Becoming You: The Process Begins (Part 1) Inside the Values Deep Dive That Changes Everything

All right, all right. Let's get this party started. You're so pretty.

Oh, my gosh, no, because I can't.

When I look over at you, I feel stunned. Okay, so that's a problem.

All right, I was a secret girlfriend not once, but twice in high school because it was so embarrassing to date me.

Okay, that has to go in this.

Why? Why would it be embarrassing to date you?

Well, I grew up in. You know what? It should go in this. And I'll save it.

All right, let's let us start the podcast. Okay, cast. Ok.

Hello, everybody. You are interrupting a conversation with my gu today, and believe me, you would not believe the territory that it's covered. I'm very seriously Susie Welch. I'm professor of management practice at NYU Stern School of Business, and we're here with three episodes that are so special of Becoming youg. Really excited for you to jump on this train and come with us. Becoming youg is a podcast where our topic is you finding your purpose, figuring out what to do with your life. That's very important work. It's hard work. It's fun work. I wrote a book about it called Becoming youg. And I teach this class that we have, open to the public, but we also have it at nyu. But sometimes people just say, like, how do you even do Becoming youg? How do you do it? This series is all about showing you how you do Becoming youg. And I have in the studio, live from New York, once again, two people who've gone through the Becoming youg process, who I hold very near and dear to my heart. I didn't know them from a hole in the wall before we got started, but I've got Max, who is one of my students at NYU and now has a great job, and Kristen, who actually came to the open enrollment version of BEC you. And they're going to be my co pilots as we walk through the parts of the Becoming you methodology. Now, look, the methodology, very quickly, is based on the premise. I'm going to pause here to say that Pierre's on my lap and he's snoring. If you hear that gentle noise in the background of this very serious podcast, it's a dachshund snoring. Okay, Becoming you. The methodology is based on the premise that your purpose lies at the intersection of your values, your authentically held belief system, your aptitudes. That's what you're uniquely good at. Your cognitive aptitudes, your personality aptitudes, and finally, your economically viable interests. These are three big data Sets for the Becoming youg Methodology. We mine them, and then we look at what lays at the intersection of those three data sets. Right? And so in the book and in the class, there's all these exercises that we go through. And so we're really kind of going to do that live here with Max and Kristen. We're going to talk about values in this episode. Stay with us. And then we're going to do aptitudes and. And then we're gonna look at economically viable interest. And in that last third episode, we're gonna look where they ended up and how it all worked together and how it. It's almost like a little mystery. Okay? It's not true crime. You're gonna have to go someplace else for that if you need it, that fix. And don't we all sometimes need a true crime episode? Admit it. Even I do. And actually, speaking of really guilty pleasures, do you know what my daughter made me watch this weekend? There's a show called the Secret Life of Mormon Wives. It's called Mom Talk. Mom Talk. These. These beautiful women out in Utah, and they've got a lot of drama. I'm sorry for this tangent. Let's get back to becoming you. No, I feel damaged by it. I feel they all need to take the values bridge.

That's what I think we should do a separate episode on the Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, because we have a lot to talk about.

We do, we do. And actually, I'd like them all to come on this show. If you're listening. You need to come on and do the values bridge, which we'll get to. All right, so look, that's what we're doing in this episode of becoming you. I'm really glad you're here, and we have got so much territory to go over, but the first thing we really need to do is we need to get to know our very, very special guests here today. Let's get to know them a little bit. And actually, you'll know them a lot a bit by the end of this because becoming you as a methodology is very fundamentally a process. When you paint a self portrait of yourself, okay, you get to know who you are in the details, what your values are, what you deeply believe. You get to know your aptitudes, which is how your brain works, and. And really how your personality is experienced by the world, okay? And finally you find out what calls you intellectually and emotionally. Once we know that about you, too, what else is there to know? All right, so let's get started again. I'm Susie Welch. And I'm super happy that you're here. Let's start with Kristen. Kristin, I met you when you came to one of the three day Becoming youg open enrollment classes. Let's just start with why. Why did you come to it? What were you doing in your life? What made you come to it? Tell us a little bit about yourself.

Yes. I was a partner at a commercial production company and so my job was to executive produce. Commercials and advertising agencies would come to me and then you try to win a job and then you put the team together who's going to shoot it and that's the job. And I really loved so much of it. And something just you. I just felt like I wasn't where I was supposed to be. And you had a little.

Oh. Feeling like this is not what I was maybe meant to do.

Yeah, well, it, it was more like you're, you should be happy. You should be happy.

Why aren't I happier?

Why aren't I happier? We had just been nominated for an Emmy. We had, you know, I'm a partner. I'm, I'm making great money. I should be happier.

Big, big presenting question for becoming you. And the whole process is like, why aren't I happier? Let's just get a little bit more detail on you. You're a.

Well, I grew up in Arkansas and I moved to New York when I was 23 and I thought it would be for just a short minute. And then I met my husband and I was like, well, I guess I'm gonna live here forever. Because it was like, first date, this is my guy. And now we have two children, a 13 year old and a 9 year old. So my husband's a Broadway producer and he started his own production company in October of 2019, which is a tough time to start a Broadway company. And both of our children were diagn with their own special neurodiverse diagnoses. And so we really had been in survival mode for so long. And then Broadway came back and John was doing great and we got both of our kids diagnosed and in the schools that they needed to be in and they were doing great. And then all of a sudden it was like, oh, I, I, I had space to think about myself and for a year I try to shove those feelings down of just like, this is what success looks like, so be happy. And it got to the point where, well, then Susie started showing up in my Instagram.

Yeah.

And I just.

The algorithm's unbelievable. It just sort of finds it my blab in a Way shows up when people are beginning to ask, what's going on here.

I listened to every podcast that was on there and I was late to, as you know, I was catching up. And you had talked about how there was going to be this three day intensive. And I I DMed you on Instagram and I said, oh, I think I missed it. And you're like, you didn't. It's next week and you should come. And so I already loved you.

And I want to say this before we go to Max, which is that, look, the nickname for becoming you, I'm not going to lie, the nickname for becoming you at NYU is the class where everyone cries. There's quite a few tears because they're good tears. As people discover who they are, that's often a shocking emotional experience. And I remember you showing up and I think you cried like in the first two hours. And I remember thinking, I love that woman. All right, let's talk about. And I still do. All right, Max, tell us about you.

So when I was in high school and in middle school, and I guess all the way back to childhood, I was always entrepreneurial and I was building photo booths and like selling tickets at my school's carnival. I was, you know, selling snow cones at the neighborhood block party. I had a company making bar mitzvah montages where I would make a bar Mitzvah video for $300, which was a deal. And people still try to negotiate with me. So my entire life, I was this entrepreneurial kid. And when I was in high school, I happened to have fallen in love with coffee, which is like a really crazy thing for a 15 year old to do, but fell in love with coffee. And part of what that led to is me trying to learn every single thing there was about it. Part of my childhood too, in addition to being entrepreneurial, it was always just reading manuals. I needed to know how everything worked. I wanted to know how everything across everything worked. And so I, of course, had to learn everything there was to know about coffee. How it's made, how it's roasted, brewed, et cetera. I eventually started a company called Brew, which was a cold brew coffee startup, you know, to make cold brew coffee at home.

You're making me want a cup of coffee. Me too.

And I'm like, it's like 6 o' clock at night, so I can't have one right now. I started this company to make cold brew coffee at home. And what happened was I have this idea for a product. I built a prototype, really loved it.

You look 16 years old at this point.

I think I was 17.

All right, fast forward. Go ahead.

Okay. By the time I'm in college, I actually end up appearing on Shark Tank. And this is a very long story that I'm glossing over, but I ended up appearing on Shark Tank. Get a deal with Mark Cuban, build this company into something really significant, and sell it at 20. And I sold it in May of 2020. So two months into the pandemic, sell the company, close my laptop, opened a bottle of champagne, celebrated the sale of the company, woke up the next morning.

And was like, what do I do with my life?

What the hell? I'm 20. I've sold a company. Now what? Like, I'm still a senior in college. Like, I have to figure out what to do. And so I think this catapulted me into this realization that who I had been defined for, for all of high school and all of college was the kid with the coffee company. That was how people described me. They're like, oh, he's the coffee kid. He's the entrepreneurship kid. He's the kid that was on Shark Tank. And once that's stripped away from you, you have this question of both immense gratitude for the experience you've had. But two, who are you as a person?

So you went to business school, and then you ended up in becoming you because you were still trying to figure that out or just because you heard I was such a fabulous professor.

Oh, seriously?

So we'll keep going. I think graduate college, got a job, didn't feel quite right. Get another job, didn't feel quite right. Started a company, really didn't feel right. I was like, this is bad. I thought I was entrepreneurial. I hated being a founder the second time. Found myself in becoming you because I was like, look, what am I supposed to be doing?

Okay, all right. You were saying, what the heck should I be doing? And that is usually what happens to some degree or another in the becoming you process. People land there, and they think, I need a little tweak or they think, I gotta blow up my life one. And you know what? No matter what, how old you are, you guys are different ages, different generations somewhat. It's just all there is.

We're definitely a different. I'm 45 years old, thank you very much.

I didn't want to say anything, you know, but. All right, how old are you? 45. Okay, 45 and 25.

I thought you were in your early 30s.

Absolutely. It's a great. Let's talk about your beauty. Routine in our next podcast. All right, listen. That's where becoming you find you. Okay, Just for those of you who have not gone through the process yet or thinking about going and have got the book in your hands, or just listening to this podcast randomly as you're driving to get your coffee, that's where becoming you finds you. Where you are wondering, what should I do with my life? Look, the first thing that we do in the becoming you process is we have to excavate your values. That's the first data set. And I will say this. I have done research that shows that almost no one actually knows what values are. They don't even know what they are. It's a word that's been hijacked by politics. There's progressive values, there's conservative values, there's family values and so forth. People don't really know what values are, and they don't know the difference between values and virtues and personality traits and skills. And so I did research when I got to NYU as a professor to found out that only 17% of people even came close to knowing what values were. But here's what's worse. Only 7% of people can actually name their own values. And so you. Let's just start in becoming you in the process in the book, if that's what you're reading right now. There are several exercises in the book that walk you through this process, process to figure out your values. But the king of all the tests is what we call the values bridge. You can go to thevaluesbridge.com take that test yourself, hit pause, go take the test or take it later. There's a free version and there's a souped up version. Okay? So I'm not trying to sell you anything here, but I really do love the test. So when you started becoming you, let's just talk about what you thought values were and what you thought your values were. Okay. When you started the process, Kristen, what do you think your values were?

Oh, I think I thought the value that I aspire to the most is kindness. And when you shared, these aren't values, they're virtues, I was like, what has been my foothold this whole time? Then what is it? Where am I?

Yeah, I mean, look, this is a very fundamental point. Very generally, people think values are virtues, kindness, generosity, integrity, and they're not values. Those are wonderful things. And guess what? We all agree everybody should have more of them. There's 15 human personal values, and everybody has a different level of each one of them. You know them because you studied it. Scope, beholderism, belonging, Work. Centrism, Family. Centrism. If you want to know every single value and what it means, please go back and listen to the podcast. Episode 35 is the podcast where I talk about the language of values. I highly recommend it. Read about them in the book. But you thought the. Your value was kindness, and kindness is a wonderful thing. Thing. It just doesn't happen to be of value. And I want to just point out that this is not something I expect anybody listening, or even my students, when they come into class, I don't expect them to come in knowing what values are or what their values are, because that would make them very unusual. So I'm not surprised. Having kindness as something that you really care about is great, but it's not a value, as you came to find out. And hopefully that was life changing for you to find out what your actual values were.

Oh, I mean, my whole life changed.

Okay, we'll get there. Hold that thought. All right, Max, what'd you think your values were going in?

So I. If you would have asked me to describe myself in terms of values, I would have said I'm very entrepreneurial. Obviously, I. I'm autonomous.

Autonomy is a value.

I didn't like direction, which is also a value. We can map these to whatever they actually are. And that I was, like, a good person and love my family, which are kind of values. Family is family. Being a good person also kind of is virtue.

Okay, okay, we're nerding out here. Okay.

Anyways, we're gonna.

You'll as soon, dear listeners, all of this will make sense to you. Stand by.

And then. And then, yes, I worked for a company, and I was like, okay, this is. This isn't right. It's because I'm entrepreneurial, and that's a value, which it's not. And then I started another company, and I was like, the satisfaction I was expecting from this is not what I'm getting. I wanted something else. I'm not getting it. So. Oh, clearly I don't value what I thought I valued.

Yeah.

Where do I stand? Like, what do I actually want to do? And what route of work will actually make me happy and bring me satisfaction?

All right, so then I get up in front of the class, and I start explaining what values were, but I do something else, and I wonder if you can remember this for yourself. I start explaining what gets in the way of us living our values. I talk about those four horsemen of values destruction. And I can tell you this is when tears typically Start flowing and people start nodding. And I think this is a very stunning moment. The Horsemen, the four horsemen of values destruction, by the way, all start with E so that my students can refer remember them more easily. The first is expectations. We can have strong values and our parents expectations, our expectations of ourselves get in the way of them. There's expedience. It's just easier non friction. I'm just going to keep going along to get along. I love excitement. I love scope. I'm going to go live in the suburbs because it's just easier get my groceries in the driveway that way. Then there's events. Children are an event that can take you away from your values. We might all agree. And then there's economic security. And that could be whether you value money or not. That gets in the way of us making decisions that are based on our values. Do you remember learning about the values destroyers?

I do. I remember learning about them and I remember, like, my reflection really being just this, like, immense amount of gratitude and reflection of like, wow. I am in a very fortunate position right now to be like 25, living in New York City in grad school without a ton of massive financial stress. I can really do anything and I really can live my values right now. And I have to figure out what those are. And I had them in the back of my mind. And I think that, like, the part of me felt a level of relief, and the other part of me was like, holy shit, now or never. Yeah.

I mean, I want to say one thing about you, Max, because I know the end of this story. I do think you had one of the Horsemen of Values destruction in your life. And I think it was expectations because of your previous life with the Brew and Shark Tank and so forth. You. You thought, the world's expecting me to be an entrepreneur, and I expect me to be an entrepreneur. That's been my identity for a long time. So I do think that you were right. You had a lot of freedom to live your values and you wanted and you needed to find them out, but you did have a horseman galloping around.

Yeah, you're right. I think actually you are right. That's something I didn't think about.

I want to just point out this is why I teach the class. Okay. All right. All right, let's go to Kristen. Did you have some Horsemen romping around in your life?

Yeah, this is when I started crying because all four of them applied to my life.

Talk to us about it.

Oh, my gosh, I'm start crying.

Expectations, the podcast where Everyone cries the.

Tissues behind you expectations. I think growing up in the south, there's a way that you were told to be and it's demure and to be shy and small and you're in service to, you know, everyone fit in Events. We had had a lot of events happen. It was survival mode of I will make this family. Okay. What were the other ones?

There's expedients. Just don't rock the boat.

I came to New York as an actress, and I came into advertising because I got a temp job at a Post House facility. And I thought, this seems cool, but it was never intentional. And then I ended up being good at it in some way. And I was like, well, I guess I should just be grateful that I'm. And then when it comes to money.

It'S just easier to keep that job and follow the flow, right?

Just easier. And whenever I would kind of get uncomfortable, and it was like, you should be thankful. You should be thankful. And then when it comes to economics, living in New York is expensive, and kids are expensive, and kids with special needs are really expensive.

And so you were making a job with the big bucks. And all four Horsemen came galloping in that moment.

See, I can, like, picture it up on the screen. That moment was, well, I just remember thinking, I'm so grateful I'm going to be here. And this is actually going to be way harder and more emotional than I.

Thought it would be.

I had a student one time, I was teaching this, and I had the four enforcement up, and she had tears just streaming down her face. And she made this gesture to me where she put the number four in front of her chest. In other words, to indicate to me all four are in my life.

We'll be back to our conversation with Kristen and Max in a moment. This is Becoming youg.

I'm Susie Welch. And we're back with our conversation with Max and Kristen. Okay, so we went through the Four Horsemen, and then we started doing the exercises to figure out what your values might be. And there's a whole bunch of different exercises we do if you're interested in all of them. The book has them all. But I want to just talk about two quickly before we talk about the values bridge, which is, as I say, the king or queen of all the exercises. One is, whose life do you want anyway? And this is where I say, I am the queen of the world, and you now must change lives with five or six people. They can be real or they can be fictitious. You can know them. They can be dead. They can be alive. You've never met them. They can be famous, whatever. And I want you to write down, if you have to switch lives with somebody, who are those people? What are the reasons and what would you leave out? And then I ask you to look for patterns. And this is a very stunning experience for a lot of people. For instance, I've had students who are very firmly going into banking, and then they list their five people and they're all entrepreneurs or they're all stay at home parents or whatever. And they're like, oops. And so this is one way I separate people from their identity issues so they can start to look at their values. Do you remember who you might have had on that list?

So two people immediately come to mind that I had on the list. One was the president of Absence, Steve Spinelli, because he was like the founder of Jiffy Lube, this, like, massive entrepreneur, and then totally shifted into a world in corporate America and becoming the president of a bureaucratic university. Interesting, interesting. And the other was somebody from Michigan, where I grew up, who happens to be the CEO of a bank. And I think he has just recently sold the bank. And.

But isn't that interesting? The two people you had were sort of corporate leaders. Yeah.

And I remember looking at the paper and saying, this is so interesting. These aren't like the Mark Zuckerbergs and the Jeff Bezos of the world. These are the people that now nobody really knows that have built amazing companies and amazing families and amazing lives and amazing wealth without being splashed across the headlines.

Interesting, interesting data. Kristen, who's on your chart?

Brene Brown, Michelle Obama, and Ramit Sethi.

Who?

It's a stupid name. I will teach you to be rich. But he started this blog when he was in his 20s. But I used his book to learn how to manage all our finances, and he made it so accessible. I mean, when you think about the three of them together, it's so obvious. But I really was.

Well, what was obvious? What was the pattern that jumped?

Well, they all have a very strong voice.

Yes.

They're all teachers.

Yes.

I mean, Brene and Michelle are like. They inspire me as a mom and as a wife because they take up space and there's that balance of strength and warmth.

And they are so clear about what they want to talk about in the world.

Yeah, they're really out there, aren't they?

They're really out there.

We now know that they have high scope, but we'll get to that. There's another exercise that we do together that is The Alpha Omega, which is three questions that prompt you to reveal your values. I just want to talk about your answer to one of those questions. And it's a question that asks what would make you cry at your 85th birthday? And this is about legacy, what we want to leave behind or what we want to fix. People cry at their 85th birthday from regret about an unfulfilled dream, about an unlived life. And it is a question that is. It's this one simple question, but it can really show your values. Kristin, do you remember what you answered to that?

Yeah, it undid me. My answer was that I would have unintentionally been a martyr in my own life.

Oh, my God. Right? So it's almost funny because what you're saying is, like, I would cry if I just given my life over to being a picture of me instead of me. And this is, to me, so much speaks to your value of scope and authenticity, voice and so forth. So your values were beginning to emerge. Max, what was your answer to the. What would make you cry from regret at your 85th?

So the first was if I was alone. Yep. Meaning if I wasn't with children or if I wasn't with siblings or, you know, as I envision it now with my parents, who hope, you know, I imagine, will not be around at my 85th birthday.

Medicine's changing, but you never know. Unlikely.

You never know. And the other was like, if I hadn't achieved and if I had just, like, lived a monotonous life of, like, routine and stability.

Right. So the values beginning to emerge. Here we have names for these values. We put it all together, then by taking the Values Bridge. The Values bridge asks you 88 questions, and it looks for patterns and does all sorts of amazing things with its algorithm. And then it gives you a list of your values. Do you remember getting back the results of your values bridge?

I do.

What happened?

So my top value period was beholderism. And I imagine that was a proxy at the time for being in this, like, very transitional space, looking for a new job, feeling very out of control, wanting to control everything in my life. And so if we scrub for that, which I, you know, still have a high value of beholderism. But I think that beholderism.

Let me just insert here, that beholderism is a really interesting value. It's the value that I often say needs a support group, because when people find out they've got beholderism as a high value, and by the way, I do, too, people are like, I can't be that person. But guess what? You can be. Beholderism is a value. It's one of the oldest values. It actually shows up in all the values inventories that have been created in academic settings. And it's typically called aesthetics. And it is the value that says that it's a measure of how much you care about how things look. Okay. How your home looks, how your stuff looks and how you look. And look. People say it means I'm shallow. And I'm like, I don't know, it may mean that you really want harmony. There's not a lot of things we can control in this world, but we can control how our things look and how we look. So you had beholderism as number one. Shows up all the time. And by the way, you look great. Okay. So, okay, your beholderism is being expressed. What were your other top values, Max?

Oh, I have achievement as a top value.

Yes. And you know where that showed up? It showed up in your whose life do you want? And it showed up in 85th birthday crying. So, okay, achievement. And achievement, by the way, is the value, it's quite self explanatory, of caring about seeing success. Success that other people can see. If you have high achievement, you want to have accomplishments. And if you are low, if achievement is like your 14th or 15th value, you just don't care about winning and losing. You don't care if you're successful or not. And guess what? No good or bad in this. No shade, no cheers for this. Your values are your values. If you're not hurting anybody, you just have to have your values. Okay, what were some of your other topics?

Family centrism was number two. And I think that's also indicative from all these activities.

Right.

That we're like having a big family and having family close to me is important.

Family centrism is the value that reflects how much you want your family to be the organizing principle of your life. And it's always shocking when parents get back and they see the family centrism is like number 11. And I'm like, do not beat yourself up. I have low family centrism and I would give my kidneys, both of them, to my children. Okay. I give everything to my kids. I love them and I adore them. I do not want my family to be the organizing principle of my life. So it's not about love or loyalty. But you have it is number two beautiful. Okay, what else?

And then I had very high work centrism.

Yep.

Which is just I want to work hard And I always want to. I find immense satisfaction through the act of working in itself.

And that's the definition of work centrism. Work centrism is the value that measures how much you like work for. For work's sake. Okay. If you wake up in the morning and you think about work and how you're going to organize your life around work, you have high work centrism. People with high work centrism are often called workaholics. I think the word aholic is something you call somebody who's got a disease. And I prefer to say somebody has. Has high work centrism or you have low work centrism. Somehow I have very high work centrism. But I managed to have a lot of children who have low work centrism. And you know what? I can't judge them because their lives are wonderful and they're living their true expression of who they are. Kristin, what'd you find out your values were?

Scope and radius were my highest, which.

I mean, I keep thinking about scope all the time and it brings so much meaning to like my entire life.

Let's pause here and I'm going to explain what scope is. Scope is a value. I love this value so much. It's no other values inventory. So I have special attachment to it. Scope is a reflection of how big a life you want, how much it excitement, how much new stuff, new experiences, new people, new relationship. It's high learning. It's high. You'll take the chaos for it. You want a big life. Always use this image of Bianca Jagger going in on her white stallion into Studio 54, having the highest scope. Your great quote one time, I think it was in class, you said, I want to touch everybody's brain.

I want to touch all the brains.

Okay? So low scope is a beautiful thing as well. Low scope is when you. Your value is predictability, routine, being able to know what's coming. I mean, if I was to say to you, what are you doing in one year at two o' clock in the afternoon? You would say, I know what I'm doing because my life is something that is contained. It's beautiful. It's a choice how big a life you want. So high scope was number one for you, right?

Big, yeah.

And then radius was number two. Correct. Radius is the desire measure of how much you want to change the world. This is about systemic change. You had a very strong presentation of race. And you know, what was your feelings when you saw your values?

Those two values.

That my life didn't have them in it.

Yeah, that's a little way. Right. Because one of the things that the values bridge measures is what we call the variance between how much you have the value and how much you're living it. What were your variances on those?

Oh, what's like the mo?

I mean, 100% is as high as it goes.

It's the.

I think it was 98 for one of yours, right?

It was. Oh, yeah.

And so you had a very high scope and very high radius and your thought was oh, oh, yeah.

And beholderism was up there. Was up there. And voice was up there.

Okay, so let's talk about voice because you've expressed voice in all your exercises. I mean, this is when you talk about Brene Brown and Michelle Obama. Voice is creative self expression. It's your desire to have the world so you stand out for who you are. Your authentic presentation of yourself. And some people have no desire to do that. They want to belong. You know, I don't want to pick on sororities. I was never part of a sorority. But sororities is where you all do the same thing. You dress the same way, and there's certain rules you fit in. And people with have really, really high voice are not particularly great fits for safe sorority type situations or they temporarily repress a. Or sublimate their voice to be in that kind of setting. If you had high voice, you might not really be great in an Amish community, for instance, or in the Secret.

Life of Mormon Wives.

Yeah, I do want to share one.

More thing, please, Because I think, I imagine that there's other women my age who are listening to this and I want to share how hard it was for me to actually identify my own values separate from my family. It's so important and it's. I still sometimes try to am trying to separate it because I love my children and I love my husband so much. And I also want to know what I think and feel about things. I always thought that I knew exactly how I thought and felt about things. And it turned out it was really hard for me to separate it.

Yeah, this is one of the gut wrenching parts of the values process, is that we don't know what our values are because we've completed completely sublimated them to the people that we love. And I think that this is a lot of times for parents. One of the hardest part of going through becoming you. The first time I had an experience with this was 2009 and I was on the road writing for oh, the Oprah Magazine and I was talking about values, and a woman came up to me after my speech, and she looked really stricken. And I remember bending down and I said to her, what is. What is wrong? And she said, I think for the past 15 years, I've been living my husband's values. And I said to her, oh, sister, you know, join the club. And we do this for love. I don't have any negative feelings about it, except for that we lose ourself in the process. And I think for you, and for many people who are moms and dads, of course, too, you start doing that, and then one day you say, why do I feel like I'm not myself? Why do I feel like I'm not in my body? And then to come to terms with the fact that you have values and the people you love may have very different values, that's the work of our lives. And I think for you, watching you go through it, I remember one time you saying, I don't even know what my values are, separate from my children.

You showed up for me with so much grace in that moment. And first of all, the fact that I could raise my hand in a classroom of 40 strangers and say, I don't know how to separate myself. And I said, I don't want my whole life to be my family. And I feel like that is something where, like, people are going to come for me with knives and pitchforks, and that might be some of my Southern upbringing coming in. And you immediately said, yes, yes, that is a challenge. And you talked through your own personal experiences of how you navigated that. And I just felt. I just felt so seen and so relieved and to be given permission.

Yeah, I'm gonna start crying.

Okay. It's all right. I'm up, too. I would say it is giving ourselves permission to know who we are. What an incredible experience it is to say, I am this person. What you just said is like, okay, there are these expectations that moms act certain way, and for working moms and for moms in general who take the test, they see that family centrism is not in their top five or three, and just say, this isn't about love. This is about how I define myself and organize my days, and it's not going to make me a bad mother. And the freedom that the language gives us.

You had previously asked us to describe becoming you in one word. And I said relaxing. And when you just said relieving, it brought it back in the sense of this doesn't have to be this massive life transformation and realization it often is. But what becoming you is, is just data. And it is learning to have the tools to discuss yourself and your own life and to understand yourself on a quantitative level. And I think just that data alone is helpful and at least for me, like having this amount of understanding of myself.

Yeah.

But I think that was, for me, one of the biggest takeaways.

That's cool. It's crazy to me how many years in our lives we can go through without knowing who we are. And we try to sort of understand the world and understand the world, but actually that whole understanding begins with knowing who we are in the details. And I'm guilty as charged. I mean, I spent a lot of time understanding the world and studying and studying. But this sort of journey of self discovery and how we fit into the world starts with understanding ourselves. There's nothing selfish about it. There's nothing self absorbed about it. Actually, we become better people and share our joy more. When we find out who we are and find our authentic lives, then we feel what it feels like to live an authentic life, this kind of very contagious joy. So we are, I believe, reaching the end of this values exploration part of this series together. Can I just pause to say I love you both so much and I'm so grateful we're doing this together and I bet our listeners are too. I just want to recap briefly. What we did here is we talked about the values portion of the Becoming youg methodology, which is this peeling away of our defenses of the Four Horsemen and peeling away what gets us in the way of our values, and talking about some of the tests and activities that get us to figure out our values. And we're going to get to the end of your stories if you got to listen to the whole series to know the end of these stories. But you came in with some questions about what your values were, and you came out with a much stronger sense of not only what your values were, but how fully or not you were currently living them in your life. This was the first piece of data that we closely looked at and we're going to talk next time about what you learned when you learned about your aptitudes, both your cognitive aptitudes and your emotional personality aptitudes. So let us leave it there. I'm Susie Welch. I'm so glad you're with us. Max and Kristen, you're the best to my listeners out there. Thank you so much. See you soon.

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