resilience is my redemption

May 23

When sharing my story with Amy Lauer (a talented executive coach who always listens deeply and isn’t afraid to ask me the juicy questions) suggested that I write this follow up.

Two days after the 9:29 moment that I wrote about last week, our internet was still out. No explanation. No timeline. Just silence from the ethernet cable and a second workshop with the same organization sitting on my calendar for Thursday.

The same leader who had been furious on Tuesday was planning to attend. I understood why. He wanted to see if I could actually deliver — if Tuesday was a fluke or a preview.

My manager, who had my back on Tuesday even while absorbing her own disappointment, went the extra mile and offered to cover a dedicated co-working space for the session. I took it. The space was professional, the connection was solid, and walking in that morning felt like I was set up to succeed.

The client leader and program sponsor joined early. This was my moment — not to over-apologize or perform contrition, but to meet him where he actually was. I looked at him and said something close to: “That must have felt terrible — gathering your entire executive team to kick off something important and having it fall apart so suddenly. I was so looking forward to it myself, and I’m genuinely sorry it happened that way.”

His energy shifted. That was it. That was the door.

From there I was able to draw his wisdom into the room and through the workshop. When it came time to facilitate, I was at my best — present, warm, and genuinely engaged. Both leaders stayed in the main Zoom room with me rather than breaking out, and those live conversations became the connective tissue of the session. The content on Feedback came alive inside their own cultural context rather than as a concept I was delivering at them. I ended five minutes early, with ease. (Who doesn’t love a few minutes back?)

This week was still emotionally hard. I won’t pretend otherwise. I didn’t quite reach what my colleague Sindri calls “healthy detachment” — that clean, unhooked professionalism that stays grounded without gripping. But I felt something real shift in my capacity to navigate difficulty and turn stress into momentum rather than noise.

Then — in a moment of irony that felt almost designed — about an hour after finishing the workshop, I taught a lunch-and-learn session to a completely different client on the topic of Managing Stress. I shared a short version of what my week had looked like, and the moral I offered was this:

When you can recognize the situation and your stress response, you can reverse the stress by taking actions that regulate the response — and that process, repeated, is what builds resilience.

Having a strong second chance felt good. But the redemption wasn’t the second chance itself. It was discovering that the resilience was already there, waiting to be used.