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

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TED Talks Daily · Why you fear the unknown — and what it can teach you | Maya Shankar, Simone Stolzoff · 5 Jul 2026 podcast

One of the reasons that I wanted to write The Other Side of Change is that in moments of inflection, at moments of inflection in my life, whether it was losing the violin or struggling to start a family with my husband and facing pregnancy losses with our surrogate and other disappointments and obstacles,

I would hear so often this popular refrain that while you can't change what happens to you, you can change your response to what happens.

You can change your reaction to what happens.

And it's meant to be empowering, Simone, but I felt frustrated when I would hear that.

I would almost bristle at that advice, like, okay, if it's so easy, why don't you do it?

You know what I mean?

How the heck am I supposed to get from point A to point B?

I don't actually know how to change my reaction.

And so in many ways, the other side of change was a response to this personal need I had, which is I'm convinced that it would be beneficial for me to have a different reaction to what I'm going through.

But I don't know what the science-based techniques are, what the right questions I'm supposed to ask myself are, or what wisdom I can glean from other people's stories.

So like, please give that to me.

And so that was sort of the goal of The Other Side of Change.

And I think one of the overarching messages of hope outside of the Change Survival Kit, which I give to each reader at the end of the book, right, which is a distillation of all those strategies, is to remind people that

When a big change happens to you, it also leads to lasting change within you.

We often forget that we are works in progress, that we are constantly changing ourselves.

And so when we're feeling really daunted at the outset of a change, like we can't possibly navigate what's up ahead,

We have to remind ourselves that we are constrained by our current abilities and values and perspectives and that we can undergo a huge transformation as a result of the big changes that happen in our lives.

And one reason...

I think, universal message I heard from the cast of characters that I interviewed for the for the other side of change is that while they weren't necessarily grateful for the changes they went through, right, they were very hard, like illness and loss and heartbreak.

They were deeply grateful for the person they became as a result of what they went through, you know, the new environment they were thrust into.

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