My Mission: To inspire others to become the best version of themselves—through business and personal reflections, tools, and practices I actually use. This is for founders, leaders, and anyone creating a life with clarity, balance, and meaning.
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Why I Gave All My Clients the Same App
Published 14 days ago • 4 min read
Lead with Purpose
My updates for founders, executives, and creators who want to lead with vision, not noise
Issue #53 • May 11, 2026
The tool underneath meditation
that nobody is talking about.
You know meditation is my diamond activity. It is where everything starts for me. If you want to experience what I mean before we go any further, here are three free sessions I recorded, available right now on Insight Timer:
Now let me tell you about a second tool I have added alongside meditation. I use it every single day. My clients use it every single day. And I want to tell you exactly why.
How I Found HypnoBox
I was on the jury at a startup pitch at SXSW in Austin when I first met Bernhard Tewes and Sebastian Meckelmann. Bernhard is the hypnotherapist and founder. Sebastian, my good friend, is the CTO and Co-Founder who built the technology behind it.
What started as a pitch turned into a real conversation. About nervous system regulation, subconscious reprogramming, and what it actually takes to perform at your best over the long haul. I downloaded the app before I left Austin. And I never looked back.
Sebastian is one of those rare people who combines serious technical depth with a genuine belief in what he is building. He is not just the CTO. He is a business angel and entrepreneur who has put his full weight behind this vision. That matters to me when I recommend something.
Now every single one of my clients is on it. That is not something I say lightly.
What Self-Hypnosis Actually Is
Let me clear something up, because I know the word hypnosis makes people hesitate.
Hypnosis is not sleep. It is not someone waving a pocket watch in your face. It is a completely natural state your brain already knows how to access, a place between being fully awake and falling asleep. Your body goes into deep relaxation while your mind becomes highly focused and alert. Time starts to feel meaningless. Your surroundings fade. You feel completely at ease.
And here is the part that matters: in that state, your subconscious becomes wide open.
Consider this. Ninety to ninety-five percent of your thoughts and actions originate from your subconscious mind. Not your conscious intentions. Not your goals or your resolutions. Your deep, automatic programming. So if you want to actually shift behavior, regulate your nervous system, and change how you show up, that is exactly where you need to go.
Meditation brings you to calm. Self-hypnosis takes you into the layer underneath that, where the real reprogramming can happen.
Why I Use It Every Day
The core reason is simple: it helps me manage my nervous system and my energy.
Those two things sit underneath everything else. Your performance, your creativity, your relationships, your sleep, how you handle pressure, how you recover. All of it runs on how regulated you are at a baseline. HypnoBox gives me a direct line to that regulation, every single day, in whatever form I need.
What Makes It Different
HypnoBox is not a fixed library you passively scroll through. The sessions are ready to go the moment you open it, and the range is unlike anything else out there.
A 3-minute Energy Kick before a high-stakes meeting. A Resilience Booster when things get hard. Confidence in a Crisis. A 45-minute deep hypnosis session before bed. EMDR for deeper processing. Extended music journeys when you need to go somewhere further inward.
And for those who want to go even deeper, you can build your own sessions entirely from scratch, choosing the topic, the voice, the length, and the background sound.
The library covers every area of life. Sleep. Confidence. Success. Anxiety. Weight. Focus. Relationships. Energy. Performance. And it keeps growing.
Over 600 suggestion modules. There is something in here for everyone.
The Man Behind It
Bernhard Tewes is a practicing hypnotherapist who built HypnoBox because he went looking for a self-hypnosis tool that actually worked and could not find one. So he made it himself.
When I watched him pitch at SXSW, what struck me was not the product demo. It was his conviction. He genuinely believes this technology can help people access parts of themselves they have been locked out of. Having used the app daily for months now, I think he is right.
Bernhard and myself at SXSW in Austin
Start Small
The barrier to entry is basically zero. There are sessions as short as 3 minutes. If you have never tried anything like this before, start there. An Energy Kick in the morning. A short relaxation before a difficult conversation. Let your brain learn the state. Build from there.
This is one of those tools that compounds the more you use it.
I only recommend tools I use myself. HypnoBox is one of them.
Best of Success
Mathias
About Mathias
Mathias Ihlenfeld is a proud father of Luca (13) and Sofia (11), loving partner to Doralicia, and an award-winning entrepreneur based in Austin, TX.
He serves as the Austin Cohort Leader and Coach for the Birthing of Giants Regional Cohort, a selective fellowship program for growth-focused founders and CEOs building high-impact companies.
He is also the creator of The R.E.C.L.A.I.M. Code, an elite personal optimization framework built specifically for divorced high performers. His proprietary 6-stage framework helps divorced founders rebuild identity, attract aligned love, and ignite purpose-driven business performance.
As the founder of woom bikes USA, Mathias built one of North America’s fastest-growing direct-to-consumer kids’ bike companies, earning multiple Inc. 5000 honors—including a 742% three-year growth rate in 2020—and recognition as one of the fastest-growing private companies in the U.S. In 2021, he played a pivotal role in merging the U.S. and European operations, leading the combined $100M global business as CEO in 2022 and 2023. His leadership has been recognized with honors such as Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year finalist and the Vistage Impact Leadership Award.
A graduate of the Birthing of Giants Fellowship Program, Mathias brings decades of expertise in entrepreneurship, business transformation, and conscious leadership. Through his coaching practice, he works with founders, executives, and high-achieving men navigating personal reinvention, guiding them through identity rebuilding, emotional mastery, business growth, and relationship alignment.
Today, Mathias mentors with SKU, invests in purpose-driven brands, and writes on his Substack—sharing hard-earned lessons, strategic insight, and stories from his journey building global brands and leading life transformations.
Entrepreneur, coach, and advisor. Helping founders and leaders reclaim clarity, build bold businesses, and live with purpose
My Mission: To inspire others to become the best version of themselves—through business and personal reflections, tools, and practices I actually use. This is for founders, leaders, and anyone creating a life with clarity, balance, and meaning.
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