tempered by experience

Syllable breakdown

Dictionary meaning

having had impulsiveness, naivety, overconfidence, or extreme positions moderated and made more reliable through the lessons taught by living through difficult, complex, or humbling real-world events; the metallurgical metaphor of tempering, in which heated steel is cooled in a controlled manner to achieve the ideal balance of hardness and toughness, is applied to human character to describe the process by which exposure to difficulty and failure produces wiser, more calibrated, and more resilient judgment; it implies that the experience has neither broken the person nor left them unchanged but has produced a stronger, more balanced character