The Liz Moody Podcast - How To Figure Out Your Dream Career (And Actually Get It!)

Episode Date: March 19, 2025

Do you know what your values are? Or why they even matter? Author, public speaker, and business advisor Suzy Welch is an expert in living authentically. It starts with identifying your values, which may be very different than you think they are. But once you identify your values, you can start living in accordance with them.  Suzy Welch has developed tools to help you make decisions and find your purpose, from the 10-10-10 decision making method to the Becoming You methodology. We’ll learn how these tools can help you make decisions about everything from your career to your personal goals. 0:34 Should You Like Your Work? 6:02 Identifying Your Values 11:30 When You Don’t Express Your Values 15:05 When to Compromise? 22:03 10-10-10 29:13 When Values Conflict with Money 35:40 Careers You Haven’t Heard Of 40:35 Skill Churn 46:01 Should You Leave Your Job? 50:30 Calculating Competitive Jobs 54:10 Getting an Interview 1:03:13 The Enneagram Find your enneagram with The Enneagram Institute and Upbuild. Find your aptitudes with YouScience. For more from Suzy, you can listen to her podcast Becoming You With Suzy Welch including her interview with Liz called Are We Ever Really Real? A Podcast About The Happiness Value, With Special Guest Liz Moody, pre order her new book Becoming You: The Proven Method for Crafting Your Authentic Life and Career, and connect with her on social media all through this link. Ready to uplevel every part of your life? Order Liz’s book 100 Ways to Change Your Life: The Science of Leveling Up Health, Happiness, Relationships & Success now!  To join The Liz Moody Podcast Club Facebook group, go to www.facebook.com/groups/thelizmoodypodcast. Connect with Liz on Instagram @lizmoody or online at www.lizmoody.com. Subscribe to the substack by visiting https://lizmoody.substack.com/welcome. This episode is sponsored by: Seed: go to seed.com/lizmoody and use code LIZMOODY for 25% off your first month. LMNT: go to DrinkLMNT.com/LizMoody to get a free LMNT sample pack with any order. The Liz Moody Podcast cover art by Zack. The Liz Moody Podcast music by Alex Ruimy. Formerly the Healthier Together Podcast.  This podcast and website represents the opinions of Liz Moody and her guests to the show. The content here should not be taken as medical advice. The content here is for information purposes only, and because each person is so unique, please consult your healthcare professional for any medical questions. The Liz Moody Podcast Episode 313. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Susie, welcome to the podcast. What do you think is the number one mistake that people make when trying to identify and pursue their dream career? Once you see all the data and you know your values, the decision makes itself. What if we're deciding whether or not we want to start our own business? So first of all, are we interested in entrepreneurial life? And then second of all, is the business idea worth pursuing? Your personality can decide whether or not you're going to the right career or not. What jobs do you think are specifically going to be needed if AI is doing all these jobs within the world of AI? People between 20 and 40 saw their parents work very, very, very hard and not going to pay off for it. This feels like a good opportunity for you to share your very famous decision-making technique. Hello, friends, and welcome back to the Liz Moody podcast.

If you want a career that you love, if you want to be excited to go to work every day, if you want to be paid what you are worth, I have got an amazing episode for you. Or even if you just want a career that feels safe that's AI-proof, we are going to get into that. too. Susie Welch is a mega successful New York Times bestselling writer, entrepreneur, and professor of one of the most popular courses at NYU. She actually wrote a book, which I got to sneak peek before its official release in May that allows anybody to learn what she teaches in this course. It's called Becoming You, the proven method for crafting your authentic life and career. And we are going to dive deep into how to figure out what the best career is for you and how to get that job if you're not already in it.

Susie actually had me on her podcast, which is also called Becoming You, and we dive into all of my values, and it's a really different type of interview than I have ever done before. It's deeply personal. So if you are interested in hearing her interview me, you can go check out that episode. It's going to come out next week. There's a lot of information in this episode. So if you want some key takeaways when you're done listening, head over to lizmoody.substack.com. You can sign up for our brand new newsletter, which has action steps for each episode, as well as meal plans, workout plans, bonus interviews, so much amazing content. Susie, welcome to the podcast.

I'm so happy to be here. I have so much to get into with you today. But let's just start off with what do you think of the sentiment? I don't dream of labor, so I do not have a dream job. It's perfectly fine. Wanting a job, wanting to have work is a value. Okay. So some people really have high what I call work centrism, a desire to work, pleasure

from working, and interest in work. and other people just don't. And the world is capable of holding us all as long as we're not yelling at each other. What do you think about the idea that we have to do something for eight hours a day, like the vast, vast, vast majority of us to make money?

How should we approach how much we like that thing? Well, I mean, I think that you don't have to work eight hours a day if you also don't care about money. I mean, there are people who don't like work and they've accommodated that entirely by having incredibly simple lives or living in communities where it's very inexpensive and they get by on much less labor or they have some kind of passive income or whatever. If you have to live in a place where you have to work

eight hours a day and you hate it, I think that's too bad because eight hours a day is a lot of hours. But I don't believe that everybody has to have a dream job. Only people who love work should have a dream job and everybody else should figure out what matches their values and how they want to live their life. Immediately we're getting into something you say in your book, you're like, this is obvious, but I do think we forget it a lot, which is that our values are going to require some sacrifice. Like, you cannot value every single thing at the top. So you can't say, oh, I value living in San Francisco and I value not working as much as somebody

else might want to work. And I value having these fancifications, whatever. Like, something has to give. There are trade-offs with every value. In fact, one of the things that happens to me all the time with my students at NYU is they'll come up to me after they've gotten the results of their values bridge where we test what their values are in rank, order them, and they'll say, uh, Professor Welch, um, can you help me out with this? My number one value is affluence, which is money. But work centristism, which is how much they want to work,

is like, uh, um, that's sort of at number 13 or 14. Is that a problem? And I say, unless you've got inherited wealth, yes, it is. Okay. So if we really want to have huge affluence, but we don't want to work, that's just a tension that you can't get around. All right. And there's other values that are in conflict. And a lot of times in our lives, we have pain and we feel conflict when our values are not aligned. And so the trick is to understand what your values are and which ones are in conflict and work those conflicts out. How would you suggest that somebody navigate, let's say, that conflict? I don't want to work a lot and I want to live a really nice life because I think that's more and more common, especially we're exposed to these dream lives on social media and we're like, oh, I want the yacht.

Right. But we don't necessarily want to be burnt out and tired and working all the time. How do we This is generationally the most common conflict because what happened is when I was coming up and along, okay, and you worked your butt off and you really gave work your all, you could be pretty guaranteed that there'd be a payoff, okay? But what's going on right now is that you can work really, really hard and the whole economy can fall out underneath you. Your job can go away, your industry can go away. And a lot of people between 20 and 40 saw their parents work very, very, very hard. and not going to pay off for it. Now what they're doing is they're looking at the economy as it is, and they're saying, yeah, I could work and work and work, and everything I do could become a sort of a moot point

because of AI tomorrow. And so they don't get the connection between hard work and affluence. It's not as guaranteed as it used to be. That having been said, it's very, very hard still to this day to become affluent without work. So you're sort of in a bind. So what I have to say to that is if you want to have a huge amount of money, even though it may not work out for you, you're still going to have to work for it. And all these people who look like they have spectacular lives and they did it sitting around, just sort of taking pictures of themselves, they worked their butts off. They worked incredibly hard. You just don't see it. Unless there's inherited money involved. But that's so rare. Most people work incredibly hard to get spectacular

lives. We just did your podcast. And I have a eunomonic value where I want to have a lot of pleasure, enjoy my life. And then I have anxiety. And I'm afraid of flying and things like that. And so I feel like those often run up against each other where I'm like, I want to hop off and take this vacation with my girlfriends. But I'm afraid I'm going to die, getting there. Right. And I think that once you know what your values are, you're able to talk about them and think about them and say, I have a value of wanting to have pleasure and fun. But I also have how that would show up as a value of low scope, which is that I want to keep my life scoped enough that I can keep it under control. And those tend to go into conflict with each other. And look, our whole lives are waking up every day and having that conversation about which part.

part of your values you're going to make the strongest accommodation with. But you could stop beating yourself up about it. It's life. Our life is understanding our values and working out. And we sort of kind of get to it later in our lives. It's really peaks sort of from 20 to 45. That's when you're in the peak of the season where all your values are clashing. Like work is clashing with family and fun is clashing with money. We do two things. One, we blame ourselves and then others we blame everybody else. And the facts are, can we just stop doing the blame game on everybody, this is the nature of modern life. And what we need more of is a language around so we can give each other grace and we can work through it and figure out, okay, yep, I've got these two conflicting

values. How do I want to balance it? Do I want to give into one or do I want to manage that paradox every single day of my life? I love that you say that because the times I am able to get on a plane, which is quite frequently in my life, it's because I am consciously saying to myself, I want to choose a bigger life in this moment. I don't want to keep my life small because of fear. I don't want my eulogy to say she kept her life small because of fear. I want my eulogy to say she lived a big life. That's right. That's what you're doing. You're saying, okay, I'm staring at this paradox of these two conflicting values and I'm choosing this one. I'm choosing the one that says big scope, big eutemonia, big fun. And I'm going to suppress that value that's telling me not to do it.

And you've made the choice. You've slayed that dragon. We'll get into how we can use our values to ascertain what our dream jobs are and to go after them if we do indeed have dream job. jobs. But can you maybe give us a few ways we can identify what some of our values are? It's very hard to actually self-identify your values, Liz. It really is because we have a voice in our head that's telling us what we should value, and we think about what society is telling us we should value, and there's cultural expectations, and then we hear our parents' voices in our heads, our spouse's voices. I call these the four horsemen of values destruction. I should want this, I should want that. And so we have a lot of trouble self-identifying. So I have all these little tricky tests.

So here's one. I call it the whose life do you want any way activity. And what you do is you don't edit yourself, get a piece of paper and write down four or five or six people whose lives you would have if you had to switch lives. Okay, you can start off by saying, I don't want to switch my life with anybody. Okay, fine. I'm the queen of the world. You've got to switch. You got to do this. I do this with my students. Write down five or six people whose lives, okay, I have to have somebody else's life. I'll take that life. And write them down. And then in the column next to it, write down what it is that made you list them. Don't edit yourself. It's their money. It's their kids. It's their legs. I wrote down Hoda Cotebe. It's just spectacular arms. I wrote it down about each person, the four, five, six things that made you pick that person. And then in the column next to that, write down if you had to have their life, even with those good things, what would you throw out the window? Okay, I don't like their spouse. They had a divorce. If they're estranged from their kids, so forth and so on. Like one of the people on my list is Martha Stewart, who I think is spectacular because she's reinvented herself and she sets the cultural conversation. She is well known by people.

She's funny and sardonic. She had a big career, all these different things. But oops, jail, I'd leave that out. I mean, that was just not a... I think she would leave it out, but nobody handled it with more grace. No one in the whole wide world. I know she would admire her for that as well, but she wouldn't want it either, right? So after you have the list of these four or five, six people, and you look at all the things

that you want about it and then you about their lives and then maybe different things for each person and then all the things you would leave out, then you put down your pen and really look at it with a gimlet eye and think, what are the patterns I'm seeing? Are they all entrepreneurs? Are they all filthy rich? Do they all have happy marriages? Look at the patterns in each column. When I look at mine, it's like career, career, career, career, big career, conversation starter, reinventer, self-made. And then when you look over in the column, that's about what I didn't want, it's my friends who I put down, who gave up their careers. And you get this very strong sense. Okay, my values are sort of, I have the big three around work centristism, achievement, and affluence. This is a archetype of people who,

want to have a lot of success. And it doesn't surprise me, but this is a sneaky way to get what your values are. It's not asking you to self-report. Okay, so I love that one. I have a list of three questions I ask people to ask themselves that help identify values. One of the questions is, what do you want people to say about you when you're not in the room? And that question, you know, you can answer it any way you want. You can say that I'm not crazy like my mother, or you can say that she's very beautiful or she's very rich. Or I have a friend who's like a brilliant genius, a playwright, is she answered that she's hot. Okay. And this will start to stir up the answer to what some of your values are. Beholderism, which is how we look, is a value. There's no crime in it.

It's just let's be real about what our values are. If somebody answers, when I walk out of a room, I want people to say, she really understood me. Typically, that's suggesting that you have the value of voice, of authenticity, that people felt they could confide in you. So that's one of the questions. What would you want people to say about you when you're not in the room? Another question is, what did you love about your upbringing and what did you hate? And this question allows you to put down lifestyle values. Like I loved how much love there was in the house, but I was bored all the time. And this would begin to suggest values around belonging, but also wanting to have scope in your life, a big life. I don't want boredom in my life. And so this question also begins to bubble up values. I struggled with that one

until I, because I didn't have a particularly happy childhood until I realized how much information was in the things that I hated. And it really did point to in many ways the life that I built for myself. Right. You hit the nail on the head, okay, because with that question, what you loved is as important as what you hated in terms of revealing values. And then the third question is, what would make you cry at your 85th birthday? This is about the legacy. I mean, I've heard this answered thousands of times because I've been using this question in my work since 2009, and people can answer everything from that I never got sober, which would speak to how much they value self-determination. and the struggle to achieve it. Or you could say something like that I wreck the company,

which would speak to somebody who wrote that down with somebody who was trying to run the family company to achievement. For me, I have like a very strong value about protecting animals and its big value of mine is ending animal cruelty. And for me, it's like if we did not move the needle on the treatment of animals in the farm system, this would make me cry because I've been working at it since I was 20 years old. And it talks to my value of radius, which is systemic change. And so I think these three questions, are ways to surface our values. What if you begin to surface your values

and the things that you value don't feel attainable in your life? They don't feel accessible to you. Maybe one of your values is family and you have been single for years and you're maybe not close with your family of origin. What if one of your values is impact and you don't feel like you have reached

beyond your small sphere? Yeah. I mean, this happens all the time. And you know what? When we look at our values and then we see that they currently feel unattainable, And to use the scientific lingo, we're not expressing them. We hold them, but we're not expressing them. My answer to that is that is why we're unhappy if we are. Okay, that is the inner sadness we feel.

That is the source of angst, of inner grief. And we can suppress those feelings of inner grief. We can lie about them to ourselves. We can make accommodation with them or we can change our life to go achieve them. Do you think they're always achievable? When you say change your life, let's say, My value is family. I'm 38, 39 years old and I don't have a partner. What do I do? Yeah. I am often with people either in my private practice or at school where they are not achievable. So, for instance, I had a friend who went through this whole process and he had very serious mental health issues, which required him to have actually a personal aid. And he had manic depression. It was very difficult for them to control it. And when he answered that question, what would make you cry on your 85th birthday? his answer was, knowledge that his obituary would not appear on the front page of the New York Times.

Okay, that's how much he wanted fame. And he came from a famous family. Okay, so he saw what he wanted was this kind of achievement and radius and fame. He could barely get through a day. And so I remember saying to him, you know, this is not going to happen for you. And he said, you can't talk me out of my values. And I said, no, I can't, but it's important to be realistic about them. And we let it go.

but I would say his grief around it was what he needed to work on, his grief around it. Now, by the same token, I had a student who was 40, and family centrism came out as her number one value. She was single, no boyfriend. And she said, I look at this and I feel like crying because I know this is true. I really want children. I really want a family. I have put it on the back burner to achieve all my career goals. I achieved them, but I don't have this number one thing that I want. What should I do? When I see it in black and white, when I see it in the test, it's actually. agonizing to me. And when she did her Whose Life chart that we just talked about, she had all these women with children. And she was like, this is just a hole. And most days, I just suppress it and I eat

it. And I said to her, have you ever thought about taking off a year from work and just 100% taking a sabbatical and go find your life partner so that you could have children or if it doesn't work, then to actually think about adopting children? And she said, I have thought about it. And I said, why aren't you doing it? And she said, I need permission. And I said her, okay, I'll give you permission. And she's a spadical. She's on it right now. And she's looking for her life partner. She's doing absolutely everything. She actually moved to a city in Latin America. She was Latin American. Moved to a city where she thought there was the most available man. And she got a matchmaker. And she's going out. And she's putting her life out there. And she is made it her,

because it's her number one value, she was sick of repressing it. So I do think if you're willing to admit that it's an unexpressed value and it matters to you a lot, yes. We often have more power than we might think that we have. Sometimes you have to do something kind of radical. Because what was the option for this student? She was going to be 50, and that unrealized value was going to be painful. Now, you can talk yourself out of it and you can make peace with it. Those are other options. Or you can go for it. I have a girlfriend who did that. She left New York City to live somewhere where she thought she could find a life partner because her life partner and family was so important to it. And she did it. Yeah. She's married and

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And if you want to grab their premium starter kit, you can use code Liz Moody for 15% off at branchbasics.com. That's code Liz Moody for 15% off the premium starter kit at branchbasics.com. And when they ask you where you heard about us, please make sure to mention the show. That is branch basics.com and use code Liz Moody. Do you have any advice for figuring out what values we should compromise on and what values we should go for if we feel like we have a lot of high values? Everybody thinks all their values are the same high value. And the facts are, this is why we rank order them and try to figure out what their

relative importance is. I think that some values you have no choice but to figure out the solution to. So for instance, you can have high work centristism and achievement. Really want to work, love work, and love the achievement or affluence work gives you. And you can love your family. I had that. I have four children. And a very unfortunate fact is that because of biome, the time that you need to be fully available to work and fully putting your foot on the pedal to get what you need at work is from ages 21 to 45. And uh-oh, SpaghettiOs, that's exactly the same time that your children need you to be fully available to them. It stinks. It's bullshit. It is what it is. But that's the way it happened. And work is saying, we need you, we need to see

you're available, we need to see you're committed. And your kids are saying, hey, I need to see you're available and I need to see you're committed in the exact same 21, 25 year period. I want to just say this one little thing. It's easier now than it used to be because of technology. You couldn't watch your kids' gymnastics meet on a phone when I was raising my four children and working 60, 70 hours a week. And in some of those years before I met my second husband, I was a single mom. It was brutal. I cried a lot. You can do a couple of things. You can say, I don't want to fight this battle every day. I don't want to suit up like Daeneres and slay this dragon every day. I don't want to do it. It's too hard. It's killing me. And it's exhausting. It's so exhausting to fight that battle every day.

And you can say, I am going to stop working. Many women do that. And I'm going to take the hit that it means to my ego and my identity and my intellectual joy. I'm going to take that hit and I'm just going to devote myself to raising the kids. My sisters did that. And I kept on working. And what I did was the opposite thing, which is I turned to my kids and I said, I really love you, but I really love my work. And one day you're going to grow up and you're going to go away and I'm still going to be here.

There's no ramp on my career. I'm going to stay on my career night, and what I need kids is for you to help me. And they bought in. They understood. And there were many times where I deprioritized my kids and I prioritized my work. I made that decision because my career was that important to me. I was shamed. I was criticized.

I was excoriated by family members. At the time, society, I didn't have a lot of role models when I did it. And I had so much belief in my values of work and achievement and success. I just did. I went, I forged through it. And, you know, it worked out. I mean, I was clear on my values. My kids and I are best friends.

Did I screw up? Yeah. Was I not there for enough things? Yep. I'm still making up for it. I mean, you couldn't be closer to your kids than I am now. I mean, I'm in their faces every single minute. I made a gamble.

I was helped because I was clear and I didn't try to relitigate it every day. I made some choices and I lived by them. And it's not the choice for everybody. You could try to do it 50-50. That's slaying the dragon every day. That's very hard. You can throw it all in, go 100% either way. But I kind of did the 60-40, 60-40, 60 towards work,

40 towards the kids. It was my accommodation. It was imperfect. But eventually, your kids grow up and they leave. And you get your hands untied from behind your back and you can just go, go, go. And for me, I had stayed on the career track the whole way. And when they went away to college, I unleashed. There's almost like a shaking of all of us that you're doing a little bit where you're like, you can't have it all. You need to figure out what matters to you. And you say this a few times in your book, the Mary Oliver quote, this is your one wild and precious life. What are you going to do with it? Because if you aren't making these choices, these choices are still happening. Well, they'll make themselves. They will make themselves. They will make themselves. You'll just not make the decision,

not make decisions. And we don't make decisions. They make themselves and usually in a very ugly way. Yeah. Okay. This feels like a good opportunity for you to share your very famous decision making technique. Can you tell us about the 10, 10, 10, 10 technique? Yeah. I'd love to talk about, Look, 10, 10, 10 is a decision-making technique that I came to because I was at rock bottom. I was trying to do it all all at the same time. I had four little children. This is like 1995. I had four little children.

My husband was one foot out the door. We had been childhood, high school sweethearts. We were not meant to be married. We're actually very good friends today, and we should have always been friends, but we went and got married. He was gone onto his second marriage, but they weren't married yet, but he was going towards it. And I had these four little kids and I was working full time, and I had not gotten

clear with myself about my values or how I want to live, and I was just trying to do it all all at the same time. And I ended up going to give a speech in Hawaii, and I brought two of my children with me, and it ended an epic fail with the kids breaking out of a hula dancing class where I had warehouse them and running up on stage while I was giving the speech. And this was, as I said, 1995 or so, and thank God there was no cell phones for somebody could videotape this and there was no Twitter for people to put it out. But actually, the other thing about it being 1995 was that this was all men, and they didn't think this was amusing at all. And they didn't clap, and they didn't. and laugh, and they just got up and walked out of the speech. And I was left there, up there on the

stage in my bow shirt and my little gray suit with my kids clutching in my legs thinking, I'm a loser, and I can't do this. I can't. I thought I was going to be the one woman who did it all all at the same time. And I came up with this idea that I was going to start living my life one decision at a time. I just had to slow this freaking locomotive down. And instead of like riding on the back of the locomotive and holding on by my fingernails, I was just going to start to understand life with a totally different construct, which was that everything in life was one decision after another. Instead of letting the decisions just make themselves, I was going to stop every time there was a decision. I was going to say to myself literally, what are my options and what are

the consequences of those options in the immediate future right now? What are the consequences of those options? All of them, two of them, three, how many options there were, in the foreseeable future, 10 months, okay? What are the consequences of those options? If I was to try to build the life I really want. That's the 10-year thing. And then you really do a data dump. I mean, you're just like dumping data. You're really looking at the pros and the cons. You're not sort of picking out on one piece of data that you really, really want to listen to or the last piece of data that you heard, because these are all decision-making biases that we give more weight to the last piece of data that we got. And you just put this huge data dump either in your head or on a piece of paper,

and then you compare it to your values. And then the decision, it usually just rises up like the sun and announces itself. It's very rare at that point that you're sitting there staring at saying, I don't know what to do. Because once you see all the data and you know your values, that's why you have to know your values, the decision makes itself. That is why the beauty of knowing your values, then you can start deploying 10, 10, 10, 10, every single time you've got a hard decision about work and family or about fun and anxiety and all these different things. You can just say, let's just 10, 10, 10. My kids say to me all the time, I raised my kids using it. Once I started using it, my life, I put my life back together again using it. And I started then using it more widely.

And then when I started writing for, oh, the Oprah magazine, I wrote about it and then had to wrote a book about it. And I meet people all the time. I was speaking at a conference recently, a wellness conference. And a woman came up to me and she said, I raised my children using 10, 10, 10, 10. And I said, so did I. That was how we learned how to do decisions and to slow life down so that you could live by your values. And that's 10 minutes, 10 months, 10 years. That's the, yeah. And look, honestly, it could be five minutes, seven months, 30 years, whatever.

But it's a proxy for saying what are the impact? immediately, like right now, and that's usually how we make our decisions, the foreseeable future we don't usually think about, but we should, and then the future I want to create. Yeah, and that's where some of the choices that we're making right now, often, yeah, they do favor the present. And so it is like, what does this look like in 10 years in our lives? Okay, so we have figured out our values. Right. How do we begin to use that information to point us into the direction of the most satisfying, fulfilling career for us? I teach a class called Becoming U.N. NYU Stern School of Business, and it's called

becoming you, crafting the authentic life you need. And my students are MBAs. They want to know what to do when they graduate. They're at business school to pivot. And I use it with the undergraduates who are looking at, you know, graduating and saying, what am I going to do with my life? And so we use a construct that goes like this, that your purpose, your area of transcendence, as we call it, lies at the intersection of three spheres, if you will. So sort of imagining these three spheres in your mind. The first is your values. And so we've talked about how you would figure out your values. And I drive my students to create a list of their values. I don't like people making up their values. I don't want people picking their values out of sky. I've got

these 15 core values and you're going to have a list and it's going to have your top five. Okay, so you figure out your values. The other piece of work that we do is we identify what your aptitudes are and the facts are you are wired cognitively to be better at some things than others and you need to know what you're good at. Are you a person who's really good at thinking about the future or are you a present focuser? Are you an idea generator? Are you a person who's better sort of midwifing other people's ideas. And there's eight big cognitive aptitudes and you can get those tested. And then we look at how much leadership potential people have with another test. And we look at personality type. And we look at personality type. I don't want to gloss over it because your personality can decide whether

or not you're going to the right career or not. When people say that they're thinking about a career, they're like, the first thing that goes into my mind is, is it a fit for your personality? Your personality is a huge part of what you're good at or not. Okay, like extroverts should be in certain jobs and introverts should be in other jobs. And whether or not you're a person who's big on belonging and whether you're a warm person, that lends itself to some jobs and whether you're a loner, that lends itself to other jobs. So here's the problem with personality, though. People hate what I'm about to say. I'm about to say something people hate, hate, hate, your personality is not necessarily known to you. Your personality is not the words you use to

describe yourself. I'm kind, I'm compassionate, I'm a good listener, I'm loyal. Yeah, that's what you say about yourself, and maybe you are, but that's the story you tell yourself. Your personality is one thing and one thing only. Your personality is how the world experiences you. Full stop. You can say you're kind and the world experiences you as not kind. Which one are you? If the world has experienced you as unkind, you're only kind in your head, okay? And you may say that you're generous and you tell yourself you're generous, right? And if the world has experienced you as not generous, which are you? You're not generous, okay? You're only generous in your mind. So I am a gigantic believer in finding out how the world experiences you. How do you do that? Well, you can

live your whole life and eventually the world tells you, okay, eventually the world tells you, but a lot of times it doesn't, because what happens is people who don't like the way they're experiencing you. They leave the scene of the crime. Okay, and then you're sort of surrounded by people who tolerate you, and even sometimes your close friends don't tell you truly how the world is experiencing you. invented this cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap, cheap test, which is a cost of coffee, a cup of coffee. And my students all take it. Anybody can take it.

It's on my website, Susie Walsh.com, and it's called Pi360. It takes two seconds for your friends to fill it out, and all that feedback is anonymously told to you, and you find out how the world experiences you and how you deal with people, how good your ideas are, and whether or not you're reliable. Okay, these are the big three things. And you find out, and then what we tell you is that your self-awareness score because you rate yourself also on the exact same dimensions. test is very, very short. How many friends do you have to send it to? You will only give you data back

if you have more than 14 people report. And I'll tell you why, because it has to be fully anonymous. Your friends aren't going to tell the truth. And the data is not as rich unless it's 14 people. And how close do they have to be to you? They don't have to be that close. I mean, just people whose opinions you trust. It's completely anonymous. It will take your friends less than five minutes, three minutes to fill it out. It's 15 very quick questions. Oh, I'm going to do this for sure. And you've got to do it, okay? Because I have done it now a lot of times. And then you get a self-awareness score. We actually tell you, okay, your friend said this.

Look at here. This is what they say about you with people. This is what they say about you with ideas. And this is what they say about you with how trustworthy and reliable you are. These are the things people care about. And you thought you were this, this, and this. And, you know, sometimes people get the results back and they say, oh, my God, I am so much better than I thought. I thought I was kind of crappy with people, but the world thinks I'm wonderful.

I thought my ideas were really great and people don't think so. And I thought I could be trusted and actually I can't. But so sometimes people are positively surprised. on some of the factors, not others. But the beauty of it is it's quick and it's easy, and you actually end up finding out how the world experiences you. And then, of course, if people want help on how to fix that, you're happy to give it to them.

But I think that that's the thing about finding out your dream job. This is part of figuring out how the world experiences you, because it's a big problem when you think, I want to be, I'm a people person, I want to go into HR, or I want to be customer facing. And then you can't seem to get success in that world. And the reason is you're not as good with people as you thought you were. Okay, that personality trait that you think you have or vice versa.

You may think you're not so good with people, but the world actually loves you and receives you with this incredibly warm way. You know what? Go into a people facing job. Okay, to finish the construct, first you do values, then you do aptitudes, including personality. And then you look at what you're interested in. What turn, what, I'm not going to use turns your crank because it's such an old-fashioned term, but what calls you intellectually or emotionally? Is it health care? Is it children, is it entertainment? And then you sort of think, well, in that same area of analysis, is it a small company or a large company? Is it a for-profit company or a non-for-profit company? Is it that you don't even care what kind of company it is? It's got to just be a company that allows

you to have work like Malins, okay? And after you have all that data from those three spheres, values, aptitudes, and interests, usually, very naturally, the work that's at the intersection of that reveals itself to you. It will pop. I've seen it happen so many times I can't even count where people go, oh my God, this suggests I'm completely in the wrong field and I need to go do something like this. Or sometimes people say, wow, I'm already on the path to exactly what I want to be doing. And then, you know, in my class, students find out what their purpose is using this methodology. And then they tell the story of their life 40 years going forward because they say, okay, it's over there. This is how I'm going to get there because you're usually not in your area of purpose yet.

you're usually not there. And you have to figure out how you're going to get there. A huge problem that I see a lot of people run into is that all of those things, except perhaps, and I'm sure this is going to be part of your answer, one value points to a specific job, but that job does not pay the amount of money that they would want to live, which would be the value that would be missing. What do we do in that scenario? Okay, I am now going to create a lot of answers today that are going to make people absolutely hate me. And this is going to make every behavioral economist in the world sort of role their but I'm going to sum up the entire field of behavioral economics in one or two sentences.

This is a very robust academic discipline with brilliant people in it, but I'm going to boil it down, okay, to one sentence, basically. And behavioral economics would tell you that a lot of times human beings make a decision based on money even when money doesn't matter to them. And there's a million reasons for it. It's how we're raised. It's how we're wired. There's all sorts of cultural reasons and there's social reasons for it.

And so what ends up happening is people say, all my values, all my aptitudes, all my interests, point me to being somebody in animal rescue. But I'll never be paid. And my question to them after that is, how much does money actually matter to you? Because you're just answering based on the fact that human beings are wired to say, how much money will I get. And then sometimes what you hear people say is like, actually, you know, money doesn't really matter all that much to me. Actually, these other things matter more. And then you go into animal rescue, say, and you find all these people who made that decision. a few years ago, that everything about it mattered. They weren't going to get the money, but because all those things mattered more. Now, the other route is you go down this and you say, well, actually, money is my number one value. It is. And so I can't go do all those things.

But then don't complain about it, my friend. Don't complain about it. You decided on your number one value, which was money, and you're not having all these other things you care about. Those needs are not being met. But you made the choice based on that value. Is there a way to figure out what the highest paying job that hits all of the, like if we're I want to be an animal rescue. Is there a way to figure out, what's the highest-paying version of animal rescue? Yes, there are definitely our ways to do that. I mean, chat GPT is very good with that, okay?

We use it a lot with students who say things like, their things will show up, and we actually are developing a tool right now. It's not available yet called the Holland Bridge. It's in a beta that will answer that exact question. But yeah, ask chat GPT. Okay, here are my values, you know, here are my aptitudes, here are my interests, what's the highest paying job? If and only if money is your number one value.

The facts are you can make money your God and make it your number one value and it doesn't love you back. You know, you give your whole life over to it. People, you know, the world is littered with people who did things for money only to find it wasn't worth it. I also think that this is a situation where perhaps more information can be helpful to like actually doing the math, how much money do I need to have to live the life that I want, which includes the vacations that I want, includes the home in the area that I want. It includes the children that I might want or not want. And what does that number literally look like? Because if we don't know that number, our tendency is just to say more, more, more, because it'll feel safer and safer and safer and more certain that we'll get those things. So true. But it might be less than we think. One of the reasons I created the values bridge was because all my students said that they wanted financial security.

And there's a range. I mean, financial security can be, I just want to be out of debt and I want to have a house and one vacation a year. And financial security can be, depending on your emotional makeup, it can be, you as I often say, one helipad per child. And the way I came up with this was I had a student, we were trying to figure out how much money mattered to him. And he said, okay, well, you want to know, you want to know the number. And I said, I don't really want to know the number. You know, let's get a small, medium or large here. Okay, let's get a fine point to it.

And he said, okay, well, you want the number. And I said, look, this is in front of the whole class. I said, why did you just tell me when you travel, do you want to travel, business class, coach, first class? And he looked at me as if I had two heads. And he said, oh, no, no, no, no. I want my own plane. I said, oh, okay, now we're talking, okay? You want your own plane? And I said, how about a helicopter? And he said, yeah, yeah, a helicopter too.

And I said to him jokingly, how about a helipad for each child? And he said, now I'm happy. Okay, that's very different from somebody saying, I just want to be out of debt and one vacation a year. The hardest conversation you have with yourself about values is privately getting away all the identity issues is how much does it just really? How much does it matter to you? What's the number? I ask people in the privacy of their own lives to actually write down the number.

You can't make any decisions without knowing the number. You've got to be real with yourself. There's no crime. And I think the number really should be added up. We sat down with our financial advisor and we have numbers for literally every part of our life. Like how much is the housing that we want cost? How much do the groceries that we want every month cost? And he was like, be serious.

Like you like organic, bougie groceries. Like put that on there. How much just helping our families in the way that we want to help them cost a year. and every single thing is line-itomed on there. So now we have a very specific number to work towards. The honesty of that process that you just described, I would recommend to every single person in the world. It is so real.

Do you know how many people do it? Very few. But to say, let me just look deeply into what really, how much I want. You have to know that to do any kind of work towards the career you want. Because you may be surprised, actually, how little you want need. When you finally are looking at the numbers and you sort of say, okay, wait, wait, I don't need organic bean sprouts, okay? Or you could say, look, I can't live without that.

You've got to get real with yourself about what the number is before you make any decisions. I feel like there's going to be like a thousand tiny deaths on this journey. And that's like allowing that, saying that's okay. Like I can't have everything. What really matters to me is like the core of all of it. I feel like a lot of people run into the problem of not even knowing what careers are out there. Like I have a friend and he, before I went to college, was like, I want to figure out my major. so he went and interviewed the highest paid people that he knew. And he was like, what's your job? How'd you get here?

Whatever. If I had done that in my small town that I grew up in, I would have interviewed like a doctor, a lawyer, and like an accountant or something like that. I didn't even have access to the I bankers that he ended up interviewing that put him in the direction of eye banking where he made much more money than the doctors and lawyers in my small town. But if you'd ask me in high school, I would have oh yeah, these are the richest people I know. This is what success looks like because I just didn't even have the spheres of influence that told me what else was out there. So how do we know what we don't know? Okay, so Liz, there is research that supports everything that you've just said. There's research that shows that when kids come out of high school and they ask them what professions exist, that the highest number,

typically there's three to seven that kids coming out of high school know, three to seven. And usually it's like doctor, lawyer, ambulance driver. It's sort of like what they, you know, it's what they see in their hometown. If there was like a Barbie for it. Right. Exactly. Right. Or if they just saw it with their own eye. Yeah. Okay. And then they get to college and you'd think that list gets bigger, but it doesn't for some reason because they start focusing in on a major.

And then by the time they get to business school, where I find them, there's three careers, okay? There's banking, consulting, and tech. And I teach this whole series of classes to open up the aperture. Like, there are mega trends coming that are going to like totally blow up, you know, interesting parts of the economy. There's all sorts of industries. There's 135 industries.

And within those industries. hundreds of different kinds of companies and hundreds of different kinds of jobs. And there's no curriculum anywhere to teach you how big the world is and what kind of. And so we're sort of stuck with this mono vision of what we know and what's right. Your friend is very unusual that he did that. There's like this children's book, Richard Scarry, where he's sort of like, you know, he looks around the town and he sees all the different jobs. There's nothing like this for adults. And even the Richard Scarry one is really sort of like bus driver. Bratmaker. A teacher. Right. Exactly. You know what this means? It means it's on you. It's on us. It's on the

individual to open their aperture. And that's very hard because there's no guidance. I mean, you have to read everything, watch people. But part of it is just a mindset saying there are so many different kinds of jobs and people out there that I don't even know about. This is why I have this line. I use it all the time. Your currency is your currency. How much you're worth, it depends on how much you know. And you've got to open your aperture. Nobody's going to open it for you. Like I always tell my students, go type into the go. Oh, your currency. Like what you know about the, yeah. How courage you are. I agree. I know.

Sorry. It's like, I'm a heart. How current you all. I like that. How much value you have. Are there pragmatic steps we can take to widen our aperture? Yes.

I call this the watch list. And I think every single person should create a watch list. You need to be disciplined. And that is websites or information sources that you're going to check in with at least once a week. And what you want to do is you want to put on it. Sources of information you wouldn't look at, columnists or websites, that are feeding your head with what's going on in the world. For instance, on my watch list on TikTok,

in any way I can find it, I followed what's going on in two countries, okay? Namibia and Argentina. Why do I do that? Because their economies are new and interesting and always changing and kind of bellwethers. And I would stop thinking about them if I didn't put them on my watch list

and I follow all these TikTok feeds about these countries and I sort of keep up with what's going on and it just continually fills my mind with what's going on in new economies. Then there's a lot of different websites and reports that tell me about megatrends, which are economic trends that are coming. And if you just go to your Google search bar and you type in, how can I find out about megatrends, they'll give you a long list.

Put one of them on your watch list. And the other is to read newspapers or websites or Twitter feeds that you disagree with because they will tell you things you don't know that you should. It's painful. I get it. It's painful. Like I read columnists who I strongly disagree with. And so this just kind of.

kind of keeps my mind open and forces my aperture open because otherwise our role gets smaller and smaller and smaller. Why would we open it up? Because we have to start seeing and hearing things that are sort of upsetting our reality. So I say create a watch list. I students do it together. And they sort of try to create a watch list of 10 things, which are news sources that are surprising them and check in once a week and then put a little checkmark that you did it. Are there jobs that you think we should be aware of that are kind of coming down the pipeline that we might not have part of? Well, I mean, obviously, AI is going to be changing jobs. I mean, I think the main thing you need to be doing right now is thinking how AI is going to change your job. And it's going to,

and it's going to change your job. Just go to AI and ask it. Okay, I'm a content creator at a website. How is AI going to change my job in the next two years? Just ask it. AI will tell you, okay? And you're not going to like that picture. Can you follow that up with how can I protect my job? Yeah, you can, yes, you can ask it. I mean, I think this is where AI will do its best in answering. your best way to protect your job. This is the number one way to protect your job is to develop, because it's very hard to have, develop a mindset of adaptability. Adaptability is the word, and that is an openness to learning new skills. So LinkedIn has incredible research that says that for the past 10 to 15 years, 10 years, that what they call skill churn, it means

how often you have to turn over your skills, that every 18 months you had to turn over around 25% of your skills. So say there were 10 things that you did. In the past, recent history, given all the sort of technological changes, every 18 months, sort of four of those skills got thrown out and you had to learn four new skills. And if you think back to your own job, you probably have, oh, yeah, yeah. I used to do this. Now I do it, do this. I have this new skill. But going forward, it looks like that skill churn over every 18 months is going to be 65%. So if you're doing 10 things, six of those things are going to be thrown out and you're going to have to learn six new things. And it's your choice, whether or not you're going to resist

it or whether or not you're going to stay ahead of it. And so you're sitting at your desk and you notice in a meeting that somebody mentioned a technology you didn't know or an idea you didn't hear about. And you have one choice, which is to say, I can't take it. I've got what I call new phobia, new phobia, which is I can't take one more new thing, okay, and I get it. Or you can say, I'm going to go right now and learn that. I remember when Canva came around. Somebody who I worked with said to me, we have to find somebody to do Canva for us. Susie, you're really going to need to use Canva. You're too old to learn it. And I said, just watch me. And I just went. I'm a very early adopter on technology. I love technology. And I taught it to myself. And that's the way you have

to be about everything. I mean, I'm not, you know, perfect in any way. But I would just say that's the attitude that you have to have. You hear about it. You're told you can't do it. They're looking for somebody else to do it. Go learn it yourself. You have to be in a state that's agonizing, which is constant upskilling. And, you know, the human brain and the human personality, you're just not wired to constantly upskill for goodness sake. Everything else is hard enough. And imagine if you're doing this while you're a mom at home and you've got young kids and then you're being told at work, you got to upskill, where your kids are forcing you to upskill constantly. Okay, they grew up, I had to learn how to talk to them about X, Y, or Z. Yeah, that's the way it's going to be. That's how

you protect your job. Wait, I love what you just said, though, because it is exhausting and it's tiring, and you just said, you're already doing it. We are upskilling constantly in our lives, and we're maybe not even appreciating the ways that we are already practicing that. Yeah, absolutely. The perfect example is parenting, because just when you sort of get the hang of potty training them, then you have to teach them to read, okay? And you're constantly as a parent, you know, what you do and your skills is when they're a little tiny babies are very different from your skills when they're teenagers and then when they become adults.

But it's part of the human condition and we kind of get it. And it's why parenting is so exhausting. I mean, there's just no name for it. The reason is you're constantly changing your skills to get it right. You're just trying to stay one inch ahead of them, frankly, okay? But now we have to do that at work. The mattress that you sleep on is one of the highest exposures that you have. Like, if it's off gassing, you're breathing that in for basically a third of your life.

and most conventional mattresses are loaded with synthetic foams, flame retardants, microplastics, and more. Plus, if it's not comfy, you're going to be tossing and turning, you're going to be really hot, and sleep is the foundation of health. It is so important. Because of all of this, if I were not going to invest in any other part of my house, no other things in my house, I would invest in my mattress. And in fact, I have four years well before I had much money to spend on any of these things

because it is such a big needle mover. The birch mattress is incredible. It is made with organic cotton, natural latex, and ethically sourced wool. So it has literally no off-gassing. You can not smell anything right when you unbox it. It has no microplastics, no synthetic foams or flame retardants. And the wool makes it so breathable, which if you've listened to this podcast for more than five minutes, you know that I run very, very hot like I am a furnace.

Zach has basically accepted that sleepy next to me is like sleeping next to like a little fire. And the birch mattress has been a game changer for that. It's made me sleep so much better. Like I can see my sleep score going up because I'm not hot all night long. It's also hypoallergenic, which is really worth paying attention to if you find yourself waking up stuffy or congested. Dust mites in a conventional mattress can actually impact your breathing and your sleep quality without you even realizing it. And again, we need to be able to breathe to get good sleep and getting good sleep is the foundation of our health. And then comfort-wise, Zach sleeps on his back and then I sleep on my side and my stomach. So we have two completely different sleep styles. And we both

wake up feeling really good, no aches and pains. CNN actually named the Birch mattress, the best mattress for side sleepers. And Wired named it the best organic mattress period. So there you go. Birch has options for every kind of sleeper in your household. They have three firmness layers. I like the Lux Natural, which is the medium one. and then parents, they even have a Birch Kids natural mattress. Birch ships right to your door. It sets up in minutes and it comes with 120 night risk-free trial. So if it is not for you, they will pick it up for free.

You have nothing to lose here. I want all of you to enjoy a deep, restful night's sleep with a new mattress from Birch. Go to birchliving.com slash Liz Moody for 20% off. That is birchliving.com slash Liz Moody. And you're going to get 20% off. Birch Living.com slash Liz Moody. When you think about strength and resilience, like your ability to feel energized, to recover well, to stay strong as you get older, what do you think that actually comes from?

Most people say working out or good nutrition, and yes, of course that matters. But there is a biological foundation underneath all of that that most people are completely overlooking. I have been diving deep into this lately with the team at timeline and what I've learned has genuinely shifted how I think about my own health. Every single movement that your body makes, every step, every workout, every muscle contraction depends on energy produced at the cellular level. And at the center of that is your mitochondria.

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The data backs everything up for a limited time. Get 15% off with code Liz at oneskin.co slash Liz. Again, that's 15% off at oneskin.com with code Liz. Okay, so I'll come back to everything being exhausting in a second. But AI is a big one. And I want to, there's something to where I think sometimes people hear like tech stuff And they're like, well, I'm not a coder. I'm not a tech person.

This isn't for me. And I also want people to understand all of the non-coding, non-tech jobs in the tech world. Because I feel like that's missed so often. Some of my highest paid friends and my happiest friends at work are ones who have no coding tech experience, but they're working for tech companies. Of course, tech companies are like any company. They need people in HR. They need idea people.

They need people in operations. They need people in logistics. There's a million jobs in tech. Some of those companies, you know, the kings and the queens are the coders. But, you know, AI is starting to code. Okay, so what jobs do you think are specifically going to be needed if AI is doing all these jobs within the world of AI? Okay, so there's two different answers to that.

Number one, we're going to have a period where AI is still coming up to speed. It's early days for AI. And there are places where AI has too much margin for error. 1% margin for error is not tolerated, for instance, in some medical diagnoses. And 1% margin for error is not tolerated in a lot of different places. For some writing, some writing, AI can do it. But other times there's writing that's so important that 1% margin for error is not permissible. And I think it would be very, very interesting to sort of start to think about jobs that have no tolerance for margin for error,

because those are going to be jobs that are going to be worth a lot of money. Some jobs will suddenly become more valuable because AI can't do them. And there's some dispute on this. But I think the human connection is going to become more and more important because technology is going to be doing so much over there. and then suddenly what's going to be left that's delicious and it's going to be friendships. So anything that maybe enhances friendship or human connection might be a growth area, storytelling is always going to be with us. But if you're not a high-tech person, I think that the tech jobs are going to get ever more skilled.

Because if AI can teach people to do simple coding and then ever more complicated coding, a lot of the jobs that were tech, you know, sort of like the first three, four layers, AI is going to be able to do. I mean, people now are just saying create an app. You can type in to some AI functionalities, create an app that does it, and the coders are completely removed from it. So then what becomes very important is people who can imagine sort of high-level training these large language systems what they should be doing. There's like a very limited number of people who do that. Their brains are different.

They're different. But you know, some things are going to remain. A wonderful restaurant's going to remain. Teaching in some levels, especially of young children, is going to remain. And I think that you just got to not be frightened of the technology. I mean, we're all in it together trying to learn it. You said we need to be upskilling constantly to kind of contend with this new world. And you acknowledge that that is exhausting.

How do we contend with the fact that while many of us are already burnt out, which is why we're probably looking to make a change, we need to somehow turn on our brain, turn on our creativity, turn on our processing to figure out what change we should make and take this leap, which is a very energy intensive thing to do. I think the only way we do that is that we stop calling it exhaustion. I think that it is self-defeating and it's self-fulfilling. And I think that we call it growing instead. And we just say, okay, I'm learning something very new. I'm doing all this new stuff. I'm growing instead of saying, I'm tired.

How do we know if we're at a good enough job and we should just hang out there and it'll be fine and we have a lot of what we need and we can work on the other parts of our lives or if there's something better out there and we should take this leave? Yeah, the job usually tells you. If you're like in a job that's pretty good, should I stick it out or should I bust out, right? This is the velvet coffin at work, as I call it. This is when you're in a comfortable job and the lid is kind of closing on you and you think, if I don't get out now, I'm never going to get out. And some people stay in it and some people bust out. And what I ask people to do in that situation is to imagine yourself staying in the velvet coffin.

And until the end, let the lid close. How do you feel? And some people say it was worth it because it accommodated all the people who loved me and who I love. and to bust out would have hurt too many people. And then you should stay. But if there's a piece of view, and you answer that question, what would make me cry in my 85th birthday? And it was like, I never wrote the book.

I never started the company. I never trusted myself enough to do the thing I felt I was born to do. You've got to take a heel of your hand and you got to shove that lid open. If we identify a job that we want that we aren't necessarily qualified for, what should be our next step? This happens. You do this whole process becoming you.

And then you say, oh, okay, it's clear. I need to be an emergency. room doctor, okay, and you don't have any of those qualifications. Then I would use 10, 10, 10. I would actually use a decision-making system because, of course, there are situations where you're going to find a job. You have not prepared for. You don't have the credentials for. I recently did this with the whole process with somebody who, it was clear that his purpose was working in international relations, and he was a banker. And he knew we had to go back to school because to go into international relations. And a lot of times, you don't need a master's, you need a PhD. And then we had to make a

decision around his values, like how much did achievement matter to him? How much did money matter to him? How much did belonging matter? We looked at his values and they were sort of the tipping point and he decided to go for it. And he's going back to square one because it mattered to him so much to live that life and to have that identity. But you may decide, okay, oops, I want to be an emergency from doctor. I'm often watching these TV shows that have doctors in them. And I think to myself, I've got to have been a doctor. I would have really done being a doctor. Oh my God, I watch those same shows and I'm like, thank God somebody else is willing to do it. I know. I know. I agree. And I Then they show blood, and I was like, I could have never done this. But I think, you know,

sometimes I think as a mind game, I think, what if when I went back to teach at NYU, what if I had said to myself at that moment, you know what? I've got this like these last 20, 30 years, maybe more, please God. But, you know, I've got those years left. I want to go scratch that edge. I want to be a doctor. Then you have to make the decision about how badly you want it and how you would feel if you didn't do it. You know, and you can't look away. You got to look right into it. The two examples you just shared are both examples where education is the missing qualification piece. In general, do you think that going to grad school or getting some sort of continuing education is like a really good move if you're trying to pivot careers?

Only for some fields. For some fields, it's just better to get a job in the field. Then the calculation would be, how much am I willing to go down the ladder to switch careers? Yeah, absolutely. How many dues am I willing to pay and am I willing to be called an assistant for a few years? The educational institutions would like you to believe that you have to go get a master's degree in something. And in some cases, it's quite true, all right? You really do, but not in all of them.

What are some examples of things where people think that that degree is going to help and it actually doesn't? I think anything related to Hollywood, okay? Anything related to filmmaking, anything related to directing is just go get on a set and learn how to do it. Because when you go to Hollywood, they look at your degree and they go, okay, what have you done? So I think Hollywood's an example. I think in some cases journalism is. I mean, there's a lot of journalism schools and they've trained some people very well. but at the end of the day.

Bylines are kind of. And I mean, one of the most interesting paths to becoming successful in journalism that I've seen is people who are willing to go do war journalism because you're able to get bylines at incredible publications that you wouldn't otherwise be able to

and then you can maximize those bylines. And when you want to be a journalist, you've got to have hustle. And so the only way to sort of show your hustle is out there trying to get the bylines. But by contrast, anything in national security, anything that has to do with working in the government, in the CIA or the FBI, or anything that has to really do with cybersecurity.

In general, that's not a learn on the job. You've got to go get typically a master's or a Ph.D. What if we've identified, like, a quite competitive career? Like, your daughter wanted to go to Hollywood and make it in Hollywood. She's a casting agent. Director. She's casting director. Casting director. If something is competitive, is there a calculus that we should be doing about whether or not it's willing, like, we should be taking that risk? Okay. What you have to figure out, the calculus you've got to make is whether you're good or not, okay, at it. And I think you have to ask people who will tell you the truth. You have to ask people who will tell you the truth.

Look, am I good at this? There's any chance for this? I mean, I believe in myself, but I need to know you have to do the hard work of facing into that answer. Hollywood in particular is filled with stories of people who had to toil for 15 years before they got their first big break. But somewhere along the way, there were somebody who was believing in them and you have to get some outside verification.

You know, podcasting is a very interesting. Everybody wants to be a podcaster. And at a certain point, you have to decide if the audience is going to come to you or not, are there any numbers that are beginning to suggest that, whoa, people are listening. Otherwise, you've got to have to say, okay, this is a very competitive field, and I gave it my all, but it was not going to happen for me. Do you have a way that we can decide when it's time to throw in the towel? Well, money usually makes that decision for us, right? You got to give it a real try. This is discernment. There's a moment where time has come. And usually your bank account kind of tells you, look, you've got to figure out whether it's worth you still investing in this.

What if we're deciding whether or not we want to start our own business? So first of all, are we interested in entrepreneurial life? And then second of all, is the business? business idea worth pursuing. Yeah, okay. So entrepreneurship is such an interesting topic. Many of my students want to be entrepreneurs. I myself am an entrepreneur, as are you. I started an entrepreneurial company and sold in. So I learned a lot about entrepreneurs being one. Entrepreneurship has a couple of things that go into it. One, there are certain aptitudes you must have. Okay, so a lot of times people love the identity of being an entrepreneur. They love telling people they're an entrepreneur, but they have none of the aptitude. So for instance, one of the aptitudes that you must have to be an entrepreneur is what I call nerve. That's the combination of stamina, mental and emotional stamina, because

nothing is harder, nothing is harder. The other is edge, the ability to make a yes or no decision, and the other is radical candor because entrepreneurship is very hard. You have no time for BS. You've got to cut to the truth and say the truth. And for you to go into entrepreneurship, an individual to go into entrepreneurship and not have nerve, stamina, edge, and candor. Forget it. Don't try. You also have to have this aptitude to be, have people say no to your face, constantly. You're going to have to raise money. You're going to get kicked down. And the saying is true that most entrepreneurs get run out of energy before they run out of time. You have to have stamina. So entrepreneurship has a huge component of actual aptitudes in it. And then you have to have a really good

idea. Not only do we have to love our ideas, but other people have to love them. There has to be proof of concept. Those things all go into it. And then there's values. If you're going to be an entrepreneur, you're going to be poor before you're rich. And some people want to become entrepreneurs because they want to be fabulously wealthy. And some, most of the most fabulously wealthy people in the world are entrepreneurs because when you own it, you get the money. But you're going to have to be prepared to fail first. I love that you say we need other people to love our ideas because I think sometimes we think, oh, if we build it, we can persuade people into liking it. But actually, it's a much better use of our time to test whether people like the, if they don't like the idea when we

explain it, they're not going to be somehow persuaded when they see it in action. This is called product market fit. And that is, okay, you got the product. Is there any market fit for it? I mean, does the market want it? And we fall in love with these ideas and we find out, you know, we are the only ones who would pay money for it. And then the other thing you have to look at is the business model. Can you possibly make money doing this? Some ideas are fantastic. They're just not economically viable. It costs too much to start them up or the revenue stream is too small and it could be a really good idea. It just does not exist because it can't. What's your best tip for getting a job interview? know why you want the job interview. It's not enough just to push a button and hope your resume

is going to be seen. I'm like still a believer in cover letters. Like if you're applying on LinkedIn, for God's sake, send them a letter saying, I just applied. And here's the reason why I want that job. You need to know your why and why you're a fit for the job. That would be my best advice is know your why and make the case for yourself. Do you think that it's more about who you know than what you know? Not anymore. What you know matters a lot more than it used to. It used to be in business that we'd say, hire for culture and train for skills. In other words, bring people in who sort of are fit culturally. They share your company and then train the skills. And the facts are technology sort of obliterated that is that there are certain skills you must hire for. Like right now, I need somebody who does a certain

tech thing in my company. And I hope I get cultural fit, but I got to hire those skills. So I do think that there's a balance. Sometimes you get a job because of who you know, but more and more what you know matters. It really matters. What's your best tip for nailing the interview if you get it? Authenticity. People are looking at you and you wouldn't be in the interview if they didn't think you had the skills. So let's just put it aside. They've seen you have the skills.

You've talked about how you've applied the skills. And they're talking to two or three or four people who all have those skills. Then you're going to get the job if you're real and you're not phony because people are thinking, I want to work with this person. What's the most undervalued quality that shows up in an interview is a sense of humor. Like when you say something funny and real, people like, oh, I'd love to work with this person. I'm not going to hire that stiff over there. They've got the same amount of qualifications. I want to work with this person.

It's so hard because you're so anxious when you're in the interview environment. So it's like, how do you loosen up enough to actually show who you are? Yeah. I mean, you could even say I'm so nervous. One time a woman told me in an interview, I loved her for it. She said, I was so nervous about this interview that I drove here last night to see where I was going to park. And I said her, I love you. Well, it's also, that's a great one because it's authentic.

It's real. but also it shows like here's how I'm so resourceful. Here's how I combat that. Yeah. Here's how I contend with that, which is something you definitely want on your team. Right. Do you have any tips for finding good mentors? I have a very strong opinion about this, Liz.

And that is this. Everyone's a mentor. Don't go find a mentor. Every single person around you is a mentor. They're a mentor of a little thing. Okay? So everybody is better at something than you are. It's a given.

You know, you're not good at everything. I consider every single person I meet a mentor. Like I love the way that person comes into a room. I love it, mentor. I love the way that person thinks about the economy mentor. I love the way that woman's marriage works mentor. You can learn from everybody. That's the mindset.

I think it's very hard to have that kind of night in shining armor, that mentor who you have that personal relationship with. In life, if you have one mentor like that, you're lucky, okay? It develops because there's a great deal of love and chemistry. I probably mentor four or five women that way. We were friends first. They were younger. There was a woman who was a babysitter in my neighborhood.

I thought, oh, she's a little bit of free time. I'm going to ask her if she's going to walk my dogs. I was probably 50, and she was probably 22. And one day I was training her how to walk my dogs, and we started talking, and I thought, God, she's so funny and smart and interesting. And I blurted out to her, what are you doing babysitting? And she stopped, and she said, what am I doing, period? We became friends.

And that was probably 20-something, you know, it was probably 15 years ago. we became friends. I loved her and without even noticing it, I became her mentor. She came to me with every hard decision. I talked to her about her career. I wrote her references when she went to business school and I just got to gave a reference for her because she's in line to be the president of a hospital. And in the same time, she's had four children. I became her mentor. It wasn't like she ever came to me and said, will you be my mentor? All right? It developed very, very naturally. I interviewed a woman years ago on the Today Show, Chris Abadner, who was making makeup in her kitchen. and she's now the founder and CEO of Thrive Cosmetics, which I highly recommend.

And she would tell you. Wait, they make my mascara. Yes. They make the best mascara on the planet. They're fantastic. And I met her when she's... I'm wearing it right now. Yeah, she's fantastic.

And she's a dear friend. And I went and I met her when I was a reporter at the Today Show. And she was literally making lipstick in her kitchen. Wow. And she was just starting off. But what she was doing is every time she made a product, she gave a product to a woman in cancer treatment. She's just an amazing human being. We became friends.

And she never said to me, Susie, will you be my mentor? But she would probably tell you, I am her mentor. But you know what? She's a mentor to me. The way she lives her life, I watch with great love and admiration. Like she said to me, she was on my podcast not too long ago, and she said to me, you need to have more fun. And I thought, I trust everything she says. And she's, you know, half my age. And I learn from her all the time. I had her come talk to my class in NYU. I learned from her so much. Mentorship is a total mindset that you can learn from everybody. And if you're lucky over your life, you'll have two big mentors, three big mentors. I love that advice.

what do we do if we feel like our partner could have a job that was more satisfying, that they could be more successful, but they're maybe not taking the steps to get there themselves? Oh, God, I've just seen this. Women just manage their husband's lives. We just do, I didn't do it with Jack because he was managing his own life just fine. Thank you. But very, very often, we become the emotional managers and the logistical managers of our husband's lives. And my advice is an old lady on this is that you're not their mother. to quote the great J-Lo, I ain't your mama. And they got to do it for themselves because they got to own the whole process themselves.

You can put the tools in front of them. But it's a recipe for disaster if you are trying to move them into your vision of their life. They've got to want it that much. They do. They have to want it for themselves. Maybe you could do like the values bridge tests together or something like that. We do. And the new version of the values bridge that's coming, you can add a person who's also taken it

and you actually see their values right next to theirs. and you can sit there as a couple and say, oh, look at this, dear, achievements my number one value. But look, it's number 15 for you. What do we think about that? Wait, you said this when I was on your podcast, but I want you to say it here because I do think it's really interesting for people to sit with. You said that you think it's really important for the long-term success of a relationship to have aligned values.

It's not an opposite's attract. It's not I fill in their holes. It's if you don't have the same values, mostly, you're going to have some real problems. Can you speak to that? I think so. Okay. I think that you can have one value in common, like fun or achievement, and it can save a marriage. But if your values are not generally aligned, it's just too much friction.

At the beginning, it's kind of fun and sexy to have a little conflict. And, you know, he's extroverted and I'm introverted, you know, opposite. We fill each other's holes. And I think that every time I hear that, I think, uh-oh, let's check in in 20 years. And I think that what I've seen in life is that the couples who share values end up being more successful long term. But especially if you don't have a language to talk about your differences, is they begin to eat away at you. And then we sort of accuse the other person of not being like us. That's what we do. We don't say, I'm so happy you're different from me. We say, I can't stand the

fact that you're different from me. And this comes up actually with children. Also, one of the hardest things we discover with children is sometimes we have children who have totally different values than we do. And we discovered as they're getting older and older. And it can cause a lot of conflict. What do we do about them? Because we can't break up with them. No, we can't. And that is when you really need to get a language of values. I mean, I fixed every problem I had with my son Rosco when I finally began to understand that we just had very different values. I wanted my oldest son to be exactly like me. I wanted him to value achievement. And you know what? For the first 18 years of his life, he was very dutiful. And he did exactly

what I said. And then he got to Stanford and he was start because he had been a dutiful son who just did what everything we asked him to do. And then he started to become his own person. I actually literally said, God, why have you given this to me? Why have you given me this burden? And I had a very wise friend who said to me, the hardest thing you're going to have to come to terms with Susie's, he's not you. And then I had to learn who he was. And because I can't break up with him and I wanted to be in relationship with him. I did not want to be estranged from him. And then he married the woman who was the most different from me in the world. And I thought, I'm not going to become estranged from my beloved son. I'm going to learn what his differences are.

I'm going to get a language around it. And I'm going to love them. And we are different. But I just love them and I refuse to be restrained from one of my own children. And actually, I mean, one of the greatest beneficiaries of all the language around values that I've done has been me because I've learned to talk to my kids about how we're different. And one time I teach becoming you outside of NYU. I teach these intensives, a three-day intensive, a one-day intensive. And one of the most rewarding things that ever happened to me was a woman came all the way from California to take the three-day intensive where she learned the becoming used language and how to apply it. And she wrote me, I came home and for the first time in 20 years, I had a conversation with my adult children.

And it gave her language to finally understand her children and talk to them. And I'll tell you something, if that's all the book does, if that's all my language does is help parents become unestranged from their children, it's been worth it to me. One of the last things that I want to touch on is, I always thought the enneagram was kind of BS. Like, I thought it was fun, but maybe there wasn't a lot of there. You're a fan of it. Can you explain why? I love the anagram. I thought it was BS. And I wanted to have more testing around temperament in my class. And I kept on asking scholars who I really respected other academics, what test should I give? And like, when the 14th person said, why aren't you using the endogram? I was like, okay, fine, I'm going to go learn more about the anagram. Then nobody saw me for two

weeks because I went down the rabbit hole of the aneogram. Like, do not do that. And I learned about it, and I learned how scientifically validated it is. And I learned about the science behind it. And many great scholars have improved it over the years. And it's now completely scientifically validated by the Association of Clinical Psychologists. And it's gotten a full literature review. And gold standard. I love what it teaches you. It is not everything you need to know. I think it is one very large tile in the mosaic of your life. I think it does help you understand two big things about yourself. It helps you understand your deepest motivation, what you really, really want, and I think it helps you understand your deepest fear. And so for me, I'm an achiever.

That probably comes as a shock to everybody. I'm a big achiever. And my number one motivation is feeling validation, feeling heard. Okay, that's what achievers want. And my biggest fear is not feeling worthy. And when I first heard it, I was in agony because I thought, oh my God, I'm so seen, how unfortunate I'm finding this out at age 60. It changed my mind. It changed my life because right around the time I learned about the Enneagram, I got a job offer. And the thing about achievers is they want the most claps. When you've got the most claps, you're being seen and heard, and you're being validated. And I got a big job offer that would have taken me away from the work I love being a professor. But I would have gotten a huge amount of claps where it would have been a big

story that I had taken this job. And I thought, ooh, I'm going to get the most claps. And then I thought, but that's just the achiever in me. I'm not going to be good at that job. And frankly, underneath it all, I don't really want that job. I want the pleasure of getting that job. I want the cheers of getting that job. And I said no to the job. And everybody who knew me thought, Susie's finally grown up. So I am like a true believer in the Antigram. It teaches you stuff about yourself. You need to know. It's not the only thing you need to know. It certainly teaches you about people around you. That same son, I just mentioned Roscoe. When I found out that he was a peace seeker, what his big fear is is disharmony. And when you fear disharmony, when you start getting

friction, you check out. And it had always driven me out of my mind that when I got in his face, he immediately went like, whatever, Mom, whatever Mom. And I hated that about him because I am fine with friction. I'm fine with duking it out. That's part of who I am. And I thought, oh, it's just his enneagram at work. He can't take friction. And I've learned how to speak to him differently because I now know his aniogram type. So I'm big supporter, big supporter. And is it cool just to take one of the tests online or do you need to like hire a professional? No, no, no. There's only, there's one really good test, the RETI. Make sure you're taking the reti. R-H-E-T-I. That's the one to take. It's the only one that's scientifically validated.

It costs $14.00. I'm sorry. I know that's not in everyone's budget, but I'd say that it's worth taking. It's $14.00 And then there's a great website called upbill.com that explains the types very well. It's free. You can go listen to their podcast. Upbill.com. It's the person who runs this organization, Upbill, which is an Enegram think tank. Rassanath Das is actually that teaches Enigram to my students at NYU. I've gotten to know him well. He's a great scholar and thinker. You can go to their website and they have free podcast about each type, which are invaluable. So I would suggest them. What do you think is the number one mistake that people make when trying to identify and pursue their dream career? Oh, okay. It's a big one. It's a big mistake. And that is they look at what the world has to offer and they try to fit themselves

into that mold. Okay, there's a lot of jobs in cybersecurity and that's growing. And I'm going to go sort of like squeeze myself into whatever hole. I'm going to go get that education and I'm going to sort of like, and I think the exact opposite is what you should do. I think you should know who you are and see what the world has for you. So I think that the biggest mistake, frankly, is that people go at finding their dream job back assword. And the first thing to you got to know is who you are, what are your values, what are your aptitudes, what are your interests, what's at the center of that? And then what are the jobs that match that instead of the other way around? Can you leave us with just one homework assignment, something that we can all do immediately to push us in the right

direction in terms of our authentic life and our authentic career? I'm going to say, go back to those three questions I asked earlier. What do you want people to say about you when you're not in the room? What did you love about your childhood and what did you hate and what would make you cry from regret at your 85th birthday? I would do that. I would take some time. I would not edit myself and I would write down the answers. Can I do too? Can I give you another thing to do? I think that here's something we never do, Liz. We never do it because we edit ourselves constantly and we're like, you know, we'll start to imagine our dream of a life and then immediately we start coming in with the pen and editing out things we think are not possible.

And I would say one thing the world does not invite us to do and we always sort of criticize people who do it is I would honestly close my eyes and I would let myself imagine the life I want in 25 years if everything worked out. Like just stop being a naysay or stop being your mother, stop being your teacher, stop being the world and just say, I'm just going to pretend it all happened for me and actually jot down that vision you see. And in fact, walk yourself through the day. I wake up. I'm an X kind of house. So-and-so is next to me or not. Okay. I've got X children or not. I get an ex-car and I drive to X place or not. Or I go out and I lay on the beach or I continue ladling out food at a refugee camp in Somalia, whatever. Imagine that day 25 years from now if you got

everything you wanted. We never let ourselves do it. And that is our dream of a life. And that is where we'll actually identify our values. We won't know our aptitudes from this, unfortunately. But we'll kind of figure out our interests if we let ourselves really do it freely. And you have to invite yourself into it and be aware that you're going to try to stop yourself 30 times doing it. But just do it. Just try it. And you're going to have some information about yourself you need to know.

Do we talk about how to figure out what your aptitudes are? I feel like we talked about how to figure out what your personality was. Yeah, that's part of aptitudes. For your aptitudes, if you don't know what your aptitudes are, and the research would suggest that you do not. And unfortunately, life will eventually tell you what you're good at because you'll keep on getting fired from certain kinds of jobs. And sometimes people tell you, but your aptitudes are pretty set by the time you're 15 years old.

Science would tell us that the main cognitive aptitudes are set. There's a test online. I highly recommend it. Unfortunately, it's a little pricey. It's $39. It's called UScience.uscience.com. And there's a 87-minute test. And it tests your big aptitudes.

It tells you how you are on idea generation. It tells you how you are on project planning. It tells you how you are on whether you're a generalist or a specialist. This is hugely important data. And it also suggests jobs you could or should have based on your aptitudes. What it doesn't take into account are or what your values are and what your interests are. So it may tell you you should be a geophysicist and you're like, I don't know, I've never looked at a rock that I'm interested in. You can take that or leave that.

But to get this data on what your actual aptitudes are, I know what's expensive, but it's money well spent. So I highly recommend uscience.com. I have no skin in this game whatsoever. I don't know them. My students take that test. Okay. Can you tell us a little bit in your own words about your amazing book? All of the information in here, we just literally skim the surface of the amount of information that you've included in this book.

And then anything else that you want to highlight. Okay. So Becoming You is the book that I wrote. It's based on my class in NYU that walks you through the process of figuring out what your purpose is. And you know, I tell you the honest truth is I didn't want to write the book. I was busy teaching it, busy doing a lot of research to create the tools that go along with it. I've written a bunch of books. And I was like, I'm tired of writing books. Books take so much time. And, you know, I had this whole story in my head. And I actually have a daughter who's an artist, and she's usually very lucy-goosey about life. She's a beautiful person who makes beautiful ceramics. And the professional world has been of no interest to her except for her pottery business.

And one day we were taking a walk, and my publisher was saying to me, I need you to write this book, Susie, about your methodology. It's a phenomenon and all this other stuff. It will help people. And I was complaining to her that my publisher was trying to get me to write the book. And she stopped, and she grabbed me by the arm. And she said, Mom, you have to write this book. And I was, what? And she said, you have to write it because not everyone can meet you. I know that this methodology I've seen at work. And you got to do it, Mom. It's like a gift.

You got to give. And so she blew my mind and changed my thinking. And so I sat down to write it. And I thought I want to do it so that if no one ever meets me or they can't get to NYU or they can't take one of my intensives or they live in Madagascar, that they can take this book and they can get closer to really knowing what their purpose is and why. And so that's why I put it all in the book. It's filled with stories. I mean, I tell a lot of stories about myself and my life and people who've gone through this process. So I wanted to make it an enjoyable read. So I hope I did. It was a hugely enjoyable read. And just, again, so many actionable things to do. Like you really spell out the process. And if your life is not changed at the end of reading it and doing the exercises, I'd be very surprised. Thanks, Liz. Thanks. Thank you so much for taking the time to share all of your wisdom. I have this has been incredibly enjoyable. I love being with you. Thanks.

Unfortunately, that is all for this episode of the Liz's Middy podcast. If you have got anyone your life that isn't in their dream career or that needs to hear this information, please share a link to this episode with them. It'll help them. And you guys can talk about it and you can process all of this together, which makes it so much more likely to have it sink in and change your life. Make sure that you are following the Liz Moody Podcast and Apple Podcasts on Spotify or on YouTube because we have got an episode coming up where we're going to have Dr. Emily Nagoski on the podcast. Yes, the Dr. Emily Nagoski. And she is going to start. all of your deepest, most embarrassing, maybe most shameful, your trickiest questions about sex.

It's going to be such a good conversation. And then I have another episode coming up with the single rule that transformed my sense of self-love, my relationships, my career. It is a game changer. Following the podcast means that the episodes will show up right in your feed. You'll never have to go searching for one. You'll never have to miss something that could possibly really help you or make you feel amazing or make you laugh or all of these things. You'll never have to miss out on one, so follow the podcast, and also you can now watch full video episodes on YouTube and on Spotify, too. Also, we are able to bring you this show completely for free because of the brands that you heard in this episode. You can save money on amazing products

while supporting the show by using the discount codes that we share. There's a full list of all of our active ones at lizmoody.com slash codes. And remember to head over to lizmoodie.substack.com to send it for our newsletter, The Takeaway, where you'll get key action. for each episode plus tons of bonus content. You can also come hang out on Instagram. I am at Liz Moody. I share tons of inspiring and always a very real content and exactly how I am using everything that we learn on the podcast in my real life. Okay, I love you. I'm very excited for you to maybe get your dream career to figure out where your values are aligned with your career, to start getting even closer to the career and the life that you so deserve. I am rooting for you.

And I will see you on the next episode of the Liz Moody podcast. Oh, just one more thing. It's the legal language. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. It is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, a psychotherapist, or any other qualified professional.