Ep 9: Quietly Powerful: Redefining Strength in Rural Life

In this episode of Rhino Resilience, we dive into the fourth and final pillar: Quietly Powerful.

This episode explores the pressure many rural people feel to always appear strong, capable, and unaffected — even while carrying enormous emotional weight internally.

We discuss:

• the hidden pressure to perform toughness
• shame and emotional isolation in rural communities
• the difference between performative strength and grounded resilience
• limiting beliefs and rigid identity
• Either/Or thinking vs Both/And thinking
• self-leadership and relational leadership
• congruence, groundedness, and emotional honesty
• why true resilience is not becoming invulnerable
• how quietly powerful people lead themselves and others through difficult times

This episode is deeply focused on helping rural people develop a healthier, more grounded definition of strength — one that allows them to stay connected, resilient, and emotionally steady while carrying the realities of life.

Because real resilience is not about becoming less human.

It’s about learning how to carry your humanity in a healthier way.

If this episode resonates with you, share it with someone else who may need it.

Learn more at:
🌐 rhinoresilience.com

#RhinoResilience #RuralMentalHealth #RuralLife #Resilience #MentalHealth #Leadership #SelfLeadership #EmotionalHealth #StressManagement #MentalStrength #RuralCommunities #Mindset #EmotionalResilience #PersonalGrowth #RuralLeadership #StrengthForRuralLife

Transcript

0:19

So welcome back to the Rhino Resilience Podcast, where we talk about real strength for real rural life. I'm Chris Swinson, your host, and before we jump into today's episode, I wanna do something a little different, something I thought of that I'm gonna bring on at the beginning of all the new episodes. Anyone I have guests on, the same kinda thing. Um, so for today, it's time for the Oopsie Tootsie question of the day. You see, my wife has a children's book that's called Oopsie Tootsie, and honestly, this is just kind of a fun way for y'all to get to know me a little more before I jump into the serious mode every episode. Um, and this, I've had people, you know, write in, they, they've messaged me, things like that, asking me just questions kind of about me, and I thought this might be a great way just to kinda share it kind of a fun way. And so each of these questions, um, each time, you know, even guests will get a chance to answer it. But yeah, today's the Oopsie Tootsie question of the day. Here is my wife's children's book, um, Oopsie Tootsie, and get it off Amazon. It's a really awesome, cute book. Kids have been loving this. In fact, our house is filled with a lot of Freda the Frogs, her little plushies, and Meringue the Rhinos as well, that you can get those. And the book I showed you is, sorry my lady, it was one I had here, and it happens to be one of your print copies, so it had a big gray line across the top. You won't see that on there when you actually order the book, but let's get into this. So today, the Oopsie Tootsie question of the day is what movie can you watch over and over? And when I hear this, like, I'm a big Star Wars fan, man. I love Star Wars. I'll watch those shows quite a bit. Um, and, uh, then there's Spider-Man. I know, like, my kids, especially my youngest daughter, she knows anytime Spider-Man's on, man, I'm watching it. I'm a big Spider-Man fan as well. But the truth is, like, the, the movie that I could watch over and over again, my all-time favorite movie would be The Outsiders. Okay, this is the movie from the '80s, Outsiders. Had a lot of great actors in that. It was a wonderful show, um, and I just, I just loved the show, man. It was, it was amazing. And in fact, one time, um, for a, a Halloween, me and my friend who lived across the street, Tom, we, we dressed up as Greasers for one, for one Halloween. And, you know, I don't even know, like, what, what kinda crap we put into my hair, or our hair, but man, that stuff did not come out for a long time. Um, but yeah, so The Outsiders would be a movie- That I could watch over and over again, and maybe you've seen it, maybe you can relate. If you haven't, check it out. So it's a great show. Um, but there's our oopsie-tootsie question of the day, and as we go f- further, man, feel free to write in. You know, message me or, you know, reach out somehow through the website or at my email, and, uh, if there are certain questions you're wondering, feel free to put them out there. I'd love to kind of bring them on. Just a nice little fun way that you kind of get to know more about me and, and all of those, like I said, before I get into serious mode, which we'll get into right now. And so now's the time we're gonna kind of dive into this, okay? And so today on this episode, we're gonna be talking about the fourth and final pillar of Rhino Resilience, okay? Which is quietly powerful. And honestly, this pillar, I think, ties everything together. You know, it's been a series we've done with a lot of the, uh, the other pillars so far this time, and we've kind of gone on that with pillar one, pillar two, pillar three, but this one here, I mean, I think it honestly just really brings everything together. So because quietly powerful, I mean, it's not about becoming louder or harder or even more intimidating. You know? It's actually about becoming more grounded, more integrated, more steady in the way that you carry yourself through life. In fact, I feel like it- it's, it's about leadership, and not just the leadership of others, but leadership of yourself. Like, how you lead yourself under pressure, how you speak to yourself, how you carry stress, how you respond when emotionally... when life gets hard, and, and basically how that way that you carry yourself, that affects the people around you as well. But wh- why would this pillar matter for rural people? Like, wh- why does this even matter? Why include this? Because honestly, I feel that this matters deeply in rural communities, because rural people like us, we carry a lot. It's a lot of pressure, a lot of long ho- hours. You know, there's a lot of financial uncertainty, isolation sometimes, a great deal of community expectations, even family expectations, and how many people begin carrying an enormous load while trying to fit this tough mold, right? And listen carefully. There is goodness in rural values. That's why I choose to live in a rural area. Wouldn't live anywhere else. It's absolutely wonderful living out here, because those rural values of being a good work ethic, dependability, responsibility, sacrifice, we show up. We are tough, and those things matter. But the problem is when a person slowly begins believing that if I struggle emotionally, then I lose my worth. You see, that's the dangerous part because now vulnerability doesn't merely feel uncomfortable, it feels threatening to your identity, how you see yourself. And honestly, I think many of us, you know, we've inherited some identities, some identity rules basically growing up, right? Just a part of growing up, we've just kind of soaked them in. You know those rules like handle it yourself, don't burden people, suck it up buttercup, stay tough, right? Keep pushing. You know, strong people don't struggle. And listen, those beliefs came from good people trying to survive difficult times, no doubt. But sometimes those same beliefs become so rigid that they leave no room for normal human experience. And one of the things you can see when you look at something that is a rigid identity or belief is you find that people fall into an either/or thinking, which is also a way you can identify limiting beliefs because they, they usually sound black and white. So either/or thinking. This is the trap we fall into because we gotta have one or the other. Which one are we? Either I'm strong or I'm struggling. Either I'm resilient or I'm emotional. Either I'm capable or I need help. Or either I'm okay or I'm failing. But man, real life is rarely either/or. Real life is usually both/and. In other words, it's not that you've gotta choose one or the other, that either I'm this or I'm that. Man, that creates c- kind of difficulty. No. You can be both and at the same time, right? Think about it. I can both struggle and still lead. I can both cry and still be strong. I can both need support and still be resilient. I can both feel overwhelmed and still move forward. You know, I can both experience pain and still have worth. And honestly, that shift changes everything because when people begin believing these rigid identity rules, like they start to feel enormous pressure to kinda live up to them, right? So pressure to always appear capable- There's that pressure around here to always stay strong, to keep functioning, to never let people see you struggle, to carry everything quietly, to never let that mask slip. Many people don't even realize why they feel such an enormous pressure to perform this identity. But underneath that pressure are often deep fears. Fear of being a failure, fear of being judged, right? Fear of maybe disappointing people or even looking weak, losing that respect or burdening others. And sometimes just a fear of judging yourself. Because many people are not just afraid of struggling, they're afraid of what struggling might mean about them. Because I'm struggling, does that mean I'm weak? No. Does it mean I'm failing? Hell no. Does that mean I'm not good enough? No. Does it mean I'm losing who I thought I was? No. Because many of these pressures become so normal in our rural culture that people stop noticing them. People begin carrying these invisible expectations that quietly shapes how they see themselves. And eventually, many people stop being real and start performing an identity. And that performance is exhausting. Because now people are not only carrying, like, real stress, but on top of that they're carrying the pressure to appear unaffected by the stress. And over time, that disconnects people from themselves, from others, from support, from groundedness. And eventually many people begin feeling just f- emotionally fragmented because the identity that they are trying to perform leaves no room for being real human. You know, I can't tell you how many people over the years have sat in my office struggling deeply, but then added even more suffering onto themselves because they believed, "I shouldn't feel this way. I should be stronger than this. Something must be wrong with me." And honestly, many times what they were experiencing was just a very human response to an extremely difficult situation, right? It's one of the areas that I have such a problem with the way our culture defines resilience today. And I'm not just talking about rural co- I'm talking about w- all around. This concept of being anti-fragile, that somehow if you can just become resilient or tough enough that you'll never, ever experience life again. That's not real. It sets it up with an either/or thinking for people. They come into my office, and one of the biggest struggles is, "I thought I was more resilient than that. I thought that I was stronger than that." And now they start to see them as weak, when in fact what they were experiencing was a very human response to an emotionally difficult situation. Like when you go through grief, you're gonna feel grief. You feel stress. You feel burnout and pressure. But because their identity was so rigid, they interpreted normal human pain as personal failure. Think about this. When you go outside, if it would be extremely cold outside right now, and you walk outside, you're gonna feel the cold. You experience the cold. Now, when you experience the cold, you know, you, you start to like... I remember growing up up north with a lot of snow and cold, and I'd be out there a long time. Pretty soon you couldn't even smile, right? My body starts shaking. My hands started getting harder to move and freezing. Now, I never interpreted that as personal failure. It was the fact that I was just cold. It was normal. But when it comes to what we look at in life when we go through hard times, we begin to interpret that as something meaning about us, when what we're really doing is just experiencing life. Like the way we experience cold is the same way we experience life. And no matter how physically strong someone is, they can still break. You know, wi- with these rigid views of resilience, we get people that believe that if I can... Think about like physically, if I could just work out enough, if I could just become so superhuman that I will never, ever experience pain again in my life. No, I don't care how strong, tough, big you are, you can still break a bone. You can still come down and get an illness or be sick. It's just not humanly possible. A lot of these rigid either/or thinking puts us into this perfectionistic view of how we got to be, when for us it's about what is the real human experience, and that's the part of being human. Well, anyways, you know, a big thing is shame and isolation. This is what it leads to. 'Cause many people are carrying the exact same fears and pressures and emotional weight while all pretending that they're the only one struggling, which isn't true. And man, that's one of the saddest realities in many rural communities, that there are people suffering beside of each other while both believing that they have to hide it. That's what's sad. And eventually people become exhausted from carrying not only the original pain, but also that pressure to hide the pain. And honestly, this is where shame becomes so dangerous because pain says, like, "I'm struggling." But shame will try to convince you that I'm struggling because something is wrong with me, right? It makes it about you. And sadly, that isolation is one of the reasons that suicide continues to impact so many rural youth and adults, not simply because they're hurting, but because many people believe they must carry that hurt alone. You know, struggle is a part of being human, but shame is what convinces people they must carry that struggle alone because something is wrong with them. I think that we need something different. You know, some kind of a new identity out here that we can begin to integrate into a lot of us. And honestly, I think quietly powerful is really about a healthier identity. Because it's not gonna abandon that toughness that we already have. It's not abandoning anything that's here. It's expanding it. It's integrating it. You know? Because the old rigid identity often says that strength means unaffected, right? The more strong I am, I'll be unaffected by life, which is not realistic. But quietly powerful says that strength means I'm grounded. Because now it's like, yeah, I'm still strong even though I'm going through this. The old identity usually says that you gotta hide being a human and try to be this almost robot to measure up to this performance picture of an identity, while quietly powerful says that you can lead yourself well through your humanity and being human. You know, one of the biggest things about this pillar is it's about pretty much deeply about self-leadership, right? Because you cannot lead others in a grounded way if you're constantly at war with yourself internally. Self-leadership is basically how you talk to yourself, how you interpret struggle, how you respond when life affects you, how you regulate your emotion, how you reconnect to your values under pressure, how you treat yourself when you fail. And honestly, many people look functional externally While collapsing internally because their self-leadership is built entirely on performance and not being human. You know, one of the most powerful concepts I ever learned doing mental toughness training programs was congruence, and that means alignment. Because when your mind, your body, your values, and your spirit are all aligned together, you become incredibly hard to break. You know? Not because, like, life stops being difficult, because it won't, but because you stop fighting yourself internally. And honestly, many people are exhausted not simply because life is hard, but because they're trying to perform an identity that no human being can actually sustain. So there's a deeper goal. It's a deeper goal with this pillar, and I think that goal is, is... I mean, I guess to articulate it would be that the goal isn't to become invulnerable, like superhuman. The goal is to become real enough that you no longer have to hide your humanity to feel worthy. Because invulnerability or being perfect, superhuman isn't human. You know, the strongest people that I've ever met, you know, through history, through books, through anything, when you read about people that are just truly strong people out there, they still grieve. They still struggle. They still get overwhelmed sometimes. In fact, I've been pretty overwhelmed most of this week and reminding myself that, "Boy, you better start practicing what you preach." You know? Because that's a part of it, and I have been. But you see a lot of the people that were there, they still struggled, they still faced these things, but they learned how to remain grounded and connected while carrying these difficult things. That both/and. And honestly, I think that's what quietly powerful really is. It's not pretending that life doesn't affect you, but it's learning how to carry yourself through life in a grounded, connected, emotionally honest way. You know, I've said this in a past episode regarding real strength, but it fits, fits here for me. Like real strength, it's integrated strength, right? All four pillars integrated together. It's not fragmented. It's not having to perform it. It's being integrated in your mind, your body, your values, your spirit all moving in the same direction. So essentially I feel that the goal- Of, of resilience, which is why I created rhino resilience, which I feel is being more real resilience, not the, the fake performative type. But the goal of real resilience, I mean, is not to become less human. It's what it is. The goal of resilience is not to become less human. But, but the goal is to learn how to carry your humanness in a healthier way. Quietly powerful people don't waste energy pretending to be invincible, okay? They don't. They settle into their identity and their values, right? They're- they move with purpose and groundedness, and that changes, like, how they lead themselves, you know? How they speak to themselves, especially how they respond under pressure, how they reconnect when life affects them. And importantly, especially for us rural people, we're very family-valued people, it also changes how they lead others, how they lead their families, how they show up in conflict, how safe people feel around them, and how steady they remain during difficult seasons. And remember, staying steady during difficult seasons is not necessarily that, oh my gosh, I am stoic all the time, 'cause that would be either/or. Being steady and being unsteady at the same time, it's possible, but it's how we manage through it. Something important to remember is that the strongest thing that you can give your family is your steadiness. Not perfection, steadiness. Because people don't need you to become superhuman. They need you grounded enough to stay connected while carrying difficult things. So where do we begin learning how to become quietly powerful? You know, I don't just wanna talk about it. I wanna give you some specific practical tools that you can begin to, to start becoming more quietly powerful in your own life. And I think it all starts when we begin asking ourselves better questions, right? Asking ourselves better questions direct the mind to give you an answer. Our minds are very much like Google. Whatever you ask it, it will give you an answer, whether it's relevant or not, you know? So if you ask it, like, "Why am I stupid?" It's not gonna determine whether you are stupid or you're not stupid. It's only gonna give you reasons where maybe perhaps you might be, right? So we need to learn to get better at questions and direct our mind differently. So in- instead of asking ourselves to be, you know, to be more quietly powerful, instead of asking ourselves, "How do I appear strong?" But what kind of person do I want to become? How do I want people to feel around me? And honestly, I've got a list of questions here. Um, and maybe this is a time for people sometimes if you wanna be active, you're not driving and listening to this, you can stop it and, you know, do some reflection, do some real serious thinking about these questions because this is what can help you truly, uh, get a, that better identity and live for something more than what you're thinking. So how do you appear strong, you know, is, is not what we want, but rather it's like, okay, so what kind of person do I wanna become? I'm gonna look at my list here. How do I want people to feel around me? What kind of emotional presence do I bring into my home? What values do I want guiding my behavior under pressure? What do I refuse to let stress turn me into? What helps me stay grounded? Who helps me- steady me? And what kind of, what kind of strength do I want my children learning from me? Spend some time to really kind of reflect on those questions and think about them and answer them in great detail. It will go a long way towards developing that fourth pillar. Because the truth is, is your identity and how you see yourself, that shapes behavior. That shapes what you do because you do what you believe you are. You know, a long time ago, I had a friend that was a cyclist. So, like, he would ride a, this bicycle all the time, and then in the wintertime he couldn't ride it 'cause there was too much snow, but he would bring it into his, his home and set it up and he'd ride cyclists all the time. He'd do that. He was- 'cause he saw himself as a cyclist. Now, I don't do that, and the reason why is that I don't see myself as a cyclist. But if I did see myself and identify as a cyclist, then what would I be doing? Riding on the bike, uh, riding on the bicycles, right? Yeah. So that's where how you see yourself shapes what you're going to do, and that's what's important. It's important to realize that identity shapes behavior. And over time, the identity that you pre- that you practice, that becomes the life you live. You know, the rhino does not perform for attention. Definitely doesn't. I mean, its power is not loud, it's obvious. And honestly, some of the strongest people that you'll ever meet are exactly like that. Grounded, dependable, steady, authentic. Because people feel calmer simply because they're there. You know, as we look to close up this episode, I want you to understand that people may not remember every word that you say, but they'll remember how it felt to be around you, and in many ways, that becomes your legacy. So as we close out this fourth pillar, I want you to remember this: that maybe the future of, like, rural resilience is not becoming harder or more disconnected, but becoming more grounded, more connected, while still remaining strong. That is quietly powerful. So if this episode helps you, share it with someone else who may need it. You know, feel free to comment to kind of let me know what impacted you about this, or maybe areas that you weren't quite clear about that maybe I kind of clear up for you. And you can always learn more over at reinerrresilience.com and explore all the four pillars in greater depth. You know, you can do those things over there, the newsletter can sign up for. Um, feel free to reach out, um, and definitely share this with others that might be out there. Like and subscribe to the podcast as always. The hope is, is I need a lot of your guys' help. Um, I can put these things out and reach so far, but I think with others, that if they find value in it and share with other people, it's a way of helping more people, and I would love to bring these messages out to more people so that we can help them as well. But, you know, I know that you've been carrying, like, an enormous load, um, but now let's make sure that you're carrying it in a way that allows you to keep living, leading, and staying connected. Stay steady. We're in this together.