Why you’re having trouble finding your purpose, according to Susie Welch

Susie Welch is an author, professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, and speaker. She was a featured expert at the TODAY Making Space Wellness Weekend with Hoda Kotb, sponsored by Miraval Resorts & Spas, where she shared her secrets on how to live the life you want.

As an academic and researcher, Susie Welch says she avoids “woo-wooism” and anything vague that isn’t backed by hard data. Instead, she helps people take on some of life’s most common problems and solve them using her science-based methods.

Discussing an important life decision? Try Welch’s 10-10-10 method, in which she encourages people to think about how each possible outcome will affect them in 10 minutes, 10 months and 10 years.

And if you’re struggling to find your purpose in life, Welch teaches a course at New York University Business School called “Becoming Yourself.” For non-NYU students, her workshop will be available to the public in January. Find out more at her website. In the meantime, read on from Welch.

How to find your purpose

While understanding your “purpose” may seem like too broad an idea to narrow down, Welch focuses it on a few different things.

First, there are your values, measured on a scale of one to seven. For example, if your job is the most important thing in your life, then this is a seven. (Just keep in mind that this means family must be somewhere lower on the scale.) Welch also looks at people’s abilities, or the skills they naturally possess, and their interests, or what attracts them professionally. plan.

Ideally, if people are able to understand these three aspects of themselves, then they will be able to find where they intersect, which will lead to their goal.

The goal of the methodology, Welch said, is for “people to simply say, I’m in my area of ​​transcendence. I’m where I’m supposed to be. I do what makes me feel exceptionally alive.”

4 E

Even if you know what’s important to you, what you’re good at, and what interests you, other factors can still get in the way of achieving your goal. Welch calls the most common of these four Es or four horses. “They jump in and out of our lives,” she says.

They are:

• Economic security, when we choose one career path over another, we may find greater satisfaction due to financial stability.
• Feasibility, when we prioritize convenience even though more complex choices may be more beneficial in the long run.
• Expectations when we make decisions based on what we think people want from us or arbitrary benchmarks we have set for ourselves.
• Events, when a life-changing moment, such as illness, children, or divorce, prevents us from making better choices for ourselves.

However, one of them confuses people more than others.

“Expectations,” Welch told TODAY.com. “What I talk to my students about is that you have this belief that everyone expects something from you, but if you come to them and say, ‘I’m not really going to live up to your expectations,’ they’re like, That’s cool. .'”

“I tell the story of a woman who became a doctor because she thought that was what her parents expected of her and that was what her culture expected of her, so she became a doctor at age 50. I finally had the confidence and courage to tell you that I never wanted to be a doctor.” And… they didn’t even remember how they told her to become a doctor.”

“Expectations are all in our heads,” Welch adds. “And you know what? Even if it’s not true… so what? Just say goodbye to it all. Expectations never helped anyone grow. And you have to be yourself, because you can’t hold your breath that long. “

By her own admission, Welch’s methodologies are not simple. “It’s like saying, ‘How easy is it to build a house?’ Welch explains. “Nobody likes it, and it’s always harder than you think… It’s always further than you think, harder than you think, higher than you think, but the view from the top is very good.”