Becoming Future You | Suzy Welch

Alright, most of us spend our days bracing for what comes next. Here we do something different. We practice what comes next. I'm Frederik, and this is The Future Is How. Today with Susie Welch, we'll turn purpose from a slogan into a daily behavior, so your choices start shaping a future you actually want. Susie, I'm so grateful you're here. You've helped millions navigate work and life with more clarity. Today, I'd love to get very practical. Not find your purpose, but how to feel it and act on it in the middle of real constraints. Suzy Welch is a bestselling author, journalist, educator, and one of the most authentic voices in leadership and purpose today. Many know her from her work with Harvard Business Review and NBC's Today Show. Or her bestselling books that helped literally generations of leaders navigate life and career decisions with honesty and heart. But what stands out most about Suzy isn't her resume. It's her radical transparency. She speaks openly about failure, faith, and the courage to start over, reminding us that purpose isn't just a finish line you cross. It's a compass. You keep checking. And that's why I wanted her here today, because Susie doesn't just talk about purpose, she lives it every single day. So Susie, welcome.

Thank you for that incredibly kind and generous introduction. I'm delighted to be here. Thank you for having me.

Wonderful. So let's actually start in the future. Imagine it's 5 years from now. Okay. So introduce future Susie to us. Where are you contributing and What do your days feel like?

Okay, what a fabulous question. Look, I hope that future Susie is, I can think of one major difference, but I think, I hope future Susie is doing what she's doing right now because I have found my purpose and I'm living it, which is to help other people find their purpose. I have a methodology, it's called Becoming You. I help people learn about and and do Becoming You in all sorts of ways. In my classes at NYU, in my open enrollment classes, I just finished doing Becoming You with a couple, um, as part of my own podcast. And we hope to expand the Becoming You process more to couples. And so I actually hope in 5 years I'm doing that just with more people doing it with me, you know, that there'd be more people who know about the methodology and that they'd be practitioners of it themselves, and that we, we certified coaches in it now and that there'd be more certified coaches and that, you know, I would love future Susie to be smiling at all of the people doing this work because I've seen this work change lives. I will say that I hope that future Susie is surrounded by her two existing grandchildren and additional grandchildren yet to come with my, 'cause my other children are now in this place in their life where they're seeking to have children themselves. And so I look forward to being, continuing to being— my grandchildren call me Kins. It's an old family nickname for me. And so I'm looking forward to being Kins to more than two grandchildren. Totally selfish because there's— but they make me so happy.

Thanks for sharing that. That's, that's an exciting future. Yes. Share a little bit more what you learned when you applied your methodology and Becoming You to a couple? Like, what was something that was maybe new for you as well?

Yeah, so actually, I'll tell you an interesting thing. When I started teaching Becoming You, um, uh, 4 or 5 years ago, I noticed immediately then when we did in, in class— I first started teaching it just at NYU— I noticed immediately in class that people who were in couples would come up to me right after the class and say, I have to do this exercise with my partner. 'How can I—' And some of the questions, some of the exercises are digital, and they would say, 'How can I get this digital tool?' And at the time, all the tools were in beta, and I would say, 'Oh, you know.' And, um, but as soon as the tools were out of beta, we noticed that there— we all noticed, and when I say we, I mean the people in my lab— immediately noticed that there was sort of an off-label use of the Values Bridge, which is our values, um, identification tool, and that couples were using it all the time. And they were using it so much that we decided to facilitate it by creating, as part functionality of the tool, if both people opt in, that their values come up next to each other and we pinpoint for them areas of harmony and conflict. And so we— this is definitely a process with couples doing it that has been led by the marketplace and that people come, you know, people come to me or they reach out to me by my DMs or whatever and say, hey, my partner and I did this together and we are noticing that I have belovedness, one of the values at number 1, and he has it at number 16. And is this a problem? So I've done— I've actually done Becoming Us, as we now call this process, um, informally dozens of times. Like, my best— my, uh, son's lifelong best friend got engaged, and as an engagement gift, she asked me to do Becoming Us with her partner, um, and so— and her. So, um, so Today, what I learned was very interesting is that I had in the studio a couple that had different but complementary values. So you don't have to have the exact same values as your partner. But in this case, they had very complementary values. One of them had very high value of agency. That's the drive, the motivation to make the decisions, to own all the decisions, to have high control and self-determination. And the other had low agency, very collaborative, does not need to own every decision, does not need to be the boss of the world. And their own lives. And I think high agency and low agency go well together in a couple situation. One of them had a very high value of belovedness. I mentioned that before. That's the value of your romantic partner, organizing your life around your spouse or your boyfriend or girlfriend. And one of them had it at number 3 and the other had it at number 11. And we ended up talking a little bit about that. And he said, you know, I really feel that. I feel that in our relationship. And they talked about it very candidly, which was great. I do think that there's no combination values that can't be talked through. I mean, I think some are pretty hard to overcome a difference in values. For instance, somebody having affluence as their number one value and the other person having it as a very low value. That's a pretty hard thing to talk through because it drives so many decisions in life about where you work and where you vacate and where you, you know, how you live and who your friends are. But I do think the whole point of the Values Bridge is to build bridges and conversations around different values.

What a beautiful gift to give someone, right? Becoming us. So I'll keep that in mind. Absolutely.

I mean, I'll give you— if you can bear with me, I'll tell you a funny story about becoming us. I spent one month of the summer with my daughter and her, at the time, fiancé. And, you know, we were spending a huge amount of time together. And I love my youngest daughter as much as a human being can love another human being. And I adore her fiancé, her then fiancé. And But we were spending a lot of time together. And one night we sat down for dinner and I thought to myself, I have nothing left to say to Eve and Kauai at this moment. They've just— we've just talked ourselves out. So I said, why don't we listen to this podcast I've just been on? And on this podcast, the host was about to get married. And so I was talking to him about becoming us. And so after dinner, she and her fiancé decided to take the Values Bridge and compare their values. So I was in the next room writing when this went on. And after I was writing for about half an hour, they called me and they said, "Hey, Mom, we're done with our values test. Will you come in and take a look at what our values are?" And as I was, I said, "Oh, okay." As I was walking towards them, like my heart was just filled with so much trepidation because they were about to get married. And I thought, "Oh my God, what if we find out?" I didn't think that their values would be different, but I thought, "What if we find out suddenly today they have like really different values?" This is sort of the awkwardness of sort of being in this business business surrounded by people using your tools. And just as I was getting close to them, my daughter said, "Is it unusual to find two people who have the exact same top six values?" And I was like filled with such joy. I was like, literally, it was like a thank you, God moment. And I went and sat down with them and their top six values were absolutely identical. And he then went on to say— he has a beautiful Brazilian accent— and he went on to say, "I'm not surprised by this." because when I met Eve, he said, I thought to myself, what just happened? And I said, what just happened was you met somebody with your exact same values. That feels like a thunderbolt. Anyway, they were happily married last week. It was a gorgeous day. In all the pictures, I'm sobbing hysterically. And but from joy, absolute joy, because I know they're off to a great start.

Wonderful. Thanks for sharing that story. If I think about values and I think about my younger self, I think my values have evolved or changed. Let's talk about it. Can you talk a little bit about that to me as well? Can values actually change over time?

All right. So, here's my answer to that. This is the question that I always get asked as a person who's an expert in values. I think that there are two schools in the study of values. One is values formation, how people come by their values. And that's psychiatrists, psychologists, sometimes sociologists, anthropologists cultural anthropologists. And then there's people whose area of expertise is more in values expression. That's like me, you know, what are your values and how are you living them? But naturally, because this is my area, I have been a student of values formation. And based on that, I would say that most people's values are pretty formed by age 25. And the reason why I say that is that how your values are formed is a big stew. You know, it's your genes, it's your parents, it's your culture, it's your neighbors, it's your best friend, it's your experience, it's often your trauma. Um, and so values are formed by a lot of different ingredients, and it all goes into a stew which pretty much gets stirred up. And my best observation— it's empirical at this point— is that by age 25, those values are pretty set. And what changes in your life is how much you express them or repress them. So, but there's one big but, and it's a very important but, and that is that I think your values can be changed by a seismic event that occurs like trauma. And for instance, I think I had belovedness, the value of marriage and/or partnered intimacy. I think it was probably number 2 for me in my life, my whole life. I definitely repressed it over certain years, but I fully expressed it in my marriage while my husband was still living. And I recently took the test again and belovedness is dead last for me. Number 16. And so I had a seismic event, I lost the love of my life, and my value of belovedness, it vanished for all intents and purposes. So I do think that you're not wrong, that in your younger self, your values were being formed, probably up until age 25 or so. Maybe it was a little later for some people, a little earlier for others. I do think after that, we're set. You know, aptitudes are somehow are different than this. Cognitive aptitudes, social scientists have very good evidence that those are firmly set by age 15. I think I think that that's not true of values. I think we have more learning and growing and that they're pretty much set by 25. Interesting.

Thanks for sharing that. So, what advice would you actually give the next generation when they say, "I don't know what my purpose is yet." Yeah.

Well, you're going to spend your whole life looking for it and you need to make peace with that. I do think that there's a way to get there faster. Usually, the way we do this in life is it's very iterative. We do something and we like a little of it and we hate a little bit of it. And we then we zig and we zag trying to get closer and closer to something that we love completely. Um, the Becoming You Methodology is meant to truncate that experience by having you excavate your values, identify what they are in clear as the light of day, 1 through 16, and then to identify, excavate your aptitudes, both cognitive and emotional. What, what are your cognitive aptitudes? There's 9 of 9 that really matter. What are they? Where are you on each continuum? Are you a generalist or a specialist? Are you a brainstormer or an idea contributor? Find out what your 9 aptitudes are. Then, find out how the world experiences you because that's what your personality is. And then finally, open your aperture and identify what is the kind of work that calls you emotionally and intellectually. And once you have those 3 data sets, and those are big data sets, this is not a hack. But it may take you— people do Becoming You in 8 weeks at NYU. But I teach it for 3 days. So, I know it can be done in 3 days because I've seen people do it in 3 days literally thousands of times. So, it may take you 3 days but it could save you 10 stupid years. So, I'd say there's no hack to it though. You've got to do the work of knowing your values, learning your aptitudes, and then and comprehensively identifying your interests. And then, your purpose is at the intersection of those data sets.

Wonderful. So, we often talk about purpose like it's this one big revelation, right, that you found your purpose. But in your experience, how does it actually show up on an ordinary Friday or on Friday afternoon? You know when you're getting close to it.

I mean, A lot of times your purpose finally dawns on you when you're doing it and you're like, oh my God, I feel exquisitely alive. This must be it. This has got to be it. Or sometimes you're doing your— my daughter was in Hollywood doing casting and she loved it, but it had a lot of inherent problems. She was away from the family and so forth and so on. And then she came back to New York to help me take care of my husband when he went into hospice. And then COVID hit and she stayed and she went into a different line of work. And she realized that casting was her purpose because she could not find anything else that filled her up the same way. And she had to get back to it. Now she's back in it and she's in a, you know, she's made peace with what's not right about it for her. But sometimes that's how we find our purpose. I think that sometimes people just are so lost though, it doesn't dawn on them. They don't bump into it and they just feel at sea. And for that, I recommend going through a process like Becoming You. I mean, mine is not the only process, I'm sure. And so, you know, I'm not saying mine is the only one you should use, but I happen to like mine. So, because I know it works. So, have you been lost?

As you shared just now that, you know, people feel lost sometimes. Have you been lost? And how did you get back? Into finding yourself, becoming you? So what did you use from your methodology, from your framework? And do you have specific maybe rituals that you use daily that really help you to stay grounded, to live according to your purpose as well?

Yeah, of course I've been lost because I'm a human. I don't know a single human being, maybe they're out there, I don't know a single person who's not felt lost at one point in their life. I'd say maybe I'm thinking about my late husband, maybe he was the one person who never felt lost, he was so directed, but most people, even people who appear to be extremely successful to the world, have at a certain point felt very lost. I think that that's the common thread of humanity, that and love. And I got very, I was actually, it's just incredibly lost after Jack died because I had been on, had been going on momentum for 60 years. Um, and I'd had such guardrails of things I couldn't, couldn't do because I had 4 children. Um, and I did not hear my own inner voice. So I let the world, uh, I was, I would say I was the editor of my life, not the author, but it was, I had so much joy and happiness and love with my family that it was okay. I knew I wasn't doing the exact work I should be doing, but it was close enough. Um, and then I was terribly lost because I lost the love of my life and the world was thrown into COVID, and those both happened at the exact same time for me. Uh, that period of life was very hard for a lot of people. I'm not setting myself up as a person who had it worse than anybody. I just— that happened. Um, and then I— my kids got worried about me and my friends got worried about me because I was living up in the woods and I was just walking my dogs constantly. And then I started doing hospice care for dogs, which was, uh, deeply disturbing to everybody, as I had just been through hospice with my own husband, and then I was taking care of dying animals, and I was clearly trying to work some stuff out. And, um, and, and, um, my, uh, my friend Hoda Kotb, who's a, uh, an American, uh, broadcast journalist, asked me to come back on the Today Show, where I had worked for many years. And I went back to work. I was scared, um, but the minute I walked onto the set, I thought, oh my God, work is the answer. So I had a little piece of data there in my lost journey. I did not know what I would do with myself. I didn't know who I was without Jack. Um, uh, I just didn't— I, I couldn't process the world without him. It was very— grief is a terrible thing, okay? And, uh, but I, I got this piece of data that I needed to work. And I also got another piece of data that day, which is I want to work but I don't want to do this anymore. Like, I don't mind going on TV. I go— I've been on it 4 times this week. I don't mind that, but I didn't want it as my daily job. And, and I'm not sure they would have wanted me back daily, but I, I thought I've got to do something else, but I had been brewing for a long time on the Becoming You methodology. I had been putting it together in my head. And I told my kids, I have this class I'd love to teach to help people figure out what to do with their lives. And it's so funny, it's so meta because of course the person who needed this class more than anyone was me. So I went to NYU where I knew the Dean of the business school from my previous life and I presented the idea to him and he said, let's try it as an experiment. And so I always say I was the first beta tester of Becoming You because when my first semester students went through it, I went through it with them. But I heard, as I was teaching them, I thought to myself, oh my God, I have found it. This is such a life-giving experience. I'm learning, I'm growing, I'm, you know, was meeting every single one of my values. One of my top values is radius, which is the desire to change the world in some systemic way. And with my methodology, I was completely fulfilling my radius. Value. I have a high value of achievement, which is a success that other people can see. And I was really on stage teaching, and it was being very successful, and that value was being met. And it wasn't getting in the way of my top value, which is cosmos, which is the value for your faith. I'm a very faithful person, and I— it was not in any way standing in the way of that. So that was great. In fact, they were very complementary because my faith urges you to help people. And so, that was happening. So, I was discovering my purpose while teaching purpose. And then, we were off to the races.

So, before we continue, I'd like to do what I call a Mindstate Moment. It's a quick pause to just take a deep breath and reflect. And I'm going to give some guidance and what we want to reflect on. So we all just want to— to our listeners, if you are in the car, again, like, you should not close your eyes. But if you are walking somewhere, just maybe take a pause and just standing still. Or if you're sitting somewhere, just closing your eyes and take a deep breath in, breathing out. So I want you to think of someone in your life who lives a value you deeply admire. Maybe it's kindness, courage, curiosity, or honesty. Just simply picture that person for a moment, how they move through the world. What do they do that reminds you of what truly matters. Now ask yourself, what would it look like to bring a little more of that into your day tomorrow? That feeling, that's purpose in practice. So let's take one more deep breath in and breathing out. Thanks for Joining that mindstate moment. And I'd like to shift gears a little bit and go into a lightning round. I'm going to give you a couple of just questions or prompts that I want you to just, yeah, quickly answer. So probably an easy one. What's your Dimension X? And Dimension X, I mean, what's your superpower people count on you for?

Making sense of their feelings. Thanks for sharing that.

What's maybe one value you've changed recently?

Definitely belovedness was a strong value of mine, uh, in my past life and no longer is.

The best advice you've received lately or in your life?

I get so much good advice. Early on in my life, I got— I'll say two things. Once, a friend said to me, "There's no last best deal," which is basically to say, don't let yourself be pressured into making a decision because you think there'll be no more decisions to make. And it taught me something I need to be better at, which was— is to is to reflect a lot more before acting. I'm an action-biased person and there's no last best deal. I say that to myself all the time just to slow myself down. And I don't— it's not really advice, but it's a saying, which is, "The only way out is through." And I think, you know, that has many times where things have been tough, I have understood that sometimes things need to be tough because you're working through something and you'll get to the other side.

It's really good advice. What's one compliment that really landed?

Oh, I'm still just not over this compliment. It was from an academic who I've known for 30 years and whom I really, really, really respect. Respect. And we were corresponding and he said, he called me the bravest person he's ever known. And I was just, I respect him so much. And I thought it was such an interesting way to understand me, to call me brave. I mean, I've done some very out of my comfort zone. I'm kind of among my friends and family, kind of really known for doing things that are really way out of my comfort zone, like going back and getting my PhD at age 60. But he, he, instead of sort of saying all the things you could have said to explain that, he's just said, you're brave. And I think that's a, that's a very gentle and compassionate compliment, which I want to really ponder.

What's something you're still afraid of?

I think it's really hard to go through what I went through with my husband's illness and not be afraid of illness because it takes you out of your— you know, there's all sorts of stories people tell each other about bravely fighting disease and a good death and things like that. I mean, I don't fear death because I'm— my faith gives me no fear of it, but I would say illness scares me. Because it just hurts. And so I feared more for the people I love than for me, but I've had very close relationship with illness for many years because of my husband. And so I'd hate to go through that again and I'd hate anybody I love to go through it.

So one last question I want to ask you, and this is not in the lightning round. This So you can expand on it as much as you like. So is there like a daily ritual that really keeps you connected to what matters when everything just feels urgent and feels very heavy in this world? What's the daily ritual that really keeps you grounded? I have to—

I have to— I mean, every— I pray every single day. I wake up and I pray. I don't think there's a day I've ever missed it since I was 14 years old. Because I would miss it so much. And so I pray for the world, I pray for those I love, I pray for all sorts of things. I have my heart filled with gratitude for everything that I have been so lucky to experience. So I pray. And sometimes it takes 2 minutes and sometimes it takes longer, but that's definitely part of my daily ritual. It's very centering, very grounding. And I've actually taught prayer to others, and that was one of the most rewarding experiences of my life. The other thing that I do every single day and have never, ever not had since I was a little girl is I spend time with my dogs. My animals, my love of animals is a gigantic part of my life. And I mean, I just, I, when I'm on the road traveling for work, I miss my dogs desperately. And so I walk them. I pet them. I stare into their eyes. I hug them. So, all of this kind of connection with my animals and with just animals in general is a huge part of my daily ritual.

Thanks for sharing both. Yes. So, Susie, I have to say, this was wonderful. Thank you. Just making that big topic of purpose and the question like, what is my purpose, really practical. So that we can feel it and that we have some next step that we can try out, right? Either with the advice that you shared around there is no last deal, or the other practices that you're doing, maybe praying some form or some way, or spending time with animals, volunteering, or finding your purpose in the work that you're doing. So thanks for sharing all of that great advice. And if this sparked something in you, try that 1-inch step for the next couple of days that you want to step forward and tell me what shifted. I read every note. And if you want one simple practical experiment every Friday, join my next letter. So let's keep practicing the future together. Thank you so much. This was Susie Welch. I'm super delighted that we have a chance to connect and work together even more in the Initiative for Purpose and Flourishing. So I'm honored and excited to bring your work to even more people. And I think Becoming You and Becoming Us will make a big difference in people's lives.

So thanks for what you do. Thank you so much. Thanks for what you do. All right. Thank you. All right. Beautiful. Thank you so much for having me on.