What to do When a Good Life isn't Good Enough

Hey. Hi. I am Susie Welch. That's right. This is becoming you. You're in the right place. Don't go anywhere. This is the podcast where every week I endeavor to help you answer the question, what should I do with my life?

Well, we're going at that two different ways today because I have two spectacular questions from listeners that are struggling with that question, and I answer both of them. And I want to thank you so much for writing in, by the way, both to people who I answer today and the others of you who also do so. And thank you for listening and sharing this podcast with your friends. Today a student came up to me and she said, I want to introduce you to another student who. Who's been listening to your podcast. And because I didn't want to make a scene, I didn't throw my arms around them and hug and kiss them, but that's how I feel about you for listening to this podcast. Thank you. I. You know, I hear from so many of you about the impact that becoming you has made in your life, and that blows my mind. And I love hearing your stories. I love it. I love it. And I love reading your reviews also. Okay. I do. So please keep that up. It means a lot. Please leave a review for this show on Apple or Spotify or wherever you're listening. All right, so without further ado, let us dive into the first question today.

Hi, Susie, this is Barbara from Belgium. In many episodes, you talk about the fact that that a lot of people are scared to do what they really want in life. I believe that is true indeed for many people. However, I suffer from the opposite. I did what I thought I wanted in life, which is combining a family with a corporate career in marketing. However, aged 45 now, I realize this is not giving me the fulfillment I was hoping for. I think my values of having an impact and authenticity are somehow not met in this job. As a marketing director, I love working with my team and achieving results together. But in my role, I need to invest the majority of my time in too many internal meetings and navigating the corporate politics. I don't always see the added value for the company, and it also drains me personally. But hard work and responsibility are also personal values. That's why I struggle with what to do, since I have built this career so carefully by working so very hard for more than 20 years. Did I put my ladder against the wrong wall? I also still love many aspects of my job, but I feel there should be something more out there for me. Sometimes the responsibility towards my team My husband, my kids, prevents me from making a decision and choosing. It is all very, very scary at this moment, but I also realize I need to choose for myself. The question is, how do I start? How do I overcome the anxiety that comes with this realization? Would be great to have your advice on this. Thank you very much. Bye. Bye.

The first thing I have to say is how much I love you. I listen to this, and I feel tears in my whole body. What you describe is so real, so relatable. Every working woman, and probably many working men have felt all the conflicts you're feeling. So, number one, you're not alone. And I want to actually start by giving you some very specific encouragement, which is one of the values that you feel is not being met, is you're one of having impact on the world. You know, you describe working in a big corporate setting, and you're caught up in office politics and meetings, and you say, you know, isn't there something bigger and more important for me? And I sometimes ask my classes, hey, have you ever had the experience where a really great boss has changed your life? And I'm not kidding, every hand goes up. Everybody's had a boss who has been great and changed their life. And you know what? You are that boss. You are a great boss. And so you may be caught up in office politics and so forth, but I don't need any data to know exactly how great a boss you are. You're a beautiful person, and you are changing the lives of the people on your team. So please, right now, stop. Stop beating yourself up. We're gonna talk about and answer the rest of your question. But you are having an impact. Because if you're just making one person's life better, and you're doing that for your employees, you know what? That's enough. Okay? And you are, I'm sure, a wonderful mother and a very good partner. And so you are feeling incomplete right now. And age 45, you know, that's just about when. When that moment when the incompleteness that we all feel at different stages in our life just begins to say, okay, I can't take it anymore. Although, I'll tell you. And the other day, I was walking the dogs, and I spontaneously burst into tears. This is random, but I'm just gonna go and finish this thought. I was walking around the pond in the countryside, as I do in the weekend with my dogs. And if you're a regular listener to this podcast, you've already heard me discuss how I do this on the weekends, because, man, I got to Hear myself think sometimes. And I thought for a moment about how much I still missed Susie the swan. So if you've been with us for a while, you know that I had a swan that just showed up on my pond right after my husband died. And I thought, oh, my God. God sent this single swan, and she's my spirit animal. She's my doppelganger. She's my everything. And I just felt like she's brave and she's doing it alone. I named her Susie, by the way. And I used to say, hey, Susie, how are you? Susie the swan. And then one day, after fourth of July fireworks, she flew away. And I felt devastated. And I thought I was kind of over it, and I got very philosophical. Susie changed. I've also changed. Bloody, bloody. And then I was walking around the pond, and I burst into tears because I. I missed her. And I think I. I missed my old self for a minute. I missed my husband. And I just. So I want you to know these feelings of not being complete and your life not being perfect, they happen even to those of us who purportedly have it all together. And I would put myself in the category of generally having fought a very hard battle and just kind of having it all together. And even I feel incomplete sometimes. And I just thought for a moment there, I'm kind of lonely and I just can't lie about it. And then I got my stuff together. And by stuff, I mean, shit, I got it together. And I. Sorry, just couldn't help myself. And, you know, I'm not allowed to swear in the classroom. And it realize. Makes me realize how many times a day I want to say the word that starts with F and ends with U. C, K. So anyway, that being putting aside, look, so you feel like you're 45 and you're saying there's something missing. I did what I thought I wanted to do. You describe the need you're feeling for change as scary. This is a gigantic leap of maturity. It is scary. And you also have an incredibly astute observation. And by the way, if you'd ever like to come teach becoming you, I think you could probably do it because you say, I. I don't make any decisions for myself. I am living by values that fill the needs of others. My company's needs and my family's needs. But I think that I should probably start paying attention to my own values, my own needs, because in the long run, that will be better for everybody. And my sister. You are completely right. But now what you're saying is it's super scary to do that. And you said, where do I start? And this is the moment and the question that we ask that paralyzes us. So I'm gonna make some suggestions. Because you feel that what's not being met is your need for having impact and voice and agency. These are all values that are about doing stuff that sort of makes us feel authentic. And you mentioned that you sort of felt like you had an authenticity deficit. And this reminds me just briefly of something that happened in class. It's another tangent brought to you by Susie, but here it is. My students had just gotten back their 360feedback where they asked 20 raters, so from their previous lives, because they're all MBAs, to talk about how they show up in the world. And a student came up to me after class, and she said, look at what all the people at work say about me. I'm fabulous in all these ways. And look what my friends say about me. I'm stressed, I'm tense, I'm hostile. And she said to me with great seriousness, am I two different people? And I said, yes, you are. You're somebody at work, the sort of shiny, happy version of yourself. And then you're somebody when you're letting down with your friends, which is a person who's gravely dissatisfied. And I said to her, you must be exhausted. And she said, I am exhausted. I'm so tired. And I said, yes. It takes a huge amount of energy to be two people. It's hard enough to be one person, okay? And you, dear correspondent, are using a lot of your beautiful energy to be two people. This person at work who's holding it all together, and then the second person who is saying, who am I and what should I be doing with my life? And really, if you could stop the world, I would say you should and paint a self portrait and then go forward. I get that that's not possible for you, and it probably is not possible for most people listening. So what you're saying and what I'm hearing is I have a value of what we call radius in becoming you, which is that if your life was a bomb and it was dropped on the earth, how big a crevice it would leave? And you're saying, I don't think the crevice is big enough. And I actually think I'm gonna say something I typically don't say, and that is, I don't think you should blow it up yet. I don't think you should. I think you should try to meet your needs of radius and authenticity outside work. I think you need to do something volunteering or something profound as an experiment to see if your needs are met that way. And there are plenty of people who go to work and they have sort of pretty good lives at work, and then they do something spectacular with their free time. And what I want you to do is I know you probably don't have a lot of time. I don't know how many kids you have, but even one kid is a lot. But I'm thinking there might be some in your town, in your place of worship, in an alumni network that you have, which allows you to have what feels like impact to you. Tutor somebody. Tutor a woman who has been in an abusive relationship, who's trying to get back into the job force. You could change her life profoundly. You could foster a dog. I'm not gonna put my doggy needs on everybody. But that can change your life. If you find a dog who's been in a terrible situation and you do what it takes to bring them back. There are ways in your community that probably won't take hours a week for you to get an immediate psychic reward of doing something that's bigger than office politics, bigger than your day job in marketing. And I wonder if that's going to begin to fill that hole. Maybe it's something that you can draw your spouse or your children into with you. Let us go work in this soup kitchen. Let us go do a walk for cancer. Let us go do this one thing that lifts our spirits together. So you can combine it with your family or just do it for you. But it's. But find a cause that is super authentic to you, because if that's a mismatch, it's just gonna backfire. One time I. When I first got married to Jack, I had not had a life that was filled with service. Why? Because I was a single mother with four children, and I didn't have time to do anything. Okay. I was just about to come up with, like, some kind of terrible metaphor, but I really didn't have time to file my nails. I didn't. I didn't have time to do anything. Okay. And when I met him, he said, something's missing from your life, Susie. You gotta. You gotta start volunteering. So he had a really good friend who at that time, they were looking for a. A board chair for an organization that served the homeless. And he said, why don't you go on that board and just spend some time doing some very serious work helping the homeless. And so I threw myself into it. I did it for a few years, ended up raising a lot of money. It was amazingly, psychically rewarding to see that I had the room to work on a cause that was so much bigger than I was. But here was my problem. It wasn't an authentic cause for me. I obviously, like all people, wish homelessness would end, but I. I remember saying to Jack one night, why didn't you let me do something for animals? My authentic from when I was a tiny girl and I would cry when my family would go fishing and I would scream at the front of the boat, throw that fish back. It has a family. I was born with a preternatural empathy for animals. I would cry when we went to the zoo. I mean, and you know what? I'm not alone. Everybody who I work with in the animal movement, which I'm a proud member of and have been for many, many years, decades now, also has these feelings of extreme empathy for animals is why I don't eat them. So I would say I want you to find an authentic cause that allows you to express your voice and feel what it feels like. Now, listen, here's what may happen. You may say, this is exactly what was missing from my life and say goodbye to your corporate job and put yourself into that more full time. Find some kind of nonprofit work that maybe allows you to do everything. But I want you to experiment first because you've built something very big. And you actually said the words, I still really like my job. It still makes me happy sometimes. I still have pride in it. I still see my contributions. This is not language of somebody who should be detonating. I mean, it sounds different. I know those people. I talk to them all the time. That's part of my work with becoming you and the initiative on purpose and flourishing. People who are at the end and they can't go in another. You're not there yet. So I'd like you to try this experiment of finding radius and finding authenticity in some kind of outside activity. And also know this, you are so filled with humanity. And what you're going through is so relatable and so many people, if they. What you were going through would be rooting for you. I am among them. And I desperately need you to follow up and be back in touch and let us know how this experiment goes and where it puts you. This is a little tiny mini pivot, not a gigantic pivot. I don't think it's time for your pivot yet. And please know as you're doing it, I am thinking of you. And I am hoping that this is the answer for your journey.

Hello, Susie. My name is Casey, and I'm a big fan of yours. I'm wondering if you have any particular tips on how. How to refine one's values to get greater clarity. I often find that my values are in conflict and misaligned. For example, I want greater financial security and stability, but I also love living in different parts of the country on a seasonal basis. I spend summers in the Pacific Northwest, winters in Colorado, and falls in California. On top of that, I'm considering a career pivot that would require going back to school and. And staying in one place for a couple of years. So I'm feeling stuck and unaligned. And I have struggled with making decisions on how to reconcile these conflicting paths. What advice do you have for navigating through this kind of misalignment and making tough decisions when one's values seem at odds with each other? So I'd love to hear your thoughts on how to work through this and find clarity. Thank you.

Bye. All right. This question is so on my mind. This question basically is, I understand it is, what do you do when you've got two conflicting values? And I hear this question every day. And in fact, in class the other day, a student came up to me and she said, I think I've got a problem. And I said, what is it? And she said, I want to be very, very, very rich and I don't want to work. And I say, I kind of burst into laughter. And I said, yes, that is a problem. I'm so glad you know that, because those two things tend to go together unless you've got inherited wealth. She said, no, unfortunately, I don't. And so welcome to humanity. One of the reasons we find out our values is so that we can know which ones are in conflict with each other. You know What? Most people, 80%, are like you, dear listener, and you have some values that are in conflict. And as I understand it, you want to financial security, but you also want a lot of flexibility so you can live where you want to live. I mean, that's agency, by the way. And you feel like this is very unaligned. And actually you're also thinking, gee, I want to make a career pivot, and that's going to force me to give up my value of flexibility, of living wherever I want to live. And as an aside, I would say the flexibility is such a strong value in people that for decades, the number one way that people in my field, values formation and identity formation, that have talked about values have followed this one inventory of values called the Schwartz Values Inventory, that was developed at the University of Jerusalem in 1990. And one of the things that actually finally galvanized me to create my own values inventory, the Welch Bristol Values Inventory, was because it didn't have flexibility on it. And to have a values inventory that doesn't include the post pandemic reality that people came to discover their voices around saying, guess what? I want flexibility felt like a gigantic shortcoming to me because, because like you, most people, not most people, but many people value flexibility. Okay, you have two choices if you've got values in conflict. Number one, you can say, I have two values or three that are in conflict and I'm going to spend my life openly managing the tension. And by openly I mean not trying to stuff it in a drawer, not getting mad that the world doesn't work the way that you want it to, that you can be rich without working, for instance, but just saying, I have a big parent paradox in my life and I'm going to manage the tensions and complexities that it causes. And I had a student like this once, she said, I want it all, I'm not going to give it up. I want to be a very professional success and I want to be the best mother in the world. And you can't, Professor Welch, you can't talk me out of wanting those being my top two values. And then she went on to say, but I understand that the work of my life is managing that, that balance and that tension all my days long until my kids go to college. And she actually painted a picture of a life where she was able to do that. How? By finding a job where she worked completely remotely and a 10 year period where she stopped working entirely. Okay, so she found a way around it. So you have that choice, which is manage the tension openly and without anger and bitterness. That's your number one choice. You can do that. You know, frankly, that's kind of what most of us do without the openness part and without the not being bitterness part. Because usually we just get mad and we can't understand what eating at us. And what I'm saying is get very real and say, I'm managing a very difficult tension, I have conflicting values, but I'm doing it with my eyes wide open and with my heart wide open. Go with me here. Okay, the second option you have is to understand you've got these unaligned values in tension with each other and you pick.

And you pick. That's very hard Work, there's going to be consequences. So, for instance, for you, my dear listener, who sent this wonderful question in, and thank you very much for listening to the podcast. It means a lot to me. Thank you. You do this very hard thing and you say, okay, the pivot means so much to me. I am going to give up. I am going to surrender the value of flexibility and living wherever I want. Or you say, look, this value of financial security is not going away. It gnaws at me, and I am going to surrender. I am going to give up this love I have of living wherever I feel like it. And I'm gonna test that for three or four years. I'm gonna stick with it for 18 months, and I'm gonna give up one just to get rid of this war of values in my chest and in my heart, in my bones. Those are your two options. Manage the tension every single day. Juggle it, balance it, go between it. Do it without angerness and bitterness. Do it out loud so everybody around you knows what you're doing and you talk about it. Or you just make that hard choice. Okay, you choose. I mean, and this happens sometimes with women who have got very good careers and then they have children and they start having this exact conflict. Okay, I love my work. I love all these things about it. I love the achievement, I love the impact. I love the money. But then I've got these fabulous kids, and I love them, and I love when they look at my face at night and at night and say, I love you, Mommy. Did you like my picture? I mean, all. And you say, yes, I loved your picture. I remember one time. Oh, with Eve, I was a. I was not a mother who was around a lot. And I remember her saying to me, she was a little girl. I remember looking down at her and she said to me, nobody understands me like you do. She was expressing why she was frustrated that I wasn't there more. I mean, it's. This is the worst. This. This conflict. Okay, maybe just because it feels so personal to me. And I was. It was my. A daily nightmare for. And I was one of those people who said, I'm openly managing this tension. I'm not going to give either one of these things up. I did often err on the side of my work, and I was very open about it, and I explained why. I used to say to my, one day, you're gonna go away and I'm still gonna be here, and I'm not getting on that very difficult on ramp back to work. I Too much of My identity is in my profession. Please help me. I say that to my kids. Please help me manage this tension. But other women who I know, and my sisters are in this category, my marvelous sisters who had good professions or in one case, a very esteemed career, and they gave them up to raise the children and they said, I'm not crazy about it. There's parts of it that hurt. I remember my sister saying, I miss being called doctor. But they made the choice and they lived with the conseque, for better or for worse. And that's my advice to you. The first decision you've got to make is not which value matters more to you. The first decision you make is which strategy you are going to make your own. Either one of those strategies is absolutely okay. But make that choice first. The other thing you have to do, and I'm really, really, really firm on this, is you better tell us what happens and better get back to me and let me know how it works out. I'm with you. I feel for you. This is the human condition. Then let's just stay in dialogue about it, all of us. All right. I hope that's helpful to you. I hope it's hard.

All right, that's it for our episode today. I love hearing from you and I love your questions. They teach me so much and they keep me focused on what Becoming youg is doing. So please keep them coming. And you can follow me on Instagram, please, and check out our show notes on this episode. And you can learn more about becoming you by following me on on social media. I'm also on LinkedIn. And, you know, if you've got the time and the inclination, you can sign up for one of the Becoming you Intensives that are coming up in the New year. The three day one is filled, but there's other intensives that are coming up really early in the year. I. If you can come to New York, they're on the NYU campus. I'd love to meet you. Most important of all, come back next week for another podcast and just keep on becoming you.