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The mindbodygreen Podcast
607: A proven method to find purpose in life & work | Suzy Welch
00:44:55
Suzy Welch, a bestselling author, founder and CEO of Becoming You Labs, and a professor at NYU Stern School of Business, joins us to discuss how to uncover your core values, identify your true aptitudes, and build a career that aligns with your authentic purpose.
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- [00:00]
A
Welcome to the mybodygreen podcast. I'm jason wakab, founder and co CEO of mybodygreen and your host. What if the key to a more meaningful life isn't chasing happiness, but uncovering your purpose? That question drives the work of today's guest, Susie Welch. Susie is a bestselling author, founder and CEO of Becoming youg Labs and a professor at NYU Stern School of Business where she teaches courses on leadership, purpose and transformation. Her latest book, Becoming youg, lays out her proven method for aligning your life and career with who you really are. In today's show, Susie shares her science backed framework to help you identify your true values, uncover what you're genuinely good at, and find work that's both fulfilling and financial sustainable. You'll also learn about the difference between values and virtues, why so many people feel stuck in quote unquote good enough lives, and how even small tweaks in mindset can create massive life changes. If you've ever questioned whether you're on the right path or felt stuck in a life that looks good on paper but doesn't feel right, this episode will give you the clarity and tools to change that. And I encourage all of you to take her incredible free quiz called the Values Bridge, which we will link to in the show notes. I've done the quiz and found the results incredibly insightful and useful. Let's get to it. So in the book you have this very interesting methodology for finding one's quote unquote area of transcendence. It's a unique intersection of one's core values, innate aptitudes, and economically viable interests. Can you start by walking us through your core framework here?
- [01:44]
B
Absolutely. So the struggle, the pain point that becoming you hopes to solve or helps to meet you at is this place where you know there's something that you were meant to do, you just don't know what it is and you feel like this. You know, you can have a pretty good life and have moments where you feel like, yeah, this is good enough, I, I, I'm happy enough, but becoming you. The construct is meant for people who want to push a little bit past that and say, wait, I do think that there's something deeper, bigger, better and more meaningful for me. So the construct tries to gather the three data sets that contribute to that feeling of purpose and being exquisitely alive, as I like to use that phrase. And so the first is your values, which I, I say values with so much trepidation because almost nobody knows what their values are. And there's a Whole bunch of reasons for that. The first is that most people think values are virtues and they're distinctly different things. The second is that nobody's ever taught in school what values really, what it means and what values look like and feel like and how they're different from virtues. And the third reason, and it's serious, is that the word values has been hijacked by the public discourse to be about political stuff. And so we, you know, progressive values, conservative values, family values, whatever. And so we are scared to talk about values with people because we are just all living in fear all the time of being canceled by people we love. So I did some research that, that confirmed for me this long held suspicion, which is that most people don't know what values really are and they don't know what their own are. And the numbers are like 17% could actually define a value and 7% could define their own values. When I start off my class, I often ask my students, what do you think your values are? And they say virtues. They say things like kindness, fairness, um, sometimes they do name a value like family. But values are the deeply held beliefs that galvanize our actions and decisions. There's 15 of them. According to my thinking, my, my research and my thinking, I have inventory of 15 human values. There's two other standard values inventories. One has 14 values, other has 20. So I'm sort of roughly in the same area. And they all exist along a continuum. And they're choices, actually. And there's no right or wrong. There's your choice about how you want to live. And so for instance, a value would be something like scop. How big and exciting life do you want? And along that continuum with the other end is how contained and foreseeable, controlled and calm a life do you want? And that's a choice. What scope is for us is a value. And so finding out what your values actually are, again, I think there's 15. And you have to figure out what your level is on each one of those is one thing, but there's another part of that, which is we often have values, deeply held values, and we don't live them because life gets in the way, or we're married to somebody who doesn't have those same same values. Or we have work that doesn't allow us to express our values, or we have kids. Kids often are the big blockers for us living our values. So values is the first data set that the methodology explores. And it does it in a very practical way. The second piece of the second data set that you have to know to figure out your purpose is what you're really good at. Because values are sort of, you know, that's what you want to do and that matters, but only in as much as you're good at it. I mean, and we're talking about careers here. You know, I'm very, I love ceramics. My mother was a ceramicist. I grew up doing pottery, but I'm just happy to be terrible at it. And you know, I couldn't be a ceramicist if I tried. But it's certainly one of my values is to do, is to do the work of, of ceramics, which we would call eudaimonia. But I would say it's very important to know what your cognitive aptitudes are. There's eight big cognitive aptitudes. For instance, you're either a generalist or specialist. This is our hard wiring of our brains. And we can go our whole lives being told what our aptitudes are, but not really knowing. And sometimes we're told what our aptitudes are because our parents really want our aptitudes to be those things. Like, you know, there are whole cultures. You know, I have a lot of students who are from, who come from India all the way to nyu. And their parents basically say to them, you're going to be good at coding or you're going to be good at, you know, at science, because those are the options that we feel are available for you. But so there's cognitive aptitudes which encompass your brain wiring. And then there's a second part of aptitudes, and that's your personality, which may or may not be the words you use to describe it. You know, we all have, oh, I'm kind, I'm generous, I'm a good listener. We have these words that we use to describe our personality. You know, maybe that's our personality, but maybe it's not. Because our personality is not always the story we tell ourself. It's how the world experiences us. And we have to find out how the world is experiencing us. So that's the second piece of data. That's the second data set. And the third is your economically viable interest. And this is the kind of work that calls you intellectually and or emotionally, but can pay you what you need to be paid according to your values. So I, I wish I could say that the methodology was, is a hack. It's not. It's a methodical data gathering process which, you know, I can, I teach it at nyu, but I also teach it as we Say in the wild, in open enrollment in three days, you gather this data. We have a lot of tools to help you gather the data. And then you identify what work exists at the overlap of those three data sets. And there, there is your purpose. And I've seen this work now thousands of times. It's very, very exciting. It's. I've cried a lot over the past couple of years with joy watching people discover their purpose and then start to live it.
- [07:09]
A
You know, a lot to unpack there. And before I jump into the. All the questions I have, it reminds me of a 2.0 version of what color is your parachute?
- [07:18]
B
Yeah. I mean, that look, that book has stood the test of time for a lot of different reasons. The, the, you know, you don't want to argue with that kind of greatness. That was a great book. What we have now is what we have now that are a lot of different wonderful digital tools that help us get to some of that information that that book gets. It's very hard to ask people to self report on their aptitudes and self report on their values because to get very nerdy on you for a moment is that a lot of identity issues get in the way. And so a lot of the work of becoming you is to separate you from your identity issues. Like when I used to ask people to self report, report on their values. And I would do a lot of. I do a lot of exercises in the classroom that help people get at their values. Big excavation process. And I literally would see, in many cases it would be mothers figure out their values using all these tools and then literally manually manipulate where family was. Like, family would show up as their eighth or ninth value as an organizing principle for their lives, and they'd literally cross it out and move it up to the top because of all the messaging that you should have family come first. And. And so I. What becoming you does is it. It has tools that very, you know, spent years developing this and very cleverly separate you from the. From your identity messages.
- [08:33]
A
Yeah. I think that's fascinating. And I think the value section really had an impact on me personally. I was like, oh, wow. I think. I think we've been thinking about this all wrong. A couple interesting things I want to touch on. So values versus virtues. You mentioned that there's a mismatch there. Like, give us some more examples about how they differ and some. Some pitfalls and identification that we've fallen.
- [08:57]
B
Yeah. Oh, look. Virtues are social or cultural constructs that everybody agrees everybody should have more of. Right. Kindness Integrity. There's no debate around the virtues, okay? You know, everybody should be more honest. I mean, there's. Virtues are sort of enduring across time. So they're all well known. And we raise our children. I mean, I remember one time somebody saying to me, you know, what did you care about when your kids were growing up? You know, you were working all the time. I said, I only at the beginning, I thought, I'm only going to get involved when it's a character issue. And then later I realized they were all character issues. I mean, when we're raising our kids, we're thinking a lot about their character. And those are all virtue issues. Okay? You know, being kind to people and so forth. Values. I use scope as an example. Let's use another. There's a value that I often say when people find out they have it, they need to go into a support group. But it's a true value. It's called beholderism. And beholderism is a value that measures how important is it, how things look to you, including yourself. And this is a very old value in the academic world. This is sometimes called aesthetics. I call it beholderism. I think it's sort of more vivid. But some people really, really care a lot about how they look or how their stuff looks or how their homes look. And other people care not at all. And people have a lot of fights about it. Couples get in a lot of fights about it. Parents get in a lot of fights about it with their kids. But there's no right or wrong. Some people really value beholderism, and some people don't. I mean, one of my closest friends, like, leaves the house with a gigantic knot in the back of her hair. She's a very successful career woman, by the way. And I just, I often say, before I start judging her, I want to just say, look, she has just low beholderism. I have quite high. Now, sometimes people don't like being. Finding out or discovering through the values bridge that they have high holderism. And they say it sounds so shallow. But my theory, one theory is that beholderism is, you know, it could be a proxy for harmony that you just, you know, we can't control a lot of stuff in this life, but we can control how our homes look or how we look. And, but look, values. There's two different ways, two different schools and values. And one is values formation, like why we have our values, why you would have beholderism. And, you know, this is the, this is the playground of therapists, psychologists, you know, sociologists, Cultural historians about why people have certain values. I'm in the field of values expression. I take you exactly as you are. I just want to know what your values are so we can come up with the best life for you. And I have some theories about why I have high beholderism. My father was an architect and my mom was an artist, and I, you know, I studied art history. I care about how things look. Some of it's my personality, but it doesn't make any difference. I have high beholderism, and it's helped me a lot to understand that. Like the other day, I was giving a speech at Google and I went into their offices and their offices are extremely beautiful. And all my beholderism synapses were firing. And I was like, I'm quitting my job and I'm working at Google. I mean, I just was, like, out of control because the beauty of those offices was just so high. And what I thought to myself is, there were times in my life where I actually took jobs based on how beautiful the offices were and that if I had been wiser, I would have known, wait a minute, I'm making a decision based on my beholderism. But I also have these other values. Does the company have that? So I think knowledge is power. And one of the quotes, another quote that I use all the time is this. When I was guest lecturing at Stanford, a student came up to me and she said, I love your language of values because it's like Wittgenstein said. And I was like, oh, man, I really am at Stanford. It's like Wittgenstein said, the limits of my language or the limits of my world. And once you understand your values, you can start to talk to people about your values and their values in ways that are less charged. And so There are these 15 values, and they all have high presentations, core presentations, and they have peripheral presentations. And what you can see is you eventually sort of get this profile of who you are and what really matters to you that is very, very useful in thinking about your life in a systematic way.
- [13:00]
A
So it feels like values mismatch, whether it's in a relationship or at work, is a recipe for unhappiness, truly.
- [13:10]
B
And, you know, this is. I often joke that I like, accidentally invented like a marriage tool or a dating tool. Because when you take the values bridge, which actually is 100 questions, where you'll get your values ranked 1 through 15, you can actually check a little box. And if somebody else takes the test, they can check a little box and your Values come up next to each other, and you can see where all the conflicts and mismatches are. I actually have friends right now, husband and wife, who refuse to take it because they're so sure their values are mismatched. And I'm begging them to do it. But I do think that not only do our values have conflicts with people and relationship, and we don't have our values alone. We are all in relational ecosystems at home and at work, but we actually very often have values within ourselves that conflict. You know, the number one values pairing I see with my students is number one, eudaimonia, which is self care, another word for personal flourishing. Self care. Use the Greek word, because I don't want to be judging eudaimonia. And their number two value is affluence, the desire for wealth accumulation. And those are values that, when you're 21 years old, are in conflict. They may not be if you've accumulated a lot of Money and you're 65. Right. You may be able to have those right next to each other. But when you're 21 and you're thinking about your first job and your top value is your wellbeing, and your second value is getting rich, good luck finding that job.
- [14:25]
A
Well said. So can you walk us through the values bridge to help us get there?
- [14:31]
B
Yeah. Well, look, the values bridge, you know that desperate women do desperate things. And I was teaching becoming you for several years in the classroom, using six different exercises to help people excavate their values. And these were wonderful, interactive, often fun exercises. And I kept on thinking, this is all well and good, but there's. There's got to be a better way to do this. And I was gathering at the time a lot of empirical data about how people talked about their values. And at a certain point, I was standing up in front of the class with an abacus, like moving beads around, talking to students about values using this. And I remember desperately thinking, I cannot do this with an abacus. I mean, the Abacus is like 7,000 years old. There's gotta be a better technology. And I finally thought, I'm going to create that technology. And, you know, I think that your listeners think a lot about reinvention and about doing hard things that. To become more themselves. And. And at the time I did this, I was 60 years old, and I thought, okay, perhaps was not on my bingo card to create a digital tool that assesses values, but I'm going to do it. And I built a good team around me of data scientists, and people were really smart about it. And I knew what the values were because I had so much research at that point. And I had. I don't know how many pieces of empirical data I had, but it was tens of thousands. And I created a new values inventory and then created this tool. It's a hundred questions, and they're all behavioral. And it will then tell you what your values are in rank order. But it also tells you something that's kind of profound, which is on each one of those values, it gives you a measurement of how close you are to living it. Because, as I said, you know, you can have scope. Let's go back to that value. Scope of how big and exciting a life you want. You want to be Bianca Jagger on the back of a. Of a silver stallion walking into Studio 54. And you'll take all the downside of it. You'll take the. You'll take the chaos, you'll take whatever, right? You'll take being hungry all the time or all the stuff that goes with having this life that she had or whatever. And so you have that as a very high value. It's new learning, it's new people, it's excitement. But you are a elementary school teacher in Wisconsin and you're not expressing your scope at all. Your. Your gap, your we call an authenticity gap would show up at like 98%. And then you have to explore why that is. Is it worth it to you? How high a value is that to you? So it would rank your. It ranks your values, it tells you what your gap is on each one. It doesn't actually. It then aggregates them all together and says, look, putting these all together and weighting them for. According to their importance to you. Here's how far you actually are from living your purpose at this moment. And then identifies for you all of your conflicts between all of your values and all of your values that are harmonious. It's quite the portrait. It took us two years to build this thing and it's now been taken by. We're approaching 20,000 people have taken it at this point.
- [17:09]
A
Well, it's fantastic. And we'll have to link to it in the show notes. You mentioned purpose and something you said, I think is also very interesting. You say purpose is more important than happiness.
- [17:19]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think it's more sustainable. I think happiness is kind of fleeting. I mean, I do not. I am not a fan of the happiness industrial complex that tells you happiness is a goal because I believe that happiness is an outcome of a meaningful, productive life. And Often a connected life, if being connected is a value of yours, it's not for everybody. But for some people, this value of what we would call belonging is a value. But I think that, you know, things can be going incredibly well for you in life. Maybe this is just my own bias, but things can be going incredibly well. You've got a great job, you've got a great marriage, and you should be happy, but you're not. And that's because somebody gets sick or kid goes off the rails, or you struggle with anxiety. And so I think that to keep on trying to chase this thing that's fleeting at best, happiness is, is a very hard thing to ask people to do. I think what if you, but what's not a fleeting thing is a life of purpose, where your life has meaning and you feel useful and you feel fulfilled. The byproduct of that is very often not just happiness, but joy. And so I, I'm trying to create a methodology that's much more sustainable and achievable. And, and so, and so that's. So I, I, I prefer to say let's try to find your purpose instead of let's find, try to find happiness.
- [18:39]
A
Wholeheartedly. Agree. And I would go as far as saying purpose is the number one indicator of health span, more so than, you know, VO2 max or whatever metric we're looking at. When purpose dies, you'll likely date, you'll likely die soon as well.
- [18:56]
B
Yeah, no, 100% agree. 100% agree. And so I think it's a little arresting to people. I mean, I want people to be happy. Don't get me wrong. It's not like I'm a, you know, I'm against happiness. It's just everybody's, I, I, I, I just think it's just a crazy, you know, you're not going to find it necessarily at a spa and that's where people go to look for it. And it's, it's not where it is.
- [19:14]
A
Well, to build off that, I agree the happiness industrial complex is an issue and purpose is paramount. With, with that said, I would also say for many people, purpose is a loaded word. And there's a belief, purpose means, you know, going big with a capital P and potentially, you know, leaving my job and then, you know, moving to Bali or doing something big or leaving my relationship and, but it doesn't necessarily have to be that too. Purpose is about the little things.
- [19:47]
B
Yeah, I mean, look, there are, I've seen thousands of people go through the, becoming a methodology now. Some people go through it. And all they do at the end is a tweak. They say, I'm so close. I just am going to make this one change. And guess what? The whole change that I'm making is in my mind. It's a mindset change. And other people go through and they blow it up and they go do something radically different. And they. And it's either sort of changing jobs or exchanging relationships or going to Bali or whatever, but it's just as relevant as you go through it. And I love it when people go through it and there's just a smaller change that's going to occur because of it. REI Co op knows when you're up at 4:30am on a Saturday for a long run and you're actually excited. Not everyone gets it, but we do at rei, we're here for people who get outside gear up for your next run in store or@rei.com you got some.
- [20:44]
A
Great case studies in the book. Can you walk us through some of these world, these real world examples and maybe focus on some of the minor changes? I think some of those are the most interesting.
- [20:52]
B
Yeah, I mean, I had a student, I call her Ana in the book, I believe it was. That's not her real name, but I wanted to let her have her private life there. And she came into the class before I start teaching. She was around 40 years old, actually. I was teaching an executive MBA session of the class and I asked students to write me why they're taking the class so I can get to know them a little bit. And she wrote the most despairing letter I'd ever received. She was like, I am in agony. I'm CEO of a company. I started, when I am a good CEO, I'm a terrible mother. And when I'm a good mother, I'm a terrible CEO and you've got to help me. And I remember thinking, oh, I may not be equal to this woman's despair. And when class started, she was despondent. She was sitting in the front row. And I remember thinking, I don't know if she's going to make it through class. She was looked like she was on the verge of tears. And she went through the whole process. She discovered what her values were. And I think that what she felt was enormously validated in that she found out that her values were work centrism, which is when you want work to be the organizing principle of your life achievement, which is the value of seen success, affluence, wealth accumulation and family centrism, where she Loved her daughter, but she did not want to organize her life around her daughter. And the facts are that she just never had admitted these things to herself. She felt so judged, and she felt so. Just so negatively judged by her family. But when she finally had an accounting of what her values were and she looked at them, she was like, I like these values. These are my authentic values, and I am not hurting anybody with my vows. She had one thing where she said, like, I'm just not spending enough time with my daughter. I. I only see her an hour a day. And I remember thinking to myself, man, I was a working mother. I. And I was a consultant. There were days on end I didn't see my children. I mean, so. And I asked, you know, I. You know, is your daughter happy? And she was like, my daughter's very happy. We have a great relationship. She loves her caretaker. She. There was. She was a single mom. There was not a dad in the picture. And there was all sorts of, you know, when she sort of looked at the cold, hard facts of her daughter's life, there was no presenting evidence that her daughter was in any way suffering because of her values. We would have had a different conversation if the daughter was in crisis, but she was living her values. Her biggest problem, she discovered, was guilt. I mean, guilt about what? The daughter was fine, and she loved her job. She just didn't have the language to say, look, my values are work centers of achievement and affluence. And I love you, sweetheart, but I made this decision to not organize my life around your activities. And she had her reasons for it. I identified with them because I myself was a working mother who said, I love my kids, but one day they're going to be gone, and I'm still going to be here, and I will. And I said to my kids, I'm going to spend my whole life trying to help you be you. Would you help me be me? And I'm so lucky. I have four children. They said, yes, we'll help you, and we'll help each other be our authentic selves. She then went on to look at her aptitudes, and it ended up when she did the full survey of her aptitudes, her leadership quotient, and all of her cognitive and emotional aptitudes, that she was doing the right work. She was actually in the exact right job. And frankly, if you looked at her business results, you already knew she was in the right job. And she loved the industry that she was in. She was in. She had a. A collection of medispas and she loved helping women, and she loved women feeling better about themselves. And she didn't want to work in any other area but medi spas. And at the end of the, at the end of the whole process, she said, this was about me coming to terms with my values, owning them and stepping into them, and being able to have a language to explain them to my daughter and help my daughter discover her own values so we could have a lifelong conversation about both of us sympathetically and empathetically living our values alongside each other. And so she had kind of a minor tweak. And she was the, she was the first one to do her presentation at the end of the semester. And she was just overjoyed. She was freed from this despair that she had. And she, you know, for her, the change was all in her mind, but it was about values can cause us so much pain because we don't know how to talk about them with ourselves or with other people. And so the first step of sort of figuring out what your values are, understanding where the gaps are, and then being able to say to people, look, the biggest one the comes around is, is this value of work centrism. Because what happens is when somebody has a high value of work centrism, they love work. They, they want to work all the time. I used to say, when I was young, if there were eight days a week, I would have worked the eighth day also. And I still feel that way. That does not make me a workaholic. A holic means implies there's a disease involved. But I have children and have good friends who have lower work centrism. And we now joke around and they'll say, well, Susie, with your high work centrism, I don't think we'll be seeing you Saturday night. But those of us with lower work centrism are going to be going to blah, blah, blah, and we all have a good laugh about it. I'm not a workaholic because I'm not, I'm not hurting anybody and I'm not ill. I just have high work centrism. And it just this, I've seen this in couples in particular allow partners to have incredible conversations where people where the partner who's the accused workaholic is able to talk about themselves in a way and ask not to be judged for it and just to respect each other's level of, of work centrism.
- [25:37]
A
You know, what comes to mind hearing you speak about the definition of workaholic is the, the question I'll ask myself sometimes. Am I running towards something or am I running away from something? If you're running toward work, probably you're probably more work centric. If you're running away to work, you're probably running from something else.
- [26:00]
B
Let's think about this for a moment because that's one way of looking at it. And I hear you, but let's think about it is that I look like I'm running to work, but what I'm doing is I'm running toward my value, my value of work, pentrism, and I'm running away from somebody else's opinion about what my value should be. So maybe somebody thinks that I should have a higher value of belonging, but that's not my value. I'm running away from a value that's not mine. And so it's true. But I think that we're all, look, I think to borrow and tweak, one of the most beautiful quotes of all time that we all know, Let me just put it this way. The arc of life is long and it bends towards authenticity. Eventually we will become our authentic selves because that is how we are. That's how we're, you know, we. You can't hold your breath that long. You, you yearn to be authentic. You yearn to live your values. And the actual activity of not living your values is painful at a certain point. I mean, I, I encounter, especially, look, it happens to men also, but I encounter women. They're typically 35 to 55, and they have spent their entire lives living their partner's values or their kids values. And they're in pain and they yearn to live their true values. So I think that what we're running toward typically in our lives is our full expression of our own values.
- [27:24]
A
It feels like self awareness, intuition play a role here.
- [27:30]
B
Well, self awareness always plays a role, you know, and I think that that's part of what the values Bridge gives you is the self aware. I mean, I can't tell you the number of times where people have gotten their results. And I've been in the room and they've said, this explains. And there's always this moment like, oh my God, like I have a good friend who just got her results back. And her number one value was luminance. That's fame. And you know the thing about that, she would never ever in the million years have ever told anybody, including herself, that her number number one value was to be famous. But the values bridge forced her to see it. And I went out to dinner with her after she got that Result back. And she was squirming in her seat and trying to deny that that was her number one value. And I said, can we sit with the moment we. With the fact that it might be your number one value? And then I just looked at her. She said, fine, it's my number one value. I just don't want anyone to know. And I said, but the person who needs to know is you, because it is. It has been the subtle subtext of everything you've done. And actually, maybe it's time to come clean with yourself that that's what you want and make decisions accordingly. And so I think self awareness is very, very important. Intuition. I mean, I like try to separate people from their intuition because intuition is so filled with all sorts of. It's a big stew. I mean, what I want people to. I want people to have the facts. I mean, I. Intuition plays a role in a lot of other things. I mean, intuition is the voice that tells you you're not living your values. I mean, a lot of people who are drawn to this work that I do are people who. I mean, I just recently asked one of my students who came to my open enrollment course what brought you to becoming you? And she said just this sense something wasn't right, and so that that voice is talking to you and that intuition matters.
- [29:01]
A
So the example you just brought up, the woman who wants to be famous. Is this a career 180, or was she kind of on that path?
- [29:07]
B
If she followed this value, it would be a career 180. She's in a very aligned industry with it in that she helps other people who are famous. So she got as close to it as she could without admitting it out loud by being in the entertainment industry. And she's around a lot of people who are famous, and she's always been kind of vaguely dissatisfied in that role. And the facts are that. And I said to her after dinner, look, I think you should just rip the band aid off and do what you really want to do, which would be to go into entertainment herself as one of the sort of main characters, not a supporting cast. And I mean, I think that's a struggle. I think that the people who do become famous ultimately are the ones who openly admit saying they want to be famous. Jim Carrey famously once said, the best day of my life will be when I can't go outside anymore because so many people recognize me. I mean, he wanted it, okay? And he said it and he made it happen. So I don't know what's going to happen with her. She's a work in progress.
- [30:02]
A
And so for someone like that, when there is maybe more of a significant career transition, I'm thinking maybe someone's listening, they're going to go, go through and they're going to do the test and they're going to have a moment and say, wow, I really need to make a shift here. I want to pursue alignment and meaningful work, but I can't lose financial stability. So what advice do you have to someone in a situation like that?
- [30:28]
B
All right, so I, I have. We just had a Becoming youg reunion. Everybody who's taken it over the past four years came for a big reunion in New York. It was really fun and I did a big sort of Q and A session and I brought people up to the stage who had done that, who'd done the gigantic 8180 that becoming you had recommended. So there's, there's a woman who had been in science from when she was a little girl, she was going to be a climate scientist and she became a client scientist and a very able one. And it was a lot of identity issue in it. She liked telling people she was a climate scientist and so forth, but she always had this kind of inner voice. And lo and behold, she was 40. She landed in Becoming you. She went through the process and there was no getting around it. She was meant to be a Broadway producer and what her purpose, she thought, her life, the life she really wanted was to be up there on stage winning a Tony for being a Broadway producer. This is about as far away from, from climate science as you can get, right? So the way she went about it, she 100% acknowledged that the results of the Becoming you process were correct, that she was in the wrong place. She was living a B plus life. She wanted that A plus life of her dreams and that she was going to do the 180. So she started to do things like take classes at night in theater production. And every single time she took one of those classes, the other people in it and the teachers would say, have you been doing this your whole life? You're so good at it. And so her question was, look, I've got this. She kept her stable job in climate science and her question at the reunion was like, what do I do? I'm getting all these indications that I'm quite good at what I thought I was going to be quite good at and what all my testing showed that I was going to be good at, which was Broadway producing, but I've got this stable job And I've got all the life accoutrements that go with it. That mortgage, the house, the car that I like, the clothing that I like, the restaurants that I like. And I said, look, I can't make this decision for you, but if I was you, I'd rip the bandaid off and I'd go get that life that you are dreaming of. Because sometimes the change is so big that doing it in baby steps is just not the answer. Now there's other people, you know, maybe she'll spend another year baby stepping towards it and then she'll rip the band aid off. I, I have another student who went through this process. He's a product manager at a very famous technology company. He went through the whole process and he found out he should be doing something mad. He wants to be a fiction writer. And he did rip the band aid off. He had enough of a little nest egg to be able to do it. He said, I think the next year I'm not going to be able to take any vacations. I think I'm not getting the new car. I think there's some things that are going to change. I've got to do this now. And so it's individual for each person. But you know, and I can't presume to know what's right for each person. I will say people are tend to be more tentative than I would suggest they be. You only have one wild and precious life. You know, you can wait and wait and wait, but it's only going to lead to regret and regret and regret.
- [33:09]
A
In your experience, do men and women differ here in terms of the age ranges they go through the process or how willing they are to go through the process or the types of issues that come up or opportunities?
- [33:22]
B
Well, I think that in look, because of the magic of computers at NYU, my classes are 50, 50 men and women. But, but when I teach it in the wild in open enrollment in the three day version of the class, I'd say it's 70% women, 30% men. And so women I think are more willing to go through the process because the process takes a lot of emotional excavation. You're sitting there and really talking about, about some very personal, vulnerable stuff when it comes to values. And you know, aptitudes are aptitudes and so there's less kind of emotionality around it and interests the same way. So I think women tend to step into this with more courage, to be honest. But I definitely have seen men go through the process as well.
- [34:05]
A
Yeah, I can't help but think of the midlife crisis that you'll see many men experience where all of a sudden, you know, marriage ends. All of a sudden, they show up with sports cars. You know the cliche.
- [34:17]
B
Yeah. No, I don't get those guys because they're too busy having fun in their sports cars with their new girlfriends. But I would say I. I do get some men who. I mean, I had an architect come through it, a male architect, and he was 50, and he was like, my dad was an architect, and I became an architect. And I'm at 50, and I'm. I'm done asking, you know, is it real? This. Is this really the job for me? And he found out it wasn't, and he was ready to start his new life. So it is. He was having a midlife crisis full on.
- [34:43]
A
So what do you think is holding most people back from living their dream life?
- [34:47]
B
Yeah, I call it. I think there's four dynamics that I call. I call them the four horsemen of values, destruction. And I. I show a slide of the four horsemen of the Apocalypse in class, and my students kind of love it because they're. The horsemen, have little eyes of fire. But there are. I think there's four dynamics. And they're gonna. Because I teach the youth, they all start with ease, so that they're easy to remember. But the first is expectations. And there's just so many expectations that our culture puts on us, that our parents put on us, that we put on ourselves. I mean, I had a student who went through this process. She was an mba, and she just kept on the whole process kept on showing her that she should be a Roomba teacher. And every single time the process showed her she should be a Roomba teacher. I remember her saying, the first time she went through the process, I remember her saying, how does it know I should be a Roomba teacher? I said, well, you did the work, and the process is designed to help you figure out the truth. And she said, but I can't be a Roomba teacher. And I said, okay, well, let's do the process again. Let's do this test again and that test again. Let's see if that. If it. I mean, I knew full well what was going to happen. It comes out Roomba teacher again. And like, the third time it happened, she said, I just can't be a Roomba teacher. And she said, because I said, why not? And she said, because I have an mba. And I said, I was not aware of the legislation in the state of New York that made it illegal for MBAs to become Roomba teachers, you know. And she laughed and she said, I can't do this because what will my parents say? And I got it. And she became a good consultant. I'll see her in a few years. I think they do come back. But I do think that these expectations we have about what we should and shouldn't do are real. And that is one of the main reasons. The other is expedience. I mean, a lot of times we have a dream of a life, we have purpose and it's just easier not to do it because we're gonna piss off fewer people. We're gonna. And or let's say we have a dream of a life that involves having high scope, but we live in the suburbs and it's very easy for the kids to go to work, go to school in the suburbs. Or it's just easier not to have that fight with your mother in law again. Or it's just easier not to ask your husband for something you don't want to ask, whatever it is. But expedience and just taking the path of least resistance is a devilish little thing. Except for that it's not little. And then the third E is events. And that is when just life happens. There's a layoff or you get sick or a kid has special needs or whatever it is. And you just drift away from your values. And more than anything, you're drift away from the feeling that you can actually live your values values. Because circumstances are hard. And the problem is that what ends up happening then is they become habits are not living our values becomes a habit. And then the final one is very real and it's economic security. And to sum up all of behavioral economics in one sentence is that we tend to make decisions based on cold hard cash, even if cold hard cash doesn't matter to us. And that's why we can be 30 or 40 years old and say, I made all these decisions because it was the right one financially, I didn't really care anyway. I mean, that's like the day, the great talking head song, you know, you wake up and you ask yourself, what is this beautiful house? What is this beautiful car? Oh my God, what have I done? And but sometimes, you know, there's mortgages and there's vacations and there's all this stuff that require us to do that we think require us to live a certain way. And we're stunned when that's us. We're stunned by people who make a lot of decisions that then involve them having less and we think, how did they wrap their head around that? And it was just that they were. They just. They were clear with their values and how much money mattered. But if money matters the most, it's going to keep driving things. And that's a perfectly fine value to have if you're not hurting anybody. But you should be clear that that's what your value is.
- [38:13]
A
So of all the work over the years, everything you put into the book, all the data, what's really popped for you? What's been the most interesting? Where you've had a wow.
- [38:22]
B
There's so much data that is a wow for me. And I think the biggest wow, and it's kind of a little painful wow is just how many people who on the outside look happy and fulfilled and very productive are suffering on some level. I mean, I can't tell you the number of times I've talked about this. And people who, from the outside look like massive successes have come up and whispered to me, can I take your class? How can I take your class? I mean, vice chairman of banks have come up to me after I've spoken to their people and they've said, I think I really need to do your class or I really need to read your book. And I think that all of us have this voice. And I think that what's popped for me is that that just is truer and truer. And I think the world's very confusing right now, and what's coming is very confusing to people. And so this feeling like, will I ever be able to live the life that I want? Feels very hard. And so that's one thing that I. I didn't intend my timing to be the timing it was. I didn't have any kind of design around my timing. I wrote the book when the book seemed ready to be written. But the timing right now with the kind of fraught feeling in the world, makes me realize that this is kind of a universal yearning.
- [39:40]
A
I'll close you. I think it's a proverb, essentially says, a dream fulfilled is the tree of life.
- [39:47]
B
The first part of it says that hope deferred makes the heart sick. And I think that that's the. Oh. Feeling that so many people have, which is that there's some kind of hope in their heart. And maybe they don't even have words to know what the hope is. Okay, they don't know what that actually is, but they know they're deferring something. And I remember when I found out that I had to go on sabbatical when my Husband got sick and I, of course I was going to go on sabbatical. I understood 100 that this, as he went into hospice, that I was going to. That everything was going to stop. And I remember that night after he went to bed, I was washing the dishes and I just stood. I was crying for a lot of reasons. And of course I was crying most because we were out of options and that this inevitable thing that we had so feared was going to come to pass. And I was weeping for myself. I mean, I'm only human. I, you know, I cried too, for my hope being deferred. You know, the dream of the life I had with him and the life we were going to have was never going to happen. The career that I wanted and I was on the precipice of achieving at that point was not going to happen. And when hope is deferred, you actually can feel physical pain. It makes the heart ache. But when we do have this opportunity to live into our full dream of a life, it is the tree of life because it grows and it grows and our heart grows and our branches spread. And, you know, joy is a contagion in all the right ways. When we feel it, we give it away. No one keeps joy to themselves. So the idea to get people from that sort of crying over the sink to the sort of tree of life is. Is my purpose.
- [41:24]
A
Beautifully said. I know we covered a lot today. In addition, I'll hold up the book. Everyone should go buy it. Becoming you. We'll link to the test. Everyone must take the test. Is there anything we didn't cover that you want to cover or tell people about what you're up to, where they can find you online?
- [41:41]
B
Before we wrap, I will say that one thing. We talked a lot about values. I do think aptitudes really matter as well. Just put in three cheers for knowing what you're really good at and how the world experiences you. That's part of the work of this. I would say that I teach becoming you in New York a couple of times a year. It's a three day and you can find me all over online. I've got Instagram and LinkedIn and I love to hear from people and I do write back and the last thing they'll say is that while I cannot touch the hem of your skirt, I do have my own podcast as well. So cold will come you.
- [42:10]
A
Awesome. Well, Susie, thank you so much for all that you do well.
- [42:13]
B
Thank you for having me on.
- [42:16]
A
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B
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