooting for. Some of what we're running on is serving us. Some of it is quietly costing us, and we usually can't tell the difference from inside it. I'd genuinely love to know what's on your list. You can always email me directly at hello@choosecourageinc.com and tell me the phrase that runs your life.

Originally aired as Episode 68: 5 Phrases to Ground You on the Choose Courage Inc. podcast.