Summary:
I’m diving into a question that feels deeply personal and incredibly important: When was the last time you truly felt like yourself? Not the version of you who is performing, managing, or holding everything together—but the version of you who feels clear, powerful, and fully alive.

So many ambitious women are doing all the “right” things on paper, yet still feel disconnected, stuck, or not quite as sharp as they know they can be. In this episode, I share why I don’t believe this is a productivity issue—I believe it’s a proximity issue. The rooms we sit in, the people we surround ourselves with, and the level of belief around us shape what we see as possible.

I also share why I’m focusing on two priorities in 2026, how the “fire horse” energy is influencing this season, and why choosing less can actually accelerate momentum. If you’ve been craving clarity, expansion, and a room that raises your standard, this episode is for you.

🔑 Key Takeaways:

Feeling Disconnected Doesn’t Mean Something Is Wrong With You
If you’ve been feeling less like yourself lately, it doesn’t automatically mean you need to work harder or become more disciplined. Sometimes it simply means you’ve outgrown the room you’re in.

Audience follow-up → Ask yourself: When was the last time I felt fully like myself, and what environment was I in?

Proximity Shapes Possibility
I share why I believe your environment changes your energy, your belief system, and your pace. When you’re surrounded by women who are playing at the level you desire, expansion happens faster because your standards rise.

Audience follow-up → Who are the five people closest to you right now, and how are they influencing your thinking?

It’s Not About More Priorities—It’s About the Right Two
Instead of spreading yourself thin across too many goals, I talk about the power of choosing two priorities that truly move the needle in this season of life and business.

Audience follow-up → What are the two priorities that would create the biggest shift for you right now?

Momentum Often Comes From the Right Room
Sometimes the breakthrough isn’t another strategy—it’s being in a space where belief expands. The right room can create what feels like a quantum leap because it shifts what you believe is available to you.

Audience follow-up → Are you in rooms that stretch you, challenge you, and help you grow faster?

This Season Is About Intentional Focus
I share why 2026 feels like a year of bold movement and intentional action, and how I’m personally choosing clarity over chaos.

Audience follow-up → Where do you need to simplify so you can move with more power?

🔎 Mentioned in the Episode:

• The Connect – my community designed for ambitious women who want to lead bigger and live fuller
• Free Live Training – Wednesday, April 15 at 7:00 PM Eastern
• The Power of Proximity – why your environment impacts momentum
• Two Priorities Framework – my focus strategy for 2026
• Fire Horse Energy – the theme influencing this season of leadership and growth

✨ Reflection Prompts:

• When do I feel most like myself?
• Who is influencing my current pace and belief?
• What would happen if I focused on only two priorities?
• Am I in the right room for the next version of me?

🧠 Who This Episode Is For:

• High-achieving women feeling disconnected from themselves
• Leaders craving clarity and momentum
• Entrepreneurs navigating burnout or overwhelm
• Women ready to expand through community and proximity
• Anyone who knows they’re meant for more but feels stuck

📩 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

LP_Ep_46_solo_Final Podcast

Hello and welcome to the Joy CEO podcast. I'm your host Lori Pine, and I'm so glad to be here with you today. If you are new, welcome. I am so glad you found your way to me. And if you are coming back, thank you so much. You know, I love you and appreciate you spending your time with me. I know you can spend it.

So many places and the fact that you plug in and spend it with me is such a privilege. So I have a question for you this week, when was the last time you felt completely like yourself? You know, I get to meet with these amazing, ambitious, successful women. I hear their stories. I interview them here on the podcast.

I run a community of. Brilliant women inside my coaching community called the Connect, and four times a month I meet with them and I'm asking questions. I'm prompting them. We're we're going deep, far below the superficial level, and when [00:01:00] I prompt them. I always get really amazing answers. And then I also have women that I coach privately in my one-on-one private coaching where I really get to know them.

It's a really deep dive. I take that really seriously. It's such a privilege to. Be trusted by these women who really share intimately with me what's happening in their business, in their personal lives, the things that they're struggling with, and the things that they're really trying to accomplish. And so I'm asking you today.

When was the last time you felt completely like yourself? And I'm not talking about performing or managing or even leading, not holding it all together for everyone else, but for yourself. You know, I always say to my clients, I say this to my [00:02:00] kids, I learned this from my mentor, Anne. Esteemable acts build esteem.

And when you do good, you feel good. And we have to do things that actually build our steam. And if we're constantly in lather, rinse, repeat mode, lather, rinse, repeat, it becomes a hamster wheel and that does not build esteem. Those are not esteemable acts. They just become rote and we can get very bored with that.

We can become really disenchanted with that. And what we're really seeking is something that says there's more. For me, it's almost like being that fire horse. Instead of being set free to run, you are at the Kentucky Derby and the gate's down and [00:03:00] you're the horse and you're just waiting and it's like, you know it's your turn.

You know the gate's gonna go up, but it hasn't gone up yet, and you're stuck in that little stall and you just have all this energy and you are ready to just run as far and as fast as you can. But all of this waiting and all of this. Stuckness makes you not feel like you. And that starts to erode so many things inside of us.

Our confidence, our self-esteem, our ability to think at high levels, our ability to see possibilities. And I had somebody recently say in one of these coaching sessions. I really don't feel like myself anymore, and it was almost kind of a whisper. I really don't feel like myself anymore, and I just felt [00:04:00] like, oh, I can relate to that.

I've had many moments in my career in my parenting where I didn't feel like myself, and there were times when I wondered. If I had lost my magic touch, was I becoming outdated? Was I no longer relevant? Was I being overshadowed by the younger, newer, shinier employees? And that can really get in your head or.

You can start to surround yourself with people and ideas that are bigger than you, bigger than anything you've yet to do. And so then you're not looking over there, or somebody might be coming up behind you or besides you, but instead you're looking forward. And that's the shift. [00:05:00] So we wanna really talk about.

Being in this moment when you can clearly define that you're not feeling like yourself again, and it's not bad, it's actually a moment where you are identifying that there is a shift happening within you. And that's an important distinction because that shift is gonna go two ways. You are either going to lean into that shift and let it propel you.

Or you're gonna let that shift take hold of you and push you back. And that's what's going to happen. And as I say that, you probably have moments when either or both have been true for you personally or you know somebody that either or both have happened to. So. Let's talk about how this starts to [00:06:00] happen, that you have more ambition in your pinky finger than most people have in their entire bodies.

And you wake up some mornings and you think, I used to be sharper than this. I don't know what happened to me. I'm constantly reacting instead of leading. That's not who I am. I've checked all the boxes, so why am I not happy? Any of this sound familiar? I think most of us could relate. Here's what I want to offer you, that this is not a focus problem.

This is not a time management problem. This isn't even really a gratitude issue, though I do firmly believe in a gratitude practice, this is actually a proximity issue. And stay with me for a minute on this because this is a reframe that really can be a, a helpful transition [00:07:00] for you. So what I see again and again inside of this community where I build and facilitate these transformations with women is a woman comes in, she's accomplished smart, brilliant, a go-getter.

She has goals. She's been circling for months and there's something really on her heart that she wants to do, and she's done a 12 year, week year over it. She's gotten the fancy new planner. She's had an accountability partner, but she just can't quite get to it. Why is that? Why is that? She's not in the right room with the right people.

When you get into a room with other women who are playing at your level, every single thing changes because then you're around women who have decided to bet on [00:08:00] themselves. They've decided to invest in themselves. They've chosen to believe. What somebody else might think is impossible, and yet these women are going after it and they are making the impossible possible.

And when you start to see that in somebody else, when somebody else role models for you, what can be you fundamentally change and something inside of you shifts. This isn't strategy, and this isn't a framework. This isn't like, let me give you steps one, two, and three. This becomes something so fundamentally core to your whole being, that suddenly seeing what is possible in somebody else and in these women around you, that you can become, that you can become that.

There's a quote I love by Marian Wright Edelman, and it says, if you [00:09:00] can see it, you can be it. And of course then Jim Rohn, you know, has always said, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Who are you spending the most time with? Who are your five people? Are they pushing you?

Are they inspiring you? Are they doing bigger and better and bolder things than you? Are they showing you what's possible? I'll tell you the end of 2025 and into 2026, I have put myself in rooms where that is exactly what's happening. Things that I didn't know how to do, but I knew I wanted to do. I'm now in those rooms and these women are demonstrating and showing me what is absolutely positively possible, because if it's on your heart, it's there for a reason.

It's not there by mistake. It's yours to believe in, so your ceiling becomes their [00:10:00] ceiling. When you see that possibility, your pace can can become their pace, and slowly with, without even realizing it, your dreams are gonna start to become bigger and you are gonna start to put them into motion. Put them into reality just by being in proximity with amazing women.

So the moment that you find women who are playing at your level, these shifts really start to take place. It's like driving a five speed and you've been in, you know, second or third, but now you're gonna kick it up a notch and you're gonna get into fourth and fifth gear for this next season of your career.

So think about expanding your thinking, expanding your possibilities, and then the plan that you've been trying to write, the plan that you've been trying to, you know, square peg, round hole just kind of starts to write itself. [00:11:00] And it's almost like quantum physics. You start to make a quantum leap and you really can't even explain it.

So I've kind of built my whole coaching philosophy around this very idea. It's why the joy CEO podcast exists. It's why I built this community of women called the Connect, because I genuinely believe that the right room, the right women, can change your life. I have been in some rooms that have changed my life, and I want to bring that to more and more people.

So let's talk about what it needs to look like. I mean, I don't think this is a mentor. I don't think it's a sponsor. I don't think this is about networking. I think this is about finding people who are successful in their own rights, just like you are successful in your own rights and breathing belief [00:12:00] and possibility into that space.

So that as the tide rises, all the ships will rise. And that's a part of the ocean that I really wanna be in. I want to be in a rising tide. So we wanna find the women who are, you know, in the arena with you, they're doing the blood, sweat and tears, the meaningful work, and refusing to apologize for wanting more, refusing to accept status quo.

You know, wanting to build the, the business, the career, but also wanting to build the wealth, wealth in so many ways for as much as that means. And then one step further, wanting to build legacy so that. There is something that leaves a mark that you were here on this earth, whether it's [00:13:00] philanthropy and giving, whether it's your family and you were present, whatever that is for you, whatever that legacy is for you, knowing that you can absolutely do that, that's what these rooms are about, and I've seen it happen already.

I can think about some women in my world and what I've watched them do. Just by creating the connect and what we've done. One woman, she had been circling the same goal for two years, couldn't seem to move, couldn't seem to commit, and then within a few weeks of being in our group community, she said to me, Lori, I didn't know I could give my self permission to do this or even want this until I met you and these other incredible women.

I mean, yes, yes, please. More of that. Permission is such a powerful word, and you know, I don't think we sit around saying, oh yes, I need to give myself permission. That's not how [00:14:00] we're thinking about it. Sometimes we're just. Stuck in our own thinking and our own limitations. Einstein says, you can't solve the problem with the same brain that created it.

So true. So therefore, we put ourselves in other environments around other people who can help us get unstuck. So let me bring this back to something I've been talking about all year because I think it really does have an impact here. Back in episode 37, we were talking about this year of the fire horse and just the energy that is in 2026.

And I don't know about you, but I'm definitely feeling this energy and I hope that you are harnessing this passion and intensity and this bold action. And I made the case that the most powerful thing you could do was really whittle down your priorities to two. And I shared with you that I was going to do one personal and one professional.

I was really going [00:15:00] to focus on moving my body and really focus on my speaking side of my business. And that is true. I have worked on that. Those things are all coming to fruition. And in doing so, you know, you can go all in for these 12 week kind of periods of time. And see what the results are. So I did a Q1 recap and I was shocked at my results.

So that and episode actually generated some questions. I got some questions, you know, more than anything was. Okay, but how, how do I choose my two priorities? I have a list of. 10 priorities, 15 priorities. I've got them in business, I've got them in personal, they all compete. I've got the kids, I've got, you know, my spouse, I've got work, I've got my boss.

How, how could I possibly narrow it down to just two? So [00:16:00] I realized the how isn't really a strategy question. It's really about how do you narrow down something when there's. This idea that you have to do it alone, and I really don't want you to have to do this alone. I think what could be helpful is to do this inside of a community.

Pick your two priorities inside of a community with women who are making the same commitment. So I'm going to do a free training. I'm going to offer it on Wednesday, April 15th at 7:00 PM It's absolutely free, and we are going to do this. We are going to talk about what are your two priorities. I want to personally invite you to be there, and in one hour we are going to talk about why everything feels harder than it should right now.

And it's [00:17:00] not what you think. We are not talking about anything outside of our hula hoops. We are going to talk about what actually shifts when you get into the right room, and I'm going to walk you through the beginning of the two priority framework so that you can start thinking about what your two priorities are.

Not 10, not 20, not your husbands, not your kids, your two priorities. It is a hundred percent free. It's one hour. I made it in the evening time because I know you're busy and you work all day, and I really just wanted to make it easy for you to say yes and show up April 15th at 7:00 PM Eastern time. So.

After this conversation, the episode is going to create a spark for you. I think it's gonna be, feel like a natural next step. So the link will be in the show notes. You'll also see it on all of my [00:18:00] social media, all kinds of information about this free webinar for you to attend. And I hope I'll get to see you there.

So before I let you go, I wanna leave you with something personal. I spent years, decades being the woman who handled everything. I was a single mom. I raised two boys almost by myself for a long, long time. I had a very successful career. I led a billion dollar business through the pandemic. I was the one people came to when they needed advice, when things got hard.

I made it look really easy and people thought that I had the answers, the plan, the backup plan, and the composure to keep it all together. I was also privately exhausted, and I just really couldn't keep the [00:19:00] pace that I was keeping anymore. I, I thought that admitting it was weakness and that it made me less of a leader, but the truth was.

I was able to see other female leaders also tap out, and that too was a really powerful example for me. And I think that knowing what is possible by seeing it demonstrated in others is a very powerful example of who I can be, who I want to be. And if I just. Can focus on the right things. I can get there.

And so being in the right rooms with those people who have done what I want to do was a very big unlock for that. It was a big unlock for it in my corporate career, getting into the right rooms, being surrounded by the right [00:20:00] mentors, the right sponsors, where the decisions were being made. But certainly since I've left my corporate career and what I'm doing now.

So I just wanna give you an opportunity to do that, and we're going to do that for free on April 15th. So it's just gonna be me and you and if you wanna tell a friend about it, please do you know I'm a girl who's a an a, more the merrier type of girl, so. Here's what I want you to do this week. A little bit of homework.

First, I want you to notice who's in your rooms right now. We're not judging, we're just observing. That's what we do, and. You don't need to take any actions at all. Just observe and observe who are those five people that you keep really close? Do they help you think bigger? Do they help you take bolder actions?

Do they give you permission [00:21:00] to actually chase after those dreams that are buried deep inside of you? To bring them to life. And then second, if something in this episode stirred a little something in you, I want you to register for the free live training. This is my first free live training I've ever done.

So you're gonna get to hang out with me for an hour and. I'm gonna really look forward to that and I think that I'm gonna impart something that hopefully is really helpful for you and I can't wait to share that. Normally I only get to do this with people, like I said, in my community or in my private coaching.

And on April 15th at 7:00 PM I'm gonna share it with you, so the link is in the show notes. It's free. Come as you are. Even if you're making dinner and the kids are in the background, just come. And then the last thing I want you to do is ask yourself the question I opened with today, [00:22:00] when was this? The last time you felt completely like yourself, you're not performing, not managing, not holding it all together just to you, and a big exhale.

The answer to that question is, it's been a long time, Lori. I'm not sure I can even remember when. I want you to know that this is not permanent and we can get you back to being you. Maybe even a newer version of you. A different version of you. So we've all been there. I've been there. Now where you are going, that is a different story.

That may be something that is still being uncovered and discovered as you really try to figure out what this fire horse energy is bringing to your 2026. Okay? It all starts with seeing you on Wednesday, April 15th, and if not, know [00:23:00] that. I don't know when I'll do another one of these, but I felt very called to do this right now to help anybody who is struggling with focusing on their two priorities.

I'm Lori Pine, the joy, CEO, and it's such a pleasure to be with you. It really, really is a privilege. I love doing this podcast and I love that you join me each and every week. If I don't see you on April 15th, I'll be back here next week for another episode. Be well, my friends. 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, loripine.com, to learn more about coaching retreats and how we can work together. [00:24:00] 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.