Discover your authentic life and career with Suzy Welch, professor at NYU Stern School of Business and creator of the proven Becoming You methodology.

What if the stories you inherited about where you come from were all a lie?

In part two of a three-episode Becoming You series about the places you travel and the self-discoveries that arise, your host Suzy Welch voyages to Sicily. Not for sun-drenched escapism or waterfront glamour (hello White Lotus), but to confront the whispered mythology that shaped her childhood and, without her knowing it, her values. This is an episode about ancestry, silence, and the stories families tell to survive.

Suzy takes us to Caltanissetta, her family’s ancestral village in the center of Sicily, where a long-told narrative of nobility and elegance collides with historical truth, about the kind of suffering that forces people to choose between staying—or running for their lives. What unfolds is not just a revelation about where her family came from, but a profound insight into a core value she would later name Scope: the desire (or lack thereof) for risk, stimulation, and a big, expansive life.

This episode explores:

How generational trauma gets buried under idealized fictions
The difference between grief and gratitude when facing your family’s past
How values like Scope shape whether we run toward calm and security vs chaos and excitement
With vulnerability, honesty, and unexpected joy, Suzy reflects on her ancestors’ courage, and their decision to leave everything behind, cross an ocean, and choose uncertainty over suffering. And she asks the question at the heart of this series: What do the places you’ve been reveal about who you are?

Next week, the journey continues—in Paris—where a completely different truth waits to be discovered. Because sometimes, you have to travel all the way across the world to meet yourself.