Episode 19: Flourish Where Your Feet Are: A Framework for Thriving at Work

Too often, high-achieving professionals think flourishing means landing the next role, title, or opportunity. But what if the key to thriving is right where you are? In this episode, Lori Pine—former corporate VP turned executive coach—introduces her CRUSH framework, a powerful tool designed to help you clarify goals, strengthen relationships, optimize processes, and protect your boundaries so you can flourish exactly where your feet are.

Packed with actionable advice and reflection prompts, Lori also shares how companies can create conditions where women win—building visibility, joy, and professional growth into the culture itself.

🔑 Key Takeaways

• Flourishing isn’t future-based—it’s present-focused. Thriving starts with making the most of your current role, not waiting for the next opportunity.
  
• The CRUSH Framework:
  
• C – Clarify: Define what success means to you right now so you’re not chasing someone else’s version of achievement.
  
• R – Re-engage: Step back into visibility by showing up, speaking up, and contributing with confidence.
  
• U – Upgrade: Identify processes, habits, or workflows you can refine to work smarter, not harder.
  
• S – Strengthen: Build authentic, strategic relationships that fuel both your growth and your joy.
  
• H – Healthy Boundaries: Protect your time and energy so you can sustain momentum without burning out.
  
  
• 30-Day Flourish Sprint: How to test the CRUSH framework in real life for immediate momentum.
  
• Conditions for Women to Win: Leaders can (and must) design environments that support visibility, equity, and growth.
  
• Boundaries are a leadership strategy. Saying no is often the most powerful way to say yes to what matters.

📝 Mentioned in This Episode

• The CRUSH Framework for professional flourishing
  
• The 30-Day Flourish Sprint challenge
  
• Strategies for leaders to create inclusive, growth-oriented cultures
  
• The importance of visibility and joy in sustaining success
  
  

🎯 Who Is This For

• Professionals feeling stuck in their current role and craving growth
  
• Leaders and HR partners seeking frameworks to retain and engage high performers
  
• Women navigating visibility and boundaries in male-dominated environments
  
• Anyone ready to thrive without waiting for “someday”
  
  

✨ Reflection Prompts

• What does flourishing mean to me in my current role?
  
• Which part of the CRUSH framework could make the biggest impact for me right now?
  
• Where do I need stronger boundaries to protect my energy and joy?
  
• As a leader, what conditions can I create to help women in my team flourish?

🌟 Want to Go Deeper?

• Connect with Lori on LinkedIn or Instagram.
• Learn more about coaching, retreats, and leadership support at loripine.com.
  
  

🎧 Listen to Episode 19 now:

• Apple Podcasts
• Spotify
• Youtube

Transcript

Welcome to the Joy CEO podcast, where ambition meets aspiration and leadership gets a whole lot more joyful. I'm your host, Lori Pine, former corporate VP turned executive coach here to help you grow your impact and your wellbeing. If you're a high achieving professional in a corporate role driven, experienced, and ready to uplevel your career while reclaiming more clarity, confidence, and joy.

This is the show for you. Each week I talk with powerhouse leaders about what it takes to really rise without losing yourself along the con. Because rising isn't just about doing more. It's about leading with vision, sharpening your emotional intelligence, and having the courage to self-reflect along the way.

Let's get to it.

Hello, I'm Lori Pine, the joy, CEO. So glad to be here with you today. Today we are going to talk about flourish where your feet are. So let me ask you, do you [00:01:00] feel like you are currently flourishing or are you floundering? Let's be honest. If you're not sure, we are going to get really clear today because flourishing isn't about a title or a new boss.

It's about how you show up right where your feet are, and that means being in your own hula hoop. I often talk about the hula hoop, so. Listen to some of these statistics. Roughly one in four women are unsatisfied at work and nearly half of all women are scanning for new roles. And if they're not actively scanning for new roles, their antennas kind of up about what could be possible.

And so we've got two jobs that we're gonna try to accomplish in today's episode. We're going to [00:02:00] really speak to companies needing to create conditions where women can win, and how we individually need to plan to reengage and be seen. Yes. So what do our companies need to do, but what do we need to do in order to maybe show up a little bit differently?

So here's what's gonna happen. I'm gonna give you a simple framework to crush the role you're in. And you are then gonna be able to use this framework to rise, pivot, or find some peace. Hopefully some joy. And we're gonna set some concrete moves for leaders who want their teams to flourish and not just function.

So grab a pen if you can. Maybe you're out for a walk, maybe you're driving, but if you can, grab a pen. Because we're going to get specific, and this might be a very joyful but very [00:03:00] actionable episode for you. Okay? So what flourish actually means. It is definitely not about doing more. I think you're probably already doing more than most humans are capable of, but it means doing what matters most.

And let's talk about three parts to this. You wanna do what matters most with one year outcomes, delivering the few results that actually move the business. So we don't wanna do more things. We want to do a few things better. Those few things that are actually going to be visibly noticed. Two. We want visibility.

Make your impact easy to see and to repeat. And then three, we want joy. And joy can be your energy. So work in alignment so [00:04:00] you're steady instead of constantly feeling depleted and spent. Alright, then I'm gonna give you this Crush framework because I want you to crush the role you're in and I've used this in a talk that I've done and people were hashtagging me after the fact.

Hashtag Crush the role you're in. So this is where we're at and it has an acronym. So the C for Crush is clarify the real mandate. What is it that is really being asked of you, and how can you get incredibly specific? So ask your leader, give me the three outcomes that define excellence for this quarter.

What are they? And then align your calendar to those three things and declutter the rest. If your calendar is filled with stuff, meetings, [00:05:00] appointments, client appointments, vendor relationships that do not align to those three things, cancel them. And you can explain this meeting does not line up to the initiatives that will get me to the results that I need to get to. And you need to have boundaries around that, but the clarity helps. Okay.

R - relationships that move the work. Relationships are the key to life, the key to life in everything. But map five key stakeholders. Book 15 minute connects with them and ask them, what does great look like for you in your chats? Ask them that. Ask them, what's one way I can make your job easier this month?

And when you have these really candid conversations and you're clear about. Where somebody else's barriers [00:06:00] might be that you could unblock, that reciprocity is going to go a very, very long way. U - upgrade the system, pick one process, and improve it by 10%. Remember 1% daily improvements add up to 37% improvement over a year.

That's according to James Clear and Atomic Habits. So in a very short period of time, you can see a 10% improvement, but it happens with these 1% kind of small micro improvements. Document, the before and the after. What is the one process that you need to improve? That right now might be a little bit sloppy, might be a little bit clunky, might even be a little bit ambiguous and your team doesn't have real clarity around it.

So name it, give it something clever. You know, [00:07:00] the Q3 crushing my goals flow, processes, whatever it might be. Name it, and then share it. Share it out. S show your wins. Use a three by three visibility rhythm. A weekly note with three outcomes. Three partner shout outs. Three artifacts like an artifact would be a brief, a dashboard or some sort of demonstration.

It might be a a client testimonial where something was sent to you in an email. You would screenshot that in something from somebody on your team that would just demonstrate what it is that your team is doing. Because here's the thing that happens if you're not showing your wins. Nobody knows. They just don't know, you know.

But without sharing them out, other people don't know. And other [00:08:00] leaders are busy and other leaders are thinking about the work that they need to do and what they need to accomplish. And believe it or not, they're probably not thinking about you the majority of the time. So in order to be your own best advocate, show your wins.

H our final letter, healthy Boundaries. This is my hula hoop theory. Okay? Hold what's in your circle, your priorities, your behavior, your decisions, what you let into your hula hoop, where you put your energy, where you get distracted. Where you let things onto your calendar that do not align to the three things that are gonna move the needle for the quarter, for the year to finish out 2025 strong.

And what's going to happen is you need to make decisions that allow [00:09:00] you to know. Whatever comes onto your plate, something else needs to go off of your plate, and it has to be that one for one exchange because in this very finite focus that you're gonna have to go after only three things. You can't keep filling the plate so big that it then runeth over.

Okay, so crush, are we really clear about Crush? We are going to clarify what is the real outcomes we're looking for are relationships that are gonna move the work U, we're gonna upgrade the system. S, show your wins, and H that's my hula hoop theory. So you can have some healthy boundaries. Now. Let's see if we can implement some sort of a 30 day flourish sprint. Week one, clarify the mandate and the stakeholder map.

Get some real understanding about what it is that you're going to [00:10:00] do and the who around helping you. Week two, ship one quick visibility, win. Send the email, have the conversation, get that information together all in one place so that you can deliver it when the time is right, you'll know when that time is right.

I used to send a Friday summary of the week to my boss. Every Friday, did he reply to that email every Friday? He absolutely did not, but I made sure I sent it every Friday. And then when he needed to prepare an update on what was happening with my part of the business, he would go to that email and reference it.

And I didn't know that until probably three to four months after I had started that process. So even if you're not getting immediate gratification or immediate responses. Understand that that will become a very resourceful tool for your leaders. In fact, it was [00:11:00] so resourceful for my leader that I then in turn asked my team to do that for me when I was leading a large team.

Okay, week three, upgrade one process. Start with 1%. You will get to 10%, but we're gonna start with the 1% improvements to this process. And start to see the magic that's going to happen. And then week four, share results and ask for next level scope. We really want to be clear about I delivered X and improved y quantifiable result.

I'm ready to lead. A, B and C next. How do we make that happen? And you're gonna be able to start to have more robust conversations about your development, your growth, where you're gonna go next in your career as you post more of these wins up on the board. [00:12:00] For companies, there's eight ways to really help women flourish, and so you might wanna write these doubts so that you can take them to your HR partner or your company.

One, make flexibility, consequence free, state it, then prove it in promotions. We're in a time right now where a lot of companies are mandating returns to the office, and I have several clients who are receiving, uh. Documented updates from HR about how many times their badge was swiped in a given week, and were they, or were they not in the office.

One even got penalized for being outta the office at a conference and, you know, it was an HR glitch, but it was still kind of a, a message that came into her inbox that like she was in trouble. So flexibility being consequence free is certainly a [00:13:00] priority. If you want to keep your women who almost half of them are looking elsewhere for a job.

Okay, number two, a right sized workload. The quarterly stop doing reviews and capacity checks. We need to be having these conversations with the people that we lead, the women that we lead. And HR, I would hope is incorporating that into a review process. But if they're not, you can review that. You can have those conversations.

What are the things we need to stop doing, and where are you with capacity and understanding where people are out. Okay. And then question three would be around clarity. You know, where can we have career clarity so that it's not a mystery. Perhaps there's one to two page growth maps with next level [00:14:00] scope for each position within the company.

That might be a tall ask, but just to know that that sort of work is in progress would be really helpful for people to start to understand where they can go. Visibility system, monthly impact snapshots, three Outcomes cross thanks and links. We wanna make sure that there is a visibility system going on within the organization, and if not in the entire organization, then within the department or the team that you lead, you want to make sure that you are highlighting impact. If not for yourself, then for those that you lead and then celebrate.

Celebrate first. It's really important that we celebrate. And that then we look to improve. We want to end any postmortems that just steal joy because that's not the point. The [00:15:00] point is, let's focus on the 99% that went right and not the 1% that might need a little bit of tweaking. So celebrate your teams and then make sure that you really cement the wins first before you do any sort of, well, we could have done this a little bit better for next time.

Number six, manager enablement, 20 minute career conversations, energizers blockers, next steps. All of that really helps managers become better leaders and an organization needs that in order to really flourish. Sponsor, don't just mentor. Senior sponsors open the doors to projects, rooms, clients, sponsors will take somebody under their wing, and then that person will be really top of mind when they're behind closed doors.

And there are opportunities for advancement, [00:16:00] opportunities for projects, special projects, opportunities for visibility. Just to be showcased, maybe to be on a panel, maybe to be selected for a leadership training. And so sponsorship is really important and the more a company can expand their sponsorship opportunities within the organization, the better all employees will be.

Then fund external community, you know, paying for credible women's networks and employee resource groups, peer circling, peer circles, all incredibly helpful. I happen to be on the board of a organization called Next Up. I'm on the board of the New York chapter, and that's an incredible organization that companies can be involved in and really benefit from.

Next year, next step, we'll celebrate 25 years of really advancing all women in business. That's their mission. [00:17:00] So your company too can get involved in something like that to engage female employees, to stay involved, become part of something bigger, represent the company at those sorts of events, and meet other ambitious women who are flourishing and having conversations about what it's like to flourish in the job that you're in so that you can then be seen and be ready for the next role.

Okay. For the individual. Re-engage and be seen. Re-anchor what three outcomes matter most. Align your week accordingly, be quotable. Send that three by three update so that you know your boss and your boss's boss even can easily champion you. They can very quickly say, oh my gosh, do you know what this team is doing?

Do you know what the leader on that team is doing? You, you won't even believe it. And all of those things become soundbites because you [00:18:00] hand fed them the soundbite. Ask for scope. Tie a crisp result to a clear ask. Those results are so important and you wanna make sure that you're really clear about the ask.

Protect your fuel, your energy matters. One weekly focus block with two firm stop times can make all the difference. And it can't be a focus block that you're just gonna let other people run over. It needs to be protected, sacred time.

And then rebuilding your community and making sure that you are joining or reactivating in a circle outside of your company to connect with people that will fuel your energy, bring you some joy, remind you of who you are. Ideally, I would recommend two peer calls per month. And make one generous intro. When we [00:19:00] spread that generosity, that joy to others, it comes back to us tenfold.

So make sure you are being a conduit in that sort of way and just watch what happens to you. It really is amazing, but. In order to do so, you really need to put yourself out there and make sure that you are leaving some space in your very busy schedule for those important connects. Okay? Pitfalls to avoid over-functioning, doing too much.

You can't be the fixer for everything. You just can't be. You don't wanna be. Perfectionism. We're not looking for perfectionism. We want progress. That's what we want, and if mistakes happen, that's okay too. That's usually where we learn the most, is when we've made a mistake. And do not avoid celebrating.

Celebrate first. [00:20:00] Reflect second. Joy fuels performance. When you want your team to perform, you need to make sure that they are not coming from an empty tank. You need to put fuel back in the tank for them. And in closing, we are going to flourish where our feet are. But that doesn't mean that you'll never leave.

It doesn't mean that the next promotion isn't on its way to you. What it means is that you are so focused on your standard of excellence and the work that you do, that you are absolutely going to crush it in the role that you're in. And that is going to be so obvious to anybody looking at you as a potential option for a role that they might have to fill, that they may just tap you on the shoulder and all the formalities of posting and interviewing and all that may not even have to [00:21:00] come into play because of the strength that you are demonstrating.

And for companies create conditions where women can win. Women, make sure you're bringing clarity, visibility, and joy to the role that you have. That's a sign of your energy. That's a sign of the power you have as a leader, and that is how you're gonna finish the year strong. So reflection prompts that I have for you, I have a few.

What are my three outcomes this quarter that I'm looking to do? Who are my five stakeholders I must deepen my relationship with now. And what process can I improve by 1% that is going to lead to a 10% improvement by the end of the year? Is there a one sentence sound bite that captures my impact? And that may require some work and some tweaking, but once you really latch onto that, [00:22:00] that becomes your brand statement.

Then for leaders, which of the eight moves will we implement this month? Is there anything that can happen that you can actually put into place for your team? So with that flourish where your feet are. Become the best version of you. It's really easy to feel stuck or stagnant. Not sure what the next move is for you.

There's a lot of headlines out there about what's happening in the job market and companies, and you don't wanna pay attention to that. You wanna pay attention to the gifts that you have and what you are bringing to work each and every day. If you are craving community while you do this work, I am building a community.

I actually have two spots left for something that I'm starting this fall, I would love to have you consider becoming a part of that. I also have a couple of spaces left for my one-on-one private [00:23:00] coaching. It just might be the right time for you to get some very customized private coaching with me where you can bank on my 25 years of leading large global corporate teams.

Okay. This is your space to grow and be seen and to lead with joy. If you have any questions, you can find me at loripine.com or on LinkedIn. I look forward to hearing from you. Please let me know what you thought of this episode by subscribing. Hitting a five star review and sharing it with a friend.