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.

Trend

recordings per month · last 12 months

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

Appearances

newest first · ▶ plays the moment

The Genius Life · 542: The Science of Navigating Change, Grief, and Uncertainty | Maya Shankar, PhD · 14 Jan 2026 podcast

And those outlets might change over time, but it was so clarifying for him to figure out what that why was.

Yeah.

I've been learning that a lot recently.

Yeah.

So I mean, one, we're mired in uncertainty.

We are dealing again with these identity threats.

And I think another thing that happens is we experience what's known as a focusing illusion.

we're in the throes of this wildly unexpected event and it's accompanied by a range of different emotions.

Let's say grief, frustration, in my case, envy sometimes, right?

Why did everyone else get this thing and I'm not able to get it, right?

And what can happen is we can become so laser focused on having achieved that thing or achieving that thing that we

are so zoomed out, we lose perspective on our lives as a whole.

So another way to actually combat the identity threat is to engage in what's called a self-affirmation exercise.

So a self-affirmation exercise simply involves spending five or 10 minutes writing down all the identities that matter to you in your life that critically are not threatened by the change that you're going through, or the one maybe you're afraid you might go through, or maybe historically that you went through.

So this is for people who are in that liminal space of change.

And you have to make sure that you're not focusing on the thing that's threatened because the whole goal of the exercise is to remind yourself that you have this very multifaceted, rich identity.

So for example, if you're in a really tough spot in your relationship, you might focus on your spiritual life.

If you're struggling with job security, you might affirm that you have a really strong, tight-knit community in your hometown, right?

And I actually saw the power of this firsthand.

Showing 1041–1060 of 1,518 · page 53 of 76