How To Never See Anything The Same Again: Part 1

Stockholm. Now I never wanna go home.

Hello. I am digging that song very much. I left my heart in Stockholm and now I never want to go home. It's mellow, isn't it? I love it. And I will tell you, I have been to Stockholm and it is very easy to leave your heart there if you're there in the summer. Summer. But guess what? This podcast is not about Stockholm. Well, not exactly. It's kind of about Stockholm. I am Susie Welch, your very devoted host. If you're new, welcome. If you're here for the 15th time, so happy that you're back. This is a podcast about living on purpose, living like you mean it, living by design, all of those things. And it's based on the Becoming you methodology, which I teach at the NYU Stern School of Business. And it excavates. The methodology, excavates three big data sets, your very authentic values, your aptitudes, both cognitive and emotional, and your economically viable interests. And when you've excavated that data, you put it all together and you synthesize it and you start to discover what it is you should do with your one wild and precious life. Like maybe move to Stockholm and leave your heart there. Or maybe not. But putting Stockholm aside. I'm going to try to put Stockholm aside. This episode is about what happens to our brains when we travel. What we learn. And listen up. I'm not talking about what we learn about the places that we are visiting, but what we learn about our own values we can find ourselves when we go away. We really, really can. And to explain and explore what I mean by that, because that's very abstract and obtuse and, you know, I'm not that girl. We've decided over here in the Becoming youg podcast studio to do three part series on places I've been and what they revealed about my values. This is like, these are three stories in a row. Okay, just to be clear, we don't do series very often. We have done them. In fact, one of our most popular sets of podcasts is when Kristen and Max came on to Becoming you Intensive students who came on and they talked about their Becoming youg Journeys. And we couldn't do that in one podcast. We split it into three. And that's what happened when we started talking about the concept behind this podcast, about what we learn about our values when we go far away from home. And so it turns out that my stories, I just wanted to lean into them a little bit and I didn't want to rush through them because a lot of stuff happened. So we're doing them one at a time in the first. What I'm going to be talking about today is what happened when my late husband and I, Jack, went to India. And next week, come with me when my siblings and I go back to our homeland in Sicily. I did that in 2018. It was not an episode of the White Lotus, I'll tell you that. And finally, we're gonna go to Paris with me and my beloved daughter, Sofia. That will be the third episode. Something kind of astonishing happened there. So this series, I wanna be clear, this is not a travelogue, I assure you. Because the journeys that I'm talking about and the journeys that I took in these places, they were internal. That's what this is all about. They changed what I thought I knew about myself. They helped me crystallize, really crystallize my deepest values. And because of that, they help me see and live my future differently. Travel can do that. It can take us afar, and then it can kind of shove us, smash us right up into utter intimacy with ourselves if we let it. If we let it. So as you listen to my stories, I hope, hope, hope that you reflect also on your travels. You've been somewhere near or far, and what they taught you about your inner world, not where you went, but where you went inside, about your values and how much you're living them. Or not. Because that's what we talk about on this pod. Now, before we launch, I want to. Can't help myself. I just want to share this one quote about the whole purpose and where I'm going with this. And it's. This quote is by Marcel Proust. Stand by. I'm going to read the quote to you. But first I have to tell you this weird thing. I know a scary amount about this man, Marcel Proust, for. I mean, for being a business professor. He was a French novelist. He was born in 1871. But in my class at Becoming, my class, Becoming youg at Stern, I do an exercise based on a famous survey that he created. You've probably heard it a bit. It's called the Proust Questionnaire. And it's kind of a party game. Vanity Fair magazine used to have on its back page a questionnaire with a famous celebrity every single month. And they would do the Proust questionnaire with them. And it's meant to surface and to illuminate and reveal your character. Okay. It has questions like, what is your idea of perfect happiness? Some of these questions are famous. What trait of yours do you most deplore? What Is your worst fear? You know, what is your worst extravagance? How would you like to die? It has all of these questions and for becoming youth purposes, I have given this a modern editing and retrofitted it. And so I had to learn about Proust a lot as I wrote about it for my book becoming you. So anyway, along with the Proust questionnaire. And I just feel so impelled right now to tell you the truth, which is some scholars believe the Proust did not actually invent this questionnaire himself, but he stole it from somebody, a woman in his salon. Anyway, he did have a really good short quote, and that's we're going to get to right now. It's really magnificent. And listen to this. He should have always just written short quotes. He said the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. And that my favorite people who are listening is what this pod is about. It's about having new eyes to see your values when you take those eyes away from home to different landscapes and away from the familiar. And so, okay, we are going to have three stories about how this happened to me. And the first takes place in India in Agra, to be exact. I'm obviously a big fan with the music. This pod started with music. Here's more music. Anyway, Agra, as you very likely know, is the site of the Taj Mahal. The Taj Mahal, little history, was commissioned in 1632 by Shah Jahan. He was the fifth Mughal emperor, and he built it after the death of his wife, Mumtaz Mahal. He was devastated by her loss, it said, and he vowed to build a mausoleum unlike any other to honor her. And he did it. You know, the construction took 20 years. It involved 20,000 artisans and craftsmen. They came from India, they came from Persia, they came from all around the Islamic world. Well documented. And if you haven't seen the Taj Mahal with your own eyes, let me sum up by saying it's just like the pictures, only much more amazing. There's actually a famous quote you've probably heard, and it goes, there are two types of people in the world, those who have seen the Taj Mahal and those who have not. Now, it is said that Mark Twain said this, but scholars would tell you Mark Twain never went to Agra and saw the Taj Mahal. Bill Clinton in a speech in India quoted Mark Twain saying it, but Bill Clinton didn't say it either. Anyway, somebody said it, and it wasn't Mark Twain or Bill Clinton originally. And whoever said it, he or she was right because there's no way not to. You know, we've all seen amazing things, okay? But there's no way not to be blown away by the beauty of this building and to be stunned by what it stands for, which is undying love. At least that's what I thought it stood for when I arrived in Agra. So it was 2005, and Jack and I were in India for a bunch of speeches. And Jack got this idea. It wasn't on our agenda originally. It wasn't on our itinerary. He said, but let's take a speech side trip to Agra, Susie. And I was 100,000% there. I was thrilled. Who does not want to go see the Taj Mahal? And now Agra, it's no, not, it's not on the beaten path. It's a big trip to get there. And so he was. Jack was not in great health, but we were absolutely committed doing it. And when we arrived, it was 10 o' clock at night, and our hotel overlooked the Taj Mahal. And so my first glimpse of it out the window was at night. And now in daylight, the pictures you typically see, the Taj Mahal is like this brilliant white, but at night, the marble absorbs the moonlight and it turns like this silvery bluish sort of faintly opalescent color. And it like, it looks like it's glowing from within. It's like extraterrestrial. And meanwhile, there's this long reflecting pool in front of it, and it doubles the image and it creates this illusion that the Taj Mahal is floating. It looks like it's, it exists between two worlds. It's like the most magical thing you've ever seen that's not in a movie. And I remember looking at it and like, and saying to Jack, oh my God, that's so beautiful. Look at that. And he said, I'm tired, we'll look at it tomorrow. And that was the first sign that we were not going to have the same experience of the Taj Mahal. I mean, I think back to it and think, wow, that was a little omen about what was to come. So the next day we get up and we start with what was to be a several hour long tour of the Taj Mahal with like a super, super expert guide who's talk nonstop about the history. And I am riveted because I love history. History nerd you may be also, but I also was sort of immediately fascinated by this public love story. Why? Because just if you think about the timing, Jack and I had had a really public love story when we met. He Was very famous. He was separated but not yet divorced. I was the editor of the Harvard Business Review. And we both blew up our, our worlds. Him much more than me because my world was so much smaller. But we both blew up our worlds and our love story became quite public. And so this is a, you know, I was already relating to this couple having sort of a public love story. All right, maybe I'm over identifying, maybe I am. But who wouldn't be fascinated by this story? But also I'm kind of completely, you know, thinking, oh, look at these people living their lives in public, whatever. That's my context. So the tour begins and I'm very in the moment, shall we say. And almost immediately you hear, you find out that Mumtaz died giving birth to their 14th child. She was 19 when they got married. And she herself was actually from a very prominent family. And by all accounts, she was brilliant. She was his total equal. She was his partner, she was his business partner. She traveled to the court with him, she went to the battlefronts with him. She was his, you know, in many ways she was thought to be his co leader. All right? And she was totally his partner in work and life and in leading. And she was doing this all while having baby after baby after baby after baby. I mean, the guide is recounting this to us in a very matter of fact way. She had a baby every single year, 14 years a row. And Jack is nodding and I'm not nodding, I am getting these little squinty eyes that I get when I am not buying it. Because very quickly I get to picture this entire situation and I start thinking about Mumtaz's life co running the country, her husband's constant partner while non stop pregnant for 14 straight years. And then, and probably even longer, right? For 16 straight years she's just pregnant nonstop having a baby. Then she's quickly pregnant right afterwards, all the while traveling all over India and being his equal everywhere he goes. And I'm sure she had help. Of course she did. But only you carry the baby and only you push out the baby. Okay? And I'm hearing this story and the guide is talking about how heartbroken her husband was when she died and how he just, you know, apparently the story is his hair turned white overnight. And I'm thinking, okay, very quickly, I'm thinking, okay, what was this guy feeling when she died? Okay, I'm sure he's feeling grief because certainly she was a partner to him. But was he possibly actually also feeling enormous guilt? Was it grief? Or was it guilt or was it both at the same time? That's what I'm wondering. I'm wondering, is he thinking, uh, oh, how do I run this place? How do I run our world? How do I run the empire without the other half of my brain? I mean, I'm going to get kind of blunt and graphic here. Go with me. I mean, no woman wants to be pregnant 14 times, especially if she's working full time. But no woman wants to be pregnant 14 times in a row. She would have wanted a break. And I think a woman might actually do everything in the world to not be pregnant over and over again if she had the choice. I'm thinking she did not have the choice. Do you follow me? Like, all those pregnancies might have happened when Mumtaz was possibly thinking, I am done with this part of the bargain. Like, maybe she was happy with eight children. Maybe she would have been happy with four children. And she keeps on having. I don't think she had a lot of choice in this matter especially. But the crazy thing is that the Shah also had like eight or nine other concubines who were not traveling on the road with him. So if what he wanted was children, there were other people to have children with that. Okay, the plot thickens. The plot thickens. In my estimation, as we're hearing this story from the guide. The story, the guide keeps on talking. And what he says is, after Mumtaz dies in childbirth, life goes on. And the leader, her husband, keeps on. He has an incredibly public display of his grief. He has days of mourning, he breaks down in court, he names things after. And meanwhile, of course, he is employing artisans, 20,000 people, to build this gigantic mausoleum to her. And interestingly, life goes on. And after this goes on for a while, one of their children together, the eldest son, takes over from his father and he imprisons him and he puts him in what's called Fort Agra, which actually is a view of the Taj Mahal, where he can see the Taj Mahal and he keeps his father there until he dies. So you may say maybe this is politics. Maybe this was a power hungry son and it was time for his father to move on and he deposed his father and stuck him in jail. But children see everything. I mean, maybe I'm reading too much into this. Maybe this son had empathy for his mom and her existence, that she was helping the father run the country and she was having child after child. And I. Maybe he just said, enough of this public mourning, dad. Maybe he kind of thought that his father was implicated in his mother's demise, and he had enough of it, and he put his father in jail and just wanted to stop the big public display. Oh, poor, pitiful me. For a person who may have been, you know, part of this woman's physical devastation. Okay, so I am thinking all of these things. You know, the Taj Mahal guide is telling us this beautiful love story about this man who really loved this woman. And I am thinking, this is not what meets the eye. This is like all love stories. This is super complicated. That's what I'm thinking. I'm thinking love is very complicated. And my own love story with Jack, I was fully aware as we were walking around looking at the Taj Mahal. It was happy and it was joyous, and we loved each other very much. But it was complicated. Every love story, every marriage is complicated. In every relationship, everyone, there are fault lines and there are power structures and there are subtle nuances because people are people. Love is not simple. I was Jack's intellectual partner, and I went everywhere he went. So maybe I was over identifying with Mumtaz. I mean, we did not have children together, but I identified with what she was going through because I was trying to raise four children while Jack and I were going to the battle lines and all over the world. And I was trying to raise four children. And that was really, really hard because what he wanted and needed was for me to be his partner. And he just didn't get that. The child rearing part of it, how time and energy it took. So hearing the story that Taj Mahal that day, I. I. Okay, I'm definitely was over identifying, but I was seeing some stuff into it that was not the story that was being told. And I start going on. I mean, I'm going off, actually, and I'm saying, jack, do you get the power dynamic that might have been underlying this whole thing? Do you see what actually went on with this story? And I said to him, do you think Mumtaz wanted 14 children? I said to him, do you think that this guy was actually racked with regret, not grief? And I said to Jack, do you think he actually loved her? Or did he love her to use her? And I was going on and on with all of the things whirling through my head. And finally Jack, like, whips around and he says, hey, Susie, stop talking. Stop making it so complicated. Stop making this story so complicated. He was just a guy who lost. And he used this word he liked to use. He just was a sad guy who lost his mummy. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no. That is not what happened. This is about a. This is about a love story that ended in death. And it's so much more complicated than that. Okay, where is this going? What did I learn about my values? All right, so there is a value called belovedness we have in becoming you. We use what's called the Welch Bristol Values Inventory, which is my system of values based on my PhD research. And it is the. It is the set of values that we use in the values bridge, which is a tool that we use. And you can use, too, to find out what your values are takes 22 minutes. And you can find out what your values are ranked, ordered, using the values bridge. And you can learn all the different values in the. In our value system. And values are the motivating, driving desires of your life. They're not virtues, by the way, which are everyone agrees are good. Values are your choices about how you show up in the world. And every value is an organizing principle. It's how you decide to spend your days, make your decisions, and live your life. So there is a value called belovedness, and it's the value of romantic love. The love you have for your family, that's the value of family centrism. And the love you have for your friends and community, that's the value of belonging. But the love you have for a romantic partner is called belovedness. And again, it's not a measure of how much you love your partner. It's not. It's a measure of how much you want to organize your life around your romantic partnership. And for some people, the screen for everything they do is like, how does this affect my marriage? How does this affect my relationship? And belovedness is their top value. And for other people, it's like, it's one of the considerations I make when I decide about my career and how I spend my weekends and so forth. But it's not the main one. And for them, it might be number seven out of 16. And for other people, it's like everything comes before their romantic relationships. Like James Bond, who has plenty of romantic relationships but does not organize his life around them. And it would be number 16 for James Bond, I am guessing. But every value was an organizing principle. So belovedness was the value that really slammed into my heart and mind and stomach when we were visiting the Taj Mahal. And I was going deep into thinking that this was absolutely the most complicated love story that had been portrayed to the world as a simple one. And there was Jack saying to me, susie, this is just A simple love story. This is a guy who loved his wife and she died, and he built a beautiful building for her. And I thought, this is a guy who childbirthed his wife to death and then felt, oops, I killed her. Okay? And we had this kind of conversation about it until he said, let's stop talking about it. And what we needed to stop talking about in that moment was how differently we felt about belovedness. Now, I want to be super clear here. I loved Jack Welch as much as a person could love a person. We had a beautiful marriage. He was my everything, and there will never be another. I loved him so much. But what I realized when we were at the Taj Mahal was that he had belovedness very high up, probably one or two. Okay. And I had belovedness probably much lower, maybe seven or eight on my list of values. Now, I am not in the business of understanding where everybody's values come from. That's a field called values formation. And that's for your therapist or for you to work out with people that you love. But it's worth kind of pondering why belovedness in this moment was a lower value for me. And I've already, in a way, told you the reason. The reason why belovedness is a lower value for me is because I was so convinced that love is messy and complicated. I had grown up witnessing my grandmother's very complicated marriage to the same man twice. Marriage, divorce, marriage, divorce. My mother and father's long marriage was wildly, wildly fraught and complicated. Although they stayed married until my dad died when he was 98 years old. So they had a 70 something year marriage, but man, was it complicated. And then I had my own first marriage, which was. I ended in divorce and was wildly complicated. And I think I got to a place where I thought every marriage has a power dynamic. It has fault lines, it's fraught, and men leave. That's what I ended up thinking. And that marriage can be in. Romantic relationships are so fragile, so fragile that you can never make it a top priority because if you do, you could be so psychologically unsafe. I mean, that's where it came from for me, the belief that love was so complicated that you can't make it your number one thing because it can slip away so quickly and that you actually had to protect yourself by not having belovedness as a top value. Okay, whatever. Take it or leave it. All right? But that's who I am. And I remember kind of what I say about values, you know, I'm a values agnostic in a way, because Values are not virtues, okay? Which everybody should have more of. Values are your choices about how you show up in the world. And if you're not hurting anybody, then you should just live your values as you fully have them. And we were there at the Taj Mahal, and I thought, oh, my God, I have this skepticism that is bone marrow deep about belovedness. And it's never going to be my top value because I have other things that I'm going to organize my life around more. For instance, I had then and still have now a very high value on radius, which is this burning desire to change the world in systemic ways. I'm doing that right now. I'm fully living my value of radius with becoming you. And I have an incredibly high value of achievement, which is being successful, having success that people can see. Some of that is personality driven. But I'm. I love building things and having those things succeed. That's one of my top values. And my number one value, by the way, is cosmos. My faith in God. That's a value that Jack also shared strongly. That was a huge, huge foundation of our happy marriage. But he definitely had that, that belovedness very, very high up for him. And he. He wanted me to have it, too. He wanted me to have it, too. And I think in that moment, it was crystallized for me, this gap between us. Now we have a lot of data on. On belovedness as a value. And people sometimes ask me, should couples both have belovednesses? Number one is that the success of a happy marriage is. And my answer is, I don't care where couples have it, but they should roughly have it in the same place. You know, you should both have it at number one, or you should both have it at number 16. But where it gets dangerous and a little bit dicey is when one person has it at number two and the other has it at number 14. Now, you know, and I think Jack probably had it at number two, and I had it number six. That's not as close as it could have been. Now, of course, when I was at the Taj Mahal, I had no language of values like this. I mean, the Welch Bristol Values Inventory, it was solidified in 2024, and the values bridge was finally out in the world in 2025. But I think that that day, that conversation with Jack at the Taj Mahal, it crystallized for me what I thought about belovedness. And I knew that it was not my top value. So here's the thing. Until Jack died in 2020, I actually went on to spend the next 14 years organizing my life around him and our marriage. I acted as if belovedness was my number one value. I traveled with him, I helped him write his books, all of his speeches. I helped him build his school. And I did it because he asked me to. And I loved him. But I missed myself. I missed my values every day. And I've talked about that here before. I would do it all again. And then he got sick and we had extenuating circumstances, and of course I'd do it all again. But I sometimes catch myself wondering, what if I had had the language of values back then? I could have used it to say, jack, here's what I care about, radius and achievement, and I'm not expressing those values fully. And that sometimes makes me ache inside. Sweetheart, can we work around that? Can we acknowledge it? Can we accommodate it a bit? I think. I honestly think he would have been very understanding, I think if I could have explained it in a way he understood. But I only had half the story. I mean, I had half the story in Agra. I had the aha about what I thought about romantic love, but I didn't have the words to speak it. And it was just the beginning of my learning journey, not the end. I'll always be on a learning journey, you know, the other day, I knew I was going to tell the story and I started to look at the photos from that trip to India and I looked at the pictures of Jack and I at the Taj Mahal. And it's funny, you can see this entire story in our faces. You can. We start off very lively, smiling, by the way, I'm wearing a fabulous skirt, which I still own. And we start very smiley and we're holding hands. And as the day goes on and I'm asking all those questions about what actually happened to Mum, Taz, Jack's face is getting very weary and I am getting very edgy. You can see it in my face. And the last picture of both of us, we're still holding hands, standing in front of the Taj Mahal, but we are both very pensive. And I. It makes me wonder, was Jack intuiting some stuff that day also? I mean, I think he maybe was hearing me and intuiting that I had some struggle with belovedness. Now, speaking of that, belovedness is currently my 16th value, dead last. And I think that my great love affair from here on out is going to be with my dogs, who are not complicated and will never leave. And this is helpful to know because actually, some people sometimes say to me, if I'm asked me if I'm lonely. And I say I have occasional lonely moments when I miss Jack. But I have made total peace with my values. I am at total peace. And it was a long, long trip away from home and a lot of years ago that I came to understand beginnings, really begin to understand now fully understand my relationship with love, with belovedness, that value. But it all started in India. I had to go away to see my inner heart. And again, I think travel does that because it's, as our dear friend Marcel Proust says, the real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes. I think so. So I have one last thought also, which is like, I hope this podcast has prompted you to wonder where belovedness falls for you and if you're in a romantic relationship where it falls for your partner. I think it's a really important thing to know. I mean, one of the great things about the values bridge test is that sometimes it reveals for people that they have belovedness as a really high value, and then it shows they have a huge authenticity gap, which means they're not living it yet. And that is information. That's information we need to face into. So I hope that this, besides being a story about how you can find your values by going away and seeing different landscapes, you get new eyes. I hope it's giving you new eyes yourself on your own view of your relationship with this value, this super important, super pivotal value of belovedness. And so I thank you for coming with me to India today. I hope you'll be back next week for our SAAB Fest in Sicily. I mean, our trip to Sicily, where, where I go with my siblings. In 2018, we went. And after that we'll go to Paris, where I had this astonishing discovery sitting with Sophia and Il di Cite that happened just last May. I'm Susie Welch, and once again, if you're a returning listener, thank you so much for coming to the podcast. I love you so much. Thank you for writing me and being in the Becoming youg Family. And if this is your first time, you dropped in on quite the story. A and I welcome you. I'm so happy that you did. I hope you'll come back for more. If you want to learn more about what we're up to with Becoming youg and Becoming youg Labs and the initiative on Purpose and flourishing at NYU, go to susiewelch.com or go to becomingulabs.com you can subscribe to our totally free newsletter at on the susie welch.com website. And if the spirit moves you. I really hope it does. Why don't you subscribe to this podcast that really helps a lot and you can leave a comment like I love this podcast about India. I wish you do it again. Thank you for joining me. I'll hope to see you next time.

Now I never want to go home. I left my heart in Stockholm.