we can especially at the outside 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 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 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 how does how we frame our goals affect our ability to accomplish our goals so one example of this is that [Music] I want to start with the almost unbelievable story of how you got into juliard when I was 6 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 VI audition and she knew that the
juliard 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 juliard and you can see what it looks like and it'll just be a fun experience and so we we walk over to juliard 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 we walked in there and my mom you know 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 juliard 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 to Colorado and then we studied with him and it was really only because of that training that I was able to pass the juli audition in the fall and so I'm really I'm grateful for my mom's courage I'm also grateful for the happen stance
of it all but since then I have been the type of person that sends many a cold email and 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 what a crazy story what get you interested in studying and learning about identity 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 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 more and 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 um 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 of 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 often times 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 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 spoonfed certain identity labels or roles that we feel we should play and
and part of the process of growing up is examining those labels for ourselves and trying them on for a 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 forclosure 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 in community uh 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 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 and kind of looked under the surface I
realized 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 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 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 firstperson 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 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 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 and identities that feel more malleable that don't feel fixed in in ways that are
problematic as we navigate the many years of life that that we have uh we're willing to revisit and we're will to reexamine and we're willing to see in a more flexible way feels like it 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 absolutely it's so well said and it's very much a narrative we tell ourselves and you you know to your point it can be extremely limiting because
when we in some ways like tight cast 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 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 kind of just written yourself off that part really
resonates with me and I think that's an excellent point you sort of hit on a little bit the 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 then it can cause sort of an identity crisis can that also be a plus so I guess the sort of meta question is is how can we use our
identity to help us accomplish our goals there are absolutely pros and pluses to anchoring ourselves to what we do it also gives us a 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 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 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 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 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 sufficiently motivating right and so that's where you might call upon the the stricter label which is just what you do I like that because it's sort of like you can turn identity into whatever you
want to help you accomplish your goals as long as it's not delusional so I really don't I'm not okay with people telling them STS stories that are simply advantageous or promote psychological well-being 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 the spaces and just make sure that whatever our self assessment is is at least in part rooted in in evidence that we're collecting about ourselves along the way 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 wait say a little bit more about that I'm I'm curious you can just be like you know I'm a nonsmoker instead of identifying
as a smoker and so you can sort of take the negative what are the identities that I don't want yes and then how do I avoid those 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 right I think when you add the the not label you can feel as fiercely about the things that you don't do right even on a character front like I don't lie we can feel as much conviction in those non-b behaviors as we do in the more proactive
behaviors 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 had 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 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 conviction 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 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 ex virus is real what you're really asking is do I belong to xgroup or not because if I don't believe that now I might get ejected from the group right there's 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 well one thing I 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 and one of those situations is when somebody treads on our identity that that's our version of territorial
we're not walking around peeing on you know 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 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 the 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 that supplies 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 uh 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 Leon Water Crisis right so this this was an awful awful situation where lead and 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 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 disentis 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 and Flynn is they organized a canvasing effort where residents of the community heads of churches heads of YMCAs people that you're seeing at the
grocery store or 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 was trusted rather than quote the highest authority figure and I think it's 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 it's certainly not the case 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 uh you know another pandemic or an emergency after we've eroded this trust and and how do we reestablish trust in our institutions I do think that we have to think at all levels right so we can think at the the highest level like you're saying and you
know how can policy makers and 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 as you were saying that it sort of
relates to 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 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 canvasing 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 um
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 we're 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 abhorent 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 they're 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 um 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 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 and our and our minds are shap 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 an actual 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 leave 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 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 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 acknowledge 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 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 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 six 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 400 p.m. when we're laying on the couch watching TV we think to ourselves okay I'm GNA get up at 400 a.m. every morning and I'm GNA work out at 400 a.m. 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 4:00 a.m. 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 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 I love that thank you uh I want to switch gears just a little bit to something you said when you were in the wedding host that is fascinating to 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 a story play and what role
do facts play when it comes to changing people's minds it's a very particular claim which is that when you are mythbusting 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 of this existing belief but what they find in research is that very quickly after you say read the 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 um 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 you try to go on the road with the 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 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 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 that it makes a lot of sense to do the do not goal another way that we can change the way that we frame the goals so that we're more likely to act on it is to think about who is setting the goals 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 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 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 4:00 a.m. when it's like yeah I don't know 300 p.m. 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 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 going to feel the pull of the chocolate cake no semantic shift is going to 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 the canonical example of this is cafes where they try to encourage healthy eating they put all the junk food at the bottom and there are no Pake containers and then they put the healthy food like
the fruits and vegetables and and healthy snacks on full display um 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 AEL at fishbach she calls it the middle problem so basically what happens is we have a huge burst of motivation at the outside of a goal we all can resonate with this right January 1 the lines to the gym are long and then like January 20th all of a sudden they start
to wne 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 o 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 iell 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 the best version of this thing that I have my site set on instead you set weekl 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 in the climate 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 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 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 um so this is from my friend Katie Milkman at the University of Pennsylvania she 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 but it'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 reading myself to like my favorite candy um and the key part like the re the 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 GameChanger 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 that's a really important Nuance thank you very much Maya for this conversation this has been fing I want to end on a
personal question which is how would you define success 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 I'm obviously very attuned to people's inner life and I think just dispositionally I'm a a fairly open person who's often willing to 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 um 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 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 it's like okay let me try to understand where where you're coming from that that to me is being a successful person that was beautiful thank you thank you so much