← Becoming You with Suzy Welch
Becoming You with Suzy Welch
Sixteen Words That Will Change How You See Yourself…and the People Around You (Part 3)
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Susie Welch
Nerds.
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NerdWallet Smart Money Podcast Host
Today's episode is sponsored by NerdWallet's Smart Money podcast. Ever Google a money question and end up 12 tabs deep with 12 different answers? This podcast is your shortcut back to clarity. NerdWallet's Smart Money podcast breaks down financial decisions With a team of trusted journalists, they explain the why behind decisions like investing, home buying and choosing credit cards. With clear research backed insights. No jargon, no misinformation. Make your next financial move with confidence. Follow NerdWallet's Smart Money podcast on your favorite podcast app.
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Narrator (Tower of Babel story)
called for bricks, and the worker beside him shook his head in confusion. Words became meaningless. Sounds and commands were ignored. Plans faltered. Shouts rang through the streets, but none met comprehension. Misunderstanding turned to frustration, and frustration turned to anger.
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Susie Welch
And frustration turned to anger. So dramatic. I love that guy's voice. When I was listening to it, I thought, did that guy have that voice when he was 12? And frustration turned to anger. All you could feel is, oh, that's from a short clip from one of the many, many depictions of what happened 4,000 years ago at what's called the Tower of Babel, which is said to have been under construction in a town In Iraq about 8, 85 miles south of modern Baghdad. So many of you know this story. The Tower of Babel. It's in the Bible's first book, Genesis. You hear it and the story goes that in those days, everyone in the world, no matter where they came from, spoke the exact same language. It was a phenomenon, we're told in Genesis, that made people like, really prideful and really arrogant. Everything was easy because everyone spoke the same language. And to prove that, to demonstrate how powerful humans were with their same language, the leaders of civilization decided to build a huge monument towering into heaven. They got about halfway there building this tower when God parted the skies and said, not so fast, human people, because you are definitely not all that I am. To make his point, he suddenly made it so that everyone, in a flash started speaking different languages and thus right past each other. They just could not understand each other. Then, boom. It was just like that narrator said, and frustration turned to anger. And the story goes that pretty soon people got so mad at each other that they all went their separate ways. And many people stopped talking to each other entirely for generations to come. You know, we're still doing it today, aren't we? Look, maybe there's so many reasons it's good that there's different languages, and maybe it has to be that way, and it should be. Except I'm gonna make the case that when it comes to values, and maybe just values, we don't have to speak past each other. And in fact, when it comes to values, we can speak right to each other. That, I am gonna boldly say would be very good, because we hurt each other when we cannot talk to each other about values. So. Hello, and welcome to the third and final installment in our Becoming youg podcast series called 16 Little Words that Can Change youe Life. I'm your host, so Susie Welch, and this is Becoming youg. Can I tell you a story? I was out to dinner the other night with the nicest group of people in the world, and we were meeting to talk about our 50th high school reunion, which is coming up next year. So, yes, we were a bunch of oldsters, and we were chatting about how to make our reunion fun and interesting because even though we're old, we still want to have fun. And also, we. We were reminiscing about 1977 and how different it was then. And, I mean, someone at the dinner was gay, and he was saying there wasn't even a word to describe what he felt. It was such a long time ago, and yet they all told me, I have not aged a year. That's what we told each other. You've just not aged a year. Anyway, we have somewhere in this conversation, one of the people at dinner started talking about his life and his old hometown where he grew up. And he said, I just learned all my values there. I learned my value of honesty there and my value of kindness, value of hard work and my value of decency. And can I tell you the self control it took for me not to be a total asshat and scream, those aren't values, my friend. They are virtues. And it really matters. But I didn't do that because I am socially acceptable. And that is what it feels like to live inside my brain, by the way. So let's talk us about what values are and what they aren't, since we are going to be talking about values for this entire podcast, and we're Going to be talking about this language of values, these 16 words, which is what I think we need. And why do we need them? You may be wondering. Well, for compassionate self awareness, so we can know ourselves with love and understanding and kindness towards ourself. And also so that we can talk to each other about important stuff without hurting each other. Values are our innermost motivations, desires, wants, needs. When we live them, which we don't always do, they drive our decisions and our actions around work and love and play, relationships. Unlike virtues, values are not good or bad. They are only good or bad for us as individuals. Virtues are good for everybody. Virtues are social constructs that societies and cultures decide everybody needs more of. And it's usually right. We all need more honesty, decency, kindness and fairness. Nobody disputes virtues. Values are different, okay? They're choices. Take for example. Let's just use one example. The value of scope. Scope is the value which reflects how exciting and stimulating and crowded and big a life we want to live. You can want scope as a low value, meaning you want a life with predictability and quiet and visibility and psychological safety. I don't care if you want high scope life or low scope life. What do I care? It's your choice. And the same is true. Let's just take another value, the value of achievement. Achievement, a little bit more of a lightning rod. That's the value. It reflects how much you want success, how much it matters to you, how much you want to feel successful and have other people see you as successful. Again. You can have an opinion about this value, but only have it for yourself, okay? Because how much achievement you have as a value, high or low, it has consequences and you're going to live them. But you cannot make somebody have high or low achievement. It's their choice based on many, many factors that have gone on in their life, like the culture, their personality, their family and their friends. You may be sitting there at this moment thinking, this woman is ranting about values. Where the heck is she coming from? Well, she comes from Portland, Oregon. No. Okay, that's. I do come from Portland, Oregon. But where I come from right now is that I'm a professor at NYU's Stern School of Business. I teach management there. But I also teach a class called Becoming youg. Becoming youg is a methodology and it helps you answer the question, what should I do with my life? By the way, that's not a question just for students. That's a question for Everybody. That's for CEOs, it's for carpenters. It's for moms. It's, it's for everybody at every age. I teach it to students at nyu, but I also teach it in enrollment. I teach it in three day intensives. I've taught it around the world. About 500,000 people have gone through the Becoming youg Methodology at this point. And the way it works is it excavates three data sets, your values, which I've just been ranting about. The second data set is your aptitudes. That's what you're good at cognitively and emotionally. It's really important to know your aptitudes. You can't just do what you want to do. You have to do also what you're good at. And the third leg of the stool, the three. The third data set is what you should do, which is the fields out there that call you emotionally and intellectually, the kind of work that calls you, but also can pay you how much you care about money and is also growing. So the Becoming youg Methodology is a matter of excavating those three data sets. And then at the end, they're synthesized and they produce three possible career paths for you. But we're talking about that first data set right now. Values. How do you find out what your values are? For a couple of years, I tried to teach Becoming youg using reflective exercises and surveys that existed, helping people try to identify their values. And finally, in frustration, I thought none of these exactly get people to a list of values with the kind of gritty specifics that I wanted. And so I created a tool with a, with my lab. I didn't do it alone. I have great team of data scientists and psychometricians, and we developed a tool called the Values Bridge, which rank orders your values from 1 to 16. It also tells you how much you're living them, which by a percentage, whether you're living in a little or a lot. And it tells you which values you have that are in conflict with each other. And about 200,000 people have taken this tool. I'm very proud of it. And if you want to learn more about it, go to thevaluesbridge.com but I want to say this. The values bridge is based on an inventory of values that I developed as part of my PhD thesis. It's called the Welch Bristol Values Inventory, named for myself and for the university, the University of Bristol, where I developed this inventory of values, the Welch Bristol Values inventory. That's those 16 values. Okay? Those are the 16 words we're talking about here. They're the 16 values that you get ranked as part of the values bridge. And you know, you can just listen to these podcasts if you want to know what your values are. You don't have to take the values bridge. You can just listen to me. And actually to help people identify their own values and come to understand them, we have been making this three part series of which this is the last one where I talk about my own values one by one. Not because I think you should have my values. Au contraire. I think you should have your values in the order that makes sense for you. In the first episode, we're starting from the bottom and going up to the top. In the first episode I talked about my bottom five values. And in the second episode, which you can go back and listen to, and I hope you do, we talked about my moderate values in the middle. And then today in this last episode, we're going to talk about what happened to be my top five values and they probably aren't yours. I mean, maybe one is yours and, and maybe two. And God knows you may think my top values are not at all how you would want to live your life. And that is fine. I am just talking about my values as a means to talk about all 16 values. And I hope it's been helpful. But in general, it's good to just know what the values are so we can talk to each other. We have to come to understand all the values. We have to understand where other people hold their values. And to do that we need to speak this language. It's so easy to get fluent in it so that frustration will not turn to anger, but instead that insight can turn to understanding. All right, shall we get going with my top five values? We're going to start. And number five, drumroll please. Here we go. My fifth value. And that's a core value. This is a high, high value for me. And it's unusual. A lot of their values tests don't have it. It's called place. It's about the importance of location to you. How come location place is one of the values in the values inventory? Well, it started this way back in the old days before the Becoming youg methodology had the values bridge to help people get to a really good sense of what their purpose was. I did the methodology without the values bridge, as I said. And I had a fantastic student. He was, he was so thoughtful. He was so he really threw his whole heart and soul into the process and he excavated his values very, very carefully. And he had a really, what we thought was a really good list of them. And then he excavated his aptitudes, and he really knew his interests. He was kind of an unusual kid. He didn't want to go into banking or consulting. He wanted to make sure that his work was outside. He wanted to work with his hands. He was a special student because he had had a very unusual life. He had had a serious car accident before I had him as a student. He had fought back to get his health back. I had such a tender heart towards him, and the whole class loved him. He was a real leader. And he did all this hard work, and then he put together his entire analysis. And he announced to me in office hours, professor Welch, I am. I've decided that based on my values and based on my aptitudes and based on my interests, I am going to become an MLB scout. And it made sense. When you thought about what his values were. When you thought about every piece of data, it made so much sense. He was going to become an MLB scout. And look, a lot of people want to be an MLB scout, but he had a lot of ideas. I'm talking Major League Baseball, but he had some stuff. He had been a baseball player and so forth. And I thought, okay, fantastic. How are we going to start this process? And he said, well, it's a little complicated, I guess, because right after graduation, I'm going to go live in Albuquerque. I, like, started to search my mind. I mean, Albuquerque. Albuquerque's got a half a million people, which generally, you know, it puts it below the threshold for any major league franchise. Albuquerque doesn't have any major league teams. It doesn't have any NBA. MLB doesn't have anything NFL. What they do have is the Albuquerque Isotopes, which is a triple A minor league baseball team affiliated with the Colorado Rockies. And they're actually pretty beloved locally. And they have a great name. It's actually a reference to the Simpsons, but whatever. And so I said to him, like, wait, why wasn't the fact that you were going to spend your life in Albuquerque? Which he said, that was part of the agreement of his marriage, is that they would move back to where his wife was. And whatever he did, it was going to be an Albuquerque. Like, why am I finding this out after we've done the entire methodology, an entire semester of work? And he said, yeah, I should have mentioned that earlier. That's a gating value. Look, some people have a very low value of place. They can live anywhere. It's not that important to them. They love to travel. And in fact, not living in one place is something they want to do. But if you have a high value of place, and I have a high value of place, it's number five in my top five. I have to think about whether or not whatever I want to do, whatever the data tells me, I have to be able to do it in one single place. This place I've got to be. And for me, that happens to be the greatest city on earth. The city of New York. Okay, you may hate it, maybe you're a Red Sox fan and you already hate me right now, but I love New York. I'm not from New York, right. I'm from Portland, Oregon. I'm not from Portland, Oregon. I was born in Portland, Oregon. My family was living in Seattle at the time. That's a story for another time. And actually, my family lived all over the place. When I was growing up, I had actually no hometown. My parents moved around a lot because of my father's job. And when people say, where are you from? I would be like, well, I was born in Oregon, and then we lived in New Jersey. We lived in New York, we lived here, we lived there. And I had no sense of place. And then I was. When I went to boarding school. So, like, when I was in ninth grade, I was in New Hampshire. Then I went to college, and I was in Boston, and I had no sense of place. But I yearned for one. And then after I married my husband, Jack, we moved to New York City. I had always visited New York my whole life. I'd always loved it from afar. I think I feared it a little bit. I mean, a little bit. If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. And I always wonder if I could make it there. I loved New York. I didn't know if I was a New Yorker, but when we moved to New York in the early 2000s, I thought, oh, yeah, I was actually meant to be in this place and only this place. I remember thinking, I'm going to settle my bones here. I'm going to live and I'm going to die in New York City. This is my place. I can't live anywhere else. And even when I go to spectacular places like Paris, I still think, I can't wait to get back to New York. Can you believe it? London's like. I love London. I could imagine living in London, but I'd still come back to New York. And so I have had many opportunities in the past 25 years to take spectacular jobs, career opportunities in other cities, at other. In other places. I have been tempted, but I've always thought to myself, but it wouldn't be New York. And this is why place shows up as number five for me. And look, it doesn't have to be a city. It could be. I have to live near the ocean. I have to live in the suburbs. I have to live in Milwaukee. If you have a specific kind of place that drives everything else, it's really like a top of funnel value, isn't it? Unless it's a low value for you. And I have plenty of students for whom it's number 16 or 15. I have plenty of people who've taken the becoming you methodology. And it's like, yeah, I could go kind of anywhere. It just has to be near nature. All right? In that way, it's not a gating value. When I teach Becoming you, and I teach about the values and I teach place, I show a clip of Fran Leibowitz, who's New York's sort of greatest defender and citizen. And I show a little clip where somebody says to her, new York's got so many problems. Why do people still go to New York? Her face kind of changes. Like a dark cloud goes over her face. She's like a flower, offended. Offended that somebody would ask this question. And she cuts him off and she says, what do they come to New York for? What's not in New York? I show it to my class. And you can see the people who are New Yorkers, because they're like nodding and laughing. And the other people are like, I can't wait to get out of here. This is not about New York. It's about your place is your place. Actually, I'd say very, very interestingly, one of the most important life lessons I learned the importance of place to my son. Now my son, my oldest son also has place is probably, I think it's his fourth value and it's his wife's second value. Both have place. And that place is Maine. Now, why should I care? I care because of the grandchildren. And actually when they stuck to their guns after the pandemic and stayed in Maine and decided to make their lives in Maine, she is from Maine. My beloved daughter in law is from Maine. I wanted them desperately to come live closer to me. And I. Because I wanted to see my grandchildren, selfishly. And I was like, you've got to look at jobs in Boston. You've got to look in jobs in New York. And they were like, actually, it's Maine. Maine's the deciding factor. I mean, their top value is family, centrism, belovedness, Other values really matter to them. Around each other, but they agree on this Maine thing. And just like, I don't want anybody to come after me for my choice of living in New York, because, remember, values are choices. I cannot possibly turn around and pick on them about Maine. And so guess what? I go to Maine a lot. Nobody goes to Maine more from New York than me. And I've made my peace with it because they have a right to their choice, just like we all do. I'm really a values agnostic, but we both have a very high value of place. This place just happens to be six hours for me. But anyway, in relationship, this can get very complicated. If one person in the relationship has place as a top value and the other person has place as a low value, the other person with the low value of place is kind of like a digital nomad. And they don't want to settle their bones any place. They don't want to settle their bones in Albuquerque. This can be very troubling, though, for the person with the high place and feeling like they're keeping somebody kind of as a captive in their city. Talk about this value of place, obviously, in relationship, talk about all of your values. If you take the values bridge, there's a little box you can check, and your values will come up next to each other and it will identify if you have any conflicts. I'm not saying it can't be worked out. All values conflicts can be worked out with conversation if you're speaking the same language. So that is the value of place for me. Coming in at number five, an absolute top value. I remember my husband, who was a real Bostonian and would have preferred to live in Boston, but understood how high my value place was. And he liked Boston. He liked New York pretty well. As he said to me, just make me one promise, Susie. We'll live in New York, but do not become a Yankees fan. He was like true blue Red Sox fan. He was. The accommodation that we built with each other was. I was never allowed to say, and I never did say I was a Yankees fan. And I used to say here was my euphemism. I. I respect Derek Jeter. I'm a Yankees fan. Okay, let's go on to my next value.
- [19:33]
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Susie Welch
All right, my next value coming in at number four. You've heard me talk about it already today. It's scope. It's the desire for an exciting, exciting, stimulating life of growth, learning and kind of chaos. You'll take it if you have high scope. And at the other end of the continuum, people with low scope, no shade, it's fine. All of my kids, by the way, have low scope and I love them so much. My sisters have low scope, no shade, it's fine. It's a different choice. Low scope, you know where you're going to be every day next week. You have a schedule. You've got some kind of visibility in your life. You feel a great deal of psychological and maybe even physical safety. It feels better to you. And you are choosing a life that's scoped. Now some people with low scope want to have their scope sometimes and that's kind of moderate scope. And that means like two or three times a year you do some stuff that's really kind of highly stimulating and exciting. And I mentioned that, you know, sort of I always throw up this picture in class when I teach it of Bianca Jagger with this kind of like look on her face of just total loosh look. I love it so much if her going into Studio 54 on a stage on a like a white stallion and everybody dancing around her, that's like high scope. It's like, why not energy. It's like, I will do anything. Why not? I have a student one time for my open enrollment who had scope as her number one value. And I remember her describing what it felt like to have scope as your number one value. And she said, I want to touch everybody's brain. I thought, God, that's just so real. But you know what, scope, it doesn't really present that much in the population. We have so much data. Let me tell you, of the whole general population, only 26% of people have scope as a top five value. A quarter of people have it, 30% have it in their bottom five. A full third are people who would. Who do not want high scope at all. So it's. So I'm not in the majority here having scope up in my top five. The only person I've ever known, well, maybe I've known a few people, but my husband Jack definitely had higher scope than me. I used to call him an action junkie. I always remember this, just this night of with Jack that was just. This is the ultimate high scope story. He. We had had a really busy day. We lived, we were living in New York City, super busy day. We were at that point in our lives. We were. Had a weekly column in Business Week, which we were writing. And we had a TV show and I had my own TV show and my book had just come out. And our lives were really busy. We were raising the four children. So there was never ad moment and I was tired sometimes at night. And I remember getting into bed like 10, 30, 11, we were watching the news and I was thinking, oh God, I just can't wait to close my eyes and go to bed. What a day. And I had like a crazy day scheduled for the next day. I felt Jack looking at me and I looked over at him and he had this most mischievous look on his face and his eyes were kind of getting small. This story is not going where you think it's going, by the way. And he looked at me and he said to me, want to do a pub crawl? And I said, At 11 o' clock at night? He goes, yeah, today wasn't interesting enough, let's go do it. And I loved that man so much, I said, okay. You know, I look back, I could have said no, but I had a high scope too and I kind of loved his energy. I loved his why not energy. So we got a car. We did not go on a pub crawl in New York on our own devices. We got a car and we went from pub to pub. We probably went to four pubs. We'd walk in, Jack would befriend everybody. I mean, I was dragging, but whatever you kind of get the energy of it. We had a beer at each place and then we got home like at 3 in the morning. We did. That's high scope. Now my sister Ellen, fabulous person, interesting, brilliant person, but her life's orderly. It's orderly and she knows that she. This happens all the time. She'll call me and she'll say, what are you, you know, we're coming to New York for a gallery opening. She's a specialist in photography. We're coming to New York for a fantastic opening in two months. Where will you be on Thursday the 17th at 2 o'? Clock? And I said to her, ellen, I don't know where I'm going to be tomorrow at 2 o'. Clock. We have a good laugh about it. She has a life with visibility. It feels good to her. She chose it. She designed that life. Now look, the word design is important there because values are a choice. But sometimes we're forced into a high scope life and then we have low scope. Like we have a lower scope and we get a job that makes us travel and that's unpredictable and has lots of crises and, and you can feel like you're in a suit that is the wrong size. And similarly, if you have high scope and you are forced, for lack of a better word, into a life of low scope because you get sick or the person you love gets sick, or you get a kid who's going through a crisis with special needs who need you close to home, or you lose your job and you don't have the excitement that your job brought you again. You can feel like you're suffocating, like you're in a suit of the wrong size. I. Scope is a very hard value not to be living. So where is scope for you in relation to your other values? Is it high for you? Is this when I talk about like the pub crawl? Is that like, ooh, that sounds like me, or that sounds like the person I want to be? Is it moderate like I like my scope and doses, or are you a lower scope person? Every single choice is fine, but it's really, really important to know it is about you. Because when you are in your life and somebody's brushing up against you or something, a job doesn't feel right or a relation doesn't feel right. It could be about scope and you need the language of the word of scope to talk to somebody about it and say, hey, your high scope is bugging my low scope. And it doesn't have to be personal. It could be about this value on which you are different. And you know, other people who are different from you, they are not flawed versions of you. They are perfect versions of themselves. You just have to understand who they actually are. So that's scope. I'm actually going to tamp down my high scope this weekend because I've had actually too much scope lately. Just a lot of stimulation, a lot of excitement, a lot of travel. And so I'm going to sneak away to the countryside and I'm going to walk my dogs in the woods quite a lot this weekend because my scope needs a little break. And the management of your scope is a very important thing, I might add. So let us move on from there. We've done place number five, scope number four. Let's move on. All right, My number three value is one I mentioned earlier and it's achievement. It's a lightning rod value. Achievement. Look, when I was coming up and along, it was assumed that everyone had achievement as a high value. Okay? That you wanted to win, you wanted to feel successful, you wanted accomplishments. That's how people kept score. And it's only been in recent generations that that people have pushed back and said that's not my value. Not so fast. It's not about winning or losing. I don't want the outward validation of success. I want balance or I want something that's not achievement. Okay? And I mean this is a big conversation going on right now between older generations and Gen Z in the workplace. I have research on this. I wrote an article about it because I know for Gen Z what the top three values are. The top three values for Gen Z. The first one, number one is Eudaimonia. That's self care, self flourishing. That's a very low value for me. I talk a lot about it in the first episode of this series because it's my number 15 value. I'm a fun gal, aren't I? But that is the number one value for Gen Z. This sense of wanting to take care of themselves and their inner selves and their. I have no shade on it. I understand why they have it, but it just doesn't happen to be my top one of my top values. The second value, top value for Gen Z is voice. Authentic self expression. Just their individuality. I talk about voice also in the first episode because also another low value for me. And then the number three value for Gen Z is non sibi. That's the value of helping other people. It's wanting to have one on one helping of people. I know that's Gen Z's values and I Also know what goes on in the world of hiring because I serve on corporate boards and because I've been in business my whole life. And so we did a survey through my lab of hiring managers and we described all the values to them, 25,000 managers. And we said, what are the top three values you would like to hire Gen Z for? And they said, achievement number one, work centrism, number two. That's my number six value, by the way, work centrism. And number three, scope the one I just described, that desire for action and intention and stimulation. When you cross reference those two data sets, the top three values of Gen Z and the top three values that hiring managers are seeking in Gen Z, what you find out is that only 2% of Gen Z has those values. And I wrote an article about this for the Wall street journal in 2025 and the wall Street Journal put the headline on it. Is Gen Z Unemployable? I did not come up with that headline, but man, I lived the repercussions of it because it kind of set people's heads on fire. But they're asking, look, it's a legitimate headline which is, if only 2% of Gen Z has the values that hiring managers are looking for, what does that mean for their future? Okay, I mention this because we're talking about this value of achievement. People in older generations have it as a much higher value. They're perplexed by people who don't want achievement. But there are whole generations now who say achievement is a losing game. If you try to get success, it used to be okay, you went and you tried to achieve. If you did certain things, you were guaranteed you were going to be able to get promoted, move up the ladder, buy a house, have some luxuries. But is that game rigged? Now you can try to achieve and you can work and you can work and it doesn't. And there's nothing guaranteed. So why play that game? Why postpone joy? Why put off your flourishing? Why put off self care? Nobody knows if achievement gets you anything and they've opted out of achievement as a top value. And in fact, let's look at the data on achievement. So for the general population, only 31% of Americans have it as a core. Okay, I'm in that 31%, 21% of Americans have it as a peripheral, okay? And everybody else has achievement somewhere in the middle. So I have it up here as a, as a core value. My whole life I've been comfortable with competition. I like the feeling of outside validation. I don't know. A therapist would have to explain it to you. But we don't think about or talk about how people came to their values as part of the Becoming youg methodology. I'm not a psychiatrist. I'm not a psychologist. When people say to me, professor Welch, do you think I have low achievement because of X, Y and Z? I say, take it up with your therapist. Becoming you as a methodology takes you exactly as you are. If you're not hurting anybody, your values are your values. You should live them as much as you want to live them. And we say, okay, given your values, what's the right job? What's the right life for you? So for me, achievement has played out as a very important value. One of the very important things I had to learn in my life was that my children did not share my value of achievement up at the tippy top. Now they don't have it down at the bottom, but they definitely have a lower value of achievement than I do. And I couldn't make them into me. And it was a great, important lesson to learn that they had a right to have their own lives just like I did. They were gonna have to live with the consequences of not having high achievement. Because when you don't have a high achievement value, sometimes you have less stuff. And they've made their peace with that, and I've made my peace with their peace. That's the way it should be. There's nothing wrong with that. Because I have high achievement, it meant a lot of things. Because I have high achievement. It meant when my kids were growing up, I still kept working. I didn't want to organize my life completely around my kids, my family, centrism. And I love them, and I told them how much I love them. But I did not stop working because of my value of achievement. So I think the thing about achievement is people sometimes feel very judged when they have achievement as a low value. They feel like their parents are looking at them or society's looking at them, or their classmates are looking at them like there's something wrong with them. And in fact, the argument that people that who have high achievement and lower achievement have with each other is you're obsessed with work, you're obsessed with winning. And then the other people look at them and say, you're just lazy. That's the bad stuff that happens, instead of saying, look, you have a higher value of achievement and you'll take the consequences. You have a lower value of achievement, you'll live with the consequences. And there are consequences. And if they're your values. You make peace with them. And so I know this is a lightning rod. I know that my kids have looked at me and they've wondered about this hunger for achievement that I have. They. They understand it's a piece of me. Just like I understand that their desire for more family centrism and more eudaimonia is a part of them. And this is why we have this tool called the Values Bridge, so that we can cross the bridge, meet each other in the middle, and have the conversations we need to have so that we can all speak the same language. All right, let's move on to the next value. All right, my second value. Okay, we have only one more to go after this. My second value is the value of radius. Radius is your. It reflects your desire to change the world in a systemic way. Like the way I like to talk about. Radius is it's the value that if your life was a bomb and it was dropped on the Earth, how big a crater would it leave? How big a crater would it leave? That's radius. It's not about helping people one on one, although you can also have that value. That value is non sibi. But radius people often don't have non sibi. They're not about helping people one on one. They're about changing the world in systemic, systematic ways. Let's look at the Data Core for 27% of Americans. Almost 30% of Americans have this as a driving motivation. But that means 70% do not. And in fact, down in the bottom five, 36%. Here's an interesting thing about radius. Remember I said earlier that the values bridge measures how much you have of a value and how much you're living it. And that different difference between those two we call the authenticity gap, radius. Generally, people who have it as a high value have a huge authenticity gap. Why? Because it's so freaking hard to change the world. Almost nobody feels like they're changing the world as much as they want to. So it's very natural to say, yeah, I really want to change the world. I'm not doing it at all. I'm going to guess Malala has radius as her number one value. I bet. Only she's the only one who's. I mean, but even she probably has a gap. But I mean, she has changed the world. It's really hard to feel like you're changing the world. Maybe Bono, I'm going to guess he's another one with high radius. Maybe he's got a small authenticity gap on it because he spends all day trying to do it. And he's had some success. So why is this a high radius for me? I am 100% sure I know the reason. I'm very specific. I have two things that I care desperately about. And the first started when I was a little girl, and it's about animals. I've had this desperate love and desire to protect animals from. When I was a little girl, my family was a family of avid fishermen. And every weekend we'd go out on that darn boat and they'd catch fish after fish after fish. And I'd stand on the front of the boat, no lie, sobbing, saying, throw that fish back. It has a family. I drove them all out of their everlasting minds. It was just terror. And then when we went home, like the rest of the family, it was my job to gut the fish and I would cry and it was terrible. I think there may be a gene for it. This pretty preternatural love and over identification with animals. I had a neighbor, let's call him Mr. Smith, used to trap rabbits at night. I don't know why, I don't want to know why. And I used to go set them free. Okay. Anyway, this is translated to me doing things like being on the board of the main world for animals and so forth. And so my radius is driven towards improving the life of animals in every way. And I have a gigantic authenticity gap on it because it's a slow. It's a slow movement. A lot of people don't love animals as much as I do. It'd be hard. And I get it. I get it. I really do. The only thing I don't get is when people don't like dogs. That one still perplexes me. But I get that people don't have this kind of passion for animals. I have one other massive component to my radius, which is this thing that I'm doing right now, which is this desire to help people find their purpose. This was something that I've been working towards my whole life. I love what I do. My. My purpose is to help other people find their purpose. I'm on fire for it. This is sort of how it rolls for people with high radius. And you can have your own causes, your own passions. They can be totally different. My sister, one of my. A different sister here has lower radius. One time I was talking to her about it and she said, my radius is my family, Susie. And if I make each one of their lives better, my work is done. Here's what I have to say to that Legit. Totally cool. Fine. I love her. I revere her. Great mom, great grandmother. I don't care if you have high or low radius, it's your choice. But radius people can get really snooty about low radius people. Okay? I've seen people in my own animal movement think, well, they're not, you know, they're not in the movement and I don't want to be friends with them. We can't do that to each other. Again, values are choices. How much you seek to live your life changing the world is up to you. There's consequences. You don't, you know, sometimes people don't like you for it. Sometimes it takes you away from your family. Sometimes it creates really hard conversations. And having lower radius, also a choice, it has consequences as well. Maybe sometimes you think, did I do enough? You know, but the main thing is to be at peace with your values. If you're not hurting anybody, it's fine. So that's my second value. It's radius. Do me a solid and pet a dog today. All right, let's move on to my number one top value. And we will be done with the language of values.
- [38:37]
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- [39:32]
Nicole Phelps
Hi, I'm Nicole Phelps, Global fashion news and features director at Vogue and co host of the run through podcast. Each week on the show, our listeners get an all access pass into the world of Vogue. On Tuesdays, join me as I interview influential designers like Calvin Klein, Rachel Scott and Simone Bellotti. On Thursdays, join Chloe Mel, head of editorial content at Vogue US And Choma Nadi, British Vogue's head of editorial content as they explore fashion through the lens of culture. With guests like Doja Cat and Margot Robbie. Listen and watch the run through with Vogue wherever you get your podcasts and Vogue's YouTube channel.
- [40:11]
Susie Welch
All right, it's been a journey and we are now to my number one top value. And it's probably not your value. It's not a top five value for 75% of people. And it is the value of Cosmos. That is the value of how much you organize your life around a faith system, around your faith, your religion. I happen to be a faithful person. I'm a Christian. And Cosmos reflects the fact that when I make decisions and take actions, the screen in my mind is how it aligns with my faith principles. Only 26% of Americans have Cosmos as a top five value. 54% of Americans, more than half, have it as a bottom, bottom five value. It's kind of a barbell in that way. But the majority, not the vast majority, but the majority of Americans and the majority of my friends and people that I know and love and hang out with and I'm related to have it as a peripheral value. That is the way it is in America today. And again, it's a choice. It has to be a choice, this one. So we've had podcasts about how I came to my faith. I do not come from a faithful family. My mom was culturally Catholic and my dad was culturally Jewish, and they got married. And not very many people were happy about it when that happened. And they both kind of just dropped out of practicing in any faith tradition. But I was aware of both faith traditions growing up. I did get exposed to Catholicism at church through my grandmother. And then I had to go to church when I went away to boarding school because it had a required chapel. And I found my people and I found something that meant a lot to me and is a gigantic guide in my life. It. If I'd had the values bridge when I was 15 years old, it would have been my number one value. It's been unchanged my entire life. I have no authenticity gap on it. I live it fully. But, you know, I live in New York City in 2026, and I don't have to be, but I desire to be super sensitive and respectful of everybody's feelings around faith. It's a controversial topic for many people. It's a lightning rod. There are people who have been hurt by other, by, by faith. They've grown up in families where faith was used as a reason to, to say harsh and horrible things. I. I don't ever expect people to be where I am with it. I have dear, dear friends who share it, and we. We talk to each other about it, but I don't impose it. I hope I don't impose it on others. But I. When I meet another faithful person, I understand what it means in their life. I also understand what it means, like to have this as a peripheral value. And again, this is a choice. But I have to tell you the craziest story about my value of Cosmos. When I was making the Welch Bristol Values Inventory, the way I did it was I deeply studied every values inventory that exists in the academic literature. There's two really big ones. One, Alport Strang, which was developed in the 1940s by two professors at Harvard. It has 15 values. They revised it many times. It started with 14 values. It went to 19 values, but let's just say they had 14 or 15 values. And then I very closely studied the gold standard of values inventory, which is called the Schwarz Values Inventory, developed by the professor Shalom Schwartz in Israel. And he also has had a changing number of values because, again, as academics, you often revise your thinking. And I studied closely his. But I studied every values inventory that existed. I did this to study, to start as the foundation of my values inventory, the Welch Bristol Values Inventory. And I also drew on 20,000 data points of clinical research that I had in the field, basically studying people's values. And then I made the sort of first list of the val. What was going to be my values inventory. And some of the values were the same as others value inventories. And this was a whole process. This is what my PhD was on. And when I came up with the first list, guess what was not on it? Cosmos. Not on it. Okay. Why? Why was. Because I was afraid that it was very political. I don't know. I had all these stories in my head. I did not want to create a values inventory that was going to be, like, dismissed because it was politicized or whatever. I don't know what was in my head. It was a process, let's just put it that way. But very early on, of course, like as a social scientist, I had to start testing the values inventory. And so I had all these focus groups where we would test the values and we'd ask people about them and we'd put them through an early version of the values bridge. In every single focus group, somebody would raise their hand, or two people would raise their hand and they would say, I'm sorry, if you have faith as a primary value, where are the questions for those? And I'd be like, well, if you're faithful, it will sort of affect all your other values. I'd have some kind of BS line, and people would say, I don't think so. One time, I had all of my former students over to my house in my backyard. I plied them with pizza, and I did the values bridge early beta test with them, and Cosmos still was not on the list. And I had a student, Heather, a very, very faithful Jewish person. I could see she was troubled as she was taking the values bridge. And she was like, professor Welch. And I was like, I knew where she was going to say what she was going to say. Professor Welch. And I was like, can't hear you, Heather. And finally she came right up to my face and she said, where's faith? My number one value is my faith. Where is it in this test? And I started my BS line with her. Well, you know, wouldn't your faith affect all your other values? And she was just firmly shaking her head at me. And I thought, that's it. I'm just. I'm just. I've got a problem, and I've got to think about my own bias in this. After that, we added Cosmos to the values inventory and started to test it, and lo and behold, it popped as a value for 26% of Americans. Of course, it had to be a value that's not an insignificant number that 26% of the people have it as a top core value. And I thought, well, you know, I'm only human. I mean, I also. I talked earlier in other podcasts about when I first made the values inventory. I did not include the value for romantic love. I had love of family, I had love of friends, and I completely left out romantic love. I was making this inventory literally in the months after my husband died, and it was like I had a blind spot for it. And luckily, very smart people who I was working with said, susie, there's another kind of love. And we had to put belovedness in and test for it and so forth. And it was, of course, an oversight. And I had this other oversight on Cosmos. I think it's ironic, but not ironic that I'm a human being. And so where. Let me just end it this way by saying, where's Cosmos for you? As I'm speaking, you know, if it's number 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5, you know where it is for you. You know, we. We grow up. But that having been said, I know that there's some portion of you, probably not a lot, that are on a journey with faith. You're curious about it. Sometimes you think about it, you want to know more about it. And that's legit. And the way that would show up is with the cosmos as a value where maybe you would have an authenticity gap. I one time had a student who had cosmos as number one and 100% authenticity gap. I mean, she said, I was brought up in a very religious home. I'm not living it at all. Something's going on and the numbers will tell you that. So where, where are you with all your values? It's such an important question because it doesn't like it affects us on Tuesdays and Saturdays and on holidays it every single day, every single day we use words. Every single day we need to explain ourselves, which is every day, every single day that we have to understand other people. We need the language of values so that we can understand ourselves, have compassionate self awareness for ourselves and understand all the people that we that we touch and live with and play with and work with it. Just if we can speak this same language, we will not let our frustration turn to anger. In fact, our frustration will go away and we will have insight. As I said, turn to understanding. And I hope that this series has helped you do that. I love talking about values. We have lots of podcasts of Becoming youg are about values. We talk about other stuff but values are so core to what we do, so central to what we do. And you know what, they're really central to your life. So I have loved spending this time with you. Thank you for listening to this podcast and maybe this whole series keep becoming you, keep coming back to the podcast. We love having you. If you have enjoyed this podcast, please leave a review. If you've not enjoyed it, don't leave a review. Okay, how about that? But if you've enjoyed it, please leave a review. You can follow me at Susie Welch on Instagram and if you have any questions at all that you'd love me to address on the podcast, reach out@hellouziewelch.com see you next time.