Maya Shankar
speaker
1,518 appearances
8 recordings
7 series
first heard Oct 2025
last heard 5 Jul
Maya Shankar’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 5.
Appearances
And we, by virtue of having a ticket to planet Earth, have been doing this change rodeo for as long as we've been alive by brute force.
Exactly like you said, we have no choice.
And so our psychologies have adapted to find really excellent coping mechanisms and ways to process this new landscape that we're operating in
in ways that ultimately can be very beneficial, right?
All the people that I interviewed, despite having been through really harrowing experiences, are deeply grateful for the person they became on the other side of their experience.
They're not necessarily grateful for what they had to go through, which of course makes a lot of sense, right?
Why would you ever invite illness or loss into your life?
But they do feel that they ended up better and more enlightened on the other side.
And there's something so inspiring in that message.
First of all, I'm one of these people, right?
So one of the reasons that as a cognitive scientist, I'm so interested in studying change is that I myself am afraid of change.
I'm going through something right now and I found myself doing some of that catastrophizing.
And I have to bring myself back to a couple of basic principles.
The first is that
research shows we are very bad cognitive forecasters what this means is that we're terrible at predicting how we are going to think and feel about certain events in our lives and that's actually reassuring in moments like this because when we do catastrophize when we think there's no way i can possibly get through this
Research shows people are often far more resilient than they think on the other side.
It's true that the good stuff is often not as good as you think it's going to be, but the bad stuff is often not as bad as you think it's going to be.
More importantly, one of the biggest reasons why we get this forecasting with these predictions about how we'll respond incorrect is that we ourselves are changing alongside the change experience.
So we tend to think of ourselves as these static entities, right?
current day maya with all of her preferences and values and abilities navigating the full arc of the change but the reality is that when a big change happens to us it also leads to lasting change within us and we
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