The Always and Forever Question

Foreign.

Hello, everybody. Hi, it's Susie. This is the Becoming youg podcast. Becoming you is a podcast that endeavors to help you answer the question, what the heck should I do with my life? That's the biggie, isn't it? That's the really big question. All of us have it at one point in our lives. I have a methodology. This is a. The whole show. And the methodology is. I teach it at NYU Stern School of Business. This is a 13 part methodology that walks you through the process of figuring out what to do with your life. All right, today on the show, we're going to hear from our listeners. There are spectacular questions that have come in. I am dying to answer them. I mean, they're really, really great questions. But first, I just feel very compelled to tell you about something, an experience I just had. I was asked to give a Fireside chat to a group of global female executives here in New York today. And this is how it happened. I. I was presenting the Becoming you methodology to the NYU Stern Board of Trustees. Why? Well, okay, not to sound like a jerk, but I was asked to present it because the class is quite popular. And the dean said, you know, given the popularity of your class, could you come talk to the board about what you're doing in that room that's making all these people want to take the class? And I said, yeah. So I was talking to the board, and then afterwards I was speaking to individual board members. I don't know, I'm a super, please validate me kind of girl.

And.

And as I was speaking to the board members afterwards, I was fully aware that they are my bosses, okay? And I am just that kind of person who really cares what my bosses think. And one of the members of the board said to me, I am the host of this event in New York City. It's women from around the world who are global executives who serve on boards. And we have an annual function. Will you come and be the keynote? And good girl that I am, I said yes. So I got up there and I talked about what Becoming youg is all about. And I could tell from the first minute that this was a group of friends. They just received me so warmly. They were so open. I could see it in their faces and in their hearts. And I loved them back kind of instantly. And I went through the whole thing and it was. They were so fascinated. And for me, the learning is that outsides have nothing to do with insides. From the outside, all of these women are unbelievably successful senior level executives with global Profiles, serving on boards. They're from all around the world and from the outside. All of these women know exactly what to do with their lives, okay? All of them know their values and their aptitudes and their interests. All of them know that stuff. And yet they received me as if they were undergraduates in college saying, what should I do with my life? They were so open hearted and had so much receptivity to the idea that this could be a journey and that we're never done with this journey. And it's. It got better and better as it went along and the audience kept on just giving me a lot of love back as I kind of told the story. And then we moved to the Q and A and a woman made the very grave mistake of asking me what my life story was. Well, then I was off to the races because I got to tell the story about my mother out in the backyard with the ax and the rattlesnakes. I had a very feral childhood in Oregon. I came from a complete family of hippies and we lived in the woods. And if you would have told my parents when we were out there living in the woods of Oregon to your daughter will grow up one day to speak to global business executives, they would have been like, oh, you've got the wrong family. Anyway, after an hour and some bit, it ended. There was just a huge amount of loves and hugs going on. I think I might see some of these fabulous women again in my intensive, which is coming up, by the way, in New York City, January 6th, 7th and 8th, where I'm teaching Becoming youg to people who do not go to nyu. This is one of my great joys in life to do that, and I hope I see some of them again. Last thing I'll say about this is that one of the really interesting things that the people in the audience said to me afterwards was, thank you for being so vulnerable. And I'm like, well, I've gotten to a stage in my life where I don't know how else to be because of a couple different things. One, it's just easier. It's just easier to be who you are. And number two, you're always rewarded for it. With people being vulnerable back, it jettisons you quickly to intimacy, which, I don't know, I really love. But we're brought up not to be vulnerable. We're brought up to be tough. To be a girl boss. I think boys get it much worse than women. They're told to be tough guys, to not show their emotions. And boys are so Filled with emotion. My boys have got more emotion in their pinkies than my daughters in their whole bodies. How did I get on this topic? Look, vulnerability is a very good thing. Try it. Okay. If you're not showing your vulnerability to people, if you're not being real, if you're not saying, I'm scared, if you're not saying this is hard for me, if you're not saying, I want to help you, but I'm afraid you'll be mad at me if I don't help you enough, just say it all. Say the real thing. And you're going to be rewarded with. This becomes addicting. And you know, look, hey, if you want to go to this intensive, go to my website, susiewelch.com go to it anyway, because I've never had such a good hair day in my entire life and my makeup looks excellent. There's fantastic pictures of my dogs. Go to my website whether you want to join the intensive. Not. But susiewelch.com go there. Sign up for my newsletter, if you will. I work hard on them. But you can also sign up for the intensive there or actually just learn about it. I mean, you may not want to go, but you may want to. So check it out. You get a certificate from NYU's Initiative on Purpose and Flourishing. That's new. I went to the mat on that one. I think you deserve it. And so if you. If you dig certificates, you're going to get one.

And now we have a very exciting next part of the show today, and it's when we're going to take questions from my listeners and the people follow me on Instagram and other places. And I love when you write me. I love writing back to you when I can. I try to write back to everybody. I know I'm not catching everybody, but thank you for doing that. And we're going to turn to that right now.

Hi, Susie. I've been following you on Instagram and started listening to your podcast recently. You've talked about how passion and purpose are different, but how do you know if you should follow your passion and make it a part of your purpose, I. E. If you should put in the time and work to get good at it, because it's something you can learn and do, but just not what you're currently able to. I worked hard to get to where I am now at my first big girl job out of uni. What I thought was my purpose, as per your definition. And I don't know if it's just the typical disillusionment that happens when you join the corporate world or after the first couple of years at any job, the specific environment I'm in or some other external factor. But it doesn't fulfill me like I thought it would or light me up like when I think about alternative jobs closer to my passion. On one hand, I know being thankful for what I've got, putting in the time and having commitment are all part of fulfillment. But on the other hand, work is a huge chunk of your life. And I want to build a life with a career that brings me joy, at least most of the time. What's your advice for someone young like me? I don't want to let too much time pass and accumulate sunk costs by staying along this path and worst case, regretting it by the time I retire. But at the same time, I don't know if it's too early to move on. There's something to learn from every experience, but how can you tell if it's a step forward, a step back, which could also lead to two steps forward or just a sidestep or distraction altogether. Thank you for your guidance and big hugs to your dogs.

I love this person so much. Whoever you are, I love you so much. First of all, you are so far ahead of the game. I don't know how old you are. I'm going to guess you're in your 20s. But to have the kind of poise and thoughtfulness and analytic insight that you have, your life's gonna be amazing. I can just tell you that right now because the things you're articulating, most people articulate in their 60s. So go kiss yourself. Okay? You are filled with goodness, and I'm very psyched and excited about your future. That's number one. Number two, I'll give my dogs a hug for you. Number three. Okay. I wanna unpack a lot of what you said, but the first thing I wanna say is, let us not mix up purpose and passion, okay? Purpose is at the intersection of your values, your deeply held beliefs, motivations and desires. And that's like, how much you want money, okay? How much you want to be famous, how much you want to be with your family. There's 15 core values, and you got to figure out where you are on each one of them. Those are your values, okay? Then there's your aptitudes, what you're uniquely good at, okay? And then finally there's what you're interested in, what calls you in intellectually or emotionally. So, for instance, I am very, very fascinated by animal protection, animal rescue on the way to the speech I was just talking to you about. I was in my car figuring out a way to get 500 pounds of donated dog food to a charity in Connecticut. Okay? I am obsessed with dog rescue and actually all animal protection, okay? That is not my purpose. That is my passion. It's not what I do for a living. I do it as a side hustle. I'm on the board of the Humane Society, and I. I'm very active with. With other groups. Okay? So for you, I think my sense, dear listener, is that you went towards a field that was a passion for you. You went to something that interests you and seems to call you. And the reason why you're disillusioned is you're bumping into a conflict with either your values or your aptitudes. And to figure out what your true purpose is, you need to do the hard work of excavating your values and figuring out what they are and also finding out what your aptitudes are. Now, you are particularly intelligent from my estimation. And so in a way, that's little bit of a curse with aptitudes, I'm afraid, because you kind of could do anything, okay? When you're kind of smart, you could just do anything. And you think, okay, I've got all the aptitudes. For instance, if I was the queen of the world, and I said to you, you must become an architect. We need more architects. And the law is, you must become an architect. You could probably go become an architect. You know how the game is played. You would know how to get into architecture school. You would study hard in the classes you couldn't do. You would get a tutor, and you would become an architect. Maybe not a great one, but you would become an architect. And so for people who are generally good at a lot of stuff, they never end up finding out what their true aptitudes are. Aptitudes. What you're uniquely good at, how your brain is wired. There's eight fundamental cognitive aptitudes. And also part of aptitudes that are not your cognitive brain wiring is your personality. Some social scientists don't include personality and aptitudes. I do, because I have known over the course of my life so many people who were good at their jobs and simply because of their personalities. And that's not a diss. It's like they're in the right job because their personality was born for it. Okay? I happen to have a friend who his personality is. You would just want him at every single party you ever had. He makes the party. His face is Sunshine, he can talk to anyone. He's utterly delightful, and he just makes everyone feel good. And people feel like they've got to stay at the party longer because he's their marvelous, delightful, cheerful personality. Guess what his passion is? His passion is cars, okay? He loves cars. He loves every kind of car. And so he keeps on going into work in car companies. Okay? He worked for Tesla. Now he's working for a startup that's trying to make a new model of an old car. I don't want to say it because I don't want to reveal him here. And he just keeps on going into the car industry. Well, you know what he should. I say to him all the time, you should go, like, run a club. You should go be the front man at, like, the best club in Paris. You should be in the hospitality industry. You should go run the Ritz in London. Okay? You just know how to make everybody want to be near you. You are missing your purpose. He kind of says, but it's not my passion. But sometimes we don't get to do our passion. And the thing is, he keeps on washing out of these car companies because to be good and to rise up in a car company, you need different kinds of aptitudes. For instance, he can't design a car. He can't really do marketing. None of these things are his gift, okay? His gift is his personality. So to get back to you, I feel for you that you're feeling a little disillusioned. You left university and you thought, I nailed it. I got a job. That's my passion. I'm going to go check it out. And then, boom, something hits you. And it was like, this is not working. One option is that it's your company or it's your boss and they're just not making the most out of you, or they're not designing the work around you, or it's just a mismatch there. And if you think it might be the company or the boss, it's worth sort of sticking it out. But I would prefer that you take a hard look and excavate your values and get a real read on your aptitudes. You can do that by taking YouScience. Go to YouScience.com it's $40. I have no skin in the game. As I've said many times, I think it's the best test of your aptitudes, and you can try to figure out what your purpose might be, which may or may not be your interest. Okay? Don't give up hope. You are Fantastic. You are self aware. You are asking all, all the right questions. This is a journey. You asked at the end. You know how long before I give up and move on? You will take many detours. The whole point of becoming you is to make those detours shorter. You will zig and you will zag. There will be an iterative process. There are no mistakes because it's all learning. Stay in touch with me and let us know how it's going. Okay, best of luck to you.

Aliza, will you read the next question? We didn't get a voice memo from the other person who wrote in. But Aliza, will you please read the question?

Okay, the first one is from an Instagram comment. Hey, Susie, I saw that. You don't think you should trust your gut? Why? I do this all the time.

Do not do it. Stop doing it. Stop, stop, stop. Why are you trusting your gut when you've got a brain? I don't get it. Okay? It's like, okay, use them both at the very least. All right, but gut, what is gut? I am not going to claim it's my idea because scientists and social scientists have been saying it for ages. What is gut? Gut is pattern recognition. I have seen X, Y and Z. I see these three dots. The next dot is going to be there. Okay? I have worked in real estate for 40 years, and when you see too many cranes in a city, you know the bottom's about to fall out on the real estate market. Stop investing, okay? That's when you use your gut, when you've got a huge database. All right? The problem is we use our gut all the time. When we don't have data, when we don't have a pattern and we just sort of say, okay, there's no pattern to recognize. It's the first time we've seen something. So we've got a vague notion, but we're not drawing on relevant data. Okay? There have been numerous scientifically validated studies that show that gut is right. Guess how often gut is right. 50% of the time. That's what you can't. And these studies have been replicated and validated. You know, it's guessing. That's what it is. And that is why when I teach, I say, fine, don't ignore your gut. Your gut's there for a reason. Sometimes it helps and sometimes it doesn't. But you better have a decision making system as well. I happen to love the one I invented. 10-10-10. It stood the test of time. It's been around for 15 years. It's taught at Harvard University, I'm proud to say. It's also taught by me at NYU and other schools. And it's simple, okay? And there's a book about it if you want to get it. Or I can just quickly say that. It says you look at all the options that you have. You have a decision and it has three or four different possibilities and you look at the consequences of those decisions in the immediate term, 10 minutes in the foreseeable future, 10 months. These are just proxies. And for the future, you want to create 10 years. And then you, you go through that with it, with each option, and then you have a lot of data and then you say, okay, what are my values? What do I want is the outcome? And you compare them. I mean, I teach it in one class and people put it to work that day. And I'm not saying it's the only decision making system. I think that there's something like 61 scientifically validated decision making systems. Just Google it and find one that you like. I personally also really like decision trees. That's another one. They're a little harder to learn, but there's good software for them. But I don't. Don't use your gut in isolation. I don't want to offend you and I don't want to say anything I wouldn't say to one of my own children, okay? So I'll say to you as if you were one of my own kids and my kids are in their 30s. I would say it's lazy, okay? It's just the easy way out. And I'm saying this lovingly. You have two organs to help you make your decisions, your gut and your brain. Just make sure you use both of them. And that's why I say it. I say it because I've made too many decisions with my gut. And I've later said, well, why didn't I use my brain? And so now I try to use both, okay? And let me try to suggest that to you. It's easy to get a decision making system. We're never taught one. We have to actually assertively, we have to proactively go get a decision making system. You can graduate from high school and know how to get the cylinder, the volume of a cylinder, but they won't teach you how to make a decision. You make decisions every single day of your life. And you get. Your brain is filled with how to play a recorder, okay? It's just cuckoo. And I am a big advocate of people learning decision making systems in high school, but I'm screaming that into the wind. But I would say it's never too late for you as an adult to figure out how to make a decision and to use both of the organs that you got at your disposal. And I'm sorry to be so intent on this. I'm like a super intense person anyways, you've probably noticed, but I am super intense on this. And why? Because I want to help you make better decisions. All right, thank you for writing in. Elisa's going to read another question. Hang here in with us because I think this is our last one. Go ahead, Elisa.

All right, this next one is also from Instagram. Hi, Susie. I've got a burning question about work. I love getting new jobs and starting at a new place, but once I'm there, I get bored or frustrated. What kind of careers could I explore that allow me to restart every few months? Or how can I develop the patience to get through the rough early years? But honestly, that seems very boring to me.

All right. Hello. Specific personality type. This is a personality type. I am begging everyone to go take their enneagram. It costs $14 online. The best one is at Reti R H E T I. I think that's the best version of Enneagram to take. It's an ancient personality typography. You are an enthusiast. This is the type of person. You're not alone. I mean, there's many enthusiasts in the world, and these are people who love the shiny new thing. And you go from shiny new thing to shiny new thing. There was a very, very good line in the magnificent TV show Mad Men, which some of us have watched and some of us haven't, but it's fantastic. The main character is Don Draper is an enthusiast, and the way it presents for him is, I hope not how it presents for you, which is that he goes from paramour to paramour. He happens to be married, so this is not a great thing. And when he gets with a new girlfriend, once his wife bumps into her in an elevator and she said, did Don tell you yet? He only likes the beginnings of things, and that is an enthusiast. You love the beginnings of things. And you asked how to build a career with this personality, it's hard. But there's one job that I think is very good for enthusiasts, and that is, I think, to be in hiring, like, to be in recruiting, because every day you're meeting somebody new and you're, like, getting excited about them, getting excited about a job, and then it's on to the next person. But you need to find the job that allows you to just be on to the next thing, onto the next thing. Companies don't love enthusiasts. They spot them a mile away. They see them not as people who build block by block. You get bored easily. That drives your manager out of their everlasting mind. When you go and look for a job because you're. It sounds like you're done with the one you're in. You should be very specifically looking for jobs that allow you to flip through things. Like something that's very projecty with very short projects. Like you plan trips, okay? My niece is in the business of planning trips for families. And she goes from one trip to the next and every. Every two weeks, it's a new family and a new trip, okay? And you need that kind of adrenaline of something very new and challenging every two weeks, every two months. Don't compromise on this. Don't try to take your square peg and put it into a round hole. Know that this is what you are. Do your enneagram and then actually go to upbuild.com, i'm filled with resources today. This is completely free. Go to upbuild.com and listen to their podcast about about the enthusiast. In 20 minutes, you will learn more about yourself and you'll say, oh, my God, how did these people know me so well? And there are careers for you, there are jobs for you, but they have to be tailored to your voice, very specific personality type. You'll be great at something once you find it. Something that actually plays to this strength. It is a strength if you find the right match of work for it. But don't try to change yourself. It's who you are. You'll only be miserable if you could go into a job and they say to you, like, the timeline of something is a year and a half. Oh, doesn't that sound horrible to you? But to me, that sounds kind of great. Okay, so I just got it. I'm different wiring. So find that job for you, you enthusiast you and lean into it because it's great for some organizations and you will find your right fit and you will be an asset. But don't try to change. Don't do that. Just celebrate who you are. Thank you for writing. All right, if you're listening on Spotify, will you leave a review, please? If it's a good one or a comment in the app right now, please do that. That means a lot to me and I'd really appreciate it as we, as we grow the podcast. So thank you I can't believe you've just spent this last half an hour or so together. It means so much to me. I'm so grateful for you. Those of you listening, I don't know you. I do love you, though, and I'm so happy you're here with me. I hope I see you next week. Come on back. There'll be more becoming you. Until then, keep on becoming you.