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 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 8 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 5.

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The mindbodygreen Podcast · 633: The psychology of uncertainty, growth & hope | Maya Shankar, Ph.D. · 18 Jan 2026 podcast

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.

And then there are our expected selves, which reflect just what we think is most likely to happen.

So yes, I would love to be a singer-songwriter like Taylor Swift, but most likely in five years, I will still be a cognitive neuroscientist.

Okay, great.

So what happens when a big change occurs is that often like a big unexpected negative change is that all these hoped for cells disappear from sight and a lot of feared cells start to emerge, right?

Based on expectations we have, stereotypes, our own experiences that we've had.

So we might believe that there are

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