Like Having a Baby, Purpose Is Hard to Miss—Yet People Do. Did You?

I'm going to start this episode of the Pod with a secret, a true secret story.

About the time I almost died, or at the time I thought I was going to die. In fact, I was so sure that I was going to die that I announced to everybody that was present at the time that I was already dead.

And what that experience has taught me over the years about my favorite topic, purpose, and what finding it actually feels like, because it has to.

You know, people always ask me, how do I know if I found my purpose? And I'm going to tell you that the one way to find out that if you have found your purpose is that you go through five stages before you get there. Otherwise, if you don't go through these five stages, I'm not actually sure that you found your purpose for real. And by the end of this podcast, I think you'll know what those stages are and you'll know if you've gone through them. They're not always sequential. You know, sometimes you go through them on loop. You do a little this, little that. You sort of go through stages one through four, and you go back to the beginning before you hit five. But if you haven't gone through all five, I am not sure that you have found the purpose you should be going for and living by. Because the only way to your purpose is through.

The only way out is through. It's a cliche. Cause it's true. So let's get going.

I'm Susie Welch, and this is Becoming youg. It's the podcast where each week we endeavor to help you answer the question, what should I do with my life? Which is not a small question at all. I am a professor at NYU Stern School of Business, where I teach a class about purpose, and I run the initiative on purpose and flourishing.

Today is my daughter's birthday. She is the youngest of my four children, and she's going to be 30. And she is the most. Every parent says this, but she's the most amazing person. Eve is probably the person with the highest radius of anyone I've ever met. She wants to change the world for animals and for all humanity. She is. Her heart is gigantic. She's a peace lover, a peace seeker, and a peacemaker, and she's quirky and real and actually just an amazing ceramicist and teacher. I just. I'm in awe of her. In awe of her. Okay. She has a lot of tattoos, by the way. If you were to see her, you would say, wow, look at all those tattoos that Susie's kid has. And the One way she got me from not to not be mad about it anymore cause I'm not a big fan of them all is that she got my favorite Bible verse tattooed on her arms. That, that sort of shut me up for about a year. And some people think we look alike. I wish. But I think what they're picking up on is our shared trait of intensity. Which is, well, you know, I don't think I have to tell you if you've ever listened to one of these podcasts before, how intense I am. And I happen to know. So tonight I am schlepping out on the six and then the F to get to the far, far reaches, the edge of the universe. I'm talking about Brooklyn, of course, to attend her birthday party. And we will all toast her. I will toast her and we will say beautiful true things about her. But I want to tell you the one thing I'm not gonna say. I'm not actually ever gonna tell her. And I don't have to worry about her ever finding out. You know why? Cause my kids don't listen to this podcast. They have plenty of me all the time and so they are not listening. I am relieved to say. And I'm not going this. I'm not going to tell her how I felt walking into her delivery at Mass General Hospital in January 1995. I'm not going to tell her, but I'm never going to forget it. I parked my car in the parking lot on the like 8th or 9th floor. I went down in the elevator. I was alone for reasons but for another podcast and I went down and I got off and I was walking slowly with my go bag towards the hospital. This was my fourth delivery and I was walking in there and I felt like I was a soldier going to battle knowing I was going to die. I had this feeling of great grief in my heart. I felt great sadness. I felt despair. But here's the funny thing about wasn't about her, it was actually about the delivery beforehand. It was about her brother Marcus. He's also going to be at the party tonight. By the way, Marcus is 32. He's different from Eve. Of course, all your children are different. I actually use him in class to describe. But he was low scope because he and his wife Eva run a fantastic home goods store in Brooklyn which is actually celebrates a low scope life. It's just these beautiful home goods and he's just a wonderful, loving, attentive, highly introverted. Yes. How did I have an introvert? Guess what? I had four introverts how did it happen? I don't know. God thought I needed to learn what introversion was all about and have a heart for it. And he helped me find that. Marcus is just incredible. Guess what? Here's a fun fact about him. He has been with the same woman. He's married to her since he was 14 years old. Yep. He brought home his first girlfriend at 14 and we were like, well, this will never last. He married her and you know what, I'm so happy he did. And it was his delivery where I had to tell everybody that I was. I actually told everybody I was already dead. And this is what happened with Marcus. I had a lovely pregnancy with him, my third kid. I thought, oh, it's easy, I've got the hang of this now. Third baby. And in those days you didn't find out as often if it was a boy or girl. I didn't know what it was. We just knew it was a very big baby and a really active baby. And about four days before I actually went into labor, I was laying in bed at my parents house. I was visiting them and I was laying in bed and I felt this gigantic movement in my belly that was like somebody was swimming in a swimming pool and doing a gigantic Olympian like flip turn at the end. I didn't think anything about it except for, oh God, he's real, or he or she, I didn't know is really a mover. Well then I went in to deliver him at the hospital and when I went in, I said very offhandedly to the nurses, we were very jolly. They thought it was the third kid. We all thought it was gonna be over in a minute. And I said to one of the nurses, hey, you know this labor is kind of different. Cause the pain is going down the sides of my legs and not in the usual place. And I saw the nurses look at each other with looks of fear and terror in their faces. And then one of the nurses said to the other, when was your last ultrasound? And I said, oh, I don't know, six weeks ago. I mean, remember this was 30 something years ago. So it was not the kind of technology they today. And they got a portable ultrasound machine right up to the room. And they immediately discerned and discovered that what he was was what's called a transverse breach. That's a baby that's upside down and backwards. So if you kind of picture it, he was like a little soldier facing outwards and facing forward. So he's upwards and forwards like a little soldier saluting instead of Facing backwards and down, which is the normal way of babies coming out. And so they said to me, you have a transverse breach. This is an incredibly unusual presentation. Usually we know about it weeks beforehand. And I thought back to that time I felt that flip turn in my stomach. And I said, well, I think it just happened four days ago. And they said, we have two choices. We can helicopter you right now to a hospital that can try to deliver a transverse breach, or you're going to have to deliver him regularly right here in this hospital. It's a little country hospital. And I said, ha, ha ha. I said, I'll just deliver him. And they said, are you sure? This is gonna be really hard. And I said, yeah, I don't wanna get into a helicopter. And we'll just do it. Okay, so flash forward 18 hours later. These deliveries are very slow, and they don't let you take painkiller because it slows it down even more. So if you can imagine, this was a slow and painful delivery that was in its 18th hour, and it was not pleasant. Okay, I'm gonna spare you all the gruesome details, except for that it got really bad, and I was really sad and it hurt quite a lot, and I couldn't take painkiller. And the doctor came in the room to check on me. And I said to her, I. Carolyn was her name, and I knew her really well. She had delivered my other children. And I said to her, look, I. I want you to know something. I'm dying. In fact, I am dead. And that this is a dead person. A dead person is currently speaking to you. I am dead right now. And she literally laughed in my face. She snorted us. She snorted, okay? She snorted. She said, that's what they all say, Susie. I said, oh, all your patients tell you they're dead. I'm telling you for a fact I am dead. A dead person is delivering this baby. And she laughed and she said, susie, buck up. There's going to be a baby in this room.

And I said, really? And she said, yeah, there's really going to be a baby in this room, and there's going to be a baby in this room within the hour. There's going to be a baby. I said, I don't believe you. And she said, just pull yourself together. And you know what? There was a baby in that room. And there he was, and he was beautiful. And I had to be apologetic that I had announced to her that I was dead. And I think I actually said other rude things to her, like, how could you let this happen to me. And so. But you say a lot of stupid shit when you're having a baby. And I'm not the only one who's ever done it. And life went on. We wrapped him up and we brought him home, and life went on. But that is why 18 months later, when I was walking into Mass General, which is where they sent me in case I had another transverse breach, that is why when I was walking in to deliver Eve, I thought, if it happens to me again, I can't do it. I can't do it. But, you know, I did do it. And we're going to her birthday party tonight. And I never forgot that phrase, there's going to be a baby in this room. Because it was said to me in a moment of extreme despair and difficulty. And there was somebody guiding me who knew that, it gets better, but you have to go through it. It's a cliche, because it's true. The only way out is through. And I have used this phrase to my students at the beginning of the becoming you process over and over again. I say, you're going to find your purpose in this process. It's very, very hard, but you have to go through it. You have to actually go through five steps as you excavate your values and you identify your aptitudes and you pinpoint your interests. That's the construct we use in becoming you, that your purpose lies at the intersection of your authentic values, what you truly believe, what truly matters to you. We never do that work. I mean, I was just in an intensive at becoming. There were 60 people in the room who walked in. Some of them with a vague sense of their values, some people not knowing what their values were, and they did the hard work of uncovering them. We use a lot of tools. We use digital tools. We do all sorts of ways. We excavate our values. Then we moved on to aptitudes where we said, what are we really uniquely good at? We cannot be great at everything. What is it? What is it that we're best at? Again, hard work. And then we pinpoint our interest. Some people know exactly what they're interested in. Other people, like, I'm interested in everything and other people are. I'm not really interested in anything. Okay. But we have this process to get through it. And when I tell my students, we're going to go through this very hard process and there's going to be a baby in the room, it's going to be your purpose, sometimes they're really skeptical. Okay? They looked at me with like an arched eyebrow. And it just seems too good to be true. Okay? Because they've been searching for their purpose. In my case, nobody goes to a becoming you class or a webinar or, or takes my class at NYU if they're not wondering what their purpose is. Because the name of the class is becoming you, finding your purpose, blah blah, blah. So they're there, they've TR died before, as we all have. And they come in and they think, oh God, I hope this works, but I'm not sure. Why would they be sure? I mean, you've heard other people say it works, but I say you've got to go through these five steps. And I say there's going to be a baby in the room. And I think about myself laying there telling the doctor that I was dead and there was never going to be a baby in the room because I couldn't do it and there was a baby in the room. You know, labor has three stages. They have like icky medical names, but actually getting to your purpose. I think it has five distinct stages and I, I've seen them again and again, but I actually named them for the first time just the other day because I got a DM from a student in one of my intensives. He is a 40 year old who's a video editor. He lives in Ottawa, Canada. And he went through the intensive and then he DM'd me afterwards to talk to me about the intensive. And in his DM he wrote, in this experience, I was veklempt, I laughed, I cried in private because gotta be strong. I commiserated, I schmoozed, and even probably shat myself a little bit. The baby is developing, but she has not crowned yet. I'm gonna get there. Thank you from the bottom of my gay, sassy heart. Love you, Susie.

I laughed, I cried, I commiserated, I schmoozed, and I even probably shat myself a little. That's what he said. And I, I, I'm sorry. I love it. Even the prudent me loves it. And I even probably shat myself a little. Okay, These are the five stages. I have a different name for them. Okay, I'm going to tell you the five stages, then I'm going to describe them to you because you can see if you've gone through them yourself on the way to discovering your purpose. And if you are on the road to discovering your purpose, I just want to warn you, you're going to go through these five stages. Okay? So here's what I call them. Elation. Revelation, investigation, refinement and scare. Foria. Now, let's go through them all. Okay? He calls it laughing. I call it elation. Because that is what I always see at the beginning of purpose Discovery. I always see people feeling a huge amount of relief, a huge amount of joy. They laugh because they think I'm finally doing it. They're almost giddy. I'm finally going to do it. I'm going to take my life back. You know, I've Talked about the 3DS. I'll talk about them again. I'll talk about them until the cows come home. Which is that there's three ways to live your life. There is default. That's how we all usually live, in reactive mode. Like, life happens to us. We just do the best we can. We live by default. I've done it. You've done it. It happens. Then the second d is deliberation. When we start to sprinkle in some intentionality and thinking and planning to our life. And it's pretty good if you're there, congratulations. That's better than default. But the third d is design. When you say, I'm going to have a theory of myself and my life, I'm going to have a purpose, and I'm going to drive my personal bus toward it with both hands on the wheel. That living by design, that's pretty damn great. And we all want that. I want it for you. And when we first get onto the path to discovering our purpose, we feel elated. We're like, that's it. I'm done. I'm done living by other people's agendas. I'm done living for other people. I'm done not living by my values. I am ready to live by deliberation and design. And you can feel so elated. You can feel delighted, thrilled, proud, joyful. And that's why there's so much laughter at the beginning. It's like probably the first day of a cruise, okay? You just feel good. Everybody's very giddy, get it, Gets a drink. And I mean the joy in the room. Before I start an intensive or a class, it's bubbly. And that's the laughing part. The laughing continues. You know, people are cheerful. But then you go into the phase of purpose, discovery that I. Revelation, okay? He calls it crying. There is a lot of crying in this stage. I mean, it is. The nickname for my class at NYU is the class where everyone cries. Not everyone, but many people cry. Because figuring out who you are is stunning and heart rending, okay? And so sometimes it's discovering who you are. But the really hard part, the really sad part, the part that makes people cry the most, is realizing.

How far you are from where you want to be and where you need to be. This is. This is a shocking revelation oftentimes. But there's this other part that makes you cry, which is you see your values and you think, oh, my God, I'm not living by them at all. Or you see your values and think, oh, no wonder I'm in so much pain. I have. My top two values are completely in conflict. One is affluence, the desire for money. And the other is what we call eudaimonia, the desire for fun and pleasure. And you crop because you think, these are my true values, but they are very hard to reconcile. Okay. Or I have a value of very large scope, this desire to swallow the world with my life. But I am married to somebody who's got a value of very low scope. And that's the source of all our problems. The revelation that goes on in this stage where you look at your values, find out which ones are actually being expressed, and you look at your aptitudes, and you think, okay, that's what I'm really good at and I'm not doing it at all. Or that's what actually bad at, and I'm doing it all the time, and no wonder my boss is about to fire me. Or you say, you know what? When I peel it all back and these are my interests and I'm nowhere near them. I love standup comedy, and I am doing data analysis. I mean, that is why they cry. He calls it crying. And there is a lot of crying. And when people are doing the exercises and becoming you, and some of them are really quiet, and people are sitting at their desks and they're doing the exercises, and I'm sitting up the front, behind my. My sort of podium at the front of the classroom, and I see a student stand up and walk toward me. I can see, usually they're coming towards me with tears in their eyes because they've just come upon something about themselves. And they come up and they always say the same thing. They always start by saying, I'm sorry I'm crying. And I say, I'm not sorry you're crying. First of all, everyone cries in this class. Everyone cries when they discover who they are. Everyone cries sometimes. They're crying because they're so overjoyed, because they can finally begin to see the road towards themselves and they're overwhelmed. And that makes you teary and happy. And that also brings tears. So revelation is the second step. If you haven't cried a little or felt like you're going to cry a little or felt a big wall of crying in your chest, and maybe you're not a crier. I'm not sure. You've done all the work to get to purpose because you got to strip yourself back before you go forward.

The third step is investigation. You've done all the data collection, okay. You found out your values. That's hard work. Okay, man. We've done a lot of podcasts on that. And if you're interested, by the way, in finding out what all the values are, all 15 of the values that I talk about are in episode 34, which is called something about having a language of values. It was dropped in the early part of the year, early in January a few weeks ago. And it describes what I mean when I talk about figuring out what your values are and then your aptitudes. We do a lot of testing for that. And interests also. I mean, these. This is not stuff you just pluck out of the system sky after you've gone through the huge revelation part of the process, okay. Which I think you have to do, it just doesn't pop up. If only. Well, if it did, I wouldn't have a job. But besides that, I know it has to happen that way. But after that data analysis, after the data collection is done, after the data collection is done, it's time to do the analysis. I call this stage investigation. My student who DM me, he called it commiseration. And actually, I love that word for it. Because this investigation stage, it cannot happen only in your head. Head. No one finds out their purpose alone. Okay? You have to have pushback. You have to pressure test. You have to be in conversation with people who know you and don't know you. In the becoming you method, we actually have a whole series of like, I call it speed dating, where you sort of take what you think your purpose is and you have 15 minute sessions where you run it by other people who are going through the same process. And you test each other's and you ask each other questions and you pressure test. And then I get up there and I lecture and then you go back and you do it again and you got to go into this period of investigation like. Like, are these really my values? Are these really my aptitudes and are these really my interests? Okay? You collect the data and then you analyze it. This investigation stage is critical. Okay? Oh, I know you're sitting there saying, wait, this sounds so hard. I don't even want to know what my purpose is anymore. Susie. No, but I'm telling you, you got to go through these stages. And you know what? We do it in three days. I'm not talking like this takes your entire life. And this part of it, it investigation, it is a lot of commiserating with people who are going through the process or people who care about you. That's the third stage, okay?

Then comes the fourth stage. I call it refinement. You know, your purpose is really important, okay? And so you don't pluck it out of the sky, you do a lot of hard work. Then you go through this process of. First you go through this revelation as I described. Then you investigate it to make sure you got it all right. And then you start polishing and honing it. It happens in more conversations. Some of it happens in your head as well, okay? You wallow in it. You refine it. You push back. And you know what we do in class? Everybody presents. They present their purpose, and then they stand up there and they tell the story of their life for the next 40 years with slides. They say, okay, my purpose is, you know, sometimes a person's purpose when they go through this, through any kind of methodology. My methodology can be very, very specific. Like, I'm going to be the CEO of Chanel Korea. I've gotten that. Okay. In my class. And sometimes it's really, really broad, Like, I'm going to be a woman's advocate. Okay. And anything in between. But your purpose is your purpose. It lays at the intersection of your values and your aptitudes and your economically viable interests. And so when we go through this process, and I go through it with my students who are going through the Becoming youg Methodology, people get up and they say, here's my purpose. We call it area of transcendence. And then they say, here are my values. Here are my aptitudes. Here are my interests. That's how I got to it. And now I'm going to tell you how that plays out. And they tell a story. I mean, I have seen people describe lives that are so beautiful. You know, why they want them. They are so exquisitely alive while they're living them. And they so perfectly align with their values and their aptitudes and their interests. My God, I mean, there's always these rounds of applause. There's lots of crying and all that other stuff. That's the schmoozing part of the process where you go out into the world, and you take your purpose to the people, it's going to impact your family, your partner, your kids, your boss. And you say, here it is. Here it is. And here's what it's going to mean for all of us, especially me. That is the refinement stage. And that is not the last stage. There's a fifth one. Okay? Remember my friend who DM'd, say? He said, I think I even shot myself a little bit. Okay. I'm such a prude. Like, even saying that freaks me out. But it's such a good line, and I love it. And I laughed my head off when I heard it. Okay? Yeah. I call this stage scarephoria. Scarephoria, the state of being simultaneously scared shitless and euphoric. Okay? That's where growth happens. It doesn't happen anywhere else. You are not growing if you're in your comfort zone. You know that. That. And you know what? You're also not growing if you're scared out of your wits. You're just not. You're paralyzed or you're running or you're freaking out. No one grows there. You grow right in the sweet spot of when you're scared because you're stretching and you are excited. You're euphoric about with hope, okay? You're right in the middle of hope and terror. That's scarephoria. And that happens after you've gotten your purpose because you know it's right. But now you got to do it. Now you got to go live it. That is enough to give you heart palpitations, isn't it? But you know what? You go forward anyway if it's the right purpose, because you know it's the right purpose. That's the beauty of having a methodology. Not just doing this. Driving in your car, listening to Florence in the Machine, okay? Which I would highly recommend everyone doing. Although last night, for some reason, I got completely hooked on Johnny Cash's song. His rendition of Nine Inch Nails her hurt, okay? And, I mean, I just have gone through everybody who goes through hard things. My dad passed, and I was just thinking a lot about that song, and I just played it over and over again. Got myself into a complete funk. I don't know why I'm telling you this story, but whatever. I think that purpose doesn't happen listening to one of your favorite songs. It doesn't happen when you're taking a random walk in the woods. The work that goes into discovering your purpose can happen in those places. But to define it the way you need to define It. To have the confidence to live it. That's those five stages I just talked to you about. Okay? Elation, revelation, investigation, refinement, scarephoria. Okay? If you haven't gone through those stages, you got more work to do, my beloveds. You do. You do. It's gonna hurt. It's gonna feel great at the end, because you know why? There's going to be a baby in the room. All right? There's going to be a baby in the room. The doctor was right. When Marcus came out, he came out smiling. My sister was in the room with me, and she said, I do believe that baby is smiling. And she took a picture. He was smiling. He put me through hell and back. Transverse breach. Do not recommend. Okay, but he came out, he was smiling. And I immediately had a certain kind of amnesia. About what? Everything I'd just been through. I was just totally overjoyed. Overjoyed. And then the crazy thing is about Eve. I started by talking about how when I walked into the hospital to give birth to Eve, I felt like a soldier going into battle. And I. I knew I was going to die because of what had just gone. Gone through. But here is this crazy thing. That nurse who was in the room with me when I delivered Marcus, she had transferred to Mass General, and she saw me coming. She remembered what I'd been through, because, by the way, it was actually around 40 hours when I finally delivered him. I'm going to spare you all those yucky details, but that nurse saw me, and I was going into the delivery room, and she said to the doctor, doctor, this woman does not need to be a hero again. Give her an epidural. Because he was like, it's coming so soon. And she said, give her an epidural. And this nurse, like, out of the blue, advocated for me. So my memory of Eve's delivery was perfectly fine because I had drugs, which were very nice, and I had this gorgeous delivery of Eve. I just remember only the joy of it. Okay? But that's not usually how it happens when a baby's in the room. You go through the kind of stages of agony that I just described in this podcast. And then after you have it, it's so fantastic, the delivery of the purpose and how it makes you feel that you get this amnesia, this amnesia about how hard it actually was. Okay? So it's going to be hard, but you're going to forget it. And from absolute proof of that, I want to tell you about the end of the DM from that person who wrote me about the five stages. You know what he said after saying? He laughed, he cried, he commiserated, he schmoozed, he had his pants. He said, I wish I'd done it sooner. I wish I'd done it sooner, sooner. But here we are. He said, but here we are. To which I say, here we are at last. The sooner you start, the sooner it's over. There will be a baby in the room.

That is it for our episode today. Thank you for being here. Here. Hey, I love hearing from you. I don't like it. I love it. So please write to me and connect with me on Instagram or LinkedIn. You know I don't make this podcast by myself alone in a closet with a microphone, don't you? Becoming you is produced by Jesse Baker and Eric Newsom of Magnificent Noise. Our production staff includes the amazing Golda, Arthur Muskan Nagpal, and Kristen Muller, with help from the Becoming Universal Universe members Elisa Zinn, Hallie Reiner, Maddie Paul, and Tanya Joshi. Could not do it without these people. Trust me. I'm your host, Susie Welch, and this is Becoming.