This paper considers understandings and applications of community resilience deployed by multiple stakeholders in rural Scotland. By exploring what stakeholders think rural community resilience means in theory and practice, we enhance existing understandings of the concept. Scottish policy has shifted towards neoliberalism and community empowerment, with the Government encouraging communities to play a proactive role in enhancing their own resilience. For this to occur successfully, we argue that it is important to understand the perspectives of multiple stakeholders in how they conceptualize community resilience, identify what practical factors they believe enhance community resilience, and provide a greater understanding of the mechanisms through which community resilience can be delivered. Drawing on data collected from focus groups and in-depth, semi-structured interviews, we question what resilience means and what factors can facilitate it in practice. We find that by examining the perspectives of multiple stakeholders, dual discourses of resilience emerge: the emergency which reflects the policy focus on short-term damage reduction, and the everyday which reflects the desire for more long-term adaptive capacities developing in response to gradual change in rural communities. We conclude that the discourse which stakeholders predominantly align with will affect how they understand, adopt, and practice the concept.