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

One helpful thought experiment you can use when you feel like maybe you're spending a little bit too much time around people who are just reinforcing whatever viewpoints you have is to ask how your belief system and your ideas and your opinions of things might have been different had you been born during a different time period and in a different family or cultural landscape.

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. 'What do you want to be when you grow up?' 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?' We say, 'What do you want to be?'

We hate uncertainty. We will go to irrational lengths to avoid uncertainty ... People are far more stressed when they're told they have a 50% chance of getting an electric shock than when they're told they have a 100% chance of getting an electric shock.

When we reduce our need for cognitive closure, when we come a little bit more open to the unbidden, to mystery, more open to awe-inspiring experiences, we can experience huge boosts in well-being, and we can become a lot more resilient in the face of change.

When other people are setting our goals, setting our targets, for us, it undermines a really valuable source of motivation, which is being in the driver's seat.

When we reflect back on how much we enjoyed or didn't enjoy an experience, we don't give equal weight to every moment ... Instead, we tend to give more weight to what's called the peak of the experience... and the end of the experience.

There's a fascinating science of awe and all the benefits that it can confer to our well-being, but it can also serve as an entry point to helping to define our identities in new places, and I just love that.

When we anticipate what a change will be like in the future, we tend to imagine how our present-day selves will respond to that future change ... What we forget is that the big changes in our lives can change us in pretty profound ways.

When we view our problems in ourselves from a third-person perspective, neural activity in areas associated with hostility and aggression actually decrease.

What we tend to find is that when you frame something in an approach orientation way, when you succeed, that success is met with feelings of pride and accomplishment ... When you frame something in terms of avoidance, success is met with feelings of calm and relief.

Probably the greatest gift that being a cognitive scientist has given me... is empathy toward people. It is the greatest driver of human empathy to learn how our minds work.

People who rate really high on the emotional empathy scale tend to experience burnout at higher rates ... Essentially what you're doing when you feel emotional empathy is you're carrying the burden of the other person's pain, so you can easily imagine how that can deplete you.

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

When I re-anchor myself to what Rick Rubin referred to as the source and identify the characteristics of music or other pursuits that really energizes me, it feels like I'm actually insulated from a lot of the external noise, and I bring a lot more clarity and focus to the work that I do every day.

I think when someone loses the ability to have a passion, they're seeking exactly the same sensory experience, exactly the same high that they experienced the first time around; and I think that's a really high bar, and sometimes it's more of an apples and oranges type situation.

I need to constantly be auditing myself through my changed experience to figure out how I have changed—because when we experience change, it doesn't happen in a vacuum.

Maybe we ought to think about empathy languages in the same way we think about love languages. People have different ways of expressing their empathy, and we ought to value them equally.

The third thing is to make sure that you're setting goals when you're in the same psychological and physiological state as the one you'll be in when you're actually pursuing the goal.

What is temptation bundling? You're pairing an unpleasant activity—like folding laundry, doing dishes, taking out the trash—with an immediately rewarding enjoyable activity.

How do we develop a more complete and richer understanding of self? I think it's actually about surrounding yourself with a diverse set of people—people that you wouldn't naturally gravitate towards.

I've learned the most about myself, I've learned the most about my weaknesses—and sometimes my strengths—from talking with someone that I vehemently disagree with.