I used to think resilience meant having a thicker skin.
What I see now, especially at this point in a career, is that it is more about what happens in the five seconds before you speak.
That moment in a meeting when your name gets called and your brain speeds up. Or when an email lands and you feel that tight pull in your chest to respond immediately, to explain, to defend, to prove you are on top of it.
Nothing is wrong with you in those moments. Your body is just doing its job. It is reacting before you have time to think.
The people who seem steady are not calmer because they care less. They are steadier because they know how to slow themselves down just enough for their judgment to catch up.
Sometimes that looks like taking a breath before answering. Sometimes it is saying, let me think about that and coming back later. Sometimes it is choosing fewer words instead of more.
That is the part of resilience we do not talk about enough. Not motivation. Not grit. Regulation.
When you learn how to steady yourself, your experience actually gets to show up. And that is usually what people were waiting for in the first place.