When the Plan Falls Apart: Finding Yourself in Change with Maya Shankar

Who would invite willingly illness or loss into their lives. Invariably, they felt more gratitude on the other side of their change experiences. And how ironic is that they've just gone through the hardest moment of their lives. But they are grateful, deeply grateful, rooted in gratitude in a way that felt elusive prior to the change, in a way they hadn't before. And in addition to that, they feel immense gratitude for the person that they have become, which is, in their minds, a wiser, more enlightened version of them that they did not feel they could become otherwise.

Hello, everybody. It's Guy Kawasaki, and we have found another remarkable person for you. Her name is Maya Shankar, and I gotta tell you something. Oh, my God, the academic credentials of this guest. I mean, she's like Stanford, Oxford, Yale. My God. She's a cognitive scientist. She's a former White House senior advisor. And these days, it gotta be very specific when you say White House senior advisor, because depending on which administration you advise, it could be very good or very bad. So she was Obama. It was Obama advisor. And she has a great podcast called A Slight Change of Plans. And that's the topic. Her work basically explores how people adapt and change to life's disruptions. And she has a great new book, the Other side of Change. And that's coming out right now, right?

Yes.

Is it your first book?

It's my first book, and you're totally right. And the book is out this week, so it's very exciting.

Oh, that's so exciting. The release of a book is the closest thing for a man to give birth to a baby. That's as close as a man can get. I just want you.

I imagine it's far easier than childbirth, but nevertheless challenging.

I. I kind of agree with you there. I've never been constrained by organization and focus. So I'm going to start off with a defocusing question.

All right, I'm excited.

In your checkered pass of Stanford, Oxford and Yale and the United nations and Obama administration, I see that if you go all the way back, you were a student at Juilliard, and then you had arguably the greatest violin teacher in the history of man. And you want to tell us who that was?

Yes. Itzhak Perlman was my private violin teacher. And it was just one of those magical moments when I first found out that he wanted to take me on as one of his students because he only taught a handful of kids at the time. And I always felt Guy. Like, I wasn't that technically proficient. So I had a pretty unorthodox way of Learning music in the first place, I never really learned how to read music. I didn't build a strong technical foundation. I learned everything by ear. It was all about my inner sense of musicality guiding me. And so I always had a lot of insecurity in me, and I felt a lot of imposter syndrome. Even after getting into Juilliard, I felt, oh, my God, I don't really belong here. And all these other kids are so much more talented. And so when Perlman took me on as his student when I was 13, that was a big vote of confidence that I needed personally to think for the first time, maybe I have what it takes. Like, maybe I could actually become a professional.

Oh, my God. And, okay, so in doing research for this podcast, I learned that Perelman had polio.

Yes. Yeah.

I had no idea. So now, I mean, here's my first tough question for you. So Perelman had polio. Arguably, that was an upheaval in his life. Why isn't he a case study in your book?

He is a case study. I think he's a little bit busy performing all over the world to have been one of my interview subjects. But you're absolutely right. He had a very formative experience with change. I think he contracted polio when he was five and has been wheelchair bound ever since. And he has become arguably the best violinist of our time, which is an incredible feat for anyone and especially someone who has faced constraints in hardship. His story is a massive source of inspiration, and I do feel like when you listen to his music, you can sense that this man has lived a life that has had a lot of depth. He's experienced a wide range of emotions, and he captures all of that in the beautiful music he produces.

And, I mean, this is kind of an academic question, but you could make the case that if he didn't get polio, he might not have dedicated himself as much to the violin.

Right.

I mean, maybe he would have played in the NBA or something. Who knows? But it's kind of one of those strange things that, as you look back, something that is very much a negative and an upheaval, turns out that it helped you go a different path and probably was a positive.

Right?

Exactly. You're really hitting at the thesis of my book, the Other side of Change, which is at the outset of a change, we can feel so incredibly daunted by what we're up against. We can fail to see any redemption in the story, any silver linings. I've certainly felt that way at the beginning of unexpected changes in My life. We didn't complete the violin story, but a sudden hand injury ended those dreams in a moment for me when I was 15 and I had to totally turn the corner and find something else. And then in my adult life, I've had to experience a lot of heartbreak in my journey to try to become a mom, to try to have a family. My husband and I have not been successful. And I just think these moments in the acute stages are so filled with grief and frustration and bristling at the unfairness of the world. And yet when you come out the other side, you feel so transformed by what you've been through in ways that actually make you, in my case and the subjects that I've interviewed for the book, a better, wiser, more enlightened person. There's a reason I call my book the Other side of Change. It's a nod to the fact that when a big change happens to us, it also leads to profound change within us, which we often forget. We will develop new abilities and new perspectives and new values as we endure a change and we might emerge. Maya 2.0 and their guide 2.0 and you can't always predict this, but I've been so heartened to see that sometimes the hardest moments in our lives really do give us an opportunity to reimagine who we can be.

So when you think about it and you think if I didn't injure my pinky, I could have stayed with violin and I mean, who am I to criticize? But don't you think that you might be in a very different place and you might not have accomplished all you've accomplished if your identity, as you will discuss later, was violinist?

Yeah, it's such a great question and I think it leads to so many different philosophical questions in myself right around who I am and what makes me me and what I thought made me me, and now what I think makes me me. But I can see so clearly with hindsight that being a violinist might not have suited my personality type. I would have spent hours and hours and hours alone in a room practicing by myself, when by nature I'm a more social creature. I like being on teams. I like seeing immediate impact. I've rich and wonderful life as a cognitive scientist and applying insights for my field. As you mentioned in my intro to Public Policy, now in my podcast, A slight change of plans, now writing my book the Other side of Change. All of these wonderful things have emerged in the aftermath of change that as a 15 year old, when I was first reckoning with my Injury I could never have even imagined would be a possibility. And so looking back, I am filled with profound gratitude. And I'm not sure I would have reached the level of happiness and freedom that I feel in my present day life had it not been for this change.

But on the other hand, we don't want people listening to this podcast. I think, oh, if I want to be a successful behavioral scientist, I should have a hand injury. If I want to be a violinist, I'm going to go get polio. That's going to focus me. That's not what we're saying.

No, that's not at all. The lesson I want people to take away is that when we have to confront these unexpected changes in our lives, they can actually serve as an important moment of reflection. They can reveal things to us about who we are, things that might have been hidden from view prior. So there's something really interesting about the word apocalypse. So when a really bad thing happens to us in our lives, it can feel like a personal apocalypse, right? Like the life that we knew and had come to feel so comfortable in is no longer available to us. And what's interesting about this word is that it actually comes from the Greek word apokalypsis, which means revelation. And so that etymology is very instructive. Yes, change can upend us, but it can also reveal things to us about who we are, about our belief systems, about our values, about the perspectives we're carrying through the world. I'll give you one concrete example of this. When I lost the violin, it was only then that I realized how much it had come to define me and my sense of value and my self worth. When I stopped being able to play, I realized that I was grieving. Not just the loss of the violin, but also the loss of myself at this more fundamental level. And it was only as a result of that experience that I was able to see. Oh my gosh. So much of who I think I am is anchored to this pursuit. And it's taken me decades to have this reflection. But I'm hopeful it can be helpful to your listeners. I've learned that it can be much more sustainable. Sustainable to anchor our self identity not simply to what we do, but to why we do those things. So when I asked myself, what was it that I loved about the violin, I realized that emotional connection was at the core. I loved being able to connect with my fellow musicians, to make members of the audience feel things they had never felt before. It was this wonderful instrument, no pun, for forging that kind of deep emotional connection with other people. And critically, just because I lost my ability to play my instrument didn't mean that I lost what led me to love it in the first place. If I could anchor my identity to that, why, to what it was that made me love the violin. So in other words, I, Maya, am someone who thrives when she's emotionally connecting with other people, right? That is the essence of my passion. Then the mental exercise becomes, well, where else can I find ways to express this part of myself? What are other outlets? And it turns out that I naturally have gravitated towards those spaces, right? As a cognitive scientist, I study the science of connection. As a podcaster and a writer, I'm all about tapping into people's lives, capturing those stories. And as a result, I feel like when change comes my way, when I get that next curveball, I will have something steady that stays constant. I will still know, let's say life takes away my ability to be a podcaster or a writer. I will still be able to say, I know that it's human connection that lights me up. Let me figure out other ways that I can feed this desire for human connection. So I would urge all of your listeners to just ask themselves like, what is your why? What is the thing that makes you tick? What makes you light up and make you love the things you love? Place some of your identity and your self worth in that bucket and it will always be there for you. Life can't take away that fundamental passion.

You are a walking TED Talk. Oh my gosh.

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In a sense, you are the perfect person to write a book called in quotes Upheaval for Dummies. So now I mean, give us the gist. What are the stages of once you go through an upheaval, what happens to you? And how do you come out on the other side?

Yeah, there's no formal stages. Right. That's the first thing to mention, which is, please don't judge yourself if you are navigating a change in any particular way or if you're navigating a change in your life right now differently than you navigated something in the past. I have not had consistent reactions to the big changes in my life, and that's a very normal human response. One thing that tends to accompany change is a profound amount of uncertainty. And as humans, we are not wired to enjoy uncertainty. I certainly fall into this category. I wonder, actually, Guy, if you feel this way too. But uncertainty gives me a profound amount of anxiety. It leads me to ruminate. I start catastrophizing the future and worrying about all these IF cases. And one of my favorite studies shows that we are more stressed when we're told we have a 50% chance of getting an electric shock than when we're told we have a 100% chance. And I think this speaks to the fact that we hate uncertainty. Right. It's like, I would rather have a negative bad thing happen for sure than to have to grapple with any uncertainty. So that's one thing that we can face in the aftermath of change. The other thing we can face is what we just talked about, which is a fundamental loss of identity or feeling that everything that we've anchored ourselves to is now being threatened. And so that can lead to feelings of denial. Spoiler alert. Denial can actually be good in the short term. That's one of the things I talk about in my book, which is a somewhat counterintuitive finding. It can also lead to mental spirals. That's a topic I devote another chapter to. It can lead people to have a very restrictive imagination about who they can be in this new state. I've certainly felt this way in the past, Right. That life will close a door. And with it goes all of these images that I once had for myself about what my future could look like. And we then have to author a new path moving forward. And it's kind of funny, in asking me this question, I'm remembering my own mental state when I was writing this book, which was, like, really scared of change, really grieving because of unexpected changes in my life, and desperately wanting a guide to help me as I moved forward, because I had heard this mantra on and off throughout the course of My life, you can't control what happens to you, but you can control your reaction. And it sounds really nice. And it, it sounded like a total platitude to me in the moment. I was like, okay, dude, easy to say.

I think it's bullshit.

Yeah, like how am I actually supposed to feel differently and react differently? And so my hope with this book, by the way, I often tell people like I'm allergic to two things. One is soy and two is platitude. So I naturally was like, I don't want to hear this, not helping me. So like my goal with the other side of change coming to the table with someone who tends to be cynical and a little suspicious of silver linings and whatnot, was to say, okay, here's an actual practical guide so that people are navigating the pitfalls of change. Know the right questions to ask, the right science backed strategies to use, the right thought experiments to engage in so that they can in fact get to the other side of change intact. And so I summarize all of this in the book in what I call a change survival kit at the end, because I want people to have that as a helpful resource. Wow.

So are you saying that when it comes to identity, you should not have an identity? You should be flexible about your identity? I mean, is it the wrong identity that's the problem or not living up to the identity you formed? I mean, it's a complex subject, like what, what am I supposed to do?

No, it's an absolute great question. And I'm not saying people should not have identities. In fact, the self identities we carry around in the world are a huge source of meaning and purpose and camaraderie. Right. Let's say that I identify as an athlete. I immediately feel connection with my fellow athletes. Right? Every day when I wake up, I know that my day will be devoted to a practice session or prepping for my next game. And it can help stave off existential angst about what the meaning of life is. So I definitely believe that we should have strong self identities. They can carry some so much value. But it's about expanding our self identities, making them more robust and resilient in the face of change. So that's why I was careful to say, not that you shouldn't attach yourself to what you do, it's that you shouldn't just attach yourself to what you do or the roles or labels you have, because change can threaten those roles. Right? You used to have a certain job and you get laid off. You used to be A wife or a husband, and then you go through a breakup, right? You used to have a healthy body and then you face an illness. So you want to make sure that you have multiple different identities that you can tap into when life gets tough. It's basically not putting all of your eggs in one basket.

So to use your story about going from violin because you love the emotional power of music to becoming a behavioral scientist using your athletes metaphor, you could say, so yeah, you're identity is as an athlete. But step back and look at the why. The reason why you like athletics so much is because of the team spirit, the team feeling, the working with other people. So now that's your why. And you can take that feeling and change it into something else that is still consistent with the why, but you're no longer an NFL quarterback.

Is that what exactly? I have two quick examples of how I've seen this play out in people's lives. This guy Scott reached out to me and after hearing me talk about this why versus what. He is a Harvard trained human rights lawyer who has been plagued with really devastating effects from long Covid over the last few years. So he has not been able to work as a lawyer. He asked himself, well, what is my why? What led me to want to be a human rights lawyer in the first place? And he realized that he finds so much meaning in representing underrepresented populations, advocating for people who don't have a voice. Guess what that's looked like post Covid, he is now an advocate for long haulers. He has organized groups of people who are petitioning to try to get new therapeutics made. He is an activist, he's a community organizer. It's incredible to see how he has translated the why he had as a lawyer into the why he now has as an advocate. And he feels like an important part of Scott has persisted right through this journey. So I loved that. Another example actually comes from a member of the publishing group where I'm publishing this book. She read an advanced copy of the Other side of Change and read about this idea. And she was telling me how her mom has recently been very sick and she was very sad that she couldn't cook meals for my friend for her daughter. And this woman's name is Michelle. And Michelle asked her mom, mom, why do you care so much about these meals that you're preparing for me? And her mom said, it's a way for me to show you that I love you now that you're an adult and I don't get to play the role of caregiver for you. And then mother daughter went away and brainstormed other ways that her mom, even with the constraints of her illness, might be able to show that same love and care. And so I really love how it's giving people a feeling of connective tissue as they navigate different parts of their life and to not feel like they've lost everything. Because honestly, it is really easy to feel guy, at an inflection point, like everything you've worked towards or everything that made you you has now been threatened.

Now, what happens if your why is bad though? I mean, what is Elon Musk's why? What is Mark Zuckerberg's why? I mean, it seems to me their why is make a lot of money. That's not a long term kind of why you would want to adhere to though, of course.

And, and this is outside the scope of the book that I've written. But questioning what your values are, questioning your moral code and your beliefs, change can serve as a really valuable moment to actually revisit a lot of those thoughts. This is tangential to what you've mentioned, but I think it actually hits on the same theme. One of the women that I write about in my book grew up having a very negative view of her family's indigenous history. She is of Colombian heritage and she grew up just feeling really ashamed of her family's stories. And when she's a 20 something, she actually gets into a biking accident and develops amnesia and it wipes the slate clean. She forgets so many of her memories and interestingly, her memories come back in the reverse order as when they started. So first she gets access to all the family stories, but without any judgment around it. So she just revisits these stories anew and thinks, oh my God, these are so delightful. My grandfather could move clouds and my mom was a spiritual healer. And it fills her with such joy. And only a few weeks later does she remember, wait a second, I feel really ashamed of this past part of my history. Why am I sharing this with everyone? It's too late, Guy, because she's already revisited her relationship with this history and she has to think back as to why she felt this way in the first place. And it turns out that when she was a little kid, her mom cautioned her about sharing anything about her family with other people. She said, you might be met with scorn or violence or ridicule. And little Ingrid's mind absorbed that message and thought, well, if I'm being told I can't talk about something that probably means there's something bad about that thing, but it was really drawing an unfair conclusion. Her mom was really just trying to protect her. Right. And I share this as an extreme example. And I don't want anyone to get amnesia as a reset point. But what change can do is it can lead us to have our beliefs come into the light. We see them clearly for the first time, and then we can challenge them. We can say, wait a second, why do I feel ashamed? Why is this such a big part of my identity? Why am I putting so much value in this other person's view of me? Why do I have this worldview? And what I love about this experiment is that our thoughts and our views and our values, they're not these sacred, immutable truths. We often arrive at many of our beliefs based on confusing subconscious factors. As kids, we're just growing up, hearing lots of messages thrown our way and our little kid brains process them and draw lots of conclusions. And I think it's really great as adults for us to take a step back and really interrogate whether the values and the beliefs and the attitudes and the ideas we hold as adults pass muster. Would they hold up to the scrutiny that I would want to hold myself to?

Yeah, I'm afraid there are a lot of people who simply do not have the ability to self examine like that.

I wish I could self examine less. Okay. From the time I was a little kid, I have been super introspective. I don't know whether introspection is correlated with happiness or not. And I'm a little suspicious about whether it is because I am my harshest critic. I always have that inner voice engaging in self criticism because I am so acutely aware of how I'm acting or what I'm thinking at any given time. I don't know, maybe all those people who don't introspect are better off in the long run.

Dude, I would debate that all day long. Maya, good.

I'm glad.

There's no way. You cannot be too self critical. I mean, anyway.

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Become a little more remarkable with each episode of Remarkable People. It's found on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Welcome back to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki. You're going to be my psychotherapist for a second here. So as I was reading your book, yes, I read about your pinky experience. I read about Ramsay, who has tinnitus, and I have actually have Meniere's, and Meniere's has tinnitus, hearing loss, and vertigo. So believe it or not, I am deaf. So, like, you had a pinky injury. I'm deaf. And yet I read the story of Olivia, or I read the story of Dwayne, or I read the story of Ellie. And on our own podcast, we interviewed a woman who got ALS and decided to run 50 marathons in 50 states. And she's had ALS for 10 years. She would be very good for your next book, 2.1 book. But after all of this, after all these podcasts, after learning about all these people, I have come to the conclusion that rather than being deaf as an upheaval, I consider myself extremely lucky. If you said to Steve Jobs, you can either be deaf or you can have pancreatic cancer, Steve, pick one. I mean, I think I'm so lucky. After all this, what many people consider very negative, traumatic upheaval of losing your hearing, I think it's, man, it's a lot better than what could be have happened. So am I crazy here or I'm in kind of reverse rumination here?

You have a blessed psychology, my friend. And I am so delighted to hear that this has been your response. You know what's so interesting and you're making me think this for the first time. I never really put the pieces together, but when I reflect on the cast of characters that I interviewed for this book, while they weren't always happy about the change they had to go through, right? In many ways, think about it. Who would invite willingly illness or loss into their lives? Invariably, they felt more gratitude on the other side of their change experiences. And how ironic is that they've just gone through the hardest moment of their lives. But they are grateful, deeply grateful, rooted in gratitude in a way that felt elusive prior to the change, in a way they hadn't before. And in addition to that, they feel immense gratitude for the person that they have become, which is in their minds, a wiser, more enlightened version of them that they did not feel they could become otherwise. In chapter one, you mentioned Olivia. Olivia has a massive brainstem stroke that leaves her with locked in syndrome, which for most people is their worst nightmare. I mean, hell on earth, where all of your cognition remains stable, your body's working, except you cannot voluntarily move any of the muscles in your body except for the muscles controlling your eyes. So the only way you can communicate with the world is by blinking with the facilitation of a letterboard where, you know, someone drags their index finger along the letters of the Alphabet and you just blink each time they get to the right letter. That's how you have to painstakingly communicate with the world. And so Olivia finds herself in this altered reality when she is in her early 20s, a college student, and what it reveals to her. And it's a fascinating tale because many of the people I interviewed for the Other side of change their stories. When I pulled back the you peel the layers of the onion, you're always shocked by what it was that was happening inside their minds. I've always been so interested in people's interior lives because you can't always predict what it is that they're getting caught up in. You can't predict how they're responding to different things. You can't predict when they're experiencing growth or not. And so all of my work as a cognitive scientist is about tapping into people's interior evolutions. And it turns out for Olivia, this experience in life taught her about what it meant to not be beholden to other people's opinions of her, that she was placing too much of her self worth in the viewpoints of other people. And I mean, I wouldn't have thought that if I just read her story, right? I'd be like, Locked in, patient. Why is she caring what other people think? She has bigger problems on her hands. And so it's a very human story. But she says at the end of the chapter, there's this beautiful quote where she says at age 27, she's reached a level of self assurance that she's not sure she would have gotten to until many, many decades had passed in her life. And then she says, if I ever got there at all. And I think that captures kind of what you're feeling right now. Right. Which is you feel so grateful she's now feeling a way about her life that she did not think would be even accessible to her in her later years. And I think that is the power of change.

Wow. So can I be a devil's advocate for a second? We interviewed the person, you must be familiar with this study where the people dressed in black and white T shirts and then they toss around a black ball, and the subject is supposed to count how many times the people in the black shirt tosses the ball and then the gorilla comes in. And yeah, so the Dan Simon, he told us a very interesting thing. He said you always have to ask what's missing. And so I'm going to ask you what's missing, because your book has five, six, seven examples of Olivia and Ramsey and Dwayne and Ellie and how they overcame all these upheavals and trauma and polio and pinkies and all that. But what's missing is what about the stories of people who didn't recover, who didn't come out on the other side? What do we learn from them? I mean, yeah, it's not like everybody who gets ALS becomes this wonderful person.

Right?

Some people just suffer and die. So what happens to what's missing? The negative or the bad side of this stuff?

No, you're. You've asked a very astute question. And first, I want to say that it was very important to me that I not choose storybook stories for this book. I wanted people to get real, raw, unvarnished testimonials about what people's change experiences are like. And so you'll notice with Olivia, she does not have a full recovery when it comes to her locked in syndrome. You'll notice with Dwayne, who is in prison for nine years, he is not able to fully escape the perils of having to carry the label of prisoner. With Tara, who gives birth to a terminally ill child, who stays terminally ill through age seven, she has to find peace and a way to move forward, even when her daughter still carries this label. So the book is actually filled with unresolved tension and change because that is actually what it means to move through the reality of a change experience. It is not clean. There are a lot of very messy and dirty parts. And while in every case the person has things they're grateful for in terms of their own self evolution, there's a lot of stuff that they're not happy about. As I mentioned, none of them would have willed their change to happen again. Olivia wishes she was never locked in, even though she's so grateful for the person she is today. It came with profound hardship. Right. Dwayne, even though he's this amazing poet today, is thinking, is it actually better that I went to prison for nine years when I was 16 years old? And so it was very important for me to capture kind of the rawness of that experience. And you'll note in the final chapter of the book, which is much more memoir, Guy I had been on this seven year journey or six year journey when I was writing this book about my desire to become a mom. I did not achieve that dream. The book ends on a dream not realized. And I have to kind of put the pieces back together in real time because I was enduring this journey alongside interviewing the cast of characters for my book and I wasn't having success. I currently am child free. And what I hope that can do is to shed light on the fact that so much of change is so challenging. And the book is not meant to sugarcoat that. And the book does not sugarcoat that. There will be very difficult moments that every person endures, including myself. But I do believe that we have some agency in these experiences and that it is possible for us to choose gratitude in certain moments. It is possible for us to try to adopt a different perspective. And to your point, I thought a lot about as I was writing this. It took me like three and a half years. What can I like honestly offer this promise? This reader of mine, and it wasn't that they would be happier. I actually don't know. For a lot of people reading the book, they might be going through a totally harrowing change and happiness might be far away right now. But what I can promise people who read this book is that they will think and feel differently about the changes they're going through. And sometimes when we are stuck in a rut, sometimes when we are in a really depressed state, sometimes when we are just filled with anxiety, like anxiety is like brimming in our systems and we just want a release valve. Different is better different is freeing. And so that is what I can commit to. I believe that anyone reading this will say, yeah, my change is really shitty. I can't see anything redeeming right now that's going to come from this. But I'm starting to see things a little bit differently.

Like I said, upheaval for dummies. That is such a beautiful way to end. So we need to thank you for being here. And my thanks to Madison Nismer, co producer Jeff C, co producer Tessa Nismer, researcher Shannon Hernandez, sound design engineer. But most of all, we want to thank Maya for helping us deal with upheavals. So that's where coming from. Alrighty. Thank you very much. This is remarkable, people.