Suzy Welch shares the step-by-step methodology for finding the career (and life) that fits who you really are.
Here’s a big question: Are you happy at work? In other words, do you wake up feeling energized and excited to do what you do?
Maybe you don’t loathe your job — but perhaps there’s just a little itch, a quiet voice saying: Isn’t there something more? Something more fulfilling, more purposeful… something that lights you up and pays the bills? That’s not too much to ask, right?
On the HerMoney Podcast this week, Jean Chatzky is joined by Suzy Welch, who has spent the past 15 years helping people figure out what the heck they should actually be doing with their lives. In her new book: “BECOMING YOU: The Proven Method for Crafting Your Authentic Life and Career,” she shares how you can identify the perfect career for you, based on your values, aptitudes, and interests.
Why We Don’t Know Our Values
Jean Chatzky: Why don’t we know our values? If you live in your body, if you listen to your brain, if you go through life day to day, you would think that at the very least, you know what’s important to you.
Suzy Welch: Sometimes we know our values, Jean, but we don’t live them. We don’t live our values because we think the world expects us to live differently, so expectations get in the way of people living their values. You may sense them, but you may suppress them because of expectations. The second one is events. Sometimes life’s events take us away from our values. There’s expedience. A lot of times living by our values is damn hard. And we take the easier route because if we followed and lived our values, we’d get in a fight with someone we love.
And then finally, the last E is economic security. Humans will act irrationally all the time when it comes to money, and they’ll just do what makes the most financial sense, whether or not it’s aligned with their values. We’ll live in a house we don’t want to live in. We’ll take a job we don’t want to stay in. We will do all sorts of things for the money. And at the end of the day, we think the money didn’t matter that much.
Find Out What You’re Really Good At
Jean Chatzky: Once you learn what your values are, how do you figure out how to apply them?
Suzy Welch: The next step is to figure out what your aptitudes are. Your aptitudes are your inborn cognitive proclivities and your emotional proclivities. And the Becoming You process is to identify where you are on the eight big cognitive aptitude continuums. Whether you’re a generalist or a specialist, this really matters about whether or not you’re happy in your job. Because if you’re a person who’s a generalist and you’re in a specialist job, you’re in misery, and vice versa.
For example, there’s a cognitive continuum about idea generation, or how many ideas we come up with quickly. And some people are slow burn and they’re better at shepherding other people’s ideas, and they’re good at processing ideas, and other people are just fonts of ideas. One is not better or worse than the other, but they’re better or worse for certain jobs, and you’ve gotta know which one you are.
It’s Never Too Late To Begin Again
Jean Chatzky: Retirement is a time when you stop caring as much about what other people think. So talk to this last third, this last half, the, whatever we want to call it, of life.
Suzy Welch: I had a wonderful woman who was in one of my Becoming You workshops who was exactly in that place, and she said, I’m here because the world is my oyster. I want to know my values, and I want to know my aptitude so I can eat the most oysters. And that is the beautiful thing is you are uniquely positioned to figure out what your purpose is because you’re free on many levels, and it can be the best period of your life.
I am doing that. My whole chapter now is to help other people find their purpose. That’s my purpose. And I have no more expectations on me. My kids are grown. I’m a widow. I am in a place where I understand what it feels like to be able to choose which road you take. And that is where many people who are in retirement find themselves. The beauty of this is that they can do what they probably can do with more freedom than when they were 20 or 30. So it’s a marvelous tool for people at this phase in their lives.
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