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Do you know what your purpose is? Many people do, and that can lead to an incredibly fulfilling life. But so many of us don’t. Business journalist-turned-NYU-professor Suzy Welch says midlife is a terrific time to figure this out for yourself, since you bring to it the wisdom of your years. She’s developed a methodology aimed at crafting an authentic life called Becoming You, and she tells Reshma all about how to identify your values, prioritize them, and live a life in accordance with them.

Follow Suzy @suzywelch on Instagram.

You can follow our host Reshma Saujani @reshmasaujani on Instagram.

Let us know how you’re doing in midlife! You can submit your story to be included in this show at speakpipe.com/midlife

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Transcript

SPEAKERS

Speaker 1, Suzy Welch, Reshma Saujani

Reshma Saujani  00:24

Welcome to My So-Called Midlife. A podcast where we figure out how to stop just getting through it and start actually living it. I’m Reshma Saujani. Midlife is a great time to take stock of your values and Suzy Welch thinks it’s the best time to do it. Suzy’s an award winning NYU Stern School of Business professor, an acclaimed management researcher and the New York Times best selling author, most recently with “Becoming You” –  a proven method for crafting your authentic life and career. Becoming You is also a class she teaches at NYU. It’s a methodology that I now love that helps you answer that question, “What should I do with my life?”. Suzy says midlife is actually the perfect time to ask yourself this question, because you’re gonna bring wisdom to that answer. It’s wild because you think in midlife, your life is done, but actually it’s not. It’s just the beginning. She says, taking time to figure out your values and see how much you are or aren’t living your life in accordance with them, can really help you find your purpose. Maybe you’ve already found yours, and you’re living it every day. Amazing. I love that for you. I definitely am, and I can tell you this, “It feels good”. I know many of you mid lifers, you’re not yet and you feel stuck and unsure about how to make a change and get your life back on track. Maybe you took some time away from work to just focus on raising your kids, or maybe you’re inthe middle right now trying to figure out whether you need to leave this job and really find one that’s going to feed yoursoul. I really think that becoming you, could be the tool that you’ve been looking for. Let’s get to it. Here’s my conversation with Suzy Welch. The show is called My So-Called Midlife.

 

Suzy Welch  03:46

Yes, I know all about your show.

 

Reshma Saujani  03:47

We love to talk about midlife. I wanted to ask you, Suzy. If there were a couple words that you would use describe this period of your life, what would they be?

 

Suzy Welch  04:00

Full. Transcendent. I have just such a feeling of gratitude and plenty.

 

Reshma Saujani  04:07

That’s beautiful. We’re gonna dig into that because you’ve had this pretty amazing career. I wanted to just start by asking you a little bit about your journey. How’d you end up working as a journalist? What about the field you know that you didn’t connect with? How are you now A professor? Walk me through it.

 

Suzy Welch  04:26

It’s a crazy life. Whenever people sort of say, “Well, how’d you get to where you are? How much time have you got?”. I’ll give you the abbreviated version of it, because the twists and turns are kind of action packed movie thing. I was a good student and a good enough athlete. I went to Harvard, and I was a student of life. But a student of life with no direction.My parents were just not particularly engaged. They had other things going on. The new Bob Dylan album was out. They had other stuff to do.

 

Reshma Saujani  04:51

Very important thing.

 

Suzy Welch  04:55

I know. I was good at writing, and I believed a lot in community. I ended up at the college newspaper, which was a daily newspaper The Harvard Crimson. One day, two guys in suits walked into the newsroom, they said, “Who would like to live in Miami?”. Unbeknownst to us, because there was no Internet, there had been a strike at the Miami Herald and all the reporters had been fired. They’d gotten in the company plane, and they were going from college newsroom to college newsroom.

 

Reshma Saujani  05:28

No way.

 

Suzy Welch  05:29

Yes, way.

 

Reshma Saujani  05:30

Wow.

 

Suzy Welch  05:31

I was like, “I don’t have a job. I’ll go to Miami. I’m in”. It was 1981. Miami was beset by riots, and there was the Maryland boat lifts. It was a terrible time to be a resident of Miami school.

 

Suzy Welch  05:45

I just graduated, 21 years old. I went down to Miami. The Newsroom was filled with college reporters who were ambitious, smart and filled with stuff. I was assigned to cover crime. Now get a load of this, I had been a fine arts major in college. I’d studied Dutch art and Japanese art, and then I got to Miami. I’d start each day in the morgue with the cop who met me there, and we went over the dead bodies. Sometimes there’d be 15 dead bodies, and he’d say, “Gunshotwound to the head. Two gunshot wounds to the neck”.

 

Reshma Saujani  05:47

What year in school are you this time? How old are you?

 

Reshma Saujani  06:15

Are you at any moment like, “I gotta get out of here and go back to Cambridge?”.

 

Suzy Welch  06:28

No way. I was like, “I couldn’t believe my good luck. I’m moving front page stories every day. I had so many friends”.

 

Reshma Saujani  06:37

You’re in it.

 

Suzy Welch  06:38

I was in it. Then I was promoted to go to the Fort Lauderdale Bureau and run the crime coverage there. Fort Lauderdale was even worse in Miami when it came to crime, and I actually ended up seeing a lot more domestic violence and stuff that I still have nightmares about, honestly. In the midst of that, I reconnected with an old boyfriend from high school who was very cute. At the same time, I had a terrible boss. I did the most mature, deliberate, intentional thing you could ever do, which is I got my car and I followed the boy up north. I did.

 

Reshma Saujani  07:08

How did that work out?

 

Suzy Welch  07:09

I married him. We married each other. It’s my first husband, Eric. We got married for all the wrong reasons, but we had a lot of momentum, and we knew each other really well. To this day. he’s one of the oldest relationships in my life.

 

Reshma Saujani  07:24

You’re so friends?

 

Suzy Welch  07:24

Very good friends. Talked to him this morning. He’s the father of my children, right? I went up to Boston, and I got another job reporting. That was going along very well. It was fine. I was married. I continued reporting in Boston. It was great. Then one unbelievable day, my boss called me in and he said to me, “What do you know about business?” And I said, “Absolutely nothing”. He said, “Well, the business reporters left” and I said, “I’m not your person. I don’t know a thing about business”. He said, “Yes, you do. What’s debt?” And I said, “Oh, come on. That’s when you owe somebody money”. And he said, “What’s equity?” And I said, “I’ll have to get back to you on that”. I had no clue, but he needed a warm body. He thought, “She’ll come up to speed”. He put me in the role covering business, and I did my first couple of press conferences covering business. I thought, “Okay, this is it. For the first time in my life, I’m gonna fail spectacularly. Ihave no idea what anyone’s saying. They could be speaking Urdu”. I don’t know. I went to press conferences, and I remember a Wall Street Journal reporter asking three questions in a row. I literally thought to myself, “Is he speaking English?” No idea. I thought, “Okay. Well, here’s a juncture in my life. I could have a baby right now or maybe I’ll go backto business” Because the irony of me teaching career planning is just unreal, which is what I teach now. I said to myself one day going home on the subway, maybe I’ll learn about business. It is sort of interesting to me. I do really like the people in business, because they’re builders and they’re not mean. I like them. They’re like foreign objects to me. I think they’re fascinating. So I applied to Harvard Business School on a Lark. One of the great mysteries of humankind willalways remain, “Why they let me in, but they did”, and I went. That began the sort of phase of my life that I’m still in, which is being a person who loves business, studies business, talks and thinks about business. I went to HBS. I did very well there, and so I was offered a job at Bain – the big consulting firm. I went there for seven years, and I had four children in those seven years. I was in that moment, I was recruited to go run the Harvard Business Review, which I took that job because there was no travel. I was traveling constantly with four children under the age of six. Then I did that job, and it was going along incredibly well, except that I got a divorce in the middle, but I still carried on. Eric and I ran out of steam. He met someone else. It was all good. Life goes on. It wasn’t good at the time, I became a single mother. In that period, I was told by my boss I needed to go interview Jack Welch as he retired from GE and I went to go do that.

 

Reshma Saujani  10:03

You met the love of your life?

 

Suzy Welch  10:04

Fell in love.

 

Reshma Saujani  10:05

In that first interview did you fall in love?

 

Suzy Welch  10:07

In the first minute we fell in love.

 

Reshma Saujani  10:09

Really? That really exists?

 

Suzy Welch  10:11

I didn’t believe it. If it hadn’t happened to me, I still wouldn’t believe it.

 

Reshma Saujani  10:15

You walk in and you lock eyes, you’re like, “He’s the one”.

 

Suzy Welch  10:18

Not only that, I staggered backwards.

 

Suzy Welch  10:19

Absolutely. Get a load of this, you want to die. Because I was interviewing him, we taped that interview. I still have the tape of it. When he was still living on our anniversary every year, we would listen to the tape of our first interview. Because in the tape of our first interview, we were talking for 10 minutes. Same thing happened to him. It was a simultaneous thing. In the first 10 minutes, he says to me, “Turn that tape recorder off”. I turned it off and he said to me, “Do you have a guy?”. It was a crazy thing that happened. I got fired.

 

Reshma Saujani  10:20

Wow.

 

Reshma Saujani  10:43

It was immediately after the interview, he asked you on a date?

 

Suzy Welch  10:47

Yeah, we went out that night.

 

Reshma Saujani  10:53

You went off that night?

 

Suzy Welch  10:59

We were never apart again. Never. He asked me to marry him that night.

 

Reshma Saujani  10:59

You’re married for how many years?

 

Suzy Welch  10:59

Well, we had to wait for him to get a divorce. That was a problem. He was separated. He was fully separated. His wife was not even living in the United States. It was a separation, but that wasn’t widely known. All in, we were married 19 years.

 

Reshma Saujani  11:17

Wow. You lose your husband? You lose him during COVID?

 

Suzy Welch  11:21

Yes, I did. We had a great run together. We wrote books together. I had my built and rebuilt my career. We had a wonderful run. He helped me raise my children. He was a fantastic, the best stepfather who ever lived. He died March 1st. Before we were all there, he died at home. It was COVID, so I went up to the woods of upstate New York with my children and their spouses, and all of our dogs. I kind of thought, “This is it for me. I can’t face the world without him”. H had said to me, “Suzy, go get your life when I’m gone”. We were able to really say goodbye and plan, but nothing prepares you. Even though he had said to me, “I’m going to prepare you for this”, he couldn’t.

 

Reshma Saujani  12:07

How did he try to prepare you?

 

Suzy Welch  12:09

He prepared me very financially for everything I needed to know. He tried to talk to me about what my life would look like, and I refused to engage. He said to me, like, “Things you’re going to regret, not talking to me about this”. I said to him, “I refuse to do this”. He said to me, “Are you going to go back? We had a home together”, because he hated the cold weather. We had a home together in Palm Beach, Florida. He said, “Are you going to keep the Palm Beach House?”. I was like, “I don’t want to talk about this”. He said, “Look, I think you’re going to sell it. Let me sell it for you, because I’ll get a better deal for you”. I said, “Jack, I’m not doing this”. He was trying to prepare me in every possible way, because he said, “I had a spectacular life. How could I regret a minute of it?”. He was very clear eyed, but then towards the end, he was very sick. Our attention turned not to planning, but just to surviving.

 

Reshma Saujani  13:03

Any advice, Suzy because there’s a lot of people in our community that lost spouses, and these conversations are really hard to have. Looking back now, any advice that you would give?

 

Suzy Welch  21:17

When we got the word that we had no other options, that euphemism, they put us on a clock. I didn’t know what to do. Did I keep on trying to live normally, or did I just stop everything and attend to him? His kind of desire would be that we just continued to pretend everything was normal until the end. I wrote my bosses at NBC and I said, we’ve gotten thenews that we never wanted to get, I’ll see you on the other side. They were unbelievable. My everlasting love and loyaltyto these people, because they were like, “Let us know what we can do. We will see you when you get back”.  I would say,if you are trying to make the decision about trying to live normally or just giving into what was happening, and making yourself fully 100% available through the latter, I don’t regret. There were long days where I did a lot of nothing. I had a little crafts cart because Jack was just laying in bed. I can’t stand it with you doing nothing. Do something, play solitaire.I got a little crafts cart, and I would like do crafts next to him while he was laying in bed, because he couldn’t do much and. I would say, those moments were precious. I wouldn’t trade them for anything.

 

Reshma Saujani  22:17

He passes, then what?

 

Suzy Welch  22:19

Went to the woods. Hit up in the woods. COVID was going on so there wasn’t much going on anyway. But then COVID ended, all my kids went back to their lives. I was up there in the woods with my dogs. You can only walk your dog so many hours a day. I went to the max. My dog happy was a Great Pyrenees, that dog is bred to be walking for like 15 hours […]. Even she was like.

 

Speaker 1  22:46

Suzy, enough.

 

Suzy Welch  22:48

I said, “Let’s go for a walk”. And he’s gonna be side eye. In the middle of that, I went back to the today show where I hadbeen working. I liked being back on set and I remember thinking, “Oh, I’ve got to work. I have to work”. Do I want to be back on TV? I’m not so sure. I’m not sure this is what I want to be doing. At that point, I had an idea for this class, becoming you, that I wanted to teach someday. A friend wrote me and said he was teaching at Stern. He was writing me about something else entirely. I thought, “Maybe this is something I can do”. I went to go see the dean of Stern, who I knew socially. I said, “Look, I have a class”, that I think I could teach. I wish I had taken it when I was younger, because Ihad the most accidental life a person could have. I have a construct that I think will save people a lot of boneheaded wrong turns and detours. I have this idea. It’s called Becoming You. I walked him through the methodology of becoming you because it wasn’t methodology. I had been developing it since I had started working.

 

Reshma Saujani  23:55

Can you tell us what it is, the methodology?

 

Suzy Welch  23:55

Yes, with joy. I will tell you about it. He said, “Yes”, then I started teaching. I became a full professor, and the rest is history in my little life. Becoming You is a methodology that helps you answer the question, “What should I do with my life?”. It helps you in the moment, because it’s designed to help you have an immediate answer. But it’s also a lifelong tool that you can pull out anytime. I’ve been teaching it for so long now that I’ve had students who have used it when they were in class, then I’ve had students who have come back four years later and say, “Okay, now I’m really ready to use it”. What it does is, it’s based on the premise that your purpose (which is where I’d like everyone to be), because I’m in mine, and it feels damn great.

 

Reshma Saujani  24:23

I’m in mine, and it feels great.

 

Suzy Welch  24:25

Yes, so your purpose lies at the intersection of your deeply held values, your aptitudes is you’re uniquely good at and your economically viable interests. You have to excavate all that data, and then your purpose will emerge, because it lies at the intersection. Well, here’s the problem. The problem is no one knows what their values are. In fact, most peopledon’t even know what values are. Very few people know what their aptitudes are, because how could you it takesyour whole life to learn what your aptitudes are, unless you test for them. Finally, economically viable interest. Some people’saperture is really small, and they don’t know what’s out there in the world for them to do. This is a true methodology that uses a bunch of exercises and activities to excavate your values. You come out of it with a list of your values like you’ve never had before in your life. It’s very exciting people. The scales fall from their eyes. It’s wonderful experiences  watch. Then we do a lot of testing to find out your aptitudes, there’s four big tests. Then we have two exercises where you figure out your economically viable interest. There’s a process at the end. When I teach it at NYU orwhen I teach it in one of my workshops on the NYU campus, that’s open enrollment. At the end of it, you tell the story of your life going forward for the next 40 years. Once you know your purpose, here’s what it’s going to look like when it unfolds. There’s usually never a dry eye in the house. It’s a very emotional experience to imagine what your life would look like if it was your purpose.

 

Reshma Saujani  25:45

Can I ask you a question? Values. It’s so interesting, because I really think the moment that we’re in right now in our country is a real question about, what are our values? Why do you think people don’t spend enough time really discovering what it is?

 

Suzy Welch  26:04

I given a lot of thought to that. In the middle of this, I failed to mention. I went back and got my PhD in this stuff. Values expression is my area of research focus and of study so I have thought a lot about why people don’t talk about values with any kind of clearly, clarity or specificity. A couple of reasons. Number one, nowhere along the way in our education are we taught what values are. It’s just a vague term. You can be taught what the volume of a cylinder is, but you’re not going to be taught in high school or college what values are. At the same time, there’s this dynamic where the term values has been hijacked by politics – Progressive Values, Christian Values, Conservative Values, Family Values, so it’s become like a third rail.

 

Reshma Saujani  26:49

It feels like when someone asks you, “What the question are? You’re like, “I believe in equality. I believe in diversity”.

 

Suzy Welch  26:49

That’s right. People don’t know what values are, and then they’ve let the zeitgeist define values. You’re afraid if you even talk about your values in many cases. If you pop your head up, you’re going to get slammed down.

 

Reshma Saujani  27:01

Can you give me a couple of examples of what values are? Just for our listeners?

 

Suzy Welch  27:05

Absolutely. Values are the deeply held beliefs, desires, motivations that galvanize our actions and decisions. There’s a couple of things you need to know about values. Number one, you have a set of values, but you may not be living them. There’s felt values and there’s expressed values. Let’s not talk about what the values are. Let’s just talk about one that people never talk people. When you ask people what their values are, they typically say “Family”, some version of family and some version of financial security, then they name a virtue like equality or honesty. These are virtues. They’re not values. Okay? Values are deeply held beliefs and motivations that drive our actions and behaviors. For instance, here’s a value that that’s not out there in the popular lexicon, it is of everybody who studies becoming you. Let’s take this valu that I call scope. Scope is a reflection of how big or small you want your life to be. Some people want a big, exciting life filled with people and experiences, learning, and even they’ll take the chaos. They want to be Bianca Jaggeron a White Stallion going into studio 54. When they see the most interesting man in the world, those ads are like, “I want to be the most interesting man in the world”. At the other end of that, continuum, there’s lower scope. Lower scope is like on Tiktok. There’s a whole vertical for it, and it sounds like this, “I like this little life”. It’s like people who have twee Brooklyn lives, no shade. My children have twee Brooklyn lives. Life is predictable.

 

Reshma Saujani  28:37

You wake up. You cut your cup of coffee. You send your kids to school. You go to a job. You come home. You make dinner. You want that life.

 

Suzy Welch  28:44

That’s right. You would trade a little bit of routine and maybe even boredom to know what’s going on.

 

Reshma Saujani  28:52

For stability.

 

Suzy Welch  28:53

For stability, control, and steadiness.

 

Reshma Saujani  28:56

Scope is a big one.

 

Suzy Welch  28:59

Yeah. It’s one of the 15. I like them all equally, they’re like my children.

 

Reshma Saujani  29:03

You can’t choose between your children, but it’s like a pretty defining one. I feel like, as you talk about it.

 

Suzy Welch  29:09

Yeah. Some of the other values, if you think about it. There is a value we call family centrism. That’s how much you want family to be the organizing principle of your life. But there’s a value for affluence, how much you want. Wealth to be the organizing principle of your life. There’s achievement, which is seen success.

 

Reshma Saujani  29:27

What if I want all of the value?

 

Reshma Saujani  29:29

No way.

 

Suzy Welch  29:29

Yes, that’s a problem. Look, here’s a value that’s huge with Gen Z. I actually gave it a Greek name, because it makes people so freaking hysterical that I have to sort of tried to take some of the noise out from it. The name of the value in my lexicon is eudaimonia. It means flourishing in Greek. It’s the value of self care, leisure, pleasure, sex. It’s stuff that makes you feel good. That’s Eudaimonia. Seventy-five percent of my students have it as their number one value.

 

Suzy Welch  29:29

Yeah, they’re 20 something. Look, their number two value is typically affluence. They come to me after they get their values back. We have a test called the Values Bridge, which anyone can take. They take a test called the values bridge, and it ranks your values from one to fifteen. They get their values bridge results, and they say, “Professor Welch, I’ve got eudaimonia at number one. Affluence at number two, and achievement on number three. Is this a problem?” I say to them, “Where’s your work centrism?”. Work centrism is the value of how much you actually like working. I have work centrism really high. I love working. I love it. I bored on the weekends, I want to work. It’s high value for me. I know it makes me sound a little, but that’s my value. I will not judge your values if you don’t judge mine. Sometimes, work centrism is down at number 13 for my students.

 

Reshma Saujani  30:56

Do you think if you were giving this class to a bunch of mid lifers it would look different?

 

Suzy Welch  31:00

I have given this class to people at every age.

 

Reshma Saujani  31:02

Tell me what happens when you give it to this class, between 40s and 50s.

 

Suzy Welch  31:06

Very typically, Eudaimonia is lower. I teach in the Executive MBA Program, and as I say, I teach becoming you in the wild as we call it, people who are not enrolled at NYU. The oldest person who’s taken the values bridge and taken becoming you is 78 years old.

 

Reshma Saujani  31:07

Wow.

 

Suzy Welch  31:07

It’s interesting. I can’t wait. I will soon have the data of all the values by age. We’re gathering that data right now. We are just very proud that we just have gotten a data scientist to help us with this. But I can tell you anecdotally that Eudaimonia is very high in younger people. I think that actually going forward, it will stay high because the pandemic raised a lot of questions about the meaning of work in our lives. There’s a whole generation that’s saying, “Wait a minute, we found out work doesn’t have to be central. I kind of like that”. Here’s the thing, is that older people tend to understand that every value has a trade off? Younger people want to have it all at the same time. I was just like that. I can’t in any way hold it against them. One of the most common questions I get, I have a wonderful community of working mothers who are very interested in the stuff that I do, because they are balancing and juggling values every single day of their lives. I often hear from working moms saying, “Look, I have a very high value of achievement. I have avery high value of work centrism. I love my work. It gives me meeting”. Some of them have a very high value of what we call non-city, which is helping others, not for oneself. I also have a high value of family centrism. I love my children. I want to be with them.

 

Reshma Saujani  32:38

It sounds like me.

 

Suzy Welch  32:39

Okay. Here’s my answer, you’ve got two choices and two choices only. Number one, you prioritize some values over the other. You prioritize them. You rank order them. You force the values bridge results into your own shape. You say, “Look, I’m going to put family centrism first for these 10 years and so forth, and I’m going to put the others lower”.

 

Reshma Saujani  33:00

To send a duck it causes, you create a diversified portfolio. You’re going to give a number to each and a percentage time.

 

Suzy Welch  33:06

Yes., you are. Then you stop litigating it every day in your head. You say, “Okay, I’ve done this. I’m going to live with it. I may not like it most days, but I made these choices, and I’m living with them”. I did that because I had achievement and work centrism much higher than family centrism. What I did is I rank ordered families. I kept family centrism low, and I kept working achievement high. I went to my four children, and I said, “One day, you’re going to grow up and be gone, but I’m still going to be here”, that’s the reason I’m going to keep working. I was a single mother at the time, and I said that I’m not giving up my career. I love you, but for these years of my life, I love you, my job comes first.

 

Reshma Saujani  33:44

Has it changed over time?

 

Suzy Welch  33:46

No.

 

Reshma Saujani  33:47

That’s what I think is interesting […]. As you’re talking, I’m just thinking I feel for a lot of people in midlife. Part of what happens for women, is this sense of like, “Do I need to reorder it?” Because I’ve had it this way, and I’m not happy. I know we’re going to right and good. That’s your favorite point.

 

Suzy Welch  34:07

No, I want to tell you this. They’re not reordering them. Your values are your values, and they’re pretty stable. What you’re doing is you’re allowing yourself to express them more. You’ve always had these values so sometimes in life, whatyou’re saying is, “I have been repressing my value of achievement for five years. I have been repressing my value of  agency (that’s self determination for seven years)”. What happens in midlife is you’re reordering what’s going on, not how much the value matters to you or not. It’s about how much permission you’re giving yourself to live it.

 

Reshma Saujani  34:33

I love that, because I’ve always had a value of pleasure. Who doesn’t? Right?

 

Suzy Welch  34:50

It’s not my top thing, but I get it.

 

Reshma Saujani  34:52

No, it’s not my top thing, but it’s something that I’ll be honest, Suzy. When I watch my boys play, I’m like, “Ah, I want to be able to play”. When I play tennis clinic and I have fun, and I get the thing. I’m like, “Ah”. It is in me to want that, but it is where you’re saying, where does it sit on the list of priorities? How I’m prioritizing that? At what moments in my life? Do I feel more freedom to do that?

 

Suzy Welch  35:20

Yeah. One of the cool things about the values bridge that I love so much is that not only does it give you a rank ordering of your values. It tells you which ones are in conflict and how much. Actually get a score that says these values are in conflict and this is the pain point for you. It’s like 11 out of this scale. The other thing it tells you is, “Okay, we now know your values. Here’s how much you’re living them in comparison, and you get this variance score”. It’s a fascinating thing, because you already know in your gut. You know how far you’re living from your authentic life. But to see it quantified is quite the moment. I think the earlier in our lives even before midlife, the earlier we know that, disconnect usthe better.

 

Reshma Saujani  41:38

I want to talk a little bit about spirituality. But, I want to start by asking you, tell me about Suzy the Swan?

 

Suzy Welch  41:56

Okay. After Jack died, I was trying to figure out who I was as a single person. I’d never been single my whole life long. I have a place right outside of New York in the countryside, old farmhouse that I go to to hear myself think in the weekends to write and so forth. It has a little pond on it. A year after Jack died, a little bit longer than that, I was walking my dogs around the pond (a big dog person), and there was this single swan on the pond. I was like, “Mate for life swans are always in pairs”. I was very curious. I didn’t know what the swan was doing there. I stared at her, and she stared back at me. One thing led to another, she stayed. I did this wacky thing. I named her after myself. I was like, “It’s Suzy. Suzy the Swan”. I did it partially, sort of prank my children who would freak out when they were visiting me. I would say, “Look, there’s Suzy the Swan”. They say, “Mom, it’s really?”.

 

Reshma Saujani  43:00

They thought you’re losing it.

 

Suzy Welch  43:03

But she became so familiar with me and my dogs that every single time we walked around the pond, she would come right out and greet us. She would swim around the pond as we walked around the pond. I grew over identified with her, and I really loved her. Felt like, “Wow, she’s taking on the world by herself”. In fact, a friend was visiting and she saw the single swan on my pond. She said, “Did you place that Swan there?”, And I said, “No, God did”. I really felt that way. I felt like this was God’s message to me, “You can do this”. I felt truly God was speaking to me through the swan. Take it or leave it. One day, I woke up and I went down, almost immediately I could sense she was gone. She had been with me for a few years at that point. I started frantically running around the pond saying, “Suzy”. I looked at all her favorite places. I was screaming at the dogs in really quite a mental state. Where is she? Helped me find Suzy. If you had a videotape of this, you would have seen how committed. I was so worried about her. I ran into the house after she was clearly not there. I ran to ChatGPT and I typed in frantically, “There’s been a swan who’s always lived on my pond, and she’s gone. Where has she gone? When will she be back?”. It was sad. ChatGPT, sort of pulsed and then it came back it said, “Swans are very committed to where they are. It’s very unusual for swan to be alone in the first place. Swans will leave when they feel threatened by some kind of animal or if there have been loud noises”. I thought, “Oh, my god”. Of course, it was the fourth of July the night before, and there had been huge fireworks not far from my house in town. She must have been terrified, and she left. This started this period of mourning for me, waiting for Suzy to come back. I was only there every weekend, but she never did come back. I finally had to reckon with the fact that she was gone. It made me ask a lot of questions about whether the time had come for me to redefine myself away from being a widow.

 

Reshma Saujani  45:09

I’m a big animal person too, and I lost my soul dog about a year ago.

 

Suzy Welch  45:13

Oh, I’m sorry.

 

Reshma Saujani  45:15

I know you can appreciate, empathize with that. I think, that’s right. I feel like animals are also attuned, especially when they’re there for a purpose. I think they know when to leave you, and it’s often like a sign. It’s time for us to also move on.

 

Suzy Welch  45:33

I think I got to the point where one day I thought, “I’m happy she’s gone. I’m happy she went to her new life, because I’mgoing to take that as a sign that it’s okay”. I’ll always be a widow, but I had over identified with my widowhood. I think it was time, maybe even overdue time for me to stop my very proactive mourning.

 

Reshma Saujani  46:00

Have you already or no?

 

Suzy Welch  46:02

I think about my husband every single day and I miss him every day, but I am no longer kind of in the state of active mourning. It’s been more than five years. I miss him and I think about him. Sometimes I think to myself, “What a rip off that he’s gone. I got screwed. I miss him so much”. A lot of times I get really mad. I really need his help right now. I reallycould use his help on this. The holidays are hard. It was truly the center of my identity for the first three years. Then you have a moment where you have to say, “I choose to live. He would have wanted me to live”.

 

Reshma Saujani  46:40

Wanted you to. How has your faith and spirituality helped you?

 

Suzy Welch  46:44

Well, I’m a faithful person. I’m a Christian. I think that I don’t know any life without it. When Jack was dying, my faith was unbelievably present for me. When he died, it didn’t swoop. I sort of conceptualized and understood everything through my faith anyway. In general, I find it to be quite a personal thing and as a professor, I’m very limited in what I can say about it. Sometimes when my students are feeling so lost and filled with sort of a lack of purpose, I wish that I could speak to them about it more candidly.

 

Reshma Saujani  47:26

I’m a woman of faith. I think we’re in a moment where God could really give people a hand.

 

Suzy Welch  47:36

No, he would love to. You have to sort of extend your hand too. I agree with you. One of the values on the values bridge test is what we call Cosmos, which is your faith. I was scared of including faith in my values inventory, because I thought, “Oh, it’s been so politicized”. Then in all the focus groups, people said, “Where’s faith? My faith is my number one value”. It’s interesting, I typically see it skew as your top value or your last value for people whom their faith is loomsimportant in their life. It’s number one.

 

Reshma Saujani  48:12

Does it increase in midlife? Or there’s no correlation?

 

Suzy Welch  48:17

You can go express your value. I think it might be in you, and then you let yourself explore it in midlife and express it. When you’re young, it’s very hard to be faithful, because unless you’re in a faith community, there’s not a lot of love for your faith. I remember when I was young even when I was in college, I would talk about my faith or I would go to church on Sundays. It would be people like, “What is with her?”. Here up in the northeast, it’s different in different parts of the country.

 

Reshma Saujani  48:46

I want to ask you one last thing. Tell me what scarphoria is by saying it right. I loved you talking about this.

 

Suzy Welch  48:53

I love making up words. Scarphoria is an important word for the becoming you process. Scarphoria is that moment where you’re scared but you’re euphoric, okay? To me, that’s where growth occurs. Growth does not occur in your comfort zone. If only, wouldn’t it be marvelous if we all grew when we were comfy in our warm bath. But scarphoriahappens. Growth happens when we put ourselves out there. The scary part is you’re definitely pushing your limits. And the euphoria part, if it happens, how great would it be? I’ve just spent five years in scarphoria. I started a whole new career. I started teaching. I remember the first day I walked in becoming you, in a classroom at NYU thinking to myself, “What in the world made you think you could do this? I was scared, but I was giddy with the hopefulness of what it could possibly be”. Along the way, I’ve met some amazing people. I’ve been involved in deeply in my students lives. Just so many things that happened but it was because I stepped into my fear.

 

Reshma Saujani  49:58

To end, for mid lifers who have no idea what we’re talking about, because that’s what I call, living at the edge of your ability. Success like athletes, always live at that ability, the edge of their ability.

 

Suzy Welch  50:00

They have to.

 

Reshma Saujani  50:07

They have to. When I’m too comfortable, I make myself do something that makes me feel that way again. If you’ve never felt that way before, what’s your advice to people of how to get there, what to do?

 

Suzy Welch  50:33

I think, don’t go for a big swing. Just try a little tiny thing that feels a little bit scary. If you fail, you fail and you realize you’re not going to die.

 

Reshma Saujani  50:45

That’s my sweatshirt. Celebrate failure.

 

Reshma Saujani  50:47

Well, this is such a great conversation. I really appreciate all of what you’ve taught us today. I’m going to really be thinking going back to your methodology and really looking on my values, because I think it’s a really important thing toassess in midlife.

 

Suzy Welch  50:47

Yes, that’s right. Sometimes I’ll be asked, “What was your biggest failure?”, I was like, “How much time do you have?”. I live at the edge all the time, because when the first time I got fired which is after I met Jack, I thought it was going to b the end of my life, but it was the beginning. Once you’ve had that experience, you understand that the nothing goes wrong when you faill. People just like you better, because you’re more human. I’d say try something small that you mightfail at and just see what happens. Don’t go for the big swing first, because that’s hard.

 

Suzy Welch  51:44

I agree with you 100%. I think midlife is maybe the best time to start assessing it, because you bring to it the wisdom of your years.

 

Reshma Saujani  51:51

That’s right. Thank you so much, Suzy for this wonderful conversation.

 

Suzy Welch  51:55

My pleasure.

 

Reshma Saujani  52:03

Thank you so much Suzy for talking with me today. Her latest book is called “Becoming You” – the proven method for crafting your authentic life and career. One last thing, thank you so much for listening to My So Called Midlife. If you haven’t subscribed to Lemonada Premium yet, now’s the perfect time. Because guess what? You can listen completely ad free. Plus you’ll unlock exclusive bonus content, like me and Dr. Sharon Malone talking about what drives healthcare disparities in the US that you won’t hear anywhere else. Just tap that subscribe button on Apple podcast or head to lemonadapremium.com, to subscribe on any other app. That’s lemonadapremium.com. Don’t miss out. Thanks, and we’llbe back next week.

 

Reshma Saujani  52:48

I’m your host. Reshma Saujani. Our associate producer is Isara Acevez. Our senior producer is Chrissy Pease. This series is sound designed by Ivan Kurayev. Ivan also composed our theme music and performed it with Ryan Jewell and Karen Waltuck. Our VP of new content is Rachel Neel. Special thanks to our development team, Hoja Lopez, Jamela ZarhaWilliams, and Alex McOwen. Executive Producers include me, Reshma Saujani, Stephanie Wittels Wachs and Jessica Cordova Kramer. Series consulting and production support from Katie Cordova. Help others find our show by leaving a rating and writing a review and let us know how you’re doing in midlife. You can submit your story to be included in this show at speakpipe.com/midlife. Follow My So-Called Midlife wherever you get your podcasts, or listen ad free on Amazon music with your prime membership. Thanks so much for listening. See you next week. Bye.