When Suzy Welch walked into the first meeting of the first university course she had ever taught, in the fall of 2022, she looked out onto 20 students. She and the dean of New York University’s Stern School of Business had agreed that the new course, which Welch had created and intriguingly named “Becoming You,” should be offered to two sections of no more than 40 students each–one section for full-time MBA students and one for part-time students. Neither section had reached its modest limit. She recalls, “I went to that classroom saying to myself, ‘What made you think you could do this?’”
One week later, the full-time section alone had a wait list of 150 students, all from word of mouth.
From then until now, Becoming You has been a phenomenon. An administrator recalls, “People were breaking down the door trying to get into the course. I cannot tell you the impact.” Welch will teach the course again this fall, now offered to undergraduates, full-time and part-time MBA candidates, and all other post-graduate students, with one mega-section of 150. It will almost certainly be much over-subscribed.
To spread the course’s message more broadly, NYU has created a staffed Initiative on Purpose and Flourishing, with Welch as director. Beyond academia, on her own she offers (for a fee) attendance at intensive three-day and one-day programs available to anyone, with NYU’s blessing, every six weeks or so; about 150 will attend the next program. Her weekly podcasts have been in the top five on careers, and her book published last spring, Becoming You: The Proven Method for Crafting Your Authentic Life and Career, was No. 1 on Amazon for a month.
Welch has tapped into a widespread modern-day yearning: to find one’s purpose in life. For most of history, earning a living and supporting a family was purpose enough. Now millions can afford to wonder why they’re here and what they truly value–and whether their job, where they spend most of their waking hours, aligns with their purpose. Welch, through rigorously developed academic instruments, guides them to the answers, which are often uncomfortable. As NYU discovered, her students of all ages overwhelmingly value the experience. For them and legions of followers, she has become the purpose doctor.
Many students call the experience life-changing. Attending in person is critical: “All of us were super-motivated to discover what drives us, but also to learn about what drives other people and how they arrived in their journey,” says James Ching, a mid-career corporate manager who flew from Singapore to New York to attend a three-day workshop. “I think that was what made it powerful.” He’s now happily on his own, offering consulting and coaching. Crucially, the fellowship of the group sparks extraordinary candor. Kim Aguilar, a Stern School MBA graduate, says, “Even among my closest friends, I don’t think we could have had similar conversations.” Kristen Johnson, 45, had reached a time where she thought, “My family’s okay, and now maybe I need to explore what’s going on with me.” She speaks for many when she says, “If I had had this information as a young person, I wonder how much different [my life] would have been.”
A winding journey
Welch lives on Manhattan’s Upper East Side with multiple dogs; they shift to an upstate weekend place when travel permits. Her four children are adults, and she refers to their kids as “the most perfect grandchildren in the history of humanity.”
Her own journey has been far from smooth or direct. She grew up in New York and New England, precocious without knowing it and without any clear dreams of adulthood. She graduated from Harvard with high honors (major: fine arts), where she spent many hours at the college newspaper. A job as a Miami Herald reporter came next, then a move to the Associated Press in Boston. But daily journalism wasn’t for her, so she went to the Harvard Business School. She graduated among the Baker Scholars, the class’s top five percent. Next: Five years as a Bain consultant. Didn’t love that either. Became editor-in-chief of the Harvard Business Review.
And then, in 2001, she went to interview Jack Welch, undoubtedly the world’s most famous CEO at the time, who was just retiring from General Electric. Bottom line, the interview took an unexpected turn, and they fell in love. She didn’t mention that to the Harvard Business Review and got fired. They got married–what Suzy has called “the rightest thing I’ve ever done”—and spent 16 productive years together, writing magazine columns (including some for Fortune) and best-selling books.
And then, just before covid reached the U.S. in 2020, Jack died. “I didn’t know what I was going to do with my life,” she says. “I had no way to conceptualize myself as separate from Jack.” After two years of walking the dogs and muddling, “I felt like there was something else for me, and I had been fiddling in my mind for years with this methodology to help you figure out your purpose.”
Values are the foundation of purpose, and Welch had begun to see that most people don’t know their own values. Thus helping people to identify their values is the heart of Becoming You, the part that takes the most time in the course and is most revelatory to each student.
Talking rigorously about values isn’t easy. For most people they’re subjective and ill-defined, a problem for inclusion in a university course. Academics have been codifying values for almost a century, but the most recent version is 35 years old. Welch wanted a more current version. So after Becoming You took off, she enrolled in the PhD program at the University of Bristol in the U.K. and created a new values inventory (and received a PhD for it).
Result: 16 core human values, for example Luminance (public recognition), Familycentrism (family as a life-organizing principle), Agency (self-determination), Achievement (seen success). Everyone has all 16 values in different degrees. Welch teaches her students the language she has developed for talking about values. Her teaching style is hyper-energized, speaking bluntly at a mile a minute. Eventually students rate the importance of all the values to themselves, from one (not important to me at all) to seven (extremely important to me).
After students have done that work, things get profound. Facing a 16-dimension portrait of themselves, they confront realities they had never seen. Some are painful. Students may realize that their seven-level Familycentrism can’t work in the real world aside seven-level Workcentrism. Some–many–acknowledge ruefully that they’ve been living by someone else’s values, not their own. At the same time, students may joyfully uncover their true career, long waiting unseen in their minds.
Any of those realizations, sad or uplifting, are so powerful they often incite tears. Among New York University students, Becoming You is “the class where everyone cries.”
There’s more to the course. After students have found their real values, they must find a way to follow them in the hard world, so the course helps students find their aptitudes and ways to be rewarded financially, emotionally, or both as they live their values. But the course’s overarching theme of purpose and meaning is well placed because it’s so especially relevant to people’s lives today.
Hunger for purpose has intensified in recent years. A major factor is the covid pandemic, a once-a-century catastrophe that changed millions of people’s views of life. In a McKinsey study, almost two-thirds of US-based workers said “COVID-19 has caused them to reflect on their purpose in life.” A major study by Harvard’s Graduate School of Education finds that “alarming percentages of [young U.S. adults] lack ‘meaning or purpose’ in their lives (58%),” part of the larger trend in which young adults feel “lonely, unmoored, directionless.” That’s especially bad news because extensive research shows that a sense of purpose improves physical as well as mental health–longer lifespan, better sleep, lower stress levels, healthier weight, improved immune function.
Welch acknowledges that luck was on her side in creating Becoming You. “I didn’t intend this, but my timing was very, very good because the world was turned upside down by covid, and here I was with this methodology that helped you figure out what to do with your life,” she says. But the course was still a gamble for her and the Stern School.
In retrospect it was a gamble with long odds. An informed bet would have said she’d probably succeed because she had succeeded in almost everything she had done. In part that was because she had always worked extraordinarily hard. This is someone who says she once worked for 352 days without a break and acknowledges she is “very, very near a seven on Workcentrism.” But in light of her varied career history, how long would she stay on the project?
The ironic reality is that this person on the verge of teaching Becoming You was not fully certain it was the right thing to do. At age 62 a friend told her he was teaching as an adjunct professor (an expert who teaches one course but is not a faculty member) at the Stern School, and Welch thought “well, maybe that’s something I can do.”
Soon after the course became an instant hit, the Stern School’s dean called her suggesting that she teach more sections and “’what if you do this and what if you do that?’” she recalls. “I don’t know what came over me. I said, ‘Does an adjunct do that?’ And he said, ‘No, we would like you to join the faculty as a dean’s appointee.’” Welch burst into tears. “I thought ‘Oh, this is it. This is exactly right. This is exactly what I want to be doing.’”
Becoming the author of your life
As a full professor, Welch teaches another course, Management with Purpose: Strategies for New and Aspiring Managers. “It’s an incredible joy,” she says. “I created a class, and I love teaching that class.”
In addition, being the creator of Becoming You is a full-time job and a business. On Welch’s website anyone can now find where they stand on each of the 16 values and can use tools to help understand the results. One tool shows how a person’s values align with their life, for example. Another compares the values of two people, identifying conflicts and harmonies. Three tools are available now, and Welch says four are in beta.
Various professions may find value in Welch’s work. She says therapists have expressed interest in using her methodology to treat the increasing patients who have lost their jobs not because they got fired but because their jobs have disappeared. Financial planners and insurance agents have approached her, she says; much of their job is talking with customers about what they really value and how they want to live, but no one has a tested vocabulary and set of concepts for doing so, and that’s what she has.
At the foundation of Welch’s work is an age-old problem, a life-changing conflict for which resolution is straightforward, hard, and liberating. “Sometimes when people find out what their values really are—what they actually care about—they say, ‘I wish this wasn’t what they were,’’’ Welch says. “And we have to talk about why. Usually they say, ‘Well, I really do feel this way, but it’s gonna make my husband so angry,’ or ‘My parents will be so disappointed.’ Well, who are you living for? And is that who you want to live for? Do you want to be the author of your life or the editor of your life? That’s your choice.”
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