Dr. Maya Shankar

You can also read fiction.

Fiction is seen as a quote, identity laboratory in which you can try on new versions of yourself and experiment with different ways of being and making decisions in this really psychologically safe space.

So that's really cool.

You can also remind yourself that

Even though life has taken a turn, you still have all the same skills and talents and abilities that you had before the change.

And so the relevant question to ask yourself is, who else can this person be?

This person who has had all of these life experiences and has accrued all of this wisdom and knowledge.

But it's not enough to simply say,

brainstorm who you can be, you actually have to put in the hard work to do it.

And so following the story of Christine Ha, I actually unpack the science of motivation and I share tactical strategies people can use to actually achieve their long-term goals and to realize those future possible selves.

So as you mentioned, I really see change as this incredible moment, this rare moment to unlock strengths and perspectives and values within ourselves that we didn't know were possible.

So one helpful way to talk about this is when a really terrible thing happens to us, it can feel like a personal apocalypse.

You can feel like the world we knew and grew to become comfortable with no longer exists.

And what's interesting about the word apocalypse is that it's actually derived from the Greek word apocalypsis.

And apocalypsis means revelation.

And that etymology is so instructive because what it says is that, yes, change can upend us, but it can also reveal things to us.

I think most of us, as we operate in our lives, think we have a fairly good understanding of who we are.

But the reality is that that image we have in our minds of ourselves is based on a limited set of data points that we happen to collect over our lives based on the somewhat arbitrary set of experiences we had.

Now, when we're thrust into a totally new environment and have to face all the demands and stresses and constraints of that new environment, it can often reveal things to us, for example, about the beliefs we are carrying or about the abilities that we have or about the perspectives we have.

And all of that gives us the opportunity to think about our relationship with each of those entities and to see them anew.