“But You Don’t Understand, She’s Special.”

Foreign.

Hello, it's Susie Welch. I hope you had a fantastic Labor Day. Welcome back to the real live world. This is a becoming you podcast. This is a podcast where we talk about, well, well, besides talking about me and my encounters with animals, which just seem to happen a lot, in this podcast we talk about becoming you and the ways in which we find the life that we want to live. A life where we are both self actualizing and giving back. That's what I call area of transcendence. And so we do that in a whole bunch of different ways. But mainly I tell stories and answer questions. And so that's what we're doing today in becoming you and we're all together. Hey, you know what? One thing I want to just give you a heads up on is that for some reason they're putting scaffolding up on the building next door to where we tape this podcast in beautiful New York City. And so, gosh, if you hear something in the background, just go with it. We live in a city. All right, so I want to thank everybody who's listening to this podcast. We are very taken aback by the number of people listening to it. So thank you very much. And I want to thank the people who are listening to this podcast podcast who also came to my free webinar on values yesterday. I love you and thank you for your wonderful comments and I want to do more of them. So thank you for your input. But let's get right down to business because we've just had Labor Day. Labor Day is this holiday that celebrates work. And I know that there are people who look at Labor Day and think, I am not celebrating work. I do not like work. And going back is making me feel icky and, and becoming you is actually for you in so many ways. But then you have people who are doing work when they would rather, or suspect that they would be rather be chasing a passion. They've got this burning passion. They have a dream of a life. They've never chased the dream of a life. And they are doing work that's very pedantic to them, very regular. But they've got this dream. They want to be a music entrepreneur. They want to do Doctors Without Borders. They want to do something that really burns inside of them. And then they go in and they're like a marketing specialist. And they do that because they're not sure they can do that dream of life. And this is one of the eternal questions that comes to people like me and other people in my space, which is basically life planning and careers Should I chase my passion? Okay? And I got a letter the other day, actually a DM from a person who said, look, I'm a writer, and my passion is writing for tv. And I. But I need another job. You know, I'm looking at other jobs. What should I do? And I said, continue being a writer because you've already been successful at it, and you just need to find other ways to write. And I, as I said to her, writers got it right? So the thing about passion, okay, and chasing your passion is there are some people in this field who tell you to go and do that. And I am actually not in that category, okay? I'm a person who says, chase your passion if you're good at it. Okay? I think that this is solid, logical advice. A lot of people say, just don't chase the passion. But the people who tell you, just do what you're passionate about. You know, if you don't have the aptitudes and there's not opportunity there, it's not a good thing. But I want to tell you a little bit of a story that. That really blew my mind and taught me everything I needed to know about passion. And it goes like this. Prepare yourself for this story, because at the end, there's a surprise ending. And when I tell it in class, it invariably gets incredible gasps. And one thing I always wonder about class is why is it that from semester to semester, the students don't tell each other the punchline? But they don't, so. But here I am telling it again. All right, so the story actually starts when I was a young girl. The story starts when I was 15 years old, when I went to boarding school and I got a fantastic roommate and named Evelyn. And we became incredible lifelong friends. And we stayed friends all the way. We were very close. We roomed together in boarding school, and we grew up together. And then we went to the same college together, and we stayed incredibly close friends. Well, then she was extremely smart, and she went off to England to study, and she became a great scholar, and she stayed in England. She married a British guy, and she started building an incredible career in academia. And we stayed very good friends. And look, a life is tough. We went through some very, very tough things together. She had a divorce. She lost her mother. I mean, look, life is. And I had my own issues, and we stayed very good friends. And I. I can't tell you how much I respected her mind. And along the way, she started to have children. She, in fact, had children before I did. And in fact, she had a Daughter when I was just married and I went over to England to meet her new daughter. And I held her daughter in my arms and it was the first baby I ever really held, to be honest. And I thought, oh my God, this is scary. Can I possibly do this? And I fell in love with that little daughter and just with Evelyn's experience of having her. So life goes on and Evelyn continues to have children and so do I. And we stay very close friends. And what happens is her kids are sort of entering teenage years and so are mine. And one time Jack and I went over to England for work, went over to London for work. And Evelyn by this time was married to her current husband, a well known public scientist in England. And we go over and Jack loved her husband and we all got along great. And we killed a bottle of wine in the backyard, had like a little cookout outside, the four of us. And we do what parents do when they get together. We started talking about our kids and what they do when parents get together. If you've never noticed this, if you've not watched this, they just sort of go down. The children we sort of started with my oldest and went down with what each kid was doing. And then we started talking about her kids. And she started off with that oldest child, who I thought was so special and who I had watched grow up and I had seen many times. She started off talking about her and she announced that this daughter had, in ninth grade, dropped out of high school to move into a basement and start a band with her boyfriend. And I just completely lost my.

Well, let's just say it became inappropriate. I was so upset about it. I was like, you've got to be kidding me. You cannot let this happen. And she was a pretty hands off, laissez faire kind of mother. She had a different mothering style than I did. Just, we have different personalities. And I said, you can't let this happen. I mean, sometimes we have to actually interfere and be the parent. Evelyn And Jack was like, susie, cool down. But I had known her since I was 15 and I felt like, okay, there's times where you sort of intervene and there's times when you don't. And I was upset because this daughter of hers, I loved her so much and she was so special and she was so uniquely smart. And I felt very invested in her. And I said, no, no, no, you actually can't let this happen. She's in ninth grade, she cannot drop out and start a rock and roll band. Are you kidding me? And. And Evelyn really Held her ground and really blew me off. And she said, she actually has a very good voice. And I screamed, everyone has a good voice now. Evelyn actually had an incredible voice. She was in the Harvard choir. She was incredible. We used to go watch her and, like, have tears in her eyes. So I knew, you know, she did it. She must have had a good voice. Inherited it from Evelyn and I. But I did scream this famous line. At least famous in my family. Everyone has a good voice. And at that point, we were sitting at a picnic table and Jack literally squeezed that place above your knee. That's quite painful. And he just shut me down because I was off my rocker on it. The party continued on and we went through the rest of her children, and I was trying to hold it together, blah, blah, blah. And the night ended, and we, of course, gave each other hugs and kisses. And we got into the car and I start to say to Jack, oh, my God, could you believe that thing? And he just beat me to the punch. And he was like, you were just absolutely out of line. That is their business. That is her daughter. And I said, no, no, no. Like, oh, a rock and roll band, okay, yeah, she's going to be a big star, just like, you know, all. And she dropped out of school. Do you understand? This has long term. And he just said to me, just back off, Susie, you're wrong. And I said, no, Jack, I love you. And you are right almost all of the time. But this time I'm right. That girl is special.

So I'm really glad that Florence from Florence and the Machine became famous quickly because I didn't have to suffer as she, like, slowly but surely became famous, because she became famous almost immediately when she came out to the scene. And I had to just lower my head in shame and just, you know. And I have to say, to her great credit, and Evelyn never brought this conversation up to me, ever. That I, like, completely excoriated her and said, don't let that child become a rock and roll star. I'm glad that she almost overnight became the huge star that she is. One of the things my children hate the most is when I drag them to a Florence concert. They love Florence and they are huge fans of hers. We all are. But when I bring them to a Florence concert and they have to watch me crying the entire time saying, I was such an idiot, will she ever forgive me? I want you to know, Florence has forgiven me. She thinks the story is hysterical and Evelyn never told her about it because she's a good mother and we all have a good laugh about it. Now, Evelyn is the life is funny because Evelyn is the head, the president of the University of Bristol in England, which is a very prominent school. It's like the Brown of England, in a way. And it's where I'm getting my doctorate, my PhD. And so Evelyn, once again, is kind of in my life every single day. And life goes on. I saw a fantastic interview where Evelyn was being interviewed by one of the students at the University of Bristol. And they said, what does it feel like to be the mother of an international rock star? And Evelyn said, absolutely terrifying. When I see Florence in concert, which I just did when she sold out Madison Square Garden five days in a row, and I went to go see her and I wanted to see her every day, but my children told me that was not mentally stable. She runs through the crowds and I feel terror in my heart and I can't imagine what Evelyn feels. So look, what's the point of this story? Besides the fact that I was inappropriate at a party? The point of this story is that there are some people who absolutely should chase their dreams. She had a dream of a life. It was in her. Nothing could deny her. She did a very bold thing. She went for it, and she was massively talented and the world needed her and she was different and the world wanted her. She's evolved, she's changed, she's grown as an artist. And, you know, I don't know, I don't want to make the Swifties hate me, but she was obviously just on Taylor Swift's new album with the song Florida, and that is the best song on the album. I did call Evelyn and say, I just listened to that, you know, it is the best song in the new album. And Evelyn said, yes, I realize. And of course the two moms are like, you know, yep, yep, we know that. But I would say that I learned a lot about the fact that there are some people who are gifted and have a passion and absolutely must not listen to the naysayers. They must not listen to people like me, the practical people who say everybody can sing. Not everyone could sing like she could. And I think that the beautiful thing is that she had a mom like Evelyn who was like, basically shut up over there, and she did what she had to do. And I think even I didn't obviously say to Florence anything along the way, but if. If she had heard me, she would have just shook her head at me. If you have that kind of self belief, if you have that kind of talent, then you should not be denied. And you should keep fighting for your passion. But let me just say that again. If you have that kind of self belief and that kind of talent, and those are two very important things, the self belief keep you going when people say no. And there's a million stories about people who became famous when people were telling them they could never do it. They were rejected a thousand times. Their book got rejected. Tundra Time, all those things. You have to have self belief. You have to keep believing, but you have to have the talent and you have to have the gifts that people want. And maybe they won't emerge immediately, and maybe you have to keep on building them, but you've got to have that. And there has to be some affirmation. And so that is my story about passion after Labor Day. If you've got a passion and you think you can do it, you should do it. I don't want to hold you back. The world will edit your dreams. So have your dreams. And also you can reflect. And you know what? I hope this does. I hope this inspires you to go listen to some Florence the Machine. She's so. If you've not seen her in concert, if you've not seen her videos, you don't. I mean, you're missing something amazing. And I hope that Jorge, our very talented producer, cuts in a lot of Florence in the Machine music here. The way I do this in class, by the way, is I say, yes, that girl was very talented. And then we immediately cut to the dog days. The dog days. Oh, I won't do it to you. Okay. But we cut immediately to that. And everybody simultaneously realizes that Professor Welch is deeply flawed. So I would say love that story because it just is about a person who was meant to chase their dreams. And maybe that's you. Maybe that's you. And if it is, Godspeed to you. The world needs you.

Never wanted anything from you.

All right, now that I've fully embarrassed myself with the Florence story, I will take some questions from the community. What do we got?

All right, the first question today is, I'm curious, what does living by design mean? Deliberation, I'm assuming, is you're making decisions and moving about life with a purpose. But can you go into more detail about living by design?

Okay, so this is based on a video I recently posted, which got a lot of love, thank you very much, where I said, okay, there's the three Ds of how you can live. Very simple. Let's boil it down. You can live by default. That's Reactive. Everything comes at you. You make your decisions on the fly. That is how most of us live most of the time. And that's the way life is. Okay? So there's living by default. There's. The second is living by deliberation. You are evolving. You're starting to think about things, you're planning. You've got values. And you start saying, well, that decision doesn't align with my values. That. That trip would not align with my values. That partner would not align with my values. That's with deliberation, okay? And then there's design, where you actually have a theory of your life. Okay? Design is when you sort of are up at 20,000ft and you look down at your life and you say, this is what I want to achieve. This is the kind of relationships I want. This is the person I want to be. I mean, there's sort of three categories of character. I want to be this person. This is how I want to show up in the world. There's about lifestyle. This is the way I want to live. And then there's legacy. This is the mark I want to leave behind. When you know those things and you're living according to them, that's living by design. Deliberation is on the way there. And I would say, you know, I teach this stuff. I think I'm pretty much. I'm sort of moved through deliberation. I'm kind of pretty much. I'm old. Okay, by the way, I'm indesign sort of of the time. But I go back and forth between deliberation and design. It all comes back to my favorite thing. Values. And knowing what your values are. And those of you who've been following the drama, the trauma, and the excitement of the values bridge, that tool which will identify your values for you, which I invented. It's coming. We hope to have a beta by late September, and maybe some of you will even be beta testers. We would love that. Just hit us up with DMs. We'll get you on the beta testing list. And so that's coming for people because, look, identifying your values is very hard. What's the language? How do we even talk about values? Well, that's why I invented my 15 values terms, which helps us decide how much value we have on, you know, how much of each value we have. To pull your values out of the air is crazy, and it's hard. And I'd like to just sort of move that conversation forward so by having some language we can all share and talk about. It. But I hope that's clear about the 3ds default is how most of us live. We just react and we take a lot of detours. And frankly, I did that for many decades because I had a lot of constraints and because I was an evolving human being and welcome to humanity. Deliberation is when you start thinking about how and why you're living and you start having a sense of your values. And design is when you really are living with intention. And of course, even when you're living with intention, you're going to screw up some time, you're going to fall off the rails. Life's events are going to drop a bomb in your head. You're going to get long Covid or something like that. And which is a dreadful thing that a million people apparently have. I was reading in the Times the other day. And so it makes it harder to live by design when these kind of things come out of left field. That's life also. But this is. This is the ideal that I'm talking about. I hope that helps. I hope that helps. Pierre seems riveted by it. Pierre, of course, is just absolutely riveted by everything I say. How could it be that? It's this early in the morning. Pierre's taking his second nap of the day. I want to be Pierre. I want to be Pierre. Somebody wrote me. I asked for people to write me and tell me how to make my webinars better. And somebody wrote and said, could you please have Pierre on the screen? So I get it. I feel for you. And I would like Pierre everywhere also. And, you know, Florida. Florida. I mean, it's such that. Okay, Taylor's great. Love Taylor. Please don't come for me. I love her. I love Taylor. Folklore, I think one of the greatest albums. I wouldn't have made it through the pandemic without Folklore. I really. I think she's amazing. But Taylor plus Florence. Good Lord, does it get any better than that? It doesn't. Okay, Maybe if they throw Moby in with them. That's what I'm going for. Or Pitbull. Okay, I have to lay down. Okay. Elise has just suggested a Moby Pitbull, Florence Taylor tour, world tour. And I would have to be hospitalized. Okay. First of all, I'd follow them like a groupie. It would be sad. I'd follow them around, and then between cities, I'd be hospitalized. That's a scary thought. Okay, maybe I can manifest it. I've always found manifesting to be one of the wildest things in the world. I'm just going to manifest it. Okay, let's enter reality. What's another question from my beloved community?

All right, next question is, I know you've said to not burn bridges, but if you have burnt bridges, what should you do?

Oh, what a great question. Okay, so we all burn bridges because we're human beings, and we get mad and we get deeply hurt. And now, burning bridges doesn't always have to be this gigantic active thing, like, screw you. I'm never speaking to you again. Boom. And you blow up the bridge between the two of you. Much more often, burning bridges happens by omission, not commission. You stop calling someone. You don't. You ghost them. You don't answer a dm. You don't show up for something, and then the bridge is burnt, and it's just this silent awkwardness or discomfort. Okay? So I actually recommend doing a very hard thing, which is repairing those bridges. And a lot of times people start doing this in their 50s, because you start thinking, okay, I don't want to live with these feelings, these open wounds. And it involves a massive amount of humility and ability. And what you have to say to yourself is, I'm going to be very uncomfortable, but it probably will only be for an hour. And so the beautiful thing is we have technology to help us in that. You can write it. You don't have to actually call people the first time. You can write a note, and you can say, I've reflected on what happened between us, and I don't like the way it ended, and I want to take full responsibility for my role in it. Would it be possible to have a conversation and, you know, you got to come at it immediately, stating that you see your role in it, even if you think your role in it was 1% and they were 99%. Okay. We all feel that because we all write the stories of our lives with ourselves at the center as the hero, as Joe Lodato, a great Miami police detective, said to me once. So I think you've got to approach by writing, because calling is usually very, very hard. And then if you can just get to a place where you agree that what happened was something that neither of you would have wanted and you don't have to reestablish becoming besties. I want to say that on this point, I actually really lived through something very profound in this way, which is that when I was a young woman, starting when I was around 18, I became wildly, passionately best friends with a person named Sue. And the way your relationships can Be in those days when you're young, are like, you know, you almost like, fall in love. Like, you become incredibly close friends. And she and I did that. And we were unbelievably close girlfriends. Best, best, best girlfriends for eight years. And we shared everything. And I mean, when I look back at the pictures of us in those days, and we didn't have a lot of pictures because it was before phones. We're screaming with laughter in every picture. I was as close to her as a human being could be. And she was at my wedding, and of course, she was a bridesmaid, and it was really intense. And then she was about to get married, and I met her husband, and of course I did. And she was. We were about two months out from her wedding, and she called me and she said, it's Sue. And she was like, weird. Her voice was weird. She was weirdly serious. And she said, we can't be friends anymore. I can't explain why. And I said, is this a joke? And she said, no, I'm sorry. Goodbye. And I mean, I knew instantly she was serious. And she hung up the phone. Now we had no way to, like, I couldn't watch her social media. There was like, literally, she lived in another city for me. We were 25 when that happened. And for the next 15 years, we did not speak to each other. And it was like a death. I mean, I was utterly heartbroken. I had no idea why it happened. And so it was redoubled by the fact that I had no idea why it happened. And for 15 years, we did not see speak. And it was devastating. And people would say to me, what happened to your best friend, Sue? And I would say, well, we're. We're not friends anymore. I like a bear. In fact, I could barely speak about it. And then life went on. I had my kids and everything like that. And then when I was 39 years old and I was in the news a lot because I had been fired from running off with my husband Jack, she contacted me through third person. There's email then and stuff like that. And she contacted me and she did this incredible thing where she said, a terrible thing happened. And I would like to. If you would be willing, I would like to explain it to you. And I said, no effing way. You know, all the Sicilian in me came out, and my husband Jack said, you were so devastated. Why wouldn't you repair this bridge? You don't have to be her best friend again. Why wouldn't you just remove this hurt from your life? It's the thing that has always made you the saddest. And he counseled me to repair the bridge. And I didn't want to because I had been so devastated. And I said very tentatively, like, I don't trust you. I don't like you. You really broke my heart. I doubted myself. I mean, a lot of bad things happened in my heart because what? She just, like, walked out of my life, and I had no idea why. And so she came over on the boat. This was happening in Nantucket. Super sorry about the street noises in the background. She came over on the boat. And what had ended up happening was that her husband, who I want to state is an absolutely magnificent human being and a close friend of mine now. But what had happened was her husband had looked at her friendship with mine, and he knew he was about to marry her. And he said, you have to choose one of us. I can't be married to you and have you married to Susie also. He was not wrong. He was not wrong. I would have gotten in the way of their marriage because we were young. And she chose him. I don't blame her for choosing him. She loved him and she wanted to be married. And he saw over the years how devastated she was by the loss of our friendship. And in fact, she did a wild thing. I was in the news a lot because I developed a career that had me in the news a lot in good ways. And her whole refrigerator was covered with clippings by me and about me. Like her kids told me later. Like, it was really weird. Like, every time there's a story about me, she would hang it on the refrigerator. In a way of. It was saying to her family, this I have not forgotten. And finally her husband said to her, sort of five years before she approached me, please, let's go reconcile with Susie. Let's explain what happened. We were young. We didn't handle it properly. For instance, he could have said that, and we could have stayed friends, and I would have had to back off a little bit. But anyway, he didn't, because we were young. And he urged her for five years, and she finally got the courage to approach me, as I said, and she came and explained it to me. And Jack was sitting next to me, and I was still mad. And Jack said, that is the most beautiful story I ever heard. He was trying to build a marriage. Susie, get over yourself. And she said to me, can we be. Can we try to be friends again? And I was really scared. But I missed her. After all those years, I missed her. And I will tell to you that that was. That was 65, 25 years ago. We had been the absolute closest and bestest of friends. Since that day, we became instantly best friends again. And we have been together through everything together. She's my absolute best friend in the world. I talk to her every single day. And we picked up where we left off. And one of the beautiful things is that Jack became really close friends with her husband. And we used to have so much fun just leaving them behind. And they would sit at the bar and talk about, he's still a surgeon. And they would talk about medical stuff and sports, and sue and I would go play golf together. And life is beautiful in that way. But she had the guts to mend an absolutely torched bridge. And my husband had the wisdom to tell me to let her mend the bridge. My instinct was like, I'm too hurt. And thank God for her husband urging her and for both those men for doing the right thing. But the person who did the rightest thing was her, because she was the one who had the courage to mend the bridge. And I was persuaded to let her. So I've lived through it, and it changed my life. I couldn't live without her. And we had more laughs than you can possibly believe. And I say that when Jack was sick and dying, she was, along with my sisters, totally my wingman, and I couldn't have done it without her. And we sometimes talk about that period when we weren't speaking to each other, and it was agonizing for both of us. And so if you have a burned bridge right now somewhere, I want to give you this story as an act of encouragement and hope. Maybe you won't become best friends again with that person, or maybe you won't. Things won't be restored to a beautiful place, but they may be. They may be. Okay. That's my incredibly long answer to that short but very powerful question.

All right, well, I have gone on and on. This has, like, been Susie's the Nostalgia Tour today. Thank you for listening to all the stories about. If you're still with us, and the stories of my life. I want to leave you with a really good hack for work, and I want to just say I'm boldly stealing this hack from Rasanath Das. Rasanath is the world's leading expert in the Enneagram, which is a personality measurement tool, which I highly recommend. My students have to take the Enneagram, and I urge everyone listening to this to go take the Enneagram. It puts you in one of nine personality types. It's about your ego. It's about what makes you strong and what makes you suffer. I entered the a world of Enneagram saying, eh, sounds like pseudoscience to me. I am absolutely convinced it's one of the most important tools we have as both human beings and as people who are working people to understand ourselves so that we can be better leaders and team members. Highly recommend. You can take it for free, but take the $14 version online because it's the better version, and learn about yourself. But I was on the phone with him this morning because Rasanath speaks to my classes at NYU Stern School of Business, by the way, and he's an incredibly important part of the becoming you universe. And we were chatting this morning about our upcoming conference, which we're putting together. And he just gave me this hack, which is so good I have to share it with you. And I want to give credit where credit is due. One of the things that happens when you've got a very forceful personality like mine is and you're the boss, which I am. In my situation, people often just cede to you because that's human nature. And so I often say to my team, can somebody please disagree with me? Because I want pushback, I want feedback. So I use this incredible blunt instrument and I say, will somebody please disagree with me? Which is not ever very effective in getting people to disagree with me. Okay, so he gave me this tool where you say these two phrases. Okay? So you start off and you say, this is how I see it. Tell me what I'm not seeing. Oh, my God. It's magic. I'm going to change my ways because it invites people in, in the most sincere way. Instead of, like, begging people to, like, put their head on the chopping block, you say, this is how I'm seeing it. Tell me what I'm not seeing. Because really, when we disagree with people, it's about underlying assumptions or it's about missing information. I love this so much. I'm going to put it to use immediately today to try to be a better leader and to try to be a better team member. And so I share it with you and I thank Ras Nath Das. If you want to learn more about the Enneagram, you can go down the rabbit hole and I'll see you in about six months. The rabbit hole on it on YouTube, on the enneagram, or you can go to upbuild.com by the way, I have no financial relationship with Ross whatsoever. It's just a fantastic website that's all about the Enneagram. I'll leave you with that. And I'll leave you with just a hope that you have a week that is not fully into fall, but is entering the realm of deliberation and on the way, perhaps to the world of life by design. Thank you for listening. You know I love you so very much. Even though I don't know you, I do love you. And I'll see you next week.