What Should You Do With Your Life? | Suzy Welch

23:23Authenticity would be another word for this. How much do you want to let your freak flag fly? How much do you want to stand out? How much do you feel? You know, like by definition, whenever I have an artist going through the Becoming You process, whenever there's an artist going through it, I always think, oh, here's going to be somebody whose voice is going to be number one or number two. And it's almost invariably number one or number two. Here's the thing. One of my tools measures how much you have of a value. And the tool also measures how much you're expressing it, living it. And I can't tell you how often I get young women, typically women of color, very unfortunately, who have voice as a value of number one or number two.

23:56but how much they're living it, the variance between how much they have it and how much they're living it can be up to 98, 99%. Okay. Then comes the value, a very controversial value whenever I talk about it of what I call eudaimonia. That's Greek for flourishing. It's self-care. It's pleasure. It's leisure. In some people it presents as sex. It's how much you want to feel good. I come from a generation where eudaimonia was what you got when you did everything else, But we are entering a different time where many of my students in some classes, more than 60 % of them have eudaimonia as their number one value.

24:33They do not want to postpone joy. They don't want to postpone feeling good. You can't blame them given what they've seen in this world. And then the final value that we measure for that I think is part of my values inventory and I think is lacking in other values inventories to nerd out on you is the value of place where you want to live. You've seen many people whose lives have been driven by just saying, look, I'm not leaving Milwaukee. But there's other people who are like, I don't care where I live. I'll go wherever. I want to be a nomad. I want to try every place. I don't really care. And how strongly you feel about where you live is actually a value.

25:05Because why? Because it can drive your actions and your decisions in a way. And so those are the 15 values. And it's often incredibly transformative for people to do a couple of things. One is to have a language to talk about what really matters to them. to know what the actual ranking of these values is for them. We have to do behavioral questions to get to that because of course there's a lot of noise in our head. I had to change it to behavioral questions, the test, because I used to see students go through all the exercises and then family centrism would be down at like number 11 or 12 and you would see them kind of cringe and move it, physically move it up because they were thinking about their mother's face.

25:39And then it's very, very important for us to find out how closely we're living with each one of those values. You know, what's our variance on each one? This is all data that we need to know if we want to figure out what our purpose is. And you said there's a place where we can go to test this? Yes, you can. You could take it. I created this test. For a long time, I tried to do this test in class, literally with like a Qualtrics survey and so forth. And I used to stand up in front of my class with an abacus. We have actually a picture of me like moving the abacus of beads around. And finally, I was talking to my PhD thesis advisor about this and I was, I think the technical term was I was bitching and moaning about how I couldn't stand that this tool did not exist.

26:18He's a British guy in his very plummy British accent said to me, he said, why don't you go fucking do it, Susie? And I said to him, what, make the values inventory in the test? And he said, I'm sick of hearing you complain about it. This inventory does not exist. You have thousands of pieces of evidence to prove it should exist. I mean, I was doing it literally. Students were taking it like on a simple computer form. He said, you got to go make the tool. And I did. I mean, I committed a couple of years of my life to making it. Now it's fully out there. It's called the values bridge. and you can just go online and type in the values bridge and becoming you and you can take the test.

26:50I think it's fascinating. And honestly, I don't think I've ever really thought about it. I mean, as listeners have heard me say many times, I have a tattoo on my left wrist that reminds me of the Buddhist goal of benefiting all beings. And so I do try to organize my life around that principle. Okay. I would bet then if that's true, it'd be interesting to see where that showed up in the test. I mean, I think it's probably radius, which is that value of wanting to change the world that often shows up as a care for all humanity, which I think is what you're saying, or could show up as non-city. Yeah.

27:25The test would tell you they're related. I've got to believe it's your top, probably one of your top values. Yeah. Well, I don't think it was for most of my life. I've been trying to steer the ship in that direction. And I noticed when I'm in that mode, a lot of the bullshit slides away and I'm not perseverating on things that make me miserable. I'm going to lovingly and gently push back for a moment and say, I actually think our values are very stable. And my guess is that it was always a value of yours, probably from when you were a young boy and you sublimated it and crushed it and denied it.

27:59And finally, when you started living it, you felt authentic. And so then you said, okay, now I'm going to let it steer the ship because I should have been letting it steer the ship my whole life long. That's my theory. It's really interesting. I was at yesterday, I was at a New York Times event in Brooklyn. They had all these folks from the wellness world at this event. And one of them was this guy who's never been on the show. I don't know why. Terry Real. He's a quite a well-known couples counselor. I don't know if that would be his preferred branding. But anyway, that's what I think of him as.

28:29And he was on stage saying something that may sound like a digression, and I apologize if it is. But he was saying that one of the biggest problems in the couples he works with is that heterosexual women often justifiably want of heterosexual men a level of open heartedness that heterosexual men are not trained to exhibit or to have because people like me with my chromosomal structure and maybe this is a little bit better now but certainly when I was growing up in the 70s and 80s caring was not a thing you were trained to value, to make a operating principle of your life, at least not in the culture that I was imbibing.

29:09So maybe it was latent, crushed by what some people call toxic masculinity. And later in my life, I've been able to nurture it to the best of my ability. That's good. I am doing a lot of couples work because what happens is when people take the test, there's a place where you can check a box. And if somebody else takes the test, e.g. a partner, your values come up right along next to each other. And it shows you the level of harmony or conflict your values have. And the other thing is that you get this number at the end that tells you how far or how close you are to living your values. When I was first testing this tool, one of my sneaky things to do would be to invite over my colleagues from the management and organizations department at NYU.

29:51And I'd tell them it was a dinner party and I'd invite all my colleagues and their spouses. And then at the end, I'd say, surprise, let's try my new psychometric tool. And they'd be, oh God, Susie, but they took it. They were good sports. and then I had to stop doing it because what would happen is one member of the partnership would get a variance at the end of like 7%. You're living very close to your values. You're living an authentic life and the other member of the couple would get like a 98 % variance and there'd be this sort of stunt silence. They knew exactly what was going on and one time this happened and the wife was very close to her authenticity in this case and the husband was very far away from it and there was this long pause in which I thought to myself, never do this again.

30:32you idiot. But anyway, in that moment, the husband said, yes, that is correct. We are living Mary's dream of a life. You know, what goes wrong in couples? In my opinion, look, there's a lot of different ways to think about this and talk about it. But one is it when there's just a complete values disconnect, which often happens for all the reasons you described, that there's a lot of things in cultures that makes us disconnect from our own values, but also not understand our partner's values.

31:01Coming up, Susie talks about aptitudes, how you are wired and how other people experience your personality, tools for envisioning your desired future, her argument that knowing your passion is not enough, and much more.

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31:59Print postage on demand 24-7 and schedule pickups from your office or home. Save up to 90 % with automated rate shopping. That's why over 1 million small businesses trust Stamps.com. Go to Stamps.com and use code PODCAST to try Stamps.com risk-free for 60 days. just to reset for us we're working through the three parts of the becoming you protocol the first part is values let's move to the second part so the second part is aptitudes what do you mean by aptitudes there's two different ways i define aptitudes this is your cognitive wiring social scientists would agree there's eight big cognitive wires is our brains wired to be generalists or specialists?

32:43Are we brainstormers or what's politely called idea contributors, which are people who don't spew ideas? Are we future focusers or present focusers? And this is good to know. There's no right or wrong. There's just right or wrong for your job. And yet we often don't know this data about ourselves at all. But I can't tell you the number of times people come to me in misery and the fix is quite easy because they're a specialist in a generalist job or they're in a job that demands a constant production of ideas. They're not brainstormers. They have other gifts. So the first part of this work is to get a grip.

33:14And it's very easy to test for this. Get a grip on where you are with the eight big cognitive aptitudes. Where it gets complicated, and it gets very complicated, is that another part of your aptitude profile is your personality. Because what kind of job you have, and typically our purpose sort of shows up in our job, or we would like it to because this is what we do most of the day. You could be really good in your job because of your personality, or you could be really bad at your job because of your personality. And I consider personality traits, some of them, aptitudes. And so what we do as part of the Becoming You process is we test, because a lot of people, everybody tells you what their personality is.

33:50Oh, I'm a good listener. I'm compassionate. I'm very kind. I'm funny, right? And that's maybe true, maybe, but actually your personality is how the world experiences you. And this is an incredibly hard message for my students to hear. I think my older students, when I'm teaching this in workshops and I've got somebody who's 50 or 60, they're like, yep, because you spend your whole life learning how the world experiences you. And, you know, I am like a poster child for this because when I first time I taught Becoming You in which a process in which people go through 360 feedback, I thought, you know, I'm going to go and take it along with my students.

34:24I'm going to find out how the world experiences me, which must be simply fabulous because I am fabulous in every possible way. And so I went through the 360 feedback. Now, this was a very complicated period in my life. When I did this, My husband had just died and I was selling our house and moving into a new house and things were chaotic, to put it mildly, because when you lose somebody, things are generally chaotic. But I thought everybody around me understands that I am the I at the center of the hurricane. I got this and everybody understands that it looks chaotic, but Susie is calm. And then I got back my 360 feedback and no, I found out that people experienced me as the hurricane.

35:00and I had to come to terms with the fact that everything I was telling myself about how the world was experiencing me was a lie I was telling myself. If I wanted to be the person I thought I was, I had to change. I'm happy to say I've downgraded myself to a tropical storm. I have. And the reason I know is I am constantly and trying to understand how I'm being experienced, which is important because I have mixing with people in the world all the time. And it's important for me as a teacher to know how I'm being experienced. So aptitudes are how your brain's wired and how your personality is being experienced by the world.

35:35Again, in pursuit of understanding yourself well enough, standing still so that you can figure out what's the right direction to go in when you start running again. We never do it. We never figure out who we are when we're standing still. I mean, maybe very enlightened folks like you do, but most people do not figure out who they are standing still until they have to, like a crisis happens. You mentioned 360 feedback. Just want to make sure everybody knows what that is. Some people listening may have heard me talk about my own 360 reviews, but the way it works is generally in a corporate setting.

36:09It's an anonymous survey of your bosses, peers, and direct reports to get a panoramic sense of your strengths and weaknesses. You may not know this, Susie, but I went through a 360 review back in 2008 that included people from both of my places of employment at that time, a startup that I had co-founded and ABC News. And then also my wife, my brother, and two of my meditation teachers. And the results were not great. And then went back through another 360 three years later and it was really quite different. Probably due for another one. All right. You know what I want to just say here is that the problem is that you can't get 360 out in the world and take it or leave it.

36:45But I got so mad about that, that I created a cheap little tool for people to administer their own 360. Because why should 360 be only for people who work at IBM and fancy companies? So pie360.com, very cheap. Cheap as a cup of coffee. Pie 360? P-I-E. It's called that because it tests how people, it takes five minutes to do for your raters. It asks them, how does this person get along with people? What's the quality of this person's ideas? And how well do they get things done? Execution. And it takes five minutes, very cheap. And you can find out with up to 40 people how the world experiences you.

37:18I got mad because I'd be out in the world talking about this process. And people say, yeah, it's great. I don't work at IBM. I can't get 360 feedback. What am I supposed to do? Go up to everybody. And ask them how they experienced me. And I said, look, there's got to be a tool that does this. And there wasn't. And I'm lucky I've got a lab and I was able to create the tool. Very cool. Yeah. Thanks. Proud of it. You've talked about several types of tests. We talked about the values bridge. Just under the aptitudes aegis, we talked about 360. But you also mentioned that we may want to test our aptitudes and our personality.

37:50I think Pi 360 tests your personality. There's another test that I did not develop. It's a very solid test. It's called YouScience, Y-O-U, science. You can find it at YouScience.com. It's a little pricey. I think it's$40. All my students take it. It will just give you an absolute read on all of your cognitive aptitudes. It's money well spent. I have no skin in the game with it whatsoever, but it's a terrific test, and it tests your aptitudes. You know, my book is set up so that you don't have to take any of these tests, right? Because not everyone can take tests, and it walks you through exercises you could just do with a pen and paper to figure out these things.

38:21If it all sounds like it's just too expensive and too complicated, I try to simple it down. because not everyone can do it. Not everyone likes to take tests. Look, you can get this information with guided exercises. Can you just walk us through one of those exercises? Well, for aptitudes or for values, I can do either one. Aptitudes. Okay, so for aptitudes, well, you can do a use science without the actual$30 or$40 test, although I highly recommend it because what you can do is just understand, for instance, that there are some people, I mean, all eight aptitudes are described. And for instance, one that I mentioned, which is really important to know about your brain is whether or not you're a generalist who likes to know a little bit about everything and sort of just wants to know what they need to know and kind of wants to know a fact about everything versus a specialist who is a person who wants to bore down deeply into topics and sort of wants to research.

39:10And I have a son who's a specialist and he's a classic specialist and, you know, he loves music and he knows absolutely every single thing about his type of music that he loves. Every artist that's ever been in it buys vinyl albums. And, you know, when you go out to dinner with him, and you start saying like, wow, did you just hear about the new Pope? He may not know about it. Okay. I mean, the generalists and specialists, I think when you read the descriptions of each one of the cognitive aptitudes, most people can with a description pretty easily say, oh my God, this explains it. I'm 100 % a sequential thinker, not a process supporter.

39:42You say, oh yeah, yeah, no wonder that job was so hard for me. The analogy I like is that when you sign your name with your dominant hand. It feels very natural. You could do it all day long, easy and fun. But if you put that pen in your non-dominant hand, you would eventually with practice be able to sign your name. It would never be natural. It would never be fun. It would never look exactly right. And when we're thinking about what we want to do with our lives, we can use the dominant hand of our brains or the non-dominant hand of our brain. And my thesis is that it's usually a lot more comfortable, enjoyable and successful, just emotionally, to be working in concert with your aptitudes rather than against them.

40:23Yeah, not cutting against the grain. Is there more to say about aptitudes before we move on to EVI, economically viable interests? I mean, I would just say this about aptitudes, which is sometimes you end up doing work for many more years and sometimes for your whole life long that is not an aptitude. It does not fit with your personality. It's not what fit with the way your brain is wired and you do it because of expedience or you do it because of expectations, it can cause a great deal of discomfort and self-doubt. And it's actually a pretty easy fix. You know, the data is there for us to get.

40:58And it's just, I mean, so many people are pushed into banking or consulting and they're like, I wanted to be an artist and they're wired to be artists. And yet we do this to ourselves. And it's as old as time. The difference now is there's ways to test and to have a language than to say, look, I'm a specialist. I shouldn't be doing this work. I'm an inductive reasoner. I shouldn't be doing this work. It's enormously powerful. Okay. So the third area to think about as we're considering what we should be doing with our lives is economically viable interests, a little bit self-explanatory, but can you explain it nonetheless?

41:31Yeah. Look, you got to work. Most people have got to work. Okay. And so you got to then pick where you're going to work. And what ends up happening in life is our aperture gets smaller and smaller about what kind of work even exists. And there's great research that shows that when kids are coming out of high school, they're aware of seven jobs on average, okay? I mean, not kids in New York City, say, or LA, they sort of seem or have been told about more jobs, but most kids coming out of high school in America today know about seven jobs, two of which their parents hold. And then the rest they sort of see, fireman, teacher, whatever.

42:04You would think that that number would really bump up if and when kids went to college. And what ends up happening is they go to college, but then group thing sets in and people start saying the jobs are in tech or the jobs are in hospitality. And it doesn't really get much bigger. In college, the research shows that young people know between nine and 11 jobs. And then as time goes on, once people are in their 30s, the same research would show you that people are down to three or four viable jobs for themselves. Whereas the truth of the matter is there's 135 industries. There's 12 identified megatrends.

42:38These are sort of the industries coming around the bend. When I first started teaching Becoming You, AI wasn't even a mega trend. And here it is. And then like the second year, AI was a mega trend and then it was everything. So the idea is to make sure we haven't shut our aperture prematurely or for no reason and to understand how big the economy is and how many different types of jobs there are and how many different kinds of work there are. And to get ourselves, if we happen to be on a conveyor belt towards a certain kind of career, to understand that we can limit ourselves too much. But for other people, there are certain kinds of work that call them intellectually or emotionally, but it has to be able to pay you according to what your value around affluence is.

43:16So it's both understanding how big the economy is and also listening to yourself about what is calling you. Yeah, I mean, it seems there's a Venn diagram here of, you know, what do I care about? What am I good at? And what am I like? And what kind of work is available? Yes, there is a Venn diagram. And it's exactly what you do. We march through it. We do all the excavation work of it. The book does that. I do that in class. And it's kind of an amazing, cathartic experience. I mean, most people really enjoy it, you know, but the class does have the nickname, the class where everyone cries. Sometimes I wonder if somebody's not, if I don't have a class where people are crying, I'm like, what am I doing wrong here?

43:52I mean, this can really stir up a lot of emotions. Yeah. Well, it is a huge question. What should you do with your life? Yeah. What about this idea of, back in 2005, I think I was asked by my alma mater to give a commencement speech and I think I gave shitty advice. I said, you know, like follow your passion, figure out what you love. No, no, no, no, no. Really? Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad. Bad advice, right? Yeah, it is shitty advice. Yeah. Yeah. Bad, bad, shitty advice. Terrible. And I've had many guests who have pointed that out to me. So look, what's the counter argument against that? What's the right advice?

44:22Look, if you're good at your passion, do it. Okay. But the problem is a lot of people like, okay, look, the simplest thing. I want to be a rock star. That's like, I'm so passionate about music. You're just not good at it. And so that's why I've got a Venn diagram. I mean, your values often surface or your interest often surface what your passion is, but that's why we got aptitudes in there. You got to be able to do it. Otherwise, you're setting yourself up to fail, really. Now, look, I know a guy. He went to college and he wanted nothing more to be a TV writer. Okay. Wanted to be a TV writer, went to Hollywood right after college, obsessed, right?

44:55It's been 15 years now. He's not sold a single script. He has all these odd jobs. He works at The Gap. He blew up balloons in the mall. He's chasing his passion. And the world has told him over and over again, like what you are passionate about, the world does not want to receive. Now, luckily, his value of the affluence is very low. He just doesn't care about money. And so he may continue chasing his passion, but he's not happy. He's now having a lot of self-doubt. He's sort of in a crisis. And it's like I have gently said to him, I think the aptitude part is the problem here. You know, I always say I'm not the AOT police.

45:31I'm not coming to get you if you don't live by your values, aptitude, and economically viable interests. I'm just telling you that this is one way to think about how to live that might get you to your purpose, which feels, again, exquisitely alive with less torment. What I would say to graduates, and I'm actually giving a graduation speech coming up, is you should know your passions, but it's not enough. Well, I'm pretty strongly inclined to agree with you. And if I could go back to 2005, 20 years ago, I wouldn't say that shit again.

46:05I do want to go back to a few points that we discussed earlier. One of them is this is not just for people who are going to business school and are in their 20s. This is. No, I mean, oh, my gosh, any age. There's not a demographic. I haven't done this, but it's interesting. I have a group of folks who really love this process who are moms, because they're working mothers generally. you're working parents, but the ones that I find are moms who are like, okay, like I gave up this piece of myself because I am going through that process. I'm in that period of my life where my kids need all of me and my work needs all of me and I can't figure out who I am or what I should be doing.

46:39So, I mean, I think that I've gone through this process with many women in their late thirties, early forties, even to the early fifties who are struggling with what is it that I really should be doing? Cause each day they get up and they kind of relitigate what they're going to be doing. So that's a big demographic for becoming you. I had for some reason into my workshops, I get a lot of men in their 40s. I think 40 is sort of when they're like, is this all there is? And so for some reason, architects, product managers, men in their 40s show up and do the workshop and say, yep, okay, it has to be a reset here.

47:11Sometimes people love this, love going through this protocol, as you call it, I'm going to steal that word, who are just retired. And they go, okay, I'm going into my third half, if you will. I don't want to blow it. What are my values? What are my aptitudes? What am I interested in? And they use it in a totally different way. They're not looking for paid work, but they're looking for what to do next. A lot of times my students who are in their twenties and early thirties use it. And then two years later, they come back to me and they say, okay, I tried that and onto the next thing, you know, or my favorite email subject line being you told me so their AOT analysis had told them to do one thing and they did something else.

47:43And then a couple of years later, they come back and say, okay, let's talk about it again. Yeah, I was having dinner last night with a new friend of mine who's 55 and trying to figure out what to do. He did a bunch of stuff in his career, and he doesn't feel he's ever really found his area of transcendence and is feeling a little bit like he's running out of time. I'm literally going to send him this book after this conversation. Yes. I think that I get a lot of people who present exactly as he does. And it sort of happens at 55. And in fact, often 60 is the number. And people like this, it's real.

48:17Like the clock is now ticking. I hear it. I may have 30 more years, but I don't want to waste them. Yeah, I would get it. I have had whole workshops filled with people in their 50s and 60s. I also have a lot of friends who are, you know, in their 70s and 80s who just as you described, you've retired. And it's potentially a huge crisis for people because these were many of my friends who were the top executives at ABC News when I was a plankton at the organization and are trying to figure out, like, what do you do with your life at this point? It can really mess people up. It really can. It can.

48:47And I've seen them come back once they get the language of values, because it's sort of like the scales fall from their eyes and say, oh my God, all along, this was about radius or all along, this was about cosmos or agency. And I just didn't get it. But now I can. It's like Wittgenstein said, and I don't go around quoting German philosophers very often. often. In fact, never. But I quote this one because it really is on point, which is that the limits of my language are the limits of my world. As soon as we get words for it, then our world can start to write itself. I like that. You have an expression that I think was coined not by Wittgenstein or any other German philosopher that I think was coined by you.

49:31Whoever said it, I'd love to hear your thoughts on it. People are incredibly complicated and incredibly simple at the same time. So yes, I said it. This non-German philosopher over here said it. Look, one time I was giving a speech about becoming you. And afterwards, I stayed and answered questions for people who didn't get their questions answered. And there was this one couple, they looked very grim. And I was like, oh, SpaghettiOs, what did I say? And they kept on moving themselves to the back of the line. They wanted to be last. And finally, after an hour of sort of talking to people individually, I was alone with them in the conference hall.

50:01And they He said, look, do you think people are good or bad? I was really exhausted. And I said to him, look, well, I was a reporter at the Miami Herald covering crime for four years. You know, I've seen some stuff, but I think people are generally good. And, you know, I think the center will hold. And I sort of told them a little bit about what I believed. And they said, well, we were just wondering where you were coming from because you're asking us to go on this journey with you. And I thought, oh, yeah, I think I better tell people where I'm coming from. And so what you just quoted was one of the premises or one of my sort of fundamental beliefs, which is that you can't make a blanket statement about human nature, that people are incredibly simple.

50:33They do want to feel safe. Everyone wants to feel loved. Everyone wants to feel heard. But then people can be just absolute, as I love to call them, messy mess balls. People are just complete messy mess balls, me included. And we're complicated. And becoming you is in one way, just a way to try to unmess the messiness of it all so that we can do something. Because you can't throw in the towel and say, we're all simple and we're all complicated. Let's just figure out a way to get as close to living authentically as we can. Well said.

51:04Coming up, Susie talks about the role of relationships, especially as it pertains to finding your purpose. And she walks us through one of her many, many exercises that help us figure out what we're all about and what we should be doing.

51:24Still waiting in line? Again?

51:53Taxes and fees apply. Another thing I want to double click on here is, and this is related to 360 feedback, but I think is a universally important and overarching. And you spend quite a bit of time on it. And I'd love to hear you say a little bit more about it here, which is just the role of relationships generally, as it relates to our purpose and the way we're what we're going to do with our lives. Yeah. A lot of people who go through becoming you are in relationship. And what typically happens is they go through becoming you. And the next time I see them, they're showing up, either going through a workshop or whatever with the person they're in relationship with.

52:26Because once you know your values, you want to talk about them with the person you're in relationship with. But if it's not a partner, you know, it can be a boss. It could be a business partner. It can be a child. And one of the reasons I like people doing the process in group is because they need to have a language. And one of the proudest moments of my entire career, you know, like, sorry for the cringe year, but one of my proudest moments was when a woman in her 60s came to one of my workshops and she wrote me afterwards and she said, I went home and I had the first conversation with my adult children in about 15 years because we finally, I could talk to them about values in a language that didn't make us all angry at each other.

53:02So that having been said, I had been in relationship my entire life. I got married very, very young. Then I got divorced, my first divorce, and then I met my husband. I had four children at that time, so I was never really ever alone. And then I met my second husband and we had a long and happy marriage until he passed away in 2020. So for the last five and a half years, I've not been in any relationship. It's very, very interesting to take the world on where you can actually, you know, for the first time, live my values and express my values without having to negotiate my values. And so I've seen both sides of the coin and I have deep appreciation for how much negotiating I did around my values all the previous, you know, 60 years of my life when I was either in a relationship.

53:42My kids are grown now. They know the language. We talk about this all the time. But to not to just live your values kind of outside of relationship is kind of an interesting experience. But the vast majority of times when I'm doing this, it's people who are talking about their values vis-a-vis somebody else's values. Yeah, I mean, I think that's all really true and important. And whatever you do with your life, you're going to need good relationships at every level in your life, including with your colleagues and your bosses and people who work for you, peers, your direct reports, your superiors, your friends.

54:15Like the relationships are the lifeblood of the human animal. And so we need to pay attention to it. I agree with you, although the sort of rise of tech has proven to us something that was never previously true in the history of humanity, which is you can be successful and be bad at people. You know, that's what we've learned. I mean, up until very recent times, if you just were terrible at the people part, it actually hurt you. The only people who ever got away with that before the rise of the technocrati were artists. Pablo Picasso was just a total jerk kind of thing. And so I would say that my theory that I teach my management students is that three things drive success long-term, the quality of your relationships, like you just said, but also I think your ideas, you have to have a couple of good ideas or you have to be able to have the openness of your heart and mind to shepherd other people's ideas or to support them or to tease them out.

55:07So you have to have something around your brain being engaged in the game. And then finally, the ability to get things done, execute, as I say. But yeah, people matter. Although, you know, when I was in business school back in graduating in 88, you know, your relationships, your EQ really mattered. And then suddenly the world went to technology and we saw the rise of the sort of uber mogul who could just be an utter and complete asshole and still be wildly successful. You sometimes hear talk and sometimes that talk is coming from me, although I don't really know, but at least you hear the theory floated that going forward in the era of AI, EQ or emotional intelligence will become more important.

55:49It may not apply to Elon Musk, but for most of us, lots of jobs will become commodified and automated. So those of us who remain in the workplace are going to need to have very human skills. Does that land for you? I hope it's true. I hope it's true. I don't know if it is. I mean, I think it's kind of a little wishful thinking. Maybe. I hope it's true. I mean, maybe what happens with AI is that at a certain point, we just get tired of talking to a machine. And we just remember that the funnest, best thing is just being with people. Like, what replaces it? I, the other day, went up to Maine to visit with my grandchildren.

56:27And I got out of the car and started walking towards the house. And one of my grandchildren ran out. And she squeezed my legs. My grandma name is Kins. And she screamed, Kins. And I honestly, physically, physically felt like this like geyser of joy and love come up into my chest. And maybe we got to just remember that no computer is ever going to give us that feeling. I mean, it's just never going to do it. And that maybe we come to our senses and remember that. We're almost done here. But before we finish, we have enough time to go back to some of these exercises that you developed and use in the class and use in the book.

57:02Maybe let's pick one. And these are designed to help us probe, you know, one of the thorniest areas here, because we've been talking about values, aptitudes and economically viable interests. But we we spent most of our time on values, I think, for very good reason, because it's really important and quite difficult. And so maybe let's pick from this menu of exercises. They have names like six squared or whose life or alpha omega or exploring fears. Can we pick one or two of these and walk through them? Yeah, let's do six squared to start. One of my favorite exercises, what happens in class is I tell my students about the six-word memoir that was originated by Ernest Hemingway when he was challenged that you couldn't write a novel in six words.

57:41And he said you can, and he typed out, for sale, baby shoes, never worn. You fast forward to 2008 and Smith Magazine and Twitter, brand new at the time got together and they challenged the internet to write the story of their lives in six words. It was the original breaking of the internet, and they just got hundreds of thousands of responses. And people sort of had to think about their life to date and write the six-word summary of it, the title of their memoir, if you will, for their life to date. And so we do that in class, but the squared part of it is, and we do that as part of the Becoming You process, you sum up your life to date.

58:15And then I ask my students to go through an exercise, a little bit of a kind of a meditation like exercise, except for sort of clearing your head. I mean, I asked them to get very quiet and very still and to imagine their lives in 25 years from that date, 25 years hence, if you will, as if everything worked out, as if it was the life they'd always wanted, that nobody had edited it, that they had achieved what they wanted, how they wanted, with whom they wanted. and to picture that life up close, sort of what a day would feel like and picture it from up between 10 ,000 people what that life looked like.

58:47And after I let them kind of soak in that for a few minutes of just living in and visualizing that life, that life, their ideal life, 25 years hence, to stop and to imagine their life from today to that day and write the title of that memoir in six words. And the stunning moment comes, you know, not infrequently without tears, where you compare the first memoir to the second memoir title. And you see the distance of the journey between the two. This tends to very powerfully pop, if you will, values, because you'll sort of see a life that was a kind of a life of living expectations and expedience for the first part of their life.

59:28And then they'll paint a small portrait of their life. And you'll see, you know, was it eudaimonia that the new life has or an ability to be with family? or is there something entrepreneurial about it or is there some sort of new closeness and belonging? When you're forced to bring this down to just six words, it is stunning. It is absolutely impels values to come right to the surface. People go right there. But it's the process of doing these two steps. That's actually how I start the whole Becoming You Processing class. People are really caught up by how, oftentimes how different the two memoir titles are.

1:00:04And again, the two steps are, start by thinking about your life to date. What are the six words that would describe it? And then envision 25 years from now, what do you want things to look like? Write that six word memoir, compare the two, reflect. Yes, exactly. Reflect deeply. You know, what's changed? What's different? What did you do that you haven't done so far? What unlived dream? What unrealized want? What unfixed relationship, one untold story. For many people who go through this process, it's the first time that there's ever been somebody standing over them saying, imagine the life you want, don't edit yourself.

1:00:44Because the first thing we do when we start imagining that life is we just start editing away. I mean, this is why I always say it's better to be the author of your life than the editor. There's just so many editors around us. The world will edit us soon enough. Don't edit yourself. And I'm just saying it, look, eventually becoming you edits a lot of things because it says, what's what are your aptitudes and what are your interests? It asks you to edit some stuff. But like, let's start first by figuring out what it is. You know, what is your heart's desire? Susie, I ask two questions at the end of every episode.

1:01:13One, the first question sometimes has really long answers and sometimes very short answers. Is there anything you were hoping to get to that we haven't yet gotten to? No, I like what we got to. Thank you. Great. Me too. Second question is, Can you just remind everybody of the name of your book and any other resources you've put out into the world, including remind us again about some of these tests that you either created or recommend? I'd love to. All right. So the book is called Becoming You, The Proven Method for Crafting Your Authentic Life. And the tools that I talked about, one is called The Values Bridge.

1:01:47You can just find it by thevaluesbridge.com. The other is Pi360. You can go to pi360feedback.com. But all of these resources are on my website, suzywelch.com. try them out. There's free versions of everything and poke around and see what works for you. Susie, thank you very much for doing this. Really appreciate it. It's my pleasure. Thanks so much. Thanks again to Susie. And again, we've got a guided meditation from Vinny Ferraro that is specifically designed to help you get still and quiet enough to try to figure out what your values actually are. We've got guided meditations now coming with all of our Monday, Wednesday episodes only for paid subscribers over on danharris.com.

1:02:29Paid subscribers also get weekly live video meditation and Q &A sessions every Tuesday at 4 Eastern. And the next one is tomorrow. It's a Vinnie Solo sesh. And finally, if you want to meditate with me in person, I've got a workshop coming up at the New York Insight Meditation Center on September 21st. And then another weekend-long thing at the Omega Institute, October 24th through 26th. links for both in the show notes. Finally, thank you so much to everybody who worked so hard on the show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People.

1:03:07Lauren Smith is our managing producer. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Kashmir is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

1:03:24Thank you.