Dr. Maya Shankar

And it's meant to be empowering.

And I know there's so much ancient wisdom baked into this mantra.

But when I was in the throes of my grief and frustration and feeling of helplessness, it just registered as a platitude.

I was like, okay, that sounds great.

But how the heck do I actually do that?

How do I change my reaction?

I felt like there was no manual for me to figure out how to actually think and feel differently about the changes that I was going through.

And so...

A big reason that I actually wrote The Other Side of Change was to give people that manual.

I wanted to give them a companion, which was part stories that are so exceptional in their nature, but are also universal in terms of the lesson they teach us, paired with science.

So they actually had concrete actions they could take to start to renew their relationship with their change.

That is so beautifully put and just touches my heart that that was one of your takeaways from the book, because that's exactly right.

In many ways, I've written it for people who are not just in the throes of change, but are anticipating a potential future and are wondering how change might intersect with all those dreams that they have for themselves or people who are looking to the past to figure out how they might potentially revisit a change that maybe they don't have a particularly good relationship with.

And I will tell you that what you've said is 100% correct.

So I think the earliest identity that I ever attached myself to, for whatever reason, right, growing up in an Indian American family, I sort of absorbed implicit messages that as a woman, becoming a mom was the end destination, right?

That is where I was going to find my value and my worth.

And that is what it meant to live a full life.

And so when I was not achieving that, right, when we were consistently not actually building a family, I did feel like this part of my future was taken away.

And there's this concept in psychology called possible selves.

Possible selves come in three different categories.