Three in 10 Americans reported making at least one resolution this year, and half of those respondents committed to more than one, according to a Pew Research Center study. Goals around health and wealth were some of the most popular.
The new year can be a natural time to set intentions related to your business, career or finances. If you’re considering a reinvention for 2025, you might be wondering how to make it stick. Or maybe you’re still trying to figure out what, exactly, you want to change.
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Suzy Welch, an award-winning professor at NYU’s Stern School of Business, might be able to help. Her popular course “Becoming You: Crafting the Authentic Life You Want and Need” explores the idea that people can build a rewarding, successful career around their purpose — and embraces the fact that many don’t know what their purpose, or “area of transcendence,” is.
Image Credit: Vincent Tullo. Suzy Welch.
“The underlying premise is that [purpose] lies at the intersection of your authentic values; your truly held values; your aptitudes, which is what you’re uniquely good at both cognitively and emotionally; and what you’re interested in that will pay you according to your value around money,” Welch explains.
“Part of finding out our values is coming face to face with the fact that we can’t really always have it all.”
Identifying personal values is at the heart of Welch’s course. When she first started teaching “Becoming You,” she realized that students struggled to determine what their personal values were, often mixing them up with virtues. Many had a vague sense that financial security and family were important to them, but found it difficult to dig much deeper, Welch recalls.
So Welch began doing research. She conducted a study based on people ages 21-45 with at least two years of college education; she asked them what a value was, and only 17% could come up with a definition. What’s more, of that 17%, just 7% could identify their own values with specificity.
Sometimes conflicting values contribute to the uncertainty, Welch says, noting that “part of finding out our values is coming face to face with the fact that we can’t really always have it all.” She uses the desire for a very high level of affluence and fun, referred to as “eudaimonia” in the course, as an example: Barring inherited wealth, those two drivers aren’t necessarily the most compatible.
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Welch recalls one student who had to have an honest conversation with himself about how much money really mattered to him. As it turned out, he’d been untruthful with himself and everyone else, but was finally able to admit that money is a significant driver for him. Your personal values are just that — your own — and you don’t have to apologize for them if they’re not hurting anyone, Welch says.
Welch put her “entrepreneur’s hat on” and developed a values test called the Values Bridge to help people determine their values. By answering 100 questions, participants can uncover their top values, bottom values and which values are in conflict with each other. A recently completed six-factor analysis is revealing the results to be “very accurate,” Welch says.
“There are eight big cognitive aptitudes, and [a test can] save you years of doing the wrong kind of work.”
People who want to unlock a more purpose-filled life (and earn an income that supports it) also have to take their aptitudes into account. That, too, can be difficult for many who are unclear on where their talents lie or have been given misguided information.
“The first place we find out our aptitudes is from our parents, who don’t always have the clearest sense of them,” Welch says, “and then school tells us. And it may or may not be true about what we’re good at, what school tells us, because it’s highly dependent on the teacher and the way that stuff is taught and so forth.”
Over the course of their lives, most people will iteratively figure out what they’re good at — but they might be 40 years old by the time they arrive at a well-informed conclusion, according to Welch.
Fortunately, some shortcuts can speed up the process: as with determining personal values, testing is effective. Welch has her students take an online aptitude assessment to pinpoint their abilities. “Are you a generalist? Are you a specialist? Are you a diagnostic problem-solver or a process supporter? There are eight big cognitive aptitudes, and [a test can] save you years of doing the wrong kind of work or not dividing the work properly if you’re an entrepreneur,” Welch explains.
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There’s another simple way for someone to figure out what they’re good at: asking those around them. Most people never experience that level of feedback unless they’re in a corporate setting with 360 reviews — and even then, the process can be a shock, Welch says.
“When I did it for the first time, I was sent away to a leadership program when I’d been promoted to a leadership position,” Welch recalls, “and the guy next to me got his 360 back and he looked at it and said, ‘Oh, you’ve given me back the feedback for the wrong person.’ And they were like, ‘Nope.'”
Welch also created a tool called PI 360 — an easy, inexpensive way for people to receive feedback.
“If you find what you’re really, really good at, you’re more likely to make money there faster.”
Of course, there’s also the case where people do know what their aptitudes are — but don’t necessarily want to accept them. The conflict often presents itself with aspiring entrepreneurs who want to start and grow their businesses, but might not have the skills they need to be successful, Welch says.
“You may not have all the stuff it takes,” Welch explains, “the ability to write down losses, the nerves of steel, the stamina. The skills and actions that are required for entrepreneurs are different from all others. You may be in love with the romance of entrepreneurship, but not actually be fully loaded for it. And that’s very important to find out.”
Once you’ve gotten comfortable with your values and aptitudes, there’s another critical factor to consider: areas of economic opportunity.
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Research shows that when students graduate from high school, they’re able to name five jobs, typically including what their parents did and “teacher,” Welch says. Then college introduces another “conveyor belt,” where it seems like everyone is going into consulting, banking or tech, etc.
“There are 135 industries,” Welch says, “and that doesn’t even include the industries you can make up as an entrepreneur. It’s as simple as Googling what industries are there and reading all 135 of them because the government publishes all the industries and how fast they’re growing. If you’re looking for a fast-growing industry that interests you, it is literally a few clicks away.”
Of course, before you pinpoint an industry, you have to get clear on how much you actually care about money. If earning potential isn’t your primary motivation, that opens up more possibilities.
“The irony of course, is that if you find what you’re really, really good at, you’re more likely to make money there faster than just going into the industry that’s growing quickly and pays a lot of money,” Welch says. “So this is a very dynamic process.”
“Any reinvention [comes with] so many bumps, difficulties, false starts and challenges.”
Although the approach of 2025 might inspire self-reflection and reinvention, there’s no magical time of year that’s better for change than another. After all, research shows that only 9% of Americans who make a new year’s resolution will keep it — and 43% of them won’t even make it past January.
That’s why it’s essential to have confidence in the changes you want to make — and get familiar with that place where your values, aptitudes and economic opportunities intersect.
Related: 10 Things You Can Do to Boost Self-Confidence
“It’s going to go wrong before it goes right,” Welch says. “Any reinvention [comes with] so many bumps, difficulties, false starts and challenges, and if you don’t have confidence that it’s the right pivot, you’re going to drop it the minute it gets hot. Whether you’re doing it in January or any other time of the year, you need to go into it with a fully informed mindset.”
