Maya Shankar

That bond can't be broken.

And when I've been going through a hard experience, I've heard the mantra, the well-known mantra, you can't change what happens to you, but you can change your reaction to what happens.

And it is meant to be empowering, but in my moments of grief and frustration and anxiety,

it registered as a platitude i was like okay that sounds great but how the heck am i supposed to actually think and feel differently about the big changes in my life right how is that actually going to unfold and it's not like there's some sort of switch in my brain that i can flip on that will suddenly make me feel

more peaceful or more hopeful or filled with a greater sense of possibility about the road ahead.

And so my goal with this book actually was to give people a roadmap.

We tend to fixate on the risks that are very salient to us, right?

Like the known risks in our lives.

We know that we have this health condition.

We know that our job is gonna come to an end, right?

But we forget that there's so many unknown risks that are just lingering all around us all the time.

In the same way that there's background radiation and then an X-ray is just a marginal amount of radiation on top of that, there's so much background risk that remains silent to us on any given day unless we think really hard about it.

And we somehow have come to live comfortably in that environment, right?

Every time you leave your house and you hit the road, you're gonna be facing all sorts of risks.

And so I also try to remind people, and I'm trying to remind myself as well, just because a risk in your head feels very prominent, remember that actually,

The well of risk was already quite full just by virtue of living on planet Earth, and you're just adding a couple more pennies into that well.

You're not going from having had no risk to a risk-filled state.

Yeah, and I also want to make clear that while the specifics of your change might be different from the past, right, when you feel like, oh, wow, what I'm going through is truly unprecedented, you should remember that the same strategies and techniques that served you well last time could very well serve you well this time.

I have found that there is so much more commonality across people's change stories that don't look at all alike on their surface than I would have appreciated before.

When someone's going through something, we tend to point them towards other people who are going through exactly that same thing.