Summary:In this episode, I reflect on the hidden cost of wearing independence as a badge of honor and why I’ve come to believe community is essential for sustainable leadership. After years of moving cities for corporate opportunities and believing strength meant handling everything on my own, I realized my independence had quietly turned into isolation.

I share the moments that forced me to confront the limits of “doing it all yourself,” from not knowing who to list as an emergency contact for my children to navigating divorce and the sudden loss of my mother. This conversation is an invitation to rethink what strength really looks like and why meaningful connection—not isolation—is what truly supports ambitious women.

🔑 Key Takeaways:

Independence Isn’t the Same as Strength

For years, I believed being self-sufficient meant I was successful. But over time, I realized independence can become a coping mechanism that disconnects us from the support we actually need.
Audience follow-up → Where in your life have you mistaken isolation for strength?

Ambition Without Community Becomes Unsustainable

I share how relocating seven times for career advancement slowly eroded my sense of rootedness and belonging.
Audience follow-up → What relationships or communities have you unintentionally sacrificed in pursuit of success?

The Emergency Contact Moment Changed Everything

One of the most confronting moments came when I realized I didn’t know who I could list as an emergency contact for my children. That question exposed just how alone I had become.
Audience follow-up → If life became difficult tomorrow, who could you truly call for support?

Community Expands What Feels Possible

Real connection doesn’t weaken ambition—it strengthens it. Being around women who see you fully creates safety, perspective, and possibility.
Audience follow-up → Who in your life makes you feel more like yourself when you’re around them?

You Deserve to Be Seen Beyond Your Resume

So many accomplished women are celebrated for what they produce while quietly feeling unseen in who they are. I believe we need spaces where honesty matters more than performance.
Audience follow-up → Where are you craving deeper connection—not networking, but genuine belonging?

🔎 Mentioned in the Episode:

The Connect

A peer community Lori created for ambitious, accomplished women seeking honest conversations, meaningful support, and deeper connection beyond surface-level networking.

Lori’s Corporate Relocations

Over the course of her corporate career, Lori relocated seven different times in pursuit of advancement and opportunity—an experience that shaped both her ambition and her loneliness.

The Turning Point

The combination of divorce and the sudden loss of Lori’s mother forced her to reevaluate what true support, resilience, and leadership really mean.

✨ Reflection Prompts:

• What have you been carrying alone because you thought you “should” be able to?
• When was the last time you felt genuinely supported?
• Are you building a successful life—or a connected one?
• What would change if you stopped treating vulnerability like weakness?

🧠 Who This Episode Is For:

• Ambitious women who feel lonely despite their success
• Leaders navigating life transitions, grief, or burnout
• Professionals craving deeper connection and community
• Women redefining what strength and leadership look like
• Anyone tired of carrying the weight of independence alone

📩 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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⭐️ 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

Hello, and welcome to The Joy CEO Podcast. I'm your host, Lori Pine, and I'm so glad to be here with you. This is a show where we talk about what it really looks like to lead with joy, in your career, in your life, in every version of yourself that you are still becoming. Joy is a leadership strategy and not a bunch of fluff.

We are going to dig in today and talk about how you can be leading with joy. If you are new here, welcome. I am so glad you found your way to me, and if you've been with me for a while, thank you. Genuinely, thank you. We have crossed into year two today with episode 53, and I am so excited that we have made it to this point in time.
This episode, I'm gonna really talk to you about a shift in my own thinking, and perhaps it will resonate something [00:01:00] within you. I've really been thinking deeply about the power of community, and this is something that I got wrong for a really long time, and I'm so committed to getting it right at this point in my career and my life.
And what happens when community gets lost and what it costs us, and w- what is it that happens when we decide that we don't need community? So here we go. Let's dive in. For most of human history, community was not optional. It was survival. It was the foundation of everything that happened for women to gather, to raise their children, to share resources, to hold each other through illness, loss, relentless work of keeping life going.
There was no figuring it out [00:02:00] alone. There was no version of success that happened in isolation. It all happened within the container of the community. The village wasn't just some nice-to-have, it was the entire infrastructure. And so something happened in our history along the way that shifted that, whether it was, you know, colonization, Industrial Revolution, whatever it was.
And it was gradual. It had the best of intentions, I'm sure. But somewhere along the way, independence became the goal, and self-sufficiency would become the marker of a woman who had made it Needing people became a marker of weakness. And, you know, asking for help seemed to become taboo, like we weren't supposed to do that.
Somehow we were supposed to know how to navigate life [00:03:00] without, you know, raising our hands or saying, "Hey, I don't know how to do this." And I bought that story kind of entirely. I-- In fact, I built my career around it. So I left my family at a young age. As soon as I finished college, I left Maine, relocated to Tampa, Florida.
That's where I got my first job. And in so many ways, that was the right thing for me to do. I, I felt like there weren't a lot of career opportunities in Maine at the time. And then once I moved, I just kept moving. In fact, I relocated seven times in my corporate life. Seven times I would pack up, put myself into a new city because there was a promotion, a, a bigger title, a bigger paycheck, and some bigger and better thing waiting for me on the other side.
And I was constantly driven [00:04:00] to build something bigger, better, more. And that ambition and drive always kept me to push and to say yes and to, to go and to do. And every time I moved, I had to start over from scratch. I had to make new friends, get a new doctor, you know, get a new dentist, meet new people, set up all the things, right?
The utilities and all those things, the neighborhood, yeah, everything. And You know, finding a sense of community doesn't always come naturally. The very first time I did it, I moved and lived with my mom's best friend in the beginning, and so she helped me with community. Then the next time I moved, nobody was there to greet me.
The next time I moved, [00:05:00] I was welcomed into a community because of the company. Same with the next time, the company. But then there was another stop where when I moved, I didn't know anybody except for the people who were at the office. So when I went to enroll my kids in school, little day school, they were, they were babies, I was handed an emergency contact form, and they were like, "Who do we call if there's an emergency?"
And it had to be somebody other than myself or my husband. It was in case they couldn't reach us, and I didn't know who to put down. I didn't know anybody. I hadn't met neighbors. I hadn't met anybody outside of the office. So I put my admin down, and something about that felt like [00:06:00] yucky, like wow, and it really stuck with me.
So I, I like stared at the form. I wrote down her name, and I'm like, "Am I really putting somebody who works for me down as my personal emergency contact in the event that something happens to my children at school?" And I don't know. I didn't have anybody else. So it really stung, and I remember feeling it that day, but I just passed right over it, kept on going to the next thing, the next thing, the next thing.
Unpacking boxes, getting situated, getting settled, getting, you know, immersed into the new job. What was the situation at hand? What were we trying to tackle? What were the big objectives? And, you know, I, I remember feeling like I, I really couldn't admit, but this was all my ambition. This was all my doing. I was the one who wanted to take the job.
I was [00:07:00] the one who wanted to relocate. I was the one who, you know, sought this all out. And, you know, building a career can come at a cost. And success, you know, really taught me to care for some things that really need to matter, and that moment was definitely a pause. I had prided myself on being independent, and I had that pride from a young age.
From probably the time I was eight or 10, I had been told how independent I was and praised for that, as that was a really good thing. And I could see now where this independence might be catching up with me when I had nobody to write down as an emergency contact and kind of had put myself in that situation in a very different part of the country, far away from all of the people that I loved So [00:08:00] what I didn't know then that I started to learn is independence wasn't really the strength I thought it was.
It-- independence was really a coping mechanism, and I dressed it up as strength. Real strength, the kind that sustains you and makes ambition worthwhile, comes from building genuine connections. Now, I was able to build connections throughout my career, and over time, in each community, I would build connections.
But the idea of immersing myself in a community where people see you and know you and there's an intimacy shared, that was next level for me, and that was going to take some time. I want to say to you that, you know, that type of community, that type of friendship, that type of sharing where people [00:09:00] are able to know you, see you, give you feedback, who want you to win, who want you to be successful and can say it not only to your face, but will talk about you in rooms that you're not in, that was a whole new experience for me as I matured, as I grew in my career.
And that infrastructure made everything else possible because things did start to burn down for me. My marriage fell apart. I was raising two little boys by myself. And so independence reached an all-time high that became so unsustainable, that became a fault. My independence became a fault. And then just when I thought, "Okay, the-- I, I've made it through the divorce.
I'm, I'm raising these two little boys, but I still have my mom." I had [00:10:00] relocated to New York. I was in driving distance. My mom was in Maine, my mom and my dad. And so just when I thought, "Okay, yes, I'm so independent and I'm still doing all this stuff, but, you know, now I've got my mom, and my mom's within driving distance, and she'll come, and she'll stay for a few weeks," then my mom got sick, and we thought she had a backache, and five weeks later she died from a very rare form of a uterine cancer.
And so now I had nobody. I, I mean, really, like I- And that loss, the loss of my mother, made it very evident that my independence was not serving me, and I really needed a community. And I think that as ambitious, go-getting corporate women, we really pride ourselves on our independence. It's, it, it's worked for us.[00:11:00]
But the truth is, there's something special about community, and even belonging to multiple communities. So I share that because I think if, if you are listening and you've spent years proving yourself, climbing ladders, being ambitious, being independent, you may have forgotten the price of that and what it costs you Even if your career is thriving, even if your resume is remarkable, and I'm sure it is, underneath it, there can just be this quiet ache, this loneliness, this isolation, almost to the point of how can I just connect?
How can I be seen? How can I have a conversation with you so that you know I'm more than just my resume? It's almost like the Julia Roberts movie with No- [00:12:00] Notting Hill when she says, "I'm just a girl who wants to be loved." It's like that. It gets to that point. And so I share all of this with you in the event that it might be resonating with you, that it's time for you to perhaps find a community.
And maybe you have in your, in your family, maybe you live close enough to your family, and so you're able to really connect with your family and ask for help and get help. Maybe you live in a neighborhood and you've made really great friends with your neighbors, and you're able to be seen for somebody more than just your job or your title.
And, you know, maybe, maybe you joined a community of other ambitious women. I say all that because I didn't know what it was like for a long time, and I didn't [00:13:00] even know I was longing for it until I started to move towards it. And so with all of that, that's been impetus for me building The Connect. And The Connect is my community for ambitious women, women in corporate leadership, women building businesses, women who are accomplished and still longing for something more.
A way to come together and talk about the real stuff, the real stuff that is happening in their businesses, in their roles, in their leadership, that they can't just sit down and talk to somebody who exists within their company about. They need other peer-to-peer conversations and connections so that the real them can show up and say, "How do I do this?
What do you think about this?" And get really fee-- good feedback because [00:14:00] they were vulnerable enough to ask for it And I love the connect because you can't believe how remarkable these women are, and the conversations that are happening are so endearing to me. So endearing. And I just closed, closed the doors on the most recent round, and we welcomed in some incredible new women, and I'm so pleased with that.
And what makes me the happiest is when we meet and there's these breakout sessions, and they have these conversations, and they're like, "Wow, I just had a conversation with somebody who I have so much in common with, who is walking such a similar path with me, and it just makes me feel so seen and validated."
And that's really remarkable because these women are operating, you know, at high levels, and [00:15:00] I love that. I love that so much. So community, finding community where you can have conversations, where you can show up for others and others will show up for you, where there are things that you can say out loud and be heard in a way that you may not be able to say those same things anywhere else in your life, and where you can be reminded who you are, who you really are, what you're capable of, what you're dreaming of, what is really on your heart.
And I believe if it's on your heart and it stays on your heart, it's meant for you. And so then if it's meant for you, how do you figure it out? You know, like this whole business was meant for me, but I was a corporate VP, so how was I gonna get from a corporate VP to The [00:16:00] Joy CEO? Well, there were some steps along the way.
And so when we're in community with each other, we are so capable of accessing insights, intuitions, things about ourselves that we cannot access when we are alone and isolated and, quote-unquote, independent. We need the community. We need to be seen. We need to be inspired. That expands everything about us, about our possibilities, about our thinking, about what we believe is actually available to us.
So if this episode is resonating with you, if you recognize any part of yourself in this, I want you to encourage yourself to start exploring the idea of [00:17:00] community. Where do you currently have community in your life? Where is it missing? Where do you want it? Are you interested in my Connect group? I, I think it's pretty remarkable.
Does that pique some curiosity for you? I have a wait list. We're gonna reopen the doors in September. I would love to have you. And, you know, what is it about independence that may no longer be working for you? All right. This is year two of The Joy CEO podcast. We are going to keep going deeper. We are going to have deeper conversations.
We are still in the year of the fire horse, so we are fire horse energy, and we want to keep harnessing that and giving ourselves more permission to be our [00:18:00] most authentic selves, leading with joy, knowing that joy actually lives within us. It is not external. It is not something that we have to go seek.
You can choose it at any moment. I am so glad you are here. I am so glad we are doing this together. I will see you next week, and I'm glad to be doing it with you. Have a great week, everybody. 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, @loripine, 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, [00:19:00] 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