Summary:
In this raw and honest episode, I take you behind the scenes of a moment that could have easily derailed me—my website crashing right after my first live training, at the exact moment people were ready to buy. The timing couldn’t have been worse… and yet, it became one of the most clarifying leadership moments I’ve had.

I share what it looked like to hold composure while everything felt like it was falling apart—from troubleshooting tech issues with multiple experts to continuing to show up for a client in the middle of the chaos. This wasn’t just about a broken website—it was about focus, resilience, and learning where I’ve been avoiding responsibility in my business.

This episode is a reminder that things will go wrong, even when you’re doing everything right—but how you respond is what shapes the leader you’re becoming.

If you’ve ever felt the panic of something breaking at the worst possible time, this one is for you.

🔑 Key Takeaways:

Warnings Don’t Prevent the Impact
I went into the week knowing there might be disruptions—but that didn’t stop the frustration or the consequences when things actually broke. Awareness helps, but it doesn’t replace resilience.
Audience follow-up → Where in your life are you expecting challenges—but still hoping to avoid the impact instead of preparing for how you’ll respond?

Two Priorities Keep Me Grounded
In the middle of everything, I came back to two anchors: movement and speaking. These kept me steady, focused, and out of panic mode.
Audience follow-up → What are the two non-negotiables that help you stay grounded when things feel chaotic?

You Still Have to Show Up
Even while my site was down, I had a client depending on me—and I chose to be present and deliver. Leadership isn’t about perfect conditions; it’s about consistency.
Audience follow-up → Where are you letting circumstances dictate your level of presence?

Avoidance Creates Dependence
I realized I had been avoiding fully understanding my tech—and that avoidance made me overly reliant on the wrong support at the wrong time.
Audience follow-up → What area of your business or life are you avoiding that’s quietly costing you control?

The Lesson Is the Real Win
Yes, the site got fixed—but what stayed with me were the lessons about ownership, discernment, and staying grounded under pressure.
Audience follow-up → Can you identify a recent challenge that shaped you more than it set you back?

🔎 Mentioned in the Episode:

Lori Pine – Sharing her real-time experience navigating a business disruption and the leadership lessons that followed.
Chani Nicholas – Referenced for her prediction of a “planetary pile up” and communication breakdowns during the week.
GoDaddy – The platform where Lori’s website was temporarily “parked,” causing the outage.
Website Infrastructure & DNS Issues – A behind-the-scenes look at how technical gaps can impact business operations.

✨ Reflection Prompts:

What do you do when something breaks at the exact moment it matters most?
Where are you being called to take deeper ownership in your business?
What helps you stay grounded when things feel urgent and out of control?

🧠 Who This Episode Is For:

Entrepreneurs navigating launches, tech, and unexpected setbacks
Women building businesses while learning to lead under pressure
Coaches and creatives who want to stay grounded during chaos
Anyone ready to shift from reactive to resilient leadership

📩 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

Transcription

LP_Ep_48_solo_Final Podcast

Hey, it's Lori Pine, the joy, CEO, and I'm so glad to be here with you today. Can I ask you something? When everything falls apart at the worst possible moment, and I mean the worst moment, who do you become? If you're new here, welcome. I'm so glad you have found your way to me. This is a podcast for ambitious women who want to lead and live with joy.

Not the Instagram version of joy, not the TikTok version, but the real kind. The kind that holds you even when things go sideways. And to my people who show up week after week, you know, I love you for it. So thank you for coming back this week. Today, I'm going to tell you about the week my website crashed right after my very first ever live training, and right when women were trying to pay me.

And [00:01:00] what this week has taught me about focus, surrender. The very specific type of wisdom that comes from paying attention to the signals at the right time. So let's dive in. So I wanna start with a little bit of Woo now. If you've been around here for any length of time, you know, I can lean on the side of Woo.

I like Woo, I believe in it. I also, you know, have a strong faith, but I'm open to all of the things that are going to enhance us. So I follow Chanie Nicholas, her app, her podcast. Some weeks I listened, some weeks I don't, but last week I happened to have listened. And she described what was coming for last week as a planetary pile up, one that we had never seen in our lifetime, [00:02:00] and it was going to be a hot mess, energetically speaking.

She forewarned us that by midweek comp communication was going to fall apart and quite frankly, be disastrous. Things were going to feel chaotic and out of control, but by the end of the week, this planetary pile up would move along and things would start to go back to some sort of. Normalcy, quote unquote, but that the lessons would remain.

I noted it, a mental note. Something made me actually kind of sit with it this time, and then I got busy. I had a lot to do. Last week I was hosting this free live training. I was putting together my presentation. I was doing all of the things. So here's how the week [00:03:00] unfolded. Monday, I listened to Channy.

She tells me about the planetary pile up, about communications gonna fall apart by midweek. I take note, I sit with it. I move along Wednesday, I host my free live training. 40 women had registered 17 show up live and in person I get to see their beautiful faces. The room felt electric, the zoom room that is.

I walked away from the call thinking, yes, this is exactly what I'm meant to be doing. I was on a bit of a high, and then Thursday mornings I woke up to text messages and emails. Nobody could get onto my website. It had some sort of message like GoDaddy had parked my website and that there was some luxury travel message in place now and.

Now, because nobody could get onto my website, nobody could buy next week's [00:04:00] masterclass, which I was selling. The momentum I had built gone the energy from the night before. The women who were ready to say yes. All of that poof in a blink, vanished, and somewhere in the back of my mind, I could hear Chaney's voice.

I had been warned. Here's the thing about Thursday, while all of this is unfolding, the texts, the emails, the the waiting, you know, I had something else to do. I have a consulting client. I actually have a couple of consulting clients that I work with, and when I'm hired on a consulting job, I am in my client's business.

I am. There to give more value than they pay me for. I'm there to be, quote unquote, an expert for the area in which I've been [00:05:00] hired. And so on this particular day, there was some irony because this client is actually a food manufacturer and they. Were meeting me at a supermarket and we were going to walk the store just like I had done for 25 years in my corporate career, and we were going to be looking at brands and innovation and the placement and exactly what I had done as a vice president, and it was really natural.

I mean, it had been five years since I had last, walked a supermarket in that sort of capacity, but it was so familiar to me. We talked about how brands can bridge their current positioning and go into an entirely new market and broaden that market and that consumer appeal. We can [00:06:00] talk about how brands become more consumer driven, how some brands use packaging as a way to do that.

Some. Use their name, how some use the promises of the brand. We walked through different categories, we walked through different aisles and you know, I was in it, like completely in it and I walked out of those stores and that experiencing thinking, dang, I've still got it. Like I haven't lost my edge. And all the while my website is still down.

And I still had every bit of what I built in this business, reflective of my 25 year career that was all cumulative. By the afternoon, I was in problem solving mode, but a different kind than I might have been a few years ago. I had [00:07:00] reached out to the IT expert who had made the changes on my site. On Wednesday, I was having an unrelated email issue and he wasn't available, so I called the woman who had built my website and together we got on with GoDaddy, made some changes, crossed our fingers, hoped it would work.

Then we had to wait. Now, I don't know about you, but patience is not my greatest virtue. But there was nothing else I could do. The DNS reset, their tech lingo was going to take an overnight to reset. And so I'm not really that patient. I'm type A overachiever. I'm building all these things. I'm making things happen, and.

What else could I do? I went for a walk with the dogs four miles around the lake, and then I came home and I started to prepare my [00:08:00] presentation for the next week because putting together this masterclass really mattered to me. So work. I am delivering matters, and because I have a discipline around two priorities, movement and speaking.

I was able to really show up when the chaos arrived and fall into those two priorities. I didn't have to go looking for like shiny new objects to occupy me and make me feel better. I was able to go back to my two things, movement speaking, because those are the things that are moving the needle. They're moving the needle for me and I can see the progress, so I know what they're doing for me.

And they were steady when everything else was falling apart. So Friday morning comes, I wake up, I check the site, the DNS reset had [00:09:00] failed. The website is still down. And I wanna be honest with you, in that moment, I was ready to cry. I really didn't know what to do, so I get back on with the woman who built the website and I talk it through with her, and the only thing I know to do is get the IT expert back so that he can undo everything he did, even if it meant my email was still compromised.

There's a previous version of me that might have completely unraveled that just the anxiety and the sheer unknowingness of it might have just fallen apart because we had done everything right. We had made the calls, we had waited, we, and, and none of it had worked. Sorry. I reached back out to him and this time he was available.

He came, he came to the house and I just left him at my computer with my phone. Because you need the phone to verify the security [00:10:00] texts. And I left. I left. I went to meet a friend and I let him do his magic without me breathing down his neck. And little by little he was able to do what he needed to do. I came back home, he'd left me a note 'cause he couldn't text me because he had my phone.

And within an hour my website came back online. He was able to find the root cause of what had happened, and he had felt terrible. You could see it from the moment he arrived at my house and when he arrived I hugged him, not because there wasn't a situation that was grave, but because he was as genuinely upset as I was.

And there was no amount of stress or frustration that was going to make any of that better, and. I just wanted him to know that I saw him and [00:11:00] appreciated him, and appreciated that he was showing up and helping me get this resolved. And, you know, I, I had brought him in, he had forewarned me that he had never done this before, never worked on this technology before.

And I was like, yeah, but you're really smart and you have a computer science degree and you can figure this out. But here's the thing. That was not fair of me to do that. Just because I am uncomfortable doesn't mean that I should put the responsibility on somebody else. So I have been so intimidated by the backend complexities of my website for years, since I started this business and when something needs fixing.

I was paying someone rather than make sure I was paying the right someone. And so that's on me too. That isn't just on the person that I hired. [00:12:00] And so, you know, I mean, bless him because he came back and he deserved a hug. So you can't yell at someone for a blind spot that you share with them. I shared this blind spot.

He warned me that he did not. Have experience working on what I was asking him to work on. So by Friday noon, I am back in business. Website is up, masterclass Link is working, and the women who had been trying to say yes could finally say yes. I really had to sit with that for a bit of time because Chaney was right.

The planets moved along this pile up in the, you know, energetic world. It passed and the chaos lifted right on schedule, just as she said it would. But what I was left with wasn't necessarily relief. It was, it was more clarity. The three things [00:13:00] that I'm taking away with this, that I know that. I need to do differently.

One forewarned does not mean forearmed, so Chaney forewarned me that this planetary pileup was coming whether I listened to it or not. And even though I heard her say that, I still couldn't imagine that my website was going to completely crash. I thought maybe I might have a lapse in communication with my husband.

Maybe we'd have an argument like that would've seemed more reasonable to me, but this was not in my periphery, so I was a little bit blindsided by the severity of the universe's. Attempt to get my attention. And so there's something about that, like paying attention to the signals that are available to you.

What is the universe trying to tell you? And that really [00:14:00] changes how you stand in a storm and how you come out of that storm. Okay, the second lesson, your priorities are only as powerful as the discipline. You build around them. So I keep talking about the importance of having two priorities. You can't have 10, you definitely cannot have ten two seems to be the magic number, and here's why that becomes specifically important when everything falls apart because.

I didn't have to decide what to do. I knew my two priorities. I knew what they were, and I had built a discipline around them. So the decision was really easy to go to them, go for a walk, and focus on more speaking, keep that presentation going. Focus on the audience you're gonna talk to, make sure you deliver something of value that they can walk away with.

And so those two things really held me in that space. And then the third [00:15:00] stop avoiding what intimidates you. I have been outsourcing my understanding of my own business, technological infrastructure. Because it scares me, because I tell myself I'm not good at it, and that made me dependent on the wrong people.

I can't tell you how many times I've hired the wrong people, paid a ton of money, and not gotten the results I wanted. So wrong people, wrong moments. And I'm not saying that I need to become some sort of a tech expert because that would not be a good use of my time or my skills, but I am saying that I should know more than I know right now.

And I should definitely hire the right experts, not just any expert. And then the planets moved along. The lessons get to remain. So my question for you, did you [00:16:00] also have a planetary pileup happening in your communication last week? Did you get any signals that maybe you were one aware of, or two you completely ignored?

Are there any lessons. You need to learn about things that maybe you are trying to avoid and the universe is just screaming, Hey, it's time in big neon lights. If so, I'm really glad to be doing it with you. I'm Lori Pine, the joy CEO. Thanks for joining me this week and I look forward to seeing you on another episode.

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 [00:17:00] on LinkedIn or Instagram at Laurie Pine.

Or head over to my website, loripine.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.