If Nothing Seems to Be Going Your Way, Listen to This

Have you ever felt like life was just starting to make sense?

“You've hit your groove and then all of a sudden.”

Someone pulls the rug out from underneath you, the layoff, the break-up, the diagnosis, the back injury that you didn't see coming, and now you're left standing here in the wreckage.

And when that happens, if you ever notice some well-meaning friend of yours always turns to you and says,

"Well, you know, when life gets you lemons, you make lemonade." And I always think, "Only if we're putting tequila in it." Here's the quote I prefer. "If you're going through hell, keep going." Winston Churchill said that, and I get it.

It's easier said than done. But when life is unfair. At some point, you're going to have to stop feeling sorry for yourself, and as my mom likes to say, "Pull up your big girl panties and deal with it." And that's exactly what we're going to learn to do today.

And you're going to love the expert, because she's somebody who has had to do this over and over and over again in her own life. She is a renowned cognitive scientist who studies human behavior. And for the last four years, she's been researching people who have experienced major life change, and is here today to teach you a few tools and mindset switches that will help you quiet the spiraling thoughts,

and find the clarity and courage that you need in order to move yourself or your career or your whole life forward. This episode is your guide to picking yourself back up, holding your own hand, as you start the process of moving forward again. And it's going to help you see bigger possibilities on the other side of what you're going through right now.

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Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins podcast. I am so glad that you're here. It is an honor to be together and to spend this time with you, and if you're a new listener, or you're here because someone shared this episode with you. I just want to take a moment and personally welcome you to the Mel Robbins podcast family. And I cannot tell you how excited I am for today's conversation because so many of you have been writing in recently and you're writing in from around the world.

And you're asking for help. You're like, "Mel, I need help navigating changes that are happening in my life."

“And these are not changes that I wanted. I didn't ask for this. They are overwhelming. Can you get somebody on to talk about this?”

That's exactly what I've done. Today, you're going to learn how to move on from the past and reinvent yourself, especially when you really don't want to. Our guest today is Dr. Maya Shankar, a world-renowned cognitive scientist and an expert in the science of change. She is a Rhodes scholar who earned her PhD in cognitive neuroscience from Oxford. Completed her post-doctoral fellowship at Stanford and graduated magna cum laude from Yale. She served as a senior advisor in the White House under President Obama,

founding and leading the White House Behavioral Science team. After the White House, she joined Google as the Senior Director of Behavioral Economics.

And for the past four years, she's hosted the award-winning podcast, a slight change of plans.

And now, she's the author of The New York Times Best Seller, the Other Side of Change, who we become when life makes other plans. Maya Shankar, welcome to the Valorabba's podcast. Thank you so much for having me now. I am so excited. You came in here like a tornado. I can tell that you are ready to inspire and teach and motivate and you have been waiting to talk about this topic.

“And the way I want to start is, how could my life be different?”

If I take everything you're about to teach me today, about change, managing it, creating it, surviving it, if I really take it to heart.

And I apply it to my life. How's my life going to change? I think we've all heard this mantra that while we can't control what happens to us, we can control a reaction to what happens. And if you're anything like me, you're like, okay, yeah, that sounds good. But how the heck do I actually do that, right? It's not like there's some sort of switch in my brain that I can flip on that suddenly going to make me feel more peaceful or more enlightened or more curious, right? If there's one thing that I've learned over the years, it's that we can change our relationship with change.

We can come to see the hardest moments in our lives, not just as something to survive, but as an opportunity to reimagine who we are. To unlock our full potential, to discover extraordinary things about ourselves and what we're capable of. And all of that surfaces in the throws of a big disruption. But when you're facing it, you don't want to be it. Exactly. And you're saying that you're going to teach us how to change the way we relate to those moments as we're going through them. I'm coming at all of this as someone who hates change. I feel so uncomfortable by change. And I feel like it brings out the worst of my anxieties. And so the reason why I've been so heartened to realize this from the research and all the interviews I've done is because I needed to change my relationship with change.

And so I'm here to tell everyone listening, if I could do it, I promise you you can do it too. You host a podcast about change. Now you're the author of a book about how to reinvent yourself when life takes a turn. But this all started because of a need for you to reinvent yourself, your identity, your future, all of it. So I want to go back to the beginning. So let's talk about what we're going to have to take the time machine back to Little Maya age six. That's when I started playing the violin. And now I fell in love with it immediately from the moment you picked it up.

Absolutely. So my grandmother in India had played the violin as a hobby growing up.

“I remember one day my mom went up to her attic and brought down her dusty violin that she had brought with her when she immigrated from India to the US. And she opened the case and it was like magic.”

I remember very quickly asking my mom, okay, can you get me like a pint-sized violin, little little version of this.

And my parents had to ask me to do a lot of things that they never for whatever reason had to ask me to practice.

I would just run home from the bus stop after school. I would practice for hours. And I remember when I was around nine years old we were in New York City. I had my violin with me. And we walked by the Juilliard School of Music. Now this was my dream school. Okay, I mean, I would I would lay in that at night and just imagine that one day I might be able to study there. And so my mom looks at me and she goes, why don't we just walk in to Juilliard to Juilliard? You're nine. I was nine.

“And I was like, what are you talking about? We are not invited. And she goes, I mean, Maya, what's the worst thing that could happen?”

And I said to her security guards, that's the worst thing that could happen. But she was just fearless and she's like, we're going in 30 minutes later. I'm auditioning for a Juilliard teacher on this spot. Really? Yes. He tells my mom afterwards, I'm willing to take Maya on as a student this summer and to basically put her through a boot camp to try to get her ready for the Juilliard audition in the fall. And I went to the summer camp. I was heads down. I really skilled up technically. I got so much better in that time period. And guess what? I got into Juilliard in the fall.

I was studying at Juilliard. I was soloing with orchestras, winning concerto competitions. There were now in violinists. It's a prominent invited me to be his private student.

And I overstretch my finger on a single note. I overstretch my pinky finger playing this very challenging technical piece.

And I heard a popping sound. And it turned out that I had damaged tendons in my hand. And doctors would later tell me it was a career ending injury that my dreams were over. What is that like to hear at the age of 15? I was in denial. I think like most people listening would be. I was also, I was in a rebellious mode. So I also didn't want to listen to them. I kept playing and practicing through pain. I was taking excessive anti-inflammatories. I was doing every physical therapy exercise in the book, every possible treatment.

“I ended up getting surgery. That didn't work. Finally, I had to face the facts. But it was very, very hard. And I think grief is actually the best way to describe what my emotional state was like.”

Because there was something so curious about my grief when I think back to it.

I wasn't just grieving the loss of the instrument. I was grieving the loss of myself at this much more fundamental level. We don't know sometimes how much something has come to define who we are until we lose it. And we feel so unmoored and so disoriented. And like there's nothing that makes a special anymore. And what's relatable about that story is that you don't have to be a violinist to understand that when you go through divorce or you get fired from a job or you get booted from the team. That you used to be on or you even move from the neighborhood to a new town.

“Yeah. That that change really makes you question who am I?”

What do I want? Like even if you think you know what you want, you pick a certain major or you go into a certain profession. And you start doing it and you're like, do I really want to be a lawyer? Do I really want to be a nurse? Like this is Lizza really? Is this really? And you start to question yourself. Because that's the thing about self identities. They project us into the future. So every future I had imagined for myself how now disappeared from view.

But what we can do is we can expand our self identity so that it is more robust in the face of change. Now what do I mean by that? My advice is to define yourself, not just by what you do, but by why you do it. Okay, so let me ask that question for the violin.

“If I stripped away all the superficial features of playing music, what was the essence of my passion? What drove me towards the instrument?”

It was a love of human connection. I loved connecting with people through my music. I loved seeing them smile. I loved seeing them feel things as a result of what I was producing. Guess what? There were other outlets through which I could express that love of human connection. I'm expressing it right now in this conversation with you and your listeners. What do you say to a person who's dealing with that kind of destabilizing change? Whether you're going through divorce, you have a life altering diagnosis. You just lost somebody that you love and they're having trouble seeing beyond just the pain of this moment.

Yeah. First of all, I feel you. It is a deeply painful and disorienting process.

There is so much research showing why change is so scary. I mean for one, it is filled with so much uncertainty. And our brains are not wired to like uncertainty. I think another reason why change is so hard is that at the end of the day, and I know you and I share this in common, we like having a firm grip of the steering wheel. We like believing that we are dictating how our lives turn out. And most of us humans fall prey to what's called the illusion of control, where we wildly overestimate the degree to which we're actually in the driver's seat.

And so for the person who's in the throws of it right now, who cannot see beyond their pain, I want to share a personal story, the last six or seven years have been really tough for my husband and me. So we have been trying to start a family. We've been unsuccessful. We've had to navigate so many disappointments and obstacles and heartbreaks and dealing with pregnancy losses has left me reeling because for someone who loves control, for someone who loves outworking every challenge, she faces, guess what?

And I was like, hell no, okay? Oh dear you, you take your Instagram BS, go into the corner with your toxic positivity, and I'm going to stay under the covers and soak, because that is my reality right now, PS, I still love you, okay? But I was so pissed. So anyway, finally he kind of wears me down. I'm like, you know what, I'm going to do this damn thing, just to get him off my case, all right? So I start to battle off a couple things. I'm like, well, I guess I'm really grateful that I get to be and on to my six nieces and nephews.

I love that I've gotten to work with the same people for like over a decade, and we still love working together. It's a greatest source of pride that the people I worked with and the white house still work with me today. So I started to do this, and the list just pours out of me, and I swear to God, something magical happened in that moment.

“I had been so single-mindedly focused on becoming a mom that I had developed tunnel vision, and I had completely forgotten about how otherwise rich and multi-dimensional my life was.”

And in engaging in this practice, by the way, it's called a self-affirmation exercise. My husband is a software engineer. Didn't know that that's what he was doing, but it basically just involves taking a few minutes to write down everything that gives her life meaning.

Every identity that makes you feel valuable, that is not in threat and by the change.

I just want to say to you if you're listening or watching on YouTube and you had this like bristle for a moment like I didn't like my edit when her husband with the best of intentions tried this. There are going to be those moments in life where you're not only going to be under the sheets for a day, you might be there for a week or a month.

“You need to process things for a year, and that's okay. What I want you to know is wherever you are.”

The moment that you're ready to pull the sheets down, you're ready to start moving forward through this change that you do not want that is not fair that is just

Horrible to have to process and accept that the tools are there as frameworks to help guide you as you move forward. What I wanted to add to this is that if you're processing a loss and you're going through the experience of grief that he takes a lot of time to come to terms with the loss that you have. The extraordinary expert on grief David Kessler on the podcast and he shared this statistic that I found to be so empowering that the average time period when somebody seek support after losing a loved one is between five and ten years.

So if you've been living with grief for a while, what David Kessler says is, the moment that you're ready to seek help is the perfect time. So I just want to remind everyone who is listening. The pain is real. It will persist. There are no instant fixes, but the small shifts in perspective can radically change your orientation as you look at yourself and as you look at the world around you. You know, in your research doctor, Shankar, you say that people are not great at predicting how change is actually going to impact them. Can you explain.

Yeah, so we are notoriously bad affective forecasters. All that means is that we are so bad at predicting how we are going to feel about events in the future.

“This is really important for us to know it is we overestimate how bad the bad things are going to be and we also overestimate how good the good things are going to be.”

I lost my job, for example, yes, it's going to completely ruin me and I will never regain the current happiness level I have.

And then I also think if I get this promotion, I'm going to be happy forever. But actually we just refer right back down to what's called our happiness set point. Okay, so whether it's a loss or it's again.

Yeah, or at a minimum, it's never as bad or as good as we thought it was going to be. Now, why is it important to know that?

The reason it's important to know that is because at the outset of a change when we're feeling so dotted. By our ability to get through it, we want to have that reassurance that it's actually never going to be as bad as we think. But one of the biggest reasons why we get it wrong is that we forget that we too will change as a result of the experience. We are work in progress. And we forget that as the world is changing around us and as a change is happening to us, it is also creating lasting change within us.

I just saw what you're talking about. That you with the person you are in this moment, you think you can predict how you're going to feel and who you're going to be in a future moment.

“The truth is the person that you are right now will not be present for the future moment.”

Exactly. Because you are going to have changed based on what's happening to you next. 100%. We somehow think that the version that we are today is like the is the final version, the fully enlightened version of Maya.

But here's the thing, we become different people on the other side of change.

And so when you are feeling so scared and don't it, everyone listening right now who is afraid of a change that is they're currently navigating or they're going to have to navigate in the future and they think I can't possibly get through this. The right question is not, how am I going to get through this? It's how will I with new abilities and perspectives and values and capabilities? How will that new version of me navigate this change? There is something so reassuring in that message because time and time again, everyone I talked to says, you know, I wouldn't have will this negative change to happen, but damn am I grateful for the person I became as a result of it.

I am so different than I was before. What is identity foreclosure? So identity foreclosure is something I actually experienced as a little kid. I didn't have a name for it of course, but it's when we anchor our identity to something prematurely without having explored all other available options. So when it came to the violin, I just kind of attached myself to that moving train and I jumped on it and I was just like off to the races.

Okay, I got to be a concert violin. Yes, that's my identity. Okay, and what that what identity foreclosure does is that it prevents us from more consciously building these multifaceted identities. We inherit labels and identities from our families, from our teachers, from our friends, from our communities.

But we aren't always interrogating what they are or making proactive choices that help expand them.

I have a friend who always wanted to get married. Yeah, and hasn't found the person yet. And yet it's this thing that they wrestle with. Mm-hmm.

“And how do you handle that experience when you, it's something you've thought about for so long, you know?”

Yeah, and it hasn't happened yet. One of the topics that I explore in the book is called "Possibleselves." Ooh, and if I like that. And here's the basic premise. Okay, so all the time we are generating possible selves as we go about our lives.

So when your friend is thinking about one day wanting to be married, she's generating a possible self. Yes. When Mel decided, "Hey, you know what? I think I should do a podcast." She was imagining a possible self. When I, as a teenager, learned that she can no longer play the violin, and had to figure out how to find some way to reinvent herself.

She too was generating a possible self. Yes. And so, "Possible selves come into three buckets." There's hope for selves, uh-huh. Those reflect our dreams of what we hope will happen in the future.

Feared selves reflect our anxieties and our worries about what might happen in the future. And then expected selves reflect what is just most likely to happen good or bad. So yes, I could tell you right now, Mel. I'd really love to become the next Taylor Swift. Too bad.

Don't know how to sing, don't know how to write songs,

“and probably in five years I'm still going to be a cognitive scientist, right?”

So that's my expected self. Okay. So what can happen when a big change comes our way? Is that all of these stores close that we were hoping would stay open? And what did you expect it, that we expected or that you feared?

I never thought that my life could maybe turn out this, like, I don't want that door to open.

That door is so scary. I don't like what that future looks like. And what I've learned from my research is that when it comes to imagining possible selves, we can sometimes have an overly constrained imagination for what is possible for us. Based on stereotypes, experiences, social norms, you name it.

“How many times have we been thrust into a new environment?”

All of a sudden, I'm a caregiver. All of a sudden, I'm a chronically ill person. All of a sudden, I'm jobless. And we've been so afraid about who we might become. And one thing that I am so eager to spread is, well, in those moments of inflection, how can we conjure up more promising, positive possible selves than we previously imagined?

This feels like a good moment to take a pause.

And I want to give our amazing sponsors a chance to share a few words.

And I also want to give you a chance to share this episode in these tools, with somebody in your life that's going through change right now. This could be exactly what they need in order to help themselves navigate this next chapter of their life, and don't go anywhere. Because Dr. Shunker and I will be waiting for you after the short breaks stay with me.

Welcome back at your buddy Mel Robbins. Today, you and I are here with Dr. Shunker, cognitive scientist who's teaching us, how to move on from the past and reinvent yourself in those moments when life is not going your way. So, Dr. Shunker, I want to hover for just a second on this identity foreclosure thing. And I'd like to focus on the experience of when you have something when you're young,

that then you can no longer do.

“And I'm just curious, is there any research or any specific advice that you have to somebody who was like the star athlete?”

And all of a sudden they don't have sports or who was the star math student?

Yes. And now they're in the corporate world and they're just lost. Can you talk a little bit about this? Yes, just because they've lost the ability to do that thing, just because they're not the star athlete anymore.

Just because they're not the top math student. Doesn't mean that all of the soft and hard skills that they built, all the experiences they had, all the wisdom and knowledge they accrued as a result of doing those things. Can't serve them meaningfully in what comes next. So we feel like we lost everything.

But actually it turns out when it comes to the violin, guess what I'm still holding on to. All that grit, guess what else I'm using, that fearlessness, going on stage as a little kid performing in front of thousands of people.

“That's helping me today in my roles that I have, right?”

As a writer, podcaster cognitive scientist. And so the relevant question to ask themselves, when they're no longer that math student or that star soccer player is, who else can this person be? You apply the worth to the label.

Exactly. And when the label is gone and identity for closure happens, we make the mistake of thinking that all of the value that was underneath the surface is gone too. It's exactly right. I want to read to you from chapter three of your book.

Most of us know what it's like to get caught in a negative mental spiral. Any number of things can trigger these unrelenting suffocating loops, but the catalyst is typically a change in our lives. Our new anxieties, regrets, and uncertainties can take on a life of their own, and become a bigger challenge to deal with and the change itself.

These thoughts become like mind worms, nestling and our psyche's hijacking our attention and stoking our biggest fears. What's wrong with me? How can I not have seen this coming? How could they do that to me?

What's going to happen? Let's talk about what to do when you are stuck in a mental spiral. So we talked about how our brains aren't wired to like uncertainty. We want what's called cognitive closure. Cognitive closure?

Yes. What does that? What that means is we want black and white answers, but clear definitive answers. Yeah, I want the possible self that I'm hoping for and the possible self that I expected.

Exactly.

“Okay, but guess what? When a big change happens, and we climb out from the rubble, there's no black and white, it's all gray.”

And that makes us feel so much anxiety.

Certainly makes me feel anxiety. I don't like being out of control. And when you're in the throws of change, all you feel is out of control. So what is our mind, too? I don't know.

It starts spiraling, but why does it do that? It's so not helpful. Exactly. It starts spiraling because it's trying to regain control in the way that it knows how, which is we think maybe I can outthink this problem, but it's full's gold.

“You think if I could just figure out, let's say you're navigating a break up.”

If I could just figure out why he stopped loving me, then I can finally move on and enter another relationship. If I can just figure out all the ways that I can keep my family safe, then I can actually move on peacefully.

If I can analyze every mistake I've made in the past and every regret I possibly have, they don't never make those regrets in the future.

So we have this false sense that we're actually making progress on the problems and challenges we're facing, but we're actually just looping over the same negative thoughts over and over again. Because a lot of questions in life don't actually have answers. But our brains, they haven't caught up to that wisdom yet. So you've got all these tools. God do we need this. Let's start with the first one cognitive repraisal. What is that cognitive repraisal is again one of those fancy pants terms that doesn't need to be fancy, which simply means that we interpret a situation differently in order to alter the emotional impact it has on us.

Okay, so let me try to put that in a way that I would understand. You are going to. Guess what yourself or you're going to put nicer icing on the cake in order to get you to direct yourself at the expected or the hope to not the fear. Is that what you're going to change the way you think of that a situation. You have a gut reaction to your being a certain way or a situation unfolding in a certain way. Yes, and you're going to deliberately change your interpretation.

Would this be an example one because I talked to somebody who on this podcast, who is an expert in grief. And he said something that I will never, ever, ever forget, which is if you're in a spiral around what if what if what if what if what if this would if that and I actually use this on the phone with my mom this morning because they had a friend who died over the weekend very, very suddenly. And I shared this little reframe with her. So David Kessler, mom, just did an episode with us and he suggests that you say even if even if even if even if.

And I find I found it to be so powerful.

Yeah, because if the person is gone, there is nothing that brings them back. And all of the worrying that we're doing, which is trying to make sense of it, which is super, super, super normal. Doesn't actually do anything. But make you feel this false sense like there could have been something. And so the even if. I thought was really powerful. And I could see how you could use even if in a breakup, even if I did this, even if I did that, even if I did the other thing.

Is that an example of what you're talking about? You're refraining a situation. And it's altering the way you feel about it. 100%. That's re-a-presal. Yeah, it doesn't mean that it wasn't fair. It doesn't mean that it's all the facts. It doesn't mean you're not going to agree for anything.

But that sort of bouncing from what I wanted and what I hoped and what I expected.

“If you're not, I can't handle it. And the need to kind of land the plane and feel okay and in control, like to me, okay, great. I thought that's what that was.”

Yes, you have another one that you reference, which is mental time travel. Yes. So our brains have a remarkable ability to go into the past and into the future. And this can be an asset to us when we are navigating a really frustrating mental spiral. We actually taught us a lot about that, because you've taught us that we can look back at the past and why I'm not that person anymore. Like I look at the college version of myself. I'm like that was peak dysfunctional.

I'm not that person anymore. Yeah. And you've also said that this possible, the possible selves are a way that you project into the future. Yeah, so proven that too. Yes. So, and it's, if there's a specific topic to your rumination, what you can do is you can travel into the future and say, so my a three in the morning wakes up,

ruminating, right?

Let's say with the coworker, okay, or let's say with the receptionist or whatever it is, okay, I ask myself, how am I going to feel about this five hours from now, five days from now and five years from now? And what that quick mental exercise does, it's just five seconds of thinking is it reminds you that your current situation is transient and the problem your current preoccupation is probably going to feel less significant to you moving forward.

And what I've done in those moments where I feel like I am still going to be worried in whatever five years is to mind my past and surface moments in which I was similarly convinced.

That I was going to be stuck in this mental spiral indefinitely, but I turned out to be wrong or moments where I showed resilience in the face of adversity that I did not think I had. And so we can leverage, we can go into the path, but we can also go into the past, by the way, when we're scared of what's happening globally. And we can say, look, it's not the first time humanity has faced these sorts of challenges that we're going through right now, but a combination of self sacrifice and collective action led us to a better spot.

So this is a mental time travel is a wonderfully flexible, helpful tool. And here's the other thing Mel, not everyone has the ability to just like get on a jet and be like, okay, I'm going to reinvent myself by like moving to another country and I'm going to quit my job. And it's like, no, most of us have to keep our jobs, okay, and most of us have to live in the homes or apartments that we're currently in.

“And so my goal was to figure out, well, how can we have that reinvention happen in here?”

And in here, by the way, if you're listening, she's pointing to her brain. Yeah, to my brain.

This is a really important note that reinvention, we think about it and we think about the thing that you put on your vision board. We think about the future that you're going to cast forward that you can visualize and all the physical stuff and what it's going to look like. You're saying that true reinvention when it comes to yourself and moments of change happens internally in your own mind. That's exactly right because we cannot control in fact what happens to us. That is the nature of let them. I think what we're talking about today and the tools that we're unpacking and the kind of mindset shifts that you're teaching us.

I think it's really going to help because when change happens is so damn overwhelming that you can just feel like you're getting run over by it. And I'm excited to share this with people because these are things that you can hold on to to help you navigate where you are right now.

And here's what I want to do. I want to take a quick pause. I'd love to give our amazing sponsors a chance to share a few words.

And I want to give you a chance to share this with people in your life who are navigating change right now. People who need tools to be able to move on from the past. Somebody who's reinventing themselves or experiencing a loss. The things that Dr. Shunker are sharing may be the exact thing that helps them open the door to a new possibility. And don't they deserve that? Of course they do. All right. Don't go anywhere. We're going to be waiting for you after the short break. Stay with me.

Welcome back to your buddy Mel Robbins today. We are talking about how to move on from the past and reinvent yourself.

“When life is not going your way, when change is happening.”

And I am feeling inspired because I love some of the stuff we've been talking about. I particularly love the three possible cells. That's a framework. I'm going to hold on to. I'm sure you have shared this with people you care about because you're learning something. So Dr. Shunker, you have a tool that I would love to discuss. So let's talk about this visual self distancing. What is that?

Yeah. So what we're trying to do with this tool is just create as much psychological distance as we can between us and the problem we're trying to solve. Okay. Because oftentimes when we're immersed in it, we have all of these heated emotions and we're feeling pissed off or feeling frustrated or feeling a lot of stress. Let's just an example. A lot of people are losing their jobs right now. Yes. And so let's use this tool of visual self distancing to help somebody who's in a situation where they have just lost their job.

And now they feel like a loser. And now they feel flat-footed because of all of the change in the ways that people are working. How do I use this to get out of that negative self talk? So visual self distancing means taking a bird's eye view on your problems.

“Okay. Because here's the thing. If you're a first person narrator of your own situation, here's what you're saying.”

What is it sound like? I'm a loser. Yep.

I'm pathetic. No one's going to respect me anymore. I don't love myself. How could anyone ever love me? I'm too old. I can't figure this out. Yep.

I've screwed up my career. Yeah. Also, I'm so intimidated by having to learn this new set of skills. Yes. What am I going to do?

“That's what this self talk version looks like and why it turns negative so quickly.”

Because at the end of the day, most people have the least amount of compassion for themselves. True. That's certainly me. I have so much compassion for other people. I reserve Mel roughly. Point two percent for myself. Okay.

So I am incredibly harsh on myself. I'm super self critical.

And I'm going to be the first person to be like, I screwed up. Now, it makes for a really nice marriage because I had to narrow both like this. So typically, we end up being like, "I'm messed up. No, I messed up." But there's other scenarios we're being like that is not healthy. It's not great for your positive talk, okay?

And so when you take a bird's eye view, when you essentially coach yourself like you would a friend, you're bringing self-compassion to the table. You wouldn't go to your friend and be like, "Hey, guess what, Maya? You're a loser. You're pathetic." Okay?

No. You have no future ahead of you. You would never say that to me. Ever. You would be productive.

You would try to correct some of my misunderstandings about myself. You would poke holes in my narratives because you would see things more objectively, without that cloud of emotions. So rather than saying, "I need to get my stuff together."

“You say, "Maya, you need to get your stuff together."”

Okay? That small little sort of sounds like a little gimmick, but it is so effective and across domains and intensity of emotions, it is one of the most powerful tools. You change the focus from feeling like you're the problem

to reminding yourself that this is a universal problem that the collective you all shares. Well, you know what's interesting is when you said, "Maya, you gotta pull it together." Yeah. Or, Mel, stop complaining about this

and sign up for the tutorial online and lean into this. Mel, start picking up the phone and just calling friends and telling them that you got laid off and, you know, you would really appreciate a chance to just talk about, you know, what they think you should do next.

Like Mel, pull your big girl panties on.

That's what my mom always used to say.

And work on that resume. Like, you get back out there. Because that's what you would tell a friend. Correct. But what's interesting is when you use your own name,

I had this experience when you said, "Maya, what did you say to yourself?" Maya? I tried to use a PC term and it was to get your stuff together. Maya?

Come on. You gotta pull yourself together. I could almost feel like there's a little coach standing behind you going, "Come on now. Come on now. You are outside of yourself." Exactly.

Now, you say distraction can be a tool to get out of the past and this negative self-talk. And I need to hear more about this because distraction is a very negative thing in the world right now.

“Yes, I think there is a really harmful, popular narrative”

that if we don't persistently and directly confront our negative emotions after some negative change happens in our lives, but those emotions are going to rear their ugly head with greater vengeance down the line. The research actually shows that the story is much more complex.

Distraction is a very helpful, productive tool for a lot of people. If you find that watching Netflix, having a conversation with a friend, going on a run is bringing you joy on any given day, and you don't feel like those negative emotions are trying to force their way through and you're actively suppressing them.

Chances are, it's a really good tool for you to be using. And so what I hate about that narrative, is that I don't want people to feel both the burden of their grief or the challenge they're going through, and then an additional burden that the techniques they're using

aren't the right way to get through their trauma or whatever negative situation they're going through. There is actually no right way, individual differences play a massive role, so if distractions working for you, you do you. Another thing that's fairly easy to do is to read fiction.

So researchers call fiction an identity laboratory. Because what you're able to do when you're reading fiction is to freely explore and try on for fit, if you will, new identities, you can anticipate how you would respond at different junctures.

You can take risks that you would never take in normal life, right?

You can, you can experiment with yourself. It's kind of like a playground. And it's a totally psychologically safe space. And so we, as readers, we tend to blend our identities with the characters that we're reading.

So that's one way to explore who else we can become.

when I was at that juncture with the violin.

“The possibility to play I was feeling down in the dumps, right?”

An identity for kids, maybe. My possible dreams, my who I expected gone. Gone. It's a summer before college. I thought I was going to major in music performance.

Now I have no idea what my major is going to be, right? And my dad looked at me and he was like, you've been wearing blinders for 10 years. You're a job this summer. In addition to doing your job that you're working this summer.

Is to, yeah, I had a job at the local museum. Is to expose yourself to as many ideas and worldviews as you possibly can. So by that, I mean watch documentaries. Read books.

Watch TV. Talk to people about their experiences. Talk to their parents about their experiences. But importantly, this was the key part, Mel. You need to go on this quest with no end goal in mind.

Because if you're trying desperately to figure out what's my major going to be, you're not going to be as exploratory as you should. Right? You're going to preemptively close doors because you don't see them as possible.

What about when you choose to make the change? Okay. So, you know, because oftentimes, you think it's going to be good, yes. But is there value in creating change in your own life?

Even, you know, though it's going to feel uncomfortable and you're going to be uncertain.

“I mean, discomfort is the key to unlocking our brain's potential.”

That's what the neuroscience shows. So, we have this remarkable ability for neuroplasticity, which basically just means our brain can rewire itself in response to our experiences and the challenges we put in front of us.

And so, every time we put ourselves into an uncomfortable situation, we are boosting our brain. Here's the great thing, though, when we are in these positions we're learning something new when we're having a challenge ourselves because we're introducing change into our lives.

We fail a lot. Failure is uncomfortable.

But what failure does is it releases this powerful cocktail of neurochemicals

that signal to the brain. Hey, something's not working. The current set up is not serving me. I have to rewire things in order to get them right next time. And so, that is how we tap into this amazing neuroplasticity

and keep ourselves sharp as long as we possibly can. So, what do you say to the person listening who may be holding themselves back? They're in a pattern. They are looking at the doors. They see who they hoped to become.

They know who they kind of expect to become, especially if they don't make this change. Yes. Because if you're thinking about looking for a job, but you're not doing anything,

you can expect to say that job. If you're thinking about running the marathon,

but you never actually buy the sneakers,

you can expect to never run the marathon. Correct. They're staring at the fear door thinking, oh, but what if this? What if that? So, they're in that moment where you are actively waiting.

You're waiting for change while you're raising a family. You're caring for your parents. You're finishing school. You're in between jobs. There's a thing you want to do,

but you just are waiting for the right time. Yep. What would you say? No action is too small. You can start right now.

You do not need to wait until the kids leave the nest. You do not need to wait until you are no longer a caregiver.

Because here's the thing.

Let's say that your goal is to start a blog. Or like, yeah, you know what? Today, I really want to write a sub-stack because let's say you really care about building community.

“All you have to do is write for one minute a day.”

And the reason is that the difference between zero minutes and one minute is seismic. Because when it's zero minutes, nothing. When it's one minute, you're a writer. You've embodied this identity.

And you're going to build towards it. And it's going to be self-reinforcing. And it's going to lead to this virtuous cycle. Or over time, you start to believe it, too. So I would tell people to start now.

It can be the smallest little action. Maybe it's just one little step you take in the direction of that possible future self. The other thing I want to share is that there are really good techniques from science that can help drive motivation when we need it most. So the first is to break really big daunting goals

into bite-sized bits that feel much more manageable

And the other reason why it's so important to break the big goal into the small goals

is that we want to avoid what's called the middle problem. What's the middle problem? So the middle problem refers to the idea that we don't have stable amounts of motivation over the course of pursuing a goal. We get a huge boost in the beginning.

So this is like New Year's Day. I'm ready to go. Where is my gym shoes? I'm going to go on the elliptical or the treadmill or whatever it is. And then we get a huge burst of motivation at the end.

Because now we're really close to achieving the goal. So we're like, oh, it's like, think of a marathon. You're in the final stretch. You actually speed up a little bit because you're so excited to almost be there. But we actually get a law in motivation in the middle.

So what breaking a big goal into smaller goals does is that it reduces the continuous length of that middle stretch. If you have a year-long goal, that middle is three months where you have that drop-in motivation and you're likely to just fall off the wagon all together. If you have a week-long goal, now your middle is just over two and a half days or something.

So now you have a much smaller time frame in which you get that, I don't want to do this. But okay, you know what? I'm right back into it as I'm getting towards the end of the week.

Okay, so that's the first thing.

Break the big goals into smaller units. The second and this is the technique that has completely transformed my life. It's called temptation bundling. Okay. Is developed by my friend Katie Milton.

You just have to do the hard thing that is required for you to achieve your possible self. With an immediately rewarding activity. So something that is immediately delightful is a great reward.

“But importantly, you have to deny yourself access to that little fun treat in all other realms of life.”

So here's how I've applied it to my life. Okay, I only allow myself to listen to Taylor Swift's new albums when I'm working out. I love temptation bundling. Yeah, I love it. Change my life.

Okay, third one.

We have a funny quirk in the way that our brains form memories and how we look back at an experience.

Okay. This is my favorite insight about the brain. When I learn this in college, I thought I need to be a cognitive scientist. Okay, it's called the peak end rule. When we look back at an experience, we don't give every moment of that experience equal weight in our memories.

We overvalue the peak of the experience positive or negative just the most emotionally potent moment that we went through. And then we assign a lot of weight to the end of the experience. Hence the peak end rule. Now, what does this mean in practice? I don't know.

It means we can't really control the peak. That's out of our control, right? If I'm looking at a different, like I've been in these difficult writing sessions. I definitely can't control how negative or positive and also when it happens. And if it's negative or positive, but what I can control is the end.

So here's what you do. You have this system. You tack on something. Joyful to the end of a working session. Or you make the end of a workout slightly less painful than otherwise when it been.

In order to remember the experience more favorably so that you're more likely to return to it.

“So after I do my 30 minutes of writing, guess what?”

I have my favorite candy. It's just like I have a little bowl sitting on my desk. I just eat a little coffee chew and I'm like, okay. It sounds so silly, but I swear to God Mel, it works because I think back. I'm like, oh, it wasn't so bad.

And you can do this like when you work out. And if let's say you don't like working out, you don't like how hard it is. And with a fun cooldown stretch thing that's more relaxing. Your brain will remember it more favorably. The peak end rule is something to keep in mind.

If you have something that you feel like I'm trying to do this in so hard, you can shape this end opportunistically to make it something you look back on more family. I love that. So Dr. Shankar, what do you want the person who's listening to know about what's possible for them?

If they change their relationship to their future to what's happening right now, and to the identity of who they think they are. Yeah. But who they could become. Yeah.

“I think you will astound yourself by the person that you can become on the other side of change.”

And I'm excited for you to go on this journey. I think your friend along the way is going to be curiosity. I think we have to be so curious about ourselves to even witness the progress we've made or to witness our own evolution. We have to study ourselves and to ask and interrogate. What are my beliefs?

How do I see myself? How do I see the world? Maybe these things aren't sacred and mutable truths. Maybe I can revisit them. Maybe there's a new version of me that can exist.

Who's better? And if you just know the right questions to ask and the right tools,

One of my favorite things that you said that I am never going to forget is that I don't have to worry about the future

“because I can stand in this moment and trust that the future version of me.”

Well, figure this all out that somehow it's going to make sense. And that I because I'm in this moment, I got to give myself a little bit more credit for how whatever it is that I'm going to go through is going to change me. Yeah. And then on your future self. You got to bet on your future self.

What a beautiful message. So thank you. Thank you so much. You're welcome. And I want to thank you.

Thank you for taking the time to listen to this.

There's so much change going on right now. I loved the frameworks. The frameworks were so helpful. I am so excited for you. I'm excited for the future you.

“And in case no one else tells you, I wanted to be sure to tell you that I love you and I believe in you.”

And I believe in your ability to create a better life. And everything that you learned today about how you navigate this moment. And how you believe in that future version of yourself and who you're going to become on the other side of what you're facing right now. That will help you create a better life. Period.

All right. I'll see you in the very next episode of Welcome You In, the moment you hit play.

These are the best versions of our lives playing out. I'm about to sneeze so bad. Go for it. Oh my lord. I just have like a little like thing to go up my nose.

So these are the versions of us that we are really, I'm sorry. Okay, let me try again. Okay, you're doing great. Are you not a ruminator?

No. Wow, that's amazing. So jelly. But I was so pissed. I was like, I'm not having it.

I pissed for you. How dare he try to engage me. That was like a life threatening dumb thing to say. Okay, but go ahead.

“I'm like, do we need our marriage to be strong right now?”

Let's not forget. We just lost his huge potential in our lives. I'm reading about mental spirals. I have a PhD in mental spirals because that is my personal specialty. Oh my god.

I've been driven crazy by my mental spirals. They killed it. I can't believe it was too early as the time to flew by. Yes. Of course.

I'm not surprised at all. I actually shocked. It wasn't three between the two of us. You were terrific. Oh, and one more thing.

I know this is not a blooper. This is the legal language. You know what the lawyers write and what I need to read to you. This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm just your friend.

I am not a licensed therapist. And this podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist or other qualified professional. Got it? Good.

I'll see you in the next episode.