Why Even the Most Successful Founders Struggle to Be Happy

This week's Founder Friday features a former professional singer who turned a career performing around the world into 28 years of helping CEOs and founders perform at their best.

Ariana Hall says she never once lost her voice throughout her touring career, a reflection of her obsession with high performance. That same mindset eventually led her to coaching founders running eight- and nine-figure businesses, and even billion-dollar companies.

After nearly three decades working with high-performing entrepreneurs, she's noticed a recurring pattern: the most successful founders are often so focused on optimizing their businesses that they neglect their own health, relationships, and happiness.

What founders can steal from this:

• Public speaking hack: use your nerves as energy to drive into impact. She goes into detail about how to do it.
• The ability to control your emotional state stops being optional once your business grows past $1 to 2 million.
• Why community matters more than you think.

Here's what Ariana shared about performing, happiness, and building a business in Austin.

Who are you, and what do you do for CEO founders?

I'm originally a professional singer, which says a lot about my background. I toured the world. I sang for a million people in my career. And I learned a lot about high performance. I had the distinction of never once losing my voice throughout my entire touring career, and I never knew anyone else who had that.

So I was a maniac for high performance. I wanted to optimize everything, every single thing. And when you're a professional singer, your body is your whole world. It's your instrument. It's your business. And your business is your body and your personality, really. It took me a little while to figure out how to translate that into what I do now.

I began as talent, a performer, trying to figure out how to create the most beautiful magic that I possibly could on a stage and have the biggest audience impact that I could have in entertainment. They call it being compelling. That was my focus and my interest at first.

Fast forward to now, I've been working with CEO founders for 28 years. My focus is to do everything I can to support them to be happy and to thrive and to be successful. Those things don't always go well together. So it's really an art form, carving out a life that includes being wildly successful and wildly happy.

How does a touring singer end up coaching CEO founders?

It's a pretty organic progression. I was touring and singing, teaching voice lessons here and there, but mostly I had a performance career. Then I noticed I wanted to stop touring. We did 250 shows a year, not counting travel days, so I was always gone and missing the life of everyone I cared about. I quit the tour to get my life back into something a little more normal and recognizable.

While I was doing that, I picked up teaching voice lessons again and noticed I had a real knack for it. Because I always had a natural talent for singing, I had to figure out how to show another person how to find within themselves what I had figured out.

I moved from there to voice work with entrepreneurs. Then my clients kept asking questions off the topic of public speaking. They'd ask things like, "I have this girlfriend, how should I respond to this text?" or "My mom keeps doing this and it annoys me so much." Eventually I amassed a huge body of knowledge from trial and error with these clients and from my own life, a giant almanac of how to be an entrepreneurial high performer and conduct a life that works on every level. It took many years to make that bridge.

When people ask what I do, I usually say I believe you don't have to sacrifice your happiness, your relationships and your sanity just to be successful. I'm not doing business coaching or accountability. Other people can handle that. I do the very strategic, unique work that figures out what someone is struggling with, does the spiritual surgery, as one of my clients called it, and helps them move the obstacles inside. It's a lot of internal work.

How can founders find their voice when they speak?

Think about it in three parts: content, nervous system, and vocal production.

Content is the words you're going to say. Ask what you want other people to understand and what their reference points are, so you can speak into that person's reference point and not just talk at them. Talking with somebody, even if they're not talking at that moment, is communication. So sense where they are through their body language, their eyes, their silences, their gestures, the way they breathe. Notice the state they're in. If someone is hangry and you say, "Would you mind putting the dishes in the dishwasher?", they're going to hear that differently than if they aren't.

In my opinion, the nervous system is highly underrated and not indexed nearly enough for entrepreneurs. We often put ourselves into an extremely high gear of performance, which requires an altered state, so you have to come in and out of it elegantly. When nerves show up, channel them. Something physical, like a few pushups or jumping jacks, or clapping your hands. You don't want to exhaust yourself. I call it the energy of performance, and you want to feel like you're driving it. Then put a hand on your heart and a hand on your belly and take a few slow, deep breaths, maybe 10. That redirects the entire experience around nerves.

Voice is produced most effectively when you're super relaxed. Your voice lives in the larynx, at the top of the windpipe. Relax the mouth, tongue, jaw, and throat, the way it feels when you get Novocaine at the dentist. Then, with a hand on your belly, send air through that relaxed voice by pulling your belly in while you talk.

What happens when founders ignore their bodies?

A lot of entrepreneurs have this problem. If I had to guess how many of the entrepreneurs I've worked with are floating heads, totally disconnected from their body, it's got to be 90%. That's a guess, not a real figure, but it's really got to be that much. It's a big deal to simply get connected with the body.

Most elite entrepreneurs do eventually study the body and the nervous system, because they come to realize, "I need to use this vehicle to be successful. I can't just use my brain." I like to think of entrepreneurship as an intellectual art form, if not an intellectual sport. Your intellect is the primary part of yourself you're using. But if that intellect is constantly firing with no rest and the body is ignored, there is a short lifespan for that entrepreneur's career.

I've had clients running billion-dollar companies, and eight- and nine-figure companies, and a lot of them, not all, are biohackers. They're very interested in their fitness and their nutrition. Am I getting my macros? This thing only runs well when you have the right nutrients in the first place.

What have you learned coaching some of the most successful founders?

Trust is the currency. That's the first thing. The second, and probably the most meaningful, is that it is very rare to meet an entrepreneur who is not struggling with some element of being dissatisfied or unhappy. It comes with the territory, and people don't talk about it. This is a difficult life path, and it's not for someone who wants to dabble. It's for someone who can do no other.

The most underrated thing I've noticed about high performance is how important it is to regulate your nervous system and become emotionally intelligent. At a million or two, you can still ignore all of that and sometimes get away with it. But if you go beyond that, it starts to become impossible to ignore. Let's say you launch something and it flops. Are you stuffing your feelings? Are you throwing things because you've lost self-control? Are you taking it out on someone near you? Being an entrepreneur is a roller coaster. If you can be graceful through it, you're going to have a long career. Being graceful is the thing.

Then there are relationships. If you have one solid friend, family member, or partner who would say "I'll be there for you in the middle of the night if you needed me," you're rich beyond measure. We are tribal beings.

Why can't founders just think their way past their nerves?

You cannot override instinct. That's why people have such trouble with public speaking, and that includes being on Zoom in an all-hands meeting or having an investor pitch meeting. That's why you have to make friends with your nervous system.

If you ignore what's happening underneath the intellect, you're going to get run over. If you're doing a complex math problem and someone screams, "I'm going to shoot you," and they have a gun, you're not going to say, "Hold on, almost done." So use the intellect to recognize the design and to operate with the design.

What makes Austin's community different?

I've been to all 50 states, and I can't think of anywhere people are more friendly than Texas. On the whole, people here are genuine and interested in one another.

In Austin, you can feel it within a couple of weeks. I've heard it said that Austin either spits people out or embraces them, and if it embraces you, it's absolutely plant yourself and just grow. Keep Austin Weird fits. There's a real quirkiness here. People here are willing to speak their mind and celebrate their individualism.

What's your advice for founders growing a business in Austin?

Embed in a community, or two or three, and grow. If you come to Austin and try to do business as usual, say you came from the Bay, LA, or New York, and you bring that culture here, you're going to get isolated. It's about getting out there, showing up at events, meeting people, doing favors for people. Scratch someone's back and be available for a relationship. Relationships thrive here.

One more thing: in my estimation, the typical entrepreneur is what I would call neuroatypical. The wiring is different than the average person. If you've always been a little different than everyone around you, it might be because your brain's wired a little differently, and that's not a bad thing. Austin is a place where someone who's neuroatypical can really thrive.

What does your typical client look like?

I can recognize my ideal client profile anywhere. I can walk into a room and say, there they are, because I know that brain. It's a person who knows how to play the game, but is really quirky when you zoom in. They're usually super chill, wearing clothes anyone else would wear, but the way they move through the world and the choices they make are highly different and unusual. That quirkiness makes them successful in entrepreneurship. The downside is they can cling to that success almost like they're getting a hit, and then not take care of the other parts of their life, which is where I come in.

Why aren't we taking better care of our entrepreneurs?

I think our society is evolved by entrepreneurs. The entrepreneurs and the artists tell you what's going on inside of a nation. Artists herald what's coming, and entrepreneurs show you what needs to be built. So why can't the person who is, in my opinion, the backbone of the evolution of a society be happy? Why can't that person be thriving?

Community means being around people who think like you and can grasp your quirkiness and your weirdness. They have the same thing going on, so they get it. That's why I'm currently organizing a live event series in late April 2027, where entrepreneurs can study personal mastery and learn what I've picked up over the last three decades to use in their own careers. The community is made up of entrepreneurs who want to master not just their business but themselves. Those are the people wild and crazy enough to come up with the idea for a company and then run it. If you want to be a thriving entrepreneur, get involved in communities.

How can the Austin community help?

Ariana's work is high-end, one-on-one coaching for CEO founders, the people she describes as wild and crazy enough to come up with the idea for a company and then run it. These are her people.

She says she's starting to figure out how to take that practice into live events, where entrepreneurs can meet one another and spend a couple of days talking about what's highly unique to CEO founders, and that she's going to be creating a community of her own.

Her advice to Austin founders is to embed in a community or two and show up. To hear about what she's building, email support@arianahall.com or visit arianahall.com.

Where can people learn more?

Visit arianahall.com. Want to be one of the 30 people attending her new live event? Email support@arianahall.com with "Master Yourself" in the subject line to get notified when the details are available to the public.