Summary:

In this episode, I share a realization that completely changed the way I think about leadership, confidence, and career growth: sometimes the problem isn't you—it's the room you're in.

For years, I believed that if I worked harder, proved myself more, and pushed through challenges, I could succeed anywhere. But looking back, I can see how certain environments quietly chipped away at my confidence while others helped me thrive.

Using the story of NBA star Jalen Brunson's transformation from being viewed as a supporting player in Dallas to becoming a franchise leader in New York, I explore how the right environment can unlock potential that was always there.

I also share my own experience working at Anheuser-Busch under leadership that made me question my value, and how everything changed when I joined Coca-Cola and found a culture where my strengths were recognized and supported.

If you've been feeling stuck, overlooked, or like you're constantly proving yourself, this episode is a reminder that sometimes growth doesn't require becoming someone different—it requires finding a room where you can fully be yourself.

🔑 Key Takeaways:

Your Environment Shapes Your Confidence

The room you're in has a powerful impact on how you see yourself. When your contributions are minimized or overlooked, it's easy to assume you're the problem.

Audience follow-up → Where in your life are you receiving signals that make you question your value?

Not All Feedback Is About You

Sometimes what isn't being said is just as important as what is. The lack of support, opportunity, or recognition may reveal more about the environment than your abilities.

Audience follow-up → What "feedback" have you internalized that may actually be a reflection of the culture around you?

Great Leaders Build Around Strengths

The Knicks didn't ask Jalen Brunson to become someone else—they built around what he already did well. Strong leaders and organizations create conditions where people can thrive.

Audience follow-up → Are your strengths being leveraged in your current role, or are you constantly compensating for weaknesses?

Self-Doubt Often Starts in the Wrong Room

Repeated exposure to environments that don't value your perspective can slowly erode confidence, even when you're highly capable.

Audience follow-up → Have you mistaken an environmental issue for a personal deficiency?

Sometimes Growth Requires a Different Room

There comes a point when advocating for yourself isn't enough. If the environment refuses to change, it may be time to find a place where your value is recognized.

Audience follow-up → What would become possible if you stopped trying to convince the wrong people of your worth?

🔎 Mentioned in the Episode:

• Jalen Brunson – His journey from Dallas to New York and how the right environment unlocked his leadership potential.
• Anheuser-Busch – Lori's early leadership experience and lessons learned about workplace culture.
• The Coca-Cola Company – The environment where Lori rebuilt confidence and thrived professionally.
• Leadership environments and the hidden impact they have on confidence, performance, and career growth.

✨ Reflection Prompts:

• Where have I been blaming myself for something that was actually environmental?
• What messages am I receiving from the people and culture around me?
• Do I feel supported, valued, and seen in my current environment?
• What strengths do I bring that aren't being fully recognized?
• What would it look like to move toward a room that expands me instead of shrinking me?

🧠 Who This Episode Is For:

• Women leaders who feel stuck despite working hard
• High performers questioning their confidence or capability
• Professionals navigating difficult workplace cultures
• Executives considering a career move or leadership transition
• Anyone who has ever wondered, "Maybe I'm just not good enough"

This episode is a reminder that your potential isn't determined by the room you're in. Sometimes the breakthrough comes when you stop questioning yourself and start questioning whether the environment is worthy of your gifts.

📩 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

Hello, and welcome to The Joy CEO Podcast. I'm your host, Lori Pine, and I'm so glad to have you here with me. If you are new here, this is a show for women who are leading big lives, walking into big rooms, and figuring out how to do all of it without losing themselves in the process. And today, we are going to talk about something I've never addressed quite so directly, the moment you realize the problem was not you.

It was where you were playing. It was the environment you were in, the people you were surrounding yourself with. Today, you're going to walk away with three things. One, a way of understanding why your environment shapes your potential far more than your talent ever could. Two, a reframe for anyone who has ever quietly wondered why she isn't rising the way she knows she should.

[00:01:00] And three, a question I want you to sit with long after this episode ends. And if you are returning back to the podcast, thank you so much. Welcome back. You know I love it when you return, and I just adore you. I'm not telling you stuff that you want to hear. I come here to tell you the stuff that I so desperately needed to hear years before I ever had the language for it, and today is one of those days.

So I'm gonna start with a question. Have you ever left a job or a relationship, a city, a team, and then watched yourself transform into someone you didn't fully recognize on the other side? A metamorphosis, calmer, sharper, more certain, like the real version of yourself who you knew you were meant to be, and you didn't know how heavy you [00:02:00] had been before you made this change.

That's what I wanna talk about today, that version of you that shifted, because I think a lot of us has been taught that our performance is gonna come out of hard work and grit and our effort, and if we stay later, and if we prove it to everybody that we pack the gear, that that's how we're gonna find success.

And quite frankly, I believed that for a long, long time until I stopped performing well. And this isn't about working hard. It's about being in the wrong room at times. What if you find yourself in the wrong room with the wrong people, and you don't even know it until it starts to erode you? Now, some of you may not follow basketball, and you certainly may not follow New York City basketball, but I have been obsessed with the New York Knicks and what [00:03:00] has just transpired for the New York Knicks.

And I actually think that this has gone like wildfire across the world, and people have really just taken to this story because it's a great story, and I specifically wanna focus in on Jalen Brunson, who over the last four years is one of the clearest leadership lessons I've seen play out in public in real time, and it's such a great example that I want to bring to all of you because I really can't stop thinking about it.

So Jalen Brunson is the point guard for the New York Knicks, and last Saturday night he scored 45 points in game number five of the NBA finals and led the Knicks to their first championship in 53 years. He was named the finals MVP, he was the captain of the team, and the city of New York lost [00:04:00] its mind in the best possible way with so much pride, and every block, every balcony was singing Empire State of Mind.

But here's the part of the story that I wanna make sure that you know about. Before New York, Jalen Brunson played for the Dallas Mavericks, owned by Mark Cuban from the Shark Tank, and he was drafted in the second round in 2018, which in NBA terms already tells you something about what they thought of him.

Not very highly. He played alongside this famous, like, sensation named Luka, and some people just went to see Dallas play just to see Luka. Like, I remember my husband going out to an NBA game when he was visiting LA and they were playing Dallas, and he went to the game just so he could see Luka [00:05:00] play So Jalen Brunson was playing in the shadow of Luka, and Brunson was good.

He was solid, he was reliable, quality teammate. But in Dallas, he was the number two. He was the backup guy, the reliable kind of person that they could count on, but he wasn't the number one, and that was the ceiling that the room set for Jalen Brunson. You're just gonna be number two. And what most people didn't know until Brunson himself said it during the finals media day, was that being in that environment cost him something internally.

He paid a price on his insides. He admitted that watching Luka work so effortlessly made him question himself, and it made him wonder how [00:06:00] hard he actually had to just work and double down just to hold his place. The environment wasn't just limiting his role, it was creating self-doubt in a person who was so magnanimous and who would go on to win the most prestigious individual award in his sport.

But he didn't know it then because he was in a shadow. And here's what Dallas did with him. They delayed his contract extension, and by that delay, they were actually telling him everything he needed to know He was up for grabs. And so when the time came for the free agency, he was hearing crickets from Dallas, and that organization had his, the rights to him.

They could have kept him, but instead, they [00:07:00] really made space for New York to come in and offer a sweet deal for him. He took it. Though, that move was highly criticized at the time. New York got a lot of flack for paying money for Jalen Brunson. Analysts said a team couldn't be built around a six foot, six foot two point guard.

He was too small, he was too limited, he was the wrong profile. But New York disagreed. The coaches, the owner, the team, they disagreed. They thought he was the right fit, and they were ready to build a team around him. So the Knicks didn't just sign Jalen Brunson. They restructured the team's entire identity around what he does best.

They traded players who would compliment him. They gave him the ball. They gave him room. They trusted him. His coach adjusted his [00:08:00] own morning schedule to match Brunson's early workouts, and the coach said, and, and listen to this clearly, the coach said, "When your leader is that way, it's easy to be a coach."

Yes. So Jalen Brunson did not become a different player in New York. He became the full version of who he was and who he had always been. He was given the room to breathe into this elite version of himself. Dallas saw him as a backup, as a number two. New York saw him as a champion who was going to lead them to a championship.

Same man, two different rooms Okay, so now this same story, but for you. Not from a basketball court, but from the corner office of a building. Anheuser-Busch was the first part of my career. So my [00:09:00] last bit of time that I was there, I was reporting to someone who had made his position on women in leadership very clear.

This was not in policy. He didn't write it down anywhere. But his attitude was crystal clear that he did not think that women belonged in the office, which meant that the environment that I was in shifted dramatically. I felt very much alone. I was the only woman in the office. All of the men thought he was great.

He was a bro. He was high-fiving them, and then he had disdain for me. So I became really insulated, and there was nobody I could really talk to about it because nobody understood. And so there was this slow erosion within me, [00:10:00] and it really started to affect my confidence, and I started to become- play smaller.

I wasn't announcing my wins like I had with my previous manager, and I started spending, like, more energy trying to just work myself up to go to work each day. And there's a big difference between managing yourself to just do the basics than managing yourself to lead and be vibrant and to shine. So that really shifted things for me.

When I resigned, something rather unexpected happened. Three people inside of the company called, people I respected, people much more senior than me, and said, "What happened? Why are you leaving? And why didn't you tell me something was wrong?" And I was like, I felt so invisible. I [00:11:00] felt so unprotected, so unseen, and I remember sitting with that in this particular kind of sting of like, "Where were you while this was happening for the last year?"

But here's what I've made of it since, is that those people weren't indifferent. They were just busy. They were just doing their own thing, and they assumed that I was being treated with the respect that the broader company would have wanted me to have been treated with. They didn't know, and my corner, my little world was invisible to them.

That happens a lot. My part was I didn't speak up. And so when a mentor who had been with AB himself and left and gone to Coca-Cola called to check on me, I told him the truth. I told him really what was happening. A month later, he called back and said, "There's an [00:12:00] opportunity for you here at Coke." And that was the door that opened, the energy shift that happened for me, and that was my call, just like Jalen Brunson's call to go to New York I didn't go to New York at that moment in my career.

I actually went to Atlanta, and that is when I joined the Coca-Cola Company. I was in a six-month training program that was much like a PhD program, and I am forever grateful for that shift because what ended up happening was I was able to thrive, and a job was built around me and my talents and what I could bring to the party.

And that was 15 glorious years with the Coca-Cola companies, with so many tremendous experiences like, like going to the Sydney Olympics, Super Bowls, NCAA [00:13:00] Final Fours, negotiating with Ludacris to make sure that he was the emcee for an event I was leading in New York City. I mean, on and on and on. Meeting Drake, meeting LeAnn Rimes, Tim McGraw.

So many fun things happened in that 15 years that I just can't even tell you all of them. So here's what I wanna offer you, not as any sort of, you know, consolation, but I want you to think about what might be happening with you right now. The environment you're in is never neutral. There's always energy, and it's always charged.

So is it actively shaping you to believe you are capable, that you are the rising leader, that you are shaping futures, that you are wired to read a room, you're wired to read the business, you're [00:14:00] wired to take things to the next level, and that you can be the one to get promoted, to have a voice, to be seen for all of your natural talents?

Or has the room already decided who you are, and that you're a number two, that you don't really have a chance to shine, that your ceiling is here when you know your ceiling is way up higher and higher and higher? So there's feedback, and then there's unspoken feedback, and what is the unspoken feedback that is being said, spoken to you that maybe you don't really want to hear because you think a job is better than no job?

Which, yes and no, because you, my love, are meant to be a champion, and the world needs the champion you are meant to be, [00:15:00] and the services and the heart and the thought and the leadership that you will bring to whatever it is that you are going to champion Don't let somebody else's ceiling be your ceiling.

Just let it be information about the building, and if that is not your right building, get out. Find the next building. Jalen Brunson did not fix himself to become an NBA champion. He found an organization willing to build around him. The Knicks never asked him to shrink or become somebody he wasn't.

Instead, they gave him the space, the runway, the mechanisms to grow and to become the champion that was already inside of him. And so here's what I wanna make sure that you are doing, that you are advocating to find a- the best solution for yourself, that you [00:16:00] are in a situation, whether it's inside the same organization or that you are looking elsewhere, but that you have a sponsor, a shift, a restructure, something that opens the door for you, that allows you to be the absolute best version of yourself.

Yeah. I know that when you get into the right room with the right people who see you for all of your strengths, the momentum and the energy that will carry you to things that you don't even know are possible will become some of the greatest moments of your career. I wanna leave you with something a mentor said to me when the erosion was happening during that time at Anheuser-Busch.

"Don't let this be about you or your worth. Let this be the fuel that gets you to the place where your worth is never the question, not by you, and not by anybody [00:17:00] else." So Do not dismiss what's happened. Let's just make sure that if you're in the wrong room, that you are able to move on, take the lesson with you, and find the right room where the ceiling doesn't exist at all, and that you can lead in a way that you are meant to lead.

If this episode has landed for you, which I so hope it has, that you're now scrolling through your Instagram, you're checking out the New York Knicks win, you're checking out Jalen Brunson and his great story, I would love for you to share this episode with just one woman, one woman that you know needs to hear this right now.

Because we are going through a time where women and men are sitting in their offices full of self-doubt, wondering their own worth, full of fear, wondering if they're gonna have a job in six months, and that is [00:18:00] not the best use of our talents. So let's build each other up. Let's support one another. Let's make sure that nobody is being left behind, insulated, felt like they are left alone.

Reach out. Let me know how I can support you. And until next week, I am so glad to be doing it with you. Make sure that you join my newsletter. L- The details are in the show notes, and I will be back next week for a new episode. Thanks so much. Talk to you soon. 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, loripaine.com, to learn more about coaching, retreats, [00:19:00] 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.