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10% Happier with Dan Harris
What Should You Do With Your Life? | Suzy Welch
00:59:20
Are you living by default or by design? A provocative question from an NYU business professor. is an award-winning NYU Stern School of Business professor, acclaimed management researcher, and New York Times best-selling author, most recently...
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Staying connected matters. That's why AT&T has connectivity you can depend on, or they'll proactively make it right. That's the AT&T guarantee. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com guarantee for details. AT&T Connecting Changes Everything. This is the 10% Happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris.
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Foreign.
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Hello everybody. How we doing? Today we're going to talk about what you should do with your life. That may sound funny at first, especially if you're a grown ass person with a job, maybe a partner, maybe some kids. But here's the question. Are you living by design or by default? Or maybe you did live by design for many years and now, whether you know it or not, the old plans are running out of juice. In other words, this question what should I do with my life? Is not really just for young people, although it can be especially acute for them, of course. But really, it's for anybody. At any stage of life. It's incredibly important to ask yourself, you know, frequently, am I doing what I'm supposed to be doing? Am I doing what I want to be doing? And with the people with whom I want to be doing it? However, for many of us, it's not just enough to ask ourselves this question. We need a system, a rigorous one, to help us deliver some answers. Which is where my guest today comes in. Susie Welch teaches one of the most popular courses at the NYU Stern School of Business. It's called Becoming youg, which is also the name of her book. In this conversation, we talk about the distinction between purpose and happiness, what values are, and why it's so important to name your values. The 15 most significant core values the importance of knowing how other people experience you and your personality, tools for envisioning your desired future and why knowing what you're passionate about is not enough, and much more. This episode is part of the Reset series. Every week this month, we're talking about how to reset one aspect of your life. Week one was about your nervous system. Week two focused on resetting your relationships, with an emphasis on how you talk to yourself. This week, Susie's kicking us off. It's all about resetting your life and your career. Wednesday, it's Philip Moffat, and then we'll have a special Friday episode with Matthew McConaughey. As always, this episode comes with a bespoke guided meditation. This one is all about helping you slow down in the right way so they can get a sense of what your values actually are. This is a conversation most people do not have with themselves. And this meditation comes from our teacher of the month, Vinnie Ferraro. As a reminder, these bespoke meditations are now available for every Monday and Wednesday episode only for paid subscribers over@danharris.com paid subscribers also get weekly live guided meditation sessions where you can ask questions. It's all on video. We do them now Tuesdays at 4 o' clock Eastern. The next one is tomorrow with Vinnie himself. So Sign up@danharris.com, join the party and we will get started with Susie Welch right after this Few things feel better than knowing someone's looking out for you. That is the spirit behind the ATT Guarantee. Staying connected matters. That's why AT and T has connectivity you can depend on or they will proactively make it right. That's the AT and T guarantee, because connection should be dependable, especially in the moments that matter most. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.comguarantee for details. @ and T Connecting changes everything you know what I'm really picky about? I am really picky about pillows. I have this problem when I'm in hotel rooms. Rarely do they have the type of pillow that I want. I sleep on my side and I want to have some support for my neck, but I actually kind of want it to be soft too. You know what I'm talking about? Anyway, you probably have your own preferences. I've got a fix though. It's a company called Coupe and I got one of their pillows recently and I slept on it last night and I was talking to my wife about it this morning. This thing is awesome and it's going to be my go to pillow. In fact, they sent me two. I'm going to keep it in two different spots in the house and if anybody takes it, I'm going to cut them. It's not only an incredibly comfortable pillow, which you can customize because they send you extra stuffing. I'm not sure that's the right word, but they send you extra stuff that you can put in the pillow if it's not thick or fluffy enough for you. On first blush actually was perfect for me right out of the box. So the pillows are not only comfortable, but they're also cool. And by cool I don't mean like awesome, although they are awesome. But I mean thermally cool. Did you know that your body needs to drop 2 to 3 degrees Fahrenheit in order to fall asleep? If you're sleeping hot and sweaty, it is impossible to get a good night's rest. And if your solutions are blasting the AC on high or just doing constant pillow flips. You really should check out Coop Sleep Goods. Sleep is just incredibly important when it comes to human flourishing or basic well being. As I often say, it's the apex predator of healthy habits. Nothing good happens if you're not sleeping. And Coop Sleep Goods has a lot to offer. They even do this thing where they give you a free pillow consultation with a sleep expert to help you optimize your sleep. The pillows come with a 100 night free trial. 86% of sleepers reported better sleep after switching their pillows to Coop. 100,000 plus 5 star reviews and over a million happy sleepers. Upgrade your sleep. Visit coopsleepgoods.com Happier10 Happier10 to get 20% off your first order. That's coopsleepgoods.com happier10 Susie Welch, welcome to the show.
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Thank you so much. I am delighted to be here.
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Delighted to have you here. So just by way of background, this book you've written is based on a course you teach at the NYU Business School. Can you just tell me about the course itself and why it got so popular?
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I can tell you about the first part. The second part I can only speculate. The class is called Becoming Crafting the authentic life you want and need. And it's a class that started off as an experiment. I had this feeling that wouldn't it be great if there was a class for business school students that I wish I had taken, which helped you figure out what to do with your life, which can be simultaneously feel like there's too many options and there's not enough options. So I had created a methodology to help people walk through the process to what I call their area of transcendence. Your purpose. The class does that. It walks students through a methodology, figuring out what your values are, which almost no one knows. Your aptitudes, which slightly more people know, but it's pretty hard to know your aptitudes and then your economically viable interests. And it's a real journey of data gathering, self reflection and data gathering. I think students in the old days used to take it hoping the class would be woo woo. And it was not because it's real mining for information. And then we put it all together and students come up with their area of transcendence, their purpose. And on the last day of class they stand up and they present the 40 year narrative of their life going forward. If they were to take a journey to that area of transcendence. It did start as an experiment, but it didn't last as an experiment very long because There was a need for the class. I mean, that's what happened is students took it and said, this helped so much. And I said, that's fantastic. And Mayu asked me, would you come and join the faculty and stick around and do this more? And I said, I will. And it took off from there.
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Is it your argument that what should I do with my life is a question that we should be asking throughout our lives, not just when we're young.
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I mean, it's the work of our lives. It is the work of our lives. I like to say there's 3Ds to it. You can live by default and just spend your entire life in react mode. And many of us do that. And I did it for long periods of my life because I'm human. But that gets exhausting, can be discouraging. And it's not everybody's favorite place to be for good reason. And then as life goes on, sometimes we start to sprinkle the second D in. That's deliberation kind of saying, okay, wait, this is maybe who I am, or this is maybe what I want. And I'm going to try to wrap my arms around this thing called life. And that's better. But there is this concept that you could live your life with more design where you have a theory of yourself and you have a theory of your values and what you want to do with your life. And you, you will fall off the trail to that life because life does happen. But if you have a sense of where you're going, you will have fewer detours and hopefully live a more meaningful life along the way. So I've done becoming you, the process with people from ages of 16 to 78. And I don't think that there's one right age to do it. I think there's an age where you're too young to do it, which is probably anything under 16. But I don't think there's any time not to be asking these questions. But I'm biased, I think.
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Well, I guess I'm biased too, because I would agree with you. You've used the word purpose or I guess it's synonym, areas of transcendence. You really do go out of your way to draw a distinction between purpose or areas of transcendence and happiness. Can you hold forth a little bit on that?
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I mean, I have nothing against happiness. I mean, I would like everyone to be happy. I mean, I'd like to. I mean, I'm not opposed to it. I just am person who understands that happiness has Got a lot of components to it, and it can be fleeting and you can have everything that might make you happy, and a lot of things can get in the way of it. I'm much more a believer that happiness is not a goal, but an outcome. It's like a. Happiness is a byproduct of having your purpose, that if you have a meaningful, productive and connected life, the byproduct is usually happiness, not always. But I think it's more sustainable to seek your purpose. And if happiness comes from that, great. I've seen a lot of people in life chase happiness and end up thinking, oh, I should have been chasing my purpose all along, because what is it to chase happiness? I don't even know what it is. I think it's. Maybe I'm just drunk on my own Kool Aid here, but I think there's just a lot more promise to trying to figure out what your purpose is. And almost everybody who is living in their purpose has a kind of exquisite aliveness, which is pretty much joy. So I'll take that.
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Yeah. I mean, I don't know that we even agree as a culture on what happiness is.
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That's right. I don't think we do either. There's so much about values and my happiness is not your happiness and all this other stuff. And that's why I like to take it out of the conversation entirely. And I joke about the happiness industrial complex. I also don't like the optimism peddlers. They also bother me where people just sort of exhort you to be optimistic, as if this is something you could will yourself to be. I think these are all kind of band aids and that, you know, from the beginning of time, the earliest philosophers spoke about meaning and understanding what you are meant to do. And as you lean into it, there'll be good days and there'll be bad days, and there'll be great seasons and there'll be terrible seasons. But in general, it is the most fulfilling and best path for us to take because it has the highest likelihood of us feeling joy. And when we do that, we spread joy, but to pursue happiness. I don't know. I don't get it. I don't want. I like it. Not to be a happiness naysayer, because, of course, I want everyone to be. And I'm happy sometimes, but I've definitely had times where I've not been happy. And I think to exhort people to be happy is kind of crazy.
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I think it really does depend on how you're defining happiness. My understanding of happiness which again is not a well understood or well defined concept. So it's a fuzzy conversation definitionally. But my understanding of happiness would include having a purpose.
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Yes, we're probably directionally in agreement. I mean, I think that if you have a purpose, you're going to be happy generally. And understanding your purpose or understanding what your purpose is, by definition, at least according to me, will mean you know what your values are. And so happiness is usually wrapped up in those.
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Yes. I would also say, and this is a bit of a digression, we'll get back onto how we should figure out what to do with our lives in a second. But I would also say that happiness has other constituent parts that include things like sleep and the quality of your relationships and exercising, getting movement, access to nature, understanding yourself through therapy, training the mind through meditation. These all work in concert. And so chasing that kind of happiness, properly and broadly understood makes sense to me. But if you think of happiness superficially, as they did in the old Toyota commercials, you leap for joy in the air every time you make a purchase. Well, that's an unsustainable and shallow goal.
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Yes. You've described these incredible components of well being and they're all connected. I just think that when you don't connect all the pieces and you're just going for something that you have this picture of in your head, that's a dangerous thing.
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Yes. Okay, well, let me ask one more definitional question or one more question on the definitions of words we might use going forward. And then I want to get into your three part protocol here. How do we think about the word success and how do we define that measure that, track that as we grow up?
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Yeah, it's different for each person. I mean, this is why we do so much work in becoming you to measure your own individual definition of success. I mean there is a 15 values which I'm sure we'll get to. And one of those values is called achievement, which is seen success, what we would consider sort of professional, traditional success. And some people have a really high value on that and some people don't. My own sister says to me all the time, I hate this winning and losing thing. And she just got a different definition of success. So it's important for us to know what we think success is. But we can't know that unless we let go of the forces that are everywhere around us around other definitions of success. We have to dig deep to find out what our own definition is. And I mean, that's also the work of our lives. I mean, to find out, to let go of what expectations are and what culture tells us or what our spouse tells us. Success or our parents tell us. You've got to know what our own definition of success is. Becoming you forces you to do that. I shouldn't use the word force. It's a voluntary protocol, you know, it impels you to do that.
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There's no waterboarding.
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No one is forced to take becoming you. It remains an elective at nyu, so.
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All right. Well, so you mentioned before, there are these kind of three areas to look at and explore as part of understanding, like who you are and what you want to do with whatever time you have on this planet. The three parts are values, aptitudes, and economically viable interests. So let's just march through these if you're. If you're up for it. So this is probably an obvious question. I just want you to define it. We still are in definition territory here, but what do you mean by values?
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Oh, it is such a complicated term, values. I did research that showed that only 17% of people can actually identify what a value is. The problem is that values is a term that's been hijacked by politics. Family values, conservative value, progressive values. You can go to high school and you can learn how to calculate the volume of a cylinder, and you won't learn what values are. So, just for definitional purposes, values are the deeply held beliefs that galvanize our actions and decisions. I believe there's 15 core values. There's several different values inventories. For some crazy reason, I like my own the best. It's got 15, and we each have some level of each one of these 15 values. Now, the thing is that people often mix up values with virtues. I had a student one time, and I asked her what her values were coming into the class, and she said, kindness and fairness. I said, those are wonderful virtues, but they are not values. And so we have to get clear on what values are. And look, I want to say very few people actually can name their values. 7% typically can name their values with any clarity and specificity. I was doing an interview the other day on tv, and I was talking about this, and as I was walking out, the sound guy grabbed me as he was taking off my mic, and he said, hey, I have a values test. He said, where can I take your values test again? I told him, and I said, tim, by the way, what do you think your values are now? And before you go and find out for sure. And he said, well, family for sure, and love, technically not a value. By the way, love, he said, and for sure, friends. And I said, okay, great, take the test. Because these are. The problem with values is we always just come back to the big three, which I say are family, friends, and love. Family can certainly be a value. We happen to call it family centrism because of it becomes an organizing principle for your life. And friends is a value we call belonging. Okay, connectivity. But love, like, what does it mean to have love be a value? It's caught up in a lot of different values. Okay? So I think that values actually, which should be very clear, and we should all be talking about values with a shared language, but we don't. Values are hard and complicated, and a lot of times we kind of have a sense of our values, but we spend our whole life kind of dodging around them. And sometimes that happens because we are in a relationship with a parent or a partner who doesn't share our values, who subtly or not so subtly asks us to sublimate our values. Sometimes we're in a culture that doesn't share our values. Sometimes events get in the way of our values. Sometimes expedience. Expedience gets in the way of our values. We could be a person who really values something we call scope, which is excitement, energy, new experiences, new people. And we could have that as a top value. And we could go live in a sleepy suburb because it's easier to get our groceries in from the driveway in the suburbs. And therefore completely sublimating a top value for ourself because of expedience. So values are not easy to define and messy. And that's why we do so many exercises around them, because you can't go straight in. You can't just ask somebody. It's not like asking somebody, what's your name? You have to ask from a lot of different angles.
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This may be an unfair question, but can you run through the 15 values that you've identified?
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Nothing would make me happy.
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Okay, yeah, I'd love to, but that's a lot to remember. That's why I.
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No, I know them by heart. You kidding me? So the first one that we just mentioned is scope, which is a measure of. And all of these would be defined as an organizing principle of your life. What impels you to do stuff. Okay, so the first one you say would be scope. And that's like a measure of how much you want stimulation. I had a student describe, scope is wanting to touch everybody's body rain. It's sort of the Bianca Jagger on the back of a white horse going into Studio 54 dream of your life. You want excitement, new experiences. You'll take the chaos now. A low scope life is, you know, I want predictability and routine and you'll trade off what could be the boredom of it because you want control. You want to know where you're going to be at 2 o' clock this day, one year from now. Okay, so that's scope. All of these exist on a continuum. You can have high or low. I mean we actually measure exactly how much you have. Another value is radius. And this is if your life was a bomb and you dropped it on the earth, how big a crater would it leave? This is, you know, our social justice warriors among us, like my daughter, that very, very high radius. You want to change the world and there's other people for whom changing the world is just of no interest to them. It's not a value. It's not something they hold dear that when they're making a decision or they're deciding what they're going to do on Saturday, they're not being driven by this desire to change the world. Second one, family centrism. How much family is your first, second and third priority? Every decision and action you make is about family. Sometimes we express values and whether or not we really want to be expressing them. As another question, value of belonging I mentioned, that's about how much you care about your friends, connection, community, how much you want to be in a group. And some people, that's incredibly high value. You know somebody who goes to 16 weddings a year, you know, they probably got belonging off the charts. And other people sort of, they got one person, they got two person universe or they like to be by themselves. Again, a continuum, cosmos is a value of your faith. This is one of the most traditional values and all the values inventories is how much your organizing principle in your life is your own God from your own religious tradition. Not one or the other. But you know, this is not faith specific but God is an organizing principle and your religion. Agency is the value continuum that measures self determination and how important self determination is that you drive your own bus. I happen to be very low on agency, but I certainly have been in life and surrounded by people of very high agency. They've got to be the author. No one is the boss of them. People who are very low on agency tend to be very high on collaboration. Beholderism is a value that is a reflection of how important it is to you, how things look, including yourself. I mean this is a very old, this is in the earliest values inventories from 100 years ago, when there were two great academics named Alport and Strang created the first values inventory. They called it aestheticism, but I call it beholderism because it's an easier word to grasp. How much do you care about how things look? Your spaces, your stuff, yourself that can drive what you do on vacation, who you marry, where you work, everything. It's a value. And you can have it very high, and you can have it very low. Would you like me to go on? Yeah.
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This is great.
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Okay. Another value is non sibi. This is the Latin phrase for not oneself. And this is the values continuum that captures how much you're motivated by helping people. Just want to help people. I've had students say to me, I don't care what company I work at, what industry I work in. I don't care about any of that. I've got to be helping people day in and day out. I've met other people and doing this work thousands of times. Who? It's not like they don't want to help people. It's just not their organizing principle. They don't think about it when they're organizing what kind of job they want, what kind of person they're getting married to, anything. Many other values inventories call it altruism. I'd like to take those words away because I don't want us to be judgy about values. I'm a values agnostic. You have a right to whatever values you want in whatever level you want if you're not hurting anybody. Your values are your values. All you need to do is live them if you want to be authentic Work centrism is another value. It's value of how much work is an organizing principle of our life. I mean, for me, work centrism, off the charts. I love my work. I would work 247 if I didn't have dogs. And for other people, for instance, my four children, Work Centrum is just not the organizing principle of their life. They work. They all enjoy working, but it's not how they think. They work as a means to an end, and that's a value. People who have high work centrism like me, have been called workaholics our whole life. And I've always thought to myself, a holic. It's not a disease to me, it's my value. I like working. I'm not hurting anybody. The one thing I would say is just be in a partnered relationship with somebody who respects your level of work centrism or shares it. Then there's money. We call that value affluence in the becoming U lexicon. And you know, everybody has a number. Everybody says that financial security is a value, but the truth is that what financial security is to one person is not to another person. I've had people go through this process and say, look, my value is financial security. I just want to be able to rent an apartment near my store. And I bet other people say, and I'm not kidding, not making this up, they want a helipad per child. And they both would tell you the financial security is a value. So we measure and you have to know the number because you have to be honest with it about yourself and with other people so you can explain yourself. And again, if you're not hurting anybody, you have a right to however much affluence matters to you. There's the value that I mentioned before of achievement, that scene, success, how much you want to be seen by the world as a successful person in conventional terms. And for some people, that's driving. I certainly have had MBA students for that's number one value. But I've also had MBA students for which it's not a value at all. And when they see that result come back, they're like, yeah, no wonder I feel like I'm wearing a suit that's three sizes too small every day. Luminance is the value of fame. A celebrity, how famous you want to be. You know, we're in a generation where 75% of people said that they want to be influencers is their job. I mean, fame is a value. And some people want to live off the grid and they hate it if they're recognized and known and other people just can't wait for that day to occur. That's value. Let's continue. We're closing in on the last three. There's the value of voice, which is creative self expression. Authenticity would be another word for this. How much do you want to let your freak flag fly? How much do you want to stand out? How much do you feel, you know, like, by definition, Whenever I have an artist going through the becoming you process, whenever there's an artist going through it, I always think, oh, here's going to be somebody whose voice is going to be number one or number two. And it's almost invariably number one or number two. Here's the thing, one of my tools measures how much you have of a value. And the tool also measures how much you're expressing it, living it. And I can't tell you how often I get Young women, typically women of color, very unfortunately, who have voice as a value of number one or number two. But how much they're living it. The variance between how much they have it and how much they're living it can be up to 98, 99%. Okay. Then comes the value, a very controversial value whenever I talk about it, of what I call eudaimonia. That's Greek for flourishing. It's self care, it's pleasure, it's leisure. In some people, it presents as sex. It's how much you want to feel good. I come from a generation where eudaimonia was what you got when you did everything else. But we are entering a different time where many of my students in some classes, more than 60% of them have eudaimonia as their number one value. They do not want to postpone joy. They don't want to postpone feeling good. You can't blame them, given what they've seen in this world. And then the final value that we measure for that, I think is part of my values inventory and I think is lacking in other values inventories. To nerd out on you is the value of place where you want to live. You've seen many people whose lives have been driven by just saying, look, I'm not leaving Milwaukee. But there's other people who are like, I don't care where I live. I'll go where I want to be a nomad. I want to try every place. I don't really care. And how strongly you feel about where you live is actually a value, because why? Because it can drive your actions and your decisions in a way. And so those are the 15 values. And it's often incredibly transformative for people to do a couple of things. One is to have a language to talk about what really matters to them, to know what the actual ranking of these values is for them. We have to do behavioral questions to get to that, because, of course, there's a lot of noise in our head. I had to change it to behavioral questions the test, because I used to see students go through all the exercises, and then family centrism would be down at, like, number 11 or 12, and you would see them kind of cringe and move it, physically move it up, because they were thinking about their mother's face. And then it's very, very important for us to find out how closely we're living with each one of those values. You know, what's our variance on each one? This is all data that we need to know if we want to figure out what our purpose is.
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A
And you said, there's a place where we can go to test this.
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B
Yes, you can. You can take it. I created this test for a long time. I tried to do this test in class, literally with like a Qualtrics survey and so forth. And I used to stand up in front of my class with an abacus. We have actually a picture of me like moving the abacus of beads around. And finally, I was Talking to my PhD thesis advisor about this and I was. I think the technical term was I was bitching and moaning about how I couldn't stand that this tool did not exist. He's a British guy in his very plummy British accent, said to me, he said, why don't you go fucking do it, Susie? And I said to him, what? Make the values inventory in the test. And he said, I'm sick of hearing you complain about it. This inventory does not exist. You have thousands of pieces of evidence to prove it should exist. I mean, I was doing it literally. Students were taking it, like on a simple computer form. He said, you gotta go make the tool. And I did. I mean, I committed a couple years of my life to making it. Now it's fully out there. It's called the values bridge. And you can just go online and type in the values bridge or becoming you and you can take the test.
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I think it's fascinating. And honestly, I don't think I've ever really thought about it. I mean, as listeners have heard me say many times, I have a tattoo on my left wrist that reminds me of the Buddhist goal of benefiting all beings. And so I do try to organize my life around that principle.
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B
Okay, I would bet then if that's true, it'd be interesting to see where that showed up in the test. I mean, I think it's probably radius, which is that value of wanting to change the world that often shows up as a care for all humanity, which I think is what you're saying. Or could show up as non city. Yeah, the test would tell you they're related. I gotta believe it's your top. Probably one of your top values.
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A
Yeah, well, I don't think it was. For most of my life, I've been trying to steer the ship in that direction. And I notice when I'm in that mode, a lot of the bullshit slides away and I'm not perseverating on things that make me miserable.
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B
I'm going to lovingly and gently push back for a moment and say I actually think our values are very stable and My guess is that it was always a value of yours, probably from when you were a young boy and you sublimated it and crushed it and denied it. And finally when you started living it, you felt authentic. And so then you said, okay, now I'm going to let it steer the ship, because I should have been letting it steer the ship my whole life long. That's my theory.
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A
It's really interesting. I was at yesterday, I was at a New York Times event in Brooklyn. They had all these folks from the wellness world at this event and one of them was this guy who's never been on the show. I don't know why, Terry Real. He's quite a well known couples counselor. I don't know if that would be his preferred branding. But anyway, that's what I think of him as. And he was on stage saying something that this may sound like a digression and I apologize if it is, but he was saying that one of the biggest problems in the couples he works with is that heterosexual women often justifiably want of heterosexual men a level of open heartedness that heterosexual men are not trained to exhibit or to have. Because people like me with my chromosomal structure. And maybe this is a little bit better now, but certainly when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s, caring was not a thing you were trained to. To value, to make a operating principle of your life, at least not in the culture that I was imbibing. So maybe it was latent crushed by what some people call toxic masculinity. And later in my life I've been able to nurture it to the best of my ability.
- [29:32]
B
That's good. I end up doing a lot of couples work because what happens is when people take the test, there's a place where you can check a box and if somebody else takes the test, for example, a partner, your values come up right along next to each other and it shows you the level of harmony or conflict your values have. And the other thing is that you get this number at the end that tells you how far or how close you are to living your values. Values. When I was first testing this tool, one of my sneaky things to do would be to invite over my colleagues from the Management and Organizations department at nyu and I'd tell them it was a dinner party and I'd invite all my colleagues and their spouses. And then at the end I'd say, surprise, let's try my new psychometric tool. And they'd be, oh God, Susie. But they took it. They were good sports. And then I had to stop doing it because what would happen is one member of the partnership would get a variance at the end of like 7%. You're living very close to your values. You're living a, you know, an authentic life. And the other member of the couple would get like a 98% variance, and there'd be this sort of stunned silence. They knew exactly what was going on. And one time this happened, and the wife was very close to her authenticity in this case, and the husband was very far away from it. And there was this long pause in which I thought to myself, never do this again, you idiot. But anyway, in that moment, the husband said, yes, that is correct. We are living Mary's dream of a life. You know, what goes wrong in couples, in my opinion. Look, there's a lot of different ways to think about this and talk about it, but one is it when there's just a complete values disconnect, which often happens, for all the reasons you described, that there's a lot of things in cultures that makes us disconnect from our own values, but also not understand our partner's values.
- [31:15]
A
Coming up, Susie talks about aptitudes, how you are wired and how other people experience your personality, tools for envisioning your desired future. Her argument that knowing your passion is not enough and much more. We're planning a trip soon, my family and another family. We're going to Costa Rica, and we've been talking about getting an Airbnb. It's really cool when you've got two families and you're traveling together. You want to spend a ton of time together to all have the same house so you're not retreating to your private layers. At the end of the day, you can have privacy, of course, but there's just so much more intimacy and together time when you're in the same house. And the really cool thing about Airbnb is not only can you use an Airbnb when you're on vacation, but when you're on vacation, you can host your home on Airbnb and make some money to offset the cost of travel or to invest in home improvements, etc. Etc. For many of us, when you travel, your place is just empty. So while you're away, it may make sense to host it on Airbnb. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much@airbnb.com host you know those moments when someone just takes care of something for you? That's what ATT is doing with the ATT guarantee. Staying connected matters. That's why AT&T has connectivity you can depend on, or they will proactively make it right. That's the AT T guarantee. Because staying connected isn't optional, it's essential. And AT&T wants you to feel that somebody's got your back. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.comguarantee for details. AT&T connecting changes everything. Just to reset for us, we're working through the three parts of the becoming you protocol. The first part is values. Let's move to the second part. So the second part is aptitudes. What do you mean by aptitudes?
- [33:26]
B
There's two different ways I define aptitudes. This is your cognitive wiring. Social scientists would agree there's eight big cognitive wirings. Is our brains wired to be generalists or specialists? Are we brainstormers or what's politely called idea contributors, which are people who don't spew ideas? Are we future focusers or present focusers? And this is good to know. There's no right or wrong. There's just right or wrong for your job. And yet we often don't know this data about ourselves at all. But I can't tell you the number of times people come to me in misery. And it's the fix is quite easy because they're a specialist in a generalist job or they're in a job that demands a constant production of ideas. They're not brainstormers. They have other gifts. So the first part of this work is to get a grip. And it's very easy to test for this. Get a grip on where you are with the eight big cognitive aptitudes, where it gets complicated and it gets very complicated, is that another part of your aptitude profile is your personality, because what kind of job you have. And typically our purpose sort of shows up in our job, or we would like it to, because it's what we do most of the day. You could be really good in your job because of your personality, or you could be really bad at your job because of your personality. And I consider personality traits, some of them aptitudes. And so what we do as part of the becoming you process is we test because a lot of people, everybody tells you what their personality is. Oh, I'm a good listener, I'm compassionate, I'm very kind, I'm funny, Right? And that's may be true, maybe, but actually your personality is how the world experiences you. And this is an incredibly hard message for my students to hear. I think my older students, when I'm teaching this in workshops. And I've got somebody who's 50 or 60, they're like, yep, because you spend your whole life learning how the world experiences you. And, you know, I am like a poster child for this because when I first time I taught becoming you, in which a process in which people go through 360feedback, I thought, you know, I'm going to go and take it along with my students. I'm going to find out how the world experiences me, which must be simply fabulous because I am fabulous in every possible way. And so I went through the C60 feedback. Now, this was a very complicated period in my life when I did this. My husband had just died and I was selling our house and moving into a new house. And things were chaotic, to put it mildly, because when you lose somebody, things are generally chaotic. But I thought everybody around me understands that I am the I at the center of the hurricane. I got this, and everybody understands that it looks chaotic, but Susie is calm. And then I got back my 360 feedback and no, I found out that people experienced me as the hurricane, and I had to come to terms with the fact that everything I was telling myself about how the world was experiencing me was a lie. I was telling myself if I wanted to be the person I thought I was, I had to change. I'm happy to say I've downgraded myself to a tropical storm. I have. And I. And the reason I know is I am constantly and trying to understand how I'm being experienced, which is important because I have mixing with people in the world all the time. And it's important for me as a teacher to know how I'm being experienced. So aptitudes are how your brain's wired and how your personality is being experienced by the world. Again, in pursuit of understanding yourself well enough standing still so that you can figure out what's the right direction to go in when you start running again. We never do it. We never figure out who we are when we're standing still. I mean, maybe very enlightened folks like you do, but most people do not figure out who they are standing still until they have to. Like a crisis happens.
- [36:50]
A
You mentioned 360 feedback. Just want to make sure everybody knows what that is. Some people listening may have heard me talk about my own 360 reviews, but the way it works is generally in a corporate setting. It's an anonymous survey of your bosses, peers, and direct reports to get a panoramic sense of your strengths and weaknesses. You may not know this, Susie, but I went through a 360 review back in 2008 that included people from both of my places of employment at that time, a startup that I had co founded, and ABC News, and then also my wife, my brother and two of my meditation teachers. And the results were not great. And then went back through another 363 years later and it was really quite different. Right. Probably due for another one.
- [37:31]
B
All right, you know, what I want to just say here is that the problem is that you can't get 360 out in the world and take it or leave it. But I got so mad about that that I created a cheap little tool for people to administer their own 360. Because why should 360 be only for people who work at IBM and fancy companies? So pi360.com very cheap. Cheap as a cup of coffee.
- [37:53]
A
Pie.
- [37:53]
B
360 pie. It's called that because it tests how people. Takes five minutes to do for your raters. It asks them, how does this person get along with people? What's the quality of this person's ideas and how well do they get things done? Execution. And it takes five minutes. Very cheap. And you can find out with up to 40 people how the world experiences you. I got mad because I'd be out in the world talking about this process and people say, yeah, it's great. I don't work at IBM. I can't get 360 feedback. What am I supposed to do? Go up to everybody and ask them how they experience me? And I said, look, there's got to be a tool that does this. And there wasn't. And I'm lucky. I've got a lab and I was able to create the tool.
- [38:27]
A
Very cool.
- [38:28]
B
Yeah, thanks. Proud of it.
- [38:30]
A
You've talked about several types of tests. We talked about the values bridge just under the aptitudes aegis. We talked about 360. But you also mentioned that we may want to test our aptitudes and our personality.
- [38:44]
B
I think pi360 tests your personality. There's another test that I did not develop. It's a very solid test. It's called YouScience y o u Science. You can find it youscience.com It's a little pricey. I think it's $40. All my students take it. It will just give you an absolute read on all of your cognitive aptitudes. It's money well spent. I have no skin in the game with it whatsoever. But it's a terrific test. It tests your aptitudes. You know, my book is set up so that you don't have to take any of these tests. Right, because not everyone can take tests. And it walks you through exercises you could just do with a pen and paper to figure out these things. If it all sounds like it's just too expensive and too complicated, I try to simple it down because not everyone can do it. Not everyone likes to take tests. Look, you can get this information with guided exercises.
- [39:25]
A
Can you just walk us through one of those exercises?
- [39:28]
B
Well, for aptitudes or for values, I could do either one.
- [39:31]
A
Aptitudes.
- [39:31]
B
Okay, so for aptitudes, well, you can do you science without the actual 30 or $40 test. Although I highly recommend it. Because what, what you can do is just understand, for instance, that there are some people, I mean all eight aptitudes are described. And for instance, one that I mentioned which is really important to know about your brain is whether or not you're a generalist who likes to know a little bit about everything and sort of just wants to know what they need to know and kind of wants to know a fact about everything versus a specialist who is a person who wants to bore down deeply into topics and sort of wants to research. And I have a son who's a specialist and he's a classic specialist. And you know, he loves music and he knows absolutely every single thing about his type of music that he loves. Every artist that's ever been in it buys vinyl albums. And you know when you go out to dinner with him and you start saying like, wow, did you just hear about the new pope? He may not know about it. Okay. I mean, the generalists and specialists. I think when you read the descriptions of each one of the cognitive aptitudes, most people can with a description pretty easily say, oh my God, this explains it. I'm 100% a sequential thinker, not a process supporter. You say, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. No wonder that job was so hard for me. The analogy I like is that when you sign your name with your dominant hand, it feels very natural. You could do it all day long, easy and fun. But if you put that pen in your non dominant hand, you would eventually, with practice, be able to sign your name. It would never be natural, it would never be fun, it would never look exactly right. And when we're thinking about what we want to do with our lives, we can use the dominant hand of our brains or the non dominant hand of our brain. And my thesis is that it's usually a lot more comfortable, enjoyable and successful just emotionally to be working in concert with your aptitudes rather than against them.
- [41:16]
A
Yeah, not cutting against the grain. Is there more to say about aptitudes before we move on to evi economically viable interests?
- [41:26]
B
I mean, I would just say this about aptitudes, which is sometimes you end up doing work for many more years and sometimes for your whole life long. That is not, it's not an aptitude. It's not, it does not fit with your personality. It's not would fit with the way your brain is wired. And you do it because of expedients or you do it because of expectations. It can cause a great deal of discomfort and self doubt and it's actually a pretty easy fix. You know, the data is there for us to get and it's just, I mean so many people are pushed into banking or consulting and they're like, I wanted to be an artist and they're wired to be artists. And yet we do this to ourselves. And it's as old as time. The difference now is there's ways to test and to have a language than to say, look, I'm a specialist, I shouldn't be doing this work. I'm an inductive reasoner, I shouldn't be doing this work.
- [42:13]
A
It's enormously powerful. Okay? So the third area to think about as we're considering what we should be doing with our lives is economically viable interests. A little bit self explanatory, but can you explain it nonetheless?
- [42:24]
B
Yeah, look, you got to work. Most people have got to work, okay? And so you got to then pick where you're going to work. And what ends up happening in life is our aperture gets smaller and smaller about what kind of work even exists. And there's great research that shows that when kids are coming out of high school, they're aware of seven jobs on average. Okay. I mean, not kids in New York City say or la. They sort of seem or have been told about more jobs. But most kids coming out of high school in America today know about seven jobs, two of which their parents hold and then the rest they sort of see. Fireman, teacher, whatever. You would think that that number would really bump up if and when kids went to college. And what ends up happening is they go to college, but then group things sets in and people start saying the jobs are in tech or the jobs are in hospitality. And it doesn't really get much bigger sort of in college. The research shows that young people know between nine and 11 jobs. And then as time goes on, once people are in their 30s, the same research would show you that people are down to sort of three or four viable jobs for themselves. Whereas the truth of the matter is there's 135 industries, there's 12 identified megatrends. These are sort of the industries coming around the bend. When I first started teaching, becoming you, I wasn't even a megatrend. And here it is. And then, like, the second year, I was a megatrend, and then it was everything. So the idea is to make sure we haven't shut our aperture prematurely or for no reason, and to understand how big the economy is and how many different types of jobs there are and how many different kinds of weapons work there are, and to get ourselves, if we happen to be on a conveyor belt towards a certain kind of career, to understand that we can limit ourselves too much. So. But for other people, there are certain kinds of work that calls them intellectually or emotionally, but it has to be able to pay you according to what your value around affluence is. So it's both understanding how big the economy is and also a listening to yourself about what is calling you. Yeah.
- [44:16]
A
I mean, it seems there's a Venn diagram here of, you know, what do I care about, what am I good at and what am I like and what kind of work is available.
- [44:25]
B
Yes, there is a Venn diagram, and it's exactly what you do. We march through it. We do all the excavation work of it. The book does that. I do that in class. And it's kind of an amazing, cathartic experience. I mean, most people really enjoy it, you know, but the class does have the nickname, the class where everyone cries. Sometimes I wonder if somebody's not. If I don't have a class where people are crying, I'm like, what am I doing wrong here? I mean, this can really stir up a lot of emotion.
- [44:48]
A
Yeah. Well, it is a huge question. What should you do with your life?
- [44:51]
B
Yeah.
- [44:51]
A
What about this idea of. Back in 2005, I think I was asked by my alma mater to give a commencement speech, and I think I gave shitty advice. I said, you know, like, follow your passion. Figure out what you love.
- [45:04]
B
No, no, no, no. Really bad, bad, bad, bad, bad, bad advice.
- [45:07]
A
Right? Yeah.
- [45:07]
B
It is shitty advice.
- [45:08]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [45:08]
B
Bad, shitty advice. Terrible.
- [45:10]
A
And I've had many guests who have pointed that out to me. So, look, what's the counter argument against that? What's the right advice?
- [45:15]
B
Look, if you're good at your passion, do it. Okay, but the problem is a lot of people like, okay, look, the simplest thing. I want to be a rock star. That's like, I'm so passionate about music. You're just not good at it. And so that's why I've got a Venn diagram. I mean, your values often surface or your interest often surface, what your passion is. But that's why we got aptitudes in there. You got to be able to do it, otherwise you're setting yourself up to fail. Really? Now, look, I know a guy, he went to college and he wanted nothing more to be a TV writer, okay? Wanted to be a TV writer, went to Hollywood right after college, obsessed, right? It's been 15 years now. He's not sold a single script. He has all these odd jobs, he works at the Gap, he blew up balloons in the mall. He's chasing his passion. And the world has told him over and over again, like, what you are passionate about, the world does not want to receive. Now, luckily, his value of the affluence is very low. He just doesn't care about money. And so he may continue chasing his passion, but he's not happy. He's now having a lot of self doubt. He's sort of in a crisis. And it's like I have gently said to him, I think the aptitude part is the problem here. You know, I always say, I'm not the AOT police. I'm not coming to get you if you don't live by your values, aptitude and economically viable interests. I'm just telling you that this is one way to think about how to live that might get you to your purpose, which feels again, exquisitely alive with less torment. What I would say to graduates, and I'm actually giving a graduation speech coming up, is you should know your passions, but it's not enough.
- [46:49]
A
Well, I'm pretty strongly inclined to agree with you. And if I could go back to 2005, 20 years ago, I wouldn't say that shit again. I do want to go back to a few points that we discussed earlier. One of them is this is not just for people who are going to business school and are in their 20s. This is.
- [47:07]
B
No, I mean, oh my gosh, any age. There's not a demographic I haven't done this with. It's interesting. I think there's. I have a group of folks who really love this process who are moms. They're working mothers generally, or working parents. But the ones that I find are moms who are like, okay, like, I gave up this piece of myself because I am going through that process. I'm in that period of my life where my Kids need all of me, and my work needs all of me, and I can't figure out who I am or what I should be doing. So, I mean, I think that I gone through this process with many women in their late 30s, early 40s, even into the early 50s, who are struggling with what is it that I really should be doing? Because each day they get up and they kind of relitigate what they're going to be doing. So that's a big demographic for becoming you.
- [47:47]
A
Yeah.
- [47:47]
B
I had, for some reason into my workshops, I get a lot of men in their 40s. I think 40 is sort of. When they're like, is this all there is? And so for some reason, architects, product managers, men in their 40s show up and do the workshop and say, yep, okay, it has to be a reset here. Sometimes people love this. Love going through this protocol, as you call it. I'm going to steal that word. Who are just retired. And they go, okay, I'm going into my third half, if you will. I don't want to blow it. What are my values? What are my aptitudes? What am I interested in? And they use it in a totally different way. They're not looking for paid work, but they're looking for what to do next. A lot of times my students who are in their 20s and early 30s, use it, and then two years later, they come back to me and they say, okay, I tried that, and onto the next thing, you know, or my favorite email subject line being, you told me so their AOT analysis, it told them to do one thing and they did something else. And then a couple years later, they come back and say, okay, let's talk about it again.
- [48:40]
A
Yeah, I was having dinner last night with a new friend of mine who's 55 and trying to figure out what to do. He, you know, did a bunch of stuff in his career, and he doesn't feel he's ever really found his area of transcendence and is feeling a little bit like he's running out of time. I'm literally going to send him this book. And after this conversation, yes, I think.
- [49:01]
B
That I get a lot of people who are present exactly as he does. And it sort of happens at 55, and in fact, often 60 is the number. And people are like, this shit's real. Like the clock is now ticking. I hear it. I may have 30 more years, but I don't want to waste them. Yeah, I would get it. I have had whole workshops filled with people in their 50s and 60s.
- [49:18]
A
I also have a Lot of friends who are, you know, in their 70s and 80s who, just as you described, who have retired. And it's potentially a huge crisis for people, because these were many of my friends who were the top executives at ABC News when I was a plankton at the organization and are trying to figure out, like, what do you do with your life at this point? It can really mess people up.
- [49:39]
B
It really can. It can. And I've seen, though, them come back once they get the language of values, because it's sort of like the scales fall from their eyes and say, oh, my God, all along this was about Radius, or all along this was about Cosmos or Agency. And I just didn't get it. But now I can. It's like Wittgenstein said. And I don't go around quoting German philosophers very often. Often, in fact, never. But I quote this one because it really is on point, which is that the limits of my language are the limits of my world. As soon as we get words for it, then our world can start to write itself.
- [50:15]
A
I like that you have an expression that I think was coined not by Wittgenstein or any other German philosopher that I think was coined by you. Whoever said it, I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. People are incredibly complicated and incredibly simple at the same time.
- [50:31]
B
So, yes, I said it. This non German philosopher over here said it. Look, one time I was giving a speech about becoming you. And afterwards I stayed and answered questions for people who didn't get their questions answered. And there was this one couple, they looked very grim, and I was like, uh, oh, SpaghettiOs, what did I say? And they kept on moving themselves to the back of the line, it to be last. And finally, after an hour of sort of talking to people individually, I was alone with them in the conference hall, and they said, look, do you think people are good or bad? I was really exhausted. And I said to them, look, well, I was a reporter at the Miami Herald covering crime for four years. You know, I've seen some stuff, but I think people are generally good, and, you know, I think the center will hold. And I sort of told them a little bit about what I believed. And they said, well, we were just wondering where you were coming from because you're asking us to go on this journey with you. And I thought, oh, yeah, I think I better tell people where I'm coming from. And so what you just quoted was one of the premises or one of my sort of fundamental beliefs, which is that you can't make a blanket statement about human nature. The people are incredibly simple. They do want to feel safe. Everyone wants to feel loved. Everyone wants to feel heard. But then people can be just absolute, as I love to call them, messy mess balls. You know, people are just complete messy mess balls. Me included. And we're complicated. And becoming you is in one way just a way to try to unmess the messiness of it all so that we can do something. Because otherwise you can't throw in the towel and say, we're just, we're all simple and we're all complicated. Let's just figure out a way to get as close to living authentically as we can.
- [51:54]
A
Well said. Coming up, Susie talks about the role of relationships, especially as it pertains to finding your purpose. And she walks us through one of her many, many exercises that help us, you know, figure out what we're all about and what we should be doing. Depending on where you live, the cooler temperatures are rolling in and if it's not happening right now, it's going to happen soon. It always does. And quince is where I'm turning for fall staples that actually last from cashmere to denim to boots. The quality holds up and the price still blows me away. Quint has the kind of fall staples you will wear non stop, like super soft 100% Mongolian cashmere sweaters starting at just 60 bucks. I've got like four of those going to bring those out of the back of the closet to start wearing again now that fall is here. Their denim is durable and fits right and their real leather jackets bring that clean, classic edge without the elevated price price tag. What makes quints different? They partner directly with ethical factories and skip the middlemen. So you get the top tier fabrics and craftsmanship at half the price of similar brands. I was at a party last night. I was wearing my quince pants which fit really well. They look good, not too tight, just the kind of thing a man of my age craves. I've got many, many quints go to's. Aside from the aforementioned cashmere sweaters, I also wear Quint sweatpants on the regular often while I'm doing interviews for this podcast. Keep it classic and cool this fall with long lasting staples from quince go to quince.com/happier for free shipping on your order and 365 days returns. That's Q U I N C E dot com happier free shipping and 365 day returns quince.com happier foreign as we switch from summer to the fall and the weather's starting to cool, Down a little bit. I really want to squeeze all the juice out of my outdoor space. I want to make it warm and cozy, and Wayfair is a great place to do this. As your trusted destination for all things home. Wayfair's got everything you need to cozify your space this fall, from comfy recliner liners to warm bedding and autumn decor. Wayfair even has espresso makers so you can make that latte at home. They've got great stuff, not only for your outdoor space, but also your indoor space. My wife has been on a binge of ordering these beautiful translucent bookshelves, these kind of modular bookshelves with wheels that you can really easily move around the room. And she's got this expanding collection of books that she places in these bookshelves, and they look really beautiful in her home office. Cozify your space with Wayfair's curated collection of easy, affordable fall updates. Find it all for way less@wayfair.com that's W-A-Y-F-A-I-R.com Wayfair Every style, every home. Another thing I want to double click on here is, and this is related to 360 feedback, but I think is a universally important and overarching, and you spend quite a bit of time on it. And I'd love to hear you say a little bit more about it here, which is just the role of relationships generally as it relates to our purpose and the way we're. What we're going to do with our lives.
- [55:19]
B
Yeah. A lot of people who, who go through becoming you are in relationship. And what typically happens is they go through becoming you. And the next time I see them, they're showing up either going through a workshop or whatever with the person they're in relationship with, because once you know your values, you want to talk about them with the person you're in relationship with. But if it's not a partner, you know, it can be a boss, it could be a business partner, it can be a child. And one of the reasons I like people doing the processing group is because they need to have a language. And one of the proudest moments of my entire career, you know, like, sorry for the cringe here, but one of my proudest moments was when a woman in her 60s came to one of my workshops and she wrote me afterwards and she said, I went home and I had the first conversation with my adult children in about 15 years because we finally I could talk to them about values in a language that didn't make us all angry at each other. So that, having been said, I was. Had been in relationship my entire life. I got married very, very young. Then I got divorced, my first divorce. And then I met my husband. I had four children at that time, so I was never really ever alone. And then I met my second husband and we had a long and happy marriage until he passed away in 2020. So for the last five and a half years, I've not been in any relationship. It's very, very interesting to take the world on where you can actually, you know, for the first time, live my values and express my values without having to negotiate my values. And so I've seen both sides of the coin, and I have deep appreciation for how much negotiating I did around my values all the previous, you know, 60 years of my life when I was either in a relationship. You know, my kids are grown now, they know the language. We talk about this all the time. But to not to just live your values kind of outside of relationship is kind of an interesting experience. But the vast majority of times when I'm doing this, it's people who are talking about their values vis a vis somebody else's values.
- [57:04]
A
Yeah, I mean, I think that's all really true and important. And whatever you do with your life, you're going to need good relationships at every level in your life, including with your colleagues and your bosses and people who work for you, peers, your direct reports, your superiors, your friends. Like the relationships are the lifeblood of the human animal, and so we need to pay attention to it.
- [57:25]
B
I agree with you. Although the sort of rise of tech has proven to us something that was never previously true in the history of humanity, which is you could be successful and be bad at people. You know, that's what we've learned. I mean, up until very recent times, if you just were terrible at the people part, it actually hurt you. The only people who ever got away with that before the rise of the technocrati were artists. You know, Pablo Picasso was just a total jerk kind of thing. And so I would say that my theory that I teach my management students is that three things drive success long term. The quality of your relationships, like you just said, but also I think your ideas. You have to have a couple of good ideas or you have to be able to have the openness of your heart and mind to shepherd other people's ideas or to support them or to tease them out. So you have to have something around your brain being engaged in the game, and then finally the ability to get things done, execute, as I say. But yeah, people matter. Although, you know, when I was in business school, back in graduating 88, you know, your relationship, your EQ really mattered. And then suddenly the world went to technology and we saw the rise of this sort of uber mogul who could just be an utter and complete asshole and still be wildly successful.
- [58:37]
A
You sometimes hear talk, and sometimes that talk is coming from me, although I don't really know. But at least you hear the theory floated that going forward in the era of AI, eq or emotional intelligence will become more important. It may not apply to Elon Musk, but for most of us, lots of jobs will become commodified and automated. So those of us who remain in the workplace are going to need to have very human skills. Does that land for you?
- [59:08]
B
I hope it's true. I hope it's true. I don't know if it is. I mean, I think it's kind of a little wishful thinking, maybe. I hope it's true. I mean, maybe what happens with AI is that at a certain point we just get tired of talking to a machine and we just remember that the funnest, best thing is just being with people. Like, what replaces it? I the other day went up to Maine to visit with my grandchildren and I got out of the car and started walking towards the house and one of my grandchildren ran out and she squeezed my legs. My grandma name is Kins. And she screamed, Kins. And I thought I honestly, physically, physically felt like this, like, geyser of joy and love come up into my chest. And maybe we got to just remember that no computer's ever going to give us that feeling. I mean, it's just never going to do it and that. And maybe we come to our senses.
- [59:55]
A
And remember that we're almost done here. But before we finish, we have enough time to go back to some of these exercises that you developed and use in the class and use in the book. Maybe let's pick one. And these are designed to help us probe, you know, one of the thorniest areas here, because we've been talking about values, aptitudes and economically viable interests. But we, we spent most of our time on values, I think for very good reason, because it's really important and quite difficult. And so maybe let's pick from this menu of exercises. They have names like Six Squared or Whose Life or Alpha Omega or Exploring Fears. Can we pick one or two of these and walk through them?
- [60:32]
B
Yeah, let's do Six Square to start. It's one of my favorite Exercises. What happens in class is I tell my students about the six word memoir that was originated by Ernest Hemingway when he was challenged that you couldn't write a novel in six words. And he said, you can. And he typed out for sale baby shoes never worn you. Fast forward to 2008, and Smith magazine and Twitter, brand new at the time, got together and they challenged the Internet to write the story of their lives in six words. It was the original breaking of the Internet, and they just got hundreds of thousands of responses. And people sort of had to think about their life to date and write the six word summary of it, the title of their memoir, if you will, for their life to date. And so we do that in class, but the squared part of it is. And we do that as part of the becoming you process. You sum up your life to date. And then I ask my students to go through and exercise a little bit of a kind of a meditation like exercise, except for instead of clearing your head, I mean, I ask them to get very quiet and very still and to imagine their lives in 25 years from that date, 25 years hence, if you will, as if everything worked out as if it was the life they'd always wanted, that nobody had edited it, that they had achieved what they wanted, how they wanted, with whom they wanted, and to picture that life up close, sort of what a day would feel like, and picture it from up between 10,000 people, would that life look like. And after I let them kind of soak in that for a few minutes of just living in and visualizing that life, that life, their ideal life 25 years hence, to stop and to imagine their life from today to that day, and write the title of that memoir in six words. And the stunning moment comes, you know, not infrequently, without tears, where you compare the first memoir to the second memoir title and you see the distance of the journey between the two. This tends to very powerfully pop, if you will, values, because you'll sort of see a life that was a kind of a life of living expectations and expedients for the first part of their life. And then they'll paint a small portrait of their life and you'll see, you know, was it eudaimonia that the new life has, or an ability to be with family? Or is it. Is there something entrepreneurial about it? Or is this some sort of new closeness and belonging? When you're forced to bring this down to just six words, it is stunning. It is absolutely impels values to come right to the surface. People go right there and. But it's the process of doing these two steps that's actually how I started the whole Becoming youg Processing class. People are really caught up by how oftentimes how different the two memoir titles are.
- [63:07]
A
And again, the two steps are, start by thinking about your life to date. What are the six words that would describe it? And then envision 25 years from now. What do you want things to look like? Write that six word memoir. Compare the two reflections.
- [63:24]
B
Yes, exactly. Reflect deeply. You know, what's changed, what's different? What did you do that you didn't, that you haven't done so far? What unlived dream, what unrealized want? What unfixed relationship? What untold story? For many people who go through this process, it's the first time that there's ever been somebody standing over them saying, imagine the life you want. Don't edit yourself. Because the first thing we do when we start imagining that life is we just start editing away. I mean, this is why I always say it's better to be the author of your life than the editor. There's just so many editors around us. You know, the world will edit us soon enough. Don't edit yourself. And I'm just saying it, you look eventually becoming. You edits a lot of things because it says, what are your aptitudes and what are your interests? It asks you to edit some stuff. But like, let's start first by figuring out what it is, you know, what is your heart's desire?
- [64:13]
A
Suzy, I ask two questions at the end of every episode. One, the first question sometimes has really long answers and sometimes very short answers. Is there anything you were hoping to get to that we haven't yet gotten to?
- [64:25]
B
No, I like what we got to. Thank you.
- [64:28]
A
Great. Me too. Second question is, can you just remind everybody of the name of your book and any other resources you've put out into the world, including remind us again about some of these tests that you either created or recommend.
- [64:42]
B
I'd love to. All right, so the book is called Becoming the Proven Method for Crafting your Authentic Life. And the tools that I talked about. One is called the Values Bridge. You could just find it by thevaluesbridge.com the other is pi360. You can go to pi360feedback.com but all of these resources are on my website. Susie welch.com Try them out. There's free versions of everything and poke around and see what. What works for you.
- [65:06]
A
Susie, thank you very much for doing this. Really appreciate it.
- [65:09]
B
It's My pleasure. Thanks so much.
- [65:13]
A
Thanks again to Susie. And again, we've got a guided meditation from Vinnie Ferraro that is specifically designed to help you get still and quiet enough to try to figure out what your values actually are. We've got guided meditations now coming with all of our Monday Wednesday episodes only for paid subscribers over on danharris.com paid subscribers also get weekly live video meditation and Q and A sessions every Tuesday at 4 Eastern and the next one is tomorrow. It's a Vinnie solo session. And finally, if you want to meditate with me in person, I've got a workshop coming up at the New York Insight meditation center on September 21st and then another weekend long thing at the Omega Institute October 24th through 26th. Links for both in the show notes. Finally, thank you so much to everybody who worked so hard on the show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan and Eleanor Vasily. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pot People. Lauren Smith is our managing producer, Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer, DJ Kashmir is our executive producer and Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme. This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible financial geniuses. Monetary magicians. These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary. Not available in all states or situations.