What’s Love Got To Do With It? Becoming You’s Version.

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Hi, it's Suzy. Suzy Welch. Welcome to becoming you. I'm so happy, genuinely happy you're here this week. I'm happy I'm here this week. This is a. Oh, I say they're all special, but this is a very special podcast because I have big news. News that's actually affects me, but it really affects you, too, and I can't wait to share it. And it came out of something that I thought was really bad and. And it ended up to be really good, like even great. And it changed my life. I think it could change your life a little bit, or maybe even a lot of it, if love matters to you, because what I'm talking about today is love. So. But let's do some housekeeping first. All right? As I said, my name is Susie Welch. I'm a professor of management practice at the NYU Stern School of Business. I'm the director of the Initiative On Purpose and Flourishing. Very fancy. And I wrote a book called Becoming youg based on a class I teach at NYU about how to figure out the answer to the question, what should I do with my life? Tell me, mama, what should I do with my life? And that's what the becoming you methodology is all about. We, through it, we collect three big data sets. What are your values? What are your aptitudes? What are your economically viable interests? And we put it all together in a blender and we find out what comes out. And we do find out what comes out, which is your purpose. And it's really good to live with your purpose. We don't always get to do it. Life is complicated. There's sort of three ways that we tend to live. The first, I call them the three Ds. The first is default. We just kind of live by reaction. That is just exhausting. But we. I've done it. I. I've decades where I did it when I had kids, where you just live reactively and you do the best you can. And then the second D is deliberation, where you sort of start to throw some intentionality at your life and you kind of try to straighten things out. And the third D is living by design, which is like when you're fully expressing your values and your aptitudes and your interests and you're living and you're the person you want to be. It's like self actualization plus plus plus. And that's where we're trying to go with becoming you, because I think that's where you want to go. I think it's where the world wants to go. So that' where we're going. And so thanks for being here. I know that we have some new listeners because a wacky, crazy thing happened, which is this fabulous human being named Caleb Simpson came up to me on the street and I got to know him and he said, you know, he has a huge social media following, and he asks people how much they pay for rent, and then he gives people tours of people's houses. And he came and did a tour of my house. The star of the whole tour, of course, was Pierre, my dachshund. And it ended up just sort of bringing me to a different group of people who had not known about Becoming youg. So if you're one of them, welcome to the pod. I'm so happy you're here.

In the next 25 or 30 minutes, we're going to just talk about some really cool stuff. But again, today, we're talking about love. All right, And I have a big announcement. Now, before I make the announcement, I have to ask you a question. And the question is this. Think about your life for a second, and is there ever a time in your life where you really, really feared something, you dreaded it and you just did not want it to happen? And I'm talking about being laid off from a job. I'm talking about getting a divorce. People fight, fight, fight against getting a divorce. Nobody, like, says, we're getting a divorce. And then it happens the next day. You try to save it for a long time. Losing a friendship, embarrassing yourself, all sorts of stuff. Like, there are things in our lives we just fear, and we have fears deep in us, and we can catastrophize themselves. But have you ever really feared something in your life? The answer is yes. Kind of hold that thought. And then it happened. It happened. And actually it ended up to be a great thing. It actually ended up to be like, because there was just some unbelievable thing that happened because the terrible thing happened. And you think later, oh, my God, how could have I feared that? I just learned so much from it. I've talked, I think, on this podcast about the time I kind of collapsed in the middle of a speech. I mean, this is the thing you fear the most as a public speaker, a person who goes out for their living and they give speeches. And I was giving a speech in Toronto, and I was at the end of my book tour for 10, 10, 10, and I was so beyond exhausted that I lost, like, the ability to keep my shit together. And I pulled out a chair to the middle of the stage and I sat down and I just literally looked at the audience and I said, I'm just so tired. And I then attempted to give the rest of the speech sitting down in a chair in the middle of the room, in the middle of the stage. There were 2,000 people there. If somebody had come out and offer a cigarette, I would have smoked the cigarette the whole time. Also, I mean, I was as low as it goes. It was the greatest speech I ever gave because I let down all my defenses. And later I thought this thing. I dreaded this thing about, like, falling apart in front of people and, like, blowing a speech actually ended up to be the moment my actual whole career changed. Because I found that actually if I just showed my vulnerability and my humanity, that was freeing to me and meaningful to the people I was speaking to. I mean, and of course, like, oh, I had a divorce. You know how hard Eric and I fought. My first husband, I fought to try to keep it together. We had four children. We just couldn't. And I thought, this is the worst thing in the world. Felt like, it's a public death when you get a divorce. I mean, it's very embarrassing. And then both of us went on to have such better lives. I'm so happy for his life now. He's a good friend of mine. And I ended up finding and meeting the man I was supposed to be married to and having our beautiful, splendid two decades together. So great things can come from bad things. And that's. That's what happened to me with what I'm going to talk to you about today. And again, this is linked to love. So here's the story, and it goes like this. Becoming you posits that your purpose lies at the intersection of three data sets. Your values, your aptitudes, and your economically viable interests. And your values are really important. And when we do becoming you, they are the foundation. We do seven exercises. When I teach it publicly and when I teach it actually at nyu and when I write it up in the book, we do all these exercises to get at your values. But the queen of the exercises, the most important one, is this test called the Values Bridge. A lot of people don't understand what values are. That's perfectly natural. They don't teach it in school. They should, but they don't. Values are not virtues. Values are our deeply held motivations, our desires, our wants, our needs. Now, listen, it's important to understand that values are not things that we just pluck out of the air, okay? That we actually have. There are things called value systems. And to get a little nerdy on you, social scientists think a lot about values. And there's a couple of different values inventories. And some of them say there's 19 values, others say there's 12 values. Well, a few years ago, I actually, as part of my research, developed my own set of values of values inventory based on a lot of research, empirical and theoretical research. Sorry, I'm being a real nerd at the moment. And I developed what's called the Welch Bristol Values Inventory. And the whole becoming you methodology has, as one of its foundational pillars, if you will, the Welch Bristol Values Inventory. And I did so much research on it as part of what my PhD was about. And I studied it, and basically when I put it all together and I sorted and I tested and I revisited and tested again, I determined that there were 15 values. And these values drive where we work, why we work, how we work, where we play, who we marry, where we go on vacation. The values drive all of our decisions and our behaviors. Now, you can have a value and repress it, or you can have a value and express it. That's a topic that's for another podcast. But look, 15 values. That's what there were. That's what I said. And I remember as my book went to press with the 15 values, I remember when I put the last period at the end of my dissertation, I thought to myself, good God, I Hope there's just 15 values. Why did I say that? Why did I say it? Because every single values inventory that's ever been created by a social scientist has been revised. Because you take your values inventory and you put it out into the world and then people test it and they push back. And there's one famous values inventory that started with 12 and then went to 19 values. But look, when you have a popular book published that says there's 15 values, and you teach a class that says there's 15 values, I just thought, good God, I hope I'm right. Because I'm going out on a limb saying there's 15 values. Now in this values inventory, of course, I accounted for the value of love, what we generally call love. And I thought I took care of talking about love with two of the values in the values inventory. The first is what we call family centrism, which is the desire, the need, the want, the motivation to have family as the organizing principle of your life. Love for family is a really big thing. It's a value. It will drive where you work, it will drive where you would go on vacation, how you Spend your time. That makes it a value. And then there's another value that captures love. We call it belonging. And that's. Belonging is the desire and the need and the want to have a community. A community either people like you or friends. One time I had a student, he had belonging as his number one value. And I said, really? Are your friends that important to you? And he said, I'm going to 16 weddings this year. I said, okay, your friends are very important to you. And like, 12 of them were like destination weddings. And by the way, as an aside, who really likes going to destination weddings? That will be a topic for yet another podcast. All right, so listen, I thought that I had captured love with family centrism and belonging and Off Values Bridge went into the world and beta tested it for a year. And while I was out there in beta testing and people were giving me a lot of feedback on it, I occasionally would get a question like, I really, really want to get married. I'm in a period of my life where that is driving all of my decisions and actions about where I live and how I work, and I really want to get married. Where is that captured in my Values Bridge results? And then I remember one time a student came to office hours and she was very distraught and she had her Values Bridge results in front of her and she had a question for me and she said, look, Professor Welch, I. I don't care about my career. I'm here at business school and I've discovered that. And to tell you the honest truth, I know I don't want children. There's nothing about children that interests me. I want one thing. I want to be a wife. And that's like very countercultural for me to say. And I don't see where that's showing up on my values. And we looked at her values together. And in fact, she had family centrism as her number one value, which was odd because she did not want children and she was not particularly close to her parents. But she had this authenticity gap of 100%, which meant something was missing. There wasn't enough of it. And she said, look, I just want to find my person. And I think about it all the time. And I thought, we're not capturing this. And so that was kind of the final to last straw. And then what happened was a few months ago, we were in the middle of certifying life. Coaches and therapists in the Becoming youg methodology, they come to nyu, they go through a six month program and they are certified to teach Becoming youg to their clients and patients. I love this, by the way. Makes me very happy if any of the coaches and therapists are listening. Hi. Hi. Hi. Anyway, all of these people happen to be incredibly smart practitioners, and I respect them all a lot. And we were doing a deep dive into the theoretical foundations of the values bridge. And I was walking them through my algorithm, and we were talking about what happens in different scenarios. And it was deep, deep work with people who are teaching this alongside me all around the world. And at the break, one of the smartest people in the room, and that's saying a lot because this is an incredibly smart room, she came up to me and she said. I think she called me Dr. Welch, but typically they call me Susie, but she was quite firm. And she said, Dr. Welch, I think that you are not accounting for romantic love with the values bridge. And this caused me. And I gasped and I said, I think you might be right. The time had come. What I had dreaded and feared with every fiber of my being, which was that the values bridge that I'd put out into the world was not absolutely 100% perfect and correct, that I was going to be the first person who had a perfect construct out there. And, you know, I've talked before that I'm an achiever on my enneagram type, and that is that you really want to be perfect at all times. I'm a little achiever girl in every possible way. But I didn't deny, okay? To my credit. Yay, Susie. And I said to her, I think you might be right. And I felt sick. I felt sick. I remember, actually, a good friend was in the room, a person who works with me. And she said later she thought I'd gotten a text that one of my dogs had an ear infection. But just, like, the look on my face, I was like, oh, no. And I was looking down, and I was just sick. And I came back to the team the next day, and I sat down with the psychometricians and the coders and everybody who's been involved in becoming ulabs and creating the values bridge. And I said, I am afraid we have another value. And they were like, no, no, no, this can't be. Because I got to tell you, we all knew immediately what it meant. It meant we had to unpick and unknit the algorithm. It meant we needed to rebuild the tool which we had been spending months building. Because you add a 16th value in, everything changes. Now, look, we knew we couldn't just throw it in there. We had to test It. And so to nerd out on you further yet, what we did first is we created a set of questions that would test to see if a romantic partnered relationship was a value. Romantic love. Is this value, the desire? Let me just explain it for you a second. This is the desire to be in a romantic relationship with one other person, or if you're in one already, the desire to organize your life around this relationship. And you know, people like my partner is the most important thing. I don't make a decision or do anything without thinking about how it impacts my partner. And like, or if you are not in a relationship, they don't make a decision without thinking how it is going to impact their pursuit of finding this person, which is no shade. I mean, I know we put a lot of positivity on, like career in our culture or we can, but if your desire in life is to be in a partner relationship, to be in a romantic relationship, to be a husband or a wife, and that's your number one value or your number three, if you're not hurting anybody, that's your value. That's a choice. That's the beautiful thing about values. They're choices, right? And the most important thing, I think, is not whether they're good or bad, because they're not. They're just good or bad for you. The important thing is to live them authentically, to live your values authentically, because that's when you feel good and that's when you feel joy, and that's when you spread that joy. Okay? It starts as a positive cycle. All right? So we got together, we worked on creating eight questions, four positive, four negative. Sorry to be all technical here. That would track, test for this value, which we called. I called. I had to come up with a name for it, just like all the other values, right? And I played with a bunch of different names, and then I landed on this term, belovedness.

Belovedness. That's the value of romantic love. And everybody seems. We tested it a lot. Everyone seems to get it the moment you say it. The value of romantic love, of partnered love, is belovedness. That's the name of the value. So we went through the process of coming up with questions. Then we started to put it into a lot of validation rounds and testing. And what we had to find out was, was it a unique value or did it track exactly with the value of family centrism, or did it track exactly with the value of belonging or some other value we didn't expect? We had to detect, determine whether or not it was a Distinct value. And believe it or not, my friends, this took several months because we did a lot of testing to make sure that we were not screwing up, or I wasn't jumping the gun, or I wasn't acting on impulse or a hunch. Because we want the values bridge to be a highly scientifically validated test. That's part of why we all feel so great about it. The people who do the kind of testing on my team went away and they did the testing. And one day I came in and they were waiting for me. And so I said to my head developer, how do you have the results? And she said, yes, we do. And I sat down, the whole team was looking at me, and she said, belovedness is a value. And it had tested out that it was entirely distinct from family centrism and belonging. In other words, there could be people who really valued family. They wanted to organize their life, say, around their parents or their kids, but had no value of belovedness or had a limited value of belovedness. They just didn't care about the role their partner played and vice versa. That there were people very, very high belovedness wanting a partnered romantic relationship, but had a relatively limited interest in family centrism. And the same was true with belonging. You could have high belonging and low belovedness and so forth. And we discovered, yeah, there was. There was. There is a 16th value, the value of romantic partnered intimacy and love. And that value is belovedness. It is the value of intimacy with another person. Intimacy that is not friendship intimacy that is not family intimacy that is sexual in a one way, but a kind of intimacy that you have with a partner, a spouse or a boyfriend or girlfriend, but your person, the person you do life with in a romantic way, okay? That is belovedness. It is not the value of loving your parents and your kids. That's a different kind of love. That's what we found out. And it's a different priority for people. And it's not belonging. The love you have for your friends, your affinity group, the people you work with or go to school with or play pickleball with or whatever. It is this very different kind of love, you know, like the Romeo and Juliet belovedness. This is romantic love. It's. It's the kind of love that people. Well, it's romantic love. So they romanticize it. And when you have it, you know you've got it. It's that kind of, oh, you're in love. That's this kind of love. That is belovedness. And so we then had to go forward and start Doing more beta testing. And then finally we had to do the work of taking apart, which we were doing behind the scenes as all of you were taking the values bridge, taking it apart and inserting a new value and all of its conflic and all of its harmonies with other values and all of the ways it plays out in people's lives and doing all the writing and assessing. And then we went forward and we tested it one last time. It's out there now. You can, and I urge you warmly to go take your values bridge again. You can do that if you've taken it before. You can take it again and again and you can find out where belovedness shows up for you. Where does the value of a partnered, intimate, personal relationship with a person, what role does that play in your life? Is it number one? Is it the top value that you have? Is it number seven? Sort of in the middle? Is it your dead last value? I'm going to tell you where it is for me. Not quite yet. Let's not jump to that yet. I want you to think and ponder about where it is in your life. Because you know, like all other values, it can drive so many of your decisions and your actions. And here's another thing about it. You can have a big authenticity gap on it. You could have it as your number one value and you could have a 90% gap, meaning you want it and you're not getting it. You haven't found it, and that's causing the ache. I bet right before my divorce I had belovedness somewhere. And I bet that my gap was 100% because I wasn't feeling it, I wasn't having it. It's a little bit different, say, than like when you have an authenticity gap on beholderism. Okay. Or on. But I think it's almost like voice. It's so deep in you. So the thing about belovedness is we can find it out about ourselves. And I urge you to do that. As I'm speaking, you may already know, oh, my God, that's the value. That's my number one. Or you may be thinking, that just does not matter to me. That's probably down at 11. I urge you to take the test to find out, or just in your own head, figure out where it ranks for you. But the test is the place that you can really find out. But here's the thing. If you are in a partnered relationship, it's kind of interesting to find out where belovedness is for your partner. Because think about the scenario where you have the same level of belovedness as your partner and you both sort of value look, and it can be high or it can be low, but when it comes to how important the relationship is, you're in the same place. And I would highly recommend that.

And then there's a case where one member of the couple really, really has a high value on the relationship. And they want the relationship to be the center of their lives. They want the weekends planned around it. They want the vacations planned around it. They want life planned around it. And the other person, you know, they're in the relationship, but for God's sake, it's just not that important to them. It's down at number 12 or 13, and that's going to cause so much misunderstanding and conflict. We call it the values bridge for a reason, because it gives you the language to get closer to each other, to cross the river, to talk to each other about what your values are. I mean, earlier today, somebody called me a workaholic. I said, we don't use that word around here. I have high work centrism. When you call somebody a workaholic, it's like calling somebody. Anytime you call somebody an aholic, it's a sickness. And I have. I want to understand you, and you want to understand me. I have high work centrism. Obviously, you have lower work centrism. Now, let's talk. Let's not judge. And the same thing is true with belovedness. I have high belovedness. It looks like yours is lower. What does that mean about how we find a mutual common ground? Now, couples, I'm not going to, like, you know, like, dodge around here. I think it's good when you have the same level of belovedness or an understanding that you have different levels of belovedness. And you're going to work that through. You're going to work that through. So that's the big headline. There's a 16th value, and it's about love. And it might just be one of the most important values eventually, and hopefully soon we're going to have enough data, about 1,000 people a day take the values bridge. Okay. We're going to a lot of people taking the values bridge. Pretty soon we'll have some data about where it ranks according to generation. What I'm dying to see is whether there's any difference between genders on where belovedness ranks. I mean, that's going to be interesting to see if men and women have different values around it. I'd love to see where it ranks with different people and generations and genders around its Relationship with other values. What's higher? Family centrism or belovedness? The data's coming. I can't wait. Who knew at this point in my life that I would become a data nerd? But I am one and I own it. So I'm really excited. I have to tell you the honest truth. Where I started, I feared this day. And yet I think that this is so exciting because the Values Bridge and Becoming youg is about creating a language where we understand ourselves better and each other better. And this makes the. This adds a word to the language that makes the language so much more expressive. My sister is in a long, beautiful relationship with a German guy, German man, Bernhardt. And she's learned all these German words. And sometimes I think, why don't we have some of those German words? Like, there's a German word for the feeling you get when you go to the library and it's closed. I mean, there's a German word for everything. A German word. You know, like what it feels like when you can't find one of your missing shoes. There's just a German words left, right, and center. And I think the more words we have, the better we are at understanding ourselves and each other. And now we have a word to understand this value, this desire to either have a romantic partnered relationship, high or low. And if we're in one, the desire to make it where it is is a priority in our lives. So that's belovedness. And I can't wait. Please write me at. Hello, Susie Welch. If you've got questions about. I'm going to ask my producers if they have any questions about it. Oh, Isa, you have a question. What is it? You don't have any data yet, but where do you think there will be any surprises around belovedness? Yeah, that's a great question. I do think there's going to be a surprise around belovedness. I think. You know what? I think people who take the test are going to be surprised. And I think it might be. I think it might be young women in their 20s, 30s, and maybe early 40s, because there's been this kind of cultural narrative that your job has got to come first. There's been this cultural narrative, like girl, boss, cultural narrative. Like, my job comes first. I'm about achievement. I'm about work and all this other stuff. Many of us truly buy into it, and other people kind of buy into it because, like, that's the narrative you're supposed to buy into. And of course, I'm speaking in New York City, so we kind of got our own culture here. But I think there are people who are going to take the test and find out that their belovedness is higher than they are admitting to themselves, I think. I don't know what the data is going to be, but if I had to guess, I think that some people, both men and women, are going to take the test. Belovedness is going to show up a lot higher than they've been telling themselves and other people. That's my guess. And so we shall soon see, because there's a very loud cultural narrative about work and achievement. I'm guessing I could be totally wrong. It actually wouldn't be very interesting if it's a complete flip. So we shall soon find out. Oh, Mikey, you have a question. What is it? So you took the test. Where did belovedness come out for you? Where do you think it came out for me? This is the shocker that I talked about at the beginning. You nailed it. Okay. Where do you think it came out? I think it would come out like a four. A four? Yeah. Issa, you want a guest? Yeah, I would think like a. In the top five. Okay. Guess where. Dead last. 16 came out. I looked at it. I have to say, I was not surprised. I mean, it's a little stunning to see that belovedness number is just number 16. It displaced Eudaimonia for me. I'm a fun one, aren't I? Number 15, eudaimonia. Number 16, belovedness. I'd say I wasn't surprised. I wasn't surprised. Look, people ask me all the time, do values change? And I say, I think our values are pretty much baked in by our mid-20s. I have a whole theory around this. I'm going to test this theory. But I do think this. I do think there are times where values change because of seismic life events. Okay. I had a seismic life event when I lost my husband. I believe when Jack was living, belovedness was probably 2, 1, 2, or 3 for me, and probably for him as well. Our marriage was the center of our lives. We liked each other very much, and we did make every decision based on each other. We were both determined that our marriage was going to last. We both had had divorces, and we were, like, absolutely going to make this one work. We loved each other, and we knew marriage was work, and we just put it first all the time. And so I'm sure for both of us, it would have been in the top three, you know, and then that the person who made that value of value to me left this world.

And I didn't feel I had to fill the void with another person. I actually, in a way, knew that another person couldn't fill that void. And so it was very interesting. I saw it and I saw it at 16, I have to say, there was a little piece of me that went, yup. And it doesn't mean I don't love love. I do. And in fact, one of my kids is getting married, and I'm like, I want to dance with somebody at the wedding. I mean, does that mean I want to, like, you know, have a partner to dance with? No. But I want to dance with somebody at that wedding. And so I get that. Love is fantastic. And I know what it feels like to have belovedness be really high up and to have it fully express expressed. It's pretty good stuff. But you know what? You can have a life without it. And that's pretty good stuff, too. Life is just so exquisite and marvelous and I. And so just living your values is so beautiful. It doesn't have to be belovedness. But for me, I have to say, it came in last. And I think it's very accurate for me at this point in my life. And again, with values, they don't move around every week and they don't move around every year. I do think that they can move with a seismic life event, and I think this is proof of it. All right, that's it. That's belovedness. That's the news. I can't wait to hear from you about it. And I can't wait to start looking at where people are ending up with it. And speaking of love, I really love you and I'm so glad that you have been here with the podcast this week. We'll be back next week. We've got a bunch of really interesting podcasts coming up. I'm doing Becoming youg with a couple coming up, and we've got some really great guests coming on. We've got another Career Confidential coming down the pike where Dustin and I sit down. Talk about your biggest career questions. I've gotten so many career questions in my DMs lately. Thank you. We keep track of them and I will be answering them in Career Confidential. So thanks for being here this week. I will see you next week. And until then, keep coming.