Three Words That Can Change Your Life. Say Them Today.

6 snips

Jan 20, 2026

Sue Jacobson, a communications CEO and longtime friend of Suzy Welch, shares profound insights on friendship and resilience. They discuss the concept of 'mattering' and the three key practices: Noticing, Affirming, and Needing. Through personal stories, including a near-death experience, they reveal the importance of vulnerability in relationships. The conversation balances heartfelt moments with humor, demonstrating how to strengthen connections and become more impactful individuals.

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INSIGHT

Mattering Is A Teachable Skill

Mattering is a teachable skill built from three practices: noticing, affirming, and needing.
When done well, these behaviors profoundly increase someone's sense of value and connection.

ADVICE

Practice Active Listening

Practice active listening: hear details, resist jumping to solutions, and ask questions that open the speaker up.
Suspend your own agenda so the other person feels genuinely seen and heard.

ADVICE

Affirm With Specific Impact

Affirm by naming the specific action someone took and describing its unique impact on you.
Avoid generic praise; be concrete about what they did and how it changed your thinking or behavior.

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Ordinarily, Becoming You is a podcast about the information we have to excavate, the decisions we need to make, and the actions we have to take, in order to live by design, not default. This week, in an unusually intimate episode, our host Suzy Welch talks about the words you need to say, three to be exact, to the same end. The only hitch is, you need to say them before it’s too late.

Suzy almost missed that chance with her lifelong best friend, Sue Jacobson, this week’s special guest, in an episode that brings us inside a hospital room awash with despair, and plumbs just what it means to demonstrate the very hard, very necessary act of mattering.

Yes, mattering. It sounds simple. It feels obvious. And yet, as this episode explores, most of us are getting it wrong.

Drawing on the research of Professor Zach Mercurio, and decades of real-life friendship, work, loss, and resilience, Suzy breaks mattering down into three teachable practices: Noticing, affirming, and needing. These aren’t platitudes. They’re behaviors. And when done right, their impact is profound.

You’ll hear live demonstrations with Suzy and Sue, honest missteps, and one extraordinary story that reveals why telling people “you matter” isn’t enough. Along the way, Suzy and Sue admit to friendship ruptures, leadership lessons, near-loss, and why vulnerability is the most underused advantage in work and life.

If you want to be a better boss, partner, friend – or simply a more impactful human – this episode will give you tools you can use today. Fair warning: it may also make you cry.

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