Fire drills feel silly until the day they don’t. Practice calm before you need it.

Composure in a crisis is not a personality trait handed out at birth. It is a rehearsed response, and rehearsal has to happen while nothing is wrong, which is exactly when it feels pointless. In the actual moment you do not rise to the occasion. You fall back to whatever you have practised.

Pick the situation you handle worst and run it small this week. Say the difficult sentence out loud to an empty room. Walk the route. Work out in advance what your first three actions would be. That mild ridiculousness is the whole price of not freezing later.