In this focused and energizing solo episode, I invite you to rethink how you approach the year ahead by embracing just two priorities—one for business and one for personal life. I share why narrowing your focus isn’t about doing less for the sake of it, but about creating space for what truly matters.

Inspired by the symbolism of the Fire Horse year and the proven framework from Brian Moran’s The 12 Week Year, I walk you through how passion, intensity, and action can work with you—not against you—when they’re paired with clarity. I also share my own two priorities, the mindset shifts I had to make, and how letting go of non-essential commitments has already created momentum, relief, and renewed energy.

If you’re tired of spinning your wheels or carrying the weight of too many goals, this episode is an invitation to simplify, focus, and move forward with intention.

🔑 Key Takeaways:

Two Priorities Are Enough
I truly believe you don’t need a long list of goals to have a meaningful year. I’m focusing on just two priorities—one in my business and one in my personal life—and the clarity has been game-changing.
Audience follow-up → If you stripped everything back, what are the two things that matter most right now?

Fire Horse Energy: Passion Without Overwhelm
For me, the Fire Horse year represents courage, intensity, and forward momentum—but only when that fire is contained. Scattered energy leads to burnout; focused energy leads to transformation.
Audience follow-up → Where are you spreading yourself too thin instead of directing your fire?

The Problem With Doing Too Much
I talk honestly about how overcommitting can look productive on the surface, but often keeps us stuck and exhausted. Sometimes “busy” is just a way to avoid making clear decisions.
Audience follow-up → What are you holding onto out of habit rather than alignment?

The 12 Week Year Framework
Using the 12-week sprint model has helped me shift from long, overwhelming timelines to focused action. I explain why 12 weeks creates urgency without pressure—and how it keeps goals realistic and achievable.
Audience follow-up → What would meaningful progress look like for you in the next 12 weeks?

Letting Go Is a Leadership Skill
One of the biggest lessons I share is this: letting go is not failure—it’s leadership. When I released what wasn’t essential, everything else began to move faster and feel lighter.
Audience follow-up → What do you need to say no to in order to fully support your top priorities?

🔎 Mentioned in the Episode:

• The 12 Week Year by Brian Moran – The goal-setting framework I use to create focus and momentum
• The Fire Horse Year – A symbolic lens I use for passion, clarity, and intentional action
• My Personal and Business Priorities – Real examples of what narrowing my focus looks like in practice
  
  

✨ Reflection Prompts:

• If I could only move two things forward this year, what would they be?
• Where has “more” been costing me peace, energy, or clarity?
• What might change if I trusted focus instead of force?
  
  

🧠 Who This Episode Is For:

• Entrepreneurs and leaders who feel stretched too thin
• High achievers craving progress without burnout
• Anyone entering a new season and ready to lead with intention
• Listeners curious about aligned goal-setting and sustainable momentum

📩 Want to Go Deeper?

Follow Lori on LinkedIn to continue the conversation

• Book a Leadership Strategy Call with Lori: loripine.com

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Transcript

Hi, and welcome to the Joy CEO podcast. I'm your host, Lori Pine, and I am so glad you are here with me today. If you are new, welcome. This podcast is for women who are leading or who want to be leading in a way that feels joyful instead of exhausting. I talk about joy as a leadership strategy, not as a bunch of fluff.

It's for corporate executives, the entrepreneurs, the hustlers, the doers, the movers and the shakers. And so if you are holding it all together and wondering if there's another way to do this, you are in the right spot. Today we are talking about the other way because if we just entered the year of the fire horse.

Passion, focus, intensity, and action. You might be thinking you actually need to do more, more hustle, more focus, get 10 new goals, you know, add them to your list. [00:01:00] I want to ask you a different question. What if you only had two priorities this year? Just two, not 10, not five, two. One for your business and one for your personal life.

Could you do it? That's what we're gonna talk about in this episode. So three things you're gonna take away. One, why Two priorities might just be the most radical thing you do all year long. Two, how I'm using this framework right now in my life, what I have to say no to in order to make it work. And number three, what passionate focus actually feels like when you stop trying to do everything all at once.

Well, let's get to it. Okay. Here's the problem. We are doing too much. You inherently know this. In fact, you probably gone to lunch or coffee [00:02:00] or Happy hour and sat around with your girlfriends and griped about this. There's just too much to do, too much on your plate. You're exhausted, you're overwhelmed, and you are at the point of complete and utter burnout.

And yet here you are. You're doing it all, growing the business, trying to lose 20 pounds, reading more books, trying to learn Italian, try to spend more time with the kids. You're taking up yoga. You're, you might even be launching a podcast on the side. You're writing a book, you're fixing the relationship.

You're organizing the garage. And for all I know, you have a, a broken relationship that you are single handedly going to fix. That's what happens. And by March. You're gonna be exhausted, flat out, cranky, and irritated with everybody, and you'll have made zero progress on any of those things that you set out to do.

And then you are gonna blame yourself. You're gonna put the blame [00:03:00] all on you and say, I'm a failure. I didn't accomplish anything. But here's the truth, it's not you. You didn't fail. You just tried to do too many things at once. In a fire horse year, we are not adding anything onto the list. Nothing goes extra onto your plate.

We are actually going to subtract things off. We are going to talk about cutting out everything that doesn't matter, so that you can actually pour all of your energy into the two things that do matter. And this is so important that you take this in, so I want you to sit with this very question. What if you only had two priorities this year?

What if everything else, all the shoulds, all the maybes, all the coulds, all the woods, all the things that you think that you're supposed to do, what if you just let them go? [00:04:00] What would that feel like? Wow. Nervous, anxious, possibility. Sit with that. I'm going to give you a framework. So Brian Moran wrote the book, the 12 week year, and I actually have had an opportunity to meet him a couple of times.

He's tremendous. Outgoing, quite friendly, but he's written this book called The 12 Week Year, and it is a brilliant, yet pretty simple framework for how to approach exactly what we are talking about and it works. I've used it and here's why I think it's so relevant to this conversation. You can lose track of your goals.

Over a 52 week year. So what was important in January is literally like forgotten or has manifested into and [00:05:00] morphed into something different by October. And you're like, wait, what? What was I working on? Why was that even important? And so when you break it down into smaller chunks of time. It actually has a chance to gain momentum because you're much more focused and the clarity is present.

So instead of setting goals for the entire year, we break them down into a 12 week sprint. So 12 weeks is actually long enough to make progress, but short enough that you can actually stay focused and energized. Remember, energy is so important. And you can't really drift for 12 weeks the way you can drift for 12 months.

You can actually stay contained in this tight little timeframe. So for the next 12 weeks, what if you picked two priorities, one for your business life and one for your personal life, and you [00:06:00] go all in on them. That's it. That's the whole framework. And by the end of the 12 weeks, you reassess. Did it work?

Did it not work? Did you keep the same two? Would you keep the same two going forward? Maybe you pick new ones, but you're always just gonna go with these two in this fire horse energy. Now maybe there's another time when you would actually add more, but because of this fire horse energy and what's happening right now, two is all we're going to go with.

And because we're gonna be new at it, we really want to do this and do this well because we want to prove to ourselves and to our brain, you know, the neuroscience side of this. We want to prove to our brain that this works and we don't want to prove that this is yet again, one more thing that does not work, and then tell our brain, see, I told you so.

So let me show you [00:07:00] my two priorities for this 12 week sprint. How they're showing up in my own life right now. So my business priority is to focus on the speaking side of my career and to get more speaking events. That's it. That's the goal. Everything I do in my business right now is in service to that one thing.

So what am I doing? What does that look like? I am refining my talk. I'm finalizing my speaker reel. I'm sending out applications to speak at events. I'm connecting with people who can bring me into their companies to talk. So if you have an opportunity for more joy in your company, if you think your employees might be a little on the low side of joy.

I'm your girl. I would love to have a conversation about it. I just did a virtual talk this week with a company. About 200 people were on on Zoom, virtually. The topic [00:08:00] was the productivity trap and how we all get trapped into this productivity, and yet Joy really was the answer, and I got such tremendous feedback.

And it's not about me getting the feedback, it's about the impact and the things that they can do to actually change how they're showing up and doing the work to actually have a better culture. A, a better environment where they're doing work that matters, that moves the needle in so many different ways.

So in order to stay true to my goal, that moves me to more speaking events. That gets my message out to more people. That shows that joy as a leadership strategy is possible. There are things that I have to say no to. So the thing that I am not doing right now is I am not writing a book. I had to put that on pause.

Was that a hard decision? Yes. And I know it [00:09:00] sounds crazy and everyone says, if you wanna be a thought leader, if you want authority, you have to be an author. But guess what, I will do that just not right now. If I tried to do the book and the speaking. I would fail because I would do them both poorly and then I would think that I'm the problem and I can't afford that.

My mental wellbeing can't afford that, so I had to pick one. Speaking it is, and I am full steam ahead with speaking. My personal priority is to move my body more. I. Have been, let's, how shall we say it? I have been really lacking in this. I've been sitting at this desk for so many hours pouring into this business, trying to build it, launch it, and they say, sitting is the new [00:10:00] smoking.

And that scares me. Like, I need to get these little legs of mine moving. I wanna feel strong, I wanna have energy, and I, I want to. You know, work on some of these cortisol levels that I'm reading about. So here's what I say no to less couch time, less movies, and Netflix. Less of that passive relaxation that feels so good after a really long day with clients and decision making and all of the things that go on from 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM.

That leaves me feeling worse later. And so I really am trying to say no to some of those things that would just feel like a warm, cozy blanket with Netflix and. I'm choosing movement. Instead, I'm, I have an accountability partner. Shout out to Jane. We're going to some classes together, [00:11:00] and here's what's wild.

It's actually working because I'm not trying to do 10 things. I'm doing two and I'm actually making progress, and so I am actually doing the same thing that I'm asking you to do. So how to choose your two priorities. So if you're sitting with this question, what if I only had two priorities this year?

Here's how to figure out what they are for business. What's the one thing that if you actually did it would really change the entire trajectory of what's going on right now? Now, this doesn't need to be the thing that would sound impressive or the thing that everybody else in your department or everybody else in your industry is doing, but the one thing that would actually move the needle for you.

For me, that's speaking. I love it. I love speaking. I love getting up in front of [00:12:00] people. I feel like I have a message to share and I want to share it now because speaking gets me in front of the right. People. It helps to build my authority, it helps to build my business and it leads to clients, and that's really the lever that, that helps me.

Now, for personal, what's the one thing that would make you feel more like yourself or maybe even. Like a version of yourself that you are craving, that you're missing, that you know is possible, but you're not even sure how to access again, not a thing you should do because we're not shooting on ourselves.

We are just really trying to access that which makes us feel good about ourselves. Again. For me, that's movement. I know when I move my body, I feel better. I was an athlete all the way through college. I want to be [00:13:00] strong, I want to sleep better. And as I age, I know that lower body strength, upper body strength will make all the difference as I age.

So for you, what are your two, one business, one personal. Then you protect them. Really protect them, and not let other people's needs come before your own. And then let's talk about what passionate focus actually feels like. That sort of passionate, focused energy. So we all know what Hus Hustle is. We have been hustling for years, decades, and that hustle feels frantic.

It feels like you're running in 10 different directions all at once, and nothing is working. People aren't listening. Nobody's doing what you say. You're not even sure that you've communicated the right vision, but [00:14:00] passionate focus feels really clear. It's as though things have become crystallized and it feels like you know exactly where you're going, and you're moving toward that direction with intention.

Under intention, hustle's gonna drain you, but this. Passionate focus is really going to energize you. So, because when you're only doing two things, you have this bandwidth to actually do them well. You're not scattered, you're not frantic, you're not exhausted. You're really just showing up in this most.

Authentic, wholesome version of yourself, and you're really clear about what you're saying no to and what you're saying yes to, maybe even hell yes to. So that is the fire horse energy. It's not about working harder at all. It's about working with the intensity and the things that actually matter to you and that you know are going to change things for [00:15:00] you for the moment that you're in.

And. The liftoff, if you will, that you really want. And so if you're feeling burnt out right now, it's not because you're not doing enough. In fact, it's likely because you're doing way, way, way too much. And so what can you cut down and eliminate? And what if you could only pick two things and went all in for this 12 week year challenge?

So listen. I know this is probably asking a lot of you, you're ambitious, you take pride in all the things that you do, but I want you to take pride in the quality of what you do and really getting visible on this standard of excellence for two things, so that you can be bold and you can gain some momentum.

Remember, esteemable acts, [00:16:00] build esteem. And so the more you pour into these two things and the more you see success in these two things, the more you are going to feel good about you, where you're going, how you're getting there, and exactly who it is that you are becoming, not someday right now and over the next 12 weeks.

So. Two things. What are you gonna let go of? What are you gonna say no to? And make space for just these two things. I'm Lori Pine, the joy, CEO. I am so privileged that I get to do this with you every single week. I would love to hear what your two things are. Send me a note, [email protected]. Hit me up on Instagram at Lori Pine or over on LinkedIn.

Same thing. Just share with me what's going on for you. I love it when I get your messages, they just light up my day. [00:17:00] Thanks so much for listening. Don't forget to give a five star rating and share this with your bestie. We never wanna leave our besties behind. See you next week. Thanks for listening to the joy CEO.

I hope today's conversation left you feeling seen. Stretched and a little more grounded in your own joy, if something resonated, be sure to hit subscribe. Leave a five star review and share this episode with someone walking a similar path. And if you're ready to take this work deeper, connect with me on LinkedIn or Instagram at Lori Pine.

Or head over to my website, lori pine.com, to learn more about coaching retreats and how we can work together. Because joy isn't just personal, it's powerful, and when you lead with joy, you don't just rise, you bring others with you. Until next time, keep leading with heart and don't forget to claim your joy.