One of the women I interviewed has spent her career teaching people about resilience and self-efficacy. She knows this material inside and out. So I was moved by how honestly she described what happens to her when stress hits.

At the center of it is a worry she has known since childhood: "the worry that I might not be able to figure it out." When that worry takes over, her body shifts into a stress response, and she described having "less contact with my executive function." The skills she teaches are still there. She just can't reach them. "I don't have access to my resources when I'm in the middle of a stress response," she told me, "even though those are things that I teach about."

And here's what makes it lonely. From the outside, nobody can tell. "Everybody else thinks I'm calm and cool and collected," she said.

If you've ever known exactly what to do and still couldn't do it in the moment, I want you to hear this clearly. You aren't failing, and you aren't weak-minded. Your nervous system is doing exactly what it was built to do, which is narrow your focus to survival when it senses a threat. The trouble is that it can't always tell the difference between a real threat and a hard conversation, a launch or a blank page.

Why insight alone doesn't fix it

I've lived a version of this myself. There was a stretch in my life when I had to step away from my work for two years. I couldn't think clearly, and no amount of sleep made me feel rested. Everything felt gray. I knew plenty about what was happening to me, and knowing didn't make it stop.

That's the frustration this woman named so well. "How many times do I have to go through this?" she asked. "When am I going to get it?" She also said, with real sadness, "I would like to have less struggle."

Her answer wasn't more willpower. It was understanding. "Once people understand their nervous system," she told me, "it validates the experience that they have." She described the relief of realizing, "Oh, this makes sense. I would feel this way." When you can predict what your body is going to do, you get some of your agency back.

Dr. Susan Truong, another leader I interviewed, added a piece I think matters just as much. She described so many of these patterns as "subconsciously imprinted and handed down. So they're not even our own." Some of what your body does under pressure was learned from people who were carrying it long before it reached you. This has nothing to do with blame. It simply means an old program can keep running long after the danger has passed.

Two practices worth trying

The first is a pattern map, and it comes straight from the woman who teaches resilience. Think of a recent situation that felt hard. Write down the thoughts you had, the feelings under those thoughts, the urges that came next and the physical sensations that went with all of it. Do that for a few situations, then look for the theme. You may find the same thought, the same urge to pull back or the same tightness in your chest showing up again and again.

She was careful about one thing. Look at what you find with self-compassion, not with the language of self-sabotage. The goal is to arrive at "Oh, well, of course this makes sense," not to hand yourself one more reason to feel bad. Curiosity, she said, helps you challenge the harsh inner voice far better than criticism ever will.

The second practice comes from the psychologist Rick Hanson, and she shared it with me. When something good happens, stay with it for at least twelve seconds. It might be a kind message from a client, a session that went well or a moment when you handled something beautifully. Hanson's idea is that holding the good moment that long helps it register in your brain instead of sliding right past. Our brains are wired to remember what goes wrong. "We remember the negativity," she told me. "That's the negativity bias, that we remember what is negative to survive."

She also offered a question I've started using: "You always think that you're not going to figure it out. Think about all the times that you did figure it out."

Owning your authority starts here, with a body that can stay present long enough to use what you already know. That's why I call this nervous-system work and not mindset work. You can't talk a body into feeling safe, but you can teach it.

The twelve-second practice pairs well with my free guide, Why Talented Women Stay Invisible: 3 Subconscious Patterns Keeping You Small, if you'd like to keep exploring.