How’s the gobsmackery going for you lately?

Love of the Week

​When my younger sister and I were in college, something brought us together for a trip to Princeton, where my dad had briefly been a professor. It was a football game, maybe, that landed us back on campus? A friend’s party?

I can’t recall, but during our trip, Della and I decided to sneak away for an hour to visit where we had lived in faculty housing, and in particular, to see our favorite old playground, which was surrounded by a metal picket fence. I relate this detail because the sight stopped us in our tracks.

We used to slip between that fence’s slats.

“Were we really this little?” we asked each other. “How could it be?” It made us laugh and cry and ponder our beginnings with awe. And ponder, too, all the ways we had grown and changed in what felt like the blink of an eye.

Yesterday, I went back to another beginning and had the same kind of gobsmackery.

It was the first day of class for Becoming You at NYU Stern this semester. I can’t count how many times I’ve taught Becoming You since its maiden voyage five years ago. But somehow, the launch of it never, ever gets old. As I stepped into the arena, if you will, in front of 130 students, I felt a rush of delight and expectation – and awesome responsibility. I didn’t exactly feel butterflies in my belly; more like hummingbirds.

I love what I do. I say this with total, unabashed cringe! I love what I get to do. The actual teaching – I have a handle on that now. And believe me, it comes with its real world annoyances, like grading hundreds of finals over Christmas break. But the gobsmackery of living your purpose never ages. And yes, I used that word again, because I made it up and I kind of like it.

Anyway, not to be nosy, but how’s the gobsmackery – third time! – going for you lately? I ask because it’s what I do. Your purpose, as I am wont to say, is my purpose.

And I ask because we have finally scheduled another Three-Day Intensive where you can unearth your purpose, or simply learn more about yourself. Thank you for your patience with us in finding the open runway to make this happen.

You can find out more about the Intensive here if so inclined, but regardless, I urge you this week to consider a joyous beginning you once had, and ask if that feeling is still anywhere in your gut or bones or heart.

Gobsmackery (4th and final!) is a beautiful thing. Let it flutter all you can.

Hate of the Week

I have a serious hate this week, almost too painful to write about, and yet it is so heavy on my heart, I must.

Becoming You Labs is incredibly proud of its coaching certification program, not just because of its excellent curriculum, but because of its amazing community of graduates, 250 strong and growing every day. Our coaches are caring, smart, creative, innovative, and every other superlative I can think of.

They are also friends. Friends to me and friends to each other.

We lost one of our friends this week. Isabelle Beulaygue, a wonderful mother and loving wife, a PhD whose brilliant research delved into adolescent psychology, a woman with rare, intertwined intelligence, empathy, and the gentlest of spirits, died in a tragic accident during Santa Fe’s sudden floods. She was just 39.

My heart breaks – our community’s heart breaks – for Isabelle’s husband and their young son. We have lost an irreplaceable soul. I have no platitudes to add; what is there to say? Maybe just this, that we all hate life’s fragility and must face it more than we can bear; love is its only antidote.

Hmm of the Week

​​Remember job security? I don’t, but if I squint my eyes and try to go waaaay back, I do recall a time when Microsoft was about as good a gig as you could get if stability was your goal.

This week, Microsoft offered 60,000 employees voluntary buyouts. This is the softest way to do layoffs, but asking a quarter of your global workforce to depart is a layoff nonetheless.

What’s next for the folks that depart? Retirement, perhaps, for some of them. But for the others?

This question is exactly what our Chief Economist Sania Khan spends her time thinking about, and in her newsletter this week, she proposes that your job security is directly related to your “job dimensionality,” i.e. how many of your tasks can be replaced by AI. (She has other astute insights too; subscribe if you haven’t already, for goodness sake!)

But the Microsoft story makes me wonder if any of us expect linear careers anymore, let alone long-term employment with one company. Do any of us want it? I do! I want to work at Becoming You Labs forever, and I want my amazing team to feel the same way.

But perhaps I am a dinosaur.

Let me know at [email protected], would you please?

In the meantime, here is to fluttering and love, on earth and heaven above.

Your friend,

6 Jobs You Should Not Take Right Now (Part 1)

“Do not, under any circumstances, take that job.”

This week, I'm joined by our very own Chief Economist Sania Khan, to tell you about the six jobs you should think twice about, in a two-part series on the jobs that look good today...but may leave you without a life raft tomorrow.

With hiring slowing and people clinging to the jobs they have, the temptation to say yes to any offer is real. But some of the most appealing roles come with risks that don’t show up on a resume.

In this series, we're giving real examples, current data, and practical ways to protect yourself if you’re already in one of them.