https://www.listennotes.com/e/d551ddc25b3341da8c28a7c120806b0d

Yep. Crack of dawn. What are you doing at the crack of dawn? Well, I am a super early riser and so usually around 5am you know what I'm doing? I'm answering DMs from becoming you people here and there and everywhere. Yes, I am. And you know what? I'm not complaining. I love it because I love being in community with you and I love doing life with you, as the old saying goes. But listen, today I'm actually going to answer DMs right here on the pod because there are just so many great questions that come in and I think might have meaning to others. And thus, ta da. Welcome to a mailbag episode of Becoming youg. I'm Susie Welch. We've got four questions today under consideration. If you stay with us for the next 25 or 30 minutes, and good Lord, I hope you do, we have a listener who's wondering about retirement, someone who is trying to unpick what she wants versus what she's been told she should want. Does that sound familiar? And then after the break, I have some tough love for a person who's having trouble landing a job. And it's tough, but it's love. And finally, I answer one of the most common questions that I get about becoming you. Full stop. In fact, I think it is the most common question I get. We will get there. Thank you for coming along for the ride. Let's get going. Hi, my name is Joanne Olufsen. If someone is work centric, does that make it more difficult for them to retire? It makes me so sad when people have high work centrism, which is a value, by the way. It's a value and they are made to feel by their families or society or color culture or people in their ecosystem who don't have work centrism as a high value. They're made to feel like they've got to retire. Thank you for writing, by the way. I'll be working in my coffin. I mean, honest to God is the. I just. I have high work centrism. I know that probably comes as a shock to you, my very beloved listeners, but I have high work centrism and I will never retire. I have no interest in retiring. I have very low eudaimonia. But let's just actually just peel back for a second and Ann, I'm going to take your question very seriously for a moment. But look, this is what I want to say in Becoming you, Becoming used a methodology that's based on the premise that your purpose in life lies at the intersection of your values, your aptitudes, and your economically viable interests. And there's 15 values. We test for those. And you can find out what your values are@thevaluesbridge.com or you can read my book. There's a lot of different ways to find out your values. And we also test for aptitudes, and then also we discern what people's economically viable interests are. But look, if you've got a defining value, and Ann, I love you so much because we share this defining value. I love you anyway. But this defining value of work centrism. Now, look, the reason why I love work centrism so much as a value is not just because it's my own. And many people I love, including three of my four children, do not have high work centrism. And I love them very much. Most times when people have high work centrism, what happens? They're called workaholics like it's a disease. Like it's a disease. And having high work centrism, unless you're hurting somebody or hurting yourself, it's not a disease. You just happen to think work is a great organizing principle for your life. Giorgio Armani is 91 years old and he gets up every single day at 7 o' clock, is at the office by 8am and works until midnight. Is he sick or is he a person with high work centrism who loves his work? Now, the problem comes when you have high work centrism and your partner, a spouse, or your family has lower work centrism. Or they infer for some reason that your work centrism is hurting you. Where in fact, maybe it's just hurting them in that they want to spend more time with you, which is touching. But people with high work centrism, my feeling is you don't have to retire and you shouldn't retire. You should boldly say to the world, hey, I have high work centrism. I love work. I'm not hurting anybody with it. And I am not going to live by anybody else's values but my own. Because when you live by other people's values, you're not being authentic. And authenticity is the goal here in becoming universe. And I have a couple of thoughts just further into this, because if you're going towards. I think I just used the word furtherant, which I'm not really sure is a word. I made it up. I've made up other words. I made up the word scarephoria, which is being scared and euphoric at the same time. So now I'VE made furtherant up now people who are coming into retirement age, I like to say that they are approaching their third half. Now I did not coin this term, I heard it somewhere, I can't remember where. Whoever came up with this term, I love it. You're approaching your third half and typically there's been this thought in post industrial America that in your third half you go play golf or you work with your garden or you spend a lot more time with your grandchildren or you get some kind of twee hobby, you go live in the villages in Florida or whatever. But there are people who have high work centrism and they want their third half to be more work, just different work. And some of these people show up in the Becoming youg intensive. Some of them write me and maybe you're one of them who's writing me because saying okay, I'm going to retire from the job I've had for the past 35, 40 years. But I want to keep working. And I think one of the greatest applications of becoming you are for people who are 65. I think I'm in many ways like the prime demo for becoming you because I have the wisdom of my years. I'm excited to know what my values are. I'm open to knowing what my aptitudes are. I have a pretty good sense of it. And my economically viable interests have changed. Maybe because I have some money in the bank or maybe because I've realized how much money matters to me or not. Or maybe because I got a certain number of years left and I'm going to have enough money to make it. And so I think past 50, 55 onto 60, 65, this is a fantastic time to think about what are your values, what are your aptitudes and what are your interests, your economically viable interests. And think what is the third half gonna be? God, it's great. You're kind of unfettered in a way you've never been unfettered before. One time we had a woman come to Becoming youg with one of the intensives and she was 65 or so. And she said, I've never worked a day in my life, I'm not gonna start working now. I took care of my family, I was a homemaker. It was a very noble way to spend your life. And she said, but you know, now my husband's gonna be retired too and I want to figure out how much time I'm gon with my grandchildren, what hobbies I'm going to take up and how seriously I'm going to undertake them. And she used becoming you to great and fruitful outcomes, figuring out how she was going to organize her time and money going forward. So, Anne, to answer your question, oh, I'm begging you not to retire if you have high work centrism. Don't do that to yourself. Don't keep working. Find out what the right work is for you to live fully into your values and your interests. Keep going. Use the language of values to explain yourself and lean into it and embrace it and continue to have that exquisitely alive feeling you've got when you are doing what you want to do, which is work. Hi, Suzy. I am Desiree. I grew up being told that altruism should be my top value. Your framework has helped me realize this was an imposed value, and I need to find out how high my personal value of Nancy is. Do you have any advice on how to explore how I really feel about the value of Nansebe? Mm. Ah, Desiree, thank you so much for this question. It is so deep and has so many tentacles to it. I'm gonna try to be concise about it. What you're saying is that when you grew up, everybody said to you, altruism should be a value of yours. You should help people. And this often happens. There's other things that people are told they should. You know, working hard pursuant to work centrism is also, you should work hard. You should want to achieve. Everybody judges everybody's values. And this is why I think it's very important to understand that values and virtues are two different things. Values and virtues are two different things. Virtues are social or cultural constructs that people generally agree everybody should have more of. For instance, kindness is a virtue. It'd be very hard to find somebody who would openly say everybody should be less kind. Kindness is bad. Integrity is a virtue. Everybody generally agrees, except for people who are social outliers and cultural outliers, that integrity is a good thing. Being honest, another virtue. Well, sometimes values get thrown in with virtues. And it's a very, very gray area that academics and philosophers, writers, have all been talking about for millennia now, by contrast, let's talk about what values are. We've talked about virtues being social and cultural constructs. Everybody should have more of them. Values are choices. Values are personal choices. They are deeply held beliefs that we hold uniquely to ourself that drive our actions and decisions. Let's just take the value of scope for a moment. It's one of my favorite values to talk about. Scope is the value that reflects how big a Life you want, do you want a life that's big and exciting and filled with new experiences and new people and even a little bit of chaos? You'll take it because you want life where you're sort of touching everybody's brains and drinking the world and just you want to have that, you know, Bianca Jagger moment, walk going in on a white stallion into Studio 54. Big, big, big. That's very high scope. Want to travel and excitement. And at the other end of the continuum, no better or worse, is having life with more predictability, more routine, more visibility about what's coming at you. You have more control over events, less chaos. And there is no better or worse. You may be dead center on this continuum, but some people want a high scope life and some people want a lower scope life. A. Okay, no judgment. Of course, people judge each other all the time on this. Now when this gets tricky is when there's a value that is around something that is often thought of as a virtue. And one of those is non sibi. Non sibi is the term. It's a Latin term that means not for oneself. And in fact, I chose the term non sibi because in every other values inventory, this is called altruism. Altruism is a virtue. It's a long held virtue across almost every culture and society. And that is if you come upon somebody who's suffering or hurting, you should try to end their hurting and suffering. Non sibi is a life organizing principle. It's a value and it's about how you want to spend your time. No one, including my values inventory, is going to tell you not to help somebody who's in harm's way or who's hurting. What becoming you is about is figuring out what kind of job or career is best aligned with your values. So if you have high non sibi, you're like one of my students or one of the people who goes to the intensive who says, I don't care what industry I'm in, I don't care where I live, I don't care what kind of company I'm in. I just want my job to be one that constantly helps people. Oftentimes these individuals end up working in hr. A lot of doctors have high non simi. They want to actively be helping people, people. They want helping people to be the organizing principle of their days and their lives and their careers. And people with lower non sibi who take the becoming you process, they're not saying they think altruism is bad. They simply do not want to organize their careers in the helping professions. And if they were at the supermarket, somebody with low non sibi and a little old lady said to them, can you get that soup can off the high shelf? Their low non civic would not get in the way. Their altruism, their virtue of altruism and knowing that that's the right thing to do would be they. They'd say, hold on a second, I'll get it for you. But when they go to work the next day, they don't want to be in hr. You know, maybe they want to be in some kind of analytical role. They want to do something quantitative. They want to do something that's not specifically about helping people. So when you're brought up, you are told that helping people, altruism is good. And I'm going to be right along there with all cultures and all societies and tell you, yes, helping people is good. If somebody is suffering, then we should try to end their suffering. That is, that's central to my faith. And you don't have to be a faithful person to be have it central to your. To your belief system. But when it comes to non sibi, the question you're answering is how front and central do I want helping people to be to my job and career? You know, I tell the story whenever I teach about non sibi of a woman in Maine who was a city administrator, and she was diagnosed with cancer in her 50s. And when she was being treated for cancer, she started to run in the kind of small marathons that are specifically set up so that people can feel like they're beating cancer. The cancer survivor, cancer patient marathons. And she found that she got very depressed because she always lost. And she said, this isn't making me feel better at all. And when she fully recovered from cancer, which she did, and she's still very much alive, when she recovered from cancer, she specifically spent her time on the weekends signing up for these races and then coming in dead last so that somebody who was going through cancer treatment would not be the person who came in last. That's non city. She wants to organize her life and her time around helping other people. By contrast, I did becoming youg with an entrepreneur, Great father, great husband, a very good employer, he's an entrepreneur. And he wrote a note, which I often show in class, that said, look, I've been helped by a lot of people and I'm grateful to them and I'll help somebody when they're in need. But, you know, if I don't desire to spend every day, all day helping people, I'm an analyst. I like being with the numbers. I like figuring out solutions to my clients gummy problems. And it's not like he's a bad person at all. And if he needed to get that can of soup or he needed to help somebody who needed to cross the street, he had to come up alongside somebody who was impaired and he would help him get across the street. It's a decision about how much you want helping people to be central to your work. So thank you for asking that question, Desiree, because it's an important distinction and it's one of the reasons when people see non sibi not be one of their top values that they feel very, they could say, wait, wait, wait. But I like helping people. I always help people. And I say, yeah, but this is not about your impulse to help somebody who's in harm's way or who's hurting. This is about how much you want helping people to be a part of your professional and your purpose driven career. So there is overlap there. And I'm so glad that you allowed me to make the distinction. I hope I did. And thanks for that fantastic question. We'll have more of your questions in just a moment. We'll be right back. I'm Susie Welch and this is Becoming youg. Hi, welcome back. It's Suzy Welch. This is Becoming youg. And we're taking your questions. And today I love this. All right, so this next question refers to a Instagram and TikTok video that I put out that basically said, get over yourself. Your first job does not matter. It's just a story at a cocktail party down the road. Everybody freaks out about their first job. Stop freaking out about your first job. And this question came in response to that video. Thank you, Susie. I understand what you are saying, but it's hard to accept that reality. And every opportunity I look for rejects my experiences because I did not start in investment banking. I know I must be missing something and would love and appreciate your advice. Okay, I feel for you. So here's somebody who's saying, yeah, my first job really mattered because I didn't go into some kind of finance job and now I'm out looking for jobs and they're saying, we have no interest in you. You didn't go into investment banking. I feel the pain of this question. I feel that this person is struggling. But I think think this is in the spirit of radical candor. I'm going to say that I think something else might be going on here. So a moment here to tell you what Radical candor is. It's an idea that was developed by the great Kim Scott. You should read her book Radical Candor. And radical candor is when you say something that the other person needs to hear, but you do it coming from a place that is clear that you love them and want them to be better. It's very, very hard. Usually we don't say what we're actually thinking because we're afraid people are going to be hurt and so forth. But the scariest thing that I do around the office, although everyone's used to it now, as I say in the spirit of radical candor, which means I'm about to say something very hard, but I'm coming from a place of love. Okay? That's where I am right now. I don't think this is about your not working in finance beforehand, because when you're young as you are, and I'm going to guess you're in your 20s somewhere and you're starting off in these finance jobs, this is what the boss is thinking, let's just get some good raw material here. Let's see if they've got the right attitude, the sort of right aptitudes, and we're going to train them in everything. We're not really looking for a fully loaded package. Every single person who's young, who comes onto my team, I'm looking a little bit at skills. I'm looking mainly at cultural fit. I'm looking, can they be trained? Because jobs change so quickly. Everybody's going to be pivoting left, right and centered. So what this person is encountering is they're going for jobs and they're getting no after, no after, no. And what this person is being told is it's because they didn't start off in investment banking. And I'm going to say again, coming from a place of love, something else is going on in those interviews. Something's happening. You're not presenting as a cultural fit. There's something that is in your narrative that is making people go, oh, there's something that is absolutely presenting to them as you being a person who's not a great fit for finance. Now, you may have identity issues that makes you really want to go into finance. I get it. People think that's where the money is and it is right now. It may not be in five years, but it is right now. And you want desperately to go into finance. And you keep on being told, we don't see a place for you in finance. And they're taking the easy route out. They're telling you it's because you didn't have your first job in investment banking. But I've seen people go into investment banking from being professional athletes, okay? And from all different walks of life. They're not looking for people who are coming fully loaded. And so I want to lovingly suggest to you that you try to unpack what else might be going on in those interviews. What else might be going on. They do not expect you to come fully loaded. They are picking up on something else. And I think this might be about self awareness. And I'm going to give you some tips, which is I'm going to ask you to get with a friend and have them do a mock job interview with you and you act the way you do in job interviews and have them observe how you come across. I'm going to suggest if you've got $12 to spare, that you do pi360 and you ask everybody that you know to tell you anonymously how the world experiences you in terms of your relationships with people and your ideas and your execution. And I think the thing I would be looking for is what people are telling you about how you relate to other people. I think that the third thing that might be going on is that you do not have a cohesive or persuasive narrative about why your previous work experience makes you a good fit or a promising fit or a person who will blow it out when you get into finance. And you may need to make that case better. You may write that case down, have somebody else look at it and say what's missing from my narrative about myself about why I should be employed in finance. And so I hear what you're saying and I think you should if you really want to work in finance. And again, I'm going to suggest to you to ask yourself why you want to work in finance, why you didn't go into investment banking. If you had the choice earlier, what was the oh in your head about that? And I look, I'm going to say this crazy, crazy thing. I teach a class on management and one part in this class in management, I teach one section on how to get promoted. And I wanted to do this exercise with my students. And then I decided that it was just going to be too inflammatory, I might do it one day. And that is this. I wanted everybody as a homework assignment to go home and fire themselves, to pretend that they were their boss and to fire themselves for cause. What I wanted them to do was to pretend they were their boss and figure out if I was Going to be fired for anything, what would it be? If I was going to be fired for anything, what would it be? So I want people to go and say, okay, I am my own boss, all right, I have to fire Susie. Okay? And you think there's nothing I should be fired for. I'm absolutely fabulous at everything I do. Yeah, you got to fire Susie. So I say, okay, if I had to fire Suzy, I would say, finally, I'd be forced to think about, okay, what, what is really, like, where's my weak point? What do I do wrong? Okay? And I'd have to come up with it and then I'd have to fire me. You'd have to figure out why you would fire yourself. And that's a really hard thing to do. But it forces you to look in to your presentation in the world and pinpoint what others might be seeing as the weakness. This is forcing you to have some self awareness. We typically don't love having self awareness and it's really hard to have self awareness. Of course, everyone thinks they're self aware and they're not. I mean, there's tests for this. So I want to ask you, Dear Anonymous, if you had to fire yourself from a job, what would it be? Where's the chink in your armor, so to speak? And I think people might be seeing it. And your narrative about why you should be hired, it's got to include why that's not a weakness or how it's a weakness that you're actually aware of. So that's my answer to you. Maybe it's not the one you wanted to hear. I do think that first jobs, look, if you get a great first job, power to you, it can lead to things, but generally it does not matter. Something else I think is going on in the interview process with you. And I want to invite you to step into the possibly difficult experience of figuring out what that might be. And look, if you've got $12 to spare, you can take Pi360. This is a digital tool that I created exactly so people could find find out how the world experienced them in terms of their relationships with people, their ideas, and their ability to get things done. You can send it up to up to 40 people and find out anonymously how the world is experiencing you. Just go to my pi360feedback.com and you can find that out and take a look at the gap between how you think the world's experiencing you and how the world really is experiencing you. In this case, when you're not getting Job time after time after time. It might be worth the 12 bucks to find that out. All right, we have one final question in today's mailbag. You know, I could actually do this all day and night. I love these questions. I mean, I. I love hearing from you. We're actually going to do another mailbag episode coming up soon. So if you've got questions, send them to me on DM and we'll try to get to them. So go ahead with this last question of today's podcast. Hi, my name is Sharon Herz. My question is, can your values ranking change? If so, how often do you suggest evaluating your values? Thank you. Love this question. Filled with love today. But I love this question because I get it all the time, so I'm really glad to answer it on the pod. So can your values rankings change? And if so, how often should you test yourself? Let's just start with the first question, which is do values change? Here's the thing with cognitive aptitudes, our cognitive wiring in terms of like, are you a generalist or a specialist? Are you a brainstormer or focus concentrator? This stuff, the hardwiring your brain. Social scientists have pretty well established that your hardwiring, your cognitive aptitudes are set by about age 15 or 16 years old. It's amazing they're able to test for that. They've tested for it, and that's the truth. Okay, now there's no such testing for values. I'm hoping that someday because of the values bridge, we will actually be able to have real answers on that. But the values bridges is only a few months old, and we all have said, oh, so and so's values changed. George was such a family man. Then he turned 40, and suddenly he was dancing on the tabletops with a lampshade on his head. His values really changed. And so people sometimes observe that people's behaviors really change. She had kids, her values changed. He lost his job, his values changed. Hmm. I'm not so sure. I'm not so sure. Look, I study values. My PhD is in values expression. So I have some opinions about this. I probably, I have lots of data. We have. 20,000 people have taken the values bridge. But I probably have heard about values from, I mean, from tens of thousands of people over, you know, with all the different ways I've done become you, I probably have more empirical data on values than even your average gal. And so here's what I think. Here's my theory, and I'm going to test it going forward. And that's this? I don't know. I think your values are pretty set by your mid-20s. And what changes? And this does change. What changes is how much you express them or repress them. All right, so let me back up a little bit. There's a whole field of study called values formation, and that's how you come by your values. How come you have non sibi as your top value? How come you have affluence as your third value? And that's what values formation studies. And the answer is, let me sum up a whole field for you. The answer is it's a big stew. You know, it's your genes, it's your parents, it's childhood trauma, it's experiences, it's your culture, it's society, it's your best friend. I mean, a lot of things go into why we have the values that we have. A lot of things. I mean, one of the values that I have, I'm pretty sure it came because I grew up with a grandmother who had a value that was at the opposite. And I didn't want to be like her because I saw the consequences of that value. And so a lot of times my students want to talk to me about where their values came from. And I say to them, thank you very much. That's not my area of expertise. Please take it up with your therapist. And honestly, this is what therapists generally do. They talk to you about where your values came from and whether that was healthy or not. I'm in the field of with becoming you of values expression. I just take you as you are. You've got your values. And my concern is whether or not you're actually living them and expressing them as much as you want. Because I believe that when you are, that's the path towards authenticity. When you're able to express your values and aptitudes and interests in some kind of career or job, that's your purpose and that's what I'm interested in. I care, of course, how you came by your values, but it's not what I'm focused on. I'm focused on how much you're expressing them. And what I've observed in my life with looking at people with their values expression is that whenever somebody changes their appears to change their values, what they end up saying is something like, well, I always had this as a value. I just wasn't able to live it. So to your question, I was eventually going to get back to your question. To your question, I'm not so sure your values ranking change. Okay. I think that after you're sort of 20 something 30, your values are pretty stable. But what changes again is how big those authenticity gaps are or aren't. And for that I would test every three to four months because your life is you trying to get closer and closer to living your values more fully. And if you get your values results and you find out your values or even if you just know your values, I have a number one value, say of Eudaimonia self care. And you, you don't have to take a test to know it's not being lived well, you should make some changes and that try to get you closer to it. Maybe you're trying already and I mean I would want to see check in with you in a few months to see if you've made progress. I don't think rankings change all that much again. Okay, that's my point. I think what changes is how much you are allowing yourself or being allowed to live the values that are pretty formed. I think by your mid twenties now there may be an exception to this rule. Sometimes I think, gee, do my values change after Jack died? I don't think they did. I think my values were. I was 60, my values were my values. I do think I started to express values that I had not really been able to express before because I was living into other values more fully, like family centrism while he was living. So that's my answer. I hope it's helpful. This is a very existential question about whether our values change over time. Look, I'll finish by saying this. When people find out their values, when they're taking becoming you and they're with me, one of the first things I say to them after they're looking at the list of their values, I ask them, do you like your values? And there's always kind of a moment of reckoning when people are looking at the list and people have to sit with it a little bit. And usually what I hear after a while is like, yeah, well, I don't like how much I'm not living them. But yeah, these are me. I do like these values. That's usually where people are. But occasionally there is someone who says, I wish that non sibi was higher. I wish that I liked helping people more. There's an identity thing around it. I want to be like my mom who really helped people. And I think you can try to shove your values into a different ranking with a great deal of intention. I don't know how successful you'll be at it, but I do think you can try to push a value up or down, but again, you want to be authentic. That's the whole point of knowing your values, because authenticity is the fresh net, the source of your journey towards purpose. Thank you so much for that. Great question. It has been so fun answering these questions from the mailbag. It's great to hear from you. I love that people are engaging with becoming you. And so if you have questions, more questions, let me know. But until next time, this is Susie Welch, and thank you so much for listening. This is becoming you. Becoming youg is produced by Jesse Baker and Eric Newsom of Magnificent Noise. Our production staff includes Muskaan Nagpal and Kristen Muller, with help from Elisa Zinn, Hallie Reiner, Maddy Paul, and Tanya Joji. I'm your host, Susie Welch, and this is becoming you.