Summary:

Every human will have chapters in trouble. Smooth sailing is never guaranteed. There are seasons in life when everything feels uncertain, but the people around you still need you to lead. 

In this solo episode, Lori shares one of the hardest chapters of her life: losing her mother to cancer in five weeks, from diagnosis to death, while leading a demanding corporate career as a single mom. She talks honestly about what grief actually looks like when you don't have the option to stop, the pressure to keep performing, and what it really means to be strong when you don't have the answers. 

Rather than offering quick fixes, Lori shares the mindset shifts that carried her through, and what she learned about choosing who to be when nothing else was certain.

If you're walking through a difficult season while still carrying responsibility at work, at home, or in your business, this conversation is for you.

🔑 Key Takeaways:

Strength Doesn't Require Certainty

One of the biggest misconceptions about leadership is believing you need to know exactly how everything will turn out before you can move forward. Lori shares how real strength is choosing your next step even when the future feels completely unknown.

Audience follow-up → Where are you waiting for certainty before allowing yourself to move forward?

Focus on What's Inside Your Hula Hoop

When life feels overwhelming, trying to control everything only creates more exhaustion. Lori introduces her "Hula Hoop Principle"—a simple but powerful way to separate what you can influence from what you cannot.

Audience follow-up → What are you carrying today that actually belongs outside your hula hoop?

Let Your Values Be Your Anchor

During seasons of uncertainty, circumstances constantly change—but your values don't have to. Lori shares three grounding questions that helped her keep showing up with intention, even while grieving.

Ask yourself:

• Who do I want to be while this unfolds?
• What values won't change?
• What energy do I want to bring today?

Audience follow-up → Which of these three questions do you need most right now?

Lower the Bar When Life Is Heavy

Hard seasons are not the time to expect peak performance. Lori explains why reducing perfectionism isn't giving up—it's making space for healing while continuing to move forward.

Audience follow-up → Where could you replace perfection with "good enough" this week?

Borrow Strength Until You Find Your Own

Resilience doesn't mean carrying everything by yourself. Lori reflects on the importance of trusted people who can hold hope, perspective, and strength for you when yours feels depleted.

Audience follow-up → Who are the people you can honestly lean on during difficult seasons?

Don't Make Permanent Decisions During Temporary Chaos

When emotions are high, our thinking often narrows. Lori encourages listeners to avoid making major life decisions in the middle of upheaval and instead focus on the next right thing.

Audience follow-up → What's the next small step you can take today instead of trying to solve everything?

🔎 Mentioned in the Episode:

• Lori's personal story of losing her mother to cancer in 2011 while leading a corporate career as a single mother.
• The Hula Hoop Principle—focusing only on what is within your control.
• Three grounding questions for navigating uncertainty with intention.
• The importance of lowering perfectionism during difficult seasons.
• Why trusted relationships are essential when life feels overwhelming.
• The practice of choosing the next right thing instead of trying to control the entire journey.

✨ Reflection Prompts:

• What's actually in your hula hoop today, and what have you been trying to carry that was never yours to hold?
• Where have you been mistaking certainty for strength, and what would it look like to lead without it?
• Who do you want to be while this season unfolds, and what values refuse to change no matter what's happening around you?
• Even load bearing walls need reinforcement. Who's someone you trust enough to lean on right now?
• What's today's assignment, not this year's, not this month's? Just today's.

🧠 Who This Episode Is For:

• Women leading teams while navigating personal hardship.
• Executives, founders, and business owners carrying heavy responsibility.
• High achievers struggling with uncertainty, grief, or major life transitions.
• Leaders learning to let go of perfectionism and control.
• Anyone who needs permission to lead with courage—even when life feels messy and uncertain.

Transcript

LP_Ep_63_Final Podcast

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome to the Joy CEO Podcast. I'm your host, Lori Pyne, and I am so glad to have you here with me today. What do you do when your world feels like it's falling apart and you still need to show up, lead your team, lead your family, lead your life, and you just wanna pull the blankets up over your head and not get out of bed?

That's what we're gonna talk about today. You can't just run away from home. You can't just quit your job. You can't just make some sort of graceful exit off of the stage of life. And yet you're not sure how to show up and hold all of the emotions that come along with what life is actually dealing you at the moment.

Your team still needs direction. Your kids still need to [00:01:00] have dinner. Your calendar does not show that your life feels like it is falling apart. If you are new here, welcome. I am so glad you found us. This is a podcast for ambitious women who want to lead and live with joy. Not the fluffy kind of joy, but the joy that is actually a leadership strategy that helps you rise and brings out the best in you and your business.

This episode is for the woman who is holding a team together, a business together, while something in her personal life is quietly or perhaps loudly falling apart. The one who walked into a meeting an hour after the-- a phone call that was perhaps devastating and said all the right things anyway, as though she compartmentalized [00:02:00] what had just happened so that she could focus on what was at hand.

The one who has cried in her car in a parking lot before going inside to face her team. The one who leads as though nothing is happening. The one who, if this is you, there is part of you right now or in some season that you have not fully set down yet that is facing something that feels hard and crippling and daunting, and yet you are the load-bearing wall to the entire building, whether it's the team or the family or both, and you cannot fail.

You have to show up, and the pressure is just daunting And to my people who keep showing up week after week, thanks for being here. [00:03:00] You know I love you. Thanks for coming back. We are really gonna get into it today, because I'm gonna tell you that I have had some really hard seasons, one of them in particular was the hardest, and what I learned about leadership in the middle of all of it, not after it, in the middle.

We'll talk about the difference between strength and certainty, why powerlessness is exhausting, and a shift in the questions I had to start asking myself that got me through days that I didn't know if I could get through them or not. I'm not going to pretend it ends up tied all neatly in a bow, because it doesn't.

That is not true, and if somebody out there is telling you it does, just keep swiping and go to the next Instagram Reel. But I do think you'll find something in here that meets you whatever your hard season might be right now. So [00:04:00] buckle up. Here we go. It was 2011 for me. I was working for a major consumer products goods company.

I was responsible for a significant amount of business, and my mom came to visit, and she had a backache. Little did we know, her body was ravaged with cancer. And so her diagnosis to death was five weeks. And in the midst of that, I Didn't know that she was going to die in five weeks. So I was doing everything I could to figure out what was happening to her.

I was meeting her in Boston at Dana-Farber. I was taking notes. I was listening to the oncologist and then the highly specialized [00:05:00] oncologist. I was leaving work. I was leaving my children. I was a single mom. I had a full-time nanny, but my nanny didn't really cover, you know, all the nights and all the overnights unless I was traveling for business, and this wasn't business.

This was extenuating circumstances. And so I really had to invite her in to what was happening in my personal life. You know, the boys were only eight and 10 years old, and so I had to tell them what was happening with their beloved Gran Gran. I left the team, I left my responsibilities, and none of it was on my terms.

It was exhausting, and it was scary. And so there was a moment when I was [00:06:00] heading south to go to New York City for a meeting, and I got a call that basically said, "She's been admitted to the hospital." And this was at, like, week three and a half, and it was really the end. And so I was in a Ann Taylor suit.

I was in a full-blown suit headed to a meeting, and I packed a bag, kept the suit on, and drove to Maine. And on I-84 in Connecticut, I got pulled over by a Connecticut state trooper, and he said, "Do you know how fast you were going?" And I burst into tears, and I said, "All I know is I'm trying to get to Maine because I'm afraid my mother is going to die before I get there."

And he said, "Well, it's not gonna help her if you die on your way." And I was like, "You're right. [00:07:00] I need to slow down. I need to be present. I need to pay attention." And he actually let me go without a ticket, but I was so tangled up and so afraid and so full of emotion. And it's funny, every time I get to that one stretch of road on I-84, I think about that state trooper and that moment And I can't help every time I'm in Boston to think about Dana-Farber and that time with her.

So I get to Maine, I end up spending 10 days there with her between the hospital, and then she was transferred to the hospice house. And my business is completely on hold. I've been excused, you know, from work. My boss is fantastic about it. Big shout-out to Justin. And then she dies, and the funeral happens, and then I return to work, quote unquote, "back [00:08:00] to normal."

And I don't know how to show up. I don't know how to go back to normal. I try. I sit in meetings. I say the right things. But on the inside, I am the hottest mess, and I end up in a bathroom stall crying. I end up going to my car and crying, and I can't quite return to myself. And so I look like the same person on the outside: blonde hair, blue eyes, 5'1".

But on the inside, it feels like everything's been rearranged, and nothing about my life is quite the same And what often happens is we confuse strength with certainty. Nothing felt [00:09:00] certain then, nothing. I didn't know which end was up. You know, I didn't know the diagnosis. I didn't know the timeline. I didn't know certainly what was going to come afterward.

And in the afterward, it felt like all of my foundation crumbled. Everything I'd known for 40 years just went away. The relationship I had with my dad completely changed. The relationship I had with my siblings was changing. Everything changed. My dad sold my childhood home. That was now gone. It was a bizarre time.

And what I learned is powerlessness is exhausting. You know, when we are so powerless over circumstances, I had no power over her cancer. I had no power over her dying. I had no power over [00:10:00] all of the feelings I was feeling, but my mind wanted to solve for it. My mind wanted to fix it. My mind wanted to control what other people were doing, run the worst case scenario on loop.

What was the worst, the most catastrophic thing that could possibly happen? And I wanted to search for control. Like, what could I control? But when none is available, it wears you down faster than the grief itself. But somewhere along the way, somewhere in that season, the question actually changed. Instead of how do I control all of this?

How do I fix all of this? Because it felt so out of control, the feelings, the people, other people's grief, my grief. The smaller question was, what's inside my hula hoop today, right [00:11:00] now? What can I control And it wasn't about the future. It wasn't about the prognosis or my kids and their whole life and their whole childhood without her, how they would grow up without this loving grandmother who would drop everything she was doing and come from Maine to New York to be with them.

It, it wasn't about the entire business I had left behind. It was just about today. In my hula hoop, I could worry about this moment. I could control this moment and this moment only. And from there, three questions that still hold up in any hard season: Who do I wanna be when this unfolds? What values refuse to change, no matter what is happening around me?

[00:12:00] What kind of energy do I want to bring into the room and into my life today? And so who did I wanna be when this unfolded? Well, I didn't wanna-- I knew who I didn't wanna be. I didn't wanna be angry and resentful, and I didn't want to have destroyed relationships with people I loved. I certainly didn't wanna have messed up my career.

So I really wanted to be somebody who was emotionally stable, who could keep her feelings in check, who could honor her own grief and honor that other people were going to grieve differently, and that didn't make it right or wrong, it just was what it was. The values that I refused to change, no matter what was happening around me, I value generosity, [00:13:00] so I wanted to be generous.

I value kindness, so I wanted to be kind. Even if I felt really judgmental, I wanted to be kind, and that meant kind to myself, even if I was judging myself, and to other people. And I wanted to be able to find gratitude. And the one really interesting thing was I was having a, a hard time with gratitude during this season.

And the one really big gratitude that became apparent to me was I knew that there were people who had lost their child, and I was losing my mother. And so I was really grateful that I was not experiencing the loss of a child And so then what kind [00:14:00] of energy did I wanna bring into the room? Well, I wanted to bring authentic energy.

And so that didn't mean that I was, like, crying or being sad or carrying this grief around with me. It meant that I was showing up in the room as appropriately as I possibly could. I wasn't oversharing my grief, but if somebody asked me about it, I would be as authentic as I could. And I made sure that I had a really, really good therapist and trusted people that I could talk to.

And these just... They didn't fix things. Nothing was going to fix anything really, but it certainly gave me someplace to stand, and it, it gave me a barometer. It made me feel like I was moving forward instead of being stuck in all of my [00:15:00] own emotions and all of my own head spiral. And it helped me to really learn that I needed to lower the bar, that I couldn't have this idea of perfectionism during this season.

You can't survive a season like this and hold the bar so high that perfectionism is your goal. I mean, absolutely not. Perfectionism was out the window. The bar was, like, how do we get through this? Chicken nuggets for dinner, cereal for dinner. You know, everybody slept in my bed during that time, snuggled in as tightly as we could.

I cried in front of the boys. We told stories. They asked if I was sad. I said yes. I asked if they were sad. They said yes, [00:16:00] and it was okay I didn't make any permanent decisions while my life was turned completely upside down. I had to wait for clarity to arrive. And when you're an ambitious type A used to like boom, boom, boom, let's make all these decisions, that's uncomfortable.

I mean, who wants to wait for clarity? But that was part of the lesson, learning to be patient, learning to wait, because anything else would've just been forced and would've fallen apart. Borrowing strength from trusted people, hence the therapist. She had been in my life already for four years, and I just stayed on with her for a while longer.

She knew the extent of this grief, and she was so trusted and so beloved in my life that she just kept walking this journey with me. [00:17:00] We have to have trusted people, people who see us, who understand us, where we matter, and we can show up as just our messiest, worst, and best versions of ourselves. And then telling ourselves the, the truth, this moment of the truth.

Not the big, whole, fat, big, scary story, but just a moment. Catastrophic thinking can get us in a whole lot of trouble, and it, it wears us down. I don't know about you, but I can go from like here I am right in this moment to like the worst horror movie that's even possible. And so just making it right-sized.

Where are my feet right now in this moment? And asking myself like, "What do I actually know to be true right now?" Not what my fear and my imagination are making up. And [00:18:00] then looking for just what's being asked of me today. Not my entire future, just today. What is the universe asking of me right in this moment?

So if you're going through a hard season, if something is really difficult for you, I see you. I feel you. I walked in your shoes. And courage does not need to be some big, giant leap. Most days it's just doing the next right thing, and what is the next right thing? You don't have to see the whole path. You don't have to have an entire five-year strategic plan to know how to take the next baby step.

Clarity will come with a little bit of action. So Whatever it is you're going through, [00:19:00] a little bit of momentum will go a long way. Know you're not alone. Find your trusted people and let them in. I'm Lori Pyne, the Joy CEO, and I'm so glad to be doing it with you. Until next time, 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.