Cognitive Scientist Maya Shankar On Navigating Unexpected Life Changes, The Neuroscience Of Identity, & How To Unlock Your Next Self

Dr. Maya Shankar is a cognitive scientist, host of the podcast “A Slight Change of Plans,” and author of “The Other Side of Change.” This conversation explores the challenge of navigating involuntary change, whether it's injury, loss, or a future that suddenly collapses. We discuss identity and attachment, the illusion of control, why our brains resist uncertainty, the end of history illusion, rumination, and practical tools to help us see change not as a burden—but as a revelation. Maya also opens up about her own identity crises, a career-ending injury at 15, and later pregnancy losses that forced her to confront who she was beyond her deepest aspirations. Change is coming for all of us, whether we like it or not. Maya's goal is to give you the companion you need along the way. Enjoy! Show notes + MORE Watch on YouTube Newsletter Sign-Up Today’s Sponsors: Go Brewing: Use the code Rich Roll for 15% OFF👉🏼https://www.gobrewing.com AG1: Get their best offer ever – Welcome Kit, Omega 3's, D3+K2, Flavor Sampler, plus AGZ sleep supplement FREE ($126 in gifts)👉🏼https://www.drinkAG1.com/richroll Rivian: Electric vehicles that keep the world adventurous forever👉🏼https://www.rivian.com WHOOP: The all-new WHOOP 5.0 is here! Get your first month FREE👉🏼https://www.join.whoop.com/Roll Check out all of the amazing discounts from our Sponsors👉🏼https://www.richroll.com/sponsors Find out more about Voicing Change Media at https://www.voicingchange.media and follow us @voicingchange Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Rich Roll?

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• 1:06Speaker 01

  We are constantly changing, and change can accelerate these inner transformations. Our brains are not wired to enjoy uncertainty, but change is coming for all of us, whether we like it or not. And we become different people on the other side of change.

• 1:32Rich Roll?

  Hey, everybody. Welcome to the podcast and welcome to the official season of change. Change is obviously something that is on everyone's minds this time of year. So, change is what I've decided to devote this month's programming towards, and it's what we're going to talk about today. Specifically, the challenge of dealing with changes that are imposed upon us involuntarily, whether it's injury, or loss, or disappointment, or maybe a future that suddenly collapses on you out of the blue. Change is this thing that has a way of really rattling our deep desire for control and

• 2:14Rich Roll?

  our profound dislike of uncertainty that really threatens our identity in ways that we're rarely adequately prepared for. But here's the thing. Control, this thing we clutch and are so attached to, is basically an illusion. And impermanence and uncertainty, these are just things that are part of the fabric of reality. And the reality is that despite what you might think, we are all changing all the time. So, to help us untangle this mental knot and help us make sense of everything, I sat down with neuroscientist Maya Shankar, who returns for her second appearance on the

• 2:59Rich Roll?

  show to explain why we have such a distaste for this kind of change, what is happening in our brains cognitively and neurochemically. And she also provides many incredibly helpful tools and strategies to better navigate a life change that is imposed upon us, and to do it more gracefully, not as like this burden, but instead, from an aspirational perspective, to approach it as a revelation. The idea being that who you become by going through change is often someone you couldn't have imagined beforehand. Because change, and I truly believe this, is the ultimate lever for growth and transformation.

• 3:44Rich Roll?

  For all of you that are unfamiliar with Maya, in addition to being a Yale and Stanford-trained cognitive neuroscientist, Maya is a former Juilliard-trained violinist and a behavioral science advisor in the Obama White House. She's also the host of the podcast, A Slight Change of Plans, and the author of the new book that provides the backdrop for this conversation entitled, The Other Side of Change. I love Maya. She's whip-smart, an absolute delight to speak to her today. So if change is on your mind, this one is for you, because Maya delivers a masterclass that really will leave you better than before.

• 4:25Rich Roll?

  I'm sort of obsessed with this topic of change and I spend a lot of time thinking about it from a layperson's perspective. I'm doing a lot of writing about it right now and you have this book now that shares the neuroscientist perspective of change. So let's just get into it. One of the things you talk about in the book is affective forecasting. Like, we're just not very good at anticipating what our future might be.

• 4:51Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And I think we forget that we are constantly changing. So when we anticipate how we're going to respond to some change, we falsely believe that the person we are right now is going to be the person that's navigating that whole experience. But of course, we're always changing. And what a change can do, what that proverbial anvil from the sky falling can do, is it can accelerate these inner transformations, such that we become different people on the other side of change. And I actually find a lot of hope in this message, Rich, because the number of times that I felt so daunted at the outset

• 5:33Speaker 01

  of change, so convinced that I was going to be incapable of coming out the other side intact, let alone better, is large. And I forgot that the change, the changes that happened in my life would change me too. Right? That when a change happens to us, it also leads to profound change within us. And we forget this because of a bias called the end of history illusion. So...

• 6:03Rich Roll?

  Which is, explain that. It's an interesting concept.

• 6:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, which is, we fully acknowledge that we have changed considerably in the past. So you pull up high school footage of Maya, I will have a total cringe moment. Be like, who is that person? Please, let me create as much emotional and psychological distance from current day Maya and that person. And so I fully acknowledge, oh yeah, totally different person than I was then. But when I forecast the future and you say, well, how much are you going to change moving forward? My brain says, no, I'm done. Like, what you see right now, this is the finished product. I more or less have settled on my beliefs and attitudes and capabilities and perspectives and whatnot. And it's so funny because of course we're going to change. But we, but we forget this really critical

• 6:50Speaker 01

  piece of information that... We will actually develop new perspectives and new abilities and new values that actually inform the way that we process our changes.

• 7:02Rich Roll?

  So when we talk about change, there's a little bit of a distinction that we should make because to my mind, and correct me if I'm wrong, there really are two fundamentally different kinds of changes. There are the changes that we volunteer for. For example, the New Year's resolution to finally lose 10 pounds or run a marathon or find the partner of your dreams. Those are the impulse that we have to become better than we are tomorrow than we are today. Then there are the kind of changes that you're really focused on, which are externally imposed upon us. Something happens in our life. We get diagnosed with a disease. In your case, two pregnancies that didn't work out, that created a second identity

• 7:47Rich Roll?

  crisis for you. What do we do when the world doesn't align with the way that we believe it should, that our predictive mind is telling us is the fair and right thing that aligns with our identity and, and, you know, how we feel like our, you know, like life should be, I guess.

• 8:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love that you make this distinction because, look, I'm the type of person who's setting goals all the time. I love initiating change in my life on my own terms, right? But what's most disorienting to me is when I'm thrown a change that I'm unprepared for, and that's unwilled. And that's why it's become the focus of my work. And I think one reason why we're so afraid of that kind of change is that it threatens our feeling of control. Right? So in everyday life, as we're just going about our days, we fall prey to what's called the illusion of control. And this refers to the fact that we wildly overestimate how much we're dictating how our lives turn out. Right? We see things as an input-output model. Right?

• 8:51Speaker 01

  And to some degree, it is an input-output model. If you work harder at X, you're probably going to get better outcomes. Right? If you try harder at Y, you're probably going to get better outcomes. But what happens when life throws you a massive curveball, especially one that's negative, is that it shatters that illusion. And in a moment, you are forced to confront the limits of your control.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  And all of a sudden, uncertainty is abound. And our brains are not wired to enjoy uncertainty. One of my favorite research studies shows that people are more stressed when they're told they have a 50% chance of getting an electric shock than when they're told they have a 100% chance of getting an electric shock. And it's like, kind of funny and a little wild, right? But I so resonate with that. I want to know how the story ends. Bring on the shocks, dude. Right? Like, I just want clarity and black and white answers.

• 9:51Rich Roll?

  Human beings seem fundamentally hardwired to have an extreme aversion to uncertainty. But the universe, the world, life, is fundamentally uncertain. And it is our discomfort with uncertainty that gives rise to all of these control issues or our over-indexing on our ability to control life outcomes.

• 10:15Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 10:16Rich Roll?

  Is there a neurological connection? Like, what is the rationale for this extreme discomfort with uncertainty? Because it feels like that's the biggest piece and everything else is downstream of that.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  Well, imagine a life in which you were fully aware all the time of the limits of your control. You might enter a nihilistic state.

• 10:38Rich Roll?

  Yeah, you're, it's terrifying, right?

• 10:40Speaker 01

  It's terrifying.

• 10:41Rich Roll?

  All these things are gonna happen. You have no control.

• 10:43Speaker 01

  You have no control. Why even try? Right? You know what? I'm just gonna hang up my hat and just be a recipient of my life. So the things that make us very human and that bring our lives meaning, like our motivation and our sense of meaning and our sense of purpose, would all disappear from view. And I think that would be, that's actually a pretty terrifying existence.

• 11:06Speaker 01

  I also think that...

• 11:09Speaker 01

  A reason that change can be so disorienting and so scary is that it can threaten our sense of identity. And I know that's one of the big themes that you explore on this show, but it's something that's taken me a really long time to discover. I think when I first started studying the topic of change, I thought, okay, I'm going to go on this journey with people and figure out what the external beats of their stories are. And it was only after a while I noticed, oh, when the big change happens, they lose their sense of who they are. And I certainly felt this with the violin, right? So when I lost the violin at age 15, yes, of course, I was devastated. We would all expect that. But there was something very

• 11:49Speaker 01

  curious about my grief, which was I found myself grieving not just the loss of the instrument, but also the loss of myself at this more fundamental level. And I remember you saying on one of your podcasts, you know, when I got injured and I had this chronic pain and I needed this spinal fusion surgery, it's like, am I not going to be an athlete anymore? And like, who's Rich Roll if he's not an athlete? So sometimes we don't realize how much an identity defines us until it gets threatened in some way, until we lose it. And so what's my advice from a cognitive science perspective in these inflection moments, moments of inflection? Well, I'm not saying do away with identity altogether. Identities

• 12:33Speaker 01

  are so helpful in our lives, right? If you identify as an athlete, if I identify as a musician, we feel immediate camaraderie with fellow musicians and fellow athletes, right? Every day I wake up and I have a sense of purpose. It's like, okay, I'll just practice a couple hours and help stave off existential angst or any other worries. So I'm not saying do away with your identity. But what I am arguing is that it can be beneficial to expand our self-identity, to actually build more robust identities in the face of change. And what does that look like? Well, one thing I found very helpful is to define myself not simply by what I do, but by why I do it. So the question becomes, okay, well, what

• 13:17Speaker 01

  did I love about being a musician? I loved emotionally connecting people. I loved improving at a craft. I loved expressing my creativity. Just because I lost the violin didn't mean I lost what made me love it in the first place. Just because you had this surgery doesn't mean you lost what made you love athletics in the first place. And so then the thought experiment becomes, through what other outlets can I express this why? Because the why is still very much intact, is a stabilizing force in the face of change, to define yourself by your why. And so I would urge listeners to ask themselves, what is my why? What is the thing that drives me towards the pursuits that I love?

• 14:00Speaker 01

  And can I embed that into my identity? Can I become someone who loves emotional connection and loves improving at stuff and loves being creative? And then it can serve as a compass, that why can serve as a compass as I try to figure out what my next steps are. And in my own life, I've seen that play out. Yes, I lost the ability to play the violin, but through podcasting and writing this book, I've been able to find that emotional connection elsewhere. By being a cognitive scientist, I've been able to have an outlet for trying to get better at stuff, you know? So there's lots of opportunities for us to still be who we are in a rapidly changing environment.

• 14:33Rich Roll?

  Sure. The violin is just the vehicle for you to have these emotional experiences that are nourishing to you. And when you can glean some clarity into that, then you can hold your identity a little bit more loosely and then transfer your behavior towards something that will nourish yourself in a similar way. You're transferring the focus of your behavior, but the experience that you're after is still the same, right? And to me, when I think about identity, it's really about your relationship with your identity, how attached you are to it, how strict is that attachment?

• 15:17Rich Roll?

  And how hard are you clinging on to it? And if you are clinging on to it hard, why are you clinging on to it so hard? Like, what is at risk if that identity is threatened? What would it mean if you could no longer do that thing? What would it say about who you are?

• 15:36Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 15:37Rich Roll?

  And how other people are going to perceive you? And that's a, you know, obviously, that can be an existential threat. But I think from a sort of evolutionary advantage perspective, like, we develop these identities and we become attached to them because they ameliorate the fear of uncertainty, like...

• 15:56Rich Roll?

  The chaos gets reduced because we invest in this story about who we are and what we do and what makes sense, and it allows us to like wake up in the morning and function. But fundamentally, from a Buddhist perspective, anything that you attach yourself to is going to create suffering. And you know, they would go so far as to say, there is no such thing as the self, like the self is an illusion.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 16:20Rich Roll?

  And ultimately, you know, enlightenment is on the other side of recognizing that and you know, realizing that it's all a delusion, right? We don't have to go all the way that far, but I think-

• 16:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm not able to go that far.

• 16:32Rich Roll?

  But I think it there, there, I want to spend some time, you know, digging a little bit more deeply into identity because when you latch on to an identity and you allow that to define yourself, your mind will begin to tell stories about who you are and you will believe those stories and you will project those stories onto the world and you will use them to get other people to see you the way that you would like to be seen. And that makes you feel, uh, makes you feel connected to other people, a sense of belonging, um, all of these sort of things that are good. Uh, but fundamentally, when something, even in the slightest, begins to challenge that, uh, it leads to all kinds of behaviors that don't serve us.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  You're leading me to have an aha moment. So first of all, that's so beautifully said. And what I'm realizing is one of the things that my violent life brought me was a strong feeling of community and belonging. So I was bullied a lot as a kid, very, very insecure. Um, it took me some years to realize, oh, I was one of a few kids of color in my school. Maybe that played a role, but little kid Maya brain saw all the taunting and, and hurtful comments and cruelty as a sign that I was just a deeply flawed, broken human being who was, you know, bad in some way, right? And-

• 18:01Speaker 01

  I knew before you made that comment that I always valued the community that I had through music, but what I didn't realize until this moment is that that was part of why I was clinging on to my violin identity, even after I was told that my violin life was over. And I was in denial and I was playing through pain and performing through pain and taking anti-inflammatories and getting surgery, doing every possible intervention. It was because the violin made me feel special in some way, worthy, like I mattered. And I was in an international community at music school that made me feel like I was, I truly was a member. And if you took the violin, if you took the violin away from me,

• 18:43Speaker 01

  then what did it mean for my self-worth at this fundamental level? Maybe it meant that I, I didn't matter as much anymore. Maybe it meant that I wasn't, I didn't have anything that made me special anymore. That would make the kids accept me.

• 18:56Rich Roll?

  Right. So the community piece is the sort of laudatory aspect of this. But the other piece is the ego piece, right? And you're, you're a striver, like you've accomplished, you've, you're like, clearly you know how to set goals and achieve them and, and just, you know, operate at a very high level. So at the risk of projecting something on, onto you, that doesn't happen, you know, in a vacuum, you know? I would have to imagine on some level that you were raised by parents who, who sort of affirmed this idea that the way to go into the world is to, you know, work hard and achieve these things. And it's inevitable that if you're raised that way,

• 19:37Rich Roll?

  you're going to develop an identity that is contingent upon achievement, to feel a sense of not just value, but love. Like, like these things become transactional and they're correlated to how much you can achieve and the diplomas and the awards, et cetera.

• 19:59Rich Roll?

  And that's a powerful engine that can propel you to great heights. But at some point, if if your identity is so reliant upon external validation, and the ego is so hungry to continue pursuing it, at some point, you're going to crash into a wall.

• 20:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:19Rich Roll?

  Because if love is a transactional thing, and not something that you truly believe that, you know, that you are entitled to and that you have inherent value as a human being, irrespective of what you're doing in the world, that's problematic.

• 20:32Speaker 01

  So I would say that, first of all, only partial projection, so good job.

• 20:36Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  So some things you said are right and some things aren't. But let me, let me, and I'm thinking out loud about all of this. Let me try to unpack it. So one is, I grew up in an Indian immigrant household. So absolutely, my parents had these values of the importance of working hard, the importance of achieving excellence, the importance of success. That said, I never felt that their love for me was contingent upon my accolades. That said, I actually think that my motivations hearken back to the earlier conversation we had, and it was about control. So if I couldn't control my social environment at school, and I couldn't control whether the girls in my neighborhood accepted me or liked me,

• 21:22Speaker 01

  well, what could I control? Maybe I could control trying to become really, really good at something and achieving something that could make, that could almost fill the void, could make me feel valuable through some other lane, if you will.

• 21:37Rich Roll?

  And if you're, if you're attached to specialness then, and then that special thing gets taken away from you, then you have to hurry up and find something else to be special at.

• 21:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, and and maybe special is going too far, because I don't think I, I don't know if I crave in my actual life specialness, but I do crave being, of course, loved by others and accepted by others. And feeling like I was accepted within my musical community is the thing that made me feel like I mattered, right? And I, and I wasn't always feeling that way as a, as a little kid.

• 22:13Rich Roll?

  So life intervenes, some calamity occurs, just speaking generally. And the human animal has to figure out how to respond to this and adapt to it.

• 22:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:26Rich Roll?

  We're not great at this.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 22:28Rich Roll?

  Why is this so, beyond what we've already talked about?

• 22:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:32Rich Roll?

  You know, why do we really rebuff these opportunities for growth and transformation? And instead, you know, kind of recoil into our shell and try to pretend like they're not happening or, you know, deny their existence?

• 22:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, first of all, denial is a very natural coping mechanism. And one sort of counterintuitive finding for my research for the book is that denial in the short term actually confers a lot of benefits. So just so people know, if they're experiencing denial in the short term.

• 23:03Rich Roll?

  It's a strategy for survival.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. Yes, it is. It is a survival mechanism, right? We want to retain some degree of hope and positivity and a feeling that things could end up better on the other side. Denial aside, I think it's actually because we don't always have a clear set of instructions about what to do next. And in many ways, my own frustration with this topic is what led me to write this book. Because I'll tell you, you alluded to this earlier, but in 2020, my husband and I were confronting the first of many, many heartbreaks in our goal to be, to build a family, to become parents.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  I remember in the face of the first pregnancy loss, the news that that happened, that I was beside myself with grief. And even though I had had formative experiences with change, even though I'd responded with resilience in the past, let's say like an administration changes, okay, fine, you find a new job, whatever, right? I felt so wildly unprepared for this moment. I think one reason I felt so unprepared is that this gets to the striver mentality, Rich. I am so used to hustling my way through hardship. So you give me a problem, I'm like, okay, I'm just going to work harder, I'm going to find creative workarounds to get from point A to point B, I'm going to, I'm going

• 24:28Speaker 01

  to figure this out, I'm going to hack this process so that I get to the end destination. In this situation, what does it mean to work harder in the context of fertility and starting a family? There's no such thing. It is a, it is a perfect example of not having control, of not having your hands firmly on the steering wheel. And so that was very disorienting for me. The other thing that I found so maddening is that people kept telling me this mantra, I kept engaging with it, which is, while you can't control what happens to you, you can control your reaction to what happens. And it's meant to be empowering. It's rooted in ancient wisdom.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  But I, in that moment, was like, WTF? How do I actually execute on this? I don't have a switch in my brain. I could just turn on and off, like, ah, yay, suddenly I feel and think differently about my change. Thanks so much, brain. I had no idea what the means were to get to that end state. Right. And in many ways, my book, The Other Side of Change, was a response to that need that I had. I was like, someone tell me, what are the tools and strategies that I have at my disposal? What are the right questions I should be asking myself? How can I actually change my relationship with this change? I need a manual of some sorts. And I don't have it, so I'm just going to create it.

• 25:54Speaker 01

  And the way that I went about doing that is I, I went on this hunt. I was like, let me try to find the most amazing page-turny stories of change in the world, but I want to make sure that what lies within each story is a universal lesson that we can all absorb about how to navigate change better in our own lives.

• 26:26Rich Roll?

  Maybe because it has been for four or five years. Share a little bit about your life experience and what led you to become interested in this topic.

• 26:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, as a little kid, I was aspiring to be a concert violinist. And then a hand injury derailed my dreams overnight.

• 26:44Rich Roll?

  Just to be clear, you were studying under Yitzhak Perlman at Juilliard.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  True.

• 26:50Rich Roll?

  So this is giving you a glimpse of the high, the high, the inner higher achiever that is sitting across from me.

• 26:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just, I felt so passionate about the violin that it was one of those things where my parents never had to tell me to practice, right? It just came instinctively to me to want to do this thing. And when Perlman took me on as a student, a lot of the imposter syndrome that I had at the time went away because I thought, wow, this dude, who's one of the best violinists in the world, is giving me his vote of confidence, right? He's saying, I think you have what it takes, kid, right?

• 27:26Rich Roll?

  And you were in high school at the time.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  I was 13 when he took me on as a student. Yeah, and he had only had a handful of students, so I felt so deeply honored. And then when I was 15, I overstretched my finger on a single note and caused tendon damage in my hand. And eventually, doctors told me that my dreams of becoming a violinist were over. And so that was my first very formative experience of change, and we can talk later.

• 27:52Rich Roll?

  We call that an identity crisis.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  An identity crisis, yeah. And it's so interesting, hearing your experience getting back surgery and dealing with chronic pain and injury. I found so many parallels between the threat to your identity that you felt and the threat to my identity that I felt. And we can talk in a little bit about what lessons I learned from losing the violin. But long story short, it was during this period of no man's land that I was in, the summer before college, when I stumbled upon a book by Steven Pinker called The Language Instinct. And it was the first book that I'd ever encountered about the science of the mind. It explained our brain's remarkable capacity for language.

• 28:33Speaker 01

  And it was one of those lightbulb moments for me because I realized, oh, my gosh, this thing that I've taken for granted my whole life, which is the ability to both comprehend, comprehend language and produce it, it's actually the result of this really complex cognitive processing that's operating behind the scenes. And this book is giving me some insight into The awe inspiring organ that is the brain. And so it was with that book that I realized I wanted to become a cognitive scientist. And so it was my undergrad major, then I did a PhD, then I did a postdoc in cognitive neuroscience.

• 29:11Speaker 01

  And so to this day, I just, the same excitement, enthusiasm that I had for the violin, I have about the mind.

• 29:20Rich Roll?

  Did you ever have a chance to meet Pinker and tell him that story?

• 29:25Speaker 01

  I met him when I was a freshman in college, actually. So one of the guests you found on the show, Laurie Santos, she was my undergrad advisor and I was in her monkey lab. And so Steven Pinker comes into the lab one day and he doesn't know that I'm completely fangirling because the person who even got me in this field is now in front of me. I can't remember, Rich, if I was sufficiently bold to tell him that story, but I think I must have said something like, you know, you're the reason why, you know, I started studying this thing in the first place. So.

• 29:53Rich Roll?

  So Yale undergrad, PhD at Oxford, postdoc at Stanford, Obama White House as the in-house behavioral scientist. And now you're kind of blowing up, like it was so fun to watch you in Chris Hemsworth's Limitless series, like counseling him to get ready to play drums for Ed Sheeran. That was just like really fun. So you're kind of like everywhere now, and now you've got this book.

• 30:18Speaker 01

  I will say that on my life bingo card, I never saw being Chris Hemsworth's brain coach as being one of the tiles. So everything that's happened to me in my adult life is just such a pleasant surprise. It was really fun to coach him on topics like neuroplasticity and cognitive reserve and kind of strengthening our brains so that we can protect ourselves from age-related decline. And then, as you mentioned, yeah, now I've written this book called The Other Side of Change. And I host a podcast, actually I've been hosting it for, gosh, over four years now, called The Slight Change of Plans. And what I learned from all those conversations, which I wasn't, because I was, I was never expecting to write a book.

• 31:01Speaker 01

  It was not on my bucket list, like Maya shall write a book before she dies, right? I had no interest in writing a book. I heard it's really, really hard and I'm a normal person. So, you know, naturally I wasn't sure that I would want to do that. And so. The first moment where I thought, oh, there's a book that needs to be written here, is when I had conducted maybe 50 interviews for A Slight Change of Plans. And I started to notice that there were these really interesting connections across stories that I was starting to observe. So typically, in the throes of change, people really focus on the topic of our change. So, oh, you're going through a divorce? Go to the divorce section of the bookstore.

• 31:45Speaker 01

  Oh, you're going through pregnancy loss? Oh, find other parents or find other people who are navigating their grief in this way. Oh, you're going through job loss? Commiserate with a community of people who are going through job loss. But what I noticed was that, actually, because of our shared psychology, because of our shared cognition, there was something that was uniting stories that, on their surface, looked nothing alike. So the person who was navigating a cancer diagnosis and the person who was navigating their husband having had an affair were both experiencing a profound feeling of betrayal. So actually, there was more uniting their story than they may have found in someone else who, on the surface, was going through a similar experience.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  And so my goal was to figure out, well, given that we have this same shared psychology, given that, no matter what the change is, we end up reckoning with the same set of uncomfortable questions. For example, why is the world so unfair? What is my identity now that I've lost? What made me me? How do I grieve the future that I once thought was so available to me? How do I avoid the rumination in my mind that's like all these loops that are playing in which I'm feeling regret because I'm actually blaming myself for what happened? Right? We're all contending with the same stuff in change.

• 33:13Speaker 01

  And so logically, I thought, well, then that lends itself to the same solution set. And so that's why I went on a mission to find these stories. I wanted, I wanted to find stories. So none of them I've featured on the podcast. I wanted to find stories, again, that were exceptional in their substance, but were so ordinary in terms of their psychology. You know, because that's like the beautiful combination that exists for me. It's like, oh, the power of rich storytelling, you know? That's why your show is such a success. Like, people love stories. It's how lessons land for them, right? And it's almost like hiding broc-, like hiding broccoli in like a kid's plate. It's like, well, I'm going to get these like gripping tales, right?

• 33:55Speaker 01

  Like, real stories where people are just like, oh, my God, this is such a thrill to read. And then I'm going to like fake lessons that they can learn within those stories.

• 34:04Rich Roll?

  Yeah, there's tons of stories. I mean, the, the, the, the woman who has locked in syndrome, the military officer in Afghanistan. There's all these different versions of people having to confront an unexpected event in their lives that is confronting them with their own relationship with the world themselves and with change itself. And so whether it's divorce, the love of, you know, the loss of a loved one, cancer, like a cyclone, they're all cyclones. They're all, and so I would imagine, you know, you're a neuroscientist. So what is happening inside the brain? The brain is just seeing all the, this is just one thing for the brain. It doesn't matter like the specific facts of it, right?

• 34:47Speaker 01

  Well, I think there's an illusion we all fall prey to within ourselves and when it comes to observing other people. I think we believe that when a seismic change happens, suddenly, everything will be put in perspective. We're going to stop caring about the stuff we used to care about. We're going to instantly become those different people. And of course, that's not true. So one thing that was so beautiful to me about interacting with the, the people that I got to interview for this book was hearing about how

• 35:21Speaker 01

  Ordinary things still plague the people who are going through these extraordinary changes. So a good example is the woman who was locked in. So there's this woman, Olivia, who I spent years interviewing. And she, when she was in her early twenties, had a severe brainstem stroke that led to locked in syndrome, where basically you have no voluntary muscle movement, except controlling the muscles that move your eyes.

• 35:48Rich Roll?

  Mm-hmm.

• 35:49Speaker 01

  So you can only communicate through your blinks. This is like most people's worst nightmare. I mean, you are trapped in a prison, which is your body.

• 35:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  Right? You retain all your consciousness, all your cognition, all your same emotions as before, but you have a very limited portal through which to communicate with the outside world.

• 36:07Rich Roll?

  Like the diving bell on the butterfly.

• 36:09Speaker 01

  Exactly. That's exactly right. So that's locked in syndrome, is Jean-Dominique Balbe's story. And I think a lot of people would think, oh, my gosh, when that happens, when such a harrowing change happens, you care about the big picture. Guess what? In this story, Olivia's diagnosis only really registers with her when her boyfriend's family shows up to the hospital, these people that she had for so long wanted to impress. And she's confronted with her inability to impress them in that moment, and that's when she realizes, oh, my gosh, this is really serious. Up until that point, it doesn't fully land, right? But how interesting is that?

• 36:52Speaker 01

  Like, we don't just shake off the stuff that we don't care about. I mean, there's another guy, Scott, who is facing a cancer diagnosis. He told me, on any given day, I'm more worried about losing my six-pack than I am about the fact I might die. So as humans, we're not just instantly shining a spotlight on what matters, like capital M matters. We're this, we are the same people overnight.

• 37:16Rich Roll?

  So what do you make of that in terms of how we interact with these changes?

• 37:21Speaker 01

  So I think what that means is, you know, I've talked about how through a change, you can shape potentially the different person that you become. But we have to see change differently than we do right now. So I think our brains instinctively view change, a change of the kind that we're describing, as like incredibly intimidating and very, very daunting. And we are, it's often unprecedented, so we don't even know how to deal with it. I think if we see change as revelation, it will build our natural curiosity in the face of change in a way that's actually very advantageous for us. So when a big negative change happens to us, it can feel like a personal apocalypse, right?

• 38:06Speaker 01

  Like the world that we know has been destroyed and nothing that we are excited about remains. The origin of the word actually comes from the Greek word "apokalypsis", which means revelation. And that etymology is really instructive because it says like, yes, change can upend us, but it can also reveal really important things to us. So let's take the case of Olivia. It was only when she became locked in that she recognized what a hold other people's opinions had over her, that she became aware of the depth of her people-pleasing compulsion.

• 38:50Speaker 01

  And up until that point, she probably would have thought, yeah, I care what other people think. But when she was confronted with a reality where she could no longer control what people thought of her, where she could no longer curate the ideal image, because she could literally only blink, where she had to present the rawest, most vulnerable version of herself, it was only through that experience she realized, oh, my God, my identity is so contingent upon what other people think of me. This needs to change, almost by brute force, right? It needed to change. And she had to slowly, over time, see, oh, wow, when I'm being my more normal self, when I'm being irreverent, when I'm...

• 39:36Speaker 01

  Freaking out and allowing myself to reveal the freaking out. Whereas before I would conceal it because I would never want to inconvenience someone and I would never want to upset someone. My, my physical therapist at this unit, they seem to really like me. Like they seem to accept me as I am. And it was through the acceptance of others that Olivia had this kind of radical idea, which was maybe she should accept herself. And one of the most beautiful, I mean, her story is so wild. Any words I try to put to it won't be of service to the full experience.

• 40:14Speaker 01

  But at the end, she said, "My change got me to a place that I would, it would have taken me decades to get to, a place of self-assurance and stability and trusting in myself that would have taken me decades to get to if I ever got there at all." And I think that's, that's a perfect example of the promise I see within change. If we can become observers of what a change sheds light on in ourselves, right? All the parts of ourselves that may have been hidden from view prior. We can then reclaim the steering wheel and try to course correct to become better versions of ourselves.

• 40:58Rich Roll?

  To become the observer, though, you have to detach from your, your kind of emotional clinging to these identities. And to me, when I think about this, it's really all about acceptance, like acceptance of reality.

• 41:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:18Rich Roll?

  Because when you say denial, it's easy to say, well, denial is when, you know, people just aren't able to see like what's obvious to everybody else. But we're all in denial. Like denial is, it's just like, there's nobody who's not in denial. And as it pertains to change, a way to, out of... Elucidate that idea is to remember that there is literally nothing in the entire universe that is ever in a state of animated suspension. Like, everything is moving all the time. The universe is expanding, you know, all the way from the furthest stars down to the subatomic particles. Like, nothing is in stasis, ever, right?

• 42:01Rich Roll?

  So, how is it possible that we can believe that we are in some sort of static situation where we just are who we are and tomorrow we're gonna wake up and we're gonna be the same as we were yesterday? Like, you know, time is moving too slow for our human brain to kind of process what's happening, but the reality is, is that change is happening all the time, all around us. It's just happening imperceptibly, most of the time. But we have this illusion that we can be on cruise control in our lives. And so, to disabuse ourselves of that is to accept that change is like this fundamental energy source of the universe. Like, you cannot arrest it, right?

• 42:46Rich Roll?

  So, it's happening. Of course, it's difficult to function if we, you know, walk around thinking about that all the time, but when we can accept reality and peel back the layers or pull the veil back on, you know, where we're in denial and where our attachments are leading us astray, then we're in a place of greater agency to make better decisions and take better actions, right? So, I always, I always look at these things through a 12-step perspective, because that's my indoctrination. But, you know, when you come into a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous, you're in, you're probably in denial about the extent of your problem. Like, you're just like, "Leave me alone." You know, like, "It's not that big of a deal."

• 43:31Rich Roll?

  It's obvious to everyone else that you're, you know, a chaos agent, but you can't see the wreckage in your wake. And sobriety is about disabusing yourself of that denial so that you can accept the reality of your circumstances and surrender yourself, surrender your will over to something greater than yourself. And when you were telling the story about trying to will your way through this childbearing...

• 44:02Rich Roll?

  Situation that you were in, you know, obviously it's not going to work, right?

• 44:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 44:05Rich Roll?

  And the only way that you're going to be able to solve this problem is by first accepting the reality of it, rather than just trying to push your way through it. Because that is a defense mechanism that is getting in the way of you accepting the, the, the reality of your circumstances, right? Like you're running away from it, thinking you can outpace it, but you know, you're not going to be able to outpace it.

• 44:27Speaker 01

  But here's the challenge, Rich. It's really, really fricking hard to engage in radical acceptance. So what I've tried to do with my work is build a compelling enough argument that there's a light at the end of this tunnel of acceptance that's worth doing the acceptance thing for. Because otherwise, what's the promise? Oh, I radically accept and then I have to feel the pain and suffering and grief faster than I would have otherwise? That sucks. I don't want to do that version. But I'm hoping with the strategies and techniques that I'm putting forward in terms of getting to the quote, other side of, I mean, there's a reason my book's called The Other Side of Change, right? I believe people can enter a more enlightened state where they become better versions of themselves.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  But they need to, again, know the path to get there. And I think unless we give them the path to get there, it's easy to say engage in acceptance. But that's a painful prospect if you don't feel something better is coming.

• 45:23Rich Roll?

  Yeah, of course. Listen, it's incredibly hard. Listen, my wife always says to me, everything is neutral until perspective is applied. So we make these snap judgments. This is bad. This is good. How's this happening to me? I can't believe it. What an injustice. I have to figure out how to solve this because this isn't right.

• 45:44Rich Roll?

  But the, but I, but I, but that is true. Like we just, we label things prematurely without evidence. And in my experience, like, you know, all of the sort of cataclysmic things that have happened to me have turned out to be these blessings, you know, like they're, they're gifts in, in the rearview mirror, right? If you are able to leverage them and do all these things that you're talking about to transform your life.

• 46:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:07Rich Roll?

  Because these painful moments are, are, you know, powerful levers for personal transformation. Like that's at the core of your book.

• 46:16Speaker 01

  Exactly. That's the thesis.

• 46:17Rich Roll?

  And, and, you know, they're, they're incredibly powerful because they're, they catalyze a level of willingness that's, that's generally unavailable to us to like, do things we ordinarily wouldn't, right? And they be, they can like, They can initiate these journeys that take us to places we never thought we could go. But the but the problem, to your point of like, it's hard.

• 46:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:39Rich Roll?

  Is, you know, just imagine, you know, the, you know, the person who's standing outside their home as it's burning down, and then you're standing next to them and you say, well, this is like, this is going to be the greatest thing that ever happened to you.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, and they say a lot of expletives in return. Yeah, exactly. So. And I do want a caveat, which is, I wanted to make sure that this book was as honest as possible and that people did not get a overly rosy view of change. I would, I would argue that the people in this book, many of them would absolutely not will for their change to have happened or to happen again. Who, who would want to say, yes, please, give me the horrible health issue that I had? Or, yes, I would love to lose a loved one, right? No one's going to raise their hands and say, oh, that's great.

• 47:33Speaker 01

  But they all came out the other side grateful for the person that they became as a result of that change experience. So both things can be true.

• 47:45Speaker 01

  I do not wish for that change to have happened in my life, and I am grateful for the opportunity it gave me to reimagine who I could be. And we have to be comfortable accepting both realities simultaneously in order to tap into the promise of change. And I think one thing that I have learned about the value of change is that in everyday life, I think we think, we falsely believe that we have a fairly good understanding of who we are.

• 48:22Speaker 01

  Our self-concept is based on a very random set of data points that we happen to collect over the course of our lives that unfolded in a fairly arbitrary way. That is not going to lead to a comprehensive view of who we are. And the argument that I make in this book, and the reason why change is an opportunity to reimagine ourselves, is because the unique stresses and demands of going through a change will reveal things to us that we did not know were true about who we are. So there's one story in the book where a woman experiences amnesia when she falls off her bike. And when her memories start returning,

• 49:04Speaker 01

  and in particular, her family's stories of Colombian heritage, she experiences them with such delight and awe and wonder that she's later shocked to learn that she had carried so much shame around her family's heritage pre the accident. And she hadn't really internalized for so long until this accident, oh, my God. I didn't realize how oppressive my views were when it came to my family's past. I didn't realize how embarrassed I was to share these stories. And most importantly, I never thought to challenge my beliefs in the first place. I never thought to ask myself, why and how did you arrive at these beliefs about your Colombian background?

• 49:49Speaker 01

  Why did you think that there was shame in these stories? Because we humans are busy. You're not like, every day, you're not waking up being like, what belief am I going to challenge today? What misconception do I have about my self-identity that I'm going to explore today? We're too busy for that. So then, when the change happens, it does give us this rare and unique opportunity to look under the hood and see what's there. I mean, another example from my own life is when we were experiencing these pregnancy losses, right? My husband and I. I did not realize how attached my self-worth was to becoming a mother. Until I got that first piece of news. I really didn't.

• 50:35Speaker 01

  I knew it was a dream of mine. I knew it was a dream I had had since I was five. I did not realize that in the face of that news, all of a sudden, my life would appear in grayscale. And I would think I didn't have worth as a, as a human being. Because I'd grown up with all of these cultural forces telling me, this is your value as a Indian woman. You, you need to create a baby. Like that's your, you get married and you have children. Right? I had absorbed these messages subconsciously from all of these places. But as someone who had a promising career and is like a strong, independent, confident woman, it was uncomfortable for me to learn just how much I tethered my sense of value to this dream and this goal.

• 51:19Speaker 01

  And I had to, the change made that salient. And then I had to do this uncomfortable work of kind of reconciling these two parts of Maya that almost seemed at odds with each other and kind of figuring that out. But that's the power of change. Because now, I still don't have kids. But my relationship with motherhood is transformed. I don't see it as a necessary part of my identity or my future anymore. And I never, ever, ever thought I could get to that point of mental freedom, where my happiness and my sense of worth was not contingent upon becoming a parent.

• 51:56Rich Roll?

  So what is it that you actually did to go to, to go from that place to where you are now? To, to have a different frame and a different relationship with that aspect of yourself? That was so powerful and reared its head up?

• 52:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's so multifaceted. And there's probably 25 plus strategies I talk about in the book. But I'll share a couple with you now that were, that pertains specifically to motherhood. Because the other thing about this book is that different strategies were, will work for people depending on what they're going through, where they are in their life. Sometimes it's a combination of strategies that will work best. So I, I actually created this change survival kit at the end of the book, which is a consolidation of all of the techniques. And my advice is, look, not everything's going to work for you every time. At times, only one thing will work. Sometimes it'll be a combination. And you just have to be, you have to be a detective.

• 52:51Speaker 01

  You kind of have to be an experimenter and just figure out like, this is a little sandbox. I'm going to play around with all these tools and see what works. Right? And so because I found the pregnancy loss is so disorienting, I had to actually engage in my own exploration. Because I thought, oh, the stuff that worked with me for the violin, which was in, as I described to you, I immediately pivoted to cognitive science. That was almost like a get out of jail free card when it came to doing, when it came to surviving that change, because I actually didn't have to do the hard work. I just subs, I just subbed in something else immediately. Right? So let me share one technique that I use.

• 53:32Speaker 01

  Actually, my husband unknowingly, on the night of the second pregnancy loss, engaged me in what's called a self affirmation exercise. So a self affirmation exercise is when you, you can just do it in five or 10 minutes. You write down all the things that matter to you in your life, that make you you, that give your life meaning, that are not threatened by the change you're going through. So let's say you're navigating a particularly tough moment in your relationship. You might focus in your affirmation exercise on your spiritual life, or the fact that you have a really beloved community at work, or the fact that you love volunteering for the PTA. Right?

• 54:15Speaker 01

  And what affirmation does is it allows you to zoom out on your life, gain greater perspective on your multifaceted identity. And importantly, research shows, makes you less likely to engage in long-term denial. Because when, to your earlier question, when you don't feel that your whole identity is under threat as a result of the change, you're much more willing to welcome it into your life. When you don't feel that your entire life depends on the relationship that you're in, you're much more willing to accept that it has fractures, right? That there are maybe fissures in the dynamic that you shared with someone else. So Jimmy, my husband, comes into our bedroom on the night of the second miscarriage and says, Maya, let's engage in a gratitude exercise.

• 55:00Speaker 01

  And I'm like, oh, hell nah, bro. Okay, you take your Instagram BS, go over there in the corner, you do your positivity nonsense, your toxic positivity nonsense. I'm staying under the covers and I'm going to feel bad for myself and just mope. Right, because it felt so jarring, Rich, to do any sort of gratitude after the day we'd had. And just so you have a little bit of context, we woke up with the news that our surrogate was bleeding. Then we saw two healthy beating hearts in the doctor's office. It turned out that our embryo had split in two and we had identical twins and they were healthy beating hearts. And then three hours later, we found out she was miscarrying. So we had the most hellish emotional roller coaster of a day. So I, I was not having it.

• 55:44Speaker 01

  Okay, but then I looked at him and he kind of wore me down and he's like, just try, just like say a couple of things. So I started to rattle off a couple of things on my list. I was like, well, I feel, I feel really lucky that the same people that I worked with in the Obama White House, I now work with today. Like, how special is it that I get to work with my best friends over 10 years? Right, like, a lot of people don't get to do that. I love doing Zoom workouts with my personal trainer. Matt and I gossip about The Bachelor and Love is Blind. It's just like a wonderful friendship we formed while also doing something I love with, which is strength training. I love that I get to be an aunt to my six nieces and nephews. I love hosting a slight change of plans, where I get to have these incredible conversations with people that I never would have met otherwise.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  And as this list started just flowing out of me, I swear something magical happened.

• 56:38Speaker 01

  I had been so singularly focused on becoming a mom for years at this point, that I had completely lost perspective on these other parts of myself. And I imagine a lot of people can relate to me, right? You, you develop tunnel vision when you're trying to achieve a goal. And all of a sudden, I realized, oh, my gosh, there are so many other identities that I carry, manager, student of my trainer, host of my podcast, that I value a lot and that I could take great meaning in. And for me, that was such a powerful moment of zooming out. And so.

• 57:21Speaker 01

  I would recommend self affirmation as a way for people to see their lives with more balance and perspective.

• 57:27Rich Roll?

  We contain multitudes. We think we're one thing. This is our identity. This is who we are. But we have many identities.

• 57:44Rich Roll?

  Our identities, as I said earlier, are formed by these stories, right? And these stories are informed by our life experiences, the way we were raised by our parents, you know, what we were exposed to or not exposed to, et cetera. But the brain, I'm interested in your perspective as a scientist, the brain does this weird thing where it unconsciously selects experiences from our past and assigns meaning to them. This experience is more meaningful than all these others that you've forgotten, right? And so we're gonna over-index on how important this is, and it's gonna, over time, drive your decision-making for the rest of your life, right?

• 58:28Rich Roll?

  And the process of not just challenging your beliefs, but challenging your beliefs around your own story, right? Like, yeah, that happened to me, but I forgot that all these other things that are in opposition to that thing also happened. And yet, my brain seems to dismiss those and say that this one is important, like putting the lie to the test about what this story is. And then you realize, like, oh, my God, I've been living my life reactively based upon this story that is fundamentally a lie. All of our stories are lies. They all have very loose affiliations with the truth, and they're informed by such a small selection of experiences or something somebody said to us when we were in second

• 59:09Rich Roll?

  grade, but they become incredibly predictive of our behavior later on. It's kind of an astounding thing. So in terms of challenging our beliefs, like our worldviews, that's one thing. But I think the real juice is in like that form, because that's the constitution, right, upon which you're basically running your, you know, the government of your life upon, right?

• 59:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 59:35Rich Roll?

  And yet, what you were saying about challenging your beliefs, like, we're now in this... Current, modern moment where everything is driving us away from challenging our beliefs. Like, we've never, we've never stress-tested our worldviews less than we are now. And we're kind of seeing the consequences of that right now. So how do you think about our relationship with technology in the modern world? And how it's impacting all of these things vis a vis your perspective on navigating these changes in life?

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, so the stories we tell ourselves about who we are is something researchers call our narrative identity. And what do we prize when it comes to our narrative identity? Cohesiveness, simplicity, a nice arc over time. What does that not allow for? Nuance, complexity, right? That's one of the reasons why we engage in these bizarre mental shortcuts. Or we have all these biases when it comes to how we process our past. We want to assimilate the information that lends itself to the narrative we've already built around who we think we are. But that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy where we don't allow in information that might challenge those beliefs or might help us build a new narrative about who we are,

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  unless we're very conscious about doing that. And so that's why we see almost like the disservice that we sometimes, like, it's a disservice to ourselves to not be more adaptive and to not build more malleable narrative identities. And so one chapter of my book actually focuses on how it is that we can proactively challenge our belief systems, not just about the world, but about who we are and our families and our places within those families and our self-identities. Because like you said, we are in a time right now where that's the last thing that people are doing, in part because people have so closely tethered their belief systems to their identities. So talk about identity threat.

• 1:01:35Speaker 01

  If I change this belief, is that challenging who I am at a fundamental level? Is that challenging my membership in the community with which I, in which I belong? Like, that's a very scary prospect. So there's a couple of questions that people can ask themselves, or at least biases to be aware of. One is that Our beliefs are not sacred, immutable truths. Okay, I think we tend to believe that we've arrived at each belief we have through a process of conscious deliberation and, you know, hyper rational mind and weighing the evidence and, you know, deliberating. Of course not, right? Because we already had bandwidth constrained minds. We're just absorbing a bunch of stuff all the time, right?

• 1:02:16Speaker 01

  In the same way that I didn't consciously arrive at my beliefs around motherhood. I was just subconsciously and consciously absorbing tons of messages that were hitting my brain from all over. And so you should ask yourself, would I have different beliefs if that message had been delivered by a different messenger? Would I have different beliefs if I had been in a different emotional state when I had received that message? Would I have different beliefs if I had been born in a different time or in a different place or into a different family? How would my belief system be different if I had grown up with only one sibling versus four or whatever it is, right?

• 1:02:57Speaker 01

  So you start to poke these little holes and you start to see the apparatus crumble a little bit because you realize, oh, wait a second. So much of my belief system, it's kind of like this tapestry and everything's kind of entangled with one another. And if you were to jostle it a little bit, like everything gets affected. So if I change this one thread, this one belief thread, it can actually affect everything else, which is why it's scary, but it's necessary work. And then the other thing to ask yourself is to actually probe individual beliefs. So how did I arrive at this belief in the first place, right? How did I get from point A to point B? Would this belief be something that those who I respect agree with?

• 1:03:42Speaker 01

  Or would they maybe find holes in my logic? And then this is my favorite one. What evidence in theory would convince me to change my mind?

• 1:03:53Speaker 01

  The reason I love this last one is that it presupposes that you ought to be willing to change your mind in the face of evidence. A lot of these techniques, by the way, come from the-

• 1:04:03Rich Roll?

  It's also holding you accountable if you are, if you do receive that piece of evidence that you promised yourself you would change your mind if you got, right?

• 1:04:11Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly.

• 1:04:12Rich Roll?

  So you're kind of priming your brain.

• 1:04:14Speaker 01

  Yes, and I love that because it assumes that beliefs are not fixed. It allows you to see when you are laboring under faulty notions, right? Like you have beliefs that are not sufficiently based in evidence that may be holding you back in some ways. I'm not saying to believe in whatever you want in ways that self-serve you. That's not what I'm arguing. It's that so much of what we've grown up with is entangled with forces that we might not even respect that much, you know? Like especially the beliefs that we build when we're little kids, right? Those beliefs are bound up in our sense of safety and belonging and attachment.

• 1:04:58Speaker 01

  And so if we were to not believe those things that we are told by caregivers, or teachers, or friends in preschool, or elementary school, or whatnot, that might challenge our fundamental sense of just being a whole human. And so those childhood beliefs are particularly hard to challenge. But when you do, and as I write about in the book, there are stories of people experiencing profound freedom when they leave a belief behind and they enter this new space. And one of the people that I interviewed said, "It's kind of like playing a game of Jenga." Like it turns out, so this woman Ingrid in my book says, "You can actually pull one of the slabs out and everything still stays. And it turns out I didn't actually need this belief.

• 1:05:42Speaker 01

  It actually wasn't true, and it was really, really holding me back."

• 1:05:46Rich Roll?

  Two reflections on that. The first is that what you were doing was asking questions, right? So this gets at, this is sort of your questions to statements ratio thing that you talk about, right? Instead of saying, "I am this," you're asking yourself questions that-

• 1:06:09Rich Roll?

  You know, that don't necessarily have answers yet, right? Like that you're gonna go on a hunt for. So rather than making these definitive proclamations about who you are, what you believe, to be in a stance of inquiry.

• 1:06:23Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 1:06:24Rich Roll?

  That's the first one. And the second observation is that the process of inquiry is really

• 1:06:34Rich Roll?

  is the active tense of curiosity, right? And curiosity is really at the heart of all of it. So talk a little bit more about how curiosity plays into this.

• 1:06:42Speaker 01

  I love that. Yes.

• 1:06:45Speaker 01

  It's funny, when I was thinking about what I could promise the reader of this book, it felt disingenuous to say, this book's gonna make you happier. I hope it makes people happier, but that might not be the outcome. What I do believe it will do is make people more curious. That is actually the optimal end state, as far as I'm concerned. And it will give them the right set of questions to be asking themselves, to engage in some kind of self interrogation. So I think one way in which curiosity is so important is when a big change happens in our lives, it can immediately, a big negative change happens in our lives. I'm not talking about like, oh, my God, you got your dream, whatever.

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  But honestly, sometimes there are unexpected downsides that come with something that we really willed and we're hoping would happen. I mean, just look at all the scientific research on lottery winners and how unhappy many of them turn out to be. What happens is we can feel our lives closing in on us because when the anvil does fall from the sky, all of these doors around us close and our lives feel very, very constrained because all of these possible futures that we imagined for ourselves no longer feel available to us. Okay? And I've certainly felt that at these junctures in my life. It's like, oh, my God, all the possible Mayas that were gonna be a violinist no longer exist. Now what? Right? Or all the possible futures Mayas who were gonna be a mom, those don't exist right now. Now what? Right?

• 1:08:14Speaker 01

  The problem, if we're not curious and we don't interrogate our thoughts, if we don't engage in what's called metacognitive awareness, which is when we think about our thinking, is that our brains can actually limit us in terms of our imagination of what's possible beyond what is reasonable. And that's because we have all sorts of stereotypes that we built over the course of our lives. We have our own lived experience, which has informed what we believe about the future. And so we may believe that there are a very narrow set of options available to someone, for example, who is incarcerated or someone who is a teen mom or someone who's a caretaker or someone who's navigating a chronic illness.

• 1:08:57Speaker 01

  And in the research, these are known as possible selves. So we conjure up these possible selves all the time when we're just living our everyday life. When you had to go through your back surgery and you were imagining Rich, who's not the athlete, that was a possible self. When I'm imagining as a young kid wanting to become an astronaut, that's a possible self. So we have hoped-for selves, which are the ones that are really desirable. Those reflect our dreams and our aspirations. We have feared selves, which reflect our anxieties and our worries. And then we have expected selves, which are the versions of us that we think are just most likely to come true. So yes, I wish I could be Taylor Swift,

• 1:09:41Speaker 01

  but more likely than not, in five to 10 years, I will be a cognitive scientist, who is a profound nerd still, right? And so what happens is when the big change occurs, the hope-for selves decrease and the feared selves increase because now, all of a sudden, doors are open into futures we never wanted to see open, right? It's like, oh, there's a guy, Dwayne, that I interview in the book. He has a remarkable story where he, as a 16-year-old, was sentenced to nine years in an adult prison for a carjacking he committed. And he was excelling at that moment in time. It was just a stupid mistake, right?

• 1:10:24Speaker 01

  He was trying to prove his machismo to the boys in the neighborhood. But, you know, he was on his way to potentially study at Georgia Tech. He was class treasurer. He was a sweet, sweet, sweet kid to his single mom. Like, he was crushing it. And then he makes this choice and... What Dwayne says is that he wasn't simply grieving all those futures that he could have lived out, like the one where he went to college and the one where he went to prom and the one where he got his first girlfriend. He was so fearful of who he might become within the walls of prison. Am I going to become violent? Am I going to develop all

• 1:11:05Speaker 01

  sorts of addictions? Am I going to have to steal a knife just to protect myself? You know, like, he was so filled with fear. And because he felt that he was destined to become a certain kind of person because he was a prisoner. And that's a very common thing that happens. We feel we are destined to become a certain kind of person. If I'm child free, I have stereotypes in my mind of what that looks like. And so, I just want to share a couple of ways that we can generate more positive, like more promising, possible selves. But I want to also, I just talked for a while, so let you interrupt me.

• 1:11:45Rich Roll?

  Yeah, I don't know where to pick that up. But, you know, in the case of Dwayne, that exemplifies this idea of, you know, all these future selves, you know, whether they're aspirational or somewhat, you know, more realistic, all get wiped off the playing field, right? It's like, removed. And, right? And so, that constraint, okay, now my possibilities are much more limited than ever. So, Dwayne is not wrong in thinking that now his, you know, his future selves are constrained and limited.

• 1:12:19Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:12:20Rich Roll?

  It's a reasonable fear, right? But in his case, there is an intervening event when this guy Bilal enters the picture. And you can tell the story, but it gets at this idea that you talk about called moral elevation.

• 1:12:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, moral elevation is, I think, maybe the concept from this book that has changed my life the most. And I'll explain why in a second. But moral elevation is that warm, kind of fuzzy feeling we get in our chests when we witness someone else's extraordinary actions. So, it might be their kindness, or their self-sacrifice, or their courage, or their ability to forgive someone, or their...

• 1:13:01Speaker 01

  Resilience or their empathy, right? Like, any upstanding human character trait can create a feeling of moral elevation. But what's really important to understand about moral elevation is that it doesn't just feel good. It actually changes our brains. It rewires our brains, that experience. And the reason is that when we witness someone violate our understanding of what humans are capable of in any given environment, it cracks open our own imagination about what is possible for us. Because we now have to assimilate this information, like, oh, my God, humans are capable of this thing. What does that mean for what I'm capable of? But it's all the, it's the positive stuff that we're capable of.

• 1:13:45Speaker 01

  So, like you mentioned, about like a year into Dwayne's sentence, he runs into this guy, Bilal, a fellow inmate. And Bilal violates all the assumptions Dwayne had about what it means to be a prisoner. So, Dwayne had believed you have to be ruthlessly self-interested, you have to be, you know, you can't ever get close to people, you have to kind of, you know, keep your cards close to the chest because you might enter into, you know, harmful relationships. But Bilal was a guy who Dwayne says took a stand and was like, no, this is my identity. And what was that identity? Well, he trained all the younger boys on how to box so that they could protect themselves.

• 1:14:30Speaker 01

  He cared for the younger inmates. When he heard about a potential instance of rape, he wanted to make sure he helped out that kid. He would always crisply iron all of his clothes. He was up hours before the guards even came to do their count, doing 250 push-ups. Dwayne says that Bilal was an example to him of someone, he says this most beautiful thing, it almost makes me want to cry. He says Bilal was an example of what it means to be lovely.

• 1:15:04Speaker 01

  And I found that so moving. Dwayne realized through Bilal's example, maybe I don't have to be a certain way just because I'm a prisoner. Maybe there are these other available futures to me. And what's so powerful about moral elevation is that it doesn't just exist in the domain of that person's example. So it's not like Bilal was the head of the Muslim community. It's not like Dwayne was aspiring to become the next head of the Muslim community in the prison, or that he even aspired to help protect the younger boys once he got older. In fact, Dwayne was like, I was kind of a weakling, like I wasn't particularly strong, and that wasn't my lane. I wasn't going to be able to help teach the kids how to box. I didn't know how to box myself.

• 1:15:47Speaker 01

  But what it did do is it cracked open his imagination. And then a couple of weeks later, when he's in a prison cell, and there's this amazing, vibrant underground library where they're like trading books, he encounters a book of poetry that's, one poem speaks to the experience of black boys in prison. He suddenly thinks to himself, oh, I could do this. I can be Bilal in my own way, which is to write words that speak to the experience of underrepresented kids in prison. That is my lane, because I know how to write, and I'm going to be a poet. And if it hadn't been for Bilal, Dwayne might have read those same words in the poem, but

• 1:16:32Speaker 01

  it would never register that he was capable. And so from that point forward, he writes poems like they're his daily exercise, and he speaks to the experience of being a boy of color behind bars. And fast forward a couple decades, I mean, talk about a badass. He's a Yale Law School graduate, he's a MacArthur Genius Prize winner, and he writes the most beautiful, stirring poetry that gives voice to the experiences that we would never have heard of otherwise. And so he is playing the role that Bilal played for the younger boys in prison.

• 1:17:12Speaker 01

  And I just find, I find that to be so inspiring, Rich, because it is a dark time right now in the world. Like, I don't want to turn on the news, I don't want to go on social media. It just feels like we're being bludgeoned by negativity. But when we make it a point to...

• 1:17:32Speaker 01

  Witness acts of moral beauty because we are keen observers. It is everywhere to be found.

• 1:17:38Rich Roll?

  That's a really beautiful story. I think what Bilal is modeling is possibility. Like, he's instilling in this person who feels stuck and in a situation where there isn't possibility, he's demonstrating that possibility is possible, right? And once that, you know, becomes a brain worm, Duane can put it to work as soon as he's exposed to something that inspires him. But I think what's interesting about moral elevation is that it's qualitatively different from something like motivation and inspiration. Like, it would be easy to say, "Well, I saw this guy Bilal, and it was so inspiring, and I was inspired."

• 1:18:23Rich Roll?

  Because I think when we get into this discourse around change, so much of it is about like motivation and inspiration and determination and grit. And the people who weather these things well are the people who have that, you know, strong capacity for self-will, for grit, for determination, for just committing themselves and buckling down, or they're just internally motivated, or they're receptive to external inspiration. So, talk a little bit about those things and how that's different from moral elevation.

• 1:18:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. Moral elevation is actually not about motivation or discipline, right? It's about witnessing human capacity, human capability, really, at its core, and then reflecting that back on yourself and trying to figure out whether you might have greater depths of things that you really value, like depths of kindness, or depths of forgiveness, or depths of resilience. When I was writing this book, I ended up remembering a moment of moral elevation that I had experienced, which I didn't even code as moral elevation at the time. But it was when I saw footage after the horrific shooting at Mother Emanuel Church

• 1:19:41Speaker 01

  in South Carolina, I saw the daughter, Nadine Collier, of one of the victims, extend forgiveness to the racist killer in the courtroom.

• 1:19:53Speaker 01

  And I was just absolutely blown away by this because she demonstrated a depth of forgiveness that I literally did not think was possible for humans. And to my earlier point, was I looking to forgive someone during that moment in my life? No, but it didn't matter. What that moment of moral elevation did for me is that it planted a seed that maybe I was just capable of more as a person than I thought possible. And that's the power of that experience. And it doesn't even translate right away. That's the thing. It's not like, oh, I've now seen this and now I'm going to change my life.

• 1:20:38Speaker 01

  These things have these kind of soft influences and you don't even know. You don't know when you're also going to have that moment of moral elevation, right? That's going to totally change your life. And actually, on that point, because you can't will moments when other people's moral beauty has that profound impact on you, I talk about some other strategies that people can use. The first is to remember that at a moment of inflection, you still have all the same experiences and skills that you've built over the years, even though you have to pivot. So, for example, I lost the ability to play the violin. Yes. And none of the technical skills that violinist Maya built were ever going to be useful, except

• 1:21:21Speaker 01

  maybe I have a sense of rhythm, so I'm like, not a terrible dancer. Okay. And so, but what, but what I did build as a violinist was grit. I built an incredible resiliency in the face of failure. I just built kind of a fearlessness. You know, as a little kid, I was going on stage and performing in front of thousands of people, right? So those were traits that could serve me in my next venture, no matter what it was. And so a helpful question people can ask is, who else can this person be? Who else can rich be, given your myriad experiences and the vantage points you've generated

• 1:22:04Speaker 01

  over the course of your life and all of the perspectives and all of the skills that you build and all the talents you have, those don't go away just because you're at a moment of inflection. And one way that we can actually kind of try these, whatever we decide might be in our future, one way that we can actually try these on for fit is to read fiction, interestingly. So some researchers call fiction an identity laboratory, because you get to go on these little journeys with characters. And in this very psychologically safe space, because it's not you, you get to sort of brainstorm, like, how would I respond if I was a teacher? How would I respond in this situation where I'm being confronted with a harsh truth?

• 1:22:46Speaker 01

  Or what would it be like if my personality changed a little bit like this or like that? And so fiction can also be a really nice way for us to generate these new selves that come into being when we think about the past set of traits or skills or experiences that we've had.

• 1:23:04Rich Roll?

  That's so interesting. So it allows, like, on an unconscious level, your relationship with identity to kind of roam around, you know, like it's going up and down the aisles of a grocery store, like looking, you know, trying on costumes or what have you in a Halloween store.

• 1:23:21Speaker 01

  And there's no risk, because you're in the safe space, so just like sitting on an armchair, reading a book, yeah.

• 1:23:27Rich Roll?

  I wanted to go back for a second to what you said about the woman who forgave the shooter. Obviously, an example of moral elevation. And when you were sharing that, I was thinking, oh, what this is doing to Maya is it's allowing her unconscious mind to... Ask questions about your capacity for forgiveness.

• 1:23:56Speaker 01

  Or other things, by the way.

• 1:23:58Rich Roll?

  Yeah, but like to say.

• 1:24:00Speaker 01

  Or whatnot.

• 1:24:00Rich Roll?

  To say, it's allowing your unconscious mind to ask yourself questions. So perhaps there's somebody that you're struggling to forgive for something that happened a long time ago. And you're asking yourself, well, maybe, you know, could I forgive that person? I just saw this other person do that. Like, that's possible. So that's that seed of possibility, right?

• 1:24:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:21Rich Roll?

  And that's, that's sort of, that's active curiosity, right? Instead of saying, well, I could never forgive this person.

• 1:24:28Rich Roll?

  But to your point about being somebody who is very determined and has a good degree of grit, and these are good traits that, you know, are, are engines for success. In the context of, of trying to navigate a very difficult change that's being foisted upon you, they can also act at cross purposes with, with trying to acclimate to them, right? Because I'm just gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna bear down and I'm just gonna get through this, you know? And you're missing, you're missing the opportunity of this experience for that transformation. Because if you're so determined and so gritty, you have blind, you're, you're, you're wearing blinders because you're just looking at the direction that you want to go.

• 1:25:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:25:12Rich Roll?

  And you're not available for, you know, kind of the miracle that, the possibility, right? That is packed into that kind of experience.

• 1:25:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I've heard you say this on your pod and I, as you can tell, I'm, I'm a listener of Rich Roll because I love your show.

• 1:25:31Speaker 01

  And I, and I really agree. And I think actually, so one part of the transition from violinist to cognitive scientist that I didn't share that speaks perfectly to what you just said, which is giving yourself space, almost a period of discovery to allow the magic to happen, was part of my experience. So I remember, my dad's a physicist, so he's not in the musical world and he had some emotional remove from my life as a violinist.

• 1:26:01Speaker 01

  And so when I lost the ability to play the violin, I remember asking him, like, what the heck do I do now, right? What do I even study in college? And my dad said, You've effectively been wearing blinders for the last 10 years of your life. You started playing the violin when you were six years old. And you've been on the speed train ever since, which means that you have not gotten sufficient exposure to what the world has to offer. And so he put me on this exploratory mission the summer before college. He said, I want you to watch documentaries. I want you to find people you admire and just listen to them talk. I want you to have conversations, read news articles, read books that you would never have read otherwise.

• 1:26:46Speaker 01

  But importantly, you can't do any of that with a goal in mind. It just has to be from a place of curiosity and joy and finding stuff that piques your interest. Please, please, please do not try and figure out how that translates into your future career. It has to be open-ended in order for this whole experiment to work. And I didn't understand how wise it was in the moment to tell me, don't do this without a North Star. He must have known, okay, I've got a type A kid here. She's gonna try to figure out immediately, like, because I was the type of kid, right? Five-year plans, 10-year plans, 15-year plans. I can only imagine. Gosh, like, I didn't, I swear to God, I was living in the future from the time I was a little kid.

• 1:27:29Speaker 01

  It's only in the last decade that I realized, oh, my God, there's this thing called the present. I think we might have even talked about this last time. It's like a discovery that there's actually this moment to live in, which, by the way, is a joy. And so my dad told me to do this. And it was during that period that I read the Steven Pinker book. And if I had been solving for my future career next step, first of all, I didn't know cognitive science was a field. It would never even have occurred to me until I looked in the Yale Course Book and saw, like, oh, this is a major. I would not have known how to even connect those dots, so I might not even have reached for that book. And so I think you're right. You have to kind of...

• 1:28:13Speaker 01

  There's a whole chapter in the book that's about fostering psychological distance between you and your current preoccupations, like the challenge that you're going through. And to your beautifully articulated point, that distance is actually a critical part of unlocking the transformation within a person.

• 1:28:33Rich Roll?

  Yeah, essentially, it's detachment coupled with sort of being able to see the forest through the trees, right?

• 1:28:41Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:28:42Rich Roll?

  Having an open disposition, a receptive disposition. I mean, that advice that your dad gave you is incredible advice. I mean, good for him. That's like amazing advice. But when I think about psychological distancing and the way that you just framed it, I can't help but think about

• 1:29:01Rich Roll?

  Adam Grant's idea around being a scientist.

• 1:29:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:29:06Rich Roll?

  You know, like which on some level is a psychological distancing from whatever it is you're trying to make sense of, that also requires curiosity and an openness and an uncoupling of your opinions and your emotional attachments to these things to allow yourself to receive ideas that might conflict with your identity or your worldview, receive them without getting triggered or being agitated, and to be in this constant process of asking questions.

• 1:29:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, to actively seek out data, like you said, that might contradict your views. Yeah, his approach of thinking like a scientist is inspired by The Economist Arnaldo Camuffo. And I think it's a brilliant lens through which to view our lives. Because what does a scientist do? They don't make too many prior assumptions. They go in with a relatively unbiased point of view. And that is the opposite of what it is like to be

• 1:30:16Speaker 01

  Thinking about our minds in the first-person perspective. We only bring prior knowledge and biases to the table when we're reflecting on our own brains. And so it's a wonderful way of bringing a more objective lens to the table, through which to see whatever the situation is that we're going through.

• 1:30:35Rich Roll?

  When a very inconvenient and uncomfortable change lands in your lap, it's a case of easier said than done to say, be a scientist about it, right? It's like some terrible thing happens or something that our brain is labeling. And, you know, we're just on fire emotionally. Like, we can't think rationally. We're just, we're overwhelmed with, you know, fear and, you know, judgments that we're making about this and agitation and anxiety. So, so it's convenient to say, well, you should be a scientist about it. It's like, so help, help walk us through how you ground yourself

• 1:31:14Rich Roll?

  in those situations that are so, you know, riddled with fear-inducing consequences.

• 1:31:22Speaker 01

  Well, the first thing I would say is it's only helpful to be a scientist when you even know what problem you're trying to solve. And when we climb out of the rubble of a terrible change in our lives, often we just, we don't see black and white clarity. We see gray space all around us. We're completely disoriented. And we're not even consciously aware of what it is that's troubling us so much. And so the sobering answer is it needs time. We first need to take time to reflect on our emotions and what it is that we're going through in order to get to that much later, later step of trying to be a scientist about our problems. Like, that's step five or 15 in the road of the change experience, you know?

• 1:32:10Speaker 01

  I think that there are short-term strategies we can use to just calm our nervous system down and to try to get to a point where we can even engage in that kind of reflection. And so a lot of this comes from the, from research on the science of rumination, right? So often, on the heels of a big change, certainly for me, I mean, I feel like, you said I got a PhD in cognitive science, I got one in rumination. Like, I'm a pro-ruminator, okay? I loop through my fears over and over and over again, or I loop through some prior decision, and that can be a maddening process, that can be a maddening part of the change experience.

• 1:32:50Speaker 01

  And I actually think, to your point, it's our way of grappling with the discomfort of uncertainty. So when we ruminate, what are we doing? We're actually trying to get a clear, definitive answer on the other side. We're trying to get what scientists call cognitive closure. But most of the time, there are no clear answers to be had. It's fool's gold. Whatever we're ruminating over almost certainly isn't going to lead to any productive ends. And by definition, rumination means you're looping over the same thing, you're trying to problem-solve, but you actually aren't making any progress at all.

• 1:33:24Rich Roll?

  You're also likely serving some emotional need. You know, you're doing it for a reason, because it's doing something for you.

• 1:33:31Speaker 01

  It gives you the illusion that you are controlling, I think, your environment. So you think, well, maybe if I can fully figure out why this person broke up with me or betrayed me, I'll never experience another betrayal. Maybe if I figure out all the ways in which my family can be harmed, I will be able to keep them safe forever. Maybe if I figure out why I lost my job, I'll make sure that I never lose anything again. It's this illusion that if we marinate in these feelings and we think about the risks over and over and over again, we will insulate ourselves from that risk.

• 1:34:10Speaker 01

  And that's the tricky devilish side of rumination. Because every time your mind gets stuck in a loop, you believe that there is reassurance on the other side.

• 1:34:22Rich Roll?

  And the way out of this is metacognition techniques.

• 1:34:26Speaker 01

  Well, I would say metacognition is too much to ask of someone when they're in the throes of a ruminative cycle. Okay.

• 1:34:34Rich Roll?

  So it's spitting out of control.

• 1:34:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, and then you're just like, oh, yeah. Think about your thinking. It's like, come on, man. That's too hard for me. This is where some more foundational psychological distancing strategies can be very, very helpful. So my favorite one that I've been using a lot recently, because of the feeling that we are in an unprecedented state on a societal level, is mental time travel. So our brains have been given this remarkable ability to travel both forwards and backwards in time. And we can actually leverage that to our advantage. We can travel into the past to contextualize whatever problem we're currently facing within the broader context of human history or within the broader context of our personal lives in which we may have shown greater resilience

• 1:35:19Speaker 01

  or in which society engaged in collective action and solved some big existential problem. We can also travel into the future as a means of reminding ourselves that our current problem is transient. So let's say you have a really bad interaction with a coworker. And that night, like at night, 3:00 AM, you're just going over and over and over that conversation, right? If you travel in time, five hours, 15 hours, 15 years, suddenly, it's like you burst the balloon and you think to yourself, oh, my gosh, I might not even have this coworker in 15 years. And then this conversation is really not going to be as troubling as it is.

• 1:36:01Speaker 01

  Now, on the other hand, if you're like me, there had been times where I'd been so fixated on...

• 1:36:11Speaker 01

  One of my concerns in the last chapter of the book is actually memoir. And I reveal just acute mental suffering when I was a teenager and into my twenties, where I was just so fearful of my future children's suffering. It just happened to be the random thing my brain latched on to. And when I am in the throes of that kind of worry, my brain convinces me, no, you will be worried about this forever. So for some reason, the mental time travel to the future doesn't help me at all. And in those moments, what I do is I try to mine my past for moments in which I was

• 1:36:49Speaker 01

  similarly resolute in my convictions that I was never going to be free of a certain concern, but I turned out to be wrong. So I was absolutely sure I was still going to be worrying about X problem five years from now, and then it turns out five years elapsed and I wasn't still worried about that thing. So mental time travel is one, and then the other is just psychological distancing more broadly, where you pretend you're kind of a fly on the wall in a situation. So this is work that Ethan Cross has done and others, where you recall the situation with your coworker, but from a more impartial observer's point of view. Or you coach yourself like you would a friend, and in turn, you give yourself a lot more self-compassion than you might have otherwise, because I'm a self-borator, and I'm very, very self-critical.

• 1:37:34Speaker 01

  So I sometimes don't give myself any compassion if I feel I've erred in some way. Or another technique, which is very, very simple, and it almost sounds a little gimmicky, but it's very effective, is to talk to yourself in the third person. So rather than saying, "Oh, my God, I need to get a grip," you say, "Maya, you need to get a grip." And that immediately forges a bit of distance between you and your problem, so you can see it through a more objective lens. And all of these techniques just kind of, again, for me, anyway, they kind of calm me down, and they just give me some much-needed perspective on the problem that I've been consumed by, that feels like the biggest problem in my entire life.

• 1:38:15Speaker 01

  And it's a reminder, oh, actually, this is probably not as big a deal, from a cosmic point of view, anyway, than I thought.

• 1:38:22Rich Roll?

  Yeah, speaking of cosmic, I mean, the ultimate psychological distancing is to telescope up, you know, above the atmosphere, which is what your dad kind of did when he took you to the cemetery, right?

• 1:38:34Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:38:34Rich Roll?

  And basically was like, listen, everyone's gonna die and there's gonna be suffering and, you know, like, you know, have kids, it's just, this is what life is. It's like, we're all destined for this place.

• 1:38:45Speaker 01

  I don't think, Rich, they write in parenting books. My dad's rather unorthodox approach, but, long story short, I was just freaking out about human suffering in college when everyone else was being normal and having fun because I was reading about hate crimes and my brain was just spiraling over all the ways that, you know, my future kids could suffer. And I think the reason I latched on to this topic was because motherhood had defined me so much. And so, the things that scare you the most are the things that you feel threaten what will make you you, right? And my dad, like you said, he took me to the cemetery and as we're walking and looping

• 1:39:25Speaker 01

  around this graveyard, he just pauses at one moment and says, "No matter how big your fears grow to be, all suffering is finite. Like, all suffering will end too." And it was so interesting because not everyone feels reassured by how vast the universe is and how relatively small we are, how transient our lives are. But I felt reassurance, like, suffering itself as this massive category that was really intimidating for me also had an end to it. And this speaks to maybe one of the most powerful ways to dampen our rumination, which

• 1:40:09Speaker 01

  is experiences of awe, in which we encounter something really vast that challenges our understanding of the world. And awe can come in all sorts of forms, right? The common ones are nature and music and art, but it can also be...

• 1:40:28Speaker 01

  What my dad exows me to in the cemetery, these big conceptual ideas of the universe. It could be moral beauty, right? It can be a skyscraper, the complexity of a math theorem, you name it. But what awe does from a neuroscientific perspective is that it quiets the default mode network. It quiets the part of our brains that engage in self-immersion, which allows us to step outside of ourselves and to forge some distance between our current anxieties and worries and to remember that we are actually part of a collective, that we belong to a group that's bigger than ourselves. And I think in some way, that's what my dad was doing in the cemetery that day,

• 1:41:13Speaker 01

  which is I was also reminded, oh, you're part of this like long history of humans, all of whom have suffered in some way. And so that doesn't make your life or your future life unusual in any way.

• 1:41:25Rich Roll?

  To the extent that these changes challenge our identities and our attachment to those identities, they also give rise to new identities, good and bad, right? Like, I think when you're in a, when you go through something very challenging, there is a bit of a fork in the road. Like, if you were to be really reductive about it, like, are you gonna be, are you gonna cultivate sort of a victim mentality around this? Or are you going to develop a more empowered, you know, agency-oriented sense of yourself as a result of this? And it seems to me

• 1:42:09Rich Roll?

  that the people who emerge from these experiences with that empowered sense of agency are the people, and there's many examples of this in your book, are the people that figure out how to attach meaning to this experience, like some kind of positive meaning, right? And, you know, maybe that's a conscious decision because it gets to the fairness and justice piece. This is so unfair. I have to figure out how this can be meaningful because otherwise it's like, it's too frightening, right? That the world, that the universe is so chaotic and that this would just happen. So where does that meaning piece fit in for your perspective?

• 1:42:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, so- It's really, it's so interesting you make that observation because absolutely, I mean, we are natural born storytellers, right? It's the way that we make sense of our lives and we are going to want to, you know, irrespective of your spiritual or religious beliefs, our human psychology is wired to assign meaning to the events in our lives. But what's really interesting is that there's a chapter in my book that features a woman named Mary Ann where she actually has to relinquish her belief that things happen for a reason in order to make progress. So, one thing that can happen for people who love exerting control in their life, people who have what scientists call a internal locus of control.

• 1:43:34Speaker 01

  So if you have more of an internal locus of control, you believe that the events in your life are the result of your doing. Okay, good things happen to good people, bad things happen to bad people. If you have more of an external locus of control, you believe that a lot more stuff is random, right? You are receiving randomness from the universe and there's all these exogenous factors that actually determine how your life turns out. So, in this particular case, Mary Ann has a very strong internal locus of control. She grows up in her family environment. It is an input-output model, as we talked about earlier. And then her worst imaginable fear happens,

• 1:44:15Speaker 01

  which is she ends up harming someone by accident. But because she has such a strong internal locus of control, instead of seeing it as what it was, which was an accident, she believes that she is 100% to blame and that she must be dangerous in some way.

• 1:44:34Rich Roll?

  Yeah, the meaning is, "I'm a bad person."

• 1:44:36Speaker 01

  "I'm a bad person." And for decades, she lives a wildly constrained life because she believes she has this bad essence within her. And by the way, this was a social scientist. But she developed supernatural beliefs about the world, namely that she had a bad essence because she was so wedded to her belief that she was dictating outcomes in her life and that the world was just in some way, right? It was fair, that the universe, that the scales balance in the universe, that she...

• 1:45:09Speaker 01

  Decided she has this thing that might unleash itself at any moment. So she basically closes herself off to the rest of humanity. She sees herself as a threat. And it's only decades later that she starts to release her grip on her belief in a just world and to believe that actually some things happen just because. And that's actually a critical insight because sometimes when we try too hard to ascribe meaning to the events in our lives, we ascribe the wrong meaning. We ascribe the wrong takeaway. And what should have been coded as just an accident in her brain became a full-on

• 1:45:51Speaker 01

  identity crisis for her that prevented her from living a full, meaningful life. And this is what I mean by there's different tools in the other side of change, depending on what you're grappling with. So you're reminding me actually through this conversation that I have that strong internal locus of control because I remember after the first pregnancy loss, I was convinced that, because it was the same day we saw, the same day we had an ultrasound of the heartbeat, I was convinced that it was the ultrasound that caused it because I had been the one to license the ultrasound so early at the six-week mark.

• 1:46:29Rich Roll?

  Right.

• 1:46:30Speaker 01

  I'm a scientist, Rich. I know what ultrasounds are capable of doing or not doing when it comes to a biological entity. And yet, I was so eager to blame myself for this bad thing that happened that I decided to believe in something totally irrational.

• 1:46:49Rich Roll?

  But what's so interesting about the way that you frame that, you frame it as ironic. The previous example, also a cognitive scientist, like, these are people that should know better.

• 1:47:00Speaker 01

  We don't know better.

• 1:47:01Rich Roll?

  But I actually think, to me, it makes perfect sense because... I have to imagine on some level, science is a self-selecting group, and people who are attracted to it are people who are trying to make sense of the world. And what they want to do is deconstruct it,

• 1:47:19Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:47:19Rich Roll?

  Take all the parts, you know, take it all apart and then figure out how to put it back together, because it is soothing some aspect of themselves that wants to feel like everything makes sense, or could, can make sense, which gives you a sense of control, right? So there is a control mechanism at the core of the scientist archetype. So to me, it's not surprising at all that when chaos enters the picture, that that is extremely unsettling, because it doesn't match up with like your whole, you know, kind of relationship with the world. And so you have to figure out how to, you know, fit that little puzzle piece in, in a way where it feels seamless, right?

• 1:48:01Rich Roll?

  And so your brain is going to make up some fantastical reason to make sure that your worldview, which is that the world, you know, the universe is an assemblage of puzzle pieces that can be assembled, remains intact.

• 1:48:15Speaker 01

  I'm smiling because I've never heard someone say it that way, and it makes total sense. I think that's exactly right. We want order and logic and natural laws. But human psychology is complex, and the world is complex in a way that we will never comprehend as humans. And you're reminding me of someone I write about in the book, who's a software engineer. So you think, again, that same kind of hyper-rational logical brain. They get diagnosed with cancer. They blame themselves for the cancer. And when I asked them, you know, it's possible that you didn't actually, you're not responsible for this cancer? And by the way, this person had been like a health nut.

• 1:49:00Rich Roll?

  Yeah, like a super health nut.

• 1:49:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, super wellness, exactly, super health nut. They were like, maybe I didn't follow the right diet. And it's like, maybe you actually played no role whatsoever in this, and that you had some genetic predisposition for bone cancer, and that's why this happened. And what they told me was...

• 1:49:20Speaker 01

  If I'm going to take credit for the good stuff that happens in my life, I need to be willing to take credit for the bad stuff that happens. I need to be willing to own, have ownership for the bad stuff. Because it was so unnerving for this person to relinquish control, to believe that their life really was random. They would rather incur the emotional penalty of believing in that kind of, in that sort of logic model and blaming themselves for their cancer than to believe that they didn't have, like, because what would it mean for this person if they didn't cause their cancer? That would mean that they wouldn't control, they wouldn't be able to control if they relapsed, they wouldn't be able to control other outcomes in their future that they desperately wanted to believe they controlled.

• 1:50:05Speaker 01

  It is an unnerving prospect to relinquish your grip of the steering wheel in that moment.

• 1:50:11Rich Roll?

  It also confronts that person with the truth, which is that, you know, this notion that he can take responsibility for all the good things that, like, he's the reason that those things happened.

• 1:50:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:24Rich Roll?

  You know, we all want to do that, right? But, and we overlook all of the, all of the things that kind of played into whatever that thing is that we're claiming responsibility for.

• 1:50:35Speaker 01

  Yes, exactly. And all the luck and randomness that was part of the equation.

• 1:50:40Rich Roll?

  That all gets called into question as well.

• 1:50:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's exactly right.

• 1:50:43Rich Roll?

  All right, so, we're sitting here, we wrap the podcast, I go to my office and I, and I get a very disturbing voicemail, something terrible has happened. I don't even want to say, right? And I am in a state of complete shock and agitation, but you're still here and I have the advantage of being able to ask you what I should do next. So, what is the counsel to the person who is suddenly confronted with, you know, their version of this kind of change scenario in terms of?

• 1:51:22Rich Roll?

  They've read your book, they've listened to this, and they're like, okay, well, now here it is. How can I, with the awareness that I have, that I have this opportunity to make a different choice about how to respond to it? Why is all of this so important?

• 1:51:35Speaker 01

  Because there's so much opportunity hidden within the hardest moments of our lives, and so much potential that we can actually unlock from these moments. And it requires a reframing of the experience in order for us to unlock that potential. So I've now interviewed people for hundreds and hundreds of hours for a slight change of plans and for the other side of change. And I've been astonished by the sense of possibility that people have been able to entertain for

• 1:52:16Speaker 01

  themselves and the realization of that possibility. People have reached heights that they never thought, that they never even felt was safe to imagine for themselves prior to the change, because it just wasn't within the conceivable landscape. So we talked about Dwayne becoming a MacArthur Genius winner. We talked about how Olivia has a kind of self-assuredness that rivals meditation teachers and yogis.

• 1:52:57Speaker 01

  Looking at her, and she's in her late 20s, I aspire to have the kind of unshakable internal confidence that Olivia has. And then there's people that I interviewed who they faced blindness and then become world-renowned chefs. And I actually think, rather than me trying to do the summary thing, I actually think Tara's story is a really beautiful example of this. So she spent her whole life being avoidantly attached.

• 1:53:36Speaker 01

  And not getting close to anyone after her dad died. And then the change she experienced led her to entertain the secure attachment. And now she has this life brimming with like love and joy and community and richness. It's a version of herself that she never, ever thought would be accessible and never would have been accessible had she not gone through the change.

• 1:53:57Rich Roll?

  For me, Maya, the defining feature of change is that it is loaded with potential and possibility and change is like the inciting incident that allows it to be released and made manifest. But from your perspective, like what is, what is the value proposition of all of this?

• 1:54:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:54:20Rich Roll?

  For the person who is going through it?

• 1:54:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, I think when we, when we are navigating an unexpected negative change, our instinct is to see that experience as something that we just have to endure. Like it's something to endure. But my argument is actually that it is a rare opportunity for us to imagine new versions of ourselves that we never thought possible and that are truly incredible. There is the gift of a better version of Maya sitting on the other side of change that is possible to access.

• 1:55:01Speaker 01

  And it's the unique conditions of the change that are going to allow that new Maya to become a real entity.

• 1:55:12Rich Roll?

  And your experience of interviewing hundreds of people and the research that went in to your book underscores this point, that this possibility for transformation is possible for anyone who is going through it. They don't have to endure it. It can be this lever for growth, evolution, change and transformation.

• 1:55:40Speaker 01

  I have spent years interviewing people across such a diverse range of changes. But the thing they share in common is...

• 1:55:52Speaker 01

  How much awe they feel for the person they became as a result of their change. And that was wildly unexpected for me. I didn't go in thinking that there was going to be this silver lining to some of the hardest moments in our lives. But time and time again, I saw people accessing these new versions of themselves that were better. And I think one story in particular from my book really exemplifies this. So a woman named Tara has a really devastating experience as a young kid. Her father commits suicide. He was a veteran of the Vietnam War and had really debilitating PTSD.

• 1:56:36Speaker 01

  And in response to that, she becomes deeply avoidant. She has a very avoidant attachment style. And because she loved her dad so much, she pledges to herself that she will never, ever open herself up to other people in that way because she's unwilling to feel that depth of pain again.

• 1:56:56Rich Roll?

  The risk of abandonment is too severe.

• 1:56:59Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And then what happens later on in her life, she experiences a very unexpected change that is harrowing, but that forces her to rework her attachment style. So contrary to popular belief, attachment styles are much more malleable than researchers once thought. We can take conscious deliberate steps to actually build more secure attachments. And the attachment styles we built in childhood are not destiny. So that's really important to clarify. And so Tara takes these deliberate steps. And it fills me with so much joy to see the life that she has built for herself as an

• 1:57:44Speaker 01

  adult. After years of closing herself off to rich, meaningful relationships, she has a life that is brimming with love. And

• 1:57:59Speaker 01

  I'm awestruck when I see that because it is a perfect example of someone who would almost certainly have still had an avoidant attachment style going into her 50s, who is now living a radically different existence. And it's not simply that she has others to support her during times of crisis, other people have her to support them. And I think many people would look at Tara's life and envy it and assume she must always have been this way. But then you realize that it was actually a moment of change that inspired all of this transformation and growth.

• 1:58:39Rich Roll?

  But for this intervening event, she would have gone along her merry way with her avoidant strategy for the rest of her life. And this interruption was the catalyst for the growth and evolution for her to finally heal this wound, to mend her relationship with intimacy and allow herself to expose herself to the risk of being, of giving and receiving love.

• 1:59:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:11Rich Roll?

  Yeah, which is like, that's the most beautiful thing because that is ultimately the most important of anything.

• 1:59:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it's given her this mindset that is so new and fresh for her, where she said, "I can find myself at times when life gets really hard, retreating back into myself. And then I ask, do I want to be the old version of Tara? Or do I want to be the new version who takes emotional risks but gets this massive, massive payoff?" And she said, "For as long as I can, I'm going to choose the latter." And that's the promise of change. It can give you the kind of transformation that someone like Tara endured. And that gives me so much hope when I think about the promise of change for everyone.

• 2:00:01Rich Roll?

  Susan David famously says, discomfort is the price of admission for a meaningful life. We don't necessarily seek out or welcome discomfort into our experience, but that really is the crucible for our growth and our evolution and for our relationship with our own change. And the change that you're talking about is compelling us to marinate in discomfort. And rather than resist it, if we can accept it and realize that it is baked with opportunity, then we can have our version of all of the experiences that you've shared with us today

• 2:00:45Rich Roll?

  of these wonderful people in the book. So it really is, it's an important service that you're performing by helping people understand this. It's really, it's really beautiful.

• 2:00:56Speaker 01

  Thanks, Rich. Yeah, look, change is coming for all of us, whether we like it or not. And so my goal in writing this book is to give people the companion they need along the way so that they can unlock the same kind of beautiful change that I've seen the people I interviewed for this book unlock within themselves.

• 2:01:17Rich Roll?

  Beautiful. Well, thanks for talking to me today.

• 2:01:20Speaker 01

  Thanks so much for having me, Rich.

• 2:01:27Rich Roll?

  That's it for today. Thank you for listening. I truly hope you enjoyed the conversation. To learn more about today's guests, including links and resources related to everything discussed today, visit the episode page at richroll.com where you can find the entire podcast archive, my books, Finding Ultra, Voicing Change, and The Plant Power Way. If you'd like to support the podcast, the easiest and most impactful thing you can do is to subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, and on YouTube, and leave a review and/or a comment. And sharing the show or your favorite episode with friends or on social media is, of course, awesome and very helpful. This show just wouldn't be possible without the

• 2:02:08Rich Roll?

  help of our amazing sponsors who keep this podcast running wild and free. To check out all their amazing offers, head to richroll.com/sponsors.

• 2:02:20Rich Roll?

  And finally, for podcast updates, special offers on books and other subjects, please subscribe to our newsletter, which you can find on the footer of any page at richroll.com. Today's show was produced and engineered by Jason Camiolo. The video edition of the podcast was created by Blake Curtis and Morgan McRae with assistance from our creative director, Dan Drake. Content management by Shana Savoy, copywriting by Ben Pryor. And of course, our theme music was created, all the way back in 2012, by Tyler Pyatt, Trapper Pyatt, and Harry Mathis. Appreciate the love, love the support, see you back here soon. Peace. Plants.

• 2:03:00Speaker 01

  Namaste. [music]