Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shankar. Welcome to Radio Headspace and to Monday morning. I'll be guest

hosting Radio Headspace this week and I'm so happy to be here. I'm a cognitive scientist

and the host of the podcast, A Slight Change of Plans, which Apple chose as the best show

of the year. It's all about who we are and who we become in the face of a big change.

And this week we're going to dive deep into how we deal with change. Because even though

it's a core feature of what it means to be human, navigating change can be very difficult.

Today I'm going to talk about the illusion of control. When life gets in the way of our

best laid plans, we don't have to see it as a defeat. Instead, we can tap into our resilience

and pivot gracefully. One of the reasons that I started the show

A Slight Change of Plans is because I'm fearful of change. It came from a very personal desire

to try to crack the nut on change and to feel more confident in the face of unexpected

change. It's easier to pretend I have control than to accept the reality that things can

shift in a moment and your world can turn totally upside down. That's a really devastating

reality to have to come to terms with. And so I think that's why we sometimes dilute

ourselves into believing that we're more in the driver's seat than we actually are.

What I found so fascinating about the Slight Change of Plans and hearing stories from

my guests is that on the surface, their stories seem so different. What unifies them are

the psychological strategies that they use to navigate these changes. What I've seen

time to time again is we're actually really bad cognitive forecasters. We're about

it predicting what exactly will make us happy in the long run. And so approaching our best

laid plans with a profound amount of humility can actually go a long way. You might find

that when you didn't feel you had control or when things took a left turn rather than

...