You Were Judged. You Judged Back. Now What?

That was spooky, wasn't it? That clanging. That's what it sounds like to get locked in a prison cell. A prison cell is where you're gonna want to throw me. Susie Welch, your host on this Becoming youg podcast, in about five minutes. Because I'm going to ask you to do something brutal today for a very good cause. A very, very good cause. For a eureka that could maybe even change your life. Because, you know, the only way out is through. So first, to make that happen, get ready to hate me for just a little bit, just for a minute, because I have a really, really unpleasant question for you. When was a time in your life when you felt totally misunderstood? I'm going to ask it again. When was a time in your life when you felt totally misunderstood?

It was painful, right? And I am pretty sure, I mean, scratch that. I am 100% sure that the most painful moments in our lives are when people judge our values and we don't have the words to explain ourselves back. So for me, that's happened a lot of times, and it's happened a lot of times for most people in this world. But perhaps the most terrible time for me was on a day in May of 1988. I was in Boston, Massachusetts. As I remember it, it was around 4pm it had to be. Classes had just ended. I was at the Harvard Business School. It was a beautiful day in May. Sunny. The sky was bright blue. It was about 75 degrees out because I can remember what I was wearing. And I was scurrying to my car to go home off campus so I could start my homework. And it was on that path that a frenemy, a friend who was really an enemy, a fellow student named Dan, biked up alongside me, and we had a conversation. And our chat, it was short. It was probably a minute. Maybe it was even less than a minute. It was short, but not so short that I didn't know what was going on. Which was. He was judging me. He was judging my values. And I'm going to say that the conversation was a little bit mean. It was possibly spiteful. And here's the thing. I was left speechless. Yes, I know it's hard to imagine that I was speechless. It doesn't happen very often, but I was utterly speechless. And I'll tell you something. No lie. To this day, and this is like almost exactly 37 years later, I mean, I remember how I felt. I remember how I felt. It was like one of those feelings you feel in your whole body, and then you could never be to a stranger to that feeling ever again. I felt ashamed. I cried. I felt not seen, not heard. I felt not known. I felt scolded. And I'll tell you why that was, and I'll explain what happened afterward.

But first, it's your turn. Go there, as I asked before, and remember. And imagine and recall a time when you felt really misunderstood, when somebody judged you and you had no words to explain yourself back.

Hello. Hi. Welcome. Welcome. I am Susan Susie Welch. Hold onto your memory, please, of feeling misunderstood for one moment longer. I know it's not great. While I do some housekeeping and I mentioned to you that this is Becoming youg. Becoming youg is the podcast where each week we endeavor to get to the bottom of the question, what should I do with my life now? Just that little tiny question. Now, our roadmap on this show is the Becoming you methodology, which I teach at NYU Stern School of Business very proudly. And if you'd like to know more about that methodology in its very specifics, please go and listen to episode 46 of this podcast, where I lay out the methodology step by step. I'd love it if you did that. Now look, the Becoming you methodology is based on the premise that your purpose lies at the intersection of your values, your aptitudes, and your economically viable interests. And as you might have guessed, today we're talking about the values part of the equation, as we often do. We do because values are super interesting and very complex and. And incredibly important in the search for your purpose. Values, by the way, are our wants and our needs, our desires, our motivations. They're like an emotional spinal cord for our lives and our identities, what drive us now. We all have values. I happen to believe that there are 15 human values. The important thing to know is that we all have values and deeply held desires and motivations. But we all have them to differing degrees. And that's where the trouble begins. We have them to differing degrees. Some people have very high family centrism. They want their family to be the organizing principle of their life. Every decision that goes through a screen that is like family first and other people have low family centrism or medium family centrism, which is family matters, but it's not driving everything. Some people have very high eudaimonia. That's the value of self care, fun, recreation, leisure stuff, feeling good, flourishing. And other people think that eudaimonia is not a. Is not their value. They have it ranked rather low because why? Because they think fun and self care is something that you Postpone. You postpone it until you have other things, other values like achievement or affluence. Okay, so there's all these values, 15, as I said. And some people have high levels of some of them and they have low levels of others. And you can't have them all high. You can't have them all low. It's just not how it works. Because we have different levels of values, each one of us, we have sort of a values DNA profile. As a result of that, we all get judged for our values and we judge others for them. And neither thing is very good. And yet all of us do it, including me. So I try not to do it. And I often tell my students I'm a values agnostic. But here's the truth. I got a message recently from one of our listeners, Isabel, and it made me scream. Oh my God, that's so true.

Hi professor, my name is Isabel and I'm a Sterm alumnus, class of 2012. I love all your videos and value centered approach to answering questions we have about purpose and career. So thank you so much. Something I've encountered is that when people have different values, they actually do judge those with different values from them. So, like someone who has high scope will judge someone with low scope, saying they're afraid of change or they're cowardly. Or someone with high work centrism might judge someone with low work centrism. I wanted to ask what is your view and advice about how to navigate this? I used to think that people should just respect each other despite value differences. But from my observations the past few years, I feel people have consistently judged each other, even if not to their face. And everyone thinks their way and their values are superior.

Everyone, Isabel says, thinks their values are superior. Yes, yes, yes. Isabel is correct. And that reality of human behavior causes most of the friction in our lives. I mean, this problem of judging each other's values actually causes most of the friction in life, full stop. Why? Well, that's a big question. And this is a question that has been explored by philosophers and poets and psychologists and sociologists forever and ever and ever. In the year 400 BC, Plato famously asked whether we can know good without comparing our version of good, our definition of good, to what others believe. So he was saying that we actually judge other people's values to know ourselves better. Hmm. I say Plato maybe. I mean, look at me. I'm disagreeing with Plato. That's bold. Anyway, other theorists and historians and sociologists have opined otherwise. And they've said that when we judge someone else's values as inferior. It's about something much less nice. I have to say, I'm kind of in this camp. When we judge, we subconsciously boost our own sense of worth and even our own chances of success by imagining that our values are more evolved, more practical and more likely to win. And to get kind of primal about it. This is about survival of the fittest. It's about those instincts. There's a lot of reasons and they're deep, okay? And they drive. Why? We judge, judge, judge. But I think that we have to put the reasons aside because we will never know for sure. The only thing that we know for sure is that judging and being judged about our values opens up a whole big world of hurt.

Let's listen to Tim.

Tim is a 32 year old tech guy in New York. I've known him for a while. He's working in a job that he's okay with. It's in tech, right? But it's not what he really wants. He wants to be in a different field. Now. He's been in a relationship with a really wonderful woman for two years. She happens to be a very ambitious lawyer. And lately they have been having some very, very intense discussions.

I loved working in music. It's what I wanted. I thought it was the only place you could change the world. I loved it. I love musicians and how they make music, the whole experience, and wanted to continue pursuing it in the future. But the jobs, they barely paid. So I moved into tech. I was hoping it was temporary so I could get back to music. My girlfriend was saying how it wasn't the best opportunity from a profitability standpoint, basically that you're never going to make money. Why would I do that?

I should note here that Tim and his girlfriend, according to his account, went around and around on this point.

It felt confusing that she wouldn't understand. I felt like she didn't get me. She didn't see me because it felt so obvious to me. But she was basically saying, well, why would you go somewhere that isn't the top tier potential for profitability? You've been so educated. Why don't you go make more money? Why is that not the only thing that matters? We were just talking right past each other. It was awkward. You could say raw.

How did you work it out?

Well, it didn't really work out. It just felt unresolved. It was bad.

Ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch. I feel for this couple so much and that's what judgment feels like. What Tim is describing It's a failure of language to. To get through to each other, to communicate. And then, of course, as I said before, sometimes we are the ones doing the judging, right? Take a listen to this.

So we had a friend in college where, you know, we all obviously graduated at the same time. So right at the end of school, we're all talking about where are we going to go? Everyone was brainstorming, and the whole time she was sort of quiet in the conversations. You know, she clearly wasn't really sharing what her plan was after graduation. Then we graduate, and it becomes clear that she's planning on staying in rural North Carolina. She wants to buy a house, get married immediately after school. We were stunned. We just completely did not understand it. It literally never occurred to us once that this option was something she genuinely loved and wanted. We were all fully judgmental.

So meet Mary. She's smart and very funny, and she calls Seattle home. Although right now she's in New York City building her career. It's in her absolute passion in fashion. Let's just say that I've known her for a while, and I don't think she's gone to bed before, like 2am ever.

We're like, she's wasting her potential. She could be in New York City or like a big city traveling. She could be doing all these things. We totally just put all of our values onto her.

What happened?

It's sad. It's sad. Our relationship has definitely changed. We grew apart because she felt judged. It didn't dawn on us then that we were judging her values, but that's exactly what we were doing.

Well, how sad that is and how entirely human. Now, I want to guarantee you that you have judged someone's values today. I have. But the times that we remember are when people judge ours because it hurts so much. I mean, I remember what happened 37 years ago. I remember the feeling. And the other thing we remember is that we rarely have words to talk about it. That's what's hurting, is that we're hearing them, but we're not able to answer them. So look, a minute ago or more, we heard from Isabel. She was asking for advice. She wanted help. And I'm going to do my very best to deliver some help and get to some solutions right after the break. Foreign.

Hi there. Welcome back. This is Susie Welch, and you're listening to Becoming you. And I'm so glad you are still with me, because today we're talking about a major problem with the human condition, which is how we tend to judge each other's. Values. I mean, this is not a little problem. It's a really big problem. We take on the big problems here, on becoming you. And when we judge each other's values, how hurtful it can be and how isolating and sometimes actually really damaging. Because when we judge each other's values, it gets so personal. We say, you're this, you're that. You know, we take on the whole person. We don't say, I'm judging your values. You say things like, you're lazy, you're bored, you're antisocial. But here's the thing. I'm going to get to the help part now. It doesn't have to be that way. It just doesn't. And I've seen it with my own eyes. There is a way out.

Look, I mentioned those 15 values earlier. They are a language of values. And full disclosure, it's my language. I invented it. But you know, my God, I have to be absolutely clear here. I did not invent it out of thin air. I stood on the shoulders of giants. My language builds on two very famous values inventories, to use the academic language. There's one by Alport and Strang. These are two brilliant experts in identity who were both professors at Harvard in the early 1940s, and they created values inventory. And then in 1990, Shalom Schwartz, professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, created what's considered the gold standard in academia, or it was until recent times, of the Schwartz Values Inventory. And they had different numbers of values and they tried to capture all the human motivations and they did very well. But I felt like these two sets of values inventories, as I was teaching about values and creating the book methodology, I felt that both of these values inventories were not modern enough, that they didn't reflect stuff and feelings and motivations that had really come up in. In the world today, especially post Covid. And they had another problem. And I'm not nerding out on you too much, this is important. Both of these values inventories held that you couldn't actually be a human being who had conflicting values at the same time. Where in my experience, and I bet in yours, you have conflicting values. And that's. And that's what makes life so hard. So my values inventory with these 15 values, it borrows from the very traditional, extremely established values inventories, but it builds on them. And in my very humble opinion, it modernizes them. And what the heck, I like it very much. So here's my advice. I'm going to suggest that you learn these 15 values, you learn them as you would any language, and you start using them to explain yourself and to understand others better. It's just that simple. It's 15 words. It can change everything. Now, I say that.

Because I just. I've seen it happen so many times. So many. Why have I seen it so many times? Well, because I live in becoming universe, where a lot of people know and use this language. I mean, becoming you has been taught to thousands of people at this point. And I see people use the language of that values. There's just 15 of them. I mean, you could learn them. You can learn the values in 10 minutes. You can learn this language. People take it home. I've seen this happen again and again. They take it to their families, their relationships, their workplaces, and they report back, oh, my God, I've had a eureka. Or we had a eureka because we started talking to each other about values in this way that lowers the temperature. Now when you start naming values and talking about them as on a continuum, I'm high on family centrism. You seem to be lower on it. I'm very high on belonging. I'm wondering where you are on belonging. It suddenly, it removes so much personal ire. It's like a rewiring. It's like a reprogramming of how we think about it. Instead of sort of getting very personal and attacking people as being better or worse, we are just talking about values that everyone has a right to have different levels of. It's so freeing and it's so life changing.

The greatest degree of friction I had was with my youngest daughter because she had this beholderism value that I just, I don't give a shit. And her from like the age of like six, she was beholderism, obstruction. And I don't like that, you know? You know, she's stylish, she sees things, she is drawn to.

Aesthetic things. So it's just, it's been a rub for 20 years. I was like, what is wrong with you? Like, you are like, you're bad. That's like enoughism and, and beholderism and what is going on here? So it was, it was more of an aha moment in the class saying, oh, this makes sense. But I didn't have the word to frame it and confirm it. And that's really what the beholderism allowed me to do and have a conversation with her about. It was like relief. It was like, oh, okay, this, this makes sense. And I, I'm not, I wasn't a bad mom. And Now I am more open to.

Receiving that versus criticizing it and even probably have a better way of.

Even talking about things with her.

I love Margaret, and I love her story. And it was. It's one of my proudest moments, actually, as a teacher to have somebody go home and have a kind of conversation that they've never been able to have before and to reunite family units. God, that's good. It's like a. If I ever had drugs in my life, I'm guessing that's how good they feel. I think it's kind of addicting. Not every story is a success story. Okay, this language came too late for one of our listeners from earlier, unfortunately. Here's Mary again.

It wasn't until I learned about scope, literally, in your classroom, when I was like, oh, my God, there was nothing wrong with her. She just had low scope and we had high scope. That was what was going on. It was just. She wasn't bad. She had a different level of scope.

Did you go back and tell her?

No, sadly, it was too late, really. We all just grew apart. I'm sorry, though, because she was a great friend and we were kind of shitty to her.

This story is so, so common, but very good news. The same language saved the relationship from our other listener.

So actually, we took the value bridge, and my number one value popped up as radius and hers as affluence. And we were like, wow, this explains everything. And it doesn't mean we agree, but we see each other so much better, and it changes how we talk about everything. I think it took the recrimination out, the anger out, because we had words.

We had words. And this is what the language does. It takes away the judgment, and it replaces it with understanding. It replaces it with silence sometimes because we suddenly have words to have a conversation instead of being judged. So let me tell you about the time that I did not have the words. So it was 1988. I was just about to graduate from Harvard Business School. I was paying for Harvard Business School out of my own pocket. I didn't have any money in those days. My husband at the time had lost his job. We were living on fumes, I kid you not. And I knew I had one major value at that point in my life driving me. And that value was money. I had to get some money. We couldn't live, and we were in debt. But I was good at school. And I was so good at school that my future employer had told me that if I graduated in the top 5% of my class, I would have one year of my tuition relieved. They would pay off one year of my debt. This was huge. But they also told me that if I graduated number one in my class, they'd pay off all of my debt. I can't express to you. This is like being in a desert and you see a glass of water and you're being told, if you just graduate number one in your class, you get to drink that water and not die. That's how I felt. And I came from a family of modest means. I had no safety net. I was scared to death. I desperately wanted that. And I was driven by that value. The value of affluence and the value of achievement. Those two values were like. I almost had no other values. I'll tell you one thing I didn't value. I didn't value eudaimonia. Fun was just something I didn't give a shit about. Pardon my French. I didn't care. I didn't care if I never had fun ever. It just was not a value. Because I had other values. And that meant that I didn't go and party with all my classmates whose parents were paying for their business school and had jobs locked up at Goldman Sachs who had already had both years paid off. I didn't, like, linger after class. I rushed home after class and I did all my homework. And I did it again. And then I did it a third time to make sure I was going to get the time. Top grade. Okay, I was just. I was scared. And you can hate me for that or you can have empathy for that, but that's what was going on. And in that time, my classmates weren't really big fans of me. Why? Because I just looked like a grunty, competitive little grind. And I didn't know that I could say anything like, hey, friends, let's just talk about values. Right now your values are eudaimonia and belonging. But my values happen to be affluence and achievement. Here are the reasons. And hey, let's not judge ourselves. Well, into this big pot of misunderstanding, a very popular kid decided to throw a huge party, a big graduation party. And everybody heard about it. Everyone was invited. And it was going to be that night, the night of this story. And I had finished class, and I had my arms wrapped around my books. And I was rushing to my car to drive home so I could start my homework. And I wasn't going to that party. Are you kidding me? Because how could I? Then I wouldn't be able to do my homework four times. And this kid Dan, comes up alongside Me on his bike. And he goes very mockingly, hey, Suzanne, are you going to the party tonight? And I said, no, of course I'm not going to the party tonight. We've got homework. And he looked at me very scornfully, really condescendingly, and he said, you know, what's wrong with you, Suzanne? You just don't value fun. And I sputtered. I felt like I was kicked in the stomach because I knew fun was good. And I knew he was being condescending, and he was basically saying, you're bad. I'm good. And I remember hugging my books even more tightly and feeling my face get super red because he basically was saying, you suck. And I had nothing to say. I couldn't say. I couldn't get a word out. You know what I said? I do value fun. I said, I do value fun. And then I ran to my car where I threw my books in the back seat, and I started to cry. And I thought, wait, I do value fun. I said it a few times over and over again. And then I thought to myself, in a moment of great insight, I might say, for a person who was sort of as kind of on auto drive as I was, I thought, no, I don't value fun, you little shithead. I'm really throwing the bombs around here today. But I hated him in that moment. I think he's a perfectly good human being. I'm sure he is. But at that moment, I hated him for. For judging me. And I hated myself for not having the words, because the words could have been, hey, Dan. Actually, I'm so happy you get to value fun, and I hope I get to value it again someday in my life. But right now, I have very strong values of affluence and achievement. I'm just in a different place in my life. And, hey, I'm not going to hold it against you that you get to value fun. And I hope you don't hold it against me. I'm just in a really different place, and I think we should. There's space for all of us. But no, I didn't have the language, and I just let myself get judged, and I felt completely misunderstood. It took me a long time to forgive myself for that moment. It just stunk everything about it. Now, here's an interesting thing. That's a long time, right in those days. It's been a long time. And you might make the case that I ended up studying and researching and writing about values as my life's work because of that speechlessness day. I mean, it was a very essential experience in my life. I don't know. I think you trace it back to that. I think there's a few places in my life where you trace back this sense of not being able to explain who I was to the world and feeling misunderstood that led me to this work. And maybe it just explains my passion around it because I can so entirely empathize with the feeling of not being able to explain your values and my desire, my passion to let us have work words to stop that pain that comes from being judged for our values and not being able to explain ourselves back. Because we can. I mean, it can happen. Starting today, all we have to do is use our words. And so you may be thinking, okay, Susie, I'm in. How do I get those words? Well, it's really easy. You can go to episode 36, where I explain each and every value. Just listen to the podcast right after this one. Or you can read my book comes out next week. Or you just keep listening to this podcast or follow my newsletter, which is free. I talk about the values and their language all the time on reels on TikTok. I never stop talking about them. So there's a way to find out. This language, 15 words. And once you hear the words, I have to reiterate this. You're going to be fluent almost instantly. I was at a dinner party this weekend, and people asked me, what's going on with your work, Susie? So I started talking to them about the values stuff and the values language and the values bridge. And they were talking about it right away. I know this is a very. I'm a very fun dinner guest, aren't I? Let's talk about values. But seriously, people are like, I love this language. And I get it. I get it intuitively, I'm already sensing what my values are, and I need to tell, for instance, my kids about this. So this is not a hard language to learn. I mean, you can put this to work, like, soon. So, speaking of kids, here's where we'll end this podcast. Okay? When my kids were little, I have four children, by the way. They're all in their 30s now. Sometimes they would start crying, as kids often do, and they would start crying from frustration, and I would hug them and bring them close, and I would say to them, it's okay, it's okay. We're gonna fix this. We're gonna fix this. Just tell me what's wrong. And of course, when they were little, they couldn't always tell me was wrong. And they would sometimes sputter. And they would gasp and they would cry, and Mommy. And I would say, slow down, slow down. You can explain it to me. And then I would say this line, which I've used a billion times as a mother. There are words for everything. There are words for everything. There are words for values. And we can use them to explain ourselves to ourselves and to others. And that is the way we stop the judging and start the listening and the conversing and the eurekas that all of that will allow us to have eurekas of insight and empathy, which are the best kind. So, sorry, not sorry I asked you to revisit one of your very painful memories earlier, but wouldn't it be great if that kind of thing never happened again to you or to anyone? I mean, I wanted you to go there because that's what this is about. Not ever feeling that way again. So if you would very kindly let me out of. Let me out of jail.

Okay, so that is it for this week's episode of Becoming youg. Thank you so much for being with me. I love you and I'll see you next week.

Becoming youg is produced by Jesse Baker and Eric Newsome of Magnificent Noise. Our production staff includes Muskaan Nagpal and Kristen Muller, with help from Elisa Zinn, Hallie Reiner, Maddy Paul and Tanya Jogi. I'm your host, Susie Welch, and this is Becoming youg.