Summary:
In this episode, I unpack a pattern I see all the time in high-achieving women—including myself: react, respond, ruminate. It starts with a quick, often stress-driven reaction—a message, a decision, a comment—followed by a genuine attempt to clean it up and take responsibility. But then comes the part that really costs us: the rumination. The overthinking, the replaying, the self-punishment that steals our joy, presence, and ability to move forward. I share a personal story from a 2012 trade show where a decision I made spiraled into a weekend of overthinking—until I chose something different.

That shift is what I call “the turnaround.” Instead of staying stuck in my own head, I redirected my focus outward—being fully present with my two young sons and choosing service over self-absorption. That single decision interrupted the spiral and helped me come back with clarity, calm, and perspective. In this episode, I walk you through how to use the turnaround in your own life, reminding you that accountability doesn’t have to mean self-destruction—and that you get to come back to yourself, again and again.

🔑 Key Takeaways:

The React → Respond → Ruminate Loop Is Sneaky
I’ve lived this pattern: I react quickly, I try to repair it responsibly—and then I get stuck replaying it over and over.
Audience follow-up → Where in your life are you still mentally replaying something that’s already been handled?

Rumination Isn’t Responsibility—It’s Self-Punishment
I had to learn that beating myself up doesn’t make me more accountable—it just drains my energy and presence.
Audience follow-up → What if you replaced self-criticism with self-trust after you’ve made things right?

The Turnaround Breaks the Spiral
For me, the shift came when I stopped focusing on myself and chose to be fully present with others. That interruption changed everything.
Audience follow-up → The next time you spiral, who or what can you turn toward instead?

Presence Is More Powerful Than Perfection
That weekend, I could’ve stayed stuck in my head—but choosing to be with my kids brought me back to what actually mattered.
Audience follow-up → Where are you missing real-life moments because you’re stuck in your thoughts?

You Can Come Back With Clarity Later
When I gave myself space, I was able to return to the situation calmer, clearer, and more grounded.
Audience follow-up → What would it look like to trust that clarity will come—without forcing it?

🔎 Mentioned in the Episode:

• The “React, Respond, Ruminate” Pattern – A loop I’ve identified in high performers that keeps us stuck in overthinking
• The Turnaround Tool – My practice of shifting from self-focus to service and presence
• 2012 Trade Show Story – A defining moment that taught me how to interrupt the rumination spiral
  
  

✨ Reflection Prompts:

• What’s something you’ve already taken responsibility for—but are still punishing yourself over?
• What does “the turnaround” look like in your real, everyday life?
• Where can you choose presence over perfection today?
  
  

🧠 Who This Episode Is For:

• High-achieving women who struggle with overthinking and self-criticism
• Leaders who want to stay accountable without burning themselves out
• Anyone ready to break free from rumination and return to presence
• Professionals who want more peace, clarity, and emotional freedom in their day-to-day life

📩 Want to Go Deeper?

Follow Lori on LinkedIn to continue the conversation

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

🎧 Subscribe to The Joy CEO Podcast

⭐️ Leave a review to help other heart-centered leaders find the show

📲 Share this episode with someone who’s navigating pressure and wants to do it with more grace

Transcript

Hey friends, it's Lori Pine, the joy, CEO, and welcome to the Joy CEO podcast. Can I ask you something? Have you ever said or done something that you immediately wished you could take back? Apologized, made right? Done everything you were supposed to do. And still you couldn't let it go. Still let it follow you home.

Still let it steal your evening and ruin your weekend. If you're new here, welcome. I'm so glad you found us and to my people who show up week after week, you know I love you. Thanks for coming back this week. So I'm gonna tell you about a client who texted me this past Friday. This was exactly her situation.

She'd received this email. She reacted, she'd already hit send, and then she caught herself. She apologized. She tried to repair the situation, but [00:01:00] she still couldn't forgive herself. She was ruminating and she thought, I need to talk about this. And she texted me and she let me know what was going on, and she just was stuck in this spiral.

And I thought, you know what? I think we have all been there and we have all been in a situation like this. And I'm gonna talk about this on the podcast. So today we're gonna talk about this pattern that I see in really high achieving women, almost more than anyone else. I call it react, respond, ruminate.

And it's this loop, and we get stuck. And I'm going to give you the single most effective tool I know on how to get out of this. And once you have it, you'll use it for the rest of your life. Are you ready? Let's dive in. Okay, react, respond, [00:02:00] ruminate. Here's how it goes. Something happens. You're stressed, you are in your mode.

A stressful moment, a difficult situation, a conversation, a deadline, a provocation comes about and you react. Maybe you send an email you shouldn't have sent. Maybe you say something in a meeting that you wish you could take back. Maybe you make a call and it turns out. It wasn't the right call. You made a poor decision, or at least it feels that way.

In the moment the reaction happens. It's human. We are human, but it's done. And then you respond. You catch yourself, you reach out, you apologize. You try to make it right, you do the work of repair. That's just who you are. You don't want to have a mess, so you don't let things fester. You try to clean up your side of the street.

You own [00:03:00] your mistakes, you address them. That part you've got down. You can do that. But then here's what happens. The rumination, you cannot let it go, and this is where the real damage happens and you do it to yourself. I have done it to myself. It's not the reaction. It's not even in the repair, but it's in the part that comes after the loop that starts playing over and over and over again in your head on the drive home, in the shower, at dinner at 2:00 AM when you're wide awake and you're staring at the ceiling when you should be sleeping.

It's this replay, the second guessing, the spiral of what if I'd handled it differently? What must they think of me now? What does this say about who I am? And all of a sudden you put yourself on trial with, like, with judge and jury, but the mistake is over. The repair is done. [00:04:00] You, you've done all that, and yet you can't put it down.

And here's what that costs you. It doesn't just steal your evening. Or steal your weekend. It puts a shadow over everything and before any wins can come back. The good work that you've done gone and the success that should be sitting right there for you, that you had within the day that should be celebrated.

Nope, you can't do it because the rumination just swallows it all whole. So I wanna tell you a story. I was running a big trade show in 2012, and it was a massive production. It took months and months and months to plan. I was just one of many people. My boss was involved, his boss was involved. It was. A master production in execution, and it had gone [00:05:00] beautifully.

It was such a huge success. Every metric, every customer, every experience that people had with our brands, and everybody who came into our periphery throughout the three-day event complimented us, gave us such high praise. And I, I mean, we couldn't have asked for it to be better. And on the third day, we were to be there until noon.

And that morning my boss left. His boss left three quarters of the trade show left. It was a ghost town and a blizzard was coming in. And so it was about 10:00 AM We had two hours left to go and the snow was piling up. We had workers that were just waiting to take down all of the equipment, dismantle the entire setup, get it loaded into the white box trucks, and get out of New York City, [00:06:00] and I was really afraid.

We were gonna start to get into some dangerous weather, some slippery road conditions, and really put people in a precarious situation. And so I called my boss, no answer. I called his boss, no answer. So I made the call. We're going, we're gonna dismantle, we're gonna. Starts to take everything down and because the safety of my people mattered more than anything else, I really felt like it was the right call and I was really comfortable with it.

So everybody starts taking everything down. 10 minutes later, the CEO of the trade organization comes through with the CEO of a major customer. Oh my gosh. And they wanted a tour. They wanted to see all of our equipment. They wanted to go through the whole pony show. So we stopped dismantling. Some things are kind of part taken down, parts still up.

We go through [00:07:00] everything we can. Smiles are on our faces doing all the hoops and the bells and the whistles, and we showed them everything. It, it was fine, but when they left. One of the trade show people, the, the director, the senior director came by and said something to the effect of the CEO was not very impressed that we had an obligation to stay until noon.

How dare we start dismantling early? And my stomach sank. Oh my gosh, I am in so much trouble, was all I could think. And all I wanted was to make sure that everybody got home safely. I ruminated all weekend about this. I left a message from my boss. I told him what had happened and I, I didn't get a call back.

He was traveling and in my brain, everything started to unravel all the good that we had [00:08:00] done, all the praise that we had gotten, all the customers that we had entertained, all the new business that we had written contracts for. All that out the window, and all I could focus on was this one, CEO and the head of the trade organization.

And this one comment, and I can remember that feeling to this day, and it was really going to ruin my weekend, that weekend or not. And because I had something waiting for me at home, the rumination. Couldn't keep perseverating. I had two young boys who had missed their mom for three days, and so the moment I walked through the door, they came running and they needed me and they had stuff to tell me and stories and what happened at school and what the nanny did, and where they'd [00:09:00] been and what they'd had.

And they had so much to tell me. And so. They did not need the version of me that was still stuck in a loop about a CEO and another CEO and what somebody said that was so slighted and offhanded about a mishap and I, and in the middle of the game call that I made, and so I made a conscious choice. That I was gonna choose those two little boys over all of that.

And I chose to be present and to show up and to really try to get out of myself and out of what was happening for me and show up and be the best mom I could to those boys. And what that meant was playing hide and seek. It meant going outside and building a snowman. And getting the [00:10:00] sleds out and going sledding.

And the more I did that and the more hot cocoa I made, the less I was concerned about those CEOs and being of service to other people who are right in front of me instead of staying obsessed with the situation, I could no longer change, changed everything. And here's how that happened. The thing that had felt so catastrophic, the thing that was going to define all the work that I had done, the show that meant so much to me, the success that we had found that had landed me in so much trouble.

It all just started to dissipate. I forgot about it, and not because it didn't matter anymore, but by Sunday night it didn't. Feel so big or so terrible, and [00:11:00] that was just the thing that by Monday morning I needed, so that I could have a really adult rational conversation with my boss on Monday morning.

And that's what I did. That's the version of me that got to show up on Monday morning. I was calm, I stated the facts. I didn't react, I wasn't hysterical. And that's what I call the turnaround. And I wanna explain why it works, because I think it's important to understand this, not just to use as a tool, but to really trust it.

When you are deep in the rumination loop, you are completely self-absorbed. You can only focus on yourself. Your entire world has collapsed down around you because the thing that you did and what it means and what comes next, the more you focus on it, the bigger it gets and you're feeding it your attention.

You're just [00:12:00] feeding it into it like it's a big burning furnace and you're stoking it and putting coal into it. It takes everything you give it. The turnaround interrupts that loop. By doing the one thing your brain cannot simultaneously do. It puts someone else at the center, and when you put someone else at the center, you shift your focus on how you can be of service and when you can be present.

When you can be useful to someone else in the here and now, then you can't be obsessed with yourself and the mistake you made. You just can't be, and that neurological impossibility allows you to show up and be fully present for somebody else and get out of your own spiral. So the turnaround isn't that you're avoiding it and it's not that you're suppressing it or any sort of thing like that.

You are not even pretending that it didn't [00:13:00] happen. You're just saying that I'm not gonna give it all of my energy right now. And when you do that, it loses its power and it gets smaller and smaller and it even gets right sized because when we give it so much emotion and energy and charge. It's oversized.

And so what I'll tell you is what you're gonna find every single time is that when you come back to the thing that felt so terrible, it actually gets smaller. And it's not because the circumstances changed, but it's because you gave your brain a chance to actually breathe, process it, perhaps look at it from a different perspective.

While you weren't obsessing and ruminating over it. And so here's what I know about you is that you're not somebody who just makes mistakes carelessly and without giving it some [00:14:00] sort of thought. And you don't hurt people intentionally. So when you react in a way you're not proud of because you're human and we are all human, we never rise above the level of human, we are gonna make mistakes.

As long as we're on this planet and accepting that goes a long, long way. You might be tired, you might be stretched, you might be caring more than one human can possibly carry, but the fact that you care so much, the fact that it bothers you at all, the fact that you apologize and try to do better, that says everything.

About who you are at your core. So caring deeply doesn't require you to just keep punishing yourself indefinitely. However, those two are not the same. So accountability is not the same as self-destruction and the quicker you forgive yourself, [00:15:00] the genuine. The more genuine you can be with yourself, the just, the better your life gets, the more joy you're going to experience when you're not actually accosting yourself.

And so it's not just about the weekend, it's just as just about the day. It's about your life and choosing to go in a different direction. So the energy that you spend in that rumination loop, it is not free. In fact, it is very expensive. It costs you the gift of your presence. It costs you your joy. It costs you the wins that are sitting right in front of you waiting to be celebrated, and it costs you the people.

Who are right there waiting to be loved by you, waiting to be seen by you and who need that version of you who is not still stuck at the trade show with the CEOs or in [00:16:00] that email thread or in a meeting that ended three hours ago. No, those people that love you deserve better. So the next time that this happens, and it will happen, because remember, we are human.

This is what humans do, and I want you to remember this turnaround. Get out of your own head. Go be of service to someone. Go be present with people who need you, love you, want you. Go be useful in the world that is right in front of you. Now, before you know it, that thing that felt so terrible won't seem quite so bad after all.

That is where some relief lives. Alright, everyone, I'm Lori Pine, the joy, CEO, and I'm so glad to be doing it with you. I'll 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.

Subscribe. Leave [00:17:00] 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.