Becoming You 101: You Were Born To Do This

Hi there. Hi there. It is Susie Welch here. And this is Becoming youg, the podcast where each week we seek to help you answer that tiny, completely inconsequential question, what should I do with my life? Which, incidentally, is not tiny or inconsequential at all. But maybe you already kind of know that because I certainly do. Look, this podcast is based on a class called Becoming youg that I teach at NYU Stern School of Business, where I'm a professor and the director of the Initiative on Purpose and Flourishing. Becoming you is at its essence, a self discovery and purpose identification class. And this is important. It is not woo woo. I am the least woo woo girl you will ever meet. Instead, becoming you puts you through the becoming you methodology, which is designed to answer that what should I do with my life question. That is very big and important. And just recently in class, this very moment occurred.

Yes, that was my students reacting to one of the major points of the becoming you process. And you might gasp too when we get to it in this episode, which is. I am so excited to announce a very, very special episode because we are going scorched earth here. We are going brass Taxi, or we're going every manner of cliche here. And I'm to explain and describe Becoming youg the method from start to finish. I'm also going to tell you two stories of people who went through Becoming youg and what their very, very different outcomes were. This is basically becoming youg 101.

If you're a new listener, I hope that this episode is helpful to you, but even if you're a longtime listener, I love you. By the way, stay with me here because you want to know what my students were gasping about, don't you? And also for the fun of it, I'm going to start with a wacky confession. Wacky, I might say, but also relevant. And here it is. Look, I may be the only person in the world I think I am who refers to Joan of Arc, the saint as Joanie baby. That's what I call her. That's how familiar I am with her. Now, why do I do that? You ask? Why would a 65 year old business school professor in 2025, living in the beautiful metropolis of New York City, be obsessed with a teenage warrior who lived in rural France in the 1430s? Well, it comes down to her sword. Joan of Arc's sword, which I have brandished, by the way, when I dress up like her at Halloween every year, her sword was engraved with these very serious words. I am not afraid. I was born to do this. I am not afraid. I was born to do this.

Now, Joni Baby, as I lovingly call her, had a very, very unfortunate end. You may have heard about it. It was very hard to be a saint in those days. She was thought to be about 14 years old when she left home, and she became a warrior and a leader of troops to basically make sure that Charles I ascended to the throne of France, which she did. But she paid for it with her life at the age of 19. And I have to say, all these years later, I'm sad about it. But you know what? I am also overjoyed that Joan lived the life in her short life that she was born to live. That is what becoming you, the methodology is all about. It's about helping you find the life you were born to live. And today we're going to explain exactly how the methodology goes about doing that. Now, you heard my students gasping earlier, but in reality, the class becoming you, its nickname at NYU is the class where everyone cries. Because, yes, sometimes students do cry in class or they cry afterwards, or they cry in office hours. Now, look, these are not bad tears. If they were, I'd stop doing what I was doing. These are good tears. Because becoming you as a process sometimes puts you where you have to go, which is face to face with the gap between the life that you are living and the life that you want and should be living, the gap between where you are right now and. And where you would be if you were living your purpose. So in doing so, the process can make you feel difficult feelings. Like the student here explains, I'm definitely.

Not an emotional person. I do not sit with my emotions or think about my emotions as much. So it takes a lot of actual introspection and maybe bringing things to surface in this class that maybe I didn't want.

And sooner or later, they are usually very grateful for it.

I think as society, we focus a lot on, like, what will make me happy. And she talks about this happiness as an outcome. But I think thinking about, like, times in your life that you've been exquisitely alive, this class helps you find what that is.

It helps you find out what that is to feel exquisitely alive. Hmm. Okay, it does. So here now is the how part. In its simplest terms, becoming you is a methodology that is based on the premise that your purpose lies at the intersection of what you want to do, what you can do, and what you should do. Let's unpack that a bit. In the lexicon of becoming you, we call the what you want to do part your values, your deeply held beliefs, desires and motivations. They're like the guiding tenets and principles that are inside of you now. By the way, and this is a small aside, you probably don't know your values in their details and specificity because only 7% of people in the general population can actually identify their values. This was something I long suspected and finally was able to do research on to confirm. The number is actually even lower than I thought. I conducted that research at NYU because I, as I said, suspected from my work in the classroom and with private clients and out in the world as a journalist, that when you ask people about their values, they usually just come back to what I call the big three family, financial security, and love. Those are fine. They are not enough and they are too generic. In Becoming youg, we actually use a list of 15 human values which are research derived and codified as part of the Welch Bristol Values Inventory. It's actually an academic values inventory which I created as part of my PhD at the University of Bristol. So a big part of the becoming you process is getting you to a place where you know your values from those 15 values, which I think cover all the territory in their rank order. And you also know which ones of your values are in conflict with each other and which are in harmony with each other. We do this through a series of exercises and assessment tools. All of these are readily available. Okay, I'm not here trying to sell them to you in any kind of way. You got to buy this pack. I want everyone to do this. They're in my book, they're on my website, and most importantly, I talk about them incessantly on this podcast. Now, to that point exactly in the show notes for this episode, you will find a list of the episodes in the archive from this podcast that I suggest you explore if you'd like to know more about the values in the Becoming you methodology. Some of them will seem very familiar to you, like work centrism, which is how important role work plays in your life. And family centrism, which is how much family is the organizing principle of your life. But there's other values that are going to feel fresh and new to you. Like beholderism, which is a value that captures it reflects how important things look to you. Your home, your office, your things and actually sometimes yourself. Beholderism. It's about how much aesthetics matter to you. That's an unusual value that many people actually do hold and don't know it explicitly. And the Becoming youg methodology is all about helping you understand what your values are explicitly. Now, my values inventory, it's important to note, is built on the shoulders of giants. For the past hundred years, social scientists have been working on inventories of values, and mine is the latest iteration in this long and robust tradition. I hope it is at least. So, in a nutshell, that is the values part of Becoming you. We do an excavation to understand what it is you really want to do by understanding your values, which we identify through an excavation. It is so interesting, but more than that, it is so illuminating. The next part of the Becoming youg methodology is excavating our aptitudes. That's the can do part of the want, can and should do triad. Aptitudes are almost as mystifying to people as values are. Aptitudes are not skills which we learn with instruction and experience. And aptitudes are not expertise which we gather with also with experience and often with practice. Aptitudes are actually what you're wired to be good at in your brain. It's sort of what you come preloaded with. We have two types of wiring. We have intellectual wiring, cognitive stuff, and we have emotional wiring, which really is just a fancy way of saying we have our personality traits. In the becoming you method, we seek to uncover both your cognitive and your emotional wiring. And again, we use exercises and assessment tools to do that because aptitudes are really important to know what your aptitudes are. That's some of the most important and most powerful data we will ever have about ourselves. But can you believe that most of us go through our lives not knowing our aptitudes and not owning them? I am guilty as charged. I really had no idea my whole life long that I was good at math and finance. And it wasn't really until I got to business school that I discovered it by accident. But my lack of owning that data, of knowing that data, of stepping into that data, and ended up with this very strange dynamic. I did well in finance, but my colleagues, my co students, my classmates, some of them assumed that the reason why that was happening was that my husband was doing all my homework for me. And I did not know this. And all of it came to a head in class one day when another student very cheekily said that he agreed with the solution that I had presented in class. And the way he put it was I I agree with everything that Susie's husband just said. And that was the big gasp you heard at the top of this program. My students are shocked and dismayed. And I want you to know something I was shocked and dismayed. I mean, it's probably taken me 40 years to get over it. And here's the thing, you can't let that happen to you. People tell you your aptitudes your whole life long. Your parents tell you, a teacher tells you, but you actually need to know for yourself. You need to know if what, for instance, you're a generalist or specialist. That's cognitive wiring. You need to know if you're a brainstormer or an idea contributor. That's cognitive wiring. A future focuser or present focuser, a diagnostic problem solver or a fact checker. All right, so these are all pieces of data that you can know with pretty quick and easy and painless testing. Now, when it comes to personality, we all think we know our personalities. Why would we need to be tested to know what our personality is? You may be wondering, well, here's the problem. You can't really rely on what you think. You can't really rely on your own opinions about who you are. Because if, if we did, we'd be things like everybody says, I'm a good listener, I'm compassionate, I'm generous, right? We have to actually face into how the world experiences us. That's the emotional wiring data we need to gather. And becoming you has a tool for that. It's called pi360. And you can find out more about on my website if you want. But it does two things. It tells you how the world experiences you in terms of the quality of your relationships with people, the quality of your ideas and the quality of your execution, how well you get things done. And it actually gives you this scary little thing, but very, very important, it gives you a self awareness score. Okay? So bottom line on this front, you need to know what you're actually good at doing in order to make good career decisions and to not wing it, which I do not recommend in this day and age with its incredible complexity. But bottom line, I just don't recommend it if you'd like to live your purpose. So we've gone over the two parts. Two parts of this construct, the becoming you methodology. What you want to do, those are your values. What you can do, those are your aptitudes. And now we're going to go to the third part of it, which is what you should do. What you should do. And we call that your economically viable interests, okay? Work that calls you emotionally or interests you intellectually, but also can pay you. All right? Economically viable interests. So here's the crazy thing about economically viable interests. Research. Excellent. Research, by the way, shows that when you graduate from high school, it shows that most of us know about five or seven jobs and that two or three of those jobs are what our parents have done and the rest are sort of jobs we can see fireman and teacher. And college, you would think would really throw open that number. Five to seven would throw it open to 20 or 30. It really doesn't. It's sort of the top. Then after colleges, we kind of know about 11 jobs and in some cases as few as seven jobs. And our aperture about what out there is really small because the world is huge. There are 135 industries in this economy right now. There are more than a dozen megatrends which are the industries of the future out there. And this whole part of the Becoming youg methodology is designed to open, open your aperture, to force it open for goodness sake, so that you know what kind of industries are out there, what kind of megatrends are out there, what kind of work, functional work exists, what kind of companies exist. And it helps you answer questions like can you work for anybody? Or do you need to be an entrepreneur working for yourself? Do you want to be working at a nonprofit or a for profit all the time you have to know what kind of work you should be doing because it calls you and can pay you appropriately. And a lot of the time this is just a matter of knowing more. We don't know enough. There's very few high school, college or MBA curriculums that basically say we're now going to dump on your head everything that's out there. So you know the full list of options on your menu instead. Instead, actually, especially in graduate schools, you start getting onto a conveyor belt and we just have this very narrow idea. We just have way too narrow an idea of what is actually out there. And from what's out there. What really calls us again, a large company, a small company, a for profit company, a non for profit company. Is it hr, is it logistics, Is it none of the above. So that's the third sphere, economically viable interests. And we do two types of testing for that. We do two A game and we actually have a tool called the Holland Bridge. And there's not a lot of testing for this. One of the reasons is that sometimes people come into the becoming you process already knowing what their economically viable interests are. And frankly it's pretty straightforward. We've got these two tests. I think they cover the territory very well. So those are the three spheres and that's what's inside of each one. Of them. First values, then aptitudes, then economically viable interests. Really, the becoming you process is about. It's about gathering data. And then you've gathered the data and ta da, that's it. All that data. What's at the intersection? Okay, I just said ta da and that's really bad because ta da is inaccurate. It's not the right word because anyone who's ever been through the becoming you process, and at this point, thousands of people have been, will tell you that the methodology is its work. I'm not going to lie to you and I'm not going to sit here and tell you that it's a hack or it's a no brainer. It's a silver bullet. It takes time, it takes commitment. You have to apply yourself to it. The upside and the outcome is worth it, I would tell you, but it's not easy. Now at NYU Stern School of Business, I teach Becoming youg over the course of six weeks or eight weeks, depending on the program that I'm teaching in, either MBAs or executive MBAs. But I also teach actually a very intense three day version of it where, you know, we get in a room for eight or nine hours a day for three days and we just blow through it. I do this on the NYU campus for people who are not at nyu and I teach even a one day intensive version of it, which leaves some of the exercises out. But I think it's kind of a best of version of it. And you know, the whole methodology is in my book. It's of kind coming out May 5th. And by all means you can just keep listening to this podcast because I try to teach becoming you each week in this podcast, week over week. And bottom line, here's the thing, here's what I'm trying to say. If you want to do becoming you, you can. You can. That's my purpose in this world. That's my job. That's what I'm here to do. I want to make it available every day and every way that I can. My purpose is helping other people find their purpose. I think this methodology, which I hope I've explained, explain clearly, does that for you. In many ways, becoming you is about figuring out who you are standing still so that when you start running again, and we all end up running, don't we? You know which direction to go. A lot of times we just run willy nilly. And, you know, if you don't know where you're going, any old road will do. So becoming you is about helping you figure out who you are while you're standing still, so you can pick the road to run on. So in a moment, I'm going to share those two stories that I mentioned to you from people who are real becoming you participants, people who've been through the process, and I hope that they can be good illustrations of how this process actually works in real, live human lives. I'm going to describe one person who used Becoming UN to freaking blow up his life. Like, boom, tnt. I mean, it was just an absolute reinvention. And. And one person who used Becoming youg to tweak her life. And not a lot. Okay. The process, Becoming youg, it's really just all about people achieving their Joanie Baby, their Joan of Arc life. I'm just all about people getting to a place where they can say, I am not afraid. I was born to do this. That is becoming you.

All right, so I want to tell you two quick stories about the people who've gone through this. One who blew up his life, and one who tweaked her life. The first student is. We're going to call him Tachi. Not his real name, but he was from a family in Asia, and he came out of the womb with his family saying, okay, here's a banker. And they basically put him in special elementary schools and just put him on the banker conveyor belt before he could even say credit default swap. Now, this all led to him being 23 in London, working in banking, and he was doing it for five years, toiling away in banking. And he was the one who actually pulled the ripcord to come to business school. His stated purpose was, I want to become a different kind of banker. So there he was in my class. He showed up in my class wearing a suit because he was always going to different banking interviews. And I wondered, what is he doing in this class? I want to be honest with you here. He was not exactly my favorite student because he appeared to be very, very disengaged. He sat in the back row, and his head was down all the time. And I remember thinking to myself, God, I wish this kid had just given his seat to somebody who wanted to be in this class. I mean, I just felt like he wasn't there. Now, on the last day of class, students present their area of transcendence narrative. Basically, they use slides, often relying on the beauty of AI imageries to talk about what their life looks like going forward for the next 40 years if they were to live out their purpose. That's the capstone project of the class. And I Always ask for volunteers to be the first presenter. And much to my shock, this student, Tashi, raised his hand in his business suit and he said, professor Welch, I want to go first. And I was like, what the heck? Is he trying to save himself from getting a D in this class by volunteering? I just thought he had checked out completely. And he came up to the front. He gets up and he says, I've discovered. In this class, I've actually discovered my purpose. And I was thinking to myself, yeah, well, you want to go into investment banking. Big whoop. And instead he said, my purpose is I want to dress Kim Kardashian.

And, you know, there was like this gigantic, like, burst of laughter. People thought he was joking, but that laughter ended very quickly because you could just read his face and you could see that he was in all of his emotionality, he was not kidding. And to make a long story short, this is a person who, over the course of the semester, had realized that he had been living a complete lie. He'd been living somebody else's values. And really what his values were were voice, which is creative self expression. They were agency, which is self determination. His purpose, as he eventually stated, was that he wanted to make clothing that made women impossible not to look at. And, you know, that was not going to happen in banking. And he had this incredible aptitude for it. He actually been drawing and creating women's clothing on the sly in secret for years and years. He actually told this heartbreaking story when he was presenting that. When he was 12 years old, he gave his parents a notebook filled with all of his fashion designs. And they took one look at the notebook and he said he never saw it again. And through the Becoming youg Methodology, he found out what his true values were, which were, as I mentioned, he found out what his. He knew what his draptudes were, but that was confirmed. They were facial visualization and all sorts of other things related to fashion design. And he found out what he already knew, and he had to just confront that. His absolute interest, his passion. What he was called to emotionally and intellectually was everything having to do with fashion and the creation of beautiful fashion. He was filled with excitement, a little bit of what I call Scare for your. The intersection of being scared and euphoric. I was really scared about him telling his parents, and he said, you know what? They know how unhappy I am. I think they're going to be relieved. It's time for us to chart my new life together. He had to actually go into banking for a year. Because he'd already used up the signing bonus that he had gotten when he got a job in investment banking. But then he went on and he went to FIT the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York to start his new life. And actually, I believe he's currently in London apprenticing for a fashion designer. So that's a story of becoming you. Unlocking someone's true purpose in life. Not their passion, but their true purpose, and blowing up their life to get to it. All right, now, the second story is about somebody who had a different outcome with becoming you. I'll call her Ana. She was in one of my executive MBA programs at NYU. She was in her late 30s. She was a single mother, and she was a CEO of a chain of med spas. And she wrote me a letter at the beginning of the semester saying, I'm absolutely miserable. I'm in total agony. I don't know how to balance being a mother and being a CEO, and I need to change my life. Everything is awful. And she went through the process, and I noticed this crazy thing. As the semester went on, she seemed less and less despondent. And I wondered, what's going on? She was so sad the first day. And she didn't say much in class. Like Tatji, I think she was doing a lot of inner work as he was. And the last day, she also volunteered to present her aot. And what she found out was that she actually was living her values once she had the language for them, and she actually was truly living her aptitudes. She found out that the work she was doing was exactly aligned with what she was really good at. And nothing interested her more nothing in the whole world than the field that she was already working in. And what really had to change when she realized she was already living her purpose was the guilt she felt about how infrequently she saw her daughter, which sometimes was just an hour a day. And she had to wrap her head around whether or not that was something she could live with. And it was really a small tweak for her to be able to increasing her daughter a bit more so that she could let go of some of the guilt she was feeling. And when she got up on the last day, she said, you know, my mindset was what had to change. I'm living my purpose. And she was so overjoyed. She gave a wonderful situation speech about it. And she said, actually, now that I know I'm living my purpose and I know my values, and I can speak with my daughter about them, she is so much happier as well. And I love this outcome. It was not a gigantic tweak. She did not change jobs and yet she would consider her outcome of becoming you process a complete success. And you know what? So did I. Okay. Finally, I just want to quickly tell you what becoming you is, is not and never will be. This is full disclosure and it's the label on the packaging. And I want to just say first that becoming you again is not about happiness. It's not a happiness hack. And if you want to use it to get to happiness, I hope you do. It is often an outcome of doing becoming you, but it's not the goal of it. Mother Teresa said happiness is not a goal, it's an outcome. And the becoming you process agrees with Mother Teresa. So I'm a not going to guarantee you you're going to get happiness. That's not what I promise. But I do think that the methodology promises you an authentic, meaningful life and that is what it is intended to do. Secondly, I'm going to tell you right now that becoming you is not about life coaching. I'm not a life coach. I am a professor. I'm a researcher. Becoming you is a tool. It's a methodology which I am overjoyed to share with you. But you have to apply it yourself. Becoming you, in a way, it impels you to become your own life coach. It helps you become your own life coach. And finally, I just want to say one last time, I said it before becoming you. And I don't want to sound like a jerk when I say this, but it is not. Woo woo. Okay. I live in fear of that. And my tools are scientific, validated. I don't like overreaching. I don't like the optimism peddlers out there. I think that, full disclosure, I believe life is hard. I think that we're all a bunch of messy mess balls, to use the technical term. And I hope that becoming you, the methodology recognizes that. That it's. That life is not slick. Life is grunty, it's gritty. And if you're looking for a simple hack, I'm afraid I just don't have that feel for you in becoming you. So I want to end that here where I want to end. I got through this, I hope pretty quickly. Thank you for staying with me. And I want to end this becoming youg 101, where I absolutely must end it. And you know, I do with Joni, baby, Joan of Arc. And you know there's a painting of Joan of Arc at the Met A very big painting, by the way. Huge. I have a dream of teaching becoming you one day standing in of front front of that painting. And to be honest with you, it's not that great a painting. I'm not really sure why it's in the Met. It's sort of a B painting. But it is her, it's Joan, and it's very important. And actually, what I love about this painting and the reason why I visit it all the time and want to teach in front of it, is that it depicts Joan at the very moment, as a teenage girl where she learned her purpose. And the look on her face is very purposeful. It's beautiful because she's definitely got some fear, she's got some expectation, she's got some hope, but she also has resoluteness. She has all those things at once. And I want you to have those looks on your face. I want you to have that Joan life. I want us all to brandish her sword. I want us all to know what we were born to do. To know our purpose and to not be afraid. To not be afraid at all.

Becoming youg is produced by Jesse Baker and Eric Newsom of Magnificent Noise. Our production staff includes Muska Nagpal and Kristen Muller, with help from Eliza Zinn, Hallie Reiner, Maddy Paul and Tanya Joji. I'm your host, Susie Welch, and this is becoming you.