There's people who are dealing with chronic illnesses, there's people who are dealing with

divorce, people who are dealing with a betrayal of some kind, people who are dealing with

changing their minds about something that they felt total conviction in. And in all of those cases,

you see this same delightful expression, which is that they deep in their understanding of who

they were as a result of going through the change. Welcome to the Psychology Podcast.

Today we welcome Maya Shankara to the show. Maya is a cognitive scientist and the crater

and host of the podcast, A Slight Change of Plans, which was awarded as the best show of 2021

by Apple and received an Ambi Award from the Podcast Academy in 2022. Maya has a postdoctoral

fellowship in cognitive neuroscience from Stanford and a PhD in cognitive psychology from Oxford.

She's a graduate of the Julliard School of Music's pre-college program where she was a private

violin student of Itsak Proman. In this episode, I talked to Maya about change. Humans have a

desire to attach roles to identities, but when events disrupt that, we may feel unsure of who we are.

Having gone through huge shifts herself, Maya shares with us ways in which we can reconfigure our

identities and pivot to pursue our goals in different ways. Change can be disorienting, but it can

also afford us a deeper understanding of ourselves and afford a lot of potential for growth. Maya

also believes that growth is an opportunity to re-examine our long-held beliefs and values.

We also touch on the topics of cognitive science, mindfulness, all, and hope. I really enjoyed

this chat. Maya and I go way back to Yale with grad school days for me and she was an undergraduate.

She was always a bright light with so much potential and now she is really realizing her potential.

I couldn't be more proud of her and more excited to share with you this chat with Maya Shankara.

Maya Shankara is so unbelievably amazing having you on the psychology podcast.

It's great to be here, Scott. We go way back. We really do. We're talking decades, decades,

...