← Becoming You with Suzy Welch
Becoming You with Suzy Welch
Be Not Afraid (Part II): “I’m Scared to Find Out Who I Really Am.”
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- [00:00]
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- [01:03]
Susie Welch
Hi everyone, I'm Susie Welch and this is part two of the Becoming youg series we're calling who's Afraid of Becoming you? Welcome for the First Time? Or welcome back to Becoming youg for the 50th time, the podcast where each week we walk alongside you lovingly and supportingly, but also very realistically on your journey to living authentically. I'm so happy you're here. So one time, like four years ago, I asked everyone I worked with to write down the first word that came to their mind when my name popped up on their phone screen. Like when I called them, they saw Susie Welch on their phone. What word came to their mind? That's what I wanted to know. And I made them each write it down on a little piece of paper. And I passed a hat around so I could anonymously see how I was being experienced. So in came the responses. What my colleagues felt when they saw my name, Susie Welch, on their phone. One person was like, oh shit, did I forget something? And another person was like, something's up. And one darling suck up wrote, caring. All right, so it was mainly stuff you would expect, but mixed into the pile there was a little piece of paper folded in half ten times, and on it there was one word. Machine. Machine. Well, I knew immediately who wrote this about me and we will hear from her later in the podcast because, you know I ran to her and said, explain this. Please explain this machine part of me, please, I need to know. Even though I don't really want to hear what you have to say, I should hear what you have to say. And that, dear listeners, is the topic of today's podcast, why we must and how we can face into the biggest, scariest mystery in the universe ourselves. So last week, in the first episode of our Be Not Afraid series, I made the case that to find your purpose, to find out where you're going, you have no choice. At some point, you have to figure out who you are standing still. It's like that old saying, if you don't know where you're going, any old road will do. And that is why becoming you as a methodology basically says, we cannot begin to talk about your purpose out there until we excavate inside here. And by excavate inside here, I mean identify your true values, your true aptitudes, and your true interest. Yes, it takes an excavation. You know, the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung said, I love this quote, people will do anything, no matter how absurd, to avoid facing their own souls. And that is so true. It's too true. Which is why really, underneath it all, that I invented the Values bridge, the digital tool we use in becoming you to identify your values and tell you how much you're living by them. So much noise gets between us and an honest reckoning of our values. So much it doesn't make a bit of difference how smart you are or how much therapy you've had or how hard you're trying to be honest. There's always going to be the static of a parent in our heads telling us who we can and cannot be. There's going to be the desire not to have a fight with someone we love about the truth of who we really are. There's going to be a baby in the next room crying and making you feel guilty. Or this ever present problem. Pressure sense, I've got to make more money. I call these blockers the four horsemen of values destruction. And we've talked about them before on this podcast. There's expectations, which is what the world expects of us or what we expect of ourselves. Expedients, just the simple human desire to take the path of least resistance. Okay, events, just big life events that just drop into our lives and get in the way of us living our values. And then economic security, which I noticed. The desire, the pressure for just good old money. These dynamics can just gallop away with our values. And so finally, I created this digital tool the Values Bridge. Basically, the test outwits you in a very scientifically validated way into revealing your true values and into revealing how much you're actually living each one. We call that distance the authenticity gap, and the Values Bridge measures it value by value, and then overall. But here's the thing. To take the Values bridge to find out your values in stark, unvarnished detail, and to realize how much of them you're living or not living, to find out your authenticity gaps. That requires courage. It does. And that is sometimes courage we do not have.
- [05:51]
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- [06:53]
Susie Welch
Here's a question I just received from one of our listeners. She DMed me. I'll read it. Hello, I'm a 57 year old divorced mom of an adult child and I am afraid to take the Values bridge. I do need to face this in order to live the life I'm craving. Have you heard this before? I'm so afraid that I'll have huge gaps in my top values and I won't know how to make the necessary corrections. I'm going to do it. I'm just afraid. Okay, so first of all, what I wanna say to this person who wrote in is first of all, I love you and thank you for writing and for your honesty and your vulnerability. And second, yes, I have heard this before. I've heard it many times because it's perfectly human to live our whole lives in that state of values. Don't ask, don't tell. I Mean, I myself have lived that way more than once. My God. The first time I remember with very painful clarity is when my kids were little. I was working at the time as a consultant in Bain. So I had four kids in five years. That's a fun fact. And it's not for the faint of heart to begin with, but in this exact timeframe when they were all little, I had a very fragile marriage with my first husband. We had met when we were very young, 14. We got married very early in our 20s. And, you know, it was just one of those momentum marriages. Those happen. Oh, we liked one song in common also. You know, we just forged ahead. What were we gonna do next? We were gonna get married. All right, and we did. But things fell apart really quickly. They fell apart because we didn't know how to talk to each other. And I. We're really good friends now, but we just didn't like each other very well. I mean, we didn't even know what marriage was. I had, on top of this all, a huge job which required a ton of travel. And so did he. I mean, the only thing holding this whole thing with these four kids together was an au pair that we had hired from a Mormon nanny service, which had led us to believe before we hired her, that because this 18 year old girl was a mor, that she would not party her brains out every night and come home at six in the morning only to black out. And, you know, this is somewhat amusing now, but not really. I mean, she was drunk when we fired her because we could not find a moment to do it when she was sober. That was our life. Okay? So anyway, in this terrible moment, this crucible moment, everything falling apart, my husband, just trying to calm the chaos, decided that I should quit my job and stay home. We had the kids. This was his argument. And someone had to take care of them. And it didn't matter. It was not discussed that I was better educated with my fancy Harvard MBA and that I was actually being paid more in my job and that I was actually doing better in my job. This was 1992, and he liked his fun finance job with its fun party people very much. And he basically said, you have to quit and clean up this mess. And I was frankly so scared of him divorcing me that I said okay. I mean, sobbing inside, I said okay. Because I too loved my job. I loved my colleagues at Bain who were smart and funny and ambitious. I mean, I made one of my best friends of my entire life working there. I mean, these I was working with My people. And I loved my clients and how much they appreciated my ideas. And I loved how much I learned from them. And I loved the actual content of my work, which used every part of my brain. Now, don't get me wrong, I loved my kids, too, but I did not find anything about parenting interesting. I mean, I remember one time I was at a indoor playground with my sister, who was much, much more maternal than I was. And we were watching the kids on these swings they had in this indoor playground place. And they were going up and down and up and down like 500 times. And she looked at my face and she said, what's the matter, Susie? Didn't anyone tell you about the tedium? And I was like, no. No one ever mentioned the tedium and whatever. Maybe they did, but I hadn't listened. By the way, I want to insert here before any new listeners start to hate me too much that all four of my kids, now in their 30s, would literally, if we got them on the phone, tell you, I'm the best mother in the world. Okay, we are best friends. We have always been best friends. Go figure. I was not a typical mom, but I was, I guess, a good enough mom. I knew my kids in their bone marrow, and I love them fiercely. Did it matter that I spoke to them like they were 40 when they were 4? Apparently not. Apparently there is no calculus to motherhood. But the bottom line is I was not, absolutely not, a mother who should have been at home full time. My values of work, centrism and achievement were too high. But there I was, suddenly, 1992, at home full time, and I thought I was doing the right thing because I was told I was doing the right thing. I. My sisters told me, my mother told me, other stay at home moms told me, aren't you so happy to be home? My husband, who didn't like me very much and was thinking of dumping me, told me so. When I heard myself inside my own head think, I'm very unhappy, I told me, shut up, Susie. So did this last? Of course it did not last. You cannot not live your values indefinitely. Your body will tell you, your life will tell you. It's like this. You have a cough, it will not go away. Some days the cough is really, really bad, and you think, I gotta go to a doctor and find out what the problem is and take care of this. But then for a week, the cough is not so bad, and you think, oh, it's getting better. I'm just gonna wait it out. But then there's a day when the cough is so bad it makes you pull over to the side of the road when you're driving. But that night, it's okay again. And on and on it goes, until one night at midnight, you land in the ER because you're coughing up blood and they're rushing you into some big buzzing machine. Okay? That is what happens when we suppress or ignore our values. Something in us starts to break, and we are forced to confront the truth. And we may not want to, but we know we have to. Are you feeling that now in your life, by any chance? Our listener, the one who wrote in, she is right there. Maybe she's feeling some shame about that. Maybe. But here's the thing. She has to know, and I would love you to know, very few people are actually fully living their values. Very few. Let's talk about the data. My favorite thing. That's actually not true. My wiener dog, Pierre, is my favorite thing. But I love the data. Okay, here are the facts. Only 1% of the population is what we at becoming Ulabs call transcendent. That is that they have a total overall authenticity gap score of less than 10%. They are very close to living all of their values as much or as little as they want. At the other end of the spectrum, about 10% of the population falls in a category we call incongruent, meaning they have, like, an authenticity gap of 80 or 90%. They are nowhere near living the lives they want. And I think our listener who wrote in, she fears that she's in this particular category. But if you look at the total average of everyone, if you take the results of everyone who's ever taken the test, most people have an average authenticity gap of around 25% with their top five values. That's not great. You want it to be closer to zero. But it's not awful. Which is why most people usually bump along not living their values for so long. It is survivable until it's not. So that is what happened to me when I was in that period of giving up work and staying at home full time with the kids. In that period, if you can believe it, I took up sewing. Why? Because I love work, I love being industrious, and the kids were at school a few hours a day, and the house needed curtains. And I decided. What? I decided to teach myself how to sew and make elaborate, tasseled, lined curtains for every freaking window in my house, which was like this big, rambling Victorian house. I was like a mad woman in my supposed downtime, trying to make something, Trying to achieve at something. Trying to fill the hole where work once lived. And you cannot believe the curtains I made. I mean, they were very good. I was like, susie, seamstress on steroids. I was also freaking deranged, okay? Because I was trying to fill a hole that sewing curtains was never, ever gonna fill. And then one day, in a sewing frenzy, I sewed right over my hand with the big electric machine I was using. Cause I was using very heavy fabrics for curtain and sewed my hand. I kind of have amnesia about it. It was very bloody. It was unbelievably painful, okay? And I don't really remember much because apparently I fainted. And then when I came to, I came to and I was like, oh, my God, blood everywhere. Oh, my hand is killing me. I got up and I went to go get the kids at the bus stop with my hand in a bloody towel. What a mess. And it kind of went downhill from there. So my husband had to come home from work and take me to the ER with the four kids. And he was so mad at me and I was so mad at him that we started to have a fight in front of the kids, which we had actually. Even our terrible marriage promised each other that we would never do. And finally I lost it. And I just screamed at him, please let me go back to work. I miss me. I miss me. I need to see me again. And these are not things to say in front of your kids. But I said them because the gap between the values I held and the values I was living had become too much for me to bear. And into such situations, there just are no band aids. Okay? It's like trying to fix tuberculosis with a cough drop. You can't do it.
- [16:43]
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- [17:45]
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- [18:35]
Susie Welch
So my husband and I, we made some very, very big, long overdue changes. We got a very good nanny, for instance. But the biggest change was that I sat my kids down and I told them that I loved them, but that I also loved work. And I was going to keep working, I said. And I don't know how I got the wherewithal to do it, but I said to them the truth. I said, I'm going to spend my whole life helping you be you. Please help me be me. And they all said, okay. It was a deal that made total sense to them. The truth can be very hard when it comes to facing your values, but it does indeed set you free to make the changes that you have to make. So I want the person who wrote in to take the values. Bridge, if you're listening, let me speak to you directly. You may fear what you're going to see, and it may dismay you to see it, but what you see will eventually set you free. That process may take a long time. It will definitely take work. It may be hard. It will be hard, but you can get close. You can get closer. Like I have gotten closer to being a machine. You were wondering when I was going to get back to that little folded piece of paper that called me a machine. Right. Well, I am getting back to it. So the person who wrote that note folded over 10 times until it was a little tiny nub was my wonderful partner in crime, my assistant, Hallie, who knows me as well as anyone can. Hallie? Hallie.
- [20:29]
Hallie
Yes.
- [20:30]
Susie Welch
Well, hello.
- [20:31]
Hallie
Hello there.
- [20:31]
Susie Welch
We have to talk to you about something.
- [20:33]
Hallie
Oh, no.
- [20:33]
Susie Welch
Sit down. Okay. Let's talk about the machine thing.
- [20:38]
Hallie
Oh, this?
- [20:39]
Susie Welch
I don't know. It was like. It was like. All right, why did you write down the word machine?
- [20:45]
Hallie
Machine was the only word I could use to describe you. And I think it's because of the way you work. You work like a machine, and you operate at a hundred percent all the time. You just know what you're going to get when you're working with Suzy.
- [21:00]
Susie Welch
No, it wasn't. You didn't mean it in a mean way, right?
- [21:03]
Hallie
Oh, God, no. No, I never meant it in mean way. I want you to know that it's because I know how much work matters to you and that your value of work, centrism, is what makes you you. And that working with you is knowing your work, centrism, and knowing that it is the organizing principle of your life. And like a machine. A machine works all the time. 24. 7, doesn't stop. That is you, my friend.
- [21:28]
Susie Welch
It was me. It was me. Which is why I ended up actually sewing my hand to the sewing machine. I just. Well, thank you for explaining it, Hallie.
- [21:39]
Hallie
You're so welcome. And I would call you a machine a hundred more times, but a good machine, a fabulous machine, the best machine in the whole world.
- [21:48]
Susie Welch
And that is why you have to know your values, really. So you can be you. Which can be scary until it's not anymore. In fact, it's the exact opposite. Thank you so much for being with me today on the second part of our Be Not Afraid series of becoming you. I'm Susie Welch. I'll see you next week.