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- [00:00]
Maya Shankar
We can, especially at the outset of goal setting, be wildly ambitious about what it is that we want to accomplish. So rather than setting a year long goal, which we might feel an instinct to do instead, by the same token, if we see ourselves through these more negative labels, then we might also act in ways that align with that and needlessly hold ourselves back. It's a mechanism by which you can get people to open their minds up without them feeling like they're threatening the entire moral compass that they live by. So that we don't have to employ willpower, we should really focus on the way that we design our lives and the choice architecture of our lives. What we're talking about here are aspirational identities, right? And we don't want to get in our own way.
- [00:40]
Shane Parrish
I want to switch gears just a little bit to something you said when you were in the White House that has fascinated me, which is how does how we frame our goals affect our ability to accomplish our goals?
- [00:51]
Maya Shankar
So one example of this is that.
- [01:00]
Shane Parrish
Welcome to the Knowledge Project, a podcast about mastering the best of what other people have already figured out so you can apply their insights to your life. I'm your host, Shane Parish. A quick favor to ask before we start. Most people listening to this show right now haven't hit the Follow button. If you can hit that big follow button right now on Apple or Spotify, we'd appreciate it. If you'd like access to the podcast before everyone else, my thoughts and reflections at the end of each episode, including all the takeaways I had. Member only episodes, Hand edited transcripts or you just want to support the show you love? Join at FS Blog Membership. Check out the show notes for a link. Today my guest is Maya Shankar, PhD. She's a brilliant cognitive scientist who worked in the White House Behavioral Science Group. She's the host of the podcast called A Slight Change of Plans. I really wanted to talk to Maya, but the idea of identity. What is it? The limitations and advantages of choosing them, how they affect our ability to accomplish our goals, how our identity affects our ability to learn from others, and how it impacts our politics. Should we keep our identity small or should we expand it? These are questions that we talk about. You'll walk away from this episode with a clear understanding of when your identity helps you, where it may be limiting you, and with practical tips on using it to set and accomplish your goals. You'll also learn that slight differences in how we frame those goals can make a huge difference in whether we accomplish them. It's time to Listen and learn.
- [02:42]
Maya Shankar
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- [02:54]
Shane Parrish
And it's now available on Sourdough, the Smash Jack.
- [02:58]
Maya Shankar
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- [03:16]
Shane Parrish
Thing Mint Mobile Unlimited Premium Wireless. How many get 30. 30 bid to get 30. Get 20. 2020. Better get 20.
- [03:21]
Maya Shankar
20.
- [03:22]
Shane Parrish
I better get 15.
- [03:22]
Maya Shankar
15, 15, 15.
- [03:23]
Shane Parrish
Just 15 bucks a month.
- [03:25]
Maya Shankar
So give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch $45 upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three month plan only Taxes and fees extra speeds lower above 40 gigabytes. Edtail My dad works in B2B marketing. He came by my school for career day and said he was a big roas man. Then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend. My friends still laugh at me to this day.
- [03:50]
Shane Parrish
Not everyone gets B2B, but with LinkedIn you'll be able to reach people who do. Get a $100 credit on your next ad campaign, go to LinkedIn.com campaigntoclaimyourcredit. That's LinkedIn.com campaign. Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn the place to be To Be I want to start with the almost unbelievable story of how you got into Juilliard.
- [04:12]
Maya Shankar
When I was six years old, I started playing the violin. And within a few years, I think my parents realized that my dreams and ambitions were surpassing whatever connections they had in the classical music world. My dad's a physicist. My mom helps students get green cards. This was really not in their domain. And so one day, I remember my mom and I were in New York for a different violin audition. And she knew that the Juilliard School of Music in New York was what I had my sight set on. Even though, by the way, Shane, I had absolutely no chance of getting it at all at that time. That was my dream. And so we're in New York and my mom just looked at me and said, hey, why don't we just stop by Juilliard and you can see what it looks like and it'll just be a fun experience. And so we walk over to Juilliard and then as we're passing by the front door, my mom looked at me kind of mischievously and said, why don't we just go in? And I remember thinking that she was totally nuts. I mean, what did that even mean? We did not have an invite, right? I was not a student there. But she said, let's just go in there. What's the worst thing that can happen? And so we walked in there, and my mom let the security guards know that her daughter dreamed of coming here and could we just check it out? And we ended up running into a fellow student and her mom. And my mom was chatting with them and expressing that I was really interested in playing the violin. And within just a few minutes, my mom had asked them if they were willing to introduce me to their violin teacher. Then fast forward, they were really gracious and said yes. And then 20 minutes after that, I was auditioning on the spot for this Juilliard teacher. Just looking back, I mean, yeah, it was a pretty wild story of just waltzing in there, but it was such a formative lesson for me about the importance of trying to be entrepreneurial and trying to just be a bit of a go getter when opportunities are not just presented to you. And in this particular case, it carried a lot of importance, because when I did play for the teacher that day, he was pretty forthcoming about the fact that I did not have any chance of getting in at my current ability level. But he believed in me. He thought I had potential and that with the proper training, I might have a shot. And so he invited me to study at his summer music program that year for just, you know, five or so weeks. And so my mom and I packed up our bags and we went to Colorado. And then we studied with him. And it was really only because of that training that I was able to pass the Juilliard audition in the fall. And so I'm really. I'm grateful for my mom's courage. I'm also grateful for the happenstance of it all. But since then, I have been the type of person that sends many a cold email and walks through physical doors and metaphorical doors, because whatever fear I had around it was kind of beaten out of me when I was a kid.
- [06:54]
Shane Parrish
What a crazy story. What got you interested in studying and learning about identity?
- [07:00]
Maya Shankar
Long story short, with the violin, I was very optimistic about potentially becoming a concert violinist. But then when I was 15, a sudden hand injury kind of ended my dreams overnight, and I was forced to reckon with the fact that I was no longer going to be able to do this thing that, since the time I was six, had essentially defined my life. And in that moment, what was so shocking to me in being told, you know, you can no longer play the violin, is that I knew that there was going to be a grief associated with not being able to play the violin. But I did not expect to mourn the loss of myself at this more fundamental level, because I hadn't realized. I mean, I was 15 at the time. Shane. Right. So I had not put all the pieces together. I had not realized consciously just how tethered my identity was to the violin. And so in losing it kind of had this oh, crap moment, like, oh my gosh, this is a much bigger deal than I even thought. And so that was the kind of lived part of my experience that led me to first think about identity. And then I ended up becoming a cognitive scientist. So in losing the violin, I had to figure out, okay, what comes next. And I read a bunch of books and I became fascinated by the human mind and all it was capable of and all there was to marvel at. And in my role as a cognitive scientist, where I study the human mind, identity just comes up over and over and over again, right? And it can become a central feature of our lives and how we see ourselves and how we process change. And especially as I moved my interest towards this topic of change, right, in my podcast, A Slight Change of Plans, I I interview people who have gone through just harrowing tales of change at times. And what you realize along the way is that they're not just telling you this external story of change, they're talking to you about something internal that shifted. And oftentimes it's the loss of an identity unexpectedly, and they're trying to figure out who they can be in the face of this change. And so fairly quickly after starting my show, I realized, wow, you know, I don't even know if this is a show about change. This is really a show fundamentally about identity. There's a concept in cognitive psychology called identity foreclosure, and it refers to the idea that we can prematurely commit to an identity before having fully explored all other ways that we can be or the things that we want to be in this life. And this often happens in adolescence. So we see things modeled for us through our environment, through parents, through coaches, through teachers, through our community, right? We're often just spoon fed certain identity labels or roles that we feel we should play. And part of the process of growing up is examining those labels for ourselves and trying them on for fit and figuring out which ones feel good and which ones don't and which ones we want to reject and which ones we want to embrace. But what can happen is that even later in life, we can have this kind of identity foreclosure. We can have what I would call change induced identity foreclosure, where you go through an experience and it just naturally cuts off opportunities for you, and then you have to figure out what comes next. When I was 15, I certainly fell prey to this kind of foreclosure because I had built my entire self around the violin without exploring who else I could be. And so then when I lost it, I felt extremely disoriented. There is a potentially more robust and sustainable way to define yourself. So I don't think we're going to get rid of the human desire to identify with things in general, to have strong identities. They're a huge source of inspiration and focus, and they can give us feelings of belonging and community. They can give us drive and motivation. Right? If I define myself as a violinist, every morning when I wake up, I know what I want to do and I'm willing to commit to hours and hours of practice. The challenge becomes, though, when you anchor yourself to something that is precarious in some way. And that's what I found with the violin. What I strive to do, because it's very much a works in progress, but I hope this resonates for your listeners, is to attach my sense of identity and worth not to what I do, but to why I do it. So this has been an exercise in trying to understand, okay, Maya, you fell in love with the violin and you enjoyed it for so many reasons. What was it about the violin that was so intoxicating for you? What were the features that made you light up? And when I stripped away the superficial features of the violin and kind of looked under the surface, I realize that there were many traits and features of playing music that really resonated with me, but in ways that transcended the violin. So I loved emotionally connecting with people through music. I loved the idea of honing a craft at slowly chipping away and getting better at something and witnessing that kind of progress. I loved having this kind of single minded determination and these goals that I was chasing. It was possible for me to find those same features in other pursuits, right? If I just looked hard enough so I could still find my love of human connection in other places. And in fact, I have, right? And being a cognitive scientist and now in having my podcast, A Slight Change of Plans, it's all about forging deep emotional connections with people, right? And I can witness progress in my role as an interviewer or in my role as a scientist. And so I would urge people to ask themselves, what is it that sits, you know, at the root of my passions in life? And can I find my meaning and worth and place my identity in that? Such that when life throws me a big change of plans, right, a massive curveball, I can mourn that loss, sure. But I don't feel completely disoriented because there's still so much of me that persists and that I can find expressions of in other mediums.
- [12:42]
Shane Parrish
As you're saying that it's like we can identify our identity with a skill. We can do it with a habit. We can do it with something larger, like Democrat or Republican. We can do it with something still larger, like American or Canadian or European, and we can do it from what to why, which sort of makes me wonder, what is identity?
- [13:05]
Maya Shankar
It's a deeply complicated philosophical question that people have been pondering for basically as long as we've been around. The way that I approach it actually is about expanding people's sense of self. Because I think what happens, especially as we get older, is that we lock into an understanding of who we are, who we think we are. And it's often not totally accurate and it's certainly not comprehensive. I mean, our sense of identity is formulated based on the quite random events that have occurred in our lives and the various ways in which we've been pressure tested or pushed or challenged. And we didn't choose that path, right, to reveal to us the maximum number of data points about ourselves. We were just living life and going through it and seeing what happened. And so I think because we have a first person perspective on our minds, we sometimes believe that we have a very good understanding of who we are. And then what happens in the face of a change is it reveals to us all that remained hidden from view, right? All that existed that maybe didn't have a reason to be expressed before then, or the various ways in which we're more resilient, or the greater number of skills that we have, or the coping mechanisms that we have at our disposal. And when I think about identity, I think we benefit from having more expansive identities and identities that feel more malleable, that don't feel fixed in ways that are problematic as we navigate the many years of life that we have. We're willing to revisit and we're willing to reexamine and we're willing to see in a more flexible way.
- [14:38]
Shane Parrish
Feels like it can be limiting and empowering. It's Almost like a thermos, like it reinforces whatever you put into it. It doesn't have a judgment about good or bad. But if we identify as like a non technical person or something, it's almost as if we absolve ourselves of the responsibility to learn and grow. So in a sense, you know, as you were saying, that it's almost like our identity is the story we tell ourselves.
- [15:03]
Maya Shankar
Absolutely. It's so well said and it's very much a narrative we tell ourselves. And you know, to your point, it can be extremely limiting because when we in some ways, like typecast ourselves, let's say, as being non technical or as being not as social as other people, or not as strong mentally or physically, whatever it is, that can really hinder our progress. Because there is research on identity priming which says that we do act in ways that are consistent with our perceived identity or the identity we aspire to have. Right? So when we see ourselves as a voter, we're more likely to vote. When we see ourselves as being, you know, eco friendly, we're more likely to recycle. By the same token, if we see ourselves through these more negative labels, then we might also act in ways that align with that and needlessly hold ourselves back when it comes to making progress. And I really, really love your point and it resonates with me so much about kind of accountability. Like when you self identify as, say, non technical, you're off the hook a bit, right? You don't have to try as much because you've just already decided that you fall into that bucket and so you don't actually reach whatever growth potential you have in that area because you've kind of just written yourself off. That part really resonates with me. And I think that's an excellent point.
- [16:16]
Shane Parrish
You sort of hit on a little bit the risks of wrapping yourself with an instrument or I think that transfers to something like a profession. And if we're no longer able to do it, then it can cause sort of an identity crisis. Can that also be a plus? So I guess the sort of meta question is how can we use our identity to help us accomplish our goals?
- [16:38]
Maya Shankar
There are absolutely pros and pluses to anchoring ourselves to what we do. It also gives us a clear sense of a future that we can imagine. Right? The future might look kind of blurry and amorphous. And when you identify as, you know, having a certain profession, you can at least project what you think the next five years can look like. And so there's definitely benefits to anchoring yourself in identity. And that's why I don't want us to do away with that concept altogether. What I'm proposing is having multifaceted identities. So you have multiple layers of abstraction when it comes to where you derive meaning and how you define yourself. And so at one level you can absolutely say, okay, I'm a lawyer, I'm a doctor, a stay at home mom, I'm a tech worker. And then you can have deeper layers of identity that can be your safe landing. You know, almost like a parachute when, when life throws you a change that you can fall back on so that when that thing maybe is threatened for whatever reason, I mean, maybe you get into an accident and you don't have the same abilities that you had before. You get a chronic illness that prevents you from doing those things. You don't feel that your entire self worth has been stripped away in the process. That is destabilizing in a way that I think is counterproductive. And I'm always trying to be a pragmatist about things and figure out, okay, what are the ways that we can try to show as much resilience as possible in these moments. And so I do think that if you can try to build identity layers, if you will, and depending on the moment in your life that you're engaging in and the challenges that you're being thrown, you can almost opportunistically choose that level of abstraction. Right? You can choose the layer at which you want to self identify. It's possible that in the moment, at your job, it's not that helpful to think of yourself as, oh, I'm the type of person who loves connecting with people because you have a really annoying work assignment that's due in five hours and that's not going to be so sufficiently motivating. Right. And so that's where you might call upon the stricter label, which is just what you do.
- [18:32]
Shane Parrish
I like that because it's sort of like you can turn identity into whatever you want to help you accomplish your.
- [18:37]
Maya Shankar
Goals, as long as it's not delusional. So I really don't. I'm not okay with people telling themselves stories that are simply advantageous or promote psychological wellbeing. Right? They have to be rooted in reality. They have to be to some degree vetted by the people in your life. If you identify as like an extremely compassionate person, but then the people around you don't feel that way about you, it's worth potentially revisiting and updating. So I really do feel like we need to allow in feedback in those spaces and just make sure that whatever our self assessment is is at least in part rooted in evidence that we're collecting about ourselves along the way.
- [19:13]
Shane Parrish
One of my favorite ways to solve problems is ask myself what I don't want. And I'm wondering if we can sort of do that with identity. And I was thinking about this and I sort of think as identity as the things that we don't do more than the things that we do. What are the benefits and sort of cons of thinking about it that way?
- [19:30]
Maya Shankar
Wait, say a little bit more about that. I'm, I'm curious.
- [19:33]
Shane Parrish
You can just be like, you know, I'm a non smoker instead of identifying as a smoker. And so you can sort of take the negative. What are the identities that I don't want?
- [19:41]
Maya Shankar
Yes.
- [19:42]
Shane Parrish
And then how do I avoid those?
- [19:43]
Maya Shankar
I mean, research has shown that can be as effective. And there's some research showing that when people are in the process of quitting and let's say they're offered a cigarette, there is a difference in terms of express behavior. If you frame your current state as being someone who is in the process of quitting smoking versus being someone who doesn't smoke.
- [20:02]
Shane Parrish
Right.
- [20:02]
Maya Shankar
I think when you add the not label, you can feel as fiercely about the things that you don't do. Right. Even on the character front, like I don't lie, we can feel as much conviction in those non behaviors as we do in the more proactive behaviors.
- [20:17]
Shane Parrish
I want to get into sort of a larger discussion about identity and how it affects us. We talked earlier about sort of like skills and habits and Democrat, Republican, you can think of religious or non religious as sort of groups of people. When we identify with something, it seems to put us in like a weird place. So if I identify as Christian, I don't need to be an expert to express an opinion on that. And I sort of got this idea from Paul Graham. And the same is true for politics. Right. If I identify as a group, say Democrats, I don't need to be an expert to have an opinion on the economy. I just need strong convictions. These are unique areas where there's no objective, wrong or right, only subjective questions. And since we can't be proven wrong, we tend to feel like every opinion is equally valid. The question then becomes how do we have discussions about something that we've made part of our identity and what does this mean for us individually and as a country?
- [21:16]
Maya Shankar
Facts and science and evidence don't surface as much as they should in some of our debates. And it's because when we look at how it is that people form their attitudes and beliefs about the world, they're not simply basing it on what the data says. They're basing it on their tribal membership, on their identity membership. So if you identify with a particular political party or particular community group, there's this feeling of allegiance that can supersede our rational minds, right? So we hear leaders saying certain things, and we implicitly buy into what they're saying because they lead this group that we feel convictions about. One downside of the group identity label is that it can make us less scrupulous and it can make us less critically minded in ways that we otherwise would be. Right. If we were reasoning through every situation for ourselves, we would probably take a closer eye to certain conclusions that are drawn. One thing that's so important for us as humans is to have the humility to change our minds and to have the humility to update our point of view and our opinions about things. And if you feel too strong tribal membership, it can impede you from updating your point of view. Because in that moment, you're not just asking yourself, do I believe in that X virus is real? What you're really asking is, do I belong to X group or not? Because if I don't believe that now, I might get ejected from the group, right? It feels like there's so much on the line every time you are open to the idea of changing your mind about something in the face of new information. And I think that's the part of the culture we have to work to change as much as possible, which is there has to be, quote, like wiggle room within these identity spaces, right? You should still be allowed to belong in a group even if you differ from people in some of their opinions. We can have these purity complexes around group membership. Otherwise, it really does hold us back from arriving at better conclusions and from being wiser and dismissing our pride in the moment in favor of actually trying to arrive at the right conclusion or the right solution. And so I feel very, very strongly that element of our human psychology and also the way that we reinforce it through some of these social factors is a really big challenge that I would. I would love to see us work through.
- [23:30]
Shane Parrish
Well, one thing I've thought about is that we're sort of animals, right? And so one of the tendencies we share with animals is that we're territorial. And when animals are territorial, they react without reasoning. And humans, we're lucky we're capable of reasoning in between acting. But there's certain situations where we tend not to reason in. One of those situations is when somebody treads on our identity. That's our version of territorial. We're not walking around peeing on street lamps or something to mark our territory. Our territory is almost how we see ourselves. And it's really fascinating to me because one of the quirks with this is that we instantly tend to reject other people's ideas, even if they're correct, because it belongs to somebody that we don't like or some other group than we're in. What can we do for ourselves to open our mind and actually think in those moments instead of just responding without reasoning?
- [24:28]
Maya Shankar
Yeah, I mean, I think you're articulating this, this massive challenge. And there's another concept in psychology that I think is a really useful aid here, and it's more on how we communicate messages. So there's this concept called moral reframing. What we find is that grounding our arguments in moral terms that affirm rather than threaten the moral views of those we disagree with is far more effective at helping them change their viewpoints. So, for example, there was this one study showing, look, if you want to convince conservatives to care more about the environment, you might appeal to values that, you know, conservatives tend to hold. So, for example, patriotism, right? Like you might say, being pro environmental allows us to protect and preserve the American way of life. Right? This is. This is the language that they use in this study. It is patriotic to conserve this beautiful country's natural resources. So it's still aligned with facts, but you're grounding it in whatever values that group has. And what that allows for is it allows for people to both stay consistent and true to their underlying beliefs about the world and the things they hold close to them, while also being willing to entertain a new way of thinking. And I think that's such a powerful instrument because it's a mechanism by which you can get people to open their minds up without them feeling like they're threatening the entire moral compass that they live by. I mean, I use the example of the environment and conservatives as applies across the board, all people in groups and communities. I think also the power of the messenger, you know, it plays a big role. So I have some personal experience with this. When I was working in the Obama White House, we were eager to help residents of Flint in the face of the lead in water crisis, right? So this was an awful, awful situation where lead in water was poisoning generations of people. One of the things we did is we designed these fact sheets about water safety. And there was a question of who should be the messenger of these fact sheets. And I think instinctively we thought, oh, it should be the Environmental Protection Agency, because the. The acronym is epa, because the EPA is kind of the leading authority when it comes to all these matters. And so we should have it come from a government body. But then when you think about it a bit more from the perspective of the psychology of the people who are struggling, right? You realize, wait a second, their local government has just lied to them, you know, for years, and they've experienced decades of disenfranchisement and systemic racism. They don't have a lot of reason to believe in these authority figures and to trust the words that are coming from these authority figures. And so I remember what the local EPA did in Flint is they organized a canvassing effort where residents of the community, heads of churches, heads of YMCAs, people that you're seeing at the grocery store or at church on Sundays, they're knocking on doors and they're saying, look, I can vouch for the content of these fact sheets, like, I, as your friend, as your neighbor, as your community member. And that's a situation where it was much more effective for the message to come from someone who is trusted rather than quote the highest authority figure. And I think it's a humbling lesson, as we think through public policy and who should convey messages, that we ought to rethink this idea that people at the top of government are always going to be the best communicators on a message? I mean, that's certainly not the case.
- [27:43]
Shane Parrish
That's fascinating because, like, as you were saying that I'm like, one of the problems today is the erosion of trust in government institutions. This was sort of like a micro example of that, but a macro example. How do we do that as a nation on a bigger scale, if there's, you know, another pandemic or an emergency after we've eroded this trust? And how do we reestablish trust in our institutions?
- [28:09]
Maya Shankar
I do think that we have to think at all levels, right? So we can think at the highest level, like you're saying. And, you know, how can policymakers and social architects figure this out so that we see this at a more scaled level? But then there are also the individual minds. We're changing in our everyday life. And I don't want people to give up on that because that matters too. And we kind of want to. We want to initiate activity at both the bottom and the top.
- [28:32]
Shane Parrish
As you were saying, that it sort of relates to identity, Right. Because now my identity is. I don't trust government institutions. And once you have that, it's like, how do we change that? So it comes back to really the fundamental question of, like, how do we change our identity when we want to or for the positive.
- [28:46]
Maya Shankar
Yeah. And I think, you know what that example in Flint shows is that even something as simple as the messenger, I mean, when your door is knocked on and it's someone that you see at church on Sundays and they're telling you that they believe in a document that was created by the government, that is a step forward, right. You are getting that person, at least in the context of this fact sheet, believe in something that the federal government has shared with you. I don't want to discount that as also being meaningful progress. So one thing I wanted to share in the context of everyday conversations we have with people, right? So that proverbial, like, Thanksgiving dinner where you're sitting down and there's an uncle there and you disagree with them, and in the past you've just kind of given up and been like, this is not worth it. There is research in psychology which shows how we can make more progress in those situations. And this is known in the research as motivational interviewing or deep canvassing. And they use this in the context of, you know, political campaigns and trying to see if people can make progress on convincing people to change their minds on important political or social issues. So there's a couple key features of motivational interviewing that are good to consider here. So one is the same way that I talked in the context of moral reframing is you don't want to undermine the other person's fundamental sense of humanity because that's just going to. That's going to close the door immediately, Right. If you're starting a conversation with me, Shane, and you're like, I think you're a terrible person, chances are not going to get very far, right? So you want to try as hard as you possibly can to show as much genuine curiosity for the person's views. You might find them abhorrent, but you want to understand how it is that they arrived at those views. How did they get from point A to point B and try to at least express curiosity for the journey. Oh, maybe they were born into a family where their grandparents all thought this thing, or maybe they were bullied in school and so they felt that the only way they could really belong was joining X or Y community group, whatever it is, Right. You want to just show curiosity, and that will at least invite more of a conversation rather than just simply a confrontation. The other thing and this relates to this curiosity point is you want to increase your question to statement ratio. So one thing that we can often do in these contexts is simply just tell people what we think they should think, right? We just come out the gate being like, well, this is how it actually is, and this is what the data shows. And it feels authoritative in a way that's often just not conducive to actual mindset change. And so instead, you want to increase the number of questions that you're asking and try to keep statements more to a minimum. And then when the person shares their point of view back with you again, you might find it to be totally at odds with your life philosophy or the way you think about the world. It can be really validating, helpful to restate in your own words what they've just said to you so that you can at least validate that they've been heard. Again, you disagree with them, but you're saying, I'm listening to you, I'm understanding what you're saying, and I'm going to rephrase what I just heard you say. And that can open people's minds, right? The technique at that point that's really helpful is you can ask them a pretty powerful question, which is, hey, so you believe this thing. What evidence do you think you would need in order to change your mind about that thing? And what I love about that question is that it just presupposes that they ought to be willing to change their mind in the face of new evidence. Right? You're kind of like putting them on the hook for at least acknowledging that there could be something in theory that could change their minds. Now, you might be talking to someone who is particularly resolute and stubborn in their views, and they could say, literally no evidence could change my mind. That's the point at which you stop the conversation and you maybe focus on the cornbread and you get back to your Thanksgiving dinner. But for most people, they might say, if I learned that these three things were true, I might be willing to change my mind. And that is progress. Like that even just the identification of what those things are is very, very meaningful. And I think you can engage with them on those things. You can also ask them how they believe they arrived at their views, right? So that they can actually see that there was maybe some randomness in how they arrived at their views. Like, how did you get from point A to point B? Oh, actually, it turns out that I was just really over anchoring on what my friend told me at school that one day or, you know, what my colleague said about this article that they read and like, they can find holes in their own arguments when they have to trace that path and realize it wasn't the result of like, you know, really clear, disciplined, rational, scientific thinking. But like everyone, myself included, we arrive at our views for a variety of reasons in our. And our minds are shaped for all sorts of reasons that aren't always totally sound. And we should also, of course, use these same tactics on ourselves. Right. So we tend to believe going into these conversations that our only job is to change their minds, when in actuality we might be a little blind to the holes in our logic and we might benefit from having a slightly more open mind going in because it's actually okay to lead the conversation in which both people have changed their point of view just a little bit. Right. That would be potentially an excellent outcome for the conversation.
- [33:51]
Shane Parrish
Sounds like a step forward. Let's say I have a goal to run a marathon next year and I'm not currently a runner. How can I use identity as a means to accomplish that goal?
- [34:02]
Maya Shankar
There is some research showing that you do want to frame your goals in terms of do behaviors versus don't behaviors. So you had kind of acknowledged this before. It's much more easy to measure progress when we're engaging in proactive decisions or proactive behaviors rather than the abstinence of things. You say, okay, I want to be a runner. I'm going to start by running half a mile every day. That's going to be easier to track than, I'm not going to sit on my couch for as long. Right. It's like, that's a really hard thing to measure and also just doesn't feel as inspiring or motivating when it comes to identity. I actually think that we talked a lot about wiggle room in identity and thinking of our identities as slightly more malleable and trying not to have a purity complex about it. And I think that applies to goal setting as well. So we can, especially at the outset of goal setting, be wildly ambitious about what it is that we want to accomplish. And we can have that purity complex where if we don't abide by the rules, let's say of our first week or our second week, we just fall off the wagon because we think, okay, well, we already kind of screwed this up, so what's the point? And that can be really counterproductive. And so there is research showing that when we introduce what are known as emergency reserves into our goal setting, basically get out of jail free cards into the process of goal setting, we're much more likely to stay the course and to reach those goals. So, for example, let's say I want to run 3k or whatever, 5k in however many weeks you actually build in 6 days along the way where you don't actually run for whatever reason you got sick, you have to drop your kids off at school, you don't feel like it, that's okay too. But you're basically bridging an empathy gap that exists between you and your future self. When you're building in that emergency reserve, you're acknowledging that real life is going to happen and that when I don't run that one day it is not a threat to this future or present identity of runner. It is a expected and pseudo welcome part of the process because it's a more sustainable way to achieve your goals. So one mistake we can make is on a Sunday at 4pm when we're laying on the couch watching TV, we think to ourselves, okay, I'm going to get up at 4am every morning and I'm going to work out at 4am and when push comes to shove, of course we're at a very different state in that moment and we often have a really hard time sticking to those goals. And that's another example of an empathy gap between our present selves and our future selves, which can be very problematic. And so if you are up at 4am and you are at the gym working out, that's a reasonable moment to say, I'm going to try to keep doing this for however many days I can manage. Right. But I think that's another way that you can set goals in ways that really don't feel like you're threatening your aspirational. Because what we're talking about here are aspirational identities. Right. And we don't want to get in our own way at the time where we're actually setting the goals such that we make less progress than we could. And so we can take these factors into account at the outset.
- [36:57]
Shane Parrish
I love that. Thank you. I want to switch gears just a little bit to something you said when you were in the White House that is fascinated me, which is you said debunking a myth often does little more than reinforce it. So if that's true, what can we do instead? What role does a story play and what role do facts play when it comes to changing people's minds?
- [37:19]
Maya Shankar
It's a very particular Claim, which is that when you are myth busting, you tend to say what is not true. Right? So you say it is not the case that blah. Right. You try to correct the record. Right. Disabuse people of this existing belief. But what they find in research is that very quickly after you say read the public service announcement or you listen to the commercial, people forget whether there was a not or not in that sentence. And so what happens is you've actually just strengthened the neural connection between, okay, let's say in this case we're trying to convince people not to boil their water because that won't get rid of lead. It'll actually make the problem worse. So we say like you know, is not true that boiling your water is going to lead to better water safety. Okay, they might forget the knot. And so now I've just in my brain strengthened the relationship between boiling water and the term water safety. And so that's where we have to be careful. And so what research has found is that we should actually just make more affirmative statements that are correct. So in order to have safe water, you should use a water filter and you should install it in this particular way. And you should, you know, you try to go on the road with the things people should do. And that way you're only strengthening the neural connection between the two relevant things that do actually fit together and will actually lead to better outcomes.
- [38:42]
Shane Parrish
I never thought of it that way. I like that you highlighted this, but I want to come back to it, which is you said, here's how we can use identity to help us accomplish our goal. How does how we frame our goals affect our ability to accomplish our goals?
- [38:57]
Maya Shankar
You want to recognize when you're defining goals as what we call approach goals versus avoidant goals because they can have a different impact on our motivation. So, for example, I want to eat healthier foods versus the avoidant version of that would be I want to avoid unhealthy foods. Right. And we do know that do goals are more motivating, they promote endurance, they're met with pride. Do not goals are more effective in certain cases where we're trying to inspire urgency. Maybe there's like a health thing that you really shouldn't do. And it makes a lot of sense to do the do not goal. Another way that we can change the way that we frame the goal so that we're more likely to act on it is to think about who is setting the goal. So it's really interesting. Like humans just love being in the driver's seat. Like hands on the steering wheel, we like owning our goals and our outcomes. And often in these contexts, right, we are working with a boss who's giving us a directive or working with a coach in the gym who's giving us a directive. But the degree to which we can introduce some degree of personal agency in that process so that we feel like we're the ones setting the goals can be super helpful. Now we're in the real world, right? It doesn't mean, like, your boss is going to be like, hey, you decide what you do today, but maybe there's choices, right? Maybe there's, like, three priorities, and you feel like you're in the driver's seat when it comes to choosing the exact priority that you focus on. Or maybe at the gym, it's like, okay, it's a lower body day, but you have options. We do find that people are definitely better at achieving them when we are the ones who feel like we set our own targets. And that's because we're really tapping into intrinsic motivation versus just extrinsic motivation. Right? Fear of judgment or punishment from. From some higher up.
- [40:41]
Shane Parrish
I want to understand the do behaviors a little bit better. When you use the example of, like, I want to eat healthier food. A couple things came to mind. One was, when we're creating that goal, we have a lot of willpower.
- [40:53]
Maya Shankar
Go ahead.
- [40:54]
Shane Parrish
And in the moment where we choose to opt out of eating healthy food, we probably don't have a lot of willpower. So that relates to sort of what you were saying, like, don't set a goal to go to the gym at 4:00am when it's like, yeah, I don't know, 3:00pm in the afternoon. And it strikes me that eventually everybody loses the battle with willpower. So where I'm going with this is, is it almost better to set rules? My rule is, I only eat healthy food. And then all of a sudden, you've changed it from a willpower question into, I just need to follow this rule that I've set for myself.
- [41:28]
Maya Shankar
I think both are going to tax willpower. I think even that subtle framing of, like, I don't eat unhealthy foods, like, if you're near the chocolate cake, you're still gonna feel the pull of the chocolate cake. No semantic shift is gonna be that powerful to eliminate the willpower issues. I know Angela Duckworth focuses a lot on this so that we don't have to employ willpower. We should really focus on the way that we design our lives and the choice architecture of our lives. What this Means in practice is to the extent that you can control your environment, you just make things unavailable to you and you make other things really readily accessible and available to you. So the canonical example of this is cafes, where they try to encourage healthy eating. They put all the junk food at the bottom and they're in opaque containers. And then they put the healthy food, like the fruits and vegetables and, and healthy snacks on full display at eye level. So it's the things you're more likely to grab. And those little nudges are actually quite effective and they don't require as much willpower because you've just architected your environment accordingly. And so that's what I would recommend in situations like that. And then the other thing we know, Shane, about motivation is that we don't have stable amounts of motivation over the course of goal pursuit. This is some research by my friend Ayelet Fischbach. She calls it the middle problem. So basically what happens is we have a huge burst of motivation at the outset of a goal. We all can resonate with this, right? January 1st, the lines to the gym are long and then like January 20th, all of a sudden they start to wane, right? So we all enter goal pursuit with a lot of enthusiasm and excitement. And then we also find actually that towards the end of goal pursuit, as we're reaching the end, we experience monotonic increases in motivation. What's called the goal gradient effect, where as we get closer to the goal, we get even more motivated and excited about it. But there's a lull in the middle, so. So that's the problem, right? It's like, you see, oof, there's like a dip in the motivation. And I think we all have the lived experience of this, right? It's like, oh my gosh, I was so excited in the first three weeks of this thing and now I'm kind of losing steam. So what Ayelet recommends is to actually just make the middle periods of time as short as physically possible. So rather than setting a year long goal, which we might feel an instinct to do, because we want to set a really ambitious goal. And so we're like, let's make it a year long goal because then I can really achieve the best version of this thing that I have my sight set on, instead you set week long goals. So that way the middle period is not a multi month period, it's actually just a few days in the middle of the week, right? And you can get away with a day or two of not working very hard, right? And then climbing your way back out on, say, that final day of low motivation. And so I really like this idea of trying to, from a temporal perspective, kind of like bound your motivational cycles so that you can experience this dip in a more constrained space.
- [44:18]
Shane Parrish
It's almost like you're a marathoner and you hit a wall and you're sort of at, like, mile 10, and instead of focusing on the finish line, you focus on, how do I get around the next corner? And then you accomplish that goal, and then you focus on the next corner. So you shorten the distance between where you are and what you want to accomplish.
- [44:34]
Maya Shankar
Exactly. I want to share the one motivational technique that I use, like, every single day of my life. It's been the most transformative for me. So this is from my friend Katie Milkman at the University of Pennsylvania. She calls it temptation bundling. The idea is very simple, actually. But what you do is you pair a desirable task with an undesirable task. So something that you have to do, right? So let's say you have to unload the dishwasher, you have to fold laundry, you have to get some sort of work assignment done. You have to work out whatever the thing is that you have a little bit of dread towards is the undesirable task. That's the thing that needs to actually happen. And then you pair it with a desirable activity that offers you more of an immediate reward. Okay, so this might be okay. While I'm folding laundry, I listen to my favorite, you know, pop album that just came out. Or while I'm on the treadmill, I'm watching Netflix. Or while I am doing this really tough work assignment, I'm treating myself to, like, my favorite candy. And the key part, like, the only way in which this temptation bundling works is if you actively deny yourself that rewarding activity in all other domains of life so that it really feels special and it feels coupled with the undesirable activity. So I can't be watching Netflix all the time and then feel motivated to go on the treadmill to just watch more Netflix, right? I have to choose, say, a show where it's like, you can only watch the show when you're on the treadmill. You can only listen to this pop album when you're folding laundry. You can only eat this candy when you're working on writing your book, whatever the thing is, right? And I have found this to be such a game changer because you get really swept up in what happens with, for me, shitty reality TV shows. And I really want to know what happens. And so I do feel a pull to go back to doing the undesirable thing just because I'm so eager to see what happens in the plot line. And so that one has been really effective for me. But again, you have to. You do have to be very rule based here, which is that you can't indulge in that thing in other spaces.
- [46:35]
Shane Parrish
That's a really important nuance. Thank you very much, Maya, for this conversation. This has been fascinating. I want to end on a personal question, which is how would you define success?
- [46:44]
Maya Shankar
I think success for me is making people feel like they've been understood by me in some way. I think as a cognitive scientist, I'm obviously very attuned to people's inner life. And I think just dispositionally, I'm a fairly open person who's often willing to share a lot about my interior life with people. And I find it to be probably one of the most beautiful experiences in life where I have been vulnerable with someone or open with them, and they in turn share something with me that they were holding in or feeling uncomfortable about. And we have this moment, this kind of singular moment of connection when we're both willing to share those experiences with one another. And I just think that if we allowed more people to feel understood in the challenges that they were facing and just less in their own heads, kind of just like suffering in silence and torturing themselves, we would just all be so much happier. And I do think that kind of understanding and compassion is available to us. I mean, I think being a cognitive scientist is the greatest lesson in empathy, because when you understand why people are the way they are, it's really hard to like, really hate people. And I think that that feeling of being understood, again, that doesn't mean that you agree with people, but you at least offer an ear that's like, okay, let me try to understand where you're coming from. That, to me, is being a successful person.
- [48:10]
Shane Parrish
That was beautiful. Thank you.
- [48:12]
Maya Shankar
Thank you so much.
- [48:19]
Shane Parrish
Thanks for listening and learning with us. For a complete list of episodes, show notes, transcript scripts, and more, go to FS Blog, Podcast or just Google the Knowledge Project. Recently, I've started to record my reflections and thoughts about the interview. After the interview, I sit down, highlight the key moments that stood out for me. And I also talk about other connections to episodes and sort of what's got me pondering that I maybe haven't quite figured out. This is available to supporting members of the Knowledge Project. You can go to FS Blog membership, check out the show notes for a link and you can sign up today and My Reflections will just be available in your private podcast feed. You'll also skip all the ads at the front of the episode. The Frenum Street Blog is also where you can learn more about my new book, Clear Thinking Turning Ordinary Moments into Extraordinary Results. It's a transformative guide that hands you the tools to master your fate, sharpen your decision making, and set yourself up for unparalleled success. Learn more at FS Blog Clear until next time.