Maya Shankar

I really had.

Because when I envision my life without a family, I imagine a grayscale life, like it lost all of its color.

And one of the very freeing exercises I'm engaging in in real time is to ask myself whether I should believe that or whether I should believe that, of course, I can live a happy, full life without having children.

Yeah.

And again, this is just a call to action for everyone to just ask themselves, what are the beliefs that I'm carrying in my life that are self-limiting in some way that a change in my life can inspire me to reevaluate with a new perspective?

So to summarize, right, what we've talked about before.

So how am I defining my self-identity?

Can I build a more robust, expansive identity that is more resilient in the face of change, that helps me prevent long-term feelings of denial and helps me figure out a path moving forward?

Another thing to think about is what is my belief system?

What are my values?

And we tend to also hold our values as sacred.

But as you'll see in many of the stories I share in the books, many of the people I interviewed actually,

change their value systems over time.

And by the way, one of my goals of this book too, was to get people to do these exercises, even if they're not in the throes of change, like don't wait for a bad thing to happen.

I want them to get ahead of it so that you can learn from my mistakes and not actually have to go through the hard part, but hopefully just get the returns, get the joyful parts.

The other thing people can think through is whenever life changes and

there's a concept in psychology called possible selves.

So we are constantly generating versions of ourselves in our minds, and they come in three buckets.

There are hoped for selves, which reflect our dreams and aspirations.

There are feared selves, which reflect our anxieties and worries.