In my last episode, I had a great conversation with Greg Stevens about learning to trust yourself when the ground shifts beneath you. Today, I'm drawing from that conversation to talk about how we build resilience. Not as endurance, but as the practice of recovering with intention. Hi, I'm Becky. Welcome to Short Story Long. In this podcast, we discuss ways you can integrate who you are into how you lead. Today I am offering strategies for building your skills as a leader. Let's break down what's important as you integrate resilience into your leadership practice. Leadership isn't built in a straight line, it's a winding path of trial, recovery, and practice, especially for those of us who lead by listening before we leap. Greg Stevens' story reminded me that leadership isn't about the confidence to always know. It's about the courage to keep learning. When you get knocked down, you don't stay there. You get up, take the next step, and practice the skill that will steady you for the next challenge. For introverted skeptics, that's our superpower. We don't fake it, we build it. We question, reflect, and keep practicing until resilience becomes muscle memory. What stood out most to me in my discussion with Greg was his honesty about the pressure. He described how resilience isn't a trait you're born with. It's something you build through repetition. Each time he faced uncertainty, he got a little steadier in how he responded. Not calmer necessarily, but more intentional. And that's something most of us can relate to. We all hit those moments when our plans collapse, when the path we were counting on disappears, and we have to decide whether to freeze, retreat, or take one step forward. Greg talked about learning to breathe through those moments. And he was talking about that literally, that pause between reaction and response. It's small, but it's everything. It's the space where emotional control, composure, and clarity begin. For many leaders, that pause is where skill is built, because it's in the tension, not the relief, where we decide who we're going to be. I think that's a lesson for all of us. Resilience isn't about never breaking. It's about learning to bend with purpose, to stretch into situations that are uncomfortable, and hold our shape anyway. It's choosing to stay in the stretch just long enough to grow from it. If you're feeling that tension now between what's comfortable and what's calling you, it might help to stop looking for confidence and start practicing steadiness. Confidence comes and goes. Steadiness is trained and it stays with you as a foundation. It's built by showing up even when you're uncertain and doing the next thing instead of the perfect thing. That's the quiet power Greg reminded me of. Leadership isn't about having all the answers or the loudest voice in the room. It's about learning to hold your shape when everything around you starts to change. It brought to mind a couple of different leadership skills that I wanted to talk through today. One of the things that Greg talked about was that he had learned resilience, that you don't fail if you keep getting up. And over and over he would run into a battle. And when he was graduating from Baylor, he got his final check to help out with his loan the day before he graduated. He said he couldn't have walked on the stage if he hadn't gotten that check. That's cutting it close. That's being able to stand in that ground and keep waiting for things to show up. Leaders must model resilience by staying committed, even when circumstances feel uncertain or overwhelming. Greg wasn't ignoring the hardship. In fact, he was living that every single day. It was about consistency. It's also the steady practice of recovery that builds credibility with your team. You can actually model how to do this so that your team learns from you. You can let your team see you regroup, reframe, and refocus after a setback. They start to recognize that in those moments you have an opportunity to take that pause, take that reset, and then keep on going. We often need evidence that persistence pays off. And when we really think about that persistence, it's persistence with a purpose. Resilience is proof that consistency rather than instant results creates confidence and credibility. You need to be able to persist in order to build that credibility and get the success that comes from that. One of the other things that I discussed with Greg was this idea of getting comfortable with discomfort. I know people talk about this all the time. The reason they do is because it's important that we do it. Greg emphasized leaning into discomfort as a leadership skill, especially in communication and relationship building. In a difficult conversation, he was talking about how the emotions are flying. And he started to reflect on what if he could just sit back and calm himself? And what would be the effect of that? Well, growth happens in uncomfortable spaces. And so one of the things that would have happened for him in that moment, and can also happen for you, is that when you start to check in and think about how is it that I calm myself? How is it that I get myself into a weird, awkward, twisted up position, and then start to unravel some of those pieces and not unravel like you let loose and lose your ever-loving direction. It is that you let loose of the things that are binding you so that you can start to create some space for some calmness and some resilience. One of the other components with this is to be able to hold a little bit of silence. Talk about uncomfortable. Sit for a minute and just, well, maybe not a full minute. Sit for 10 seconds and just hold that space. Let's do it right now. I'm not gonna lie, it felt like a long time to me. It felt like you might be listening to this podcast episode and going, hey, did Becky go away? When you're in front of someone and they don't have an answer, sometimes it's necessary just to hold that silence. And it's hard for them too. They're thinking, I should have words, I should have words. But if you fill that space, you give them an opportunity to say, Oh, I don't have to respond now, that person did. And so that kind of resilience to let that space lengthen, get that tension high, and then let loose and let it be. One of the other things that can be really uncomfortable is when someone is bringing hard feedback. And it's important to resist the urge to defend your person or defend yourself and stay curious instead. Discomfort like that is where some of that trust begins. It's an opportunity to ask the questions, engage in the conflict, and try to understand what's happening. When you shy away from the discomfort, you miss out on an opportunity to learn something about yourself, and then critically, you miss an opportunity to learn about other people as well. Sometimes one of the things that's really important is actually seeing beyond your own lens. And you need to have an opportunity to cultivate some of those deep listening skills. Fear has a tendency to distort what we see. So if you're concerned, fearful, anxious about a decision, you've got a distorted view in the first place. It's not that your lens is wrong, it's that it's incomplete. Anytime you're in a room and you're experiencing a meeting or a discussion, everyone else in that room or in that place is actually having their own experience of that same situation. So conversations, the words don't change, the players don't change, but the lens and the perspective is different for each individual person. So it's an opportunity to engage with other people. What did you see? What did you understand? How did that work? And with that, you start to be able to recognize different ways that you can respond to different situations. What's really important about that is that you can listen beyond the words. It's the body language. Again, it's that silence and listening for what's not said. What is behind what they're talking about? Are they demonstrating that they're anxious? Are they demonstrating that they're really excited and want to be involved? Sometimes, Greg said, people want to talk. And he'll stop them and say, let's go back to that. Let's land that for a minute. And again, this is this whole idea of listening for what's not said. One risk is that you might make an assumption about what's going on for them and you're not asking. But if you're asking them, then you're engaging in that conversation, you're building that capability to engage in that difficult space. Effective leaders create space for reflection. They notice those subtle cues that reveal the deeper truth in a conversation. Emotional control is not repression or hypervigilance. It's intentional breathing room. Leaders who pause before reacting teach everyone around them to do the same thing. When you practice some of these micro pauses, maybe not that 10 seconds that I made you wait before in meetings, you respond to the tension or the challenge with a different mindset. It's that difference between reacting and responding. Your calm presence in that moment is contagious and it breeds the resilience within others as well. It's that opportunity to take that deep breath in and release it. It starts to shift your nervous system back to where you need to be. And with that, you start to begin the process of regulating how other people are responding in those situations as well. Because they start breathing when they start seeing you doing it. And then you can turn your brain back into the conversation. What is it I want in this moment? How can I be my best right now? Sometimes we just need those tools in order to override our stress and doubt. Simple techniques like breathing and reflective questions give control back to us in that chaotic moment. And sometimes we need to have some semblance of control in those chaotic moments so that we can make the decisions and choose boldly as we go forward. Those courageous decisions aren't easy to make. And Greg was talking about a situation when he had gotten into Baylor and he was having these conversations with his family about should he go and, you know, how would he be able to make that work. Until that moment, he didn't think he knew how to take a stand for himself. That moment for him was visceral. His chest and his gut tightened, and he said, I can't not do this. There's no other way to go in that moment. He really just felt that compulsion to go in the direction that he was choosing. Courage isn't just mental, it's embodied. And leaders need to learn to trust that instinct and take the bold path, even when it feels risky. And yes, I know, there are times that you trusted that instinct and maybe things didn't go that well. Those are the things that you learn from. That is where that resilience continues to grow and the foundations build around us. Some of the other foundations around that are just taking responsibility for the choices that went sideways. You have to be able to take that responsibility for your life, and it's everything in your life that you create, promote, or allow. As a leader, you own the outcomes of your choices. Whether those are created directly by you, they're tolerated behaviors or attitudes that somebody else might have, or things that you have enabled over time, and now you have to go back and you have to deal with that. And it might be that uncomfortable moment where you have to take a lot of deep breaths and take those pauses. Ownership is where leadership begins. Responsibility doesn't mean blame, it means agency. And sometimes a project will go sideways and it'll start with what did I allow or promote that led me here? That's an opportunity for you to take that accountability without fear. It's not about, oh my gosh, how did I let myself do this? It is an educational process to allow yourself to go through that reframe and that evaluation of if I would have turned left here instead of going right, maybe I would have ended up in a different place. Now we can't go back, turn back time, and do things differently, but we can learn from the things, take responsibility, and own that the next time we're in a situation that's like that, we can at least take a moment, take that pause, and evaluate where we want to go. Maybe you're like me and you value autonomy. It's important to take that full responsibility because it shifts your energy from doubt into empowerment. And it means you're never stuck waiting on other people. You can do a lot of these things for yourself. You can do this in leading your team, and you don't have to ask anyone for permission to talk to people. And you certainly don't need to get permission to take responsibility for things, especially when they go right. Like lean in, take that. One of the key things about this is that you need to make a commitment to practice. This isn't just an insight. This isn't just, hey, it was really great to listen to that podcast where Becky was talking about resilience. No, this is actually where you want to embed these breakthroughs into your permanent way of thinking. And then you practice them over and over and over again so that they become leadership habits that you have developed. We want you to be having this as a second nature kind of tool. If you haven't heard, I really hate the phrase fake it till you make it, deeply and abidingly hate that phrase. You aren't faking it. You're doing it. So don't even talk about that you're faking it. You might be acting as if you've already done it, but you're doing it in the process. The mastery comes from the repetition, not the charisma. The repetition you can control. How other people feel about certain situations, you don't have any control over that. You may have influence, but again, that comes back to that repetition and showing up with consistency. How do you put it into practice? Well, you start building the skill by challenging yourself. So you know that here's the skill builder challenge if you choose to accept it. What I would ask you to do is identify one conversation or action you've been avoiding because it feels uncomfortable. Yes, recognize that resistance that you feel within your body. And yes, I mean right now while you're even thinking about it. My invitation to you is that you schedule a conversation that you've been avoiding with that person. Before you have the discussion, plan a single sentence that gets you started. You might even add a second one or tag on a question so you create your pause as the other person responds. It's also a moment for you to commit to sitting in the discomfort. There may be a pause or silence, and no holding that moment helps settle you, and likely the other person or people that you're talking with anyway. And before you start that meeting, prepare by breathing and framing it as a chance to understand that person, not to fix them. The outcome is the conversation itself, not that you get your way during that conversation, but that you stopped avoiding it in the first place. You know, leadership isn't something you perfect, it's something you practice. It's a living, breathing process that unfolds as you stumble, adjust, and find your footing again. The moments that stretch you, the missed cues, the awkward pauses, the random and weird turns are the ones that build your depth. Resilience grows each time you choose to get back up. Responsibility expands when you realize it's not a weight to carry, but a power to direct. It's the quiet commitment to keep learning, to keep showing up, and to keep refining who you are as you lead. So be gentle with yourself. Take the breath, choose your next step, and trust that progress lives in the repetition. Every conversation, setback, even every moment of courage adds a layer to your leadership. Over time, those layers become something strong, graceful, and unmistakably yours. Thanks for listening. If you found this episode helpful, share it with someone who could benefit from it. Until next time, I'm Becky Fraser, reminding you to integrate who you are with how you lead. Okay, bye.