The Quiet Cost of Always Being the Strong One

Winston Chew 6 min read Intrapersonal skills

The restructuring was announced on a Tuesday. By Wednesday, the managing director had held six town halls, taken forty calls and reassured every worried face in the building. On Thursday evening, alone in the car park, she realised that no one had asked how she was. The honest answer frightened her: she did not know.

Many leaders recognise this scene. We become the steady voice in the crisis, the one others lean on, the calm face in the boardroom. Strength is a gift to any organisation. The research, however, shows what it costs when strength becomes the only thing we allow ourselves to show. The strong one pays quietly, and the bill arrives late.

The hidden cost of holding it in

Psychologists call the habit of hiding what we feel expressive suppression. James Gross and Oliver John studied it alongside a healthier strategy, reappraisal, which changes how we interpret a situation. People who habitually suppressed experienced less positive emotion and more negative emotion, had poorer relationships, and reported lower well-being (Gross & John, 2003). Hiding a feeling leaves it intact and adds the effort of hiding.

The cost spreads to the people around us. In laboratory conversations, Emily Butler and colleagues asked one partner to suppress their emotions. Their conversation partners showed higher blood pressure, felt less rapport and were less inclined to form a relationship (Butler et al., 2003). The steady face we offer to reassure others can unsettle them.

The effect holds over time. A study following 278 students through their first term at university found that those who suppressed more received less social support, felt less close to others and were less satisfied socially. Peers did not dislike them; they simply never got close (Srivastava et al., 2009).

How many people in our organisation know how we are actually doing?

Composure protects the room; constant composure empties it of anyone who truly knows us.

When strength becomes an obligation

Some of the clearest research on the cost of strength comes from studies of Black women in the United States. Nurse scientist Cheryl Woods-Giscombé identified a “Superwoman Schema” with five features: an obligation to show strength, an obligation to suppress emotions, resistance to vulnerability or dependence, a determination to succeed despite limited resources, and an obligation to help others. The women she interviewed saw real benefits, including the survival of family and community. They also named the costs: strained relationships, neglected self-care and stress carried in the body (Woods-Giscombé, 2010).

This work grew from the specific weight of racism and sexism, and that context deserves respect. We should not flatten it into a generic leadership lesson. Its central finding, however, sheds light on anyone for whom strength has become a duty. In a study of 194 Black women, the felt obligation to show strength predicted depressive symptoms, and self-silencing — keeping our needs and opinions to ourselves — carried much of that effect (Abrams et al., 2019). In another study of 158 women, stronger endorsement of the schema was linked to feeling less emotionally supported, which in turn helped explain greater psychological distress (Watson-Singleton, 2017).

The pattern is instructive. Strength as a capacity serves us. Strength as a rule that forbids need isolates us, because the people around us come to believe we need nothing. Strength chosen serves us; strength demanded silences us.

Why the strong one won’t ask

The strong leader rarely asks for help, and the research shows our reasons rest on a miscalculation. Francis Flynn and Vanessa Bohns found that people underestimated by as much as 50 per cent how likely others were to agree to a direct request for help. We focus on the effort we would impose; we forget how uncomfortable it is for others to say no (Flynn & Bohns, 2008). Help is closer than our pride calculates.

We also fear that asking will make us look weak. Alison Wood Brooks, Francesca Gino and Maurice Schweitzer found the opposite: people who sought advice were seen as more competent, especially when the task was difficult and when they asked the advisor directly (Brooks et al., 2015). A related set of seven studies found a “beautiful mess effect”: we judge our own displays of vulnerability — admitting a mistake, asking for help — more harshly than observers do (Bruk et al., 2018).

Honesty requires one qualification. When higher-status people disclosed a personal weakness to peers in task-focused settings, those peers saw them as lower in status, gave their ideas less weight and reported more conflict (Gibson et al., 2018). The lesson for leaders is discernment, not silence. Asking for advice on a hard problem builds credibility; carrying our deepest struggles only in the team meeting may not. The strong leader chooses where to be known, and chooses someone.

Where, outside the chain of command, do we let ourselves be fully known?

What putting it into words does

The antidote to suppression is expression in a safe place, and the evidence begins with a simple experiment. Psychologist James Pennebaker asked university students to write about a traumatic experience, including both the facts and their feelings, for fifteen minutes a day over four days. On those days they felt worse and their blood pressure rose. Over the following six months, however, they visited the student health centre at about half the rate of a comparison group who wrote about trivial topics (Pennebaker & Beall, 1986; Pennebaker, 2018). The discomfort of saying it is often the doorway to relief.

Pennebaker himself describes that first study as underpowered, so the wider picture matters. A meta-analysis of 146 randomised studies found that expressive disclosure produces a real but modest benefit across psychological and physical health outcomes (Frattaroli, 2006). Disclosure is a helpful discipline; it is no cure-all.

The brain offers one reason it helps. Putting a feeling into words reduces activity in the amygdala, the brain’s alarm centre, and engages the prefrontal regions that regulate emotion (Lieberman et al., 2007). A leader who can say “I am carrying more than I have admitted” has already begun to carry it differently. Naming the weight is the first step in setting it down.

A practice for the strong one

Strength and openness can live in the same leader. Here are five practices that keep both:

1. Name it privately first. Write for fifteen minutes about what we are carrying, facts and feelings together, for a few days in a row (Pennebaker & Beall, 1986; Frattaroli, 2006).
2. Label the feeling in one sentence. “I feel stretched thin and uncertain.” Naming engages the brain’s regulating systems (Lieberman et al., 2007).
3. Build a circle outside the hierarchy. A coach, a mentor, a peer in another organisation, a spouse or a counsellor. This is where we let ourselves be fully known, without the status costs that personal disclosure can carry inside the team (Gibson et al., 2018).
4. Ask for help on the hard problem. Seek advice directly and specifically. It is more likely to be granted than we think, and it raises our credibility (Flynn & Bohns, 2008; Brooks et al., 2015).
5. Hold strength as a capacity, not a rule. Ask ourselves weekly: Am I steady because I chose to be, or because I believe I am not allowed to be anything else? Research links the felt obligation to be strong, together with silencing our own needs, to depressive symptoms (Abrams et al., 2019).

One caution belongs here. If persistent low mood, exhaustion, sleep problems or a sense of numbness accompany the constant pressure, these deserve professional attention. A psychologist, counsellor or doctor is a wise next step, and seeking one is itself an act of strength.

Return to the managing director in the car park. Suppose she calls a trusted friend and says, “I’ve held everyone up this week. I need someone to hold me up for ten minutes.” Nothing about her leadership shrinks in that moment; something in her is restored. The strongest leaders are known by someone.