← Becoming You with Suzy Welch
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- [00:00]
Narrator/Announcer
Nerds.
- [00:01]
Lloyd Lockridge
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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Susie Welch
and repeat after me Bonjour un peu dejeuner. Bonjour un peu dejeuner. Vous avez table. Vous avait une table. I learned purportedly French in high school. That's as good as it gets now. It's come in really handy in my life every time I have to read a French French menu. So basically never. I am stuck just knowing English. But I happen to know the 16 most important words in English that you can possibly know. I'm going to teach you the language of values. Sixteen words that can, I promise and will unlock your understanding of yourself and the people you love or don't love. And along with that, help you figure out why you're so happy or not so happy. And and on top of all of that, what you can and should be doing with your life. Or not. Yes, just 16 words. Can you believe it? Maybe not this early in the podcast, but I can believe it because I have seen it happen thousands upon thousands of times. No exaggeration. And let's get started on it happening again right here and right now. I'm Susie Welch and this is becoming youg Bonjour. Okay, no delays here. As I said, let's jump in. But I lied. Sorry about that. We can't really jump in until we clear up a really fundamental thing. Like what? Even our values. I'm going to talk about values a lot in the next three podcasts, so I want to clear up what they are. I asked what our values don't Even try to answer. I was on a podcast not long ago, and I started talking about values. And the host, who is brilliant, said to me, why do I need to take a test, Susie Welch, to find out my values? I know my values. And I said, really smart person. What are they? And he said, that's so easy. My values are honesty, respect, and fairness. And I didn't scream. I kind of wanted to. I wanted to scream, no, no, no. But instead, I said very nicely, you know what? Those are not values. Those are virtual virtues. Everyone wants those things. Virtues are social constructs that everyone shares. Everyone believes they're good. That's why societies and cultures hold together when they hold together, because there are shared virtues, values which we're going to talk about today. Our choices. Choices about what we want, what we desire. There are motivations in work, in love, and in play. And as I said, there are 16 of them. And each one exists along a continuum from high to low. We all have some amount of each value, every one of us. It's like DNA. And that amount is not right or wrong. It's just right or wrong for us. But let's just get back for a moment to that very nice podcast host who mixed up values and virtues. It's incredibly common. I cannot blame him. When are we ever taught what values are? Our parents teach us virtues, or most do, right? And sometimes we learn virtues from mentors or in a religious tradition. But school then does not jump in and start talking to us about values. They don't. It teaches us about parallelograms. It teaches us about the kings of Mesopotamia. So you're not learning them in school, then let us pour gasoline on this dumpster fire of omission. Because around 20 years ago, the term values became really politicized. Family values ring a bell? Progressive values, right? Et cetera, et cetera. And people just generally stopped using the word values unless they were in a safe place with other people who they thought shared their values, okay? And the word values and talking about it openly became a toxic exercise. Now, this was a very upsetting development for values scholars like me. And, yes, guess what? There are value scholars. There are actually two types of value scholars. To get very precise about it, there's a whole group called Values Formation Scholars who think about and study and do studies on why people and how people come by their values, okay? Is it childhood trauma? Is it cultural tradition? Is it genetics? I mean, the Values Formation Scholars are looking at all the different elements that can form our values as adults, okay? The second group is called Values Expression Scholarship, of which I am one. And we think about what people's values mean for their lives and careers and relationships. And I'm actually in a sub field of that because my exact field is what our values mean for our ability to find and live our purpose, how our values do or don't drive our purpose. I mean, that is what I actually do for a living, day in and day out. Aren't I lucky? I actually have a PhD in this area. My doctoral work at the University of Bristol in England produced what's now called the Welch Bristol Values Inventory, and it's the scientific foundation for everything I'm going to share with you in this series. And I teach this work lovingly and happily at NYU Stern School of Business, and I've brought it to companies and many, many schools and nonprofit organizations, even hospitals. Right? So when I say I have seen the language of value change people's lives, I am not being dramatic at all. I've actually seen it tens of thousands of times. Now. I do this work mainly by teaching a methodology called Becoming youg, which excavates three data sets, and it says your purpose. It lives at the intersection of those three data sets, and those three data sets are your aptitudes. Your aptitudes are what you're good at cognitively and emotionally. You know, what is your hard wiring about what you're intellectually strong at, what are your emotional strengths, which is really just sort of a fancy way of saying what's the best parts of your personality. It also excavates another data set which is economically viable interests. That's the whole big world of work that calls you emotionally and intellectually, but also will pay you the amount of money you're motivated to earn. Okay, so those are the first two data sets, and the third data set are your values. Now, there's just one hitch with the becoming you methodology, which is that for it to work, you have to know your values. You have to. You have to know them really, really well. Like, with gritty specificity, you cannot be generic about your values. All right? That's for the methodology to work, which it does. And over teaching Becoming you for many years, I have found that to be a real challenge for a lot of people, which I really get, because it can be very hard to access that information. Why, number one, we don't even know what values are, as I've already made the point, I hope. But it's also really hard to access our values in the big mess of our hearts and our minds. And Our souls, We're just human beings. We're messy mess balls, all right? And also at the same time, a lot of people are telling what our values should be without even knowing it. Like our parents and our bosses and our spouses and everybody's telling us what our values should be and it gets to be really complicated. So a few years ago I invented an assessment which you can actually go and take. It will do the work for you. It's called the Values Bridge. You can find a link to it in the show notes and. Or you can just keep listening to this podcast and the next two podcasts in this series because I'm going to explain each one of the 16 values in the Welsh Bristol Values Inventory one by one. And by the end, I promise you, I'll give you my word, you're going to be absolutely fluent in the language of values, which may not allow you to read a menu anywhere, but it will allow you to write the entire book of your life. And I think that is trading up, don't you? I like that. I'm going to tell you how we're going to do this. I am going to tell you my values, my very own personal values. And I have to say, I talk about values constantly. I have written about them, I've taught them, I've written a book about them, but I've never actually talked about my own values in order. I mean, occasionally I'll mention, this is a top value for me, this is a bottom value for me. Not once, because right now I'm actually going to list them straight up. In the Becoming youg methodology, we rank values from 1 to 16, number one being your most important value. The thing that matters most to you, drives you the most in your decisions and actions. And number 16 being your least important value, which matters the least. It may matter to you, but not as much as number ones 2, 3 and 4. I'm going to start at the bottom and work my beginning today with my five lowest values. And for a little spoiler alert, I'm gonna let you in on a secret, that my bottom values are really unusual, statistically speaking, compared to the 150,000 plus people who have taken the Values bridge. Next week we'll talk about my middle six values, my moderate values. And in the final week of this series, coming up, we'll talk about my top five values, the wants and needs and motivations that really drive me to do what I do, including things like having lots of dogs and happily making this podcast. I know that this sounds like a lot about me, me, me. But really, what's ahead is just a way for me to explain each value and describe what it means and what it looks and feels like, honestly, for this to be very much about you, you, you. So listen along. Before you know it, you're going to be speaking the language of values like a native. In French, I'm going to say, en y va. It means, let's get going. Without further ado, let's start with my absolute bottom value, my number 16 value. I hate to start on this very tragic note. Number 16, belovedness. This is the value that reflects how much you want to organize your life around one special partnered relationship, a romantic relationship. It could be your boyfriend, girlfriend. It could be your domestic partner. It could be your husband or wife. In the Welch Bristol Values Inventory, there are three different values that capture the three different types of love. Belovedness is romantic love. There's a value we'll talk about later called belonging, which is the love of friends and community. And then there's a value called family centrism, which is the value of family. Family loving your family like your kids and your immediate family. But fun fact, when I first created the Welsh Bristol Values Inventory, belovedness was not on it. There were only 15 values. I thought I captured everything with family centrism and belonging. And then when the results started coming in and about 15,000 people had taken the test, there was some confusion around family centrism because it turns out that you can have different feelings about your family and your romantic partner. Let me talk to you about how I teach belovedness. I know it's a lot of content. Look, I want to tell you, if you have high belovedness, here's kind of a statement that you might. You might make. Having a true partner, a romantic partner isn't just important to me. It's the foundation of everything that my life is built on, okay? That it's a. It's the foundation that the house of your life is built on. That's when you have super high belovedness. And look, people with low belovedness like me, it doesn't mean that we don't want a relationship. It's just not how we organize our lives. Or actually, frankly, it can mean you don't want to be in a relationship or you're in one, and it's just not the organizing principle of your life. Let's talk about numbers. Belovedness is a top value for 44% of Americans. Okay? Not. That's not a majority, by the way. 44% want their lives to be Organized the screen of every decision they make to be their romantic partner relationship. 35% of the population says, okay, this is somewhere in the middle. For me, it's a priority, but it's not my top or bottom priority. But for me, belovedness is my dead Last value. Number 16. Nothing in my life, nothing is organized around a romantic partner. Guess what? I'm not alone. 21% of Americans have belovedness in their peripheral. If we dig deeper into this data, it's more women in this than men. Men are actually seven times more likely to have belovedness as a top value. We could talk about that for a long time, but not today. I look very closely when I'm working with couples at where belovedness shows up in a coupled relationship. So, you know, if you both have it high, great. If you both have it low grade, both have it in the middle, great. Where the pain starts or trouble could begin is when one person has it high and the other person has it low. People often ask, do your values change in your life? And they do when there's a seismic event. I think in general, your values are set by your mid-20s, and what changes is your expression of them? But your values can be reorganized by a seismic event. And if you're a longtime listener of this podcast, you know what I'm about to say. And if you're new, I'm about to say something sad. Look, belovedness used to be a higher value for me. I'm not gonna say that belovedness was ever my number one, number two value. We'll get to those eventually. It was pretty high for me, though. It was probably in my top five or six. And then in 2020, my husband died and belovedness just dropped to dead last. I organized my life around a lot of other things now, and I'm not sad about belovedness being dead last. Belovedness being dead last has opened up my ability to do a lot of things that bring me joy. But belovedness, you know, when Jack died, our love, our marriage had been an organizing principle. And in fact, Jack and I both had had unsuccessful marriages before we found each other. He had had two divorces, I had one divorce. And we looked at each other and we said, this one's going to work. And we really believed in this theory that the marriage should come first, that he didn't come first and I didn't come first, but the marriage came first. And we made a lot of decisions based on how will this affect the marriage. We actually thought for a while about picking up our whole family, my kids and moving ourselves down to four Florida at one point. Because at the time we were raising our kids in New York City. That's quite a challenging thing to do. And then we asked, okay, this might be great for the kids, but how does it affect the marriage? And we both thought, well, our marriage really thrives in New York City, and our marriage is important. So we, we made decisions through the screen of our belovedness, our marriage. And that is what the belovedness value does, is when you have to make a decision or you're gonna decide on a job or you're gonna decide on what you're gonna do one afternoon or what you're doing on the weekend that the scre. If you have high belovedness is how does it affect my relationship? How does it impact my partnered, loving relationship? That's when belovedness is high. But for me, I make every decision and every action. What I decide what I'm going to do on the weekends. Like this weekend, I'm going to Maine to see my grandchildren. You know, there's like, I have a couple of other screens. I have very high, as we'll soon find out, very high work, centrism and achievement. I think, how's this going to affect my work? I think, how's it going to affect my dogs? Because. But I don't ever think about a relationship. I'm not in that place in my life, and my values show for it. I guess my question for you is, hearing this is like, when you are making your decisions and you are deciding about the shape of your life, the feel of your life, where does your belovedness fall in that? It may be very high, even though you're not in a relationship because you're trying to find one. No shade. A beautiful coupled relationship is a fantastic gift. My marriage with Jack was, I mean, the great joy of my life. And so it's worth fighting for that. If you believe in love, don't feel awkward or anything negative. If belovedness is a high value to you, but you're not in a relationship, you're yearning for one, it's okay. I think there's a real narrative in society about, especially for young women, girl boss narrative. Like, my job comes first. And a lot of women have sacrificed, put off looking for a partner because of the girl boss narrative. And then they're 35 and they're like, oops, forgot to get married. Because I was listening to a cultural narrative that I don't entirely buy into. I know I just said something. Please go ahead at me. I'd love to Talk to you about it. I get it. It's a hard message to hear. But I have students who catch me in the stairwell, and they have just gotten back their values bridge results, and they've discovered that belovedness is number one. And they're completely single. And they're like, I. Oops. They're. This is. This is like looking in a mirror. I'm very. I'm in a lot of pain, Professor Welch. And then we have office hours and we both cry. So belovedness, very important value, super important value, to be honest with yourself about. Now, look, the values bridge assessment, it does something. Not only does it rank order your values, but it tells you how value by value, how much you're living it. So you will find out what number your belovedness is, but also you're going to get a number call called an authentic gap, like if you have a desire, strong desire to be married. And so belovedness becomes your number one value, and you're unbelievably unmarried and can't find anybody. Your authenticity gap may be as high as 100%. For me on belovedness, since we're talking about me for a bit here, my gap is zero. It's zero because belovedness is my last value, and I may never meet somebody again, and I'm in total peace with it. If I meet somebody again, they're going to have to love dogs, I'll tell you that. But I would also say they're going to have to love my work and all the other things that I have as top values. I don't think it's likely. And again, I've made total peace with it. So my authenticity gap is zero. So it's very important. Think about two things here on belovedness. Belovedness, where is it for you? You can take the test and find out, or you can just guess. And that's fine, that's legit. But also, how much are you living this value? Because not living any value can cause you a lot of heartache, but not living belovedness can really make you sad. Anyway, I'm so glad we started on this very happy value. But it's hugely important, and it. And belovedness is a value, is a huge part of the cultural conversation. Let us move on to my second lowest value. Again, very countercultural on this one. For me, on the list of 1 to 16, number 15, it's eudaimonia. Eudaimonia is the Greek word for flourishing. Eudaimonia reflects how much you don't want to postpone joy, how much your personal Pleasure, your fun, your happiness is guiding your decisions and actions. You know, people with very high eudaimonia, they. They believe life is meant to be enjoyed in the present. They do not want to postpone personal satisfaction. Personal pleasure can be everything from going to a rave to needle pointing. Okay. You know, it can be everything from like, sex to woodworking. Okay. In your garage. I mean, eudaimonia is how you define personal pleasure. Joy, recreation, kind of the sweetness of life. You know, when I was in Italy not too long ago, and I was walking down the street and there were just a lot of people out at cafes and they were. They were sort of passing the afternoon like, you know, drinking like coffee and chit chatting with people who they loved. And I thought, God, this is just a eudaimonia culture that people just take in the sweetness. And eudaimonia is a really prevalent value in the United states right now. 62% of Americans have eudaimonia. Okay? This joy, pleasure, personal flourishing value. 62% have it in their top five. Yep. I have it down at number 15. I'm not alone, though. I'm not alone. There's 7% of us. 7% of us. I mean, and there's 31% who have it as a moderate value. Does it surprise you that I have really high values around achievement and work centers? I mean, that's what's displacing eudaimonia. And look, let me be clear. It's not like I don't like fun, although I have been accused of that. It's not like I don't like personal pleasure, although I've been accused of it. It's like, it's just that I really value other things more. And I don't begrudge anyone who has this as a top value. I'd have no friends or co workers if I held eudaimonia against anybody. Everyone has a right to their values if they're not hurting anyone. Maybe you're in a family and there's a member of this family who all this person thinks about is his or her own personal pleasure, and it's hurting other people. Okay? That's an example of eudaimonia being harmful. Usually it's not that way, but in general, my personal pleasure in flourishing, just not priorities. Because guess what? I'm building something. I'm building Becoming youg Labs. This is a group of 20 of us that, that create assessments and tools. We make this podcast, we do research, we put out white papers, we hold conventions. I love it. It gives me A lot of joy. It's work though. It's not, you know, I am working. And a lot of times, guess what? It's not fun. I'm not recreating, let's put it that way. But when my team goes home on Fridays, I say to them, have some eudaimonia with great love and affection. Alright, so for me, this is a low value. I don't think there's ever been a time in my life where I've had high eudaimonia. It's probably the reason I got my first divorce. My first husband and I were incredibly dear friends today I love him and his partner very, very much and life does go on. By the way, anybody who's listening to this, who by the way is going through something acrimonious right now, it can get better and it really does. But I will say he had high eudaimonia and he still does. And I had very low eudaimonia. And sometimes I secretly, although not so secretly anymore, refer to this as the divorce value because it can really break up a relationship when one person prioritizes well being and fun and pleasure and recreation and the other person has incredibly high work centrism or achievement, which are values that we'll get to in podcasts that are coming. Your eudaimonia affects everyone around you, but it really affects you and it can affect your career. I mean, every value has trade offs. I mean, it is not uncommon for somebody to get their values bridge results back. And let's just talk about my students. They get their values bridge results back and then they have class the next day and they come in and they're all kind of, you know, pondering and making sense of their results. And at the break, oftentimes there'll be a little line of students who want a kind of personal tarot card reading of their, of their values results. A lot of times those students are saying, professor Welch, I have eudaimonia as my number one value, but I have affluence as my number two value. Is that a problem? And I sit there and I pause and I say, do you promise not to kill the messenger? Do you promise not to hate me? Do you promise not to cancel me? Because guess what? I have to be truthful with them. They trust me to be truthful with them. And if your well being and pleasure and recreation and personal flourishing and joy is your number one value and you want to prioritize that, unless you're unspeakably talented, that does not necessarily harmonize with making A shit ton of money. I'm sorry to be blunt like that, but it's the truth. I mean, I can't change it. If there was a way, probably we would change it. Usually it doesn't work that way. So you, when you look at your eudaimonia value, you got to think, what is it? What's it to harmonize with? And what is it in conflict with? The values Bridge test will tell you that. Exactly. And maybe as I go over this language, you'll begin to hear and you'll be able to infer and understand where the conflicts are. But let's just say you're hearing this and you're thinking, you know what, the way she's describing Eudaimonia, that's my top value. My well being, my pleasure, my happiness in the moment. Yeah. That is how I make my decisions. That's how I've thought about my career. That's about how I've thought about who I want to be friends with. That's how I've thought about how I organize my days. That's me. That's my number one value. Again, you're in the majority. And so what I would ask you to say is like a number one. What's your authenticity gap? How much are you living it? Why aren't you? Is my question. If you're not, why aren't you? What could you do to change that? Is it because you don't want to hurt somebody you're close to, that you don't value eudaimon anymore? Or do you feel guilt over expressing your eudaimonia? The thing about it is, once we have a language to talk about it, it's easier to say to somebody or to say to yourself, you know, all these decisions I've recently made, they've had these consequences and these outcomes, but they've definitely been counter to my number one value, which is eudaimonia. Maybe that's why they hurt so much. I want to make last one last point about eudaimonia before we move on to my bottom third value. You know, just like human beings, companies and cities and entire cultures have a value of Eudaimonia. Like I mentioned Italy, right when I was there, I was like, this is a really eudaimonic culture. I often think back to when I was working at Bain, the big consulting firm after I got out of business school. When I was there, they said, hey, you know, there's no consulting firms really in with offices in New Orleans. We should open an office in New Orleans. Why isn't anybody. You know, why don't any of our competitors have offices in New Orleans? It's a. It's a big industrial city, and there must be so much opportunity there. And they sent a team to open an office in New Orleans, and they found out really, really quickly that New Orleans is a city with extremely high eudaimonia. If you've ever visited, you'd know that within five minutes of arriving. I mean, New Orleans is a city where you can actually walk down the street. It's legal to walk down the street carrying a can of beer. I mean, almost no city has an open carry thing where you can drink beer or like, swee vodka. Walking down the street in New Orleans, you can do it. It's a party town. Colleges have a. Have a level of Eudaimonia. I mean, like MIT's eudaimonia is quite low compared to, say, oh, Mrs. Eudaimonia. I'm just broadly speaking, right? I mean, obviously there's variation at all of these schools, you know, so cities can have it, colleges can have it, but so can companies. Some companies really have a culture of fun sometimes. That's because the founder is fine. Don't you feel sorry for the people who work for me at becoming you labs with my low eudaimonia? But here's the thing. I really want my team to have fun. And we do have fun. Okay, I think we do. I think work is fun. So that's my problem. But I think that, you know, you may ask yourself, am I a high eudaimonia person at a very low eudaimonia company? Am I a high eudaimonia person in a low eudaimonia city? So that's Eudaimonia. When I teach values, there's a couple of values that people spend a lot more time thinking about. We just talked about one with belovedness, and Eudaimonia is another. Let us move on to the next value, because it is also one that really raises a lot of noise in people's hearts and minds.
- [26:52]
Advertiser/Commercial Voice
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- [27:21]
Lloyd Lockridge
Hi, my name is Lloyd Lockridge, and I'm the host of a new podcast from Odyssey called Family Lore. In this podcast, I'm going to have people on to tell unusual and sometimes far fetched stories about their families.
- [27:32]
Susie Welch
I've heard my whole life that she invented the margarita.
- [27:35]
Lloyd Lockridge
And then we're going to investigate those stories and find out how much of it is true.
- [27:39]
Narrator/Announcer
He gets a patent one month before the Wright brothers.
- [27:42]
Lloyd Lockridge
Oh my God. Please follow and listen to family lore an Odyssey podcast available now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you get your shows.
- [27:51]
Narrator/Announcer
Focus features in Blumhouse present Obsession.
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Advertiser/Commercial Voice
When I have a crush on a
- [27:56]
Narrator/Announcer
guy no one knows, Be careful. I wish. Nikki, love me more than anyone in the entire world. Who you wish for. Obsession is 96% fresh on rotten tomatoes.
- [28:07]
Susie Welch
I love you so, so, so, so much.
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Narrator/Announcer
It's blood soaked nightmare fuel. Brooke, I spilled your foot on her. You have been warned. Obsession. Rated R under 17. Animated without parent. Only in theaters May 15 with special engagements in Dolby.
- [28:22]
Susie Welch
All right, here we are at my number 14 is voice. Voice is the value that reflects your desire to express, express your authentic self, mind, body and soul, your individuality to the world. Okay, this is about sort of showing your inner life on the outside. People who have high voice, they yearn for like, creative expression and all they do, they want the world to see and know who they are. They want to, as I said, share their individuality without constraint. That's high voice. And those with lower voice and I have got low voice, they, they don't. This is not a value to them. They don't want to be like sharing their, you know, inner individuality in every way, whether or not it bumps into somebody or not. And look, you may think, wait, you've got a podcast. You're out there all the time. How could you possibly have low voice? People who have much higher voice than me, this is, it's, it's a driving motivation. Like what I'm doing with my voice is speaking to other values that I have, which we'll eventually get to. When I'm out there sort of fully expressing myself, it's insane service of something else. Whether or not my individuality is expressed or not is of no importance to me. Now look again, I'm a real aberration on this because when you look at the general population, voice is a top value for 54% of all Americans. It's a moderate value for 34% and people like me who have peripheral only 13%. Let's talk about a little bit more about what actual high voice and low voice are. I have a favorite voice story. I think it tells it incredibly well about, about what Voice can look like. I have a family that I'm very close to. They have a lot of kids, and I got to know those kids really well. They grew up with my kids. And one of the daughters in this family was incredibly high voice. I mean, she just. You just. She had a huge personality. You just. Everybody knew her, and she was just never held back at expressing her opinions and her individuality. And when she was really young, as soon as she could ride a bike, she would go to the pharmacy, and she would dye her hair different colors, and she just always had incredible nail art, and she just had strong kind of opinions about things going on in the world that were different than other people's opinions. Everyone knew her opinions, and her individuality was completely on display, and it's actually, like, just central to who she was. So then, funny thing happened. She got older, and she was dying to go to college because she had been homeschooled, although she loved that experience. And she ended up going to a school that was really, really big in sororities, and she wanted to get into a sorority. Well, sororities are not typically about expressing your individuality. Right. That's kind of the antithesis of a sorority or fraternity. I mean, rush is about finding people who are exactly like each other. I mean, you know, you all sort of like the sisterhood or the brotherhood. It's about conformity in the. You know, in the spirit of kind of, you know, of having, like, a great school experience. Right. It's not a negative thing. Many people, they're. So sorority or fraternity experiences are the best experiences of their life. But she ended up rushing, and she did get. This is a Southern school. And so she got into a really Southern school sorority. And I was thinking, how is this gonna work with her constant need and desire and drive to, like, just be different and to express her authenticity in almost, in her case, kind of extreme ways. Right. And so she was in the sorority, and I was thinking, God, how's this gonna go? She actually wrote a letter to me saying, Mrs. Welch, as she called me, because I was a neighbor. I'm so excited I got into this sorority. It's so exciting. It's like a really competitive sorority. I got into it, and I was like, wow. Well, I cannot believe that happened. We'll see how this works out. So Thanksgiving rolls around, and I hear through the neighborhood grapevine that she is no longer in the sorority. And I thought, love to hear the story behind that. Well, a few days later, she bikes by my house, and she comes on into the kitchen and my daughters were there. We all knew her really well. And she sits down at the kitchen counter and she starts to tell me all about how school's going. I said, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. Let's just back up. What's going on with the sorority? What happened? You're not in it anymore? And she said, well, she starts in. You know, we just agreed that it was probably going to be better if I got my own apartment. I said, just stop the bs, would you? I've known you since you were born. What happened? And she looked at me and her eyes kind of narrow and she said, Mrs. Welch, the bitches are real. This had led to me and my daughters every single time we didn't like something that happened in the world, looking at each other and saying, the bitches are real. But it's caught. Exactly what happens when a very high voice, high individualistic person bumps into a situation where conformity is more desired and in fact enforced, like the Amish community. I'd love to go in and just give the values bridge to an entire Amish community or to like a. To a group like that or to a sorority for that matter. Voice. And actually, like I said with eudaimonia being in cities and in cultures, Voice also has cultural aspects. If you think about the Japanese cultural concept of. I think the pronunciation is hua. It translates as harmony in English. And it's a cultural value that emphasizes peaceful unity and conformity within a social group. It's about continuation of a harmonious community over personal interest and personal self expression. And in the United States, you know, there's certain cities where, like, where wa is much more present than it is. Like if you go to a place like New York City or Provincetown, Massachusetts, where, you know, your sort of authentic self expression is really celebrated. San Francisco. And so my voice, you know, like again, I have very low voice because this is just not a. I don't have any problems with it. It's just not a priority of mine. But for some people, and again, for a small majority, 52% of Americans, this is a top value. And demographically, no surprise, it skews younger. Younger generations are more value voice more than older generations. And in fact, for the, what we call the silent generation, which is people over 70, I'm culturally aligned with it down in the bottom five. So that's voice again. I want to leave you some questions about yourself, which is how important is this value to you, this authentic self expression that people understand and know your individuality. Are you living as much Voice as you want to, Is it high, medium or low for you? So important to know so that when you're talking to other people about what's working in your life and what's not working and you're thinking about what job you want to have or what kind of company you want to work at, you can say, how will my value of voice work there? When you're marrying somebody, will this person let me express my voice or not? Will this company let me express my voice or not? Again, this is your authentic self expression and how much you want to fit in or not. All right, let us move on to the next value down at the bottom. For me, two more values to go. My number 13 and my number 12. And here's where I start being a little bit more like the rest of the world. My number 13 value is agency, not a high value. For me, agency is about self determination. It reflects how much you want and need to control your life's direction, its decisions and its details. So people with high agency, they are driven. They have a deep desire to steer their own course. They crave autonomy even when it's not within their reach. And people with lower agency, like me, we have, let's just put it this way, we have more comfort with collaboration and delegation and consensus. We do not need to own or drive every decision. You know, you may be thinking, doesn't everybody want to have self determination and decide how everything is going? And the answer is no. In the general population, 24% have this as a top five value. Only 24%, only a quarter of the population says, you know what's super, super important to me? That I make all the decisions. Now, you know, these people maybe like it's your Uncle Joey or it was your mother, okay? I mean, maybe it's your partner. If it's not you. You could feel a person with high agency a million miles away. I remember one time I had a student who said to me, after getting back their values bridge results, saying, professor Welch, I don't care what industry I work in. I don't care what my job title is. I don't even really care how much money I make. I just want to make all the decisions that, my friends, is high agency, core agency. Now most people have agencies somewhere in the middle. It's a moderate value for 42%. Maybe that's not most people, but that's a pretty high percentage. But 34% of the population, including yours truly here, has agency. Down in the peripheral for me, it's a pretty low value. I do want some determination. And actually when it comes to few things, like there's some things where I really, really want to drive outcomes, but it's not very many. In general, I'm a person for whom just owning every decision and its outcome, it's just not important to me. It's not a priority. In fact, there are times where I probably should have cared more and I can think back to decisions where I should have been more involved. But I'll tell you something, I mean, here's a story about my low agency. Absolutely. My son and my daughter in law, they run a fantastic store together in Brooklyn's very successful. And it's so successful that they've just decided to change locations. They're going to double their space. And they called me up to talk about it. I had some opinions about where they were moving and how they were thinking about it, but I said immediately, this is your decision to make. I said, absolutely. And they were like, no, no, no, we really want your opinion, we really want you to help with this decision. And I said, no, this is really, you're going to own the outcomes of it. And it's really your decision. I really want you to own the decision. That is low agency when you push the decision onto other people. I mean, I delegated work a lot. Maybe I delegate too much. I don't know, it seems to be working. But you know, agency is an interesting thing culturally. You know why we think a lot of people are high on it? Because the culture celebrates high agency people. You know, Steve Jobs was a super high end agency. He famously said, you know, don't ever let anyone make decisions but you and don't let anybody ever crowd your decisions. He was like the poster child for high agency. Movies celebrate, TV shows celebrate almost exaggerate high agency people. There was a TV show I liked for a couple of seasons called the Bear about a restaurateur guy named Carmi. And there's a sort of a famous scene, I show it to my students where he works with a sous chef and he promises her that he's gonna let her have agency. And she does a beautiful job making a lot of dishes. Then when she's not in the room, he goes and he changes every last one of them and they have a confrontation. I show this confrontation to my students where she says, why'd you do that? And he said, well, I just had to make everything my own. And that is high agency in high relief. And it can be very complicated or it can really make your life exactly what you Want it to be. So look, here are some questions I want to leave you with about agency. Because it shows up usually in relationship with someone else. I mean, you've got to wonder what is the level of agency of your partner, of your boss? If you're in a marriage and you both have I agency, that can be complicated. I think that my late husband Jack had extremely high agency. He ran a company with 400,000 employees. Okay, that takes a high agency person. And I had low agency and it worked out just fine for us. But you've got to be careful in a relationship when both people have low agency because at the end of the day, somebody's got to make some decisions. So agency is something very important to know about yourself. Just like all the values, it's very important to know what, where agency falls as a value for you. Let me leave you with this. When I actually teach agency in classrooms around the world, I always trot out the great. The famous song of the of Leslie Gore singing, you don't own me. Now, if I actually sang it fully, you would all just hit the stop button. I have the worst voice in the world. But you all know the song you don't own me. And I play it and I say, how does that make you feel? That song? You don't own me. I'm not one of your little toys. I mean, if you feel this surge in your heart like, yeah, nobody owns me. I own my life. I make all the decisions and you start feeling like I, you know, I inhabit this song. You might have higher agency. I hear it and I think, what a great song and how amazing she was at 18 or 19 when she recorded that song. Had that fierceness. But I know that's not in me. I don't get that feeling that I've got to own things and I. And I don't feel like I've got to own my life. I feel like there's a lot of stakeholders and shareholders in Suzy Incorporated. I'm okay with that because I don't have high agency. It's not in me.
- [40:43]
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- [42:02]
Susie Welch
Jobs Let us move on to the last value we're going to talk about in today's podcast. Belonging. You know, as I said, the values bridge and the values language captures three kinds of love. We talked about the first kind, belovedness, romantic love. And next week we're going to talk about another form of love, which is family centrism, the love of your immediate family and the desire to organize your life around that immediate family. But belonging reflects how deeply you feel the value of friendships or community or both. And people with very high belonging, they feel the most alive when they're in some kind of group. They feel satisfied when they're embedded in a genuinely connected group, be it with friends or be it with work colleagues or be it in a, you know, in the Shriners or the Elks or a local soccer club. People with high belonging, they they yearn to be in social groups. And people with lower belonging, they may love their friends and they may have one group or two groups, or they may have some sense of community, but they don't organize their life around fulfilling this value of belonging. It's not a top priority. They may often feel more comfort with navigating their life on their on their own terms without an affinity group. Now look, my Belonging is number 12, right? I love my friends. I have friends, I have a lot of friends, and I and I value them, but just obviously not as much as a lot of other values that I have. 11 values come ahead of it. People are almost saying, saying all the time how much they love their friends, and they're saying how much they want a sense of community. And sometimes people say, oh, in America, we're losing our sense of community. And that's a very bad thing. And if you look at it with our statistics, only 24% of Americans have belonging as a top five value. 46% have it in the middle. And I'm down there with the 30% who have it as a bottom five value. So it's kind of spread across the continuum. But only 24% are saying, look, my friends come first, my sense of community comes first, and you may be one of them. And again, the thing with values is there's no right or wrong. There's only right or wrong for you. How do you know if you have high belonging? Well, it's like a lot of the other values, you know, if you, I mean, as I'm describing it, you know if it's you or not. I mean, I had a student once who said, professor Welch, I have to miss class again next week because I'm going to a wedding. And I said to him, because it wasn't the first time, how many weddings have you been to this year? And he said, 12. And I thought, wow, this is a guy who travels around the world going to weddings of his friends. I'll bet he has very high belonging. And lo and behold, when he took the values bridge assessment, it was number one for him. I mean, this is a person who arranged his life, organized his life around his friendships. That was, and power to him. It's a beautiful thing if it's for you. I always say your values show up in who you marry, where you work and where you, what you do on the weekends. You really can start to say, well, how do I organize my time? You know, what my priority is? That's where you really see your values and you see belonging. Pop. If your life is organized around being with somebody who also shares your friend group. If you're, if your vacations are around friends or a sense of community and where you work has a side. Like people with high belonging often hate working remote. I actually know a young woman and she was looking really, really hard for a job as a lawyer and she couldn't find a job. It's hard for first year lawyers out there now. And she finally got a job and it was remote. She said she cried the whole first week. Belonging, number one, top value. So that kind of thing pops for people. And so it's important to know people who, when they graduate, feel a deep sense of loss. Like it's a tragedy to leave school often high belonging, because you have a lot of your natural friend groups in, in, in college. It makes it so Easy in high school makes it very easy. I mean, I think the world today, it makes it pretty hard to have friends. I mean, the statistics would show that the top. The time you have the most friends, all data would show. All this reporting on research would show you have the most friends in your life when you're in high school and college. It makes sense. It's just. It's so easy to have them. Your whole world is set up for you to see your friends and be with them every single day and on weekends and all the way through high school and college. It's all about your friends. Then the statistics, the research would show that the number of friends we have starts dropping off as soon as we go to work. Then it pops up again when, when we're in our late 20s or early 30s, because we start generally having children and we get into our mommy and daddy groups and we start seeing the same group of people every day at hockey practice or at pickup or at birthday parties, and suddenly you have a whole new affinity group of parents. I mean, I could not have raised my children without my mommy friends. When I was raising my kids in New York City, every Thursday morning before work, I had a Bible study with other working moms. It was a fantastic Bible study about 10 years. And, you know, I don't know if I could have raised my kids without these women going through Bible study together. We talked about everything under the sun, about why we were living, what kind of parents we were. It was. It was incredibly important to me. Then our kids grew up and they started going away to school. And eventually the Bible study, it just kind of. It fell apart bit by bit. One woman would leave and then another woman would leave. You know, I wonder in that period if I had taken the values bridge, if my belonging would have popped much higher. Because at that point, the thought of living without that group was pretty impossible. Now, another few things about belonging. Sometimes we see people who have high belovedness, very high importance of a partnered relationship, and very high family centrism, and they have lower belonging because that feeling of community is met by their partner and their immediate family. So sometimes we do see a dichotomy between that. It's kind of rare to see somebody who's got very high belovedness, very high family centrism, and. And then, then immediately high belonging. And sometimes we see people with very high belonging who have lower belovedness and lower family centrism. Obviously, there's an interrelationship between the values. The values, like all, all words in a. In a language they speak to each other. Now, eventually we will have the longitudinal data about how belonging rises or falls, how when people age. I mean, we will have that in time and again. I should say there are cultural aspects to this. I can't wait to see where belonging falls as we start to do the values bridge in different countries. I can't wait to see see where belonging falls in different cultures. I wonder what it is in China. I wonder what it is in Italy. I wonder what it is in Latin America. I'm very eager to see how it differs among genders and, and all the different ways that we can cut the data that is coming. What is your belonging? How important is it to you? Is the time you spend with friends and the feeling of community that you have? How much are you living it? You know, for some, this is a gigantic yearning. It's just. It's a itch that has to be scratched. You've got to have it, and if you don't have it, you feel this ache, and that's the authenticity gap. I want to be part of community. I want to have more friends. I don't have it. I want to fix it. And for others, you know, we. We don't have that. We don't have that burning desire. I think these are really just important things to understand about our belonging, how much we have it and how much we are able to live it. Because that's the thing about values. Once you know what your values are, the next question becomes, how much are you able to express, express them? And when we talk about living your purpose, which is the becoming you methodology's whole point, it says, to live your purpose, we've got to know these things about you. What are your values? What motivates you? What are your aptitudes? What are you good at? What should you be doing in this world of ours? What work calls you emotionally and intellectually? What is the overlap of those three data sets? And that's not usually a lot of things, but that's what we're looking for with the whole methodology. But again, to get there, you really have to know your values in great detail. And let me say this, whether you're looking for your purpose or not, because there are people who are listening right now who know their purpose and they're living their purpose. And you are so lucky, and I love that you're doing that. I mean, that is fantastic. But regardless, you've got to know your values. And you know, the name of the tool that we use to find your values was very, very carefully Chosen. It's called the values bridge for a reason. Because once we know our values, once we're fluent in the language of values, it builds a bridge for us to talk to other people about our values and to talk to ourselves. But you know, just the way when you learn French or you learn German or any language in the world, you can just start speaking to other people. You can have a conversation. The great philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said famously, the limits of my language are the limits of my world. Once we have no more limits on our language, we can, we can create our world so much better. We can start to live the life we want to live. But you got to use the language of values to begin to say, hey, this is who I am. This is what I want. This is what motivates me. These are my needs and my desires. Otherwise, we just. We struggle for words. Like, we feel it and we don't say it. It's almost like, you know, toddlers do a lot of screaming and crying and tantruping because they don't have words to. To express what they want. And then we grow up and we start to have words, but we don't, for some reason, usually have the words. The most important 16 words. We can have the words of values to talk about what is galvanizing us, what is motivating us deeply. And we talked about five of those words today. Belovedness, the value of romantic love. Eudaimonia, the value of sex. Self flourishing, Voice, the value of authentic self expression, Agency, the value of self determination, Belonging, the value of friends and community. Oh, my God, already. Go use them. Figure out where you are with those. We're going to come back and do six more values in our next podcast in five, the week after that. I love talking about the language of values. You can write me at hello, Susie Welch about any questions you have, or write a review where you listen to your podcast and drop a question in there any way you want. Let's keep talking because we are speaking the same language. The language of values. I'm Susie Welch. This is becoming you. I'll see you next week.