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

Welcome to the Learning Leaders Show. I am your host, Ryan Hawk. Thank you so much for being here. Go to learningleater.com for show notes of this and all podcast episodes. Go to learningleater.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 bestselling 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 and virtues. You may find that funny, but also I think really, really good. And then we discuss why so many people lack self awareness and how to develop it. And 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 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 Bean 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 a higher 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 slash Learning Leader today to learn more that's inSightGlobal.com slash Learning Leader. She's doing listening to a heavy metal band, but what's happening in that clip? And the reason why I showed that's a great video. They're doing a cover, disturbed, is doing a cover of Sound of Silence. And 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. And 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 kind of like a purpose doula. My job is to get you to be the drummer and disturbed, so to speak. My dream is to someday have the drummer and disturb come speak to my students, but I've written them. And as of yet have no response. I don't think they're gonna answer at this. I love this, Susie. And I think it's great. With that said, I'm an optimist. I love being around optimist. I would love being around like just your vibe and your energy has been awesome from before we recorded until 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 like those types of gigs, but it's not reality for everybody though. So that guy's good at drumming. I mean, everybody, everybody wants to be the drummer and disturbed, but like, you know, like I want to be Celine Dion. And my voice is so bad that when I'm singing to church, people ask me to stop. And that's the nicest place you could be singing. And people literally say, Susie, we can hear you if you could please pipe down. And so my home 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 some people to go be drummers at all. I have four children, you know, 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, the drummer disturbed because he can get paid for it. So I'm your ultimate realist here. I'm not woo, woo, my head explodes and people tell me they want to pursue their passion. I mean, I have to pull it together and say, yeah, 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, come. I'm fascinated by your story. And there's some parts about it that I just want to pull the thread on it a bit. Okay. So there's this quote from a great poet in your book named Mary Oliver. And she says, quote, tell me what it is you plan to do with your 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 one 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. And 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 a peace with ourselves and what we're doing in our lives, we can take that angst out of not me. Am I doing the wrong thing? This is a B plus life. This is not the A life 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 doing. So I'm 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? Like how did this becoming you become a thing at such a prestigious university? Well, no one was more surprised at me. Let me preface it that way. I was coming out of a really terrible period in my life. I had a successful career. I was a best-selling author at both the New York Times and the Most Regional. I'd been a broadcast journalist of some note. And I'd had a really successful begin-to-life. I'd written for Oprah and also spoke things. And then life happens. You know, 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 youth and his amazement is, you know, you run out of options that happened to us. And I stopped everything. I went to NBC and I said, I need a sabbatical. They said, we'll see you on the other side. And I went home to take care of him. And he died March 1, 2020. And my plan was to grieve. Even when you know it's coming, you'd nothing prepares you. And I was running a small company at the time of music start up with my son and grandson. We're running it together in COVID hit. And it was kind of a double whammy. I lost Jack. Then the world kind of clapped 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 I just, and the world was kind of feeling very fragile at that time. And it was dark. And then I was kind of walking around the woods with my dogs all the time and kind of figuring out who I was. And I didn't, I was per, I look, grief is crazy. Grief is has no linear aspects to it. It's you just sort of 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 mean, I was like 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 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 Uriko, which was, oh my god, actually the cure is 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 career reporter. I had a show, 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. And I had been building this methodology. And I described one night my kids did come to see me and I described this methodology to my kids. And 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. And my kids were like, go do it, mom. And I said, I don't know what to call it. And my oldest son, who was 32 at the time, said to me, I think you should call it becoming you. So I put together some stuff becoming you. Here's this methodology. And I went to the dean's office at NYU. And I knew from my previous life because your business journals, career journals, you meet the dean of NYU. I went to go see him. And I suggested he said, well, you know, we have nothing like this. And I said, I know that's why I'm here. And he said, well, have you ever taught anything before? And I said, no, but I'm a writer and I've been TV a lot. And he said, well, let's try a small experiment. And that is how it began. They put in the course catalog. I think they just brace themselves. They thought maybe they'd let 20 students take it. And he called me back about two weeks later. It was sort of if you build it, they will come. He called it 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 weightless for 800 students. And so we had to adjust just a 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 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. And, you know, within a semester, the dean called and he said, we have some ideas about this class. And it's important here because we are seeing a response that we have not seen before. It was very humbling. And they asked me to join the faculty full time. I gratefully accepted, but literally sobbing from joy and relief. I thought this was the thing that was waiting for me. So I now teach becoming you in mega sections. I also teach a class in management because when you're full professor, they don't let you just get off teaching 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. And I went to NYU and I said, I kind of 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 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? Yeah. Feeling I haven't experienced that, which you have like feeling that feeling of loss and pain and anguish to where you sit today. I can't believe it. I mean, 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 I mean, to get very meta, that's why I want other people to feel this. I mean, I found the work that I was meant to do. And the reason I know is 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. 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 three. Part three, open the aperture of your economically viable interest. Okay, who's going to pay you? Right? Okay, so let's get into it. Let's start with part one. And, you know, to go much deeper, you got to read the book and actually do it. But let's just get like a high level Suzy and get into it so we can 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 do? Okay, Ryan, what are your values? Thoughtful, thankful, curious and consistent. Okay, I love you so much, but those are not values. Okay, why? 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 kind of nerdy and academic on you on a second. I mean, can you share your values? Yes, I will happily share my values, but I'm happy to, but let me tell you what values are first and 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. Okay, yeah, yeah. Ragec, values are the deeply held beliefs and motivations that galvanize your actions and decisions. And I believe that there are 16 values now in my academic sphere. There are two different other values inventories. One thing's there's 13 values, one thing's there 19. I know there are 16 values. It's the Welsh Bristol values inventory. And values are 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. Scopes the value. There reflects how exciting a life you want. Do you want to be like Bianca Jagger on the back of a white stallion writing into Studio 54, a life of stimulation, relationships, excitement, unpredictability, or do you want to be living in a, you know, sort of a tweed 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 no better, 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 o'clock, 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. And I have two of my children have these lives where they want everything to be predictable and controllable. And 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. So there's 16 of this. I mean, there's the value of radius. That's how much you want to change the world systemically. And some people want to blow it up. And their whole lives are organized. It's an organizing principle. It's how much you want. And 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 values. I'd love to run them all through with you. And I'm happy to. I'll mention one other, which is kind of an interesting value. It's the value of belovedness. And this is how important an intimate relationship is to you. A romantic intimate relationship. And it's a choice. Do you want your personal relationship with a, say, 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. This 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. And 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 you, I mean, you could find out 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. Okay. So the first thing we have to do to do the becoming you methodology is figure out what our values are. Number one, we rank order them one to 16, but we also tell people how much they're actually living their values because you can hold the value scope. Scope could be your number one value. It is for 14% of the population. But you could not be able to 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. And so we call that number your authenticity gap. And if you've got a big one, you know it because it hurts. So 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 responses. Holy you know what? This is the self-portrait I have been afraid to talk to people about or I was, I did it with friends the other night. They took my test when it was in beta. And the husband said to me, Suzy, you changed my life. I said, what? Alex, why didn't he say, 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. And 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 you change some things around. So it's on like a scale, right? Of these 16. Each one of the 16 is on a scale. Right. I'm dealing with this like in real time. And I know from reading the work like that this is going to be a big point of us to really go deep on because of, 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 in? 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. And so for me, cosmos is number one. I put everything through that screen of my faith. And cosmos is kind of interesting. We've so much data on it across generations who has it high, who has it low. It's actually a barbell value. Either it's like 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 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 change how they live. I want to help people find purpose because I have this desire to have people wage peace internally. And so I want them to find themselves and be a 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-centrism, which is I love work for work-sake. We do not allow the word work a holic anywhere near becoming new methodology. We believe there's a value called work-centrism. Some people love to work for work-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-centrism 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 work-a-holic. And I said, we don't allow that word in our world. Your husband has high work-centrism. We don't judge. And she said, yeah, yeah, no, 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. And it just loves work so much. It's where it's all is being is. And I said, well, I think you might have low work-centrism. And she said, no, I think the problem is I have high work-centrism 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-centrism if you've got it also. So that's my third top value. And then after that, I have 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 I just live in breathe New York. But for other people, they could live anywhere. In that case, place is a value would be quite low for them. Okay. So can I give an example of how I came up with my values? And then you can share why I'm wrong? Yeah, no, I'm not. I'm not. I'm an academic. So I think, but I mean, I'm happy to hear. I mean, go ahead. I think this is fun, actually. I this is again, this is why I wanted to I listened to your new and 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've 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 trash? I pick it up, right? 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 love you for that. Yeah. I think it's a very beautiful thing. My friend, that's a virtue. Everybody should be like you. Okay. 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 as we're saying. So can you define the difference between a virtue and a value? Yes, a virtue is a generally accepted social construct or behavior that we all should have more of. Okay. There's no debate. No one's going to say leave the world worse than it should be. Right. And the fact that you live by it, it's beautiful. I'm not telling you not to. Everyone should have more virtues. Okay. Society would be better. And you, what you listed were your virtues. I think that's fantastic. Yeah. That views are choices or choices about how much excitement you want in your life. How family centrism is a value. Look, how central is your family as an organizing principle? But what everybody say, of course, like everyone, that's you. Let me let me, let me say family, of course, they wouldn't. I have absolute data to tell you you're wrong. Really? I mean, family centrism, how much family is an organizing principle of your life is not universally shared, only 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 centrism. They know, but part of it is, me, but you just assumed that I said, thankful, you're like, well, of course, everybody should do that. Everybody should like, I know, I know, but like 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, no, these are totally different definitions. They're totally different definitions. I don't want to nerd out too much on your poor listeners. But 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. And so family centrism is a choice. And actually people make, like we just have data right now about how much people are choosing to, so only 50% have family centrism in the top five. That makes it a value where it's a choice and it exists on a continuum. I'm kind of surprised you don't have that in your top five. Look, I love my children. I have four fabulous children. Sometimes I over express on family centrism because I had to, but I'm a working person. I love work. When my kids were growing up, I'd say, I used to say to my love you, but I love my work too. When Jack was alive, do you think family centrism would have been in the top five? I think for neither of us family centrism would have been in the top five for either of us. Belovedness was, belovedness, how much we valued each other with our marriage. Our marriage was, I mean, when Jack was living probably, I had cosmos and then certainly belovedness. And I think that Jack probably had belovedness and then cosmos. Interesting. And 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. And we were very clear about it that the marriage came first. We used to say to them all the time, the greatest gift we could give you is our happy marriage. And it was a 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. And when we were dancing, and that first dance, he said to me, the greatest gift you gave me in Michelle was the example of yours and Jack's marriage. You live for that. But interestingly, my son, that same son, has family centrism as his number one value. And he has achieved it down at 11. So he's made a lot of decisions in his life. You know, I think what lots of the goes on is people like, you know, the younger generation should care more about achievement. They just don't. The number one value for Gen Z is what we call eutomonia. And that's self-care. And the reason why we don't use self-care and we use a Greek word instead is because we don't want people's heads to blow off their body. You mentioned self-care and all you can start a fight in the street. But 75% of Gen Z has their top value. Self-care, well-being, pleasure, leisure. And that's not true for older generations, not true in my generation, 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 like, and they don't want it. They don't want to work really, really hard and then get laid off. They don't want to work really hard and then be replaced by AI. And 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, centrist, and we're achievement are 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 did sit at 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. Okay. I meet them too. I mean, many of my students look, I'm at 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 Udomonia, which is self-care. The second one is voice, which is authentic self-expression. They want to beast authentically self-expressing. And the third one is helping other people, non-city, which is that they want to organize their lives. They want to have jobs where they feel like they're helping people. Now, I mean, I think it's wonderful and power to them. Okay. 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? And the number one value was achievement. Okay. They want people who want to win. The number two, it was scope. They want people who want to learn and grow. And the number three value was work centrism. And the overlap is 2%. So that 2% out there. And 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 maybe 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 excavation. We could probably talk about the rest of the time, but we're going to go to part two. We just kind of 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 enough 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 reason or a data processor? Are you a brainstorm idea? Are you a person who sort of comes up with one fully baked idea a year? These are all cognitive aptitudes that are pretty preset. Nusk by age 15. We're born with them. And we can go through life, meaning into our aptitudes or not. And look, if I told you right now, take 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 to pen to your non-dominant hand. And your signature will look terrible and 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. You know, we are good at certain ways of processing information, thinking, seeing the world like, 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? And you know, it's 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. So we do a lot of testing as part of methodology to figure out what your cognitive aptitudes are. So you can build a career that leads into what you're already good at, okay, underlined. But we also take a look at another part of aptitudes, which is your personality, because you can be very, 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. Kind, thoughtful, uncompassionate, I'm a good listener, I'm loyal. And 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. So let's go find out how the world experiences you. And 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 30, 20 to 40 people. And they anonymously get aggregated and people tell you how the world experiences you. And it's a very interesting experience for students to find out how they're actually experienced. And we only measure three things. How are you with people? What's the quality of your relationship with people? What is the quality of your ideas in 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-awareness, 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 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. And we also do the NE Graham, which is a personality type indicator. We're currently working on a version of that test. It'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 do this work on yourself for part two, what popped up? Well, I mean, I think I was I'm old. So I already knew my aptitudes. I'm a future focuser. I'm an inductive reasoner. I'm sequential thinker. One of the wonderful things to seek 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? And the fact was like, I was way over there reading Camu. And they were like designing sailboats. And it's very interesting. So it was fun and confirming to understand why I got a D minus an architecture when I tried to take that in high school. I think that with any gram, I'm a classic achiever. I'm a achiever. I'm a three winged two would achieve with help attendancies, meaning I like to help people a lot, but I'm also very achievement oriented. And 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, you know, there's one thing about being older is that the world pretty much eventually tells you how it's experiencing you. So I was my self-awareness score was quite high. So, but who do you send the three six? It's got to be beyond students. You send your friends family like who do you send it to? And I'm curious what you learned or confirmed. Because like, 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. Let's get you to the high, high 360. We'll get you a copy of it because it lies online. You get it there, but I'll send you 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 kind of a walking hurricane, but they understand I'm the eye of the hurricane. I'm the calm at the center of it. And the world said back to me, baby, you are the hurricane. And so I've had to downgrade myself to a tropical storm. And so what I learned to do is when it's a hurricaney kind of 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. Now 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 Yurak, you may have done work with her. She's written multiple books on self-awareness. She's been on this podcast a few times. Basically, you cited the same stats that you're citing that everybody in the world thinks they have extremely high levels of self-awareness and yet almost nobody does. What are some tools? The 360s? 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 has ever been 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. Nothing was automated. I found out it was going on in each community in Miami. A fabulous young lieutenant named Joe Ladato took me under his wing. He said, I like you, Susie. Most of the crime reporters hate the police and you'll give us a break or you'll listen to us. There's a problem with you. You like the criminals too much and you always think that they've got a back story and you want me to feel sorry for the criminals. I said, oh, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, I made my case. A few weeks later, there was a guy who was about to go on trial for attempted murder and Lieutenant Ladato 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. I went and I talked him in the jailhouse and by the time I was done talking to him, I was like sobbing and I came outside and I said to Joe Ladato, this guy has 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. After he's all over, I said to Joe Ladato, why in the world did you do this to me? Why would you make a fool of me this way? He said, you needed to understand something that, I hope you remember for the rest of your life. It's this, everyone writes the story of their life with themselves at the center as the hero. 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. And 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 be aware. We have to be aware. But that's hard. So short of that, I like testing. I've 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've 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 you know why would you 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 Scott, you know, to practice radical candor, you know, 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 personality is different. What about with your close friends? And you notice something that is not quote good. Like what do you do? I am not great at this. Really? I mean, I'm pretty like, I like being able to banter with you. It's fun. And because like you know your stuff, I wouldn't do this with somebody who didn't know what they were talking about. Yeah, I mean, I thank you. Thank you. I mean, I wish I was better at it. I mean, I think that I have said I err on the side of empathy. I think I note so much about my friends. I think, you know, her marriage is struggling. Her kids are an addict. And I think I can't, I, you know, I tried to tell the truth. But I try 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. And I, and actually one thing that happens when you kind of practitioner radical, Candor, which I very much I'm 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 to me and say, Suzy, I think I can count on you to tell me the truth. What is it? And in those situations, I'm quite wrecked. 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, I feel sad that I am, 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, but I'm told truth, but it's on my, 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 kind of vague about it. She doesn't need to 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. And instead of confronting it directly, I just, I just slowly, but surely backed off from her. And it was so awkward. It was like, I didn't have the full facts. And I think she had just had a baby. And she'd actually, here's the even a layer on top of it. She had lost a baby and then had a baby. And I just couldn't do it. I mean, I just, I thought, what if I'm wrong? This woman has been through too much. And it kind of stunk. So is he isn't life really, really messy? Yeah, messy. That's all. You know what I'm saying? Like, 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 last. So that is when you talk to a lot of people and you try to have these in-depth conversations where you could go anywhere and ask anything, when you get a microphone, you're allowed just to say it and ask anything. It's kind of cool. But what you learn is like people and their stories, they're tough and they're messy and there, there's a lot of nuance to them. So when anyone has like these hard and fast black and white things, I'm like, that's not life, man. Like that's not how it goes. 100% agree with you. I mean, 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 centristum, you know, how much you want to organize your life-oriented 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 being 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 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, eutomonia. And their second value is affluence. And then they say to me, is this going to be a problem? And as a do you promise not to kill the messenger? Because, you know, it's there these things can be in conflict. So 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 is a very peripheral value. They just don't care. All right. And then there's the vast majority. Have it as sort of 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 also pays in that category. So the reason why we use the term open the aperture is that a lot of people get onto a conveyor belt of what they're going to do with their career. And there's great research that shows that when kids come out of high school, they only know about five jobs to which are their parents. I mean, they really can't list a lot of jobs. There's just they're busy learning the recorder and about Egyptian, 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, nope. They're busy learning about Egyptian hieroglyphics. So not that I, you know, resett having done that homework with my children four times, but whatever. I think that we have opened the aperture because there are so much more work that people could know about. So then you go to college. You think that, okay, oh, now they're going to know a lot about a different lots of different jobs. Nope, it goes only up to seven. And by the time people are in graduate school, they're really just thinking about two or three options. Like my MBAs, it's banking, consulting, or tech, right? They don't even think about aviation, shipbuild, all the things. I mean, there's so many industries and types of work. And there's 12 mega trends right now. I mean, at different times, there's different identified mega trends. People don't even think about mega trends. Maybe 0.001 percent of the population think, oh, like right now, one of the identified mega trends is space mining. Okay, you could learn everything. I'm going to get into space mining right now. But they don't even nobody's talking about it unless you're deeply curious in that way. So there's two things that we do in the part of this part of 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. And then we actually teach the mega trends because I feel like they're not going to find them out themselves. And 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 becoming you tries to teach it. But at the end of the day, if you just say, well, the only thing that only kind of job I could get is X, you have not opened your aperture enough. And even with my MBAs who are really kind of savvy or 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 used this 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 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 like I get people who you probably get similar types of people who say, like, I want to host a podcast and get keynote speeches and write books like they want to do this type of thing that types up dead that I do some of the stuff that you do. And one of the questions I asked beyond like, why do you want to do it all that? We go deep there is 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 they do got to live. If they have a wife and kids and cars and houses and weddings in college, like, you know, 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 and maybe it builds up, but it can't be a real business or a thing unless it's economically viable. That's right. That's right. And so, but I mean, I think that some people go, I mean, look, I get the same thing all the time. People say, I want to do exactly what you're doing. Right. You know, 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 live still live very modestly. Or you can say, look, I want to send all my kids to private colleges. And that's going to, 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, like, 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 to real around it? You've got to tell yourself that number. I want to just ask a leadership question. Suzy, 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 bestselling 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 was doing it for the money. And I have been very blessed to know many of the greatest leaders. And they just are 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 it for the money. Who in your mind are like 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 Lang 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 the 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, we get bad rap these days because of some stuff going on. But I think Jeff Bezos was a great leader. Again, clarity, vision, and excellence and everything. Just absolute excellence and everything. No shortcuts. No, I mean, I mean, I went time moderating him on a panel. And I said, are you looking for, we were talking about decision making. And he said, what 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. And I just think like his clarity and his vision was incredible. Is still is incredible. But he's not running a day to day anymore. So yeah, Jensen seems like he gets after it though. Like talk about that, dude. Seems to have a work centric focus. Oh, he's like, look, I used him as an example of work centrist and because there's a great quote of him saying, I go to movies and I don't remember what they're about because I'm thinking about work. Yeah. It just blew my mind because I couldn't sit to a movie with Jack. Jack really? Well, any good movie. And he said, I'm bored because he'd be thinking about work. I mean, 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're laying on the beach in Barbados and we are really both of you. Both of you. Both of you. Yeah. 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 me and he goes, you're bored. I said, I'm so bored and we went home. Why do you like go hiking or something that's more fun than just laying down on a beach? Well, we weren't 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. Like, when you realize that, like, hey, why are we fooling ourselves here? Let's 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 puts 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. And remember that their wedding was scheduled at this point. I was walking towards them and as I walked through them, 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 have the exact, they were number one through six with the exact same values. They've got married last week. No mother was happier than I was because I know that they're, you know, they'll have their ups and downs like any other marriage, but have the exact same values is a very good thing. So wow, we'll get the links to take these assessments for everybody listening. But one more for we run Susie, you regularly are around ambitious, both 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 slash 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 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. And the way you do that is by knowing who you are. And 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? And you should have editors and you should have pushed back, but you have, you got to put the pen in your hand and write that story. So good. So good. The book that we are 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. But this is one of the greats as Hollis Heimdeck. She was 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, has to be digitized and it has to, 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 cabin. 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 dialogue 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, Ryan at learningleater.com. Let me know what you learned from this great conversation with 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 and 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 G 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 and then they 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. Gotta know those. Part two, identification of your aptitudes. Part three, open the aperture on your economically viable interests. You have to do all three of those things. Once again, I would 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 Leadership with Susie Welch. 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 Leaders 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. Talking to you. Okay, wait.