Before an important deal meeting, I stop being İskender for a while. I go in as Alexander.

İskender is the Turkish form of Alexander. Alexander is my alter ego: the super-dealmaker version of me that leaves all doubts at the door. He comes along to every deal meeting where a lot is at stake – with high conviction, energy and power.

I recently explained my alter ego to a founder I am preparing for a growth round. The pitch deck is almost final, so in our session we turned to what comes next: the mindset the founder takes into each investor meeting.

My rule: never walk into an investor meeting to find out whether they like you. Walk in with 200 percent conviction that the round will happen. The only open question is whether this investor wants to be part of it.

There is research behind this rule.

Investors read the founder early

Early-stage investors bet heavily on the founder. The management researchers Laura Huang and Jone Pearce studied how angel investors decide whom to back. One investor told them: "Sometimes I can tell within five to 10 seconds of meeting somebody whether or not I'm going to invest in them."

Part of what investors read in those seconds is how convinced you are of your own company. A founder who walks in asking for approval signals that even the founder is not sure the round will happen.

Energy needs preparation behind it

Investors care about energy. Paul Gompers and his co-authors surveyed 885 venture capitalists on how they pick companies. Passion, the energy a founder brings, is among the team qualities they value most, next to ability and industry experience. A founder who pitches as if the company bores them transfers no energy to the room.

Energy alone does not move the decision, though. In 2009, Xiao-Ping Chen, Xin Yao and Suresh Kotha published a study on how investors react to founder presentations. In one part, 55 experienced investors judged founders at a business plan competition. What moved their decisions was preparation: the substance of the plan and the quality of the answers.

So you need energy and preparation. Energy makes the room listen. Preparation makes that energy believable, and it lets you answer without hesitation.

How you answer risk questions moves the money

Researchers have measured how founders answer investor questions after a pitch. The researcher Dana Kanze and her co-authors analysed the pitches of 189 startups at the startup conference TechCrunch Disrupt in New York, between 2010 and 2016. They sorted the questions investors asked the founders into two kinds: questions about growth and gains, and questions about risks and what could go wrong.

The study set out to explain why female founders raise less. One reason it found: they were asked more of the risk questions. Another finding applies to every founder: each additional risk question went along with 3.8 million dollars less in funding. In follow-up experiments, founders who answered risk questions by talking about growth received more money than founders who kept defending.

A founder who hopes for approval answers a risk question by defending. A founder with conviction answers it, and then takes the conversation back to where the company is going.

How to build conviction

Conviction is built before you walk in. Three tools I use with founders:

1. Repeat your core messages until they are instinctive

Write down the core messages of your company. Repeat them until you know them by heart. In the meeting, say them in your own words, fitted to the question.

Tobi Lütke, the CEO of Shopify, used the same principle on his fear of public speaking. For a week, he spent ten minutes a day writing down that he loves public speaking. A sentence you have written or said often enough stops feeling like a claim.

2. Build your own alter ego

An alter ego is a version of yourself with its own name, built for the moments where a lot is at stake. For me, those moments are every important deal meeting. For a founder raising money, they are every investor meeting.

Alexander has traits I do not always feel myself. In the moments that count, he steps in and walks into the room assuming the deal will happen. To build yours, give it a name and the traits you want to bring into the room.

Research points the same way. Rachel White and her colleagues gave 180 children aged four and six a boring ten-minute task, with a tablet game as temptation next to it. The children who pretended to be someone else, Batman for example, kept working longest.

For adults, the psychologist Ethan Kross ran a set of seven studies. In one, participants had five minutes to prepare a five-minute speech. Those who talked to themselves using their own name instead of "I" were rated better by the judges and felt less shame afterwards. In further studies, people who used their own name saw the upcoming task as a challenge rather than a threat.

Both studies point to the same effect: looking at yourself from the outside helps you stay focused and calm. An alter ego does that by design. Seen from the outside, a deal meeting looks like a challenge you can win.

3. Write down how the round will go

Before your fundraising round starts, write a short story of how brilliantly you will perform in it: the meetings, the hard questions, your answers, the term sheets. Then read it again and again.

It is the same principle as Tobi Lütke's exercise, only longer. The round stops being something you ask for and becomes something that is happening.

What this means for you

Before your next investor meeting, prepare your answers to the hard questions. Conviction without substance reads as arrogance, and it breaks in due diligence.

Then prepare yourself. Walk in as your alter ego: the version of you that already knows the round will close. Then let the investor decide whether they want to invest.