“It’s Supposed to Be Hard”: How Terryn Drieling Is Disrupting the Way Rural America Heals

By the time Terryn Drieling sat down to record an episode for Your Ag Empire, she’d already spent her morning the way she spends most of her days — raising cattle, raising kids, and raising hell for the status quo.

Drieling, a Nebraska rancher and writer, isn’t out to put a shiny filter on rural life. She start fires, or at least keeps the right ones burning. As the founder of the Good Movement Collective, a rural relationship guide, and the host the Good Movement Draws Good Movement podcast, she’s built a community rooted in the belief good movement draws good movement.

That phrase, which she first learned through stockmanship, has since become her guidepost — not just for working cattle, but also for rebuilding relationships, finding self-worth, and doing the hard, slow work of emotional healing.

“We need to normalize being humans who are still learning how to be humans,” Drieling said on the Your Ag Empire podcast. “There are a lot of us walking around dysregulated and calling it normal.”

Drieling and host Holly Haralson wasted no time diving deep into not only what Drieling does, but why she does it, and what she’s lost, found, and reclaimed along the way.

Terryn Drieling

At first glance, she’s exactly what you’d expect of someone from the Sandhills of Nebraska: gritty, funny, and hands-on. She lives and ranches with her husband and their three kids, and she’s built a business that lives at the intersection of cow work, coaching, and courage.

And, she’s not in the business of pretending it’s all easy.

“When we start peeling things back,” she said, “it’s like, oh, there's some shit there that we haven’t been taking care of.”

What makes Drieling’s work different is that she’s not preaching from a mountaintop. She’s walking it with her people. Her clients are not just farmers and ranchers, they’re humans, often exhausted, often unsure how to ask for help, and often the kind of people who’ve been taught that talking about feelings is a luxury reserved for people who don’t have to fix fence before dark.

Terryn Drieling

“My body’s always known how I feel, even when I couldn’t put words to it,” Drieling said. “It just kept getting louder until I finally listened.”

That body knowledge, she says, is a critical tool. It’s how she helps her clients, many of them rural women, build awareness, process pain, and change the way they move through the world. “When we want to change the way we communicate, we have to change the way we relate to our bodies,” she said.

It’s heady stuff — until Drieling delivers it in her signature plain-spoken tone, like someone who’s been in the barn too long to bother with jargon.

“There’s so much of this healing work that we expect to be neat and linear,” she said. “But it’s supposed to be hard. That doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It means you’re doing it.”

Through her one-on-one guidance and group coaching, Drieling has created a lane all her own. And rural America is showing up. “We’re creating new patterns,” she said. “Not perfect ones, but better ones.”

By the end of the episode, Haralson summed it up best: “I think folks are going to leave this conversation knowing they’re not crazy — they’re just in the middle of hard, good work.”

Not fixing people, but walking beside them, slow and steady, like a good ranch horse who knows the trail home is what Drieling is all about.

Because in the end, the goal isn’t perfection. It’s movement. Good movement.