Summary:

In this solo episode of The Joy CEO Podcast, I’m sharing a conversation that hit me harder than I expected. A mentor once told me, “Your biggest problem is that you make it look easy.” At first, I took it as a compliment. But the more I reflected on it, the more I realized it was actually pointing to a hidden challenge many ambitious women face.

When you’re known as the person who always has it together, people stop checking in. And eventually, you stop checking in with yourself.

In this episode, I unpack what I call the Permission Problem—the belief that because we’re capable, we shouldn’t need support. I share my own experience leading a large, travel-heavy team while silently battling exhaustion, and why burnout isn’t always about workload. Sometimes it’s about feeling like you’re not allowed to struggle.

If you've ever been the strong one, the reliable one, or the person everyone depends on, this episode is an invitation to stop performing fine and start being honest about what you need.

🔑 Key Takeaways

Making It Look Easy Can Become a Trap

For years, I wore competence like armor. The problem? When you make everything look effortless, people assume you don’t need help.

Audience follow-up → Where in your life are you performing strength instead of allowing support?

Burnout Isn't Always a Time Management Problem

Research shows that burnout is rising among high performers, especially women leaders. The issue often isn't productivity—it’s carrying everything alone.

Audience follow-up → Are you overwhelmed because of your workload, or because you're trying to carry it without support?

The Strongest Person in the Room Still Needs Someone

I share a season in 2019 when I was traveling constantly, leading a large team, and outwardly succeeding while privately feeling depleted.

Audience follow-up → Who knows how you're really doing right now?

Stop Performing Competence You Don't Feel

There's a difference between being capable and pretending everything is okay. Leadership doesn't require perfection.

Audience follow-up → What truth have you been editing out when someone asks, "How are you?"

Build an Inner Circle Before You Need One

Whether it's a partner, friend, therapist, mentor, or coach, every leader needs people who can hold space for honesty.

Audience follow-up → Do you have a circle where you can be fully yourself—not just your professional self?

Permission Starts Within

No title, promotion, or achievement will give you permission to rest, receive support, or be human. That permission has to come from you.

Audience follow-up → What would change if you gave yourself permission to ask for help today?

🔎 Mentioned in This Episode

• Gallup workplace burnout research
• McKinsey research on women in leadership
• Lori's 2019 leadership experience managing a large, travel-heavy team
• The concept of the "Load-Bearing Wall" leader
• Building a personal support system and inner circle

✨ Reflection Prompts

• Have I become so good at coping that people no longer know when I'm struggling?
• Where am I performing competence instead of telling the truth?
• Who are the people I trust enough to be honest with?
• What support do I need that I haven't asked for?
• What would it look like to pursue ambition without carrying everything alone?

🧠 Who This Episode Is For

• High-achieving women in corporate leadership
• Entrepreneurs carrying the weight of their business alone
• Leaders experiencing burnout despite external success
• Women who struggle to ask for help
• Anyone who feels responsible for holding everything together

📩 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

Hi, I'm Lori Pine, the Joy CEO, and welcome to the Joy CEO Podcast. This is a show for women who are leading in corporate and building businesses who refuse to believe those two things have to feel like a grind. If you are ambitious, driven, and somewhere in the back of your mind wondering if there's a way to lead that doesn't cost you everything, you are in exactly the right place.

We lead with joy here. Joy is a strategy for leadership and not just fluff. So welcome back. If you've been here before, you know I adore you, and if you're new here, I'm so glad you found your way to us. Today, I want to start with something someone said to me years ago. My mentor, Anne, a woman I just adore and trust, someone who has watched me operate up close and personal, pulled me aside and said, "You know, Lori, your biggest problem [00:01:00] is that you make it look easy."

And I remember hearing that and thinking, "Is that a compliment?" Because it certainly felt like one. I do all the things, and here I am making it look easy because I am so capable, composed. Look at me having it all together. Well, guess what? I sat with it a little bit longer, and I started to understand what she actually meant.

The problem wasn't just that I made it look easy, it's that everyone believed me. Every single person in my life believed me That my busyness, my hard work, that it all came so easy, when in fact, it didn't. So my leadership believed [00:02:00] me, my team believed me, my family believed me, and the longer I kept performing, the more I believed it, I myself, until I genuinely couldn't tell the difference between being fine and just being really good at saying so.

"Hi, how are you?" "I'm fine. I'm good. I'm fine. Yes, got it all together. Latest project right on track. Gonna have those deliverables to you. Promise we are going to meet that number." "How are the kids?" "Yep, they're fine, too." Meanwhile, you know, House of Cards feels like I'm barely keeping it together. And so really, here's what I've come to believe and what this episode is all about.

The women who are struggling the most right now are not the ones who cannot perform. In fact, they're the ones who perform so well that nobody, including themselves, ever gives them permission to stop. [00:03:00] Nobody's really checking in on them and saying, "How are you really?" Not just the answer that you give to everybody, but how are you really?

And then looking them square in the eye with an open heart and waiting for a response. So this woman, she doesn't have a bandwidth problem. She might be you, she might be your friend, she might be your boss, but she doesn't have a bandwidth problem. She doesn't have a time management problem. She has a permission problem.

And the very thing that makes her exceptional at her job, because we know she's really good at her job, she loves her job, is the same thing that is making it impossible for her to breathe right now. And that's what we're gonna talk about today So let's talk about why this might feel a little bit urgent.

Because year after year, and 2026 is no [00:04:00] different, we are seeing data come out of Gallup and McKinsey with a story that's telling us that I think probably all of you listening to this podcast can feel in your body, in your psyche, even if you haven't seen the numbers, that women are engaged. You're probably the most engaged employees in the workforce, and simultaneously the most burnt out or on the brink of burnout.

And those two things are happening at the same time, in the same body, at the same job. Women in senior leadership are burning out at rates significantly higher than their male colleagues, and we know that that's because they're putting more in, more energy, more feeling, more heart. They're doing the extra projects.

They're being asked to do extra projects, and they almost [00:05:00] never, ever put it down. They don't shut it off. They're bringing their laptop to bed after they put the kids to sleep. They're waking up early and logging on so that they can get things done before anybody else is awake in their house Here's the part that I find the most telling.

When women receive the same support, the same sponsorship, the same advocacy that the men do, they are equally as ambitious, just as interested in advancing. So ambition isn't the problem, it's the operating system that runs underneath it. And I don't know about you, but when I was leading a billion-dollar team, I didn't even fully r- realize the amount of anxiety that I had in my operating system that was constantly running be- beneath the surface.

I just wasn't able to even be [00:06:00] aware of it at that time. So let me take you back to a time, 2019, when I was leading a very large team. My customer had 13 divisions spread across the United States, and I had team members in every single one of those divisions. So, you know, I was constantly on a plane every single week, going to see the customer, meeting up with somebody that reported to me, and I would also be heading to our internal headquarters in Charlotte, North Carolina.

So every week, I would kiss my husband goodbye, say goodbye to the boys, and off I would go. And that was just the rhythm of the job. You know, it was one night, two nights, three nights. But that fall of 2019, my son, my oldest son, started his senior year of high school, and something just wasn't sitting well [00:07:00] with me.

I was really starting to come to terms with, this is his last year at home, and every single event was a last. And for those of you who have children in high school, you know, who have children who are, are graduating this year, you know what I'm talking about. You know this ache and this realization of, wow, that went really fast.

So this calendar started to feel like a countdown. So by December, you know, each event is carrying a lot of extra weight. So one week in early December, I needed to be in Charlotte Monday through Friday, which was rare for me that I was there the entire week. This was a heads-down planning session and really important work, and I needed to be there.

The problem was that Wednesday night, Jackson had a senior [00:08:00] night for his wrestling team. And I wasn't going to miss it. So I left the meetings on Wednesday afternoon, caught a flight from Charlotte back to New York, attended the event, even had a big sign handmade. I don't know how I pulled that off, like, "Go Jackson," all the things, and attended the parents senior night, and then caught a 6:00 AM flight out of New York the next morning to get back to Charlotte by 8:00 AM.

And you know, you can do the math. That meant I was up at, like, 3:30, to the airport by 4:30, you know, to catch the 6:00 AM flight. So was I exhausted? Yes. Was I there? Undoubtedly. Wouldn't have missed it. But something in me really started to shift in, in that particular trip, and I remember telling my husband that weekend when I [00:09:00] got home, "I can't keep up this pace.

I'm tired. I'm missing too much of his senior year. I feel like I'm really not present, and something has to change." But I didn't know what it was going to be, and it turned out that a couple of months later there would be a global pandemic, and the world would shut down. And suddenly my whole family was home, and together in a way none of us had planned.

It was something we all needed. And there were so many hard and awful things about that time, but that was a real blessing for me and for us and our little family, that we were home and we were together and we really got some quality time. And the one thing I want you to notice about that December is I was performing at the highest level of my career, and I was running on fumes.[00:10:00]

And not one person around me, not my leadership, not my peers, not my team, had any idea. Nobody knew, because I made it look easy, and they believed me. My mentor was not wrong. I did make it look easy, and for a long, long time, I thought that that was a skill and that that was a gift I thought that was professionalism and leadership at its finest, and I thought that that's what strong leadership looked like, that that's what strong female leaders do.

They lead, and they make it look easy, and they really forego any of their personal needs in order to do so. What I didn't understand yet was that making it look easy and having everyone believe it had actually become its own kind of trap, and I was trapped. Because if you make it look easy and people assume that it is, well, [00:11:00] then they give you more, and then they give

you more, and maybe even a little bit more, and then they rely on you more, and they stop asking you how you're doing because the answer always seems to be the same. "I'm fine. I'm doing great. Everything's great." And before you know it, you become, and I've used this image before, you become this load-bearing wall, and everyone in the building starts leaning on you because you're a load-bearing wall, and load-bearing walls don't get to take a day off, ever, because they're the one keeping the whole building upright And the thing that makes this so insidious is that you start to believe it too.

Excellence becomes your identity, productivity equals your self-worth, and when that happens, any deviation from it feels like failure. [00:12:00] Like you're just failing if you're not constantly operating at the highest level. So you keep going, and you keep going, and you keep going, and you make it look easy, and everyone believes you, and it is this vicious cycle.

And the gap between how you look and how you feel gets wider and wider and wider until one day you can't remember the last time those two things were the same. And that's not a time management problem. Fixing your calendar or finding efficiencies in your calendar, not being triple-booked is not going to help that.

This is a permission problem. You are waiting, consciously or not, for someone to tell you that it's okay to have needs. It's okay to ask for something. It's okay to put some things down. It's okay [00:13:00] to take a day off, a week off, and be completely unplugged. And the permission that you're looking for almost never comes from the outside.

How could it? They don't even know what you're carrying. It has to come from the inside. It has to come from you. So what do we do with all this? I'm really not interested in just giving you all this and then telling you, "Okay, have a nice day." So let me give you just a little bit of direction. The first thing I would want you to consider is this: Where in your life are you performing competence that you might not actually feel?

This would be ways that you are just habitually making it look easy, and it's so automatic for you that you've actually stopped checking in with yourself about whether or not that's true. I had this moment where I got promoted once, [00:14:00] and I was so interested in the actual promotion that the thought occurred to me, "I wonder how quickly I can get promoted again?"

And I hadn't even actually started the job. So that constant need for acceleration, that constant need to keep going, and it, that ambition was really detrimental to me at that point. So where might this automatic ambition, this habit of making it look easy for you be causing you issues, and where do you need to check in with that?

It could be a leadership meeting where you give confident answers and then go back to your desk and quietly question every one of them. Like, is that even necessary to do to yourself? Maybe it's with your team where you project certainty because you've decided that's what they need from you, but really what they need for, from [00:15:00] you is not for you to give them the answers.

Maybe what they really need from you is for you to say, "Tell me what you would do." Because what they really need from you is for you to infuse in them that you believe that they have the answers, that they know what to do. Maybe it's at home where the people who love you most have the least accurate picture of how you're actually doing.

And I was once told that intimacy is into me see. Let them see. Let the people closest to you see how you actually are, and watch your relationships flourish. Let them into that tender part. The second thing I want you to notice is who you've given permission to to be honest with you,

and this is the real kind of heartfelt honesty

This [00:16:00] is, this is like kinda what Brene Brown talks about. Who is in that inner circle that you're actually sharing your most inner self with? And it's important that there's somebody. If it's not a partner or a spouse, is it a best friend? Who is it that you can tell the truth to? A therapist, a coach. Find somebody, because you want to be able to share that part of you.

We are constitutionally ambitious, and that part of us is not going away. The drive, the vision, the willingness to do hard things, that is woven into the fabric of who you are. But ambition without the permission, permission to be a human, to have feelings, to talk about that, is really just going to be a short fuse.

And allowing [00:17:00] yourself to be supported, to not have it all together, to not have all the right answers is, is the salve, it's the healing, it's the medicine that we, that we need so that we can actually be whole. So remember, joy is not a reward after you've earned it. Joy is actually within you. Joy is the fuel that can coexist with the hard stuff, that you can just choose at any moment, and it will h- help you overcome any of the hard stuff.

My mentor was right. She was right about me, and I bet she's right about you, too. We make it look easy, and then everyone believes us And that really cost me things that I couldn't clearly see until I had enough distance to look back. What I now know is that [00:18:00] I, and I want you to be able to look at this today, is that the most powerful thing you can do is not perform more effectively.

It's actually to give yourself permission to be known more honestly by the people in your life and by yourself. That's where things actually begin to change. If today's episode resonated with you, and I so hope it did, and you heard something about yourself in it, I would love to stay connected with you.

The best way to do so is to join my newsletter. So if you are not on my newsletter, I promise it is a juicy Sunday and Wednesday subscription where I share more of what we talk about here, the honest stuff, the practical stuff, the joyous stuff, and the stuff that doesn't always make it into the podcast episode.

So you can find the link in the show [00:19:00] notes, and I would love to see you over there in the newsletter where I can cheer you on and give you more tips and tricks on how to weave joy into your life. Thanks for spending some time with me this week, and I will look forward to seeing you next week. Do it with joy.

Glad to be doing it with you. Thanks, 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 @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, you don't just rise, you bring others with you.