Totally Booked: LIVE! In this special episode of the podcast (in-person at the Whitby Hotel with a live audience!), Zibby chats with New York Times bestselling author Suzy Welch about BECOMING YOU, an inspiring and highly practical guide for identifying the career that is meant for you. Suzy shares how she developed her unique methodology, from her career in journalism to the loss of her husband and rediscovery of purpose as a professor at NYU Stern. She emphasizes how not everyone is meant to be a leader and the importance of knowing your aptitudes and values to make better career and life choices. She also shares the personal story of her public job loss after falling in love with Jack Welch, how she rebounded, and what she learned about resilience and self-worth.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome back to Totally Booked. So pleased to be here with Susie Welch, Becoming You, The Proven Method For Crafting Your Authentic Life and Career. 

Suzy: Mm-hmm. 

Zibby: Congratulations. 

Suzy: Thank you very much. 

Zibby: Oh, so happy to have you here. I'm gonna read Susie's quick bio for you. Okay. Susie Welch is a professor of management practice at NYU Stern School of Business, and an expert on personal values and their role in forging meaningful careers.

She invented the three scientifically validated digital tools used in the Becoming You Method, the Values Bridge, PI 360 and the Careers Traits Compass, and is the creator of the Welch Bristol Values Inventory. Congratulations. 

Suzy: Thank you. Hi everybody.

Zibby: Susie, this book is so great because first of all, your voice comes through on every page. I haven't met you until today. I felt like I completely got to know you through the book, you share the joys and sorrows, your most intimate moments of loss and resilience and motherhood and career and everything.

And I feel like not only at the end have I read a great memoir but then you give all these tools for me to have a better life myself. So thank you. 

Suzy: Thank you for saying that. Thank you. I just let it all, I let it rip. I thought, why hold back? I don't wanna write a boring how to book. I wanna tell the true story of how I came to this, these ideas, there's nothing simple or hack like about them, and there's nothing simple or hack life about life, and so I just poured it out. 

Zibby: It's amazing. 

Suzy: Thank you. 

Zibby: Can you tell everybody a little bit of the backstory, how you decided to teach a class, how you came up with this method, how just all of it came together?

Suzy: Yes. Do you have 17 hours? Um, yes. I'll do the, I will do the very, I'll do the cliff notes of it. I had had a, um, a long and happy career in broadcast journalism. Basically, I worked on NBC and CNBC and I wrote for o the Oprah magazine. And I, um, I was, uh, pretty happy doing that as I was raising my four children and having a very busy life with my late husband.

And we wrote books together about business and management and that was going along pretty, uh, very happily for, uh, I mean, I have four kids, so I don't wanna say very happily because kids are kids and they go off the rails when you're not looking and even when you are looking. Right? And so that was all going along for 15 or something, 20 years.

And then, um uh, my husband got very sick and everything had to change. At first, we thought we could beat it, and so we did that fight and then we couldn't beat it. So we did a totally different fight, which is a not a fight, but it's a journey. And in that period, I, um, brought my work down. At first I cut my work in half.

I let go of one of my shows on CNBC, and then I brought my life down to an even lower boil. I ended up being on some boards and doing some stuff like that. But then in 2020 my husband passed away and, um, it was, I was prepared, but nothing prepares you. That's the thing. I mean, he wanted me to be prepared.

We talked about me being prepared, but. And it happened on March 1st and then COVID hit March 16th. And yes. And you know, it was terrible for all of us. And so I don't wanna say it was worse for me or it wasn't. It was. It was just terrible. And it was terrible with many, many layers. And we went up to the woods of upstate New York, my all, I've, as I said, four children and their spouses, and we all went up to the upstate of New York with all of our dogs.

It was Dog of Palooza, there were seven dogs and all of us. And then, um, and I was sad and they were wonderful and we grieved together and then they are young and they started to put their lives back together again. Um, but I did not, and I was wandering around in the woods of upstate New York with all my children gone and my dogs to the point where like the dogs were like, enough is enough.

I mean, and I was uh, still walking, and then I'm very fine and I kept on saying, no, let's keep walking. And um, then very fortunately, the great, um, Hoda Kotb called me up and said, I think it's time for you to come back on tv. And I said, okay, okay. And I didn't, like, I didn't know how I felt about going back into the world, but as I got closer and closer to the studio, I felt more and more excitement.

I felt like, oh, oh, oh. And I remember like seeing New York again for the first time and feeling like, oh, I. I, I, I do belong back here. And I was, I went back on the show and that day I did a segment and Hoda said, after the segment was over, Susie Welch, will you come back to the Today Show? And I went, yes, but I already knew.

No, because I, I, you know, I, I mean, I like we have a photograph of my face sort of going. As I said it, but it was like being, has to be married on the jumbotron, you know? Um, and, uh, I loved the show, but I, something in me had really changed and I was, uh, something in me had really profoundly changed, but I didn't know what I should do with my life, only that I wanted to do something with my life.

Um, and for years I had been formulating a methodology and I, I'd been formulating it. I had a show called Susie Welch Fix my Career, and I, uh, was writing a careers column for Oprah and then for business week. And I had this methodology that was bubbling up and right around then a friend mentioned to me that he was teaching at NYU, and I thought, oh.

Well, maybe I could take this methodology and teach it at the business school. I wish I'd had this methodology when I was in business school. So what came over me, I went to, I knew the dean from my previous life and I went to go see him and I said, I have this idea for methodology. And he said, well, you can try it as an experiment.

We, we always were very experimental at NYU, we're very entrepreneurial. Come and try it. And I said, okay, great. But you know, if you. Create a class called Becoming You, crafting the authentic Life you want need, and you offer it to 20 and 30 somethings. It's not an experiment for very long. Uh, and they call, they were gonna do a 20 person experiment the first semester, and then they called me and say, how'd you like 40 students?

How'd you like 80 students? And the rest is history. So, um, I, the course was needed, um, and it became. Very well received. And, uh, I love those students in the first semester so much because I, after every class I had required homework where they had to tell me how I was doing, and they were wonderful and kind and encouraging.

They had a heart for me. I had a heart for them. We were all going through it together because I was the first beta tester of this methodology. And then, um, the course took off. I was asked to join the faculty full time as a, a full professor. I did and took on another class called Management, uh, with purpose, and I teach that as well.

And then I thought one day I was teaching and I thought to myself, I'm extraordinarily happy. First time in a really long time. And I thought, oh, I, I found my purpose. And the method helped me get there. And, uh, right around the time my old publisher was coming around and saying, would you like to write a book on this?

Would you like to write a book on this? And I was like, no, no, no, no. A thousand times, no, no, no. Then around Christmas she took me out for lunch. I believe a bottle of wine was involved. And next thing you know, there was a book. Um, but I was urged by my children to write the book. And so here it is. 

Zibby: It's amazing.

Suzy: Nice. Thank you. Thanks.

Zibby: Well, you outline the methodology in the book and you gave us quizzes that we can all take for free on your website and all of that, which I, of course had to take. Good. 

Suzy: I'm glad. 

Zibby: Uh, so thank you for that. 

Suzy: Okay. 

Zibby: Um, your, your general premise is the, the differential between your, what you want out of life and what you have in your life and how you can.

Sort of make that difference up and what you can do to change it? 

Suzy: Yes. 

Zibby: Sort over oversimplification. 

Suzy: Okay. 

Zibby: Why don't you do it better? 

Suzy: Okay. All right. Well, the, the premise of the methodology is one thing, and then the values bridges another. Let me just quickly go to them. So the methodology says that your purpose lies at the intersection of your values.

Your deeply held beliefs and desires, your aptitude, which is what you're uniquely good at. And your economically viable interests? Well, we can test for aptitudes. Okay. Your aptitudes, you have eight cognitive aptitudes that tend to matter at work. None of us ever get tested, but we should, and the book has tests for it.

Um, and our personalities, and also also an aptitude. You know, as well as I do that some people are very good at their jobs. Because of their personalities and sometimes not. Um, and your interests, most people know their interests, but if you don't, there's ways to find that out. The complicated and very hard part is knowing your values.

So one of the first things I did when I landed on the faculty was research to, because my suspicion was that most people didn't know what values were or what theirs were. This is really hard stuff to know because society is screaming and your parents are screaming in your ear what your values should be, and so most people.

Have their values galloped away with by a partner, a parent life children. And so I started to try to develop exercises to help people excavate their values. And I developed seven exercises that I used there in the book, and I used them in class, but I was frustrated, um, that there was no exercise that captured accurately.

Uh, there's 15 core values that I work with. They're part of this inventory that I invented, the Welch Bristol values inventory, uh, which builds on the shoulders of other great inventories. But I like mine better, but it whatever. There's other values, inventories and no tool really captures not just what your values are, but how much you're living them.

So say you have a value of, uh, scope. Scope is the value that measures how big and exciting a life you want. And some people wanna be like Bianca Jagger riding it on a white horse into Studio 54 with tons of excitement. Stimulation. New learning, new experiences. You know, my husband was off the charts on scope and, and how do you know we were lying in bed at 11 o'clock at night and he'd say, let's go do a pub crawl.

I mean, he could, he was a junkie for excitement. Right. And so would you,.. 

Zibby: Would you do it? 

Suzy: I did it. I loved him. Did I wanna do it? I mean, I, once we got going, I'd had fun, but usually I'd be like, I lights out at nine o'clock for me. Okay. I mean, like, I, me and the dogs were asleep at nine typically, but I loved him and I would go and it would always be fun.

You know, it was fun. It was fun when we did it, but some people don't want scope in their life at all. I mean, they wanna know. They want a lot of predictability and they want control, and there's no right or wrong. It's a continuum right now. What I wanted was for my students a to know. How much of each value they had, scope, affluence, luminance, family, centrism work, centrism.

There's 15 of these values, how much they had, but how much they were actually expressing. Like, you can really have a value of scope, but have a very boring life and you could feel like you're in a suit that doesn't fit you. That's the variance that you got measured. So the, the test that I have, this values bridge, which you can take, it's on my website.

Um. Tells you what your values are, ranked one to 15, um, and it tells you the variance on every single one of them. And then it tells you your overall variance. And so I developed this because I was frustrated that my students, uh, the exercises weren't getting us close enough. And now on my Bingo card developing digital tools, starting at age 60, not there, but you just, you know, a, a necessity is the mother of invention.

Zibby: Well, you gave us so many examples in the book of who this has helped and the way in which it helps where you have one man who comes into your class and is an investment banker, and that's his path. And by the end of it, he is a fashion designer. 

Suzy: That's correct. His parents still looking for me. You know, they're, his parents gonna hunt me down, but yes, no, I mean, they, they, they, they came to peace with it.

Zibby: So what if you. What if you take these quizzes and you're like, okay, my life is totally out of alignment in this way, or I didn't realize I prioritize this side or the other thing as much, or I was embarrassed to admit that this was important to me. Now what do I do? 

Suzy: Yes. Alright, so I have taught this. Not just to MBAs, but I've now done a lot of workshops.

I do these three day workshop and I've talked to people from age 18 to 78. So it's not just MBAs who are in this place where they're wondering, do I, what do I do now? So I've seen it tweak people's lives where they go through it and they have a, oh, okay, this is what the problem was. This value gap needs to close.

Or, I am a generalist and I should be in a specialist job. Or I wanna take this whole package and move it over to this industry. But some people really do. End up blowing up their lives and then. The question becomes, well, can you, you know, um, do you have the courage? Um, is this the moment? And so I've seen every different outcome.

I've seen people. Last night I was at a book event and um, I was signing books and somebody came up and he said, uh, you totally changed my life. I was gonna go into, this was a MBA student. I was gonna go into X in industry doing something. And now I'm chief staff at a tech company. And, um, you know, once I got over the shock of it.

And, you know, wrap my head around it. I'm, you know, I was scared when I realized what my true purpose was. I have to say, now that I've done it probably with people or heard about people doing it like almost 5,000 times now, I would say the reaction is everything from exhilaration to fear, to wanting to postpone it for a while.

But I've never had anybody go through it and say, the process did not get me to something as soon as I heard it. I knew it was the thing. Um, people see it and they're like, yep, that's it. And then it's up to you how much you wanna execute. I mean, sometimes students say to me, uh, okay, I got it. I know what my purpose is, what's the first step?

And I say, that's what the career office is for. You know, I send them on their way. I mean, I, there's this, there's a skill to that. 

Zibby: You also show us how people might not be made to be managers. Like there's a temperament and sometimes being around lots of people is not in your skillset. I mean, we all know these things.

Yes. But having a way to say, oh, maybe this job is not for me. 

Suzy: Right. 

Zibby: And you're helping someone turn it down. Because if you love to be alone in a room,.. 

Suzy: Yeah. 

Zibby: Maybe you don't wanna. Take the promotion where you have a whole team. 

Suzy: Yeah. This is a little bit about aptitudes. I mean, so, uh, uh, one thing that happens when you're young in your twenties and thirties and forties, generally people tell you you should be a leader.

There's like a halo over the word leader. I mean, I remember when my son was applying to like, uh, middle school, and I remember them asking me in the interview process, is he a leader? And I was like, he's 11 years old, you know, it's like how do we know? Um, and so there's this whole halo around leaders. And so what I do is I end up getting a lot of people who come into becoming you who don't know what's exactly going on, but they feel like something is wrong.

And I pretty early on diagnosis is people who were probably not meant to be natural. Were not, didn't want to be, and really weren't meant to be aptitude wise leaders. They should be individual contributors or you know, there's a lot of different things you can be that is not a leader. You can be a great team member, you can be a great follower, frankly, and, but the society and culture and organizations tend to put us on a conveyor belt towards this thing, leadership. And it's not for everybody. And so I developed a tool, this is career traits, compass, it's on my website. It is for free, which assess you on four bundles of personality traits. Uh, that I, that will, and it's, look, no judgment, but it will say to you, okay, here's what the, what it, the data is showing us on these traits, which I think are the ones that would be most aligned with environments that are high in ambiguity, high in acceleration, uh, of, of everything low on boundaries, leadership type situations, whether that's your place or not, it's not for everybody leadership. And so I think that it's a, one of the contributions of the book is to. Is to say, you gotta know this about yourself and there's no good or bad about it.

There's just you and you are you. And you gotta find the, the kind of environment and work that fits you. 

Zibby: And some of them you don't even need the entire quiz. Like I know that spatial relations is never gonna be a skill of mine. 

Suzy: That's right. 

Zibby: Um, whereas. Ideas, it can be easier. 

Suzy: Yes. 

Zibby: Like we all need to take stock.

And I think that it's something people don't prioritize in a day-to-day life. Like let's just take stock of the things that come easily or come naturally. 

Suzy: You know, shouldn't we have, this is data about ourselves shouldn't know who we know, who we are standing still, but we don't. Right? Shouldn't we know what our values are?

Um, the other day I was, uh, running out of the room and somebody sort of said to me, Hey, what's the name of your test again? To find out my values. And I told him how he could find it, and then I said to him. By the way, what are you, what do you think your values are now? And he kind of laughed, sheepishly and he said, uh, well, family of course.

And, um, you know, friends for sure and love and like, this was a grown man, right? And, and, and I thought like, oh, this is very familiar to me. Who's like, you know who among us, if I asked you to write down your values, could like, with great clarity rank from one to 15 what your values, and yet don't you think this is data we should have?

And, and we don't. And aptitudes is right behind because our brains are wired away. Our, we figure it out eventually. You know, if you're self aware and you've been watching yourself, you kind of figure it out, but you don't really take stock of it. Uh, but this is very good information to have. Sometimes we do it more for our children.

Then we do it for ourselves. 

Zibby: So a good team exercise too. 

Suzy: Yeah. 

Zibby: Okay. Team members see some knots in the book. You talk about a more, um, public moment of your career where you lost your job based on falling in love with somebody. 

Suzy: Yes. 

Zibby: Who was separated but not divorced, but people didn't know Jack Welch, who many in the room may know who he was, but as you put in the book, people don't even know who he is anymore.

I'm like, really? 

Suzy: No. I have students who say, how'd you meet Mr. Welch? And I'm like, oh my God, how young are you? I know they're very young. I mean, but it was 26 years ago, so. 

Zibby: So how did you a sort of follow your heart and go for it? Yeah. And take the risk and be rebound from the backlash. 

Suzy: Well, there was no social media then.

Okay. So that was a big, big, I mean, like, I don't know what would've happened to us, um, had there been Twitter or anything in those days it was, it was pre social media. So we fell in love. We met, we fell in love. He was separated. His wife was living in Italy with the, her, uh, with the gentleman she was still with.

And, uh, I was divorced, but it was not in the media that he was separated. And so for us, it was a surreal thing. I mean, there was quite a bit of shock about it, but, and I got fired. I, it would never happen today. Um, and, uh, it would never happen today. Um, but it did, and I was, I was, I as a very good girl who'd always gotten a's and always gotten done everything, you know, that she was supposed to do and graduated top of her class.

This was like my first failure and it was very, very public. And I remember Jack saying to me like, get over yourself. He had been CEO for 25 years and he said, you know, you go prince to pig, prince to pig prince, they, you build, get built up and then you come down, this is gonna be fine. And I said to him, um.

I'll never work again. No one will ever hire me again. I was crying and crying and he, I remember like, it felt very cruel. He like laughed in my face. He said, you know, Susie, get over it. And I was like, no. And then like two days later, Gail King from Oprah's, she was editor of Oprah Magazine at that time, called me and said, why don't you come in and talk to us about, um, working for us?

And, uh, he just slapped his thigh and thought it was hysterical because like I had been saying, I never, and, and life did go on, but it was a terrible injury. I don't wanna minimize it. I was, uh, devastated and, but you know, we pretty quickly afterwards got married and then we became quite boring. We were like a, you know, like people would see us out with the kids getting ice cream.

We just. We didn't feed the fire. We ended up writing books together and, uh, and having a, a, a wonderful life together. And until it got very imminent, even when it, he got sick was still a wonderful life as uh, just different. Um, but so, but it was terrible, uh, while it was going on and, uh, I can only imagine what it would've been like if it happened today.

It gives me a heart for anybody going through it, that's for sure. Um, I remember like while it was going on, there was some scandal going on with some rap star and one of my kids said, can we, can you believe such and such did such and such? And I said, I don't believe anything they say in the papers. I mean, I was really.

Zibby: Oh my gosh. So what did you learn about yourself through then? And also it sounds like you had this really idyllic marriage in the way you talk about your husband. It's so amazing and the way you write about him in the book and everything. How can you share that? How can everybody find that type of joy?

Is it something that can be taught or is it just chemistry? 

Suzy: I have what might be good or bad news for, uh, on this one. Okay. Okay. So what I'm about to say is like, uh, you may love it and you may hate it. Jack and I had the exact same values. If we had taken the values bridge test, our one through 15 would've been extremely high overlap. Okay. I mean, uh, kind of we tweaked there would be a little tweak here and a little tweak there. Um, and, uh, and so I'd say that we got along and it used to frighten the children. Like they'd come to us and we were such a united, uh, uh, force and we, we sort of felt the same way about everything and it made for a very happy marriage to tell you the truth.

So, you know, sometimes people'll say, well, opposites attract, and I'm like. I don't know. I had one of those marriages before, which I met Jack and that did not work out, and he's a good friend of mine now, but it, it, it didn't work out. So I would say we found that joy. We did not particularly chase joy. We just loved each other and respected each other.

And I think, uh, it just worked because, uh, we respected, you know, we just wanted to be together. So, I don't know, like I, I watched my kids get married and actually my daughter just, uh, youngest daughter just, uh, met this, I think they're gonna get married. They, they, they are gonna get married. Um, she just doesn't wanna have the wedding part.

And I'm like, give me the wedding. But I don't care as long as they get married. But I think that. Um, my other children make fun of the fact or lovingly mock that they talk alike. They kind of look alike. They have all the same interests and I'm like, yes, I, you know, I understand like I like a big diversity of friends.

If you looked at all of my girlfriends and I'm so blessed to have so many girlfriends. There's a lot of difference among us. And I, you know, my best friend, we argue all the time because we have a lot of difference in political opinions, all sorts of stuff. But I think for life partner. For us, what worked was this very, uh, strong overlap in values.

Take it early, leave it. 

Zibby: So where are you today on the alignment yourself with your values and the life you're living? You know, I'd have to say I'm pretty aligned. 

Suzy: I, I, you know, like every other person, like, ah, every other person, there are things that I need to tweak, but I know my values really well. How could I not?

I talk about this stuff. Day and night. Um, and every once in a while I'll catch myself making a decision out of expedience or out of expectations, or because events are pushing me a certain way and I will say, oh, wait, wait. I know my values and I'm gonna walk the talk. And I mean, I just did it recently. I mean, I made a different decision.

I said, no, I'm not doing that because my values are X and I'm gonna go do something else. So I'd say my variance is pretty, uh, pretty low. 

Zibby: Amazing. Yeah. Susie, thank you so much. 

Suzy: My pleasure. Thank you very much. 

Zibby: Thank you. 

Suzy: Thank you.