Hate Is Not a Feeling. It Is a Piece of Data.

Foreign.

I am Susie Welch. Welcome to the Becoming youg podcast. I am super happy that you're here. I'm. Thank you for being here. And just the other day, I was in an Uber, and guess what my driver actually said to me, I listened to your podcast and I almost passed out. Just unbelievably. I love him and his family, who apparently listened to it together. Get out of here. Anyway, becoming you is a podcast that's about breaking you down into little tiny pieces so we can rebuild you. No, not really. Okay. Sort of it is. It's actually about figuring out who you are standing still so that you can run as fast as you want when you start running again. And we are all running all the time. It's a podcast that's designed to help you answer the question, what should I do with my life? And that's a gigantic question which we spend our entire lives trying to answer. And guess what? I'm going to try to do it here in these 30 minutes. And I want to start off by talking about something that I was thinking about last night in preparation for making this podcast. And I. I found myself getting kind of hysterical and my heart starting to race. And so I'm going to try to be calm as I talk about it. And it's about the journey to Figuring out who we are is a journey about three things. Figuring out our values, which are our deeply held beliefs and motivations. About finding out our aptitudes, which are our competencies. What we're really good at, what we're born to be good at, our underlying, inborn cognitive and emotional strengths. And. And it's about figuring out what interests us that will also pay us what we want to be paid. Okay. It's about finding out those three things. A lot of the focus of becoming you, though, is on discovering your values because they're so important, and also because so few of us know what our values are. Why? Because when you go to school, they teach you the volume of a cylinder, but they don't tell you what your values are or how to even figure out your values. And I myself didn't know my values until I was at business school. I was 28 years old and finally started this journey to figure them out for myself. And every day I think about them and wonder what they are, and I tweak them and so forth. And I go through that discovery process, but I want to be part of that process with you. And I'm always thinking about ways to help my students figuring out what their values are. And I do that with various exercises and tools. And you will have help with that. When my book finally comes out in May, I'm not even. I can't even be said to be pitching my book right now because it's so far off in the distance. May 5th. Please get in line immediately. You can't even pre order it. Okay, so we can't even say I'm hawking it here, but I actually just recently came up with another idea about how you can just driving in your car or taking a walk or rowing a boat across a pond looking for Susie the swan. That you might actually, at this moment be thinking about what your values are. And I want to suggest that the people that you hate are data. Okay. I want to suggest that if you actually did an inventory of the people that you hate. And I know hate's a strong word, and I want to tell you I myself don't feel a lot of hate in my heart towards anybody. I feel sadness and I feel misunderstood. I'm not a big hate hater and I never have been. And maybe I should have been at points in my life, been angrier. But usually I just feel hurt when something befalls me. So I'm using hate loosely. There is the people who have made you feel terrible or, I mean, but every human being in the world, and they're lying if they say it's not true, has at one point really disliked someone or hated them or wanted them to go away. Okay? I want to ask you to take those emotions and not think of them as feelings, but to think of them as data. Okay? Those feelings are data. Data about your values. Just take a moment and think about that. I know we try not to think about the people we hate, but I'm going to tell you to do that. So let's just use Susie as an example. Why? Because Pierre is fast asleep. And so, Sir. And Audrey's awake, but she doesn't hate anybody. She's the friendliest dog in the world. Okay. When I think about this, I think that the first person that I felt a lot of hate for, and this is. I'm sorry, it's a sad moment for me to admit this, was my grandmother, Francesca, who raised me in the house with my mom. She was an amazing woman. I now, as an adult woman, fully understand what a radical human being she was. She was a immigrant from Sicily. She came over in her teens. She was. I mean, I think that there's a lot of her in me. She was fierce and defiant. I think she was very smart. She didn't finish high school. I think the family lore is that she was very, very smart. And. And she came to the United States and she married a man who was much older than she was. She had four children by the time she was 21. And then, get a load of this. Remember Italian Catholic, Sicilian immigrant. She divorced him at 24. And she told stories about how the priest came over and yelled at her and so forth. Obviously something very, very bad happened and there's family suspicion about what happened, and I will not mention what it was, but it was not good, whatever happened. And it involved a. A child, blah, blah, blah. So she divorced him and she took her kids. A single woman took her children on a train across the United States to La Jolla, California. Resettled there. And several years later he came and found her and they got married again and they went back to Rochester, New York. Okay. She was under 30 and there they were. And guess what? At age 31, she divorced him again. Something terrible must have happened. Life went on. She built an incredible business. She was like Rochester's Woman of the Year. She was an incredibly gifted knitter. She knit beautiful silk suits. I have three of them up in my bedroom. And my life's aspiration is to be skinny enough to fit into them one day. But that's a long way off. And they're gorgeous. They're just museum pieces. And she ended up living with my family and helping raise us. And she was mean to me. I think that maybe she looked at me. I have a heart for her now, and I think she looked at me and she thought she saw herself or something. And she couldn't express some mixed up emotions she had about maybe my ambition. I don't know what it was. And she picked on me a lot. And I wanted her to love me. And I obviously felt strong love for her because we have so many pictures of me together with her. But the thing that really struck me about her, that made me resist and as a young woman growing up, grow apart from her, was her bitterness towards the world. And when I was beginning to be a woman in college and growing up, I remember telling my sisters, I hate Nana. She's so bitter, she's so angry. And I look at that now and I think this was the beginning of one of my most foundational values, which is towards belonging. I love my friends. I love community. I love being in relationship with people. In fact, one of my mottos is always stay in relationship, even when you're estranged. And I didn't do that with her. And when she died, I was not in relationship with her. A gigantic regret of my life. I wish earlier had understood that the source of my hate was me trying to push away from her value. Her value. She was filled with rage and anger, and I had a value of belonging. Belonging is like the love value where really one thing that matters to you is that feeling of being a part of a relationship or being with somebody else. And I. I hated that she was exemplifying and that her life was wrecked by it. Her life was wrecked by this anger. I remember was a girl saying to her once, did you love my grandfather? And she said, I've pondered this so many times. She answered, I must have. I mean, oh. Anyway, so when I had these feelings about Francesca, or flying Frances, as we called her, because she traveled a lot, it stirred up in me so many emotions. So, number one, when I look back to it now, I just resisted her. I didn't want to be near her. I remember feeling as a little girl that I wanted her to stop hugging me, okay? And we were Italian. Hugging was a big thing that went on all the time. And I didn't want her touching me anymore. So I think now that I look at this and I mine it for data, I think two things were going on. Number one, her bitterness, her rage and her anger shut down her life so much. And that was absolutely antithetical to this value I had of belonging, which was for. That's the friendship value. I just. I thoroughly loved friends. I wanted friends. And with friends, you can't be bitter unless you just find a bunch of other bitter people like you. But the other value that I didn't have any words for at the time, which were that her hatred made her life small. Okay? If you're filled with rage and you're filled with seeing the bad in everybody and being skeptical of everybody, which she was. She doubted everybody. You're making. You're scoping your life down very small. So to me, scope is a gigantic value. It's the size of how big your life is. You know, like with. When I teach my students about scope, I always say, okay, high scope, you're Bianca Jagger coming into Studio 54 on a white stallion. That actually happened. Youngsters. That happened. That was a time. And she had a big, exciting, glamorous life. And then there's that, you know, all the way down with scope is when you really value things like privacy, predictability, security. There's a whole TikTok, you know, vertical you can go into where it's like, I like this little life. And, you know, I. You want to have your cup of coffee in the morning and you want to do one chore, and that feels really good to you, and you value just a few friends. But for me, I wanted people look. To look at me and to say, oh, my God, what a huge life. Why? Because I wanted to live that life. I wanted a big, exciting, complicated life. And guess what? I got it. I mean, I got it very quickly when I married Jack. I mean, I thought I had a big life then. Married Jack Welch. Boom. And I think one of the reasons I loved him, to be quite frank, was because I loved how big and exciting. And he. If there was a person, one person in the world who had a larger value on scope than me, it was my husband, Jack. But we were two peas in a pod, and my grandmother had made her life tiny with her bitterness, okay? Because it's very hard to be expansive and to meet new people, have new experiences if you're a cynic. And her bitterness made her a cynic. And so I look back now, I mean, now I had no words for it then, but now as a semi scholar, a person who likes to think of herself as one a little bit, but as an academic who's doing work on identity and values, I see the data in my hatred for the way she was living her life was actually my love of the values of belonging and scope. It's very, very hard in, in any event, to look straight into the mirror and to know what your values are, okay? And so you have to excavate. You have to sort of come at it every different angle. I use this analogy in the book of what happens when you find a diamond. Like, if you saw a diamond lying on the ground in its raw form, you wouldn't even know it was a diamond. It's like a big, like dark yellow, clumpy kind of thing. And then jewelers use all these tools to reveal the diamond underneath. There's all these technical terms for which I've done way too much reading about, thank you, Wikipedia. But we have to use, as human beings, we have to use all these tools to excavate our values. And when the values bridge finally arrives, and it's coming, it's about to be in beta. And I'm so grateful to the people who have offered to be beta testers. We're coming for you. This, I hope this tool that I've invented, which is a wacky, wacky, wacky thing that I've done, that I have a lot of help, thank God will hopefully make more efficient and shorter work of beginning to surface what your values really are. So I want to just finish with one thing, which is that I mentioned earlier that one of my values is belonging, which is really the friendship value. I really honor my friends. I love my friends. I have been so blessed by so many friends and have so many. And one of those friends is a person named Andy Wazentuk. He was my first boss at Bain and Company. He was the greatest boss a human being could ever have. He actually taught me what it was to be a good boss. If I could be 10% as good a boss as he was, I would be a great boss. He was amazing. And so one of the things I do in a class I teach called Developing Managerial Skills is it's a surprise. At the end of the first class, I say to them, look, I'm going to spend the next 12 weeks telling you all how to be a boss and how to manage people. But let's. What do you think it was like to manage me? And then as a surprise, I zoom in. Andy Wozentchuk, who was my boss at Baynu, who actually then just retired because he went on after an incredible career with the New England Patriots, to be a professor at Harvard Business School. So he's very agreeable to do this. And he comes into class and he talks about what it's like to manage me. My favorite line from this is, you did not manage Susie. You survived her. But anyway, I was. I was a unmade bed in those days. And he is so unbelievable. In just 15 minutes, he teaches more to my class than a normal person, including me, could do in months. And he's just a very wise person. He's a good friend and I love him and I love his wife very much. And I've known him now since 1988, so that's a long time. So this morning I woke up and I got a email from Andy. And he basically said, in the nicest possible way, because he is the nicest possible person. He basically said, hey, Batch, you never thanked me, okay? He said it in a super nice way. He basically was like, hey, where was my phone call after that? Me talking to your class? And I wrote him last night immediately. And I said, I hate myself. I'm a skunk. Can I talk to you right now? And he didn't answer me. So I called him today and I started off by saying to him, I, you know, I have all this lip service about how much I love my friends and I didn't call to thank you. And I hate myself. And he let me go on and on. He didn't stop me. You know, not only is he a good boss, but he's a really good friend to remind me that having good friends is hard work. And so I apologized profusely, and then I spoke to him for half an hour. And I lived into my value of friends. But I want to just actually, apropos of just my big, massive rookie mistake. Okay, that's a rookie mistake. Not to thank somebody who does a gigantic favor for you. And yet, am I the only one who did that today? Okay. We have to thank the people that are good to us and who teach us things. And I want to say that my mistake should not be yours. So along with the little values lesson on living out our values, belonging, if we have it. And belonging is not for everybody. Not everybody's value. I mean, some people are going to take the values bridge and find out it's not a value at all. Okay? But it is for me to live it fully. You have to thank people and. Hey, Andy Wozachuk, I know you don't listen to my podcast, even though I keep on telling you to, but if you're listening, if anybody knows. Andy Wiesnchuk. Andy, thank you. All right, that's the end of this long rant. Let's play some music for you and give you a break from my voice.

Okay, it's time for my favorite part of the show, which is questions from the community. I want to just say this. Friends, I love that you write me, and I. I endeavor to answer many of you. The volume is kind of hard to get to everybody, but I. I hear you, and thank you. And now Elisa is going to ask me a question from the community. Go for it. All right.

This one is about family and work.

Okay?

Love your values, conflict, conversation around family and work. I definitely value family as my number one priority, but it directly correlates to my career and money, as I want to provide the most financially secure life for them. Do you have any tips on how to balance or work through this? Values conflict? I'm feeling stuck.

All right, this is the big conflict. Family and work. Everybody has it at some point. Jorge, you're about to have it, because Jorge's got a baby on the way. I mean, I like to mention that in every single podcast. I also have a baby on the way with my grandma. I have a grandson on the way. Oh, my God. Let's just stop and talk about that. Let's not. Let's talk about this particular question. So what we have is somebody who says, family is my number one value, and I also value work. Why? Because it's a means to making my family have more financial security. Right. I think that that's what they're saying. Am I reading understanding that correctly, Eliza?

Yes.

Okay. So they're asking how to manage this. And my answer for that is, you don't so much manage it as you understand it. You survive it, and you understand the paradox of what you're doing. What ends up happening is if we don't have language around it, we say, work's driving me crazy. My blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And we. And actually, what you need to do is just say, I've got a value of family centrism that often puts me in conflict with work. But interestingly, I also value work because it allows me to make a better life for my family. This is one of those values conflicts that I have very good news for you about. It gets better, okay? Because it's typically worse when you've got young children, okay. And you're like, young children make you lose all control of your life. And they have schedules that make work very hard. And I have lived through it. It's over for me now, thank God. And one of my things that I like to do when I see parents who are struggling with this family and work conundrum, when they're right in the thick of it, when their kids are young and, you know, as I try to say to them, it's going to get better. And I want to actually share this one thought with you. The reason why this particular values conflict is so darn hard has to do with what. It has to do with biology, and it has to do with our culture and that. Just hear me out for a second. The time when your children need you the most is sort of typically. And if you have children and sort of in the normal age range when people have children, the time your children need you the most is sort of when you're between 22 and 45, okay. And the time when work needs you to be the most available is when you're sort of between 25 and 45. So there's this overlapping period where work values your availability and your family does, too, okay? And it's killer. You know, it's like I almost. When I remember, when I was going through it, I remember thinking to myself, those women who had their children when they were 18 knew what they were doing because they sort of got the children on the road before work started to need them. And there's no escaping this biological conundrum. But there is managing it at the edges, which is what you end up doing every single day, doing it. But I would say the one thing I would do is I'd be very, very open with my family about why I'm working so much. But I'd also do the very bold and brave thing. And it's very, very helpful. And it helped me a lot when I did it, which is I said to my kids, I love my work. I'm not gonna apologize to you for working. I love it and it's part of my life. And one day you will grow up and go away, and I will still be here and my work will be part of my life. And so you have two choices. You can help me or you can resist me. And I'm gonna help you live your values if you would help me live my values too. These were magical words that I used with my children. They really changed my life. So I put them out there for you to, to think about and try out. And I hope that helps a little bit. Maybe not a lot of it, but I have to say the conflict you have is shared by humanity. And it's just something that we all individually invent and reinvent. And having language around it makes it easier. Thank you for asking.

All right, we're coming to the end here. I want to read a quote and then I want to tell an amazing story. It's amazing to me you can be the judge. I love to tell people that becoming you is not woo woo, but I'm going to get a little woo woo on you. So one of the people I admire the absolute most in this world is a guy named Richard Rohr. He's a Jesuit priest who is a. A great philosopher. And he's still with us. He's not. He's his health. Having a lot of health struggles, but he is a. I think he's kind of a modern day prophet. And he had a quote today, which I really touched me because of something that happened. So let me start with the quote and then let me tell you what happened this weekend. When we make a pact with ourselves to show up for reality just as it is. Reality rewards us by revealing its hidden holiness, its ordinary wonder, its fruitful shadows and radiant wounds. Not always, not everywhere, but more and more often and in the places we least expect to show up for what it is to be present to all that is to take refuge in the boundless intimacy of what exactly it is. Okay, I'm not Sure, I totally understand that quote, But I understand what he's getting at, which is about being present. And when a small gift of a present relationship finds you to revel in it and to not rush so much. This is a gigantic effort for me. Okay, so here's this crazy thing that happened that made me think a lot about this. It was the tiniest thing. I'm not kidding. It was tiny. But I can't stop thinking about it. So. So I was at church this weekend. It's a tiny church in the countryside that has very, very few members. I mean, how it keeps going, I don't know. It's just whatever group of people that are very nice, and it's so few people go that sometimes you have a pew all to yourself. And so this week, when I went, I was the only person in my pew, and there was no one in the pew in front of me, but there was two people in the pew in front of that. And at the end, as we were all saying goodbye to each other and we were getting our blessing before we went out the door, and I'm not trying to get a holy roller on you here. I mean, I. Your faith is your own business and none of mine. But I'm just telling you the story with that context. The pastor said, before we go, will everybody just hold hands as a way of saying goodbye? And there I was, alone in my pew, and I had no one to hold hands with. So I just sort of stood there feeling very sorry for myself. It was a massive pity party, let's not lie. And I was just feeling very alone standing there. And it made me miss Jack. I mean, a lot of things made me miss Jack. But then I was just sitting there, and I was like, okay, fine. And I saw everybody else was closer to each other in the pews, and they were all holding hands. And right before I was about to really go into a massive pout, that woman who was one of the two people standing in the two rows ahead of me, turned around, saw me, and reached her hand over the two pews and grabbed my hand, and she just took my hand and she held it, and then she gave it a squeeze. And I was like, I love humanity so much. I love that woman so much. I loved what she did. I could have done it to her, and I didn't because I was sitting there feeling sorry for myself like a baby. But she did it to me, and she just looked at me and she smiled, and I felt just this incredible moment of understanding how important the small things are. Because they're all small things, aren't they, that add up to the big things? The time we actually make eye contact with somebody, we smile at somebody. We actually make a decision when someone's talking to us to listen to that them. Okay. Or like, what I didn't do earlier that I spoke about that. I didn't call Andy Wozentuck and thank him. That was a small thing I forgot to do, and it was dumb. And that woman just changed my life in that moment. And it made me feel like I want to do that. I want to do something small and change somebody's heart and remind people of the goodness that's all around us. And so I'm going to commit to doing that more. And I want to thank her. And after. After church was over, I went up and I said, I want to just thank you for doing that. And she just smiled at me in this very knowing way. And it made me think that the next time that opportunity arises, I want to be the person who reaches across and touches somebody's hand and reminds them that goodness is all around us. And I leave that my last thoughts to you. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. I love you so very much. I don't know you, but I love you, and I'm so happy that you're here. I'll see you next week.