Transcript of 661: Suzy Welch - How to Identify Your Core Values, Close the Authenticity Gap, and Live with Purpose

Welcome to the Learning Leader Show. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Go to learningleader. Com for show notes of this and all podcast episodes. Go to learningleader. Com. Now on to tonight's Featured Leader, the great Susie Welch, award-winning Professor at NYU Stern School of Business, three-time New York Times best-selling author. Latest book is called Becoming You. During our conversation, we dive deep into Susie's three-part Becoming You framework, which she calls your area of transcendence, where your values, aptitudes, and economically viable interests intersect. So good. We explore the critical work of values excavation, how to truly identify your aptitudes beyond what you think you're good at. We also have some really good banter about the difference between values values and virtues. You may find that funny, but also, I think, really good. Then we discuss why so many people lack self-awareness and how to develop it. Then Susie closes with some powerful advice about becoming the author of your own life. Ladies and gentlemen, please enjoy my conversation with Susie Welch. This episode is brought to you by Insight Insight Global. Insight Global is a staffing and professional services company dedicated to being the light to the world around them.

If you want to learn more about the CEO, Bert Bain, and Chief Revenue Officer, Sam Kaufman, check out episode 424. We had a fantastic conversation talking about my partnership with the great people at Insight Global. If you need to hire one person, hire a team of people, or transform your business through talent or technical services, Insight Global's team of 30,000 people around the world have the hustle and grit to deliver. Hiring can be tough, but hiring the right person can be magic. Visit insightglobal. Com/learningleader today to learn more. That's insightglobal. Com/learningleader. To start, I want to know, what can we learn from the drummer of the band Disturbed? When he was playing a cover of Simon and Garfunkel's song, The Sound of Silence.

No one ever specs that at a business school class. When I throw that video up of Disturbed, they're like, First of all, isn't Professor Welsh old? What is she doing listening to a heavy metal band. But what's happening in that clip, and the reason why I show it, that's a great video. They're doing a cover, Disturbed, is doing a cover of Sound of Silence. There's a moment where you can see the drummer almost levitate. He is so into the music. He's so into the moment. He's so into the crowd cheering and the almost sacredness of this experience that it appears his feet lift up off the ground. What What I use that video for is to say, Look, this life is available to you. This is what it looks like to be in your area of transcendence, as I call it. This is what it looks to be living your purpose. That guy's living his purpose. He is doing what he was born to do, and that feels exquisitely alive. And my whole life's work, my purpose, is to help people find that purpose for themselves. I'm like a purpose doula. My job is to get you to be the drummer in Disturbed, so to speak.

My dream is to someday have the drummer and disturbed come speak to my students, but I've written them, and as of yet, have no response. I don't think they're going to answer at this point.

I love this, Susie, and I think it's great. With that said, I'm an optimist. I love being around optimists. I love being around just your vibe your energy. It's been awesome from before we recorded it through now already. But one of the things is everybody wants to be a drummer. Everybody wants to be a rock star. Everybody wants to be those types of gigs. But it's not reality for everybody, though. That guy's good at drumming.

I mean, you're right. Everybody wants to be the drummer and disturb. But I want to be Céline Dion, and my voice is so bad that when I'm singing in church, people ask me to stop. And that's the nicest place you could be singing. People literally say, Susie, we can hear you. If you could, please pipe down. And so my whole methodology is about realism. And you got to know what your values are and you got to know what your interests are, but you better be good at it or forget it. Otherwise, it's a hobby. And so that guy is not a hobbyist as a drummer because he's great at It. And so you're right. I'm not telling people to go be drum at all. I have four children, so I'm not telling them to go be drummers. I'm telling them, Excavate three data sets, your values, your aptitudes, and your economically viable interests. And those two words, economically viable, are very important. That guy can be the drummer and disturbed because he can get paid for it. So I'm your ultimate realist here. I'm not woo-woo. My head explodes when people tell me they want to pursue their passion.

I have to hold it together and say, Yeah, are you good at it? Because otherwise, That's for the weekends.

I got you. Okay. So can I pose a question that you pose to others? And I want this to be about you, specifically. We're going to get into the work. Those three things you just talked about, we're going to go deep on those things in a second. But I want to start with you, Susie, because I'm fascinated by your story, and there's some parts about it that I just want to pull the thread on a little bit, okay? So there's this quote from a great poet in your book named Mary Oliver, and she says, Tell me what it is you plan to do with your one One Wild and precious life. Susie, how about you? What is it that you plan to do with your One Wild and Precious Life?

Well, I'm lucky because I'm doing it, Ryan. I am doing it at last. That's why I am such an apostle for it, because I am levitating. So what I plan to do with my Wild and Precious Life is to help people discover their purpose, because I think when you find your purpose, you have a new level of peace. I think we're at a stage in the evolution of humanity where each and every one of us needs to be waging peace because so many other people are waging war. So as individuals, if we can wage peace by being at peace with ourselves and what we're doing in our lives, we can take that angst out of, Am I doing the wrong thing? This is a B plus life. This is not the A I want. If we can do that, then I think this is the way I want to contribute. That's what I want to do right now with my life. That's what I can do, and that's what I've been told I'm okay at doing. So I hope I'm on the right track.

Well, I love reading about how this became a class at NYU and how you made this happen. Can you tell me that story? How did this becoming you become a thing at such a prestigious university?

Well, no one was more surprised than me. Let me preface it that way. I was I was coming out of a really terrible period in my life. I'd had a successful career. I was a best-selling author at both the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. I'd been a broadcast journalist of some note, and I'd had a really successful beginning of life. I'd written for Oprah and all sorts of things. And then life happens. There's just nothing we can do about that. And my husband got very, very sick, and I stopped everything to take care of him. The euphemism is you run out of options. That happened to us. And I stopped everything. I went to in BC, and I said, I need to sabbatical. They said, We'll see you on the other side. And I went home to take care of him. And he died March first, 2020. And my plan was to grieve. Even when you know it's coming, nothing prepares you. And I was running a small company at the time, a music startup with my son and grandson. We're running it together and COVID hit. And it was a double whammy.

I lost Jack, then the world collapsed upon itself. And I went up into the woods with my kids and their spouses and all of our dogs. And I thought, Well, I'm never leaving these woods. Life sucks. I don't know who I am without him. I can't imagine another life. And the world was feeling very fragile at that time. And it was dark. And then I was walking around the woods with my dogs all the time and figuring out who I was. Look, grief is crazy. Grief has no linear aspects to it. You just bump along with it. And then the world started to come back, and my kids left the woods. And then I was in the woods alone with my dogs to the point where the dogs were like, Please don't make us walk anymore. I was wearing everybody out with the walking in the woods. I didn't know what I was trying to do. I was trying to work through. And around that time, The Today Show asked me to come back. I had been on The Today Show for many years at that point. And I went back, and I loved being in the studio, and I loved being on air.

And I had this gigantic eureka, which was, Oh, my God, actually, the cure not walking in the woods. The cure is working. And I need to get my stuff together, and I need to get back to work because this walking in the woods is making me sadder and sadder. But I didn't think I wanted to go back to TV full-time. I had this burning desire to create something, and I knew what I wanted to create, which was a class about how to figure out what to do with your life. Because I had been building this methodology for years and years as a business journalist, as a careers reporter. I had two shows on CNBC. One was called Get to Work with Susie Welch, and the other was called Susie Welch, Fix My Life. I had been building this methodology. I described, one night, my kids did come to see me, and I described this methodology to my kids. I said, What do you think about me taking this to NYU to suggest it would be maybe a class in the business school? Because when I was in business school, I would have loved a class that helped me figure out what to do with my life.

My kids were like, Go do it, mom. I said, I don't know what to call it. My oldest son, who was 32 at the time, said to me, I think you should call it Becoming You. I put together some stuff Becoming You. Here's this methodology. I went to the dean's office at NYU. I knew him for my previous life because you're a business journalist, career journalist, you meet the dean of NYU. I went to go see him and I suggested, and he said, Well, we have nothing like this. I said, I know. That's why I'm here. He said, Well, have you ever taught anything before? I said, No, but I'm a writer and I've been on TV a lot. He said, Well, let's try a small experiment. That is how it began. They put it in the course catalog. I think they just braced themselves. They thought maybe they'd let 20 students take it. He called me back about two weeks later. It was, If you build it, they will come. He called me back two weeks later. He said, How do you feel about teaching this to 40 students? And then it was 80 students, and then there was a waitlist for 800 students, and so we had to adjust.

Just to fast forward, the class met students where they were. It ended up my hunch was right. People needed it. I was able to teach, apparently. I remember many days walking into that classroom thinking to myself, What made me think I could do this? But I said to the students, Please give me some grace. I'm learning this along with you. Thank you for being my beta testers. They were awesome. Within the semester, the dean called and he said, We have some ideas about this class and its importance here because we are seeing a response that we have not seen before. It was very humbling. They asked me to join the faculty full-time. I gratfully accepted, literally sobbing from joy and relief. I thought this was the thing that was waiting for me. I now teach Becoming You in mega sections. I also teach a class in management because when you're a full professor, they don't let you just get off teaching It's your favorite class. You teach other good things and hard things. So pretty soon, though, it became clear that there was a need and a desire for becoming you outside of NYU. I went to NYU and I said, I'd like to democratize this.

And to their great credit, they said, You should democratize it. It shouldn't just be within the walls here. Our students get you. That's great. But let's make it possible for people around the world to take it. And we opened up the campus to people to take it from around the world and open enrollment. And then the book came along and we were off to the races.

How cool is that from Walking in the woods, feeling... I haven't experienced that, which you have, feeling that feeling of loss and pain and anguish to where you sit today.

I can't believe it. I can't believe it. It's incredible. I wish everyone could feel this feeling of finding what you're supposed to be doing. I mean, that's why, to get very meta, that's why I want other people to feel this. I found the work work that I was meant to do. And the reason I know it's meant to do it is because people keep on telling me to do more of it. And we've been able now to really scale the methodology with all these digital tools so that people could take it around the world. This is really cool when you wake up to an email from somebody in Jakarta saying, I just did the methodology with my whole family. We want to thank you. And you're like, how does it feel? It feels surreal. It feels fantastic.

It's pretty cool. Okay, let's get into it. There's three parts. Values, excavation. That's part one. Then part two, identification of your aptitudes. That's part two. Part three, open the aperture of your economically viable interest. Okay, who's going to pay you? Okay, so let's get it. Let's start with part one. In And to go much deeper, you got to read the book and actually do it. But let's just get a high level, Susie, and get into it so we could try to help people take action immediately following this podcast. I think that would be really, really cool. So part one, values excavation. What does that look like? What does that feel like? What do you actually Okay, Ryan, what are your values? Thoughtful, thankful, curious, and consistent.

Okay. I love you so much, but those are not values. Okay? Why? Those are the ways you want to act, because that's not what a value is. Okay? Values are choices about how we want to live, work, relate to people. I always say it's a value if it would drive who you married, what job you took, and where you went on vacation. Values, I want to get nerdy and academic on you on a second. I mean, I've done- Wait, wait.

Can you share your values?

Yes, I I'll happily share my values, I'm happy to, but let me tell you what values are first and open it up for everybody. It's perfectly legit to want to be those things. Those are personality traits. Okay? Values are so... Look, the thing that kids should learn in school are what are values and what are yours? And instead, they learn the volume of a cylinder. They learn to play the recorder. It's tragic. Values are the deeply held beliefs and motivations that galvanize your actions and decisions. I believe that there are 16 values. Now, in my academic sphere, there are two different other values inventories. One thinks there's 13 values, one thinks they're 19. I know there are 16 values. It's the Welts-Bristol values inventory. Values all exist on a continuum. They're like a DNA profile. You can have a lot or a little of them. Let me just explain one. Here's a value. It's a value of scope. Scope is the value that reflects how exciting a life you want. Do you want to be like Bianca Jagger on the back of a white stallion riding into Studio 54, a life of stimulation, relationships, excitement, unpredictable?

Or do you want to be living in a twee brownstone in Brooklyn with your children in pinafores where you could tell everybody what you're doing a year from now? Scope is a... There's no better or worse. There's just better or worse for you. Some people want high scope lives and some people want lower scope lives. My husband, at 11: 00, I'd be getting ready to go to bed, and he would look at me and say, Let's go on a pub crawl. You couldn't possibly have higher scope than Jack, okay? And I have two of my children have these lives where they want everything to be predictable and controllable. I think that's cool. It's hard when a high scope person marries a low scope person, but you have to work it out. There's 16 of this. There's the value of radius. That's how much you want to change the world systemically. Some people want to blow it up and their whole lives are organized. It's the organizing principle is how much you want. Other people like, That's somebody else's job. I've got a lot of other values, a lot of other... So there are 16 I'd love to run them all through with you, and I'm happy to.

I'll mention one other, which is an interesting value. It's the value of belovedness. This is how important an intimate relationship is to you, a romantic, intimate relationship. It's a choice. Do you want your personal relationship with, say, a spouse or a partner to be the organizing principle of your life? Yes or no? Well, it's a continuum. For some people, we just have incredible data that just came in yesterday that says basically for men over the age of 32, the value of belovedness is number one. It's much lower for women. Really? Yes, we have fun with data. Okay, so values are ways that we show up in the world, live, work, play, and relate, that we can decide how much or how little we want in our life. They're not virtues. Virtues are things like integrity and courage. Virtues are social constructs that we all agree everybody should have more of. All right? So I am sure that we could find out in 22 minutes what your values were because we have a test for that called the values bridge, which 70,000 people have now taken. I created it because we wanted to scale Becoming You as a methodology.

The first thing we have to do to do the Becoming You methodology is figure out what our values values are, number one, we rank, order them 1-16. But we also tell people how much they're actually living their values because you can hold the value of scope. Scope could be your number one value. It is for 14% of the population. But you could not be able live it right now because you've got a job where you've got to be there. You've got a kid who's got, say, learning disabilities, and you can't live your scope. We call that number your authenticity gap. If you've got a big one, you know it because it hurts. What we do as part of the Becoming You methodology is we give you firm data on what your values are and how much you're actually living them. This is transformative for people because they're like, usually the response is, Holy, you know what? This is the self-portrait I have been afraid to talk to people about. I had dinner with friends the other night. They took my test when it was in beta. The husband said to me, Susie, you changed my life.

I said, What? Alex, what? And he said, Yeah, because I was on all these boards, all these nonprofit boards, and then my values, Bridge Results came back and Radius was number 16. I thought, Why am I spending all my time on these nonprofit boards when actually I'm just doing it to look good? I don't really care. And he changed some things around.

So it's on a scale, right? Of these 16.

Each one of the 16 is on a scale.

Right. I'm dealing with this in real-time. And I know from reading the work, this is going to be a big point of us to really go deep on because I think I have a different way of viewing values. And I think that's why I was really looking forward to this conversation. So what are your top few that you are very high on?

Okay, so I know my values backwards and forward. My number one value happens to be Cosmos because I'm a very faithful person. Cosmos is the value that reflects how much religion or faith is the organizing principle of your life. Life. For me, Cosmos is number one. I put everything through that screen of my faith. Cosmos is interesting. We have so much data on it across generations who has it high, who has it low. It's actually a barbell value. Either it's number one, two or three for people, or it's number 14, 15 or 16. There's not a lot of people who have it in the middle. So there's 40% of people who have that in them. My second value is radius, the value we talked about earlier. I have a deep abiding, overwhelming desire to organize my life around helping people I will change how they live. I want to help people find purpose because I have this desire to have people wage peace internally. I want them to find themselves and be at peace with themselves because I don't know any other way to undo this world of acrimony. And that's my second value. My third value is work centrisme, which is I love work for work's sake.

We do not allow the word workaholic anywhere near becoming you methodology. We believe there's a value called work centrisme. Some people love to work for for work's sake, and some people just don't like work. It's to an end. And I don't think that's good or bad. There's only good or bad for you. There's consequences, perhaps. If you don't like work, you may not be able to have the affluence you desire. But work centrisme is a continuum. I was one time at a conference, a woman came up to me, she said, I got to talk to you. My husband's a workaholic. And I said, We don't allow that word in our world. Your husband has high work centricism. We don't judge. And she said, Yeah, you're right. I said, He wants to organize his life around work. And she said, Yeah, get the company logo tattooed on his ass if he could. He just loves work so much. It's where all his meaning is. I said, Well, I think you might have low work centrisme. She said, No, I think the problem is I have high work centrisim, too, but I've not been able to live it because of my children.

I said, Well, don't resent him for his high work centrisim if you've got it also. That's my third top value. Then after that, I am very high on the value of achievement, which is I like to... That's the value of having success that other people can see. I'm not going to lie, that's a value for me. My fifth value is place. Location is a value for some people. For me, it is. I have to live in New York. I'm a New Yorker through and through. Perhaps you could notice that already because I just live and breathe in New York. But for other people, they could live anywhere. In that case, place as a value would be quite low for them.

Okay. Can I give an example of how I came up with my values, and then you can share why I'm wrong? Yeah, no, it's not...

Look, I'm an academic, but I'm happy to hear... I mean, go ahead.

I think this is fun, actually. Again, this is why I wanted to listen to I'll just give you on other podcasts and stuff. Okay, so I'll just give one example. So I mentioned thoughtful, thankful, curious, and consistent. The critical behavior that aligns with my thankful value, for example, is, I think you got to have behaviors to make values true, is leave it better. That's the phrase in my mind, which is leave people, places, and things better than I found them. And so then if I want to say, am I living in alignment with my thankful value? At the end of each day, I say, did I leave Susie better than I found her? Did I leave the park better than I found it? Was there a piece of Or how should I pick it up? Did I leave it better? So to me, this is a very simple and clear and easy way to live out my value of being thankful. And one of the reasons that thankful is one of my values is I have been born into an amazing situation. Great parents, great brothers, great family now, marriage, kids, all that. And I think when you've been given a lot, you should give a lot.

And that's how you show gratitude. Okay? So I'm using this one example.

Let me respond. I I love you for that. I think it's a very beautiful thing. My friend, that's a virtue. Everybody should be like you. Everybody should do it because the world would be better if everybody thought that way. It's a virtue. Gratitude, thankfulness, that's a virtue. And please continue to live that way. But it shouldn't be a choice.

We're talking about the difference between virtues and values, is what you're saying. So can you define the difference between a virtue and a value?

Yes. A virtue is a general There's no accepted social construct or behavior that we all should have more of. There's no debate. No one's going to say, Leave the world worse than it should be. And the fact that you live by it, it's beautiful. I'm not telling you not to. Everyone should have more virtues. Society would be better. What you listed were your virtues. I think that's fantastic. Values are choices. They're choices about how much excitement you want in your life. How family centrisim is a value. How central is your family as an organizing principle?

But what everybody say, of course? No. That's just like a virtue.

Oh, my God. Let me show you this.

Everybody would say family. Of course they do. No, they wouldn't.

I have absolute data to tell you you're wrong. Really? Family centricism, how much family is an organizing principle of your life is not universally shared. Only Really, 50 % of people have it in their top five values. Really? Yes. But you make a fabulous point for me because we assume everybody else's values, don't we? You just said everybody has family centricism. They don't. It's number seven for me.

But you just assumed that I said thankful. You're like, well, of course, everybody should do that. Everybody should- That's a word, too. I know, I know. But we're doing the same thing here because I'm saying the same thing with family. You're saying the same thing with being thankful.

No, no, no, no, no, I don't want to nerd out too much on your poor listeners, but I would say- I love this. This is what it's all about. I would just say that, look, how much you organize your life around your family is up to you because you could decide not to have children. You could decide never to get married. You could decide, I love my family, but I want to see them three times a year. Okay? And so family centricism is a choice. Actually, we just have data right now about how much people are choosing. So only 50% have family centricism in the top five. Okay? So that makes it a value where it's a choice, and it exists on a continuum.

I'm surprised you don't have that in your top five.

Look, I love my children. I have four fabulous children. Sometimes I over-expressed on family centricism because I had to, but I'm a working person. I love work. When my kids were growing up, I used to say to them, I love you, but I love my work, too.

When Jack was alive, do you think family centricism would have been in the top five?

I think for neither of us, family centricism would have ever been in the top five for either of us. Belovedness was. Belovedness, how much we valued each other.

With each other?

With our marriage. Our marriage was... I mean, when Jack was living, probably I had Cosmos and then certainly belovedness. I think that Jack probably had belovedness and then Cosmos. Interesting. I wish he had lived to take the test. But neither of us, we were often telling the kids, We're going off on vacation by ourselves. See you later. We were very clear about it, that the marriage came first. We used to say to them all the time, The greatest gift we can give you is our happy marriage. It was a great gift that we gave them. I was dancing at my son's wedding. Jack was still living then, and my son got married to his wonderful wife. When we were dancing in that first dance, he said to me, The greatest gift you gave me and Michelle was the example of yours and Jack's marriage. You lived for that. But interestingly, my son, that same son, has family centrisme as his number one value. That's cool. He has achievement down at 11. So he's made a lot of decisions in his life. I think a lot of stuff that goes on is people like, The younger generation should care more about achievement.

They just don't. The number one value for Gen Z is what we call eudemonia, and that's self-care. And the reason why we don't use self-care, and we use a Greek word Instead, it's because we don't want people's heads to blow off their body. Imagine self-care and all you can start a fight in the street. But 75% of Gen Z has as their top value, self-care, well-being, pleasure, leisure. That's not true for older generations. It's not true for my for instance.

Why do you think that is?

I think that the reason is that kids these days look at the deal that's being offered to them by companies, and they don't want it. They don't want to work really hard and then get laid off. They don't want to work really hard and then be replaced by AI. They think, why would I chase achievement when achievement just brings you anxiety? Now, I don't agree with that, I think, but I'm a different person, and my feeling is that's their right. Have that value. I don't think work, centrisme or achievement are their virtues, I think we get to have a choice about them.

I think that part of it really... Because saying Gen Z is like something, I know you have some of the data to back that up. I just met with a... I just did an event at Ohio University this week with an amazing friend and author named James Clear, who wrote Atomic Habits. And we met these kids. There's 250 students there. And I think they probably picked the best of the best. But still, they blew my mind with how impressive they are. The internships, the big companies. Maybe they just picked all the achievement-valued kids in there, but it just made me feel amazing for the future of our country. These kids, they are miles ahead of where I was just playing football in college. They were miles ahead of where I was. In a way, I feel really, really optimistic about our future as a country because of kids like that.

I meet those kids, too, and they're often self-selected to come meet us when we go and visit places. I meet them, too. I mean, many of my students... Look, I'm at I had a fine business school, and so many of my students present this way as well, but we have 70,000 data points, and I encounter the other values presentation as well. And again, I have no shade. If you want to have your top values, the top values, generally for Gen Z are, I wrote about this in the Wall Street Journal the other day, the top three values for Gen Z are eudemonia, which is self-care. The second one is voice, which is authentic self-expression. They want to be authentically self-expressing. The third one is helping other people, non-cibby, which is that they They want to organize their lives. They want to have jobs where they feel like they're helping people. Now, I think it's wonderful and power to them. You come by your values, how you come by them. You have every right to live the values that you have if you're not hurting anybody. We did research in our labs of hiring managers, and they had to be 40 years old managing at least five people.

They were all in the knowledge industries, and we showed them all the definitions of the values, and we said, Which ones do you want in your new hires? The number one value was achievement. They want people who want to win. The number two, it was scope. They want people who want to and grow. The number three value was, work centricism, and the overlap is 2%. So that 2% is out there. You met them at Ohio State, and I meet them all the time as well. But the vast majority are like, I don't want to buy this bargain. My parents bought it, and it sucks.

But you got to make money.

Exactly. So there's a part of this where those may be their values right now. And after four years of not working, they're going to say, Okay, it's time for me to repress my values or delay my values. That's very possibly what will happen. But they're certainly not coming out of the gate saying, I'm ready to buy into the values that the hiring managers are looking for. I mean, they are Goldman Sachs goes and finds those individuals, but it's not as widespread as you might think.

Okay. Values excaved Identification. We could probably talk about the rest of the time, but we're going to go to part two. We just briefly touched on part three there for a second because you got to figure out what you can do that the world will pay you to do. Okay. Identification of your aptitudes. How does this work?

Yeah, this is another thing that we don't know well enough about ourselves is what we're actually good at. We actually have nine cognitive aptitudes. Are you a generalist or a specialist? Are you a inductive reasoner or a data processor? Are you a brainstorm ideas? Or are you a person who comes up with one fully baked idea a year? These are all cognitive aptitudes that are pretty preset in us by age 15. We're born with them. We can go through life leaning into our aptitudes or not. Look, if I told you right now, take out a pen, sign your name with your dominant hand, you would do it. It would feel great. You could do it all day long. Then I would say, Switch the pen to your non dominant hand, and your signature will look terrible. You could practice your whole life, and your signature will get slightly better, or you could spend your whole life writing with your dominant hand. And aptitudes are the dominant hand of our brain. We are good at certain ways of processing information, thinking, seeing the world. Are you a future focuser, a person who really loves to look to the horizon, is not freaked out by it, or are you a present focuser?

It's painful, painful to be a person who, say, a generalist in a specialist job or to be a present focuser in a future focuser's job. We do a lot of testing as part of the methodology to figure out what your cognitive aptitudes are so you can build a career that leans into what you're already good at. Okay, underlying. But we also take a look at another part of aptitudes, which is your personality. Because you can be very good at a job because of your personality, and you can be terrible at a job because of your personality. And so we look very closely at what your personality is. Now, my students often start out by thinking, Oh, my God, I already know what my personality is. I'm kind, I'm thoughtful, I'm compassionate, I'm a good listener, I'm loyal. I think, Well, maybe you are. But your personality is not the list of adjectives you write down about yourself. Your personality is how the world experiences you. Let's go find out how the world experiences you. They all go through 360 Feedback. We do it with a tool called Pi 360, which is a very fast. It takes five minutes.

You give it to 20 20 to 40 people, and they anonymously get aggregated, and people tell you how the world experiences you. It's a very interesting experience for students to find out how they're actually experienced. We only measure three things. How are you with people? What's the quality of your relationships with people? What is the quality of your ideas and thinking? And what's the quality of your execution? Do you get things done? And really, that's about trustworthiness and reliability. And they get a report card. And then they're given a final number, which usually blows their minds, which is about self because they've rated themselves as well. And when we compare what the world says about them and how they've rated themselves and they get a score, and everybody thinks they're going to get 100% on self-awareness, and that is not the case. So that's how we come about aptitudes. We take a good hard look at your cognitive aptitudes, and we do that with testing, and then we look at your personality. We also do the Enneagram, which is a personality type indicator. We're currently working on a version of that test that's more accurate because it has a little bit of accuracy problems.

It's a wonderful test, but it has to be facilitated, but we're hoping to get a more efficacious version of that out there on the market pretty soon.

Okay, let's go into yours. When you did this work on your sofa part two, what popped up?

Well, I think I'm old, so I already knew my aptitudes. I'm a future focuser. I'm an inductive reasoner. I'm a sequential thinker. One of the wonderful things to see confirmed was that there's a scale that measures whether or not you're a 3D visualizer, whether you can move objects in space. It's a very good thing if you're in product, if you're an architect, a designer. And I am so bad at that. I'm all the way at the end as an abstract thinker. My dad was an architect and my mom was an artist. They both were incredible 3D visualizers, and they were always like, What's wrong with Susie? The fact was, I was way over there reading Camus, and they were designing sailboats. It's very interesting. It was fun and confirming to understand why I got a D minus in architecture when I tried to take that in high school. I think that with Enneagram, I'm a classic achiever. I'm a achiever. I'm a three wing two, an achiever with helperper tendencies, meaning I like to help people a lot, but I'm also very achievement-oriented. Then when it comes to how the world experiences me, I always go through with my students.

I think that I've learned a lot about myself. But the wisdom, there's one thing about being older is that the world pretty much eventually tells you how it's experiencing you. So my self-awareness score was quite high.

But who do you send the 360? It's got to be beyond students. You send your friends, family. Who do you send it to? I'm curious what you learned or confirmed, because I want to do this more now. I love 360s. I've done them for myself. I've done them for others.

I love them. Oh, let us get you some PI 360. We'll get you a copy of it because it's online. You get it there, but I'll send you it.

I'm in. What did you get back that was surprising?

Okay. I want to say that what I got back was that I was not good enough at telling people and showing people that... Let me put it this way. I thought that my life is a bit of a hurricane. I'm building a company. I am a very high scope person. I have tons of things going on. And I always thought, well, people understand that I'm a walking hurricane, but they understand I'm the eye of the hurricane. I'm the calm at the center of it. The world said back to me, Baby, you are the hurricane. I've had to downgrade myself to a tropical storm. What I learned to do is When it's a hurricane-y day, I'd literally turn to the people I'm with and I say things like, I got this. I'm enjoying this. I understand it looks chaotic. I am in control. I had to communicate better that I knew that there were a lot of plates up in the air and I was going to be able to catch them all, and I typically can. But I had to become better at explaining what was inside my brain. It was enormously helpful feedback to me.

People were experiencing me as too chaotic, and I had to stop acting as chaotic. I had to just calm it down. I was freaking people out.

We've been talking about self-awareness. Tasha Yurk, maybe you've done work with her. She's written multiple books on self-awareness. She's been on this podcast a few times, basically cited the same stats that you're citing that everybody in the world thinks they have extremely extremely high levels of self-awareness, and yet almost nobody does. What are some tools? The 360 is definitely a good one. What are some additional tools or additional ways people can become more self-aware?

I've tried everything, and I think the only answer is a tool. No one is ever going to tell you. I have to tell you a quick story. When I started my career, I was a crime reporter in Miami. I drove all day long from police station to police station. In those days, nothing was automated, and I found out what was going on in each community in Miami. A fabulous This young lieutenant named Joe Lidado took me under his wing. He said, I like you, Susie, because most of the crime reporters, they hate the police, and you'll give us a break or you'll listen to us. But there's a problem with you. You like the criminals too much, and you always think that they've got a backstory, and you want me to feel sorry for the criminals. I said, Oh, blah, blah, blah, and I made my case. Well, a few weeks later, there was a guy who was about to go on trial for attempted murder. Lieutenant Lidado said to me, Why don't you come to meet him before his trial? Because you're going to be covering the trial. It was a case where he had tried to kill his girlfriend and her daughter.

And so I went and I talked to him in the jail house. And by the time I was done talking to him, I was sobbing. And I came outside and I said to Joe Ladado, This guy's been framed. What a terrible case. I hope he gets off. I can't wait to cover this trial. What a sad case. Okay, then we go to trial. The guy is so guilty. It's unbelievable. They literally had fingerprints, DNA, everything. And after it was all over, I said to Joe Lidado, Why in the world did you do this to me? Why did you make a fool of me this way? And he said, You needed to understand something that I hope you remember for the rest of life. And it's this, everyone writes the story of their life with themselves at the center as the hero. So no matter what story we're telling ourselves, we always tell it with ourselves as the hero. Anyway, very sadly, he went on to lose his life in the line of duty, which is a great tragedy. But I will take him forward to everybody with this line that everyone write. He told this to me.

Everyone writes the story of their lives with themselves at the center as the hero. I think that one way we can try to be more self-aware is to understand that when we are telling the story of everything, we are making ourselves the hero, and we have to beware. We have to beware. But that's hard. So short of that, I like testing.

Got to have the people in your life who are truth tellers. Using tests could be helpful, right? I agree with you. I just feel like you got to have truth tellers in your life, people that are willing to give you feedback.

But you know what? Nobody wants to be a truth teller. I mean, I think that because- Why would I do not want to be a truth teller. Because you do the calculus in your head, I'm going to tell my daughter that she's too sarcastic with her friends, and you do the calculus in your head, she's going to be mad at me for three days, she's not going to hear me. So I think that, yeah, everybody wants to be a truth teller. But every single time we're about to tell something very hard to someone we love, we do the calculus about the blowback. And so, yeah, when we're our best selves, we do tell the truth, and we are the truth tellers. But it's one of the hardest things we do as human beings, as Kim to practice radical candor. She's got her beautiful construct. I teach it to my students. I think 10% of the population practices radical candor, where you care personally and challenge directly. We just care personally, and we keep the challenging directly to ourselves. Everybody can be better at it. So you're right. We've got to have truth-tellers around us. But even the truth-tellers will err on the side of love.

What do you do for your friends? Kids are another animal. I'm with you. It is so tough. And every kid's different. Every person Your personality is different. What about with your close friends, and you notice something that is not good? What do you do?

I am not great at this.

Really? I'm not. You seem pretty like... I like being able to banter with you, it's fun because you know your stuff. I wouldn't do this with somebody who didn't know what they were talking about. Yeah.

No, I mean, thank you. I mean, I wish I was better at it. I mean, I think that I said, I err on the side of empathy. I think I I know so much about my friends. I think her marriage is struggling, her kid's an addict. I think I can't... I tried to tell the truth, but I tried to do it in a way that they can hear. I could be better at it. I mean, there's definitely times where I've had friends say to me, Thank you. I needed you to say that to me. Actually, one thing that happens when you're a practitioner of radical candor, which I very much am at work and with my students, and probably over index on it with my kids much more than any other mother that I know, a lot of times friends will come me and say, Susie, I think I can count on you to tell me the truth. What is it? And in those situations, I'm quite direct. I tried to speak truth in love. I mean, I want them to understand this is coming from a place of constructive love. But I feel sad that I still have a friendship that I lost years ago because I could not practice radical candor.

I don't know why I couldn't do it. And I see this person intermittently, and I think it's too late now to tell the truth, but it's on my list of things to do.

You did not tell the truth?

No.

What do you mean?

Well, I thought that she had done something wrong in regards to something at work. I want to be vague about it. She had done something at work that I thought was lacking in integrity. I didn't know all the details, and that's why I didn't go for it completely. But I suspected she had cheated at work in a certain way, and I suspected it. Instead of confronting it directly, I just slowly but surely backed off from her. It was so awkward. It was like, I didn't have the full facts. I think she had just had a baby, and she had actually, here's the layer on top of it, she had lost a baby and had a baby, and I just couldn't do it. I mean, I thought, What if I'm wrong? This woman has been through too much. It stuck.

Susie, isn't life really, really messy? Yeah, messy as fuck. You know what I'm saying? You think it's black and white It is just not. That's one of the things. So 650 plus of these conversations, 11 years. One of the things I've learned is to be much more reasonable, to be much less judgmental, and much more curious, to quote Ted Lass. So that is when you talk to a lot of people and you try to have these in-depth conversations where you can go anywhere and ask anything. When you get a microphone, you're allowed just to say it and ask anything. It's cool. But what you learn is people and their stories, they're tough and they're messy, and there's a lot of nuance to them. So when anyone has these hard and fast black and white things, I'm like, That's not life, man. That's not how it goes.

100% agree with you. I think one of the reasons I like... Two thoughts. One of the reasons why I like the values bridge is it allows us to have very difficult conversations in a nuanced way. Let's just talk about work. There is no black or white. There's a continuum for how much it matters to you. No shade. It's not wrong or right. It's wrong or right for you. Family centrism. How much you want to organize your life around your family. That's a choice. It has consequences. Where are you on it? Let's talk about it in a reasonable way. But there are so many shades of gray, and to be more reasonable when we talk to people, Oh, my God, to bring the temperature down, what a great thing that would be.

Let's go to part three, open the aperture on your economically viable interest. Essentially, what can you do that people will pay you for?

A little bit more than that, though. It's the work that calls you intellectually and emotionally that matches your value of affluence. So one of the things we test for in the values bridge is how important money is to you because everybody lies to themselves about how much money matters. That's why we test for it behaviorally, and you find out where affluence is. I mean, sometimes I get people who they get back their values, bridge results, and their number one value is self-care, eudemonia, and their second value is affluence. Then they say to me, Is this going to be a problem? I said, Do you promise not to kill the messenger? Because these things can be in conflict. We test how much money matters to you. You would think it would be in the top five for everybody, and it's really not. I mean, 15% of people have affluence as a very peripheral value. They just don't care. All right? And then the vast majority have it as a moderate value between four and seven. And then there's about 34% who have it as a top value. The strategy is to find work that both calls you emotionally and/or intellectually, but also is aligned with your value of affluence.

And depending on how much you care about affluence, the circle of opportunity is bigger or smaller. If affluence is your top value, then you've got to look at all the work that calls you intellectually, emotionally. There may only be one job that also pays in that category. The reason why we use the term open the aperture is that a lot A lot of people get onto a conveyor belt of what they're going to do with their career. There's great research that shows that when kids come out of high school, they only know about five jobs, two of which are their parents. I mean, they really can't list a lot of jobs. They're busy learning the recorder and about ancient Egyptian history, but nobody's telling them, guess what? There's 135 industries, and there are literally thousands of different types of work. Let us tell you the difference between logistics and HR. Let's tell you what a mediator is. Let's talk to you about all the different types of jobs that there are. Nope, they're busy learning about Egyptian hieroglyphics. Not that I resent having done that homework with my children four times, but whatever. I think that we have to open the aperture because there is so much more work that people could know about.

Then you go to college, you think that, okay, oh, now they're going to know a lot about lots of different jobs. Nope, it goes only up to seven. By the time people are in school, they're really just thinking about two or three options. My MBAs, it's banking, consulting, or tech. They don't even think about aviation, shipbuild, all the things. I mean, there are so many industries and types of work. And there's 12 megatrends right now. I mean, at different times, there's different identified megatrends. People don't even think about megatrends. Maybe 0. 0001% of the population think, Oh, like right now, one of the identified megatrends is space mining. You could learn everything. I'm going to get into space mining right now. But Nobody's talking about it unless you're deeply curious in that way. There's two things that we do in this part of the methodology. One is we play a game called Opportunity Bingo, where we literally force people to learn about the 135 industries and different types of jobs that exist. Then I actually teach the megatrends because I feel like they're not going to find them out themselves. So we go through that process.

But the facts are that your currency is your currency. How much you know about how big and wide and deep the world is, the more you give yourself opportunity. And so that's a discipline that's on you. I mean, I can teach it and become a U, tries to teach it. But at the end of the day, if you just say, Well, the only job I could get is X, you have not opened your aperture enough. And even with my MBAs who are really savvier then about the world of work than most, even they're like, Oh, yeah. It didn't dawn on me I could do X. And I was like, Yeah, well, go for it. I mean, I use this An example of nut tree farming, which is an incredibly fast-growing industry that cannot find people. And they have a need for managers. They have a need for logistics, they have a need for communications, they have a need for everything, and they cannot find people. That's one of the fastest-growing industries in the world right now.

Wow. Sometimes I think about... I get people who... You probably get similar types of people who say, I want to host a podcast and get keynote speeches and write books. They want to do this type of thing that types up that I do, some of the stuff that you do. And one of the questions I ask beyond, why do you want to do it? All that. We go deep there as though, are people willing to pay you money to do it? Because if they're not, then you're right, it's a hobby. But if you want to make it a business, the market doesn't lie. Are they willing to pay you or not?

And if they're not- But if affluence doesn't matter to them.

I think the question- But they do got to live. If they have a wife and kids and cars and houses and weddings in college, that's real. So if they're not willing to give you anything for that, then it's a hobby and it's great, and you should do it and maybe do it on the side Maybe it builds up, but it can't be a real business or a thing unless it's economically viable.

That's right. But I think that some people go... I mean, look, I get the same thing all the time. People saying, I want to do exactly what you're doing. There's a lot of questions to ask. And if they've got a lot of infrastructure around them, as you've just described, you can have a lot of infrastructure around you and still live very modestly. Or you could say, look, I want to send all my kids to private colleges. And that has to be part of the conversation, how much money you actually want. Nobody likes to answer that question. And I always say to my students, you only have to tell one person the answer to this question, and that's you, but you better get an answer, and that's what's the dollar figure? What's the number you want? Don't surround it. You got to tell yourself that number.

I want to just ask a leadership question. Susie, you've been around some of the greatest leaders in the world. You are a productive achiever as a leader as well. You've done amazing, amazing things, written best selling books. When you think about excellence from a leadership perspective, what have you found to be some of the commonalities among leaders who have sustained excellence over an extended period of time?

They're not doing it for the money. Really? I've never met a great leader who is doing it for the money. And I have been very blessed to know many of the greatest leaders. And they're doing it for the love of the people, the love of excitement, the love of work, the love of impact. But I've never met a leader who was doing for the money.

Who in your mind are an example or two? When I say the word or the phrase excellent leader, who are the first couple of people that pop into your mind?

I think Jensen Wang is. I do. I think he's a great leader because He's so clear. He says, Here's our mission, here's our strategy, here's our goals, here's our culture. And the whole thing is very cohesive. He doesn't try to make everyone happy all at the same time. He's absolutely clear about what they're going to do. They're going to invent the future. They're going to do it with a bunch of true believers. If you buy in, you don't get laid off. He's clear on what excellence looks like. He's fully invested in it. He never was doing it for that money. I mean, he stayed the course year after year because he believed they were doing something. So I think he's great. I think actually, he gets bad rap these days because of some stuff going on. But I think Jeff Bezos was a great leader. Again, clarity, vision, and excellence in everything. Just absolute excellence in everything. No shortcuts. I mean, I one time I was moderating him on a panel, and I said, Are you looking for... We were talking about decision making, and I said, What are you looking for in decision making?

He said, I just want everyone around me to be right. I don't want them to be right. I want them to be right. I just think his clarity and his vision still is incredible, but he's not running it day to day anymore.

Yeah. Jensen seems like he gets after it, though. Talk about that dude seems to have a work-centric focus.

Look, I use him as an example of work-centrism because there's a great quote of him saying, I go to movies and I don't I remember what they're about because I'm thinking about work. It just blew my mind because I couldn't sit through a movie with Jack. Jack is full of any good movie, and he'd say, I'm bored because he'd be thinking about work. Jack and I left our honeymoon after three days because we were so bored and wanted to get back to work.

Are you serious?

Yeah. We were laying on the beach in Barbados, and we were reading both. Both of you?

Yes. Both of you felt that way?

Oh, completely. I mean, we were the same person. And then you looked over at me, and I looked over to him and he goes, Are you bored? I said, I'm so bored, and we went home.

Why do you go hiking or something that's more fun than just laying down on a beach?

Well, Very good. That would have been even more boring to us. We wanted to go back to work. We were building something.

I think it's cool, though, when you realize that. Hey, why are we fool ourselves here? Let's go.

Yeah, we did. We were very clear about everything. And because our values were so identical, it was very easy. My daughter just got married, but before she got married, she and her husband took the values bridge, and they said, Oh, come on, Mom, come talk to us about our values. So the tool has a function where if you both opt in, it put your values next to each other, and it compares whether your values are similar or different, and where the conflicts might be. And as I was walking towards them to see what their values were, remember, their wedding was scheduled at this point, I was walking towards them, and as I walked through, I was like, literally, Please God, please God. And then my daughter said to me, Is it normal when two people have the exact same top six values. And I was like, Thank you, God. They were number one through six with the exact same values. They got married last week. No mother was happier than I was because I know that they'll have their ups and downs like any other marriage, but to have the exact same values is a very good thing.

Wow.

We'll get the links to take these assessments for everybody listening. But one more before we run. Susie, you regularly are around ambitious, growth-focused, I'm going to leave a positive dent in the world type people. A lot of them students, a lot of them younger. What are some general pieces of life/ career advice you give to those types of people?

The number one piece of advice I give is that it's better to be the author of your life than the editor. This happens. When you are ambitious and you want to make a dent, you are typically surrounded by a lot of people, and typically you're a learner and a collaborator. And then you start getting a lot of voices in your head, and you can end up being the editor of your life. And look, I have definitely been in a position where I used to say there are a lot of stakeholders in Susie Inc. But at a certain point, you have to become the author of your life. The way you do that is by knowing who you are. We put that off and we put that off. But you have got to paint a self-portrait of yourself standing still so that when you start running You know where you're going and why. You should have editors and you should have pushback, but you got to put the pen in your hand and write that story.

So good. The book that we're referencing is called Becoming You: A Step-by-Step Journey to Uncovering your Unique Path to Achieving Success. I was introduced by our mutual friend, Hollis. She's the best. I don't know if you want to tell your Hollis story.

This is one of the greats, it's Hollis Heindek. We were young editors together at the Harvard Business School Publishing Company. I think I met her in 1995. She's been my editor for a long time and a great and dear friend of mine. And when I first thought, Okay, the values bridge as a tool has to be digitized, and I have to scale this tool so that other people can find out what their values are. I drew it on a yellow pad, and I got in a cab, and I went way downtown to her office, and I went up to her cubicle, and I showed it to her. Her voice was the most important thing, and she said, You've got something here, Susie. And it was gigantic. It was the vote of confidence that I needed to go forward.

So good. Susie, thank you so much for being here, and I would love to continue our dialog as we both progress.

I'd love that, too.

It is the end of the podcast club. Thank you for being a member of the end of the podcast club. If you are, send me a note, rian@learningleader. Com. Let me know what you learned from this great conversation with Susie. Susie Welch. A few takeaways from my notes. Self awareness. Everyone writes the story of their lives with themselves as the central character and the hero. That is why so many people lack self awareness. It is critical to surround yourself with truth tellers to get a raw and honest look at how you are perceived in the world. It's also helpful to use assessments and tools like the one Susie has built. Self-awareness is key. Then commonalities of leaders who sustain excellence. They aren't doing it for the money. They love people. They love the work. They're work-centric people. It's like her and her husband, Jack, the former CEO of GE, one of the most famous leaders of all time, Jack Welch. They left their honeymoon early because they got bored and they wanted to work. It's nice. In fact, probably mandatory if you're aligned with your spouse in this. Then the Becoming You framework. How can we figure out what to do with this one wild and precious life?

It's three parts. Part one, values excavation. Got to know those. Part two, identification of your aptitudes. Part three, open the aperture on your economically viable interest. You have to do all three of those things. Once again, I want to say thank you so much for continuing to spread the message and telling a friend or two, Hey, you should listen to this episode of The Learning Leader Show with Susie Welsh. I think she'll help you become a more effective leader because you continue to do that, and you also go to Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and you subscribe to The Learning Leader Show, and you rate it, hopefully five stars, and you write a thoughtful review by doing all of that. You are continually helping me do what I love on a daily basis, and for that, I will forever be grateful. Thank you so, so much. Talk soon. Can't wait.