Summary:

In part two of this deeply personal series, host Lori Pyne shares how a collapse outside a New York deli became the wake-up call that changed the trajectory of her life and leadership.

After years of chasing achievement, identity, and external validation, Lori began the inner work that would eventually shape her philosophy that joy isn't separate from success—it fuels it.

This episode explores the hidden cost of tying your worth to your title, the discomfort that comes when high achievers slow down, and why so many women instinctively fill empty space with more work instead of reflection. Lori shares practical tools for regulating your nervous system, breaking free from people-pleasing, and reconnecting with the person underneath the performance.

If you've built a successful life but still feel exhausted, disconnected, or unsure who you are outside of what you do—this episode is for you.

🔑 Key Takeaways:

The Identity Trap Is Real

Many ambitious leaders become so attached to their titles, achievements, and image that they lose sight of who they are outside of work.

When your identity becomes your role, every setback feels personal—and stepping away feels impossible.

Audience follow-up → If your job title disappeared tomorrow, how would you describe yourself?

The Void Isn't the Problem—It's the Invitation

When high achievers finally slow down, they often encounter what Lori calls "the void"—an uncomfortable space where busyness no longer distracts from deeper questions.

The instinct is often to fill that space with more doing. Growth begins when you stay long enough to listen.

Audience follow-up → What have you been avoiding by staying busy?

Your Worth Is Not Your Productivity

Lori challenges the belief that value comes from output, achievement, or being the person everyone depends on.

Grounded leadership comes from presence, not constant performance.

Audience follow-up → Where are you measuring your value by what you produce rather than who you are?

It's Time for a Corporate Exorcism

People-pleasing, perfectionism, over-functioning, and saying yes when you mean no aren't leadership strengths—they're survival strategies.

Leadership in alignment requires boundaries, even when they disappoint other people.

Audience follow-up → What boundary have you been avoiding because you're afraid of letting someone down?

Your Nervous System Needs Leadership Too

Stress isn't only a mindset issue—it's physical.

Lori shares practices that helped her regulate her body and return to herself, including breathwork, yoga, time in nature, movement, and intentionally seeking moments of awe.

Audience follow-up → What helps your body feel safe enough to slow down?

Small Habits Create Big Shifts

Transformation rarely happens through dramatic change.

Micro-habits practiced consistently create sustainable leadership and lasting wellbeing.

Audience follow-up → What's one small daily habit that would help you reconnect with yourself this week?

Healing Doesn't Happen Alone

Therapy, coaching, retreats, and supportive communities can provide the space and mirrors we often can't create for ourselves.

Growth accelerates when you're surrounded by people committed to becoming more fully themselves.

Audience follow-up → Who supports the version of you you're becoming?

🔎 Mentioned in the Episode:

• The Identity Trap — when achievement and titles become your entire sense of self.
• The Void — the uncomfortable space that appears when busyness stops and self-reflection begins.
• Corporate Exorcism — Lori's framework for releasing people-pleasing, perfectionism, and over-functioning.
• Nervous System Regulation Practices — including breathwork, yoga, movement, nature, and awe.
• Micro-Habits — small, repeatable actions that support sustainable change.
• Therapy, Retreats, and Community — essential support structures for long-term growth and alignment.

✨ Reflection Prompts:

• Who am I when I'm not producing, performing, or achieving?
• What am I using work to avoid feeling?
• Where do I need stronger boundaries to protect my energy?
• What brings me genuine joy—and when was the last time I made space for it?
• What would leadership look like if I stopped proving and started aligning?

🧠 Who This Episode Is For:

• High-performing women who feel exhausted despite their success
• Leaders navigating burnout or questioning their identity outside work
• Executives ready to lead from alignment rather than obligation
• Professionals working to overcome people-pleasing and perfectionism
• Anyone curious about the connection between nervous system health, joy, and sustainable 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

Transcript

Hello, and welcome to the Joy CEO Podcast. I'm your host, Lori Pyne. So happy to be with you today. This is part two of a two-part series. Last week, you heard my story about collapsing on a sidewalk outside of a New York deli, the day my body forced a system override. It happens a lot with us overachievers, where we push and we push and we go and we go, and then one day something unthinkable happens.

And I want to remind you that in last week's episode, I shared with you some data that comes out of Harvard and McKinsey that proves that joy is actually a business metric. It drives business results. It is not just some soft, fluffy skill. And knowing that data does not necessarily change your life.[00:01:00]

Doing the inner work does. And so that day that I was on the sidewalk, taken away by an ambulance with my vice president, Jack, standing over me, I had a decision to make. Was I going to keep doing what I had always been doing, or was I going to start to live life a little bit differently? And that was the moment in time, it was the impetus, where I had to choose differently, and that was when I began the real inner work, and it has now been a twenty-year journey.

And today, I wanna talk to you about that journey, what it is like to face the inner stuff, the things that we think that we can't face, we don't need to face, it's not really holding us back, but when in fact, it is absolutely [00:02:00] the stuff that is getting in our way. And when we get into the trenches of how we can reprogram that, that high-performing mind will actually choose alignment over exhaustion.

So welcome to part two. I am so glad you are here. Okay. I want to unmask first for you the identity trap. We all fall into it We fall into, I am now this outer version of myself, the title, the paycheck, the clothes I wear, the car I drive, the house I live in, the community I belong to because of the job I have.

And our attachment to that drives everything we do. [00:03:00] But what actually starts to happen is we put up this impenetrable armor, and the coat of armor gets thicker and thicker and heavier and heavier, and we actually start to think, "Am I addicted to the work?" But I would actually challenge that. It's not that we're addicted to the work, it's that we are addicted to who people think we are because of the work that we do, and there's a really big distinction.

So a lot of glamour can come from the company that you work for, can come from the things that you get to do because of the company you work for. Like, for example, I've been to Olympics. I went to the Olympics in Sydney. I went to Super Bowls. I negotiated entertainment deals with, you know, artists like Ludacris and, [00:04:00] you know, famous people.

And, you know, I would get to tell these cool stories at dinner parties because of my job. So then I became my job. That was my identity. So when I started to do the inner work, I couldn't suss out who I was versus who my job was. I didn't even really know what I liked, what I didn't like, what hobbies I wanted to take up.

I had no idea. I just liked to work. And that is not a good place to be when you've worn yourself out to the point where you are on a sidewalk and they're hauling you off with an ambulance. So who are you versus the persona that you've created? The person versus the persona. And that's a really good thing to look at [00:05:00] because the persona becomes this amplified kind of egomaniac part of us, and the person is inside going, "You know, part of me really loves this, but there's a part of me who craves something deeper," the connections, the intimacy, the being with my family.

And, and those are hard things to balance Next, let's talk about the void. When we talk about slowing down, doing some inner work, I think immediately this fear comes up, this, "Oh my gosh, what would I do with quiet time? What would I do if I actually slowed down?" And for a minute we would love it. We have all these ideas about what we would do if.

But [00:06:00] then the reality is we wouldn't actually relax. We wouldn't actually slow down. We would take that void and that space and fill it with something else. When I left my corporate job to become a stay-at-home mom, somebody gave me some very wise advice. They actually said, "Do not take on any pro- projects for the first six months," because everybody in the community is going to ask you to volunteer, be on a board, be on a committee, because they know that you're going to be effective once they find out that you're not, quote-unquote, "working."

But the point of me becoming a stay-at-home mom was to actually be home, to be present, to give my attention where my attention needed to go, not to become the queen of volunteering and the queen of [00:07:00] every, you know, community project in my area. So being really intentional about not filling the void and not allowing my own anxiety to become so great that I felt like I needed to fill that empty space head-on.

And let me tell you, those first few weeks of being an empty mom were so uncomfortable. I didn't have a laptop. I didn't have a second cell phone. I wasn't running an enormous team and a billion-dollar business. And so I really had to settle into, where's my self-worth coming from? What are valuable contributions that I can make?

How can I wake up and feel good about myself even if nobody else is praising me today? And that's part of the inner work that I'm [00:08:00] talking about. How can you do that and be that for yourself? It's really important And so the reframe is being able to shift your worth from what you produce to how you actually lead, and we need that reframe.

Our productivity is not equivalent to our self-worth, but how we lead is indicative of a lot of things that are happening on the inside. And you can tell a leader who is insecure, unsure of themselves, leading with scarcity, because they come across as somebody who can't stand on their own two feet. They have to be in the know, they're constantly busy, [00:09:00] and they're really unsure of themselves in a way that over projects them.

And I'm sure you've noticed these types of leaders. We wanna make sure that we are grounded as leaders, that we know ourselves, that we're sure of the way that we're leading, it aligns with our own values. And so when we come up against something challenging, we can steady ourselves because we're coming back to who we are.

That is critical. Critical. And being able to access joy and knowing that joy lives within you, and it's simply a choice, it's a matter of choosing it, no matter what else is going on or how hard things are, that is the difference between a leader who's going to contribute and [00:10:00] rise, and a leader who's going to be towed under by insecurities, jealousy, it's my turn, but somebody else is getting the job, excuses for the we- the reasons, the whys the project isn't getting done or the numbers aren't being met, and we wanna rise above all of that kind of minutiae Next, we may need a bit of a corporate exorcism, and what I mean by that is there's kind of three parts.

How do we kill the good girl syndrome? I don't know about you, but I was raised to be really performative, over-delivering, people-pleasing, making sure that I was the first to volunteer, raise my [00:11:00] hand, sign up, do that extra thing, all under the guise of work ethic, but it came at such a price. And that visibility isn't necessarily the visibility I want you to have today.

The visibility I want you to have today is your thought leadership, your ability to speak in moments that really count, your ability to be bold when bold is required, your ability to bring others with you so that you surround yourself and insulate yourself with tremendous other leaders who are experts in their lane so that you can be the expert in your lane The next part of the exorcism is embracing the boundary, and a lot of us have frictions with boundaries.

When we do the inner work, [00:12:00] we learn to survive being uncomfortable and that temporary disappointment of holding a boundary that somebody else is going to feel. When you hold a boundary, you're going to honor yourself, and somebody else may not be happy with you. But that's okay, because you're going to be happy with you, and you're going to start to reaffirm your own trust in you instead of selling yourself to everybody else out there and all of their needs and all of their demands and all of their urgent matters to the point where you exhaust yourself and you have some version of the deli incident.

And so I bring you back to, where do I need to start holding my boundaries? Where am I saying yes when I need to say no? Where am I [00:13:00] signing up for an extra project or an extra committee at work when perhaps it's somebody else's turn? Let me give the next girl behind me a chance. Let her have visibility.

Let her learn. Let me make room. And then, you know, the, the last part is around the physical part, the physical part of doing the inner work, and you can't intellectually work yourself out of stress. It is a physical manifestation. You have to actively reset your nervous system, and sitting in your desk all day long does not do that.

It actually contributes to it. Sitting at your computer, marinating on what the problem might be, trying to fix it, that is not helpful. I've had to learn, I mean, [00:14:00] so many times the hard way, to actually breathe. I've had to take breathwork classes. I've had to be in yoga classes where they teach me about my diaphragm and how to breathe in deeper in ways that actually help my body relax and reset I've had to learn about going barefoot on the grass and what that does energetically, letting the Earth's energy into your, your body from the feet up.

I've learned about going and hugging trees and energetically what that does to you. And all of that sounds so crunchy and granola-y and woo-woo-y, but it helps. You know, doctors are so quick to wanna prescribe a medication, and so many people absolutely need a medication. I'm not here to debate that. But If there is something you can do [00:15:00] holistically, naturally, get yourself out in nature.

There's a book entitled Awe, I'll link it in the show notes, that talks about the healing power of awe. When we are in awe of things in our life, we heal. It's the opposite of stress. It-- if there were two ends of the spectrum, they're on polar opposite ends. Finding awe, being awed in your own life, that will help reset, that will do the inner work.

And lastly, how do you have an action plan around this? How do you create micro habits that will help you put some of this in place? For me, I've been doing so many different things for 20 years, but it started with a therapist. One therapist changed my life. I sat on her blue [00:16:00] couch every week for four years.

I had to pay cash, she didn't take insurance, and she was worth every penny, and I would do it again today if I had to. That was the type of person I needed. She shot me straight. She never let me off the hook. She called me on my BS. She pushed me into uncomfortable places, demanded that I know who I was, demanded that I know my, my desires, my likes, what hobbies I wanted to take up, that I could not be a single-aspected woman.

I could not be all about work and all about raising children. There had to be something more to me, something more interesting. And if you want people to be interested in you, you have to be interesting. My very first podcast guest, Justin Honaman, said that, and he was my boss for a few years at Coca-Cola, and he is so [00:17:00] interesting.

Why? Because he does interesting things, and so many of you out there have forgotten how interesting you are, that you have these interests, and these desires, and these things you wanna do. And you keep delaying them until the kids are grown, or until I get the promotion, or until I'm making more money, or until, until, until.

We only have today. Today is the gift So creating micro habits, intentional one-minute pauses for you to get back in touch with you, back in touch with what's going to make a difference. The other thing that really made a difference was, so therapy, and then I found these group retreats and these amazing women to connect to.

And these women kind of became like my fairy godmothers. And so at [00:18:00] least once a year, I would go on a retreat weekend and see them. And now, almost 20 years later, I feel like I've grown up with them, and they have seen so many iterations of me. And that's really special to have that group of women and those experiences.

And creating a community of my own or creating a community of women for other women to be a part of is really important to me because when we are isolated, when we think that other people don't understand, that's when we go more and more inward. And I don't want any of you to feel alone, misunderstood, like there's just nobody out there who's walked in your shoes or can empathize, relate to what's going on, whatever it is, whatever it [00:19:00] is that's going on with you right now, because I do believe that there's nothing that you're walking through that one of us hasn't been through and can help you through as well.

And that's the beauty. That's the beauty of being honest and doing the honest inside work so that we can really show up in the world to be who we're really meant to be. And I think it's more than just our jobs. It's more than just being a wife or a mother or sister or aunt or... We're more than that. And so I encourage you to find these really intentional pauses where you can explore, ask yourself, "What is it that I'm searching for?

Am I at risk of collapsing on the sidewalk, or am I taking really good [00:20:00] care of myself?" The corporate world will not hand you joy on a silver platter. They just won't do it to you. You have to remember that joy is within you, and you can choose it at any moment. I'm Lori Pyne, the Joy CEO. I am so glad to be doing it with you.

You are the Joy CEO of your own life, and I encourage you to make sure that you are living it interestingly so that others are interested in you, and it just keeps taking you to newer and higher levels where all of your dreams come true. So glad to be doing it with you.