Are you constantly asking yourself, "What should I do with my life?" If so, you're not alone. This profound, often bewildering question is at the heart of Suzy Welch's "Becoming You," a methodology she teaches at NYU Stern School of Business and has distilled into a powerful book and podcast. Far from being a woo-woo self-help guide, Becoming You offers a data-driven, practical roadmap to self-discovery and purpose identification, aiming to help you find the life you were truly born to live.
The Core of Your Purpose: Values, Aptitudes, and Interests
At its essence, the Becoming You methodology posits that your purpose, or what Welch calls your Area of Transcendence, resides at the dynamic intersection of three fundamental spheres: what you want to do, what you can do, and what you should do.
What You Want to Do: Your Values These are your deeply held beliefs, desires, and motivations - the guiding tenets of your life. Surprisingly, only about 7% of the general population can explicitly identify their values beyond generic concepts like family, financial security, and love. To uncover these, Becoming You utilizes the Welch-Bristol Values Inventory, an academic tool derived from research, which features 15 human values. Examples include:
Work Centrism: How important work is as an organizing principle in your life.
Family Centrism: How much family is the organizing principle of your life.
Beholderism (Aesthetics): How important things look to you – your home, possessions, even yourself.
Scope: The desire for a big, exciting life with new experiences and people, embracing chaos.
Radius: The desire to make systemic change in the world, leaving a large footprint.
Voice: Creative self-expression and the desire for the world to see your authentic self.
Achievement: The desire for visible success and accomplishments.
Udonomia: A proclivity for well-being, fun, and pleasure.
The process involves an excavation through exercises like the Values Bridge assessment and thought experiments like "Whose Life Do You Want Anyway?" and "What Would Make You Cry at Your 85th Birthday?". This deep dive helps individuals understand their true motivations and the potential conflicts between them.
What You Can Do: Your Aptitudes These are your innate, hardwired strengths - "what you're wired to be good at in your brain" - distinct from learned skills or expertise. Aptitudes encompass both intellectual (cognitive) and emotional (personality) wiring. Many people go through life unaware of their true aptitudes.
The methodology employs various tests and tools to uncover these:
US Science: Identifies cognitive aptitudes such as being a generalist versus a specialist, a brainstormer versus an idea contributor, or a sequential thinker versus a process supporter.
Enneagram: An ancient, scientifically validated personality type indicator that helps understand how your personality operates under different conditions (healthy, stressed, destructive).
PI 360 / LMAP: Tools that provide anonymous feedback on how the world experiences you in terms of personal relationships, ideas, and execution, revealing your self-awareness score.
Career Traits Compass: A tool Welch developed to identify key leadership-related personality traits grouped into four "coordinates":
Nerve: Stamina, candor (radical honesty), and "edge" (ability to make decisive yes/no decisions).
Soundness: Positive energy, self-awareness, accountability, and resilience (ability to bounce back, often involving forgiveness).
Elasticity: Adaptability to new tasks and the ability to form "irregular relationships" with diverse people.
Wonderment: Curiosity and "currency" (staying up-to-date on trends and events).
Knowing your aptitudes is crucial for making informed career decisions and avoiding roles that inherently conflict with your natural wiring.
What You Should Do: Your Economically Viable Interests (EVIs) This sphere focuses on work that intellectually or emotionally calls you, and can realistically provide financial stability. Many people have a limited view of career possibilities, often only aware of a handful of jobs, typically those of their parents. The Becoming You method aims to open your aperture to the vast economic landscape, including 135 industries, megatrends, and diverse company structures (non-profit/for-profit, large/small, entrepreneurial pursuits). This helps align your passions with practical opportunities.
Applying Lessons in the Modern Day: Business & Entrepreneurship
"Becoming You" offers profound insights for today's dynamic professional landscape:
Pivoting and Reinvention: In an age of rapid change, the ability to pivot is paramount. Dan Roth's journey from traditional journalism to leading LinkedIn News exemplifies this. His pivot was not clean, involving pay cuts, impostor syndrome, and an identity crisis, but it ultimately led to his Area of Transcendence. The lesson: sometimes you have to jump before you're pushed, recognizing that industries go down together and embracing discomfort for long-term growth. Continuous learning and adaptability are key, as 60% of job skills are expected to change in the next three years.
Entrepreneurial Drive: Karissa Bodnar, CEO of Thrive Causemetics, illustrates how deeply held values can drive entrepreneurial success. Her commitment to non-civvy (giving back) and radius (making a big impact) was fundamental to her business model from day one, even at the cost of higher profits. Her story also highlights overcoming impostor syndrome and refining leadership skills by playing to your strengths and being a student of the game.
Effective Leadership: The Career Traits Compass provides a framework for understanding and developing vital leadership qualities. Leaders must possess Nerve to make tough decisions and give candid feedback, Soundness to maintain positive energy and resilience in the face of setbacks, Elasticity to adapt to constant change and embrace diverse relationships, and Wonderment to fuel curiosity and stay current. Self-awareness, gleaned from feedback tools like PI 360, is critical for leaders to understand how they are truly perceived.
Navigating Obstacles: The methodology addresses the "Four Horsemen of Values Destruction" - Expectations, Expediency, Events, and Economic Security - which frequently derail individuals from their authentic path. Whether it's societal pressure, choosing the easier path, reacting to life changes, or prioritizing money above all else, these horsemen can lead to deep unhappiness and a feeling of quiet desperation. The process helps individuals identify and consciously fight against these forces. Molly's struggle with job insecurity in a startup environment, despite her high scope value, demonstrates how purpose can come with complications, and the need to fight for your values even when it's scary.
Becoming You in Interpersonal Relationships
The insights from Becoming You extend far beyond career, offering a powerful lens for understanding and enhancing personal connections:
Understanding Others Through Values and Aptitudes: One of the most profound benefits of understanding your own values and aptitudes is gaining compassionate awareness of others. When you recognize that someone has different values (e.g., low work centrism vs. high) or different cognitive wiring (e.g., generalist vs. specialist), it helps depersonalize conflicts and fosters empathy. This language of understanding can eliminate much friction in relationships.
Family Dynamics and Expectations: The methodology sheds light on how familial and societal expectations can obscure one's true self. Suzy's own children, like Sophia, navigated these pressures, struggling to define their aptitudes and interests independently from their parents' strong opinions. Sophia's journey involved realizing her addiction to TV was actually a deep interest in storytelling and production, a path her parents initially disapproved of but eventually came to support. Kristen's experience of sublimating her true values to meet the expectations of being a good girl from the South and prioritizing her family's survival, even when it led to dissatisfaction, is another powerful example. The process helps individuals separate their own values from those imposed by loved ones.
Marriage and Partnership: Welch emphasizes that successful marriages are built on a foundation of shared values, or at least a deep respect and explicit understanding of differing ones. Misaligned values, such as varying levels of Eudaimonia (desire for fun and pleasure), can be a divorce value if not addressed. Welch and her late husband, Jack, famously treated their marriage as a separate entity, making decisions in service of the marriage itself. The program aims to offer a Becoming Us experience for couples to build this shared understanding.
Friendship and Community: Beyond family and romantic partners, Becoming You underscores the importance of friends and community. Karissa Bodnar highlights the need for friends outside of work. Welch even envisioned a Becoming Friends class, emphasizing that friends are tiles in the mosaic of your life, each contributing to a beautiful whole.
The Ongoing Journey of Becoming You
Becoming You is not a quick fix or a one-time event. It is an ongoing, often emotional process that can lead to tears as individuals confront the gap between the life that you are living and the life that you want and should be living. It can lead to a complete blow up reinvention, like Tachi leaving banking to pursue fashion, or a subtle tweak that redefines one's perspective, like Anna finding purpose in her existing CEO role by shifting her mindset around guilt.
Ultimately, "Becoming You" is about gaining clarity and living by design, not by default. It empowers individuals to understand themselves quantitatively and qualitatively, providing a language to articulate their inner world and navigate the messy, beautiful reality of life. As Suzy Welch puts it, the goal is to "figure out who you are standing still so that when you start running again... you know which direction to go" and to embrace your Joanie Baby, Joan of Arc life, fearlessly proclaiming, "I was born to do this". The journey of "Becoming You" is a lifelong commitment to authentic self-expression and purposeful living.
1 Note: As an Amazon Associate, we may earn a commission from qualifying purchases.