Why the calmest person in the room is often the one who has already survived the thing everyone else is afraid of - Silicon Canals

"What we're actually witnessing, more often than not, is the quiet result of prior exposure to genuine threat. The person who doesn't panic when the company is running out of runway has probably already lived through financial ruin. The founder who stays measured when a co-founder exits has likely been abandoned before - in business, in life, in some formative context that rewired how they metabolize loss."

"Psychologist Richard Tedeschi, who coined the term post-traumatic growth, documented this pattern across decades of research: people who have endured and processed significant adversity don't just recover - they often develop a kind of psychological recalibration. Their baseline shifts. What once would have felt catastrophic now registers as serious but survivable. Not because they've become numb, but because their internal reference point has changed."

Calm people in high-stress situations are frequently misinterpreted as either emotionally detached or possessing special inner peace. In reality, their composure typically results from previous exposure to significant adversity that has fundamentally rewired their nervous system. Psychologist Richard Tedeschi's research on post-traumatic growth demonstrates that people who endure and process serious challenges develop psychological recalibration, shifting their baseline expectations. What feels catastrophic to others registers as serious but survivable to them. This isn't numbness but rather a neurological shift in their internal reference point, allowing them to process threats differently based on accumulated life experience.

Read at Silicon Canals