Transcript
A (0:00)
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B (0:30)
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C (0:37)
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D (1:31)
Well, hello. Hello everybody. It's Susie Welch and this is Becoming youg. I am digging our new theme music. We just started with it a few weeks ago. It is ushering in a new day for us at Becoming youg. I hope that our old listeners like it as much as I do. I mean, I picked it, so I really like it. And if you are new to this podcast, a special special hello and welcome. I'm so glad you're here actually, because today's episode is kind of a Becoming youg 101 An Introduction if you will. But old listeners also please stick around because I promise we're going to have fun. Anyway, for our purposes here today, we're going to introduce you or reintroduce you to becoming you using the tried and true two truths and a Lie construct. But unlike that game, I'm not going to make you guess the lie. I'm not. Because, please, we aren't at a company icebreaker here. The lie about becoming you is at the end, and I cannot wait to dispel it because I hear it all the time and it makes me vaguely insane. But our two truths also get me all up in a frenzy, as you will soon see. So let's get going. All right, here is the first truth. And, you know, by the way, I should state that with these truths, I actually beseeched my producer to let the truths be read in a crisp British accent just for the fun of it. Like, I thought that we should use the voice of Queen Elizabeth. I also suggested that we use a robot's voice. I thought that would be funny. But I guess that's why I'm not the producer of this podcast. And as a result, you're going to hear the truths and the lie straight from me. All right, here we go. Truth number one. I did not invent the becoming you methodology to help other people. I invented it to help your girl right here. Me. Now, look, every single day, I get emails and DMs, and people stop me in the street or they literally come up to me in the subway and they say very nice things like becoming you saved my life. Becoming you transformed my life. I was lost, but now I'm found. And I feel like crying every time I hear something like this because these are very tough and complicated times. I know that you know that there's AI, there's instability. I mean, who knows what the future holds? And it is unbelievable to be part of the solution with becoming you. It's unbelievable to be helping so many people. But that is not how this thing started with me thinking about helping a lot of people. I couldn't imagine that I would, and I did not imagine that I could. It was December 2020 when this thing started. It was the middle of the pandemic. I was sheltering in place with my whole extended family during the pandemic in upstate New York. Everybody in that period was kind of lost and in a spell, but I was kind of in a trance because I had also just lost my husband, Jack, and. And I was not sure what the heck I was going to do with myself when the world came back. I mean, I was lucky. I was lucky. Don't get me wrong, I had options. I had had a long career in business and in broadcast journalism. There was a management consulting firm that wanted me to come aboard. I could have gone back to working on TV at NBC, but I had walked those paths for many years. And while I liked them, I knew that they were not the paths I wanted to keep walking. In many ways, the jobs that I had had up until that point during the pandemic were jobs I had because I was pretty good at them and because they worked for a life with four kids and a husband who was retired and then became very ill. They were the careers that were okay. You know, they were B or B on a good day. And I am not complaining. That is better than many people have. But I was thinking that I wanted at last to find a career that was my true purpose, and I wanted to live my purpose. I was 60, and the clock, I thought, was not ticking backwards. So I am a complete fan girl of Joan of Arc. I mean, if you've listened to this podcast even once before, you know that I love her. Look, she had a very, very bad ending. Nobody wants to die at age 19, okay, end very unpleasantly, as she did. But when Joan of Arc was 13 years old, this was in 1412, and she was in her backyard at a loom, and she was just a peasant girl in rural France. And suddenly the sky opened up and three saints appeared. And they said, hey, Joan, we need you and only you to help drive the English out of France and reclaim France as an independent nation. And that's what she did. I mean, the historical record would show she marched into war as the commander of the French army at age 16, and she succeeded in driving out the English and reinstating the King of France. And somewhere along the way, she had her sword engraved with the words, I am not afraid. I was born to do this. I wanted that. I wanted to find and do the one thing that I was born to do with my life. Now, interestingly and very ironically, I had spent my career thinking and talking about careers. In fact, I was technically a noted career expert. That's what it said in my bio. I mean, I had a digital show on CNBC called Susie Welch Fix My Career. And later I had another show called get to Work with Susie Welch, all about careers. I had written a book with my husband called Winning still very popular business book, which had a chapter on building a career. And I had written my own book about decision making called 10-10-10, which had multiple chapters on not just careers, but on purpose driven careers. And so I knew, I felt certain that a person's purpose lay at the intersection of three big superhighways, or actually, let's use the term data sets. I like that better. Three big data sets, our values, which is what we want to do. Our aptitudes, which is what we can do and our economically viable interests what we should be doing. All you had to do really was excavate that data and figure out what career lay there at the overlap. I knew that. And so in my wandering and wondering, I set out in the dark of the pandemic and in the yearning of my heart to do that for myself. So I started by figuring out my values. Now, I was lucky in that I knew my values. Not everyone does. I knew that I wanted to impact the world in some very positive and systemic way. I knew that I loved work like a junkie. And I wanted to do something fun full time, all out. And I knew I wanted to do something with my life that was aligned with my faith and in particular, John 10:10, which exhorts us to live life to the hilt. So I was clear on my values. Then I looked at my aptitudes. I had verbal cortex stuff going on. I can write, I can talk. And I knew I loved business. And I knew I was good at business because I have been on corporate boards. But I didn't stop there. I asked around. I asked everyone who knew me. I said, be very blunt, what am I particularly good at? And I remember asking one of my dear friends, very smart, dear friend, and she'd known me for 30 years. And I said to her, what am I really good at? And she said, you're really good at convening people, Susie. That's your superpower. And I thought, oh, convening people. I think she might be right. I actually, I'm good at bringing people together and getting them to talk to each other, not past each other. That was an interesting observation. Had not realized that aptitudes. Finally, I took a hard look at what really interested me. I had fallen in love with entrepreneurship, running a company before the pandemic. And so I love the idea of building another business. I love the whole field, conceptually of careers and purpose. I. I could talk and think about them endlessly. They interested me. So then I took all that data, my values and my aptitudes and interests, and I thought, oh, I see what lies at the intersection of all of these three data sets. It's teaching and specifically getting very meta about this. It's teaching a class about the methodology of how to figure out what to do with your life. I was totally taken aback. I'm not going to lie. This was a departure. No one was sitting around suggesting that I become a professor, I assure you. But the minute it came to me, I was like, I am not afraid. I was Born to do this. It was crazy. And so I ended up describing this idea to my kids. I talked to them about the methodology and what was part of the methodology. And my kids were listening very, very closely. And it was my son, Roscoe. He was 30 at the time. And he said, I love that methodology. I love that idea of you teaching it, Mom. And I think you should call the class Becoming you. And I was like, sweetheart, I think that is exactly what it should be called. And so I went back to my office. It took a while. I created a curriculum, and it was not at all elaborate. It was not the curriculum that was eventually to become the true, the Becoming U class at nyu, but it was the bones of one. And I went to the dean of the NYU Stern School of Business, where I knew the dean. His name was Raghu Sandaram. And I said, hi, I have an idea for a class, and I wish I had taken it when I was in business school, like 40 years ago, because if I had, I would have avoided a lot of boneheaded detours and a lot of angst and maybe even some grief, because that is what you feel when you're not living your purpose. And I described the methodology and I described the class to him. And Raghu said, let's try it as a little experiment. Well, I mean, in 2021, if you offer a class as people are coming out of the pandemic, and you call it Becoming youg, Crafting the authentic life you want and need, that is the field that if you build it, they will come. And they did. They came. And one thing led to another. And I ended up joining the faculty of NYU and teaching Becoming youg Around the World. And I wrote a book about it. And now we have a whole company based on getting this methodology into other people's hands. And it is really, really, really excited. And the growth has stunned all of us in a way that is very happy making. And look, even part of it is this podcast, which I love to do, and thank you very much for listening to it. But again, the truth is, the first person who needed becoming you was me. I did not make the methodology because I was an expert. I made it because I was a seeker. And it was only after I saw how much it was helping all of my students that I realized, oh, wow, maybe this should not be just for me and the people I can see four feet in front of me. I think it can be for other people. I think it could be for everyone. So, you know, a long time ago, like in the 80s, there was this infomercial, it was on late night TV all the time and it was for actually, it was for toupees. It was called the Hair Club for Men. It's a pop culture classic if you're my age and you know the infomercial, it starred the CEO. He was a very flat fellow, let's just say very non emotive. Although one thing about him was you couldn't miss that he had this huge head of hair himself. And at the end of the infomercial, the CEO, his name was Cy Sperling, would say, by the way, I'm not just the president of the club, but I'm also a client.