Episode 8: The Cost of Being the Exception (And How to Break Free)

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If you’ve ever been called the first, the only, or the one who always figures it out—this episode is for you.

Being “the exception” can sound like a compliment. But for many high-achieving professionals, it’s a heavy, invisible contract. You carry the expectations of your family, your company, and your community—all while trying to hold yourself together.

In this solo episode, Lori opens up about:

• The emotional cost of being “the one who made it”

• What finally broke her high-performance façade

• How to shift from being the exception to the example

She also shares the three traps most high achievers fall into—and how to break free:

1. Getting rewarded for what should be shared

2. Normalizing the unreasonable

3. Feeling resentful but trapped in performance

Plus: Lori offers 3 powerful mindset shifts to help you lead from a place of alignment, not exhaustion.

🎧 Tune in now and explore what it means to lead with clarity, courage, and JOY.

Reflection Prompts:

• Where are you still striving to be the one who does it all?

• What might open up if you stopped being the exception and started being yourself?

🌀 Subscribe to The JOY CEO Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts.

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Transcript

Hello, this is Lori Pine, the joy, CEO, and I am happy to be here with you today. It is just you and me and we are going to talk about the cost of being the exception. You know what I mean by that? When you are the exception. You're exceptional and everybody knows it. And what I'm gonna share with you is how you can break free from this. 

So I was under the myth of the arrival. I was the first in my family to graduate from college. And not only did I graduate from college, but I did so with honors. I was a scholar athlete, and then I was the first to move away for a Fortune 500 job. The first to be the only woman in many corporate boardrooms, and I would have these experiences that the people who raised me really wouldn't be able to relate to because they weren't shared experiences. 

And with every first came an invisible contract. I needed to make it count. I needed to make them proud, and I needed to prove that the sacrifices that were made for me were not in vain. I felt a tremendous amount of responsibility for that, and the people that I know love to celebrate first. The only woman in the room, the one who broke through the underdog. 

We love to celebrate an underdog, the high achiever who always figured it out, but no one talks about what it costs to live as the exception, and you have been the one others admire. The one others rely on, but underneath the accolades can be this real sense of exhaustion, emotional labor, and quiet pressure to always be on. 

This isn't just your story, it's really a reality, silent or spoken reality for many ambitious professionals, especially women. So if I am speaking your language and this makes sense, let's keep going because I have got some juicy reality and then some perhaps tools to help you become the example instead of the exception. 

So let's dig in. When you are the exception, you carry the weight of the system, not just the role. And that can be such a burden. You're praised for making it work. Even when it's breaking you, people will notice, I don't know how you do it all. How does she do it all? And they talk about you, whether you're there or not. 

As though look at her. Isn't she just doing phenomenally? And you become this model, but not always the one being modeled after, maybe this sounds familiar. You can't just do well, you have to excel because you are representing more than just yourself. You're representing your family, you're representing where you come from, you're representing who you work for. 

And if you show any weakness or uncertainty. That's not really acceptable to you because then you think you won't belong. You carry the responsibility of opening doors while also proving that you deserve to walk through them, so you know that the women and the younger people coming behind you, you want to pull them along with you, but yet you're looking at doors ahead of you and asking yourself, do I have what it takes to go through those doors? 

When everybody around you is like, of course she does, but self-doubt starts to creep in. So here are the traps you're falling into. One. You get rewarded for what should be shared, like being the closer in every meeting, or the one everyone defers to, you are the one who stays late to fix presentations that somebody else messed up again and again and again. 

Instead of addressing the pattern, everyone just thanks you for being so reliable. Or you might see that somebody's not doing it right, and you just take the work on yourself and say, oh, let me fix that. That's in my wheelhouse. I know how to do that. It'll only take me five minutes and five minutes and five minutes and five minutes, and then before you know it, you're adding hours onto your work week. 

Okay? Number two, you've normalized the unreasonable. So like taking on big projects with no extra support or answering emails on vacation, the bar keeps getting higher and higher, but somehow you keep jumping over it. You keep clearing that bar, and so everyone just assumes that you're fine because you make it look easy. 

My therapist said to me one time, she said, Lori, your side of the street, your problem is that you make it look easy, and they believe you. That was a very big aha moment for me. Number three, you feel resentful, but you don't feel like you can stop or do it any differently. Yikes. Because here's the thing. 

You've been conditioned to prove and prove and prove your worth, and there's this voice that says, if you don't do it perfectly, they'll know you don't belong here. They'll know that you were a first, and maybe you shouldn't have been given that chance. So I wasn't just doing great work. I was doing it under the feel of this microscope and what looked like success on the outside really felt like I was just trying to survive on the inside. 

And I had so much fear of failing and what if I failed? And then my thinking would just go to this catastrophic thinking of all these horrible things that would happen. So let me tell you a little bit about my story and when all of this hit me, there was a moment when everything I thought I knew about success really crumbled. 

I was at the top of my game professionally. I worked for a company that I loved so much, and I loved my team and the people I worked with. I was one of the highest performers. You know, they did a nine box. I was in the top nine box ranking. There was literally nothing else I could do. I was crushing it, and then my mother complained of a back ache. 

It was right around the time of my 40th birthday, and five weeks later she was gone. What we thought was a backache was actually a rare, aggressive form of cancer, and none of us saw it coming, and that hit really, really hard, really hard. I was still reeling from losing her. I mean, the person who believed in me most, believed in me first, sacrificed so that I could be in those rooms. 

She was a working mom. She ran a successful restaurant. So when my company went through a reorg, despite being a high performer and being in that top nine box, I lost my job. And for the first time in my life I couldn't quite figure it out. I couldn't get my bearings, I couldn't just perform my way through it, and the scholar athlete in me just couldn't take me to the next level. 

I was completely caught off guard. I was stumbling, and I was unsure of what to do next. My therapist mentioned her again. She always taught me that when you don't know what to do, do nothing, and that's not always what you want to hear when you've just become unemployed. So I really was at a point when I did not know what to do, and I realized I had been climbing this ladder that I didn't build in shoes that may or may not have fit me. 

And the higher I got, the further away I fell for myself and it took losing pretty much everything, my mother, my job, my certainty, my trust in myself to see that the system I've been trying to prove myself worthy of was not really meant to sustain me. That system was not deserving of my trust and my faith. 

That moment, sitting in the wreckage of everything, that summer really was a turning point for me. It forced me to ask questions I had never asked myself before. What if I stopped trying to prove I belong and just started building something that actually fit? And that was really the moment when I realized I had two choices. 

One, I could scramble to get back to where I was, to prove once again that I could handle anything that was thrown at me. Or two, I could use this as a chance to break free from a system that had never really been designed for me to thrive in, only to survive in. I was only going to survive in that kind of dog eat dog, climb, climb, climb, do, do, do, prove, prove, prove sort of world. 

And for the first time in my life, I really chose differently. And here's what I learned about breaking free from the exception trap, that there are three ways that we can do it. One, choose alignment over approval. Now for somebody who thrives on approval and validation. I cannot tell you how hard this was or how long this took for me. 

I really had to stop contorting myself to fit into this version of leadership that others expected. You know, my boss's, boss's boss's version of who I was to be wasn't necessarily my version of who I was to be, and that took practice. That took. A strength that I really needed to dig into so that I could be clear on who I was to be as a leader, knowing that my way was valid, that my voice was powerful. 

Your way is valid, your voice is powerful. When I lost my job, I realized I'd been leading from this place of constant performance. Constant, constant, constant performance. Almost like the seal at the zoo who just performs for the audience, gets the treat, everybody claps and then they do it again. I was the seal always asking, will this make them proud? 

Will this make them clap? Will I get another treat? And instead of. Does this really feel true to who I am? Is this the work that makes me thrive and bring me to life? My mother didn't sacrifice so I could spend my life contorting to fit other people's expectations. She sacrificed so because she saw something beautiful in me and so that I could really truly be myself. 

I grew up in a small town in Maine, one traffic light. I graduated with less than 70 kids in my class and she knew that I had big dreams and she did everything she could to help me reach those. It, it was important that I get back in touch with those roots. And so let me ask you to ask yourself, is this me leading or is this me performing? 

Big question. Number two, stop carrying what isn't yours. Ooh, that's a doozy. You are not the fixer of every single problem, the emotional manager of every room or the safety net for broken systems. You do not have to fix everything, manage everything. Promise you don't. In my grief and job loss, I started to see all the weight I'd been carrying. 

That wasn't mine. It, it was remarkable. The company's broken systems, other people's comfort with my over performance, the pressure to be the poster child for making it for my hometown, none of that was my responsibility to fix or maintain none of it. So ask yourself, what am I holding that someone else can own? 

And number three, define success on your terms. Being the exception often means playing by rules that were not made for you. But legacy isn't about fitting in, it's about building differently. And at the end of our days when we're on our final breath, legacy will matter. When everything fell apart for me, I had to rebuild from scratch. 

And some of you might be in that very place right now. So for the first time, I really got to ask myself, what does success actually look like for me? Not my family's dreams, not for corporate metrics, but for the person I'm becoming. So you can ask yourself, what does success look like for you right now in this moment, in this season of your life? 

So. In closing, we are gonna move you from the exception to the example, knowing that you do not have to prove yourself one more day to belong. You've already earned your space. What's next in learning how to lead from joy, not exhaustion. Let me say that again. You can lead from joy not this burnt out version of you. 

I went from being the exception that proved that systems work to being the example of what's possible when you build differently, when you honor where you came from, while also honoring who you are becoming. So here's a reflection prompt for you. I'm gonna give you a couple where are you still striving to be the one who does it all? 

So for me that's in parenting. I wanna be the favorite parent. I wanna be all things to my boys because they matter so much to me. The second reflection prompt would be what might open up if you stopped being the exception and just started being yourself. The cost of being the exception is really too high, but the freedom of being authentically you, that is priceless. 

So I am cheering you on. Let me know what you think of this episode. Let me know what you think of going from being the exception to being the example. These are some real personal details I shared with you today, and I am invite you to send me a note and share with me your personal stories, what you are going through. 

I know it feels like a tough world out there, but remember that you can control what is in your hula hoop. You stand inside of a hula hoop, you only control what's inside that hula hoop, and that is you, your thoughts, your energy, your perspective, what you invite in. And so I encourage you, go gently. And remember, you can lead with joy. 

I'm glad to be doing it with you, and I look forward to seeing you right back here next week.