Finding Your Life's Purpose with Suzy Welch EP 431

00:00:09
Speaker 1: Hi.

00:00:09
Speaker 2: I'm Laura Vanderkamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker.

00:00:15
Speaker 3: And I'm Sarah hart Hunger, a mother of three, practicing physician, writer and course creator. We are two working parents who love our careers and our families.

00:00:24
Speaker 2: Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long.

00:00:33
Speaker 1: Term career goals.

00:00:34
Speaker 2: We want you to get the most out of life.

00:00:41
Speaker 1: Welcome the best of both worlds. This is Laura.

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Speaker 2: This episode is airing in early November of twenty twenty five. I am going to be interviewing Susie Welch. We're delighted to have her here at the best of both worlds. Susie teaches at the New York University Stern School of Business.

00:00:55
Speaker 1: She is the author of the book.

00:00:57
Speaker 2: Becoming You, which is all about finding your purpose in life. So, Susie has a long career of writing about business related topics and business leadership, and one of her big ideas a couple of years ago was I think this is.

00:01:11
Speaker 1: The title of one of her books.

00:01:12
Speaker 2: It is ten ten ten, and that is when you were choosing what to do, you ask yourself how you will think about it in ten minutes, how you will think about it in ten months, and will it matter in ten years now. I had to look that up because I first thought was it was ten hours, ten days, and ten years, but I guess it's ten minutes, ten months, ten years. So I'm curious, Sarah, is there anything big that you were thinking about and wondering about ten years ago that turned out not to be something that you are thinking about now.

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Speaker 4: Yeah.

00:01:43
Speaker 3: I was just like, Okay, this is twenty fifteen, and what would have been kind of stressing me out? What would I have been ruminating about then? And I think there were like two things that came to mind. One is that I was always worried about having to miss work with my kids getting sick and like did I have enough layers?

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Speaker 1: And I had a full time nanny, so.

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Speaker 3: I don't know, I just felt I just remember being like every single day, like being nervous that like the shoe would drop in the morning and I miss work and something bad would happen. So that's interesting, definitely not something I worry about now. And then also one of those things where like in retrospect, like if I had missed a few days, like what would have happened?

00:02:17
Speaker 1: Nothing?

00:02:18
Speaker 3: And then the other thing is I do feel like that I would have certain clinical dilemmas that would stress me out so much, like, oh, I don't know what to do, Like this is so hard. I'm like internalizing the patient and like I now am at a point when so yesterday I was working and we have this junior colleague that's like one or two years I think she's like a year at a fellowship now, and she's always coming to my office with this worried look on her face and asking me these questions. And the questions never seem hard to me. I'm always like, oh, do this, Like it does make you realize that when you're new at.

00:02:50
Speaker 1: Something, it's really really hard.

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Speaker 3: And I'm not saying my clinical job still doesn't have challenges, because of course it does, but it is totally easier. Recognizing that is really fun.

00:03:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, I know that we get better at what we do, which is a wonderful thing for sure. With another decade of experience under your belt, Well, mine is a little bit more lighter than that. I was thinking of this ten years ago. I had been wanting to. I we had this episode about wanting a bigger kitchen recently with Kate Strickler. Right, So, ten years ago, I was really unhappy with my kitchen. I wanted to renovate it, but it seemed like a huge thing to do. I didn't really have experience with doing a whole lot of renovation and what that would involve, and so I was very nervous about the process and all that. We finally finally did it in twenty eighteen, which, you know, you realize you should have done it years ago, But of course none of that mattered now because we wound up moving. We bought a different house in twenty twenty, which then I had renovated a whole different kitchen, although probably learned some lessons from the first one, and it probably helped to have renovated the kitchen to sell that house, although I'm sure that the people who bought it have probably ripped everything out and done their own things, So none of it was really worth all this angst that I probably put into it. So, yes, kitchen angst, that was your practice kitchen. It was my practice kitchen. But if it was going to be my practice kitchen, I should have done it so much before twenty eighteen. I should have done it the second we moved into the house if I didn't like it, but live and learn.

00:04:23
Speaker 1: Turns out you can change things that you don't like. Life moved on.

00:04:27
Speaker 2: But anyway, Susie has all sorts of great career and life advice. So we're very excited to hear from Susie Welch. Well, Sarah and I are delighted to welcome Susie Welch to this show. So Susie, thank you for joining us.

00:04:40
Speaker 4: Oh, I'm so happy to be here. Thank you for having me.

00:04:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, we are very excited to talk with you. So maybe you could tell our listeners a little bit about yourself.

00:04:49
Speaker 4: Okay, Well I'm sixty six, so this could take a while to you know, get yourself a hot toddy and sit back, all right. I'm a professor Management Practice at NY Eastern School of Business, where I teach MA but I also teach a class called Becoming You about that process of figuring out who you are in what direction you should go. And I also teach the CITTMYU in open enrollment. So I've taught it to people of all ages from around the world. I'm also the mother of four and I have two little grandchildren.

00:05:16
Speaker 2: Oh that's a wonderful, full life. Yeah, full life for sure. And you've had quite a very career. This stint at NYU is only the latest of a long string of things. I mean, you want to list a few. I know, crime reporter, look at my career.

00:05:31
Speaker 4: Makes perfect sense to me. I mean maybe when you get to a certain point in your life. It Look, you've had a lot of jobs, you know what I mean, I'm four decades into this working thing. Look, I start off as a journalist, and in those days, you started on the crime desk, and I did. That's how they started journalists in nineteen eighty one. I don't know a reporter who didn't start that way. And I started as a crime reporter. It's filled with fabulous stories. I love it. I learned a lot about human nature. I always say to my kids, you know, if you want to learn about human nature, really quickly, be a crime reporter in Miami in nineteen eighty one.

00:06:04
Speaker 1: So I didn't want to rest to pull off now right it is, But I mean that's good retrospective advice.

00:06:08
Speaker 4: But that exposure to the real world is good stuff. Yeah. I happened to love to write, and so that was a lucky combination. And I was buffing along happily and successfully as a crime reporter until one day I was serendipitously reassigned to cover business. I had no interest in it. I didn't want to do it. I went kicking and screaming, and yet that was the open job, and it was a promotion. I went into it and I thought, I'm going to fail. I know nothing about this thing business. I had been a fine arts major in college. I had covered crime, and I didn't know what they were talking about, but I thought it was very interesting. I thought whatever they were talking about seemed to be important. These were people who definitely understood why the world was working. And I was like, wow, I know nothing about this at all. And so in those days, there was no Internet to go find out about business. There was no anything. You couldn't read enough books to understand what business was. I cooked up this crazy sigmate where I went and I interviewed so of the top business CEOs in the New England region. I was working in Boston at the time, but it wasn't enough to go interview CEOs at all, and so I did that. You know what seemed to be a normal thing, which is I applied to business school to learn about business. And you know, one of the great mysteries of all times how I was accepted at business school, but I was. I went to HBS and I had a fantastic time there. I learned a ton about business. It ended up I had something of an aptitude for it, and I became a business journalist. So this all makes sense to me. I mean, so you know, sure you see on my resume that I started as a crime reporter. I ended up working at Baine. But it kind of made sense. When you go to business school, you generally graduate into a job in consulting or banking. I went the consulting route. I did it for seven years. I learned a ton about business. I kind of got my sea legs underneath me. And then I combined the two. I was recruited away to come run the Harvard Business Review because they thought, oh, look there's a person who has a basic understanding of business but also can write. To go get her. And they did, and I had a great run there. And then I, in the process of doing that, met my husband who at the time had just retired as a cooge and we decided I got fired for writing a story about him. But whatever, this is ancient history now, I don't think it would happened today. And then I joined forces with Jack. We wrote a couple of business books together, we had a TV show, and then I ended up going and doing work on my own, writing a business column for oh Oprah's magazine, writing my own books about business and decision making, and then I ended up having two shows on CNBC about business and careers. So again it makes sense to me. Okay, I get that it looks like it's a but you know I was. I was pivoting along with the times. I wrote my original newspaper stories on a manual typewriter, and I kept on having to be it, just like everybody to day has to pivot. The big pivot really wasn't to academia, which happened after my husband died and I needed a new beginning and it seemed to make some sense to me, and it was calling me, and I thought, I'm going to give it a try. I have this idea, this class I want to teach coll becoming you, And YU was a very entrepreneurial place, and they said, we'll let you try it here. We'll watch you closely, but we'll let you try it here. And it worked out really well.

00:09:17
Speaker 2: Absolutely well, we're going to get to becoming you and all the things people might learn about themselves as they are becoming you.

00:09:24
Speaker 1: But I want to back up.

00:09:25
Speaker 2: A little bit because a lot of our listeners are moms with young kids who are also working big jobs.

00:09:34
Speaker 1: Yes, that's why we are best at both worlds.

00:09:36
Speaker 2: And so I understand that your stint at Bain also corresponded with you having like four small children.

00:09:41
Speaker 1: I did write as a timeline, So I.

00:09:44
Speaker 2: Wonder if you talk a little bit about the logistics of your life then the various strategies you employed so.

00:09:50
Speaker 4: To make me work. You know. Look, first of all, I can't swear on the show. Yeah it was the s show. Yes, it was the absolute horror show. Is terrible. I can't I paint a pretty picture of it. It was really hard and at the time my first marriage, which I was in my children with my first husband, who was a very dear friend of mine now, but he wasn't at the time. Our marriage was a disaster, and so I had a lot of stuff going on. I would say this, I'll describe it to you and how bad it was and how I did logistically. It doesn't go like that anymore because it doesn't happen that there's a firm that doesn't have a partner track for mothers. Okay, But when I was at Vain, you had your kids, and you basically pretended you didn't have kids. The trick was to not show your motherhood anywhere. These days have gone. They're gone. I have many good friends now who are being who are happy parents. Okay, But in those days nineteen eighty eight, the trick was my first kid. In nineteen eighty nine, I had four kids in five years, and I was succeeding if I never talked about them and no one ever saw it. And I still traveled four days a week along with my case team. We had my fourth child, a case team meeting in the hospital. My team came. That was an important thing. I was holding the newborn baby. They sat around my bed and we talked about work. But these were really different times. The way I did it logistically was I had a nanny, I was making a good salary Baine, and my husband was working as well, and so we had enough money that I had to live in nanny and she remains a dear friend of mine. She helped me raise my kids. She was a young irishwoman. How she knew so much about kids, I don't know. But I loved her and the kids loved her. And she was with us for eight years, which is a long time in nannydom. And you know, on my sister's help, My mom helped, everybody helped. We all helped each other. Both of my sisters were not working, so I could lean on them, but that's you know, you can't lean too heavily on people. And my mom stepped in, but she had a lot of grandchildren to step in for. But I wouldn't wish it on anybody. It was hard. Yeah, And look, one of the reasons I went to Harvard Business Review when they came to recruit me after that was that in the interview, I asked the editor in chief how much travel is there with this job? And she said she thought I wanted travel, so she said, unfortunately, lay none and I said I'll take it. I said, I'll take take it.

00:12:03
Speaker 2: Sign me up.

00:12:04
Speaker 4: I know that seemed like and it was actually when I didn't have to travel four days a week. It was a lot better. But you know, I'm still a working mom. I have four children and they're in their thirties. But if your kids are still young and you think they're ever going away, you're so mistaken. They never go away. In their twenties and thirties, they become very dear friends of yours. Their problems become bigger, Their friends become characters in your life. Their partners become characters and important individuals in your life. I'm unbelievably close to my kids' partners. Their lives are critically important to me. And so I'm still a working mom. I mean last night, my daughter who's thirty five, wrote me a text we were gonna have dinner together, and I wrote back to her, go away because I was still I was like I was working. The difference is that you could really talk to them about working a way they understand.

00:12:51
Speaker 1: Yeah. Absolutely.

00:12:53
Speaker 2: So let's talk a little bit before we go to our first commercial break about this idea of becoming you so you wind up with your job at NYU. We're going to teach this course on how people are going to find themselves.

00:13:06
Speaker 1: I guess is how we're to talk to your purpose. Yeah, find their purpose.

00:13:09
Speaker 2: And you joke in the book that you didn't really find your purpose till you were sixty, that this was your ultimate purpose.

00:13:16
Speaker 1: So I mean, is this really something people can.

00:13:17
Speaker 2: Do at any time of life? I mean we can, we can figure those out. So yes, I mean I've taught the Becoming You Methodology to people from ages sixteen to seventy eight and with great success. Okay, so when you're dead, you're done, is I like to say. And until then you're living, and so you can get closer to living your purpose, which is it feels exquisite. It's a really beautiful thing. It's wonderful, and so I highly recommend it. But why would you ever stop trying?

00:13:46
Speaker 1: Absolutely?

00:13:47
Speaker 2: So, the Becoming You methodology, it's somewhat from what I can understand from your book and all that is that it's a sequence of tests where you are figuring out your various values, your aptitudes, you are figuring out your personality, and you are putting all this together.

00:14:05
Speaker 4: And so it's three data sets. That's a good job. Thank you for summarizing that way. Look, you gather data. There's three data sets. The first is your values, which we rank from one to sixteen. We get really nobody really knows what their values are. They think there's only two values, there's sixteen, and we do a very we do a series of exercises. But then there's just one big test called the values Bridge, which I developed in my lab, that ranks your values for you from one sixteen in a way that is scientific and research based and removes your identity and all sorts of other issues from it, which is very nifty, but also tells you how far you are from living your values. It also measures that that's always a very big moment to get that data back. The second set of data that we excavate are your aptitudes, and so we do both cognitive aptitudes, which are your the big six. You know whether or not your generalist or a specialist, a brainstormer or contributor. So we test for those, and then we also look at your emotional aptitudes, which are really your personality, and we don't let you tell us what your personality is. We have the world report on your personality because the underlying premise of becoming you is that your personality is how people experience you. So that's the second set of data your cognitive and emotional aptitudes. And then the third set of data is your economically viable interests. That's the work that calls you emotionally or intellectually or both and also pays you according to it. Or desired affluence value is so like everybody has a different value that they place on money, and so we've already discerned that through the first sets of tests, and so then we look at this third thing. We sort of open the aperture on all the different kinds of work and different industries that exist, and then we put it all together and we identify what's called your area of transcendence, your purpose. Sometimes people will come up with two options. Typically it's one option. There's a lot of technology involved in this process. There's a lot of tests that we've developed, assessment tools that we've developed in the lab that make it easier on peace because it's a lot of data to gather. But we think we've helped a lot and then you've got it. And tens of thousands of people have gone through this process now, and for some people it's a little tweak. Okay, yes, I'm so close, I just need to do X. And for other people it's like got to get out the TNT kind of stuff. There's a very big reinvention or very big change that has to either be done or considered. I mean, sometimes people walk away and say I need a year to think about this, and other times people say it's it. I've been waiting for this conviction and this clarification and I'm going to go do this. So I've seen everything at this point with it. It's exciting. Yep.

00:16:33
Speaker 1: Absolutely, all right.

00:16:34
Speaker 2: Well we're going to take a quick ad break and then I will be back with more from Susie Welch. Well, I am back talking with Susie Welch, who is the author of Becoming You, host of that podcast, also teaches at NYU, which is helping many people discover their purpose in life.

00:17:01
Speaker 1: So Susie, I had to laugh when I.

00:17:03
Speaker 2: Was going through some of your things and Becoming You, of learning about your different values and all that. I think I'm highest on agency, which makes sense.

00:17:14
Speaker 4: Did you take the test I have?

00:17:16
Speaker 1: I did not go through a completely I will.

00:17:19
Speaker 4: Because maybe look, sometimes people are really right, like I knew my top values before I took it, but I'm and maybe you do, but you think you're high on agency, which is the value that it reflects how much self determination matters to you. Do you often feel like you want it? You want to drive all the decisions.

00:17:33
Speaker 2: And I cannot work for anyone else, says I can't even do group exercise classes because I don't want people telling me what to do.

00:17:42
Speaker 4: Okay, I'm seeing the agency. I think you're right, and that really matters, Like it matters in so many ways. It matters in terms of your career and you already know how it plays out, but it matters in relationships too. It's a little bit concerning for me when I do the Becoming Us methodology, which is when people do becoming you together, there's a couple and both people have high agency. It's fine if both people have medium, or both people have low, or one has high and one has low. But in a marriage, for instance, where both people have high self determination.

00:18:09
Speaker 2: It gets complicated, gets complicated for sure, what are you sort of off the charts on of the different app So my.

00:18:16
Speaker 4: Top value is cosmos. That's the faith value of a faithful person, And so this reflects how much your faith is an organizing principle of your life. And so my number one value is cosmos, and it has been across all the years of us testing the tool. My second value is radius, which is the value that reflects how much you want to create systemic change in the world. So that's a different value than wanting to help people, because wanting to help people is often quite an intimate act, and we call that non city not for oneself, and it attracts very differently than the value of radius, which is a strong desire to create systemic change. And for me that's I have that in many different aspects of my life. And then my third value is what we call work centrism, which is the desire for work to be the organizing principle of your life. I love work. I've always loved work. When I was a little girl, literally I would see a woman with a briefcase and I didn't know what she was doing, but I would think, I want to be her. I've always loved work. And we don't allow the word workaholic in the lexicon of becoming you. People either have high work centrism or lower work centrism. It's no wrter or no wronger anywhere you are. We're sort of the judgment free zone. But I definitely have close friends who have lower work centrism than I do, and we talk about it and we joke about it, and we ask each other about it. But it's not right or wrong. So those are my top three. I also have high achievement and a high place, which is the value around where you want to live.

00:19:42
Speaker 2: But is it common for people to have a lot that are sort of in the middle, Like I feel like a lot of people there are many things that we could feel in the middle on right, Like, you know, you want to be comfortable, but money isn't the driving force of your life or things like that.

00:19:55
Speaker 4: Everybody's different. Everybody has top values and if they're middle, show up as middle. I mean, the tool force ranks it. So the way it tests it is it's going to find out which ones are the top for you and which ones are the middle, and which are the bottom. I mean, it's very possible that you have two that are sort of middling. For sure, you do, yeah, but you have some that are defining and not defining for sure all people do. Yeah.

00:20:18
Speaker 2: And then let's talk about this idea of sort of following your passion, which I know gets a bit of a grimace when we put it that way. But you talk about just in many cases people sort of underestimate what are economically viable interests. I know, you go on a whole rant in Becoming You about some TikToker who was going on about how she had no idea what she wanted to do with her life, what was everyone else doing? Somebody please tell her what she should do? And then she mentions she'd love to have a farm and rescue dogs. And then she moves on as if this is nothing that anyone could ever pursue a career in.

00:20:53
Speaker 4: Yeah. Look, when it comes to passions, I think there's this follow your passion stuff and I and my answer to that is is, yeah, fine, if you're good at it. If you're good at it, If you're not good at it, then it's a hobby, all right. I love ceramics. I'm terrible at ceramics. My daughter happens to be a ceramicist. So we have a pottery studio in the garage. And I know how bad I am at ceramics. Do I love it? And do I do it every weekend? I sure do, But I'm not going to pursue it as a career because us stink right, and she's magnificent and she makes her living doing ceramics because she's so good at it and she always has been. And so passions are fine, but most people have some level of affluence or you know, having money as of value, and so I or you with the whole becoming you methodology urges you to do is find what's at the intersection of your passions, which we would say are values or potentially interests, and your aptitudes. So that's why there's so much data, because something's at the intersection of those three super highways, if you will, and it's where they meet that you are going to find most likely to find your purpose.

00:21:55
Speaker 2: But you have people that go through and research all sorts of varying industry. Is that, you know, because people haven't really thought about it, right, that's right.

00:22:02
Speaker 4: There's one hundred and thirty five industries and eleven hundred job titles. There's twelve mega trends, and what it's happening is, I mean, there's research that's just heart stopping in terms of like kids coming out of high school know about five jobs can spontaneously, unprompted, name five jobs and two of those are typically their parents. Then you go to college and you think, oh, they're going to learn about a lot more jobs. They don't. They have the five jobs they used to know about, plus two that they heard through group think. You know, oh everybody should get a job and took right. And then you go to graduate school. Forget it. It's down to two jobs because the conveyor belt has started, and so so much of the work of becoming you is opening your aperture to say, here's what one hundred and thirty five industries are, Here's what all the job types are, Here's what the mega trends are. Are you sure that you're looking around and seeing everything?

00:22:52
Speaker 2: I mean?

00:22:52
Speaker 4: One of my happiest stories is about a student I had. It was going into consulting, as students are wont to do in the NBA program, and we went through this process and I could sort of see her eyes drifting away, and I said to during the break, what's going on? And she said it didn't dawn on me. I could take my aptitudes to shipbuilding. I love everything about the sea and shipbuilding that her It's interesting her brother was a merchant marine, so there must have been something in the family, right, And she ended up applying to shipbuilding companies with her skills. She was very good at logistics and project management. She got a good job at a big shipbuilding company based in Mobile, Alabama. That's where a lot of shipbuilding is in the United States. She was just transferred to Athens, she got promoted, transferre to Athis and she's going to have like a fantastic career in shipbuilding. And it was just like somebody had to say the word shipbuilding to her, otherwise she was going to go work in in SaaS consulting and not have nearly the life of adventure. And actually this for this particular student, her number one value was scope. Scope is the value of adventure, change, growth, risk people who just like very stimulating lives. That was her number one value. And so she actually her awareness of kinds of jobs allowed her to express her number one value.

00:24:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, well there's things we just don't know about. And if everyone's always like tech consulting and banking, yeah, then that's right. You know, even if you have skills that could be applied to a wide variety of countries, I know there might be something else.

00:24:13
Speaker 4: Yeah. I think it really hits people very young. I know, I saw my sons. You know, I think it's a mother just thinking. This is about a mother because I raised four children. I saw them in college with this group think about what they should be doing, like everybody was going to do X. And when my daughter, who was unbelievably talented, everything around TV, starting in middle school and middle school, she would recast TV shows for fun and she would like come down to dinner and she say, I've just recast you know, Malcolm in the Middle with different actors, and we'd be like, that's weird. And I mean, she would like say things like we would see a movie and the family would walk out talking about the plot of the movie, and she would say, that movie would have been so much better if so and so was cast in the lead role. So she went to college and she studied English and was very involved in the drama program, casting all the plays, and the whole time Jack and I, my husband and I were talking to her about getting jobs in marketing and all these jobs that were kind of what English majors did. And then one day I was visiting her in Miami and she was watching TV with like this look of just like it looked like she was like praying in an altar. She was like watching TV and I thought to myself, the whole life, this child has loved TV. And I went to the bedroom and I called my husband. I said, what if TV is not the problem? What if it's the solution? And he said, what are you talking about? I said, I think she should go work at Hollywood. So I went back. He said, Druck, so you shall do it. I went back into the other room, and when she stopped watching her show, I said, Sophia, have you ever thought about taking yourself out of this whole kind of conveyor belt thing that we've thought of for you and going out and finding people just like yourselves and working in Hollywood? And she said, oh, Mom, would you let me? And like we had been, I know, talk about moments of I felt sick. I thought, what a dumb mother move, and I said, would I let you? Oh my god, I am so late to this game. And she graduated and she and her dog, Virginia Wolf, and I got on the plane the next day and she had in short order eight job offers because she went around to the interviews in casting and they thought, who is this young idiot savant? Because she like was just crazy, she would like recast their shows for them, and then and she's fifteen years later right now as we speak, casting two Hollywood movies. So she built a huge career in casting because it dawned on me to invite her to consider that there were other jobs besides the ones we think that are available.

00:26:36
Speaker 1: There's everything, there's everything, absolutely all right.

00:26:38
Speaker 2: Well, we're going to take one more quick ad break and then I will be back with more from Sizie Welch.

00:26:54
Speaker 1: Well, I am back talking with Susie Welch.

00:26:56
Speaker 2: We've been talking about the varied careers that are available in this world, and sometimes we have to just look a little broader to figure out where our economically viable interests overlap with our values and our aptitudes. So we have a lot of probably achievement sevens. Listening to this people who are very ambitious and who are in that little kid phase of life. I wonder if there's some ways that somebody who does have big ambitions and also who has a full personal life in this modern world can be smart about going about being visible and being the one that people are considering for leadership roles.

00:27:34
Speaker 4: Well, I think that the kind of rules of how you get promoted. Have always been the same in a way, even though this world is crazy and changing underneath our feet. And I think that it comes down to three things. I mean, really just simplify it right down. And I have a little acronym for it, which is PI. It comes down to the quality of your relationships with people, and quality is the key word there. It's like how authentic are you? How collaborative kind are you? It ends up that most people actually appreciate decent people, So just the quality of your relationships with people be number one. The second and you can't escape it. It's the hardest one, which is your ideas, Like how good are your ideas? How often do you have them? And if you don't have a lot of good ideas yourself, how good are you as a midwife of other people's ideas That can cover for you if you don't have very good and you can get by without ideas, but it's hard to get promoted without really good ideas. And then the third area is execution, which is you know, I think women are much better at this than men in general, which is that you say what you're going to do and then you do it, and you typically do it better and faster than you say you're going to do it. And I think that there's no hack, there's no shortcut for it if you just have high quality relationships with people, high quality ideas. And that takes a lot to have high quality ideas, because it means you have to be very hyper aware of trends and other new ideas. You've got to be very current, and you know these things don't typically just pop. You've got to cultivate the field where the good ideals ideas grow, and you just have to be so people can make break their careers on execution and the consistency of your execution, and in that execution, sort of owning the outcomes if it doesn't go your way or if it does, to share the credit where credits due. So I think this is whether you have kids or don't have kids. That's the hard It's incredibly hard. Kids make it harder because you're distracted because you have this whole other life going on in your head. I mean, you're work focusing on this things, but half your brain is focusing on your kids also achieving that in their lives. Are my kids friendships doing all right? Is my kid doing okay? In school. Is my kid engaging with the world? And is my kid adulting in a way? You know with execution? Is my kid adulting in a way I want to see? And you're living those two parallel lives, and it's just an accident of biology that those two things happen over happen to overlap for fifteen years from when you're twenty five to forty five. Your work needs to watch you mind, body, and soul, and so do your children. And you just suit up and you do it every day.

00:30:02
Speaker 1: Suit up, put on the suit, and get to work.

00:30:05
Speaker 2: So, Susie, are there any routines you have right now that are helping your life, your daily life be better.

00:30:12
Speaker 4: I'm a founder and so I have a startup. We're only fifteen people, but we're in startup mode and we've been going out of this for about a year, and so I don't have any routines. I do have like sort of life practices which are identity in very good stead. You know that I use the word routine, so I mean I wish I had a routine. I mean I say I have life practices. I have time every day where I pray and I express gratitude for just the incredible amount of good fortune I've had in my life, and also for the things that didn't go my way. I mean, I lost my husband. I am still processing that, even though it's been six years, and I try to make sense of it. I have definitely have friends and family who feel like how much I work is my lack of ability to process it. But I do think they're not disconnected. And I you know, I have dogs and I spend time with them, and I talked to about I know this is going to sound crazy given the fact that my kids are in their thirties, except for people who are listening who have kids in their thirties. I talk to all four of my children every single day. I never miss a day where I talked to me. I talk to my kids every single day. Sometimes it's really short and sometimes it's it's longer. I often talk to their This morning, I was not able to talk to my son because he runs a big company and this is the thirty six year old, and I texted him. We usually text at six thirty in the morning. And I talk to my grandchildren, then that's absolutely something that the day does not happen unless I talk to my granddaughter at six thirty in the morning. I do that every day, and so I talked to his wife instead. I try to find time to reconnect with my humanity when I'm not working. Excellent.

00:31:46
Speaker 1: Reconnecting with humanity is good.

00:31:47
Speaker 2: Well, Susie, thank you so much for joining us. Where can people find you?

00:31:52
Speaker 4: Well, I have a social media I'm mainly on Instagram and LinkedIn Susie Welches use z y and I have a newsletter which you can subscribe you for free on my website Susielch dot com. And if you want to find out more about Becoming You, you can go to Becoming You labs dot com. That's where it describes all of our programs and workshops and webinars and stuff like that. So you can't miss me. I'm all over over.

00:32:15
Speaker 1: There, all over the place. Wonderful. Well, please check that out.

00:32:18
Speaker 2: Everyone's Susie Welch, author of Becoming You, who teaches a course by the same name.

00:32:23
Speaker 1: We can all become better versions of ourselves. Thank you, Susie.

00:32:27
Speaker 4: I'm glad it was on. Thank you so much.

00:32:30
Speaker 2: Well, we are back after hearing all sorts of advice from Susie Welch on building our careers, making space for life, finding our purpose. So, Sarah, here's this week's question. Is it okay to not travel to visit extended family for Thanksgiving? We always have, but with little kids it is a pain to travel, the airports are crowded. I'd like the extra days at home. I'd kind of like to start our own traditions. Is there any good.

00:32:59
Speaker 1: Way to handle Yeah?

00:33:01
Speaker 3: I mean, I definitely don't think that anybody is obligated to be the traveling party in any family on any year, and I think these things can be negotiated and discussed year by year. I do think what can be helpful is figuring out if there are times of the year that you will make an effort to see that part of the family, either making it easy for them to come to you, or perhaps you choose some other times of the year, like, oh, we don't really want to travel for Thanksgiving, but we plan on coming President's Week and fourth of July. And I say that because those are two times we're planning to hit Philadelphia, not during Thanksgiving, when I would much rather stay here. So yeah, I think that making sure that there are times that you are going to connect is one thing that very much helped if you don't want to connect at a specific time because of other logistical challenges.

00:33:54
Speaker 1: What are your thoughts.

00:33:56
Speaker 2: Well with that, though, I would say there's often this gap in sort of extended family vibe and logistics and things between when it was easier for all the adult children, like young adult children to land at say the parents' house for holidays, and then when people start building their own families and become a lot less mobile, right, and there can be this lag and people are still in their mindset of like, oh, it makes sense for everyone to come to us, but it's like, no, if somebody has three small children, it does not make any sense for them to come to you. It makes way more sense for parents who are adults to get on a plane and go to them. And yet there can be a lot of lag and sort of this understanding or you know, sometimes people just don't like to travel, so they've been excited about the fact that people come to them and think that's the natural way of the world, but it isn't so anyway. That to be said, if it is your side of the family that you go to see or Thanksgiving, obviously you can simply say that you are not coming. You are not coming this year. People are welcome to come to you. They can come for Thanksgiving, they can come for Christmas, they can come for X, Y Z other times which you have identified which would be great.

00:35:08
Speaker 1: You know, come beyond in May.

00:35:09
Speaker 3: When we have for a million things going on, So come for a kid performance or a kid getting honored or something.

00:35:15
Speaker 2: Yeah, And if people ask why, like how could you do this, to say, well, it's very challenging for us to travel with three small kids. You are welcome to come to us and just keep repeating this line over and over again until they either do, like they buy a plane ticket, or you'll have to figure out at some point, you know, if the kids are older, then you'll get back on a plane and go visit them again. But I think you are allowed to set these boundaries. You're allowed to make your own choices. And then if it's on your partner's side, then obviously that person needs to have this conversation. And assuming you are both on board with this idea that you do not want to travel, then they just need to repeat that script with their family over and over again until it sinks in people buy a plane ticket or they don't. They have to make their own decisions in life too. But then yes, you should start making your own traditions if you had decided you're not going to travel. Cooking Thanksgiving meal is not that hard. Honestly, people get a little bit like, ooh, it's so intimidating. It's not really that intimidto if you only choose a couple of dishes to do, Like green beans on their own are not hard to cook, right, Like mashed potatoes also not that hard to cook.

00:36:25
Speaker 3: You can also take the whole thing out from whole foods or something like you know what I mean.

00:36:29
Speaker 2: You don't have to though, that's even the thing, Like you stick a turkey in the oven and it cooks like it takes a while to cook, but it does. In fact, heat will cook meat over the course of several hours. So you'll be okay, just cook your green beans, like, get some corn bread, put it in the oven, mashed potatoes, You've got a meal, right, Like that was not that much harder than cooking an average weekend meals. So and then think about what else do you do? Are they like holiday things you want to start doing over the weekends? Are there parades you want to go to is they're a really cool thing at the Children's Museum. Yeah, you'll start building your own traditions and then it'll feel a little bit more not just that you're not doing something yet, you're not going to visit family, but that you are truly building your own stuff that hopefully you can incorporate other people into when they start to come visit.

00:37:14
Speaker 4: You love it.

00:37:15
Speaker 3: We also do a friends giving that's a fun you tradition that you can add on to a family event or do on your own.

00:37:21
Speaker 2: Absolutely well, this has been best of both worlds. I was interviewing Susie Welch. We will be back next week with more on making work and life fit together.

00:37:31
Speaker 3: Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you.

00:37:39
Speaker 2: Can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com.

00:37:43
Speaker 1: This has been the best of both worlds podcasts.

00:37:46
Speaker 2: Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.