In this deeply personal episode, I share the story that became the foundation of The Joy CEO. It’s a story I don’t tell often—one that begins in 2008 when I was juggling a new leadership role near New York City, relocating across the country, navigating a divorce, and raising two young boys.

On the outside, I looked like I had everything under control. On the inside, my body was sounding alarms I refused to hear.

After months of stress, sleep deprivation, and pushing through exhaustion, I collapsed outside a deli and woke up in the back of an ambulance after experiencing a grand mal seizure. That moment forced me to confront a truth so many high-achieving women face: just because you can carry it all doesn’t mean you should.

In this episode, I explore the hidden cost of high performance, the warning signs we often ignore, and why joy is not a luxury—it’s a leadership strategy. I also share research showing that leaders who cultivate joy and wellbeing are more productive, creative, and resilient than those operating from constant stress and survival mode.

This is part one of a two-part series on the real origin story of The Joy CEO and the inner transformation that changed everything.

🔑 Key Takeaways:

High Performance Can Hide a Breaking Point

Many ambitious women become so skilled at carrying responsibility that they stop recognizing when they’re overwhelmed.

Your Body Often Knows Before Your Mind Does

Stress doesn't always show up as a breakdown. It can appear as exhaustion, headaches, anxiety, poor sleep, irritability, or chronic tension long before a crisis occurs.

Survival Mode Is Not Sustainable Leadership

Operating on adrenaline may create short-term results, but it comes at a cost. Constant hustle can disconnect you from creativity, clarity, and joy.

Joy Is a Leadership Advantage

Research highlighted in this episode shows that leaders who experience greater wellbeing and positive emotions are more productive, innovative, and effective.

Self-Awareness Is the First Step Toward Change

Transformation begins when we pause long enough to notice what's happening internally rather than pushing through discomfort.

You Don't Have to Earn Rest

Many high achievers believe rest is something they deserve only after achieving enough. This mindset often leads to burnout.

🔎 Mentioned in the Episode:

• Lori's 2008 grand mal seizure that became a turning point in her life and leadership journey
• The "I've Got It" high-performer mindset
• The impact of chronic stress, sleep deprivation, and emotional overload
• Research from Harvard and McKinsey on the connection between joy, wellbeing, productivity, creativity, and business performance
• The concept of joyful leadership as a sustainable alternative to hustle culture
• The upcoming Part Two episode exploring the inner work and mindset shifts that followed this life-changing experience

✨ Reflection Prompts:

• What warning signs have I been minimizing or ignoring?
• Where am I relying on willpower instead of support?
• What does my body need from me right now?
• How has stress affected the way I show up as a leader?
• If joy became a leadership priority, what would I do differently this week?

🧠 Who This Episode Is For:

• High-achieving women balancing leadership, family, and personal challenges
• Executives and professionals who feel successful but exhausted
• Leaders experiencing stress, overwhelm, or early signs of burnout
• Women who are tired of carrying everything alone
• Anyone seeking a more sustainable, joyful approach to success and leadership

💛 Favorite Quote:

"The very thing that made me successful—the belief that I could handle it all—was the thing that nearly broke me."

📩 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. I'm so glad to have you here with me today. If you are new, welcome. So glad to have you here, and if you are returning, thank you. You know I adore you, and I'm always so glad to have you come back to listen. Today, we are going to talk about how the Joy CEO actually began, the real deal, the real story, the one that I often do not tell.

But since you have been with me now for over a year, it's time that I peel back the curtain and share with you the journey that brought me to this moment in time. It was July of 2008. I was in a new city, a new job, and probably a new Ann Taylor suit that felt [00:01:00] really uncomfortable and itchy, and we were presenting to our senior vice president.

So I was new in my role. I didn't know the business that well, and I was going to go in front of him and give him an update and my recommendations. I made it through the meeting, and a group of my colleagues decided to go to the deli, grab a sandwich, and then head back to the office. I stood in line with several of them to get what would become this disappointing concoction of fried chicken, dripping mayonnaise, and I thought it was gonna be lettuce and tomato, but it was coleslaw.

So when I got to the front of the deli line, I asked, "Can I just have a plain grilled chicken sandwich, nothing else except lettuce and tomato?" And the woman [00:02:00] behind the counter looked at me and she said, "You must be new around here. That's not how we do it." And she proceeded to give me this messy concoction that I knew I would not eat.

I took it. I went to the checkout and paid for my sandwich, and I remember nothing else The next thing I know, I'm waking up in an ambulance, and my vice president, Jack, is standing on top of me, horrified, white as a ghost. "Lori." And with my blank stare, disoriented, inability to comprehend where I am, who Jack even is, I say, "Where am I?

What happened?" It turns out that I had had a full grand [00:03:00] mal seizure and collapsed on the sidewalk outside of a New York deli. The stress that I had been holding for months finally caught up to me. My body pulled the emergency fire alarm You see, what was happening in the background that I didn't let anybody else see is that I was mid-divorce.

I had two little boys, ages three and five at that point. My ex-husband wouldn't acknowledge that I wanted a divorce, so I went out of my way to be accommodating, and I relocated my entire family from Little Rock, Arkansas, where we were living, where I was working, to New York. Why would I do that? Because that's where his family was, and I was trying to make this [00:04:00] entire process easier for him, easier for my children, who were now going to be around family for the first time in their little lives.

But in doing so, I made my life so much harder. There was the actual move, the selling of a house, getting promoted, starting a new job, meeting a new team, the cultural differences of being in an office in Little Rock, Arkansas, v- versus being in an office just outside of New York City. Can you imagine the differences, the pace, the expectations?

I had to find all new doctors. I had to find preschools, register my oldest for kindergarten. And all the while, I was handling everything. I've got it. I can do it. Yes, I've got it. Boom, boom, boom. I was the girl [00:05:00] who looked like she had it all together. And then the day came when I knew this meeting was happening.

I had left Maine, left the boys with my parents and my ex-husband, driven back to New York so I could take this really big, really important meeting. And the night before the meeting, I was in this rental house by myself, and I thought somebody was trying to break in. So I laid in the bed terrified. I put the dresser up against the door.

I didn't know if I could leave, because if I leaved, it sounded like there was somebody outside of the door, and they would just kill me and do terrible things to me. So I laid there until daylight And once daylight came, I had already formulated a plan. I had all my clothes packed. I was ready to go. [00:06:00] I drove to the office.

I showered at the office, got ready at the office, and was there so early for the meeting. And, and then we presented to our senior vice president. So by the time I took a ride in an ambulance, it had been well over thirty-six hours before I had gotten any sleep. I was running at this pace for months, trying to make everybody else happy.

Now, I am not the only one who has done this. Perhaps this is you right now. Perhaps this is a shadowing of something that might happen to you unless you change your ways. Perhaps you know somebody who's going through something similar, because here's what happens when we as high performers [00:07:00] get into this trap.

We tell ourselves that we can handle it. We've got it. No worries. Go ahead. Give it to me. I can handle it. I've got it. I'm going to take care of that. But the truth is, our plate starts to run over, and our body can feel the stress, the anxiety, can feel the tension when things are starting to conflict, like living in a new city where your in-laws live as you're trying to divorce their son, and now they're involved in all your business, and they wanna sit down and talk to you and tell you why everything you're doing is wrong.

These are the things that I didn't think through when I thought, "I can figure this out. I'll just move us. It will be so much better for him." [00:08:00] Never once considering, is this going to be better for me? If I think about that time in my career, I was also doing really well. I was crushing it. I had just gotten awards.

I had just gotten the highest performance rating of my career, and that opened the door to me being promotable. So I was able to interview for multiple jobs, one in Atlanta, one in New York. I was offered both of them. I chose New York because of my personal situation. And so now I'm in a situation where I'm seen as a high performer.

I'm seen as somebody who can get the job done. I've delivered results. I make the number. The collaborators align with me. I create cohesiveness. And guess what? All of [00:09:00] that just glorifies the corporate grind, right? I make it look easy, and so people believe me And here's what happens when we do that habitually day after day, week after week, quarter after quarter, year after year.

There is this grinding, there is this erosion on our nervous system, and we start to get warnings that we need to take care of ourselves, and yet we keep hitting that override button. Override, override. I don't need to slow down. I can't slow down. I love this work. I love what I'm doing. They need me. I can do it.

I wanna do it. And yet something is happening on the insides. So I wanna share with you that my logic [00:10:00] was flawed. It was flawed that I thought I could do everything. It was flawed that I thought I could handle all of this personal turmoil and then add on top of it this massive change to my corporate life.

That was flawed thinking. But I didn't have a trusted mentor or ally in my life at that time that I could really talk to and outline my thinking and get feedback. So I went ahead and did it with my best thinking at that time, and my best thinking landed me in that ambulance that day. Here's what happens, though.

When we actually become leaders who lead with joy, the data changes. There is [00:11:00] concrete information out of Harvard and McKinsey that tells us that joyous leaders are aligned, they grow the business, they're more profitable, customer satisfaction improves, and they're two times less likely to burn out. So let me give you a few of these numbers Joyous leaders are 31% more productive, they're three times more creative, two times less likely to burn out, they can drive sales up to 37% more, they'll drive profit increases of 23%, and customer service satisfaction increases by 31%.

So there is real business improvement in being joyous. [00:12:00] However, we are not joyous when we are doing it all to the point that our bodies keep giving us signals that it's time to tap out, time to take a break, time to rest, to the point that we end up in a full seizure on a sidewalk, taken away by an ambulance.

So what I wanna ask you is scan your body right now. Are you clenching your jaw? Are you holding your breath? Are you ignoring something that is screaming at you from the inside out? Are you having trouble sleeping? Are you having some anxiety? Are you having tummy issues? Is there something going on with you that is just a warning sign that an ambulance ride is right around the corner?

Because here's the [00:13:00] thing, knowing the data about joy, knowing that it's gonna drive productivity and sales and customer satisfaction and reduce burnout, it doesn't do us any good unless we're willing to do the inner work. The inner work, the what is it that we're telling ourselves? What is it that we make up about ourselves?

What is it that needs to change inside of me so that I can then show up and actually live into becoming a joyous leader, one who can lead with command and authenticity and results, but in a way that actually shines and highlights my truest self and who I am Next week, we are going to do part two of this episode, and I'm gonna pull back the [00:14:00] curtain on exactly the internal reprogramming that I had to go through from being the girl who collapsed on the sidewalk, taken away by an ambulance, life is a chaotic mess, to an aligned woman who is really clear on her purpose, why she's here, and who she is meant to serve.

So you do not have to wait for an ambulance ride to stop you. You can choose to stop today. There is something that you can put down and something else that you can kindly and graciously pick up that will serve you well. And that is some joy, my friend. So until next week when we go through part two, I'm Lori Pine, the Joy CEO.