Four big hairy things get in the way of living authentically. What are they?

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Hi there. Welcome to Becoming youg. It's Susie Welch. We're here in Becoming youg. This is the podcast where I endeavor boldly and perhaps recklessly to help you answer the question, what should I do with my life? That is the question. That is the work of our lives. We have new listeners every week, and so I want to welcome you. Hi. I'm really happy you're here because it feels really great to hear back from people that the podcast is having a great effect on their lives. They're just making them think that's what it's all about. I really dig that it's a funny podcast here today because usually the studio is filled with my three dogs, Sir, Audrey and Pierre, but I've sent them away for the weekend because I'm going to London, where I'm going to go visit my thesis advisor. I'm getting my PhD. Why? My family would also like to know the answer to that question. It's something that I started in my head really long time ago. And in fact, when I was at business school, I was recruited by the head of the faculty to join the PhD program at Harvard Business School. And I didn't say this, but the thought bubble over my head was, no, I don't want to be poor, because I had an offer at that point from a consulting firm, and the head of the faculty said to me a really interesting thing that has stayed with me or revisited me recently. And he said, you're going to be an academic someday, Susie. Why not do it right here at Harvard? And I thought to myself, what the heck is that guy talking about? I have no interest in doing that. And I mean, what I had interest in was driving a car that I didn't have to see the highway through, through the floor of because I had no money whatsoever. And I was really excited to go work at Bain, where the work was not an exactly very good fit, but the people were lovely, the offices were shiny, and I was no longer going to be in debt. So that's what I went and did. That was the sum total of the kind of thinking I did about what to do with my life in those days. And guess what we're talking about today. Something that I should have talked about before with my listening audience, but I'm really happy to talk to you about it now. And that is the reason we do not do what we're supposed to do with our lives. I mean, this podcast is about figuring out what to do with your life, living your purpose, living authentically, figuring out that One thing you should be doing, and then going and doing it really hard. This is not a light and fluffy thing to do. I realize it when I say that, how hard it is. But something always gets in the way. And I want to talk about that thing that gets in the way. And I actually want to say there's actually four things. I call those four things the Four Horsemen of Values Destruction. I actually teach them in my class. And because I'm a teacher, they all start with E's. And we're going to go through each one of those E's today. The Four Horsemen of Values Destruction. That is what gets in the way of us living the lives we want to be living and the lives we should live. And I want to say, it's funny that we're talking about this today because this morning I woke up and I was twisted like a pretzel on my bed. I mean, if you had taken a picture of me from above with a drone in my bedroom, well, first you'd be arrested, because there'd be something wrong with you. But if that picture ever got taken and you looked down my bed, you would see a woman who was twisted like a pretzel because three dogs were sprawled across the bed. And I had manipulated my body to accommodate the dogs so that the dogs were very, very comfortable. But I was in a state of complete discomfort. And I thought to myself, it's. This is, like, the reason that people don't live by their values. You are twisting yourself in a way that accommodates everybody but you. I mean, I sleep in a way that is super uncomfortable to accommodate my dogs, who are so fabulous. And that is what, exactly the metaphor for the things that get in the way of us living our natural purpose. But I call them horses. I could have called it the Three Dogs of Values Destruction. But there's actually four Horsemen. Now, I wanna tell you what's at stake here. I wanna tell you why it really matters that you live authentically and live according to your purpose. And the reason is that if you don't, you wake up like I did, with your whole body hurting. Okay? And eventually what happens is, if you don't live according to your purpose and your actual values, you wake up, and instead of your body hurting, your heart hurts. I mean, this is why I quote Proverbs 13:12 in class at great risk of being canceled. I suppose that hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a dream fulfilled is the Tree of Life. Becoming you as a methodology is all about planting you, planting and growing the tree of life. But I remember one time in my life where I had to put aside my dreams for a very, very good reason, by the way, because my husband was sick and he really needed me. But I had to, at that point, leave a job that I loved. And I remember actually standing by the kitchen sink and crying. I mean, my heart ached. It can be physically painful. It's deeply, emotionally painful not to live the life you feel you thought you were meant to live, even if you don't know. Like, sometimes you don't know the life you were meant to live, but you know you're not living it. And that can hurt. That can feel like you're wearing a suit that's not the right size. So what's at stake with understanding what the Four Horsemen of values destruction is, is to see if you're on the back of one of them, if one of them is galloping away with your. You and your life at the same time. And to put yourself through the test of saying, whoa, whoa, whoa, that's me. I. I am living that E. And therefore, that is the reason I'm not living my authentic, purpose filled life. And I gotta fix that. I gotta fix that. So to continue this metaphor until you just want to throw up, to continue the metaphor that you wake up feeling refreshed or that you are planting the tree of life. And that is why we're going through this exercise today. The first one is a real biggie. The E is economic security. We do things or we don't do things because of money. All right? Now, right off the bat, you can say, yeah, people have to live, Susie. And the answer is, yeah, people have to live. That's why I went and I took the job at Bain because I needed money. I was not necessarily interested in that job. Consultant. Me, Susie Welch, girl reporter from Miami. Crime reporter. I mean, I was going to go do consulting. Yeah, economic security was the reason. Now, here's the thing about economic security. We all have it as a value. Of course we do. But what we don't do is we don't dig in to ask ourselves, how much is enough? We don't, because it's a scary question. And there are implications to that question. Because for some people, the answer is, you know what? Not very much is enough for me. But then you have to tell all the people around you who maybe want you to have more. Like a spouse, okay? Like, I want to live very simply. And the spouse is saying, yeah, but I want two cars, and I want the kids to go to private school. And so you adopt their value of what economic security is. Okay. Or you think, okay, my value in economic security is gobs and gobs and gobs of money. I just. It's very embarrassing to actually say that to people. I want to be ridiculously rich. Okay? Then what ends up happening is we say we're doing things for reasons that are not the money. Okay, look, I never ever told anybody I was working at Bain for the money. I admitted that only to myself. And it looked weird to people like, why are you doing that? And I never had an honest conversation with a single person about why I was unhappy at work or why I was actually even working there until it became so obvious that it was a wrong fit. So economic security is a horseman that gallops away with our lives because we do not have the kind of conversation we need to have with ourselves and those in our ecosystem about how much is enough. Are you actually in touch with your true value around money? Okay, so that's the first E. Economic security. Let us move on to the second E. It's expediency. Oh, my God. The number of ding dong dumbbell decisions made against our values because of expediency. What does it mean? Mean? It means that we just do something because it's easier. Okay. The example I love to use in class is like, I had a client once, and she was the most urban person you've ever met in her life. She actually had a huge value of high scope, which we've talked about on this podcast before, meaning that she wanted a really big life. She wanted an exciting life. She wanted to swallow the world hold. She just, you know, she wanted to be on the back of a white stallion riding into Studio 54. You know, when Studio 54 existed. She was a big scope person. Person. And she needed to live in an urban center. She lived in New York City, and then she had kids and she discovered it was very hard to get groceries into your second floor apartment when you lived in the city. And it was just hard, hard, hard. So they moved to the suburbs because it was just going to be easier. Easier to pull your van into the driveway next to your suburban house. And I mean, she died inside. I mean, there were 12 years. The marriage didn't make it, the kids were miserable. I think there's still reverberations from this because when you kill a value, and she killed her value of scope going to live in the suburbs for expediency, when you kill a value, there's collateral damage. And the collateral damage was her family. And her own happiness. She ended up not having to have her job anymore. And this was a person who actually went against a primary central pillar of a value for getting her groceries into her house more easily. Now, this is a very extreme example, but there are so many times where we kill a strong value or we destroy a value for expedience. And I can think of times, you know, where it really happens. It happens around the value that describes how much we care about our friends. That's the value of belonging. Friendship is hard. Maintaining friends is hard. When a friend needs you, sometimes you don't want to show up, and it's hard, but you need to. And a lot of times expedience, because it's just easier not to make the phone call. It's just easier not to text. It's just easier not to go across town when it's raining to meet them at their restaurant. And we just say no, and we lose a friendship or over the fact that it was hard. And expedience would have just made it easier not to do the things. And that's a values killing. And then later you wonder, well, what happened to that friendship? Yeah, expedience killed it. Take this moment and ask, can you think of a time where this was you, where you made a decision based on convenience, on something being just easier? Maybe, you know, because you had an, uh, oh, feeling in your stomach when you were doing it, and you rationalized it by saying it was just convenient. It was easier. That's expedience. And can you think of a time that happened to you? I bet you have. I mean, it's all of us. We are human beings. I've done it, and I think you've probably done it. Think about that for a second.

Okay, the third e is another big E. Well, oh, for God's sake, they're all big. Okay? But the third e is expectations. I actually have an exercise for my students where I say, tell me what you want to be when you grew up. Like, when you were little, what did you want to be when you grew up? And then write down why you didn't do it. And, I mean, 90% of the cases, I wanted to be X, Y, and Z. My parents told me people like us didn't do that. My parents said I'd never make enough money. People from my background don't go into that kind of work. I mean, all sort of expectations are familial from your family. They're cultural, they're societal. They come in every flavor. Okay? Every flavor of bad. I saw this Very personally. In my own family, I came from a second generation. My grandmother's born in Italy. My mom was born here in the United States. And my mom, when we were very young, started saying to my oldest sister, we need a doctor in this family. It's very good when a family has a doctor. She tried to make me a lawyer. Ha ha. Sorry about that, mom. But she went for my sister being a doctor. And my sister was very dutiful. She was the eldest. She had no interest in science whatsoever. She suffered all the way through high school focusing on science. And then she got into college and she suffered mightily and finally managed, like after just incredible amount of tutoring and hard work and suffering to get into medical school. And she did become a doctor. She actually became a research doctor. And she slogged through, kept on trying to find reasons not to be working. She had a kid who needed her at home, all sorts of stuff. And it was clear she did not love it. Now she was married to a doctor, so you could actually see what it looked like when there was a person who loved being a doctor. But she was sort of doctor adjacent, and she liked being called doctor. And at age 50, age 50, she had the courage to go to my parents and say, I never wanted to do it anyway. And I'm becoming what I've always wanted to be. Life is too short. I'm becoming a photographer. Which she did. Okay. And my parents were like, we. This is the beauty of it. My parents said, we never wanted you to be a doctor. I mean, it's like, luckily my sister had all of us going. Like, it's all you talked about for the first 20 years of her life. And then you feasted on it non stop when she became one, telling everybody, like, literally Ellen would walk into the room and my mother would announce, here's my doctor. Okay? And this is not a unique experience. This is the way it goes. Families have expectations. The world has expectations. But we are often the killers of our, you know, we are often the worst bearers of expectations. People like me don't do things like that. I didn't go to ex college to teach such. I had a student one time, she desperately. She loved Roomba as much as my other student loved fitness. And we take an aptitude test called YouScience, and it actually told or tells you what your cognitive aptitudes are. It literally suggested she become a Roomba teacher. She came up to me and she was like, how does it know this about me? This is what I really want. And I said, well, why don't you become a Roomba teacher? And she said, I didn't get my Stern MBA to teach Roomba. I said, you know, you could open up, like, a whole bunch of fitness studios or whatever. And she was like, that's not happening. So, you know, that wasn't her family speaking. That was her speaking. And so we do this to ourselves, and then we live these lives of quiet desperation. I have my students. I read it to them. An incredible poem around expectations. The poem is called Ed. It's by Lewis Simpson. He's a very underappreciated. He's no longer with us. Very underappreciated Jamaican poet. He won the Pulitzer Prize. And it is the simplest poem. When I read it, I know you probably think if you listen to this podcast, that I do a lot of crying. I did cry when I read this poem, but I was crying because I thought, oh, my God, I must teach this in becoming you. Okay, it goes like this. Ed was in love with a cocktail waitress. But Ed's family and his friends didn't approve, so he broke it off. He married a respectable woman who played the piano. She played well enough to have been a professional. Ed's wife left him. Years later, at a family gathering, Ed got drunk and made a fool of himself. He said, I should have married Doreen. Well, they said, why didn't you?

I'm gonna cry right now. I mean, this is the whole problem with expectations, my beloveds, is that they're bullshit. Okay? We let the horsemen of expectations run away with our lives. And again, I ask you to stop for a moment and ask yourself, are you living right now somebody else's expectations? Are you letting somebody else's values and expectations about what your values should be be the driver of your life? It happens all the time.

And I'm not exempt at all. I mean, one of the bravest things I ever did when I had four children, everyone expected me to stop working. Everyone. My family, my friends, everyone. And all sorts of stuff was said to me. This was the olden days, by the way. But I really heard it. And you know who really picked on me the most? My kids. They were like, why can't you be like the other mothers? Why aren't you, like, here on St. Patrick's Day wearing a green hat? Mommy, it wasn't me. And the hardest thing I ever did, and I'm proud of it. So I'll tell this story, because I'm not proud of a huge number of things in my life, but I'm super Proud of this is. I sat my kids down and I said, someday you'll be gone, but I'll still be here. And I want to be someone. And I love my work, and please don't make me give up something I love. You can fight me or you can help me. I will spend my whole life helping you, doing things you want to do. Please help me do something I want to do. And there was just this moment of silence, and Roscoe said, I mean, I'll thank him for the rest of my life and thank him for everything. He's the greatest son a mother could ever have. Along with his brother Marcus, he said, we'll help you, Mom. And he was the leader of the family. I was single mother then. We'll help you, mom. And I was asking them to not put their expectations on me about what a mother did, but to accept my values about what Susie did. And it was brutally hard and scary to have that moment with them. It could have gone either way, but it changed the course of my life. It did for the better. To actually say, here's who I truly am. Here are my true values. Will you please let me be me? And sometimes we have to ask, and then we sort of have to tell. I don't know what would have happened if they'd said, no, you've got to stay at home. I think I would have fought for myself because it was a matter of life or death. I did try not to work for a while, and I made draperies for every window of the house. And they would have. Eventually, I would have had to be institutionalized. I just couldn't do it. So, all right, those are expectations. And again, ask yourself, are there expectations that you are living by that are not truly about your own values? That's the third E.

All right, we're moving on to the fourth and final E, and that is events. Events are huge values killers, because what happens as events come into our lives, they shift us off our values because they have to. We have a baby, someone we love dies, we get fired. Okay, maybe we're living our purposeful life, or we're living according to our values, and then events drop into our life like a bomb, and we get pushed off of them. And then the problem is we don't go back and reclaim them. We let the events run away, and we follow that road. That's human nature. That's also sort of expedience and comfort and all sorts of other things, and we then just accommodate our new life that have been changed by events, and we don't go back and get our values. Haven't you heard somebody say, I don't know why I changed it. I used to, I used to be so much more playful. I used to be so much more adventurous. I used to be so much. And then, and then they describe an event and they say, but you can go do that again. Well, things changed. And it's true. You know, I am the poster girl for things changing and everybody is. I'm not the only person who's lost a spouse or had something happen in their life. Okay, I, I get that. But we have to go get our life back when it's been stolen by events and it happens. And the biggest event is children. Love them. Love them. Oh, my God. I have to just say, as an aside, I saw my granddaughter this past weekend.

She's good. She's perfect. Do you have a half an hour? She's just amazing. And the most amazing thing about her is what she's teaching me about myself. Okay, let's just be very selfish and spoiled and make it all about me. But I mean, she's just an amazing child. But when I'm with her, I think, where was this version of Susie? Where was she? When I, my children were little, I was a not a maternal mother, let's just put it that way, to be very, very euphemistic about it. But I played a game with her for half an hour this weekend where she was hiding in the curtains. And for half an hour I asked her if she was different places. Is Lirael on Mount Kilimanjaro? No. Is Liriel in a submarine? No. And I did it for half an hour. I came up with every place in the world where Lira could have been. We played that game and my son and daughter in law watched me. And when it was over, my son said to me, who are you? What I'm trying to say is the kids come into our life and they can steal them, they can steal us away from our values or sometimes they give us permission then to go embrace our true values. I mean, because sometimes kids come in and parents say, you know what? I was meant to be home and I was meant to be a full time parent. And that's beautiful. And they say I was faking it when work was the center of my life. I was faking it when partying was the center of my life. This is what I was meant to be. That's beautiful also. But a lot of times we then completely subsume ourselves to our children's needs and we lose track of our values. And that is a recipe for unhappiness and trouble. So there are other kinds of events. I mean, a divorce does the same thing. So again, I ask yourself if there's been a life changing or transforming or disrupting event that pushed you away from who you really wanted to be, what you really wanted to do, and then you didn't do the hard work of reclaiming. I know how hard it is because I've walked that road that I'm asking you to walk. So those are the four Horsemen. They are. Again, just to review class, economic security, expediency, expectations, and events. And I told you the E's are real. Okay? I couldn't even come up with better words. It just so happened they're all E's. This is a podcast today just to ask you to ponder because the work of becoming you. I'm always telling you to do stuff. You know, think about this, think about your values, think about your aptitudes. Go find them out. But I also want you to think about what's getting in the way of you living that life. I want you to be living. You need to be living to be planting the tree of life. Okay? Remember, hope deferred makes the heart sick, but a dream fulfilled is the tree of life. The tree of life. I want us all to be living in a glorious blooming orchard of trees of life all around us, with you dancing around your very own. Oh, my God, this metaphor is going on and on. I'm just gonna stop it. I love you so much and I'm sorry. So grateful that you have spent this time with me and I look forward to being with you again next week. Thank you so much for coming and listening to my podcast. Review the podcast on whatever platform you listen to it on, and I'll see you next week. Have a fantastic week. Until we meet again.