← Becoming You with Suzy Welch
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Parle tu francais habla sepanol. Parle italiano. If you've used Babbel, you would. Babbel's conversation based technique teaches you useful words and phrases to get you speaking quickly about the things you actually talk about in the real world. With lessons handcrafted by over 200 language experts and voiced by real native speakers, Babbel is like having a private tutor in your pocket. Start speaking with Babbel today. Get up to 55% off your Babbel subscription right now at babbel.com listen spelled B A B-B-E-L.com listen. Rules and restrictions may apply. True Confession I am a person who for many years had no idea what FAQ stood for. I mean, isn't that amazing? I just didn't want to admit it out loud. I didn't know it meant frequently asked questions. I don't know. I just finally one day, you know, blurted it out and somebody told me. And now I use that term all the time. Because the thing about becoming you, the methodology is when you hear about it, you often have questions. People often have questions. And in my mind and on our website and so forth, I know when I talk about becoming you, I know what questions are coming afterwards. Welcome to Becoming youg. I'm Susie welch. Today's episode FAQs question number one, do your values change during your life? Yes and no are going to be my answers. But let's go deeper than that. Okay? The deeper questions underneath that are what are even values? And also, where do your values come from? Let's, let's start there with this very important and frequently asked question. All right? Values are choices about how we show up in this world, how we live, how we work, how we enter a relationship, how we play. Again, choices. They are not virtues. Virtues, which are wonderful, are social constructs that we all generally agree are fairness, kindness, honesty, compassion. Everybody agrees you should have more virtues unless there's something really wrong with you. Virtues generally are thought not to be choices. I don't think it's a choice to be kind or not. Values are so totally different thing. Values are. There's 16 values as far as I'm concerned, and the Welch Bristol Values inventory says there's 16. I invented that inventory as part of my PhD thesis. But there's other scholars who think there are 14. There's another scholar who thinks there's 19. Yes, there are scholars of values, believe it or not. And they're sometimes called scholars of desire because values are desire. It sort of sounds like the name of a dirty movie, frankly, scholars of desire. But that's not part of my resume. So I would say, say that values are our desires. None of the values are better or worse by definition. They're just better or worse for you based on what you want. What are your authentic motivations, your wants, your needs? Everybody has a different. We can fight about values, and people often do, usually not using the language of values. They say, you're this, you're that. You have low achievement, you're lazy, you have high work centrism, you're a workaholic. That's how we usually talk about values. But in the Becoming youg methodology, we're 100% values agnostic. Agnostic. If you're not hurting anybody, your values are your values to express. All right, let's talk, though, about where your values come from. So there are two schools of values of understanding values. One is values formation, how you came by your values. And the other is values expression, how you live out your values or don't. I actually technically am a scholar of values expression. And becoming you is about how much you live your values or. Or don't live them. And it's very future focused. Values formation is the study of how we came by our values, which typically happens before we're age 23 to 25. And imagine your life like this, a big cauldron. And into that cauldron of your formation goes things like your culture, the era you were born in, your genetic makeup, okay, your personality, the influence of your parents, your best friend, childhood trauma or childhood happiness. All of those things get put into this cauldron. Everything that happens to you in your life gets put into it, and it gets stirred up like a big stew. And out of that stew comes your values, how much you want and need certain things. You may have life experience and personality and everything that adds up to you. The most thing you value is family. Or because of what's happened to you and who you are, family may be way down at the bottom of one of your values. Who can unp? Who knows? This is the nature or nurture question. And a lot of times when people get back their results on the values bridge, which is the digital assessment that we use in the Becoming youg methodology to determine your values and rank them from 1 to 16, people will get back their results, and the first thing they want to know is, well, why their values are that way. And they'll say, professor Welch, do you think that I have family centrism at number 11 because my parents got divorced When I was young. And I will say you can take that up with your therapist. A wonderful question. It's not what we do in becoming you. I'm not a therapist, and I don't know why your values are why they are. I have some understanding of why my values are the way they are because I've had my own lived experience and I have some theories about it. I don't know for sure. It's a big cauldron of reasons, and I am not able to unpick them all. In becoming you, we're really focused. The methodology is focused on taking you as you are with the values you have and having you express them as fully as possible to live the life that you were meant to live, to live a A plus life, a life of total fulfillment and joy, along with the assessment of what your aptitudes are, what you're good at, and your interests. You know what call the work that calls you emotionally and intellectually. So the question is, do your values change as well? If we know what values actually are, which, again, are choices, and we know where they come from, which is this cauldron of experiences and personality and identity and era, this gigantic culmination of things, the research would suggest that your values are pret formed between 23 and 25. And so do your values really change? Probably not too much. What will change is your expression of them. You may have a value early in life, and you may not have the courage or the confidence or the capability to express it till later in life. Take the value of, say, scope. You may want an incredibly exciting life. You may have very high scope. But for the vast majority of your life, you may live in a culture or in a family that doesn't allow you to express it. But at age 40, you find a way to complete independence and you're able to fully live your scope. But values can and do change. And that happens under a very specific circumstance, which I call a seismic change, a seismic change in your life, a death, being laid off, perhaps a baby. These can all be seismic changes that change your worldview. They throw something new into the cauldron that fundamentally changes the composition of what your values are. So let's use me as an example. Belovedness is the value of romantic love, right? How much you organize your life around a romantic partnership, it's in many ways the, say, the marriage value or the partnered value back when I was younger and my husband was still living. The value of belovedness, I'm going to guess, because we didn't have the values Bridge, then I'm going to guess that belovedness was in my top five values. I mean, explicitly stated. My marriage is the most important thing in my life. The marriage comes first. I used to say to my children, the biggest gift that Jack and I can give you is a happy marriage. And there were many times where Jack and I would talk about decisions based on how it affected the marriage. And I would say Jack also had belovedness as a very high value, and it worked very well for us. I recently retook the values bridge because I'm always testing it and we're always refining it. And guess where belovedness was. For me right now, as a widow, number 16, I had a seismic event. I do not anymore organize my life around a partnered romantic relationship. I'm a single person and intend to stay one. I don't have a partner. And so belovedness, because of this seismic event in my life is no longer a top value for me. And in fact, it dropped from the top way down to the bottom. And that meant something else rose up. And I actually have a supposition about what rose up. The value of belonging, which is a pretty high value for me. That's the friendship value. Belonging is the value that reflects how much we value our friends and our community. And that moved up to number seven. So some kind of change happened, and probably it was because I lost the centrality of my romantic relationship. And what emerged and rose up in its place was how important my friends are to me. It makes sense, doesn't it? So the question, the FAQ is, do your values change? And the answer is, not as much as you think, but they can. Sometimes people want to change their values when they see them. You know, a lot of times people get back their values and they're a little bit taken aback. All right, this is the common reaction. They look at their values. The first reaction is, wait, wait, wait. Oh, isn't this interesting? Sometimes people say, oh, this can't be me. And that lasts around 10 minutes. And then they say, oh, my God, this really is me. And then sometimes people have discomfiture with what their values might be like. They may find out that their top value is affluence, which is the desire for financial security. No shade. Because if you're not hurting anybody, and that's your value, that's your value. Sometimes a top value is beholderism. That's a very old value. It's in every value's inventory. It's the value of aesthetics, how much you care about how things around you look including yourself. And I always say there should be a support group for people who find out that beholderism is their top value. People are like, oh, that can't be me. But it can be. If you're not hurting anybody, just lean into it. Artists and others from the beginning of time have valued beauty, and they brought great beauty to the world because of it. Your values are you. And unless you want to really change you. And most people don't want to. Most people want to lean into who they truly are and live more authentically. It's the exact opposite. They don't want to change themselves. They want to be more of themselves more freely and more fully. I would say your values are you, and the task ahead of you is to understand them and see how they play out in your life and how they can play out in your future for a better, more full, more meaningful, more productive, more. Just, more you life. All right, the second FAQ I want to take on involves a term that we made up. It's called the authenticity gap. People often say, I got my results to the values bridge, and there's a number with each value, and it's called an authenticity gap. What does it mean? Have you ever really wanted something? Wanted a way to live? Wanted more freedom? Wanted to control decisions more, Wanted to spend more time with your family? You want something, and you can't live it. You can't. Something's in the way. There's constraints on you. There's a spouse, there's a job, there's your health. There's constraints, and there's a gap between what you really want and how much you're living it. Yeah. Okay. That feeling is what we call the authenticity gap. And I want to tell you right off the bat, originally, I kind of wanted to call the authenticity gap the happiness score. I will explain. So you have values, as I said earlier, you have 16 values. You have top values. We call those core values, peripheral values down at the bottom, and moderate values in the middle. And for each value, you may have it, but you may not be living it. All right, let's use scope again. It's such a good value. It's how much excitement you want in your life. And you may want a life just teeming with excitement and stimulation. You may want to travel every day. You may want to be meeting new people. You want to go to studio for on a white stallion. Okay. You want to just have a life that's you're the most interesting person in the world, and so you're very, very high scope let's say. And actually not a lot of people do. It's probably something like 21% of the population has it in their top five. So not a very common top value, but it happens. But you can't do it, as I said before, because you've got, say you've got kids or you've got a job that doesn't allow you to travel. You've got elderly parents. There's a million reasons we don't live our values. And oftentimes that feels like a suit that's not fitting us very well. But we all make accommodations for our life. If you had incredibly high scope as a value, but you had elderly parents, that meant that you could not leave your town, and you were, you know, living there taking care of them, and you were doing it every single day, and you had no ability to express your scope. You might have an authenticity gap of like 90%. The higher your authenticity gap, the less you are living your value. The ideal is to have authenticity gaps of zero, no matter what your values are, no matter what comes first, no matter what comes 7th or 16th, that you're living it exactly the amount you want it. That's very rare. In fact, it's only 1% of the population that has authenticity gaps all put together of less than 10%, 1% of the population. Occasionally I meet these people in the wild. I'm always kind of studying them. They're like, they're in a zoo. It's so rare. And always say to them, like, how does your life feel? And they usually say things like, it feels really perfect. Thanks for asking. They don't realize how rare they are. So we don't live our lives, our values, as much as we want. This is part of the human condition and part of the becoming you methodology, to be honest, is intended to help you live your values more fully. That's a process. It doesn't happen overnight because there's a reason we're not living our values usually. And a lot of times we don't live our values because of people we love. And so we, you know, our kids or our spouses or our parents are good friends. We don't do stuff we want to do because we love them so much. That's sort of the irony of it. Sometimes we just make these accommodations and we either feel it quite a little or quite a lot. So the authenticity gap measures for each value, how much you are living your value. And again, you want it to be low because you want to be living your values as much as you can. But sometimes it's quite high. Anything over 50% I think this is a red flag. Now here's the thing. The authenticity gap can be negative. You can be over expressing a value in your life. So let us take the value of achievement. Achievement is the value that reflects how much you want to have, how much you prioritize success that you can feel and others can see. Interestingly, as you might guess, certain generations think about achievement differently. My own generation has achievement as a much higher value than Gen Z for instance. And in fact, in general for Gen Z, achievement is a value that's around number 11 or 12. But here's the thing. Even though it's a very low value, a peripheral value for Gen Z in general. And of course there are exceptions to this. There are people in Gen Z who have achievement as number one, but 60 something percent of Gen Z has it down in the bottom five values. In general, Gen Z has a negative 60% variance on achievement, meaning even though they have it as a low value, it's still 60% too much in their lives. Why are they feeling it even? Probably because their parents are telling them they should achieve more. So if you have a value and you don't have, you don't like that value all that well and you're still living it, the authenticity gap will show you how much more you're expressing it than you'd like to be expressing it. One more short story. Family centrism Organizing your life around your family is a middling value for me, number seven. And I love my kids very much. They're my best friends and of course I love my grandchildren even more so love my family. But I don't organize my life around them in general because I've organized my life around my work. But there have been when my family needs me, I am there for them. Of course I am. There was a period last year when for some reason all four of my children decided to have life crises simultaneously. For three of them it was about work and for the other it was about where she was going to live. And this was a giant. All four of them, kind of, they're all in their 30s by the way, had simultaneous implosions. In this period I was actually in a very intense time at work creating a new class at nyu. I was starting to teach a new class and I was creating the curriculum for it and I was intensely involved in this with a team. And in this period my kids were constantly calling me all day, writing me, needing me. And of course I needed to be there for them. In that period I happened to take the values bridge and my value of family centrism was, was firmly still at number seven. But my variation was a negative 70%. My authenticity gap was a negative 70%. I was over expressing this value of family centrism in this period. And when I took the test recently, that authenticity gap was gone. Because my kids are all out of crisis, I'm happy to report, and everybody in this particular moment is fine. So that's what an authenticity gap is. And as I said, we. When we were first designing the tool, we thought about calling it a happiness score because how much you are living or not living your values is sometimes connected to how happy you are. But we said no to it and I kind of had the final veto on it because I don't. Our goal with the whole Becoming youg methodology is not to guarantee you or promise you happiness. I'm not part of the happiness industrial complex. I think happiness is a wonderful thing and I would like everyone in the world to be happy. Of course I would. But I think happiness is not a goal, it's an outcome. I think it's an outcome of a life of purpose. And so what we are trying to do with becoming you is help you find your purpose. And the usual outcome of that is happiness. But not always because you can certainly be living your purpose and then something terrible can happen. You can get a terrible diagnosis or you can lose someone you love and happiness can be quite fleeting. I think your best friend option, your best chance of having happiness and sustained happiness is to be living a life of purpose. So we ended up not calling it the happiness score to sort of make sure that it was clear that we are not about promising happiness per se. Although again, I would like to repeat, I would really like everyone to be happy. Well, the third question does not have to do with values, although a lot of questions in any FAQ session around values. The third question has to do with aptitudes. What are aptitudes? Aptitudes are not skills, they're not competencies. Aptitudes are very specific. There are inborn proclivities. They're what we're naturally good at. And they can be both cognitive, sort of how our brain processes information, makes decisions, and they can be emotional. What I'm talking about is our personality. And so we can spend our whole life as a flight attendant and be an introvert and we are going to be basically having a job. That's completely against our natural aptitudes. Introvert and extrovert. Being aptitudes how we're kind of wired to interact with the world. So our aptitudes, which we study a lot in the methodology, we have four different tests for them help us understand what our hard wiring is around our intellectual, cognitive aptitudes, and also our personality. You know, who are we in our most natural state? Because you can be great at a job because of your personality, and you can be not so great. So what's the FAQ around this? The FAQ is this. What if I really, really want to do something with my life that I'm not naturally good at? Okay, well, you can go that route. Okay. Say you're very, very interested. You desperately want to be an actor or an actress or a singer, but you don't have the natural aptitudes. You can do that. A lot of people have tried. I mean, that's like Hollywood. Hollywood is filled with people, and many of them are wonderful human beings, and they have kind of a front row seat on this because my daughter is a casting director. Hollywood is filled with people who have gone there with dreams of. They've stood in front of their mirror accepting their Oscar, all right? And they don't have the ability to act. They are not as good at it as they need to be to break through. I mean, I think people think Hollywood is just filled with people who are wildly talented, who never get their break. And that's true, but it's also filled with people who have identity and emotional desires, and they may have values that have driven them to. They may have the value of luminance, which is fame, and that. That's driven them to Hollywood, and they're just not that good. I mean, look, there's a lot of people who want to be Celine Dion or Mariah Carey, and they're just not as good, all right? And so this is the dilemma. This is why it's so dangerous. When your Aunt Matilda tells you to follow your passion, I want to interrupt her at dinner and say, yeah, Matilda, what if they're not good at it? Okay? What if their passion is Broadway and they're just not good? All right? They're kind of pitchy, as they used to say on American Idol. All right? So my answer to this is, you know, if you're not good at something and you've got a real passion to do it, and it's just not your aptitude, there's a name for it, and it's called a hobby. All right? Look, I. You can't love ceramics more than me. Can't love ceramics more than me. I Grew up in a household. My mom is a ceramicist. She's 98 years old. She's still on the wheel. My daughter, one of my daughters, is a ceramicist. Okay. They're unbelievable. They throw. You cannot believe the pottery that I grew up around. I mean, I grew up in a pottery studio in my own home. We have a pottery studio. Some people have, like, you know, have a backyard where they toss the football. We actually have a pottery studio where the whole family gathers. It's like our living room. Guess what? But I'm so bad at it. I mean, I remember one time a friend literally saying to me, did you make it look like this on purpose? It's childlike. I will never stop doing it. It is where. It's the only time I ever relax. Okay. I mean, I actually do a type of pottery called Kiranuki, where you carve out. It's really meditative. Yes, I actually do. That goes very slowly, and I love it. But I'm so bad at it that I often break my own pots by digging too deeply. I'm terrible at it. I have no aptitude for it. I love doing it. Guess what? It's a hobby. It's a hobby. It'll always be my hobby. All right? But if I had tried to become a professional ceramist like my daughter, I'd fail. And so my suggestion to everybody going through the becoming you methodology, and you can take it or leave it, because it's a strong opinion, which is, lean into your aptitude, your natural aptitudes. Don't try to overcome them. Don't try to overcome what you're not good at. Don't try to keep on throwing experiences at yourself that try to force you to be something you're not. I have seen it work one time. I've seen it work one time. I have a friend whose values are all around changing the world, and the way she wants to change the world is completely connected to the life of animals. This is a passionate cause of mine as well as the animal protection movement. But to be a leader in that space, which she has been in for quite some time, to be a leader, you have to have an aptitude of fundraising. You have to have an aptitude of being a good communicator. You have to have an aptitude of diagnostic problem solving. She has none of these. She has none of these. She's a deep introvert. She's very, very shy. Everything that would take to be a leader in a nonprofit space, these are not her natural aptitudes. In fact, her Natural aptitudes are. She's a specialist. She should be a researcher, right by her aptitude, she's an introvert in every possible way. And yet, because of her incredible passion for radius, for changing the world, and in particular the world for animals, and because of her interest in the fate of farmed animals, she has worked her entire life to overcome her aptitude deficits. And she succeeded as much as a person can. But she has worked every single day of her life basically against type to get to where she is. I applaud her, I revere her for what she's done, especially because she has moved forward this movement that I care so much about. But it has not been easy. And, I mean, I think there's been times where it's felt so hard to her. She wanted to step back, but her values and her interests have pushed her forward, knowing that she's not working in a space that plays to her natural aptitudes. So that is what I say about aptitudes. First, number one, know what your aptitudes are. Don't guess. Don't let people tell you what your aptitudes are. You can test for them, both cognitive and emotional. And then my advice would be, if you can work in the space that actually allows you to lean into them, and if not, understand that you're going to have to work and work to overcome being in work that is not naturally aligned with who you naturally are. Let us end with something I hear painfully often, and it is the question, what if I figured out my purpose? I see my purpose. I desire to live my purpose. I know what my values are. I know what my aptitudes. I know what my interests are. I know what the intersection is. I know what it is. I just can't go there. I just can't get myself there. It's too scary, it's too hard. And sometimes I hear it's just impossible. What if? That's a big question that comes at me all the time now. We just did a series on overcoming the fear of knowing yourself, but this is a different kind of fear. This is a fear when you do know yourself and you can't operationalize. Just seems like, okay, I figured out my purpose. I want to become a hospice nurse. But right now I'm a famous broadcast journalist. How do I possibly get there from here? I'm making good money. Everyone knows me as this. How do I possibly get from this, this job, this life, to that way over there that I know is my purpose? Well, I mentioned this specifically because this actually happened. This is a true story. There's a woman, a broadcast journalist named Sue Brady Hartigan, a person who I know who came to the Three Day. And she was a well known. If you're from Boston, you recognize her name. And when she took the Three Day, what happened was she discovered her top value was cosmos. For her represents her Catholic faith and her desire to live a life that was, in her words, holy. This was her driving value. And she felt this was not being met doing drive time talk radio. And her second value was what we call non sibi. This is not for oneself, the value of helping people in an intimate way. And she was like, I think, I think what I should be doing is hospice work. And I was like, really? And she was like, yeah, well, there's a long way. And look, she had an identity. She was like well known for this other identity and she wanted to blow it up. It felt unachievable. So there's two ways you can go about this when this happens to you. Okay, there's my purpose over there. How do I get to it? You can go towards it in baby steps. Try a little of this, try a little of that. Kind of say, I've got a five year plan. I'm going to zig and I'm going to zag. I'm going to leave radio, I'm going to go do this, I'm gonna go do that, and then I'm gonna work my way over there. It won't surprise anybody. I'll sort of put my toe in the water. Then when it feels better, I'll go up to my knee. When I feel okay, I'm going up to my waist. This is how I used to get into the water in Nantucket, which was like 2 degrees. You know, you sort of slowly wake, make your way in. And the other option really isn't it that you would just rip off the band aid. You rip off the band aid and you just say to everybody, guess what? I've had a, an awakening and I'm going to leave this and I'm gonna go to that. Well, for sue, it was the step by step. The first thing she started was sort of take care of people, older people. She kind of explained to her family, I want to help people. And she started to take care of elderly people. And she actually, no surprise, really loved that. And she started inching closer to doing that full time. And then she found out, you know what I think to work in hospice, I need to become a certified hospice caretaker. I need to go back to school and she did that. And she inched closer and closer. She started to work in hospice as a trainee. And I don't know, I guess her family was probably crying, but I don't know anybody crying harder than me this weekend when she sent me the photographs of her graduation with the other hospice nurses. And she will now go into full time hospice. The world is going to be a vastly better place because of it, because she's a person who found her purpose and went to go live it. And everybody will benefit from the beautiful fulfillment of who she is. Spectacular caregiver. And I know personally from my own experience that hospice nurses save you when you need. They are there. They are angels. I'll never forget at Jack's funeral, looking up and seeing his hospice nurses all sitting together in one of the pews. And sue was born for this work. She was born for it. And she did the hard work of getting there. I've seen other people have discoveries through the Becoming youg Methodology, and they get to the end and they realize. We had a climate change scientist go through the process, decided she wanted to produce Broadway shows and she tried the step by step method. She was taking a class learning how to produce on Broadway. After she, she left the Three Day Experience and she started taking a class. And when she started to take the class, people said to her, wait, have you been doing this your whole life? You're really good at it. And she went home and she ripped off the band aid, quit her job, and dove right in. There are all sorts of ways to do it, but my answer is like, you know you're gonna get there. Because once you know your purpose your heart's yearning for, it never goes away. Once you've identified it, it calls you. And you hear that call and you ache until you go there. So look, I'm a rip a band aid off kind of girl, but I'm not saying that's for everybody. Only you know your capacity and your appetite for risk. Only you know your capacity and your appetite for financial insecurity, which often happens with change. But once you're called, you're going to go fast or slow. You're gonna go, all right. So those are the answers to the FAQs that I so often hear about the Becoming youg Methodology. I hope it was helpful to you. And as more FAQs come in, I'm happy to answer them. This has been Becoming youg. I'm Susie Welch. See you next time. Quick reset. Something practical. TikTok is packed with free workout plans, home training, fat loss, routines, muscle tips. No coach fee, no gym contract. Just follow and move. Download TikTok now.