In this chapter, Andrew Huberman introduces the Huberman Lab Podcast and his guest, Dr. Maya Shankar. They discuss their backgrounds and areas of expertise.

Introduction to the Podcast

Dr. Maya Shankar shares her journey from being a student at the Juilliard Conservatory of Music to becoming a cognitive scientist and senior advisor to the White House. She discusses the career-changing injury she experienced and how it forced her to reframe her life plans and identity.

Dr. Maya Shankar's Background and Career Change

Dr. Shankar and Andrew Huberman delve into the topic of identity, discussing how it influences goals and motivation. They explore the concept of identity foreclosure and the importance of aligning goals with one's true self. Practical tools for assessing goals and relating them to deeper feelings are also shared.

Exploring Identity and Goals

Dr. Shankar discusses the science of feelings and their role in guiding decision-making. She explores the limitations of relying solely on feelings as a compass and provides insights into how to make decisions that align with one's identity and goals.

The Science of Feelings and Decision-Making

Andrew Huberman thanks the sponsors of the podcast, Maui Nui Venison and 8Sleep, and provides information about their products. He highlights the importance of high-quality protein intake and optimal sleep for overall health and performance.

Sponsors and Nutritional Information

Dr. Shankar and Andrew Huberman discuss how identity is formed in childhood and adolescence. They explore the influence of observation, societal expectations, and the brain changes that occur during these developmental stages. The concept of essentialism and the importance of cultivating a growth mindset are also explored.

Exploring Identity Formation in Childhood and Adolescence

The speaker discusses how playing the violin was seen as a rebellious choice due to their family's background in science. They also explore the pressure to pursue a scientific career and the cautiousness of their parents towards their musical aspirations.

The Rebellious Choice of the Violin

The speaker's mother, who had been denied opportunities in her own youth, was determined to expose her children to various extracurricular activities. The speaker and their siblings were encouraged to pursue their passions, leading to their love for music and the violin.

Exposing Children to Opportunities

The speaker shares their experience of learning the violin, starting with their grandmother's instrument and their own passion for practicing. They discuss their unconventional learning methods, including learning by ear and having an inexperienced teacher, which allowed them to focus on the fun aspects of playing.

The Journey of Learning the Violin

The speaker emphasizes the importance of intrinsic motivation in pursuing a passion. They discuss a study on rewards and motivation, highlighting the need to cultivate a love for the process rather than focusing on external benchmarks. They share personal experiences of finding joy in their violin journey.

The Source of Intrinsic Motivation

The speaker shares stories of how their mother created opportunities for them, such as getting them into Juilliard through a chance encounter. They emphasize the importance of taking initiative, being curious, and embracing imaginative courage to pursue one's passions.

Creating Opportunities and Embracing Curiosity

The speaker discusses the devastating loss of their violin career due to a finger injury at the age of 15. They reflect on the impact of losing something that defined their identity and how they navigated through grief and loss. They also highlight the importance of finding new passions and embracing personal growth.

Loss and Identity Reconstruction

The speaker discusses the value of pop science books in making complex subjects accessible to a wider audience and praises the efforts of scientists and researchers who strive to educate and engage people from all sectors in the pursuit of knowledge.

The Value of Pop Science Books and Making Science Accessible

The speaker explores the concepts of curiosity, change, and self-discovery, emphasizing the importance of reducing the need for cognitive closure, embracing uncertainty, and seeking diverse perspectives to gain a deeper understanding of oneself and navigate life's transitions.

Curiosity, Change, and the Journey of Self-Discovery

The speaker delves into the challenges and rewards of embracing change, highlighting the need to explore different ways of grieving, the value of seeking feedback from others, and the importance of considering the impact one has on others in shaping self-identity.

The Challenges and Rewards of Change

The speaker discusses the importance of maintaining a flexible mindset and being open to critical feedback in various aspects of life, including work and personal relationships.

Open-Mindedness and Flexibility

The speaker explores the concept of using distancing techniques, such as thinking about problems from a third-person perspective, as a way to gain objectivity and reframe situations. They also discuss the benefits of seeking honest assessments from trusted friends.

Using Distancing Techniques for Self-Reflection

The speaker discusses the potential downsides of venting and how it can hinder self-reflection and personal growth. They also highlight the importance of expressing and receiving gratitude, as it positively impacts neural circuitry and neurochemistry.

The Pitfalls of Venting and the Power of Gratitude

The speaker delves into the factors that sustain motivation and the importance of goal framing. They discuss the impact of approach-oriented versus avoidance-oriented goals and how defining goals in terms of approach can enhance motivation and perseverance.

Motivation and Goal Setting

The speaker emphasizes the significance of agency in goal pursuit and the benefits of individuals setting their own goals. They discuss how having control over one's goals increases motivation, satisfaction, and productivity.

The Power of Agency in Goal Pursuit

The speaker explores the dangers of being surrounded by like-minded individuals and the influence of group affiliations on beliefs. They discuss the importance of understanding the role of group dynamics in order to effectively challenge and change others' beliefs.

Group Dynamics and Challenging Beliefs

In this chapter, the speaker discusses the significance of empathy and understanding others' perspectives. They explore different types of empathy and how it can be cultivated. Additionally, they address the middle problem in goal pursuit and provide strategies to sustain motivation, including shortening the time duration of goals and using temptation bundling.

The Importance of Empathy and Overcoming the Middle Problem

In this final chapter, the host expresses gratitude to the guest and emphasizes the enjoyable and insightful nature of their conversation. They express hope that the guest's work has been helpful to the listeners and express a desire to have future discussions. The host then provides instructions on how to support the podcast by subscribing, leaving reviews, and checking out the sponsors. They also mention the opportunity to access supplements discussed on previous episodes and sign up for the Neural Network newsletter. The chapter concludes with a reminder to follow the host on social media and a final thank you for the audience's interest in science.

Closing Remarks and Call to Action

In this episode, my guest is Maya Shankar, Ph.D., a cognitive scientist, former senior advisor to the White House and Chair of the White House Social and Behavioral Sciences Team. She is the creator and host of the podcast, A Slight Change of Plans. We discuss how our identities develop and change, how our beliefs and internal narratives shape our perception of self, and how to use structured introspection about our values to determine our goals. We discuss how to cope and grow through uncertain situations, especially those that force us to reexamine our roles and identity. Dr. Shankar shares her experience of redefining her identity after an early career-ending setback. She also explains numerous science-based strategies to effectively define goals, structure our goal pursuits and maintain consistent motivation. This episode provides a science-supported toolkit and roadmap to assess your identity and goals and positively transform in the face of change.
For the full show notes, visit hubermanlab.com.
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Timestamps
(00:00:00) Dr. Maya Shankar
(00:02:37) Sponsors: Maui Nui Venison & Eight Sleep
(00:05:15) Identity Foreclosure, Identity Paralysis, Throughlines
(00:12:10) Identity & Adolescence; “Essence” & Shame
(00:16:58) Delight & Awe
(00:23:00) Delight & Possibilities for Self
(00:29:28) Playing Violin, Childhood
(00:34:54) Sponsor: AG1
(00:35:58) Intrinsic Motivation; Juilliard & Courage
(00:45:43) Competitive Environments; Curiosity & Growth
(00:53:46) Re-Creating of Self
(01:00:51) Pop-Science, Science Accessibility
(01:05:25) Sponsor: InsideTracker
(01:06:32) Passions & Curiosity
(01:13:20) Change, Cognitive Closure, End-of-History Illusion
(01:22:29) Self-Awareness & Critical Feedback
(01:30:48) Tools: Flexible Mindset; Reframing & Venting; Gratitude
(01:40:13) Tool: Framing Goals
(01:47:13) Tool: Agency in Goal Pursuit
(01:52:25) Tool: Like-Minded People & Goal Pursuit; Challenging Beliefs
(02:01:27) Cultivating Open-Mindedness & Empathy
(02:08:15) Building Self Narratives: Empathy, Burnout
(02:13:56) Tools: Goal Setting
(02:19:54) Tool: “Middle Problem”, Maintaining Motivation
(02:24:55) Tool: Aversion & Memory, Peak-End Rule
(02:31:41) Zero-Cost Support, YouTube Feedback, Spotify & Apple Reviews, Sponsors, Momentous, Neural Network Newsletter, Social Media
Title Card Photo Credit: Mike Blabac
Disclaimer

Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast, where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Huberman, and I'm a professor of neurobiology and ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine.

Maya Shankar is a cognitive scientist who did her undergraduate training at Yale University, her PhD thesis at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and a postdoctoral fellowship also in cognitive science at Stanford University.

Shankar also served as a senior advisor to the White House, and she founded and served as the chair of the White House Behavioral Science Team.

Shankar is also the host of her own podcast entitled A Slight Change of Plans.

Shankar herself is no stranger to having to make major changes to one's life plans.

As you'll learn today, prior to all of those incredible accomplishments that Dr.

Shankar has achieved, she was a student at the Juilliard Conservatory of Music, preparing her life to become a professional concert violinist.

But as you'll also soon learn, she then experienced a career devastating injury, forcing herself to have to reframe everything about her life plans and her own identity.

And that's really what we talk about today.

Shankar's prior and current identities, but of course, your identity.

We pose a number of questions geared toward getting you to ask, who am I really?

Do my goals align with who I am and what I want?

Shankar shares with us the research on identity, goals, motivation, and plans, as well as many practical tools to answer those key questions that guide us down either the correct or incorrect trajectories in life.

She shares with us, for instance, how to assess on paper goals of the sort that you would see on a CV.

So which school, which job, which salary, which spouse, et cetera, et cetera.

And how to relate those to the deeper feelings that relate to one's ability to continually pursue a given goal, knowing that it's the right goal for us.

We also talk about the science of feelings, what they can and cannot tell us, and when they should or should not serve as a compass for guiding our everyday and longer term decisions.

By the end of today's episode, you will realize that Dr.

Shankar is essentially handing you a science supported roadmap for how to determine and assess your identity and goals and how 1 influences the other.

That is how your identity influences your goals and how your goals influences your identity in becoming the person that you want to be.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford.

It is however, part of my desire and effort to bring 0 cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public.

In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.

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I have a lot of questions about identity, about goals and motivation, and about change in general.

And I'd like to divide it into 2 segments.

And we'll get into your story in, I hope, a bit or more of detail.

But when we're younger, we tend to ask questions about ourselves, but also about the world around us.

We want to learn what our parents do for a living, what the workers on the street are doing that for, et cetera.

How much of our early identity do you think is formed by observation of what we are doing versus observation and labels of the people that are around us and closest to us?

I think a lot of it is based on what we see around us and what we see is deemed successful and society privileges.

And there's a concept called identity foreclosure where actually when you're young, right, it's not just that you're observing what your parents are doing or what your peer group is doing, they impose their own structures on you.

And so what that can do is it can really limit your mindset in terms of what it is that you want to achieve and what it is that you're capable of achieving.

And so oftentimes when people experience identity foreclosure, they have to take a lot of active steps to overcome whatever biases or limitations they experienced as a young person, given what they were projected to do or believe, right?

So identity, you know, it can be about what you do.

It can also be about what you believe in the world, right?

And so a lot of those belief systems are also passed on.

You inherit belief systems from the people that surround you when you're young.

And if there's 1 thing that I've learned, it's that we tend to put a huge premium on what it is that we do.

We tend to define ourselves by what we do.

And you can see this in the questions we ask young children.

We never say, who do you want to be when you grow up?

What kind of person do you want to be when you grow up?

And the consequence of that kind of mindset is that we end up anchoring our identities very firmly to what it is that we do.

And I certainly, you know, you were alluding to my personal story, right?

I started playing the violin when I was a little kid, 6 years old, became absolutely obsessed.

And for the large part of my childhood, I was first and foremost a violinist.

I mean, if I had met you, I'd be like, hey, Andrew, I'm a violinist.

And then the second up would be, I'm Maya.

That's how tethered my identity was to being a violinist.

And then fast forward to when I'm a teenager, you know, I have these huge dreams of going pro and becoming, you know, yeah, just like a, hopefully a professional violinist for the rest of my life.

And then I tear a tendon in my hand, my dreams end overnight.

And suddenly there's this profound loss of identity.

Because what I hadn't realized is that in losing the violin, sure, I was losing the ability to play the instrument, but I was actually losing a huge part of who I was.

And that was so destabilizing and so disorienting for me because when you define yourself by the what, then as soon as the what goes away, you're like, oh my gosh, who the hell am I, right?

And what I experienced at the time is known in cognitive science as identity paralysis.

Maybe you felt this way during various transitions in your life, but basically who you are and what you're about is suddenly called into question and you end up feeling really stuck, right?

You don't see, you don't have the courage to imagine what a future could look like.

And I certainly fell prey to identity paralysis and it took me a long time to kind of figure out what my path would look like moving forward.

But I learned a really valuable lesson from that very formative experience I had with change about how it is that I should define myself.

And for what it's worth, I don't think our desire as humans to have identities is going anywhere.

We're not gonna be able to dispose of identities and we shouldn't because our self-identities bring us so much meaning and purpose in our lives, right?

These things are actually really helpful and motivating.

So we don't want to do away with identities altogether.

But what we can be more particular about is what we anchor our identities to.

And I have learned in my adult life to anchor my identity to why I do the things I do rather than what I do.

And I found this to be a much more durable, reliable relationship.

So to make this concrete, let's think about the violin.

But when I stripped away all the superficial features of the violin, what I really, really loved and was so drawn to as a young child, was the emotional connection that I could form through my music.

So that might have been with my orchestra mates, my chamber musician friends, playing solo and performing in front of an audience.

And ideally, we all feel something new that we haven't felt before.

I mean, it's kind of an intoxicating feeling when you're little to have the ability to inspire new feelings in people, right?

And when I realized that human connection was at the heart of what it is that drives me as a person, right?

Like what lights me up every single day is a desire to connect with others, to understand other people, to understand their psychology, to understand how their minds work.

Then when the violin was taken away from me, even in terms of narrative I tell myself about my life, I could still find that same core underlying feature elsewhere.

I found it as an academic, as a cognitive scientist who studies the science of connection and emotion.

I've seen that connection play out in the work that I did in public policy when I was at the White House.

Obviously, with my podcast, a slight change of plans, you're forming these intimate connections with people every day.

And so even though it feels in my life like I've done such disparate things, right?

There actually is a powerful through line that connects all of them.

And that is my desire to connect emotionally.

And so what I would recommend to people who are listening, especially when they're in the throes of change and they're feeling destabilized by that threat to identity, that loss of identity, is to try to figure out what their through line is, right?

Like what are the underlying features of the things that you used to do that you absolutely loved?

And can you find the expression of that elsewhere?

The first 1 relates back to childhood identities and how we often can project onto children what they are likely to become.

You observe a child playing with trucks in the sandbox and we say, oh, you know, they're going to become a contractor.

We tend to project roles that are fairly high up within occupation hierarchy, right?

We sort of, like any parents, you know, you wish for the best possible life for your kids.

But I can see the perils of doing that if then the kid starts to think, well, that's what I'm bound to become because it is restrictive.

I also am fascinated by the fact that when we are adolescents and teens, there's a tendency to ask questions about identity, like who am I?

I mean, I don't know many 40-year-olds that say who am I at, you know, at one's core, one's essence.

And we might change careers, change relationships, change geographies, you know, all sorts of things.

But there must be something going on in the brain in those adolescent and teen years That forces this question of self of you know who am I and?

Teenagers are notorious for trying on different Uniforms different friend groups different behaviors as a way to sort that out.

Sometimes in ways that support them and sometimes in ways that act as pitfalls.

So I'm curious about what's known about how we develop our own identity from the inside out as well as from the outside in.

And it's also something I'm very curious about.

I mean, we know from neuroscience research that there are significant changes that the brain undergoes during puberty and other periods of adolescence.

And the primary change that we see is a desire for independence.

And so 1 reason why we see teenagers grappling with this question of who I am is that they're actually breaking from these structures that they grew up around, the imposed structures, The identity foreclosure that they might have experienced and are starting to figure out for the first time or wanting to ask the question for the first time, who do I want to be?

What do I want to do outside of the systems that I've grown up in?

And I think this is 1 of the primary reasons why we find that during teenage years, this sort of question is asked more commonly.

I think that 1 challenge that we can face, because you said this 1 word that really caught my attention, which was, what's my essence?

And 1 of the things I studied as a cognitive scientist is the psychology of what's called essentialism.

So our underlying belief that there are essential qualities to people that are immutable.

there's lots of studies with young children and adults showing that we really believe that people do have these essences, right?

And unclear what that even means from a metaphysical sense.

But I think that the challenge in believing that we have essences is that it leads us to believe that there are these truly immutable states about ourselves that we're incapable of changing.

And I think this can give rise to feelings of shame, for example.

Shame is not the feeling, oh, I did something bad.

It's not that I lost at something, I failed at something.

And so the problem when we try to figure out the essence piece is that it doesn't give you the kind of malleable way of thinking that actually there might not be something that's so defining about you that you're incapable of changing.

As humans, maybe all we are are collections of behaviors and thoughts, right?

And there's nothing more to it than that.

And I find that way of thinking a bit more freeing when it comes to who we are, because I think it allows for, I think it allows us to cultivate more of a growth mindset.

I think it prevents us from engaging in these very harmful self narratives that a lot of people tend to have about themselves.

I mean, probably a lot of people listening to your podcast are self-critical.

We listen to this because we want to improve.

You know, I'm a fan of your show because I want to be better and I want to improve.

But that also is often accompanied by a lot of self-berating and questioning of self, right?

And so, yeah, I think I've just tried to have a slightly more capacious understanding of who I am and also recognizing that there might not really be these essential features that are immutable.

I don't know if you resonate with this notion of like the essence, like the desire to feel that we have essences.

Yeah, I used the word essence without thinking too carefully about exactly what I meant.

But what I'm trying to say when I said essence is, you know, as a child, I did certain things and I enjoyed some of them, didn't enjoy others, and I really disliked others.

A very famous neuroscientist who's at Caltech named Marcus Meister.

People literally refer to him as the great Marcus Meister once said, and I totally subscribe to the fact that neural circuits in the brain basically divide our sensory experience along the dimensions of yum, yuck, and meh.

Because the circuits ultimately have to drive either forward movement toward more, right?

Apetitive behaviors in nerd speak, or aversive, leaning out, I don't want that, or just kind of a neutral response.

A yum-yuck and meh seems to be the trinary response.

And there is this component of childhood, I think, where we are foraging naturally, using our senses, experiencing yum yucks and mehs, and hearing yum yucks and mehs from our parents, that's good, that's bad, that's whatever, it's neutral.

But at some point, I certainly have had the experience and I've observed others, I think, having the experience of feeling something that's on a different dimension entirely, which is this notion of delight, which is that it sort of fills your body with a sense of so much yum, that it gives you energy to do so much more of it in a way that is almost on a different plane.

And I'm not trying to be spiritual or metaphysical about it, but it feels distinctly different.

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Dr. Maya Shankar: How to Shape Your Identity & Goals