“What Are You Doing When You Lose Track of Time?” Four Questions to Break You Open (And Free).

Hey, it's Susie Welch. It's becoming you. I have a question for you. How are you? I mean, how are you really? All right, that is a question we're going to talk about today because we're going to talk about some questions that I think you better know the answer to. And if you don't, you got to ask why and these are questions that I had the incredible opportunity to source from a collection of brilliant life coaches. Look at becoming you. We are certifying life coaches in our methodology. It helps you figure out your purpose. And in the room when we were doing the certification, I was sitting there with 50 purpose doulas, people whose lives are committed to helping other people give birth to their purpose. And I asked them, hey, what's your best question life coach? Like, that's what I asked them. What is your best question to crack somebody open to find out what you really need to know with all your expertise, expertise? What's the best question to ask somebody to find out who they really are? And the life coaches gave me their answers. You may be already heard the first installment of this podcast because we did it before. I shared five of those questions and today we're going to look at a few more of those questions. And I know this will come as a big shock. I'm going to opine all those questions. But really the main thing is I'm going to pose the questions and I'm going to ask you, do you know the answer about yourself because this is a show about figuring out who you are. Why? Because you can't get a good career. You can't get a good life if you don't know this incredible important information. You can't find your purpose until you know who you are. And this is hard. I'm going to tell you, I probably didn't know who I was truly, truly. I didn't know who I was until I was in my 50s. And I think it can take a really long time. I'm always stunned when I see somebody who's really young who gets it and knows who they are. I yade for them. I didn't do that. But I maybe that's why I'm so excited about it now. And so we're going to get to that question, how are you really? And what it means. But before then, we're going to take a look at some other mind opening questions about who you are and why you are that person brought to you direct from some of the greatest purpose doublas that are in this great land. And so let us get going again. This is Suzy Welch and this is becoming you. I'm so glad you're here. And if you're this is your first time listening, welcome, welcome, welcome. And if you're back and you've been listening to this show, I love you so much. You know I do. I actually, within a wedding this weekend in Vermont, or just wedding. And I met a listener named Claire. Hi, Claire. If you're listening, I loved meeting you and I love knowing that you're out there. And thank you for your DMs and your emails and everything else. It's such a joy to be doing life with you. Okay. Let's get to our first question. Here it is. Hi, my name is Elizabeth Schneider. I'm a psychotherapist and a coach in helping someone find their purpose. One question that I would ask is what one person that you know either personally or publicly has the greatest level of job satisfaction. And the reason that I would ask that is because I think it identifies very quickly for us the type of lifestyle and the type of career that we want to emulate. This is such a great question on so many levels. I love it. And here's why it forces you to announce the trade offs that you will make. Look, when we have to talk about purpose and we have talk about values, here's the problem I get. This is my job. Okay. I'm a person who talks day and night to people about their values and their aptitudes and their interests. And here's what happens if people don't make choices and don't talk about trade offs. It's like the kitchen sink. I value this. I value that. They all are in conflict. I want to do this. I want to do that. I want to do this. They're all in conflict. And the work that purpose doulas do is we help people figure out which trade offs they're going to make. And what Elizabeth is doing with this question is she's saying what one person, what one person and when you have to narrow down to one person, you literally are forced to say, okay, when I factor everything in around career and lifestyle, those are the two big choices we're making with our purpose. What do I want in my lifestyle and what I want in my career, which one matters more, which one is a bigger priority. I mean, there are 15 values, but it all kind of boils down to lifestyle and career. And she's saying, yeah, you got to name one person. And I bet when she hears that, she's listening so closely, you could say, well, the one person who has the most job satisfaction is my aunt Sally and aunt Sally could be a second grade teacher at a rural school in Maine and New Hampshire. And that's the person you choose. Or you could say, Dolly Parton, my personal favorite person in the entire universe is I continually tell people. And that's a different choice. That's a different set of trade offs, isn't it? And you know it immediately. The other thing I love about this question is it forces you to define what you mean by job satisfaction. Okay, whoo. Do you, can you answer what is job satisfaction? I mean, that's a great question. What one person represents job satisfaction to you? And I love this question. We have, and I've talked about it before, we have a test that we do and an exercise in becoming you call whose life do you want anyway? And you create a chart where you list all the people whose lives you would trade. If you have to, as am the queen of the world, you've got to trade lives, name five people whose lives you want. And you say, this is what I would love about there. This is what I would choose them. And this is what I'd leave out. And that's it's similar, but hers is much more efficient. You know, what we do is what people list five, six, seven people, they look for patterns and why they chose that person fame, money, impact, and what they'd leave out, you know, divorce, a strange mint, not, you know, not enough money, whatever. Okay. And then you look for the patterns and it is a way of surfacing your values, but Elizabeth's question goes right for the jugular. And I wonder, you know, if I had to answer this question, even I, you know, chirping away as a purpose person all the time, if I had to name one person, I kind of, I like whose life, because I'd like to list five, six people. But if I had to name one person whose life I'd want, whose values most closely resemble mine in terms of lifestyle and career, I don't know, it would probably be Mark Stewart, Dolly Parton share. I mean, one of those people who really, you know, made some choices around life and career. And it's like you immediately consents. Well, I have some kind of value around impact I do. It's called radius. I wanted to have a big impact in the world. So I love this so much because it's a winnowing exercise. And we can't do it all all at the same time. I want to tell you that for a fact, as I tried, I mean, I tried for about 25 years. And if you've tried, you know, you cannot do that. But we can, if we are forced ourselves to make the hard choices around trade, also we can get pretty much a life that is as close of fit as we can get. And it's often pretty exquisite, by the way. Now, I wanted to say one thing, a little aside, which is that sometimes when I do this kind of exercise, not Elizabeth's question, which is very good, by the way. But when we do the whose life exercise, sometimes people will come up to me afterwards and they'll say, Professor Welch, I actually put you on my list. I'd love your life. And I'm always really honored. I'm kind of reclamped. I get embarrassed. I'm like, but I want to say I have had these really big trade offsets I've had to make. I have. I mean, like I, you know, I, because of my incredibly high value around family centrism and belonging, my dogs control my life, because you know what, my dogs are my companions. I mean, since my husband died, they are. And I have made a lot of choices around that. And, you know, I, that's like the one non-negotiable, the one non-negotiable. And I mean, I think, you know, you'd have to understand that if you chose my life, you would be choosing a life of, of having had a massive loss. And, you know, you would be consigned to cry at every wedding when the dancing starts. Like, because when the dancing starts, I usually say, I'm leaving now. And actually, I tried that at the wedding this weekend. And I said to my daughter and her fiancee who were at the wedding with me, the dancing starting. I'm leaving now because it reminds me Jack used to love to dance at weddings and we dance together. And they said, nope, it's been five and a half years and they took my hands and they brought me up to the dance floor and we danced together. And I did it. I lived and it was okay. I cried a little, but I was smiling most of the time. We took a video of it and I did it. I danced. And I think that, you know, I make trade offs too. And so no matter who you answer this question with, and this is the point, every single person that you answer this question with has made some trade offs and you have to make them too. And that's what this question gets at. And that's why it's chef kiss. Thank you, Dr. Schneider. Thank you, Elizabeth, so much for that question. Let's go on to the second one that came up at this meeting of purpose duolars. Hi, my name is Gleen Horseful. I work as an educator and purpose coach. When I'm helping you find your purpose, the one thing I want to know about you is what are you doing when you lose track of time? This question comes from a guy named Gleen Horseful as he identified himself as an educator who came to the certification all the way from New Zealand. He did it. He came from Wellington, New Zealand. I haven't noticed something about New Zealand. Wellington, New Zealand. This is one of the nicest towns in the world. It is 200,000 people. It's like a little village in the in the northern island of New Zealand. Most people go to Auckland or they go to the southern part of New Zealand. All of New Zealand is beautiful. You could actually go there and just actually think the world is a beautiful and splendid place. We are so lucky that Gleen got on the plane and took the long trip to come get certified. He asked this question and you could have heard a pin drop as I think the other purpose duolars in the room were all asking it themselves. What are you doing when you lose track of time? You know what I think it is? That's flow. That's when you're in flow state. People have lots of definitions of flow state, but you know what I think flow state is? I think flow state is when every value is activated, every aptitude that you have is activated, and every interest you have is activated. All of those things are firing. You are in your area of transcendence. You are living your purpose when you're in flow. Everything is working. For me, the answer is immediate. I know when I lose track of time. It's when I'm teaching. We had the certification from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. 3 days in a row at like 5 o'clock. I would say like wait, didn't we just start? And when I'm teaching my students, I'm not sure. I think my feet are off the ground. I'm levitating. That's flow. That's when you lose track of time. Glenn told this hysterical story about when he is high work centrism like I do, and when he's teaching, he's also in flow state. And he said that when he's walking in the garden with a friend, or they're taking a walk by the water, or whatever, he's like secretly looking at his watch, saying like what time is it? When is this walk going to end? We know when we are not inflow state, and we know when we're in it. And I think this tells you so much about somebody's values, so much, because you will never lose track of time if you are not living your values. If not, if you're not in your comfort zone of your of your aptitudes, and you're not doing something, that's interesting to you. Now, I'm just going to use this opportunity about this great question to give a little gratuitous couples advice. What the heck? Because it's just a great question, but I want to ask you, do you know the flow state of your partner? And do you allow them to enter it? I think the couples fight about this a lot. That they have different flow states. They have different moments when they lose track of time. And again, gratuitous, I had a very, very happy marriage. That's my basis of sort of authority here. I'm not a couple's therapist, but I watch couples very closely as part of becoming you. And I will say that love, part of love is allowing your partner to enter their flow state, even if you don't, and respecting their flow state. And I will tell you this, when I met Jack, he was an absolute sports junkie obsessed with sports, especially baseball, but all sports. I was just not a sports person. I played sports, but I wasn't going to go watch the Red Sox four nights. So we guess what I did? We had seasons tickets. And I went to the Red Sox with him four nights a week when they were in town. He was in his flow state. And I wanted him to be his. He was on fire. He loved it. And chart partner showing loved him was letting him be in a place where he lost track of time, even though I was so bored out of my mind. I thought I might die because I loved him. And you know, he didn't really like dogs at the beginning. He came to love dogs. And he would take walks with me with the dogs because I was in my flow state then. I was just so happy walking happy was our dogs named through Central Park. And he let me go there. And he didn't pick on me or criticize it. And so I just think you got to know that answer to this question about yourself. When do you lose track of time? And then the second question, if you're in a partner relationship, is do you know when your partner loses track of time? And is it okay with you? Do you give them permission to go there? Do you even celebrate them when they go there? Because that's a beautiful way to express love, I think. And actually, I'm just thinking about this right now in the moment. I think it's also sort of about parenting. I can tell you when each of my four children are in flow state. And as I've gotten to be a better parent, just time goes on. And you never, you never stop trying to be a better and better parent. Coming to respect, appreciate an honor. There are flow states is there is just sometimes you don't agree with it. One of the hardest things you do as a parent, by the way, is to come to terms with the fact that your kids are really different than you. They can be. You think you're going to have like little replicas of you. That does not happen nice most of the time. Although one of my sons married a replica of me. Well done son. But I would say that you got to respect their flow states also. So I love this question because I think it opens up so much about you and also your relationships. And so think about those questions and let us move on to the third question from our Purpose Dualists. Hi, this is Marilyn Dollar from the women'scoach.com. And I'm an executive coach. And one of my questions that I ask is, what gives you the Sunday scariest? You know, this is a very important diagnostic question. And Sunday scariest are real. I mean, think about Sunday night before you go to work. And are you feeling just, you know, maybe you don't have them. Maybe you're feeling like, oh, I can't wait to get to work. And if so, you're like in 1% of the population. Most people have some kind of anxiety about work. And sometimes it's good anxiety. You're excited. Something big is happening. You're going to be stretched. You're going to see people you like and so forth. But most people have some anxiety about work. What is yours? And why? And sometimes the answer is quite straightforward. I have a bad boss. The company might close. Somebody I love is about to get fired. But sometimes it's a little more complicated. And we have the Sunday scariest because we're doing work we're not good at. Okay? Or we're doing work that's contrary to our values. Have you named it? Have you put a name to it? Or do you just say work makes me anxious? This is the problem with anxiety. Anxiety is real. Look, I teach 20-somethings and 30-somethings, a data's not go by, or a student doesn't talk to me about anxiety. And I have children. I understand anxiety is real. I had anxiety when I was young. And I have to say I'm coping mechanisms, but anxiety's real. I don't want to belittle it. But what ends up happening too often is we say I have anxiety about work and we don't ask the next question, which is why? Why? Is it just simply a bad boss? I've had bad bosses. I had a boss when I worked in Fort Lauderdale as a reporter who literally would not call me by my first name. He thought that the way that you built somebody up was you broke them down first. And he was so mean, he was a mean guy. And something was wrong with him. And I actually ended up leaving the company because of him and other people did too. And that was why I had the Sunday Scaries because I had to go deal with that bastard. But sometimes we have Sunday Scaries because we're just, we have an inner voice that's telling us we are not good enough at what we need to do. And here's the thing. Once you can say it, you can pretty much get better at it or at least try. I mean, there's some things that we're just not wired for. We'll never get better at it. But look, the story of my life is just me getting better at some things I wasn't naturally good at. Like I was, I know this is going to sound wackadoodle, but it's true. I was just not a good public speaker. I wasn't. I was too stupid. I tried to say too much. I was too rigid in my speaking. And when I wrote 10, 10, 10, it became a big bestseller. This is back in 2009. This is my book about decision-making. And my book tour kept on getting extended and extended because the book continued to stay on the bestseller list. And I got exhausted and I used to go to a city and I'd get up and I'd give a speech and everybody would clap. And I would give myself a B. It was an okay speech. It was pretty stupid. Okay, I would hate to see a video of it. That's for sure thing. I have never seen one. But one time, my book tour was extended again, again and again. And I ended up in Toronto. And I was literally, I think I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown. I was so exhausted. I missed my kids. But you do this grind. You sign up for it and you want to keep the book on the bestseller list, whatever. I did that. I got to Toronto and there was a group of 2,000, 3,000 women who had been waiting to hear me speak. And the host got up there and did this whole big introduction for me and then she went backstage and I was supposed to go on stage and I literally said to her, I'm just going to take a chair out. And she was like, what? And I said, I'm taking a chair out and I dragged a chair to the middle of the stage and I sat down and I started the speech by looking at at these women and I honest to God I said, I'm just so tired. I'm just so tired. And then for the next hour, I completely spoke from the heart. I told the true story of my life. I told why I wrote that book. I didn't have any funny bromides. I just, you know, I think I said some funny things, but I just told the truth sitting there and I then finished and I said, thank you for listening to me. It was silence in that room. I mean, I was looking at their faces and God bless them. They were receiving me exactly as I was. And when I was finished, they, you know, they stood up and they clapped for about 10 minutes and they just, it was beautiful. I saw one of the most beautiful experiences of my life and then they came up and people were hugging me and I was hugging them and I thought, I'm going to get better public speaking because I can and I learned the hard way that I had to experiment and it was a great learning. I speak differently now and you can get better at stuff. And I talk a lot about aptitudes on this show and how we're wired to do certain things, but sometimes we have work, we have to do and we don't have the aptitudes for it and we got to push through, we got to endure, we've got to get better at it. So the Sunday scary's, hey, ask yourself, do you have the Sunday scary's? And if you do, don't let yourself give the easy answer. What's the hard answer for why you have them? Can you fix it? Okay, you want to blame somebody else? Can you fix it though yourself? Can you? I hope so. And if you can't, I don't want you to stay in a life where you have the Sunday scary's all the time because they stink, they stink. All right, let us move on to our very last question and it's the one that I started with. Let's hear it straight from the persons, the wonderful, beautiful, beautiful Beth Briggs mouth. Hi, this is Beth Briggs and I'm the Dean of Students at the NYU Stern School of Business. When I'm helping someone find their purpose, the one thing I want to know about them is how are you doing really? When I was in college, I will never forget this experience. I was walking on a beautiful sunny path. It was a gorgeous day and you know how people we say to you, "Hey, how are you? How are you?" And everybody goes, "Good, good. Hey, good. Yeah, hanging in there." And I was walking by and somebody said to a person they were passing, "How are you?" And the person answered, "I'm terrible, actually." And the other person just kept walking. I mean, I kept walking because it was so arresting that somebody answered with the truth. All right, and so we have this construct of saying to each other, "How are you?" And automatically, "Is there a cool good, hanging in?" Whatever, all right? And what Beth is saying is what we want to know as purpose dualists and what you need to know about yourself is how are you really? We lie to each other so much about pain. We lie to ourselves about pain. We just lie about our pain because pain takes time to unpack and sometimes we just can't. I mean, sometimes people tell me, and I think this might be true, people really close to me literally have looked me in the face and said, "You have not yet grieve, Jack. You've not done that yet, Susie." And I think they might be right. I'm not ready. I can't face the pain. It's possible. So I get it. Sometimes we protect ourselves and we hold on to pain and then it builds. And here's the problem. You know it, as well as I do, that which is not transformed is transferred. That which is not transformed, pain that's not transformed is transferred. We put it on other people. And usually we put it on people we love and then we hurt them. And that's bad. And so we need to understand our pain. Now sometimes we can't. We got to creep up to it. But that question, how are you really? It's so big. How are you really? Are you happy? That's great. I hope you are. The whole point of this show is joy. The closest you're going to get to joy is living your purpose. And so that's what it's all about underneath it all, above it all, whatever. Finding your purpose. That's as closely as you'll get to it. You know, I don't like that being this industrial complex, but I want you to live your purpose. That's as close as we'll ever get. I think it's fabulous, exquisitely alive. But this question, how are you really? Is there some secret pain? You're not accessing or thinking about or acknowledging a good friend of mine. His mom listens to this podcast. Just gave me a quote from Confucius, which says the road to wisdom begins with calling things by their proper name. And you know, we got to give a name to what's giving us pain. Is it? I'm going to suggest. And I think that I've seen this in my own practice. My practice is a private coach. My practice is a teacher becoming you, both at NYU and outside of NYU, is that one big source of pain. There's trauma. But another big source of pain is an unexpressed value that we hold the value. Maybe it's a scope. Maybe it's a radius. Maybe it's a family centrist. Maybe if it's of affluence. Whatever. You know, I'm a values agnostic. Your values are your values. But if we hold it and we don't express it, it's like holding our breath. I mean, this is one of the reasons I created the values bridge, because the values bridge tests what values you have and how much you're living them. Okay, you can go take the values bridge right now and find that out. By the way, at thevaluesbridge.com, I hope you do. We're talking that test. But that's where pain comes from. And I think women are, okay, can I say something gendered? Are you saying something gendered? Women are better talking to each other about this and talking about it in general. That's what I've just observed from 65. That's my observation. Please don't sue me or cancel me or any of those things. I think men, and particularly, I think men in their 30s and 40s and even their 50s, just they're not invited to talk about their pain in a way that's easy for them. And then they explode. You know, I think that they don't have the language. They're not inculturated. They're not socialized. I think we don't do a good job with our son. I remember one time talking to a mother and her son was kind of struggling and I said to her, he was a teenager and our boys knew each other and I said, "How's his inner life?" And she said, "I'm not sure he has an inner life." And I grabbed her by the shoulders and I said to her, "I must tell you your son has an inner life. Everyone has an inner life and your boys have one." And she said, "I'm not so sure about that." And I was like, "Please, please find his inner life." And I think that we've got to acknowledge that as moms, that our sons have inner lives and we have to invite them to share them with us at the beginning of teaching them about it. But I would just say this question, "How are you really? I want you to ask yourself and know the answer." And if you do know the answer, it turns to the person that you love the most and asks them, "How are you really? How are you really?" That's a really big gift to give somebody and that's the gift that I want to end with today. And so that's it. I can't wait to see you next week with another virgin, another episode of Becoming You. I'm Susie Welch. Keep Becoming You.