Jillian Schafer

Jillian Schafer is the co-founder and Chief Product Officer of Selfpause, the affirmations and self-talk app she started in 2019 with her husband, Jaeden. She led the company as CEO through its earliest years before stepping into the product role she holds today, shaping how hundreds of thousands of people record, listen to, and build a daily affirmation practice in their own voice.

An entrepreneur and computer scientist by training, Jillian studied at Brigham Young University–Hawaii, where she also worked as a front-end web developer, and spent her early career managing web-development projects and marketing campaigns. She went on to co-found AI Box, and across every venture she has been an advocate for democratizing access to good technology — the belief that powerful tools should be simple enough for anyone to actually benefit from them.

That same conviction drives her work at Selfpause and her editorial role here. Jillian reviews every article on the site, holding each piece to a simple standard: the science has to be represented honestly, and the takeaway has to be something a real person can use on a hard day. A mother of three and a Christian musician who writes about gratitude, resilience, and agency — "act, don’t just be acted upon" — she cares as much about the tone of the inner voice as the research behind it.