Maya Shankar

She inadvertently caused harm to someone else.

And because she believes the world is fair, because she believes things happen for a reason, she goes down this really terrible self-sabotaging path where she believes that she must be evil inside if she were to will this bad outcome into the world.

And that shows kind of the flip side of trying to find too much meaning in things because actually her way out of her closing herself off to the world and thinking she was a danger to everyone around her came from loosening her belief in a just world and recognizing that actually sometimes things happen just because.

There's no deeper meaning in those things.

And there's no why it happened.

And it's just about how you carve your path moving forward.

And so that was a really fascinating inquiry because, yeah, you might think like just believing in fundamental fairness is overall a good way to live, right?

In some ways it is, but it can backfire.

It's hard to capture all of that in one answer because obviously that's the premise of the entire book.

So there's so many strategies.

I mean, there's dozens of strategies that I outline in The Other Side of Change.

But what I will do is share a couple of strategies that people can use in the immediate aftermath of change to...

help reduce certain things that can hold us back.

Like for example, feelings of denial or those ruminative spirals we get into when we are feeling a lot of anxiety.

So one thing that was really interesting that I discovered in my research is that

Denial actually has benefits in the short term.

And I hadn't known that before writing this book.

But there's research showing that, you know, what is denial?

Well, as grief researchers have said, it is nature's way of...

giving us only as much as we can handle in any given moment, right?