Dr Maya Shankar How To Shape Your Identity Goals

High-Level Overview

Andrew Huberman talks with cognitive scientist Dr. Maya Shankar, a former Juilliard violin student whose career ended at 15 with a hand injury, who went on to study cognitive science at Yale, Oxford and Stanford, founded the White House Social and Behavioral Sciences Team, and now hosts the podcast A Slight Change of Plans. The conversation moves from how identities form and how to rebuild one after loss, through awe, curiosity and the fear of change, to a practical, research-backed toolkit for framing goals, sustaining motivation through the dreaded middle, and remembering hard experiences in a way that brings you back.

The tone is warm, curious and often playful, as the two discover shared backgrounds (both have theoretical physicist fathers, and both learned music by ear) and trade personal stories. The discussion swings between Shankar's life story, cognitive science research, and concrete strategies listeners can apply to identity, relationships, disagreement and goals.

The Discussion Explores:

• Identity foreclosure, identity paralysis, and anchoring identity to why you do things rather than what you do
• Essentialism and shame, delight, awe, and seeing a place for yourself in something bigger
• Shankar's violin journey, intrinsic motivation, and her mother's lesson in imaginative courage
• Rebuilding after loss through curiosity, and the value of pop science
• Fear of uncertainty, cognitive closure, the end-of-history illusion and gathering honest feedback
• Changing minds, group identity, and the three kinds of empathy
• Goal framing, agency, slack, fresh starts, the middle problem, temptation bundling and the peak-end rule

Deep Dive into Main Ideas

Anchor Your Identity to Your Why

Shankar explains identity foreclosure: when we are young, the people around us impose their structures and beliefs, limiting what we think we can become. We also tend to define ourselves by what we do, as reflected in the question we ask children, "what do you want to be when you grow up," rather than who they want to be. She started violin at six and was a violinist first and Maya second. When she tore a tendon in her hand as a teenager, her dreams ended overnight and she experienced what cognitive scientists call identity paralysis: not knowing who she was or daring to imagine a future.

Her lesson is not to abandon identity, which brings meaning and purpose, but to be particular about what we anchor it to. She now anchors "my identity to why I do the things I do rather than what I do." Stripping away the violin's surface features, what she loved was emotional connection with other musicians and audiences. That through line reappeared in her cognitive science research on connection and emotion, her White House policy work and her podcast. Her advice for anyone destabilized by change is to identify the underlying features of what you loved and look for new expressions of them.

Essentialism, Shame, Awe and Seeing a Place for Yourself

Huberman asks why teens obsess over "who am I and what our essence is. Shankar explains that adolescence brings a drive for independence from imposed structures. She has studied essentialism, the belief that people have fixed, immutable essences, and warns it can fuel shame: Shame is the feeling I am bad," as opposed to having done something bad. Thinking of ourselves as more malleable collections of behaviors and thoughts supports a growth mindset and gentler self-talk, especially for the self-critical.

Huberman cites Caltech neuroscientist Markus Meister's idea that neural circuits sort experience into "yum, yuck, and meh, and describes delight as something on another plane. Shankar connects this to awe, drawing on Dacher Keltner's work: awe involves perceived vastness, whether physical, conceptual or temporal, and a need for accommodation, updating your mental model. She describes hearing Anne-Sophie Mutter's recording of the Beethoven Violin Concerto at 11 or 12 and feeling transported. Huberman notes that New York City awed him as a child, but neuroscience delighted him because he saw a place for himself in it, a role to act within rather than just observe; a trauma therapist friend of his says nouns are just very slow verbs. Shankar tells the story of Reginald Dwayne Betts, imprisoned at 16 for a carjacking, who found an anthology called The Black Poets in a prison library and said it gave me something to be." He went on to write prolifically, attend Yale Law School and win a MacArthur fellowship.

Intrinsic Motivation and Imaginative Courage

Shankar's mother, who had felt stifled growing up in India despite studying physics, exposed her four children to many activities. When Shankar found her grandmother's violin in the attic at six, she fell in love, and her parents never had to push her to practice. She learned by ear with an inexperienced first teacher, which hurt her technique but let her jump straight to the fun of playing pieces. Huberman connects this to the classic Bing Nursery School finding that rewarding kids for something they already enjoy undermines intrinsic motivation, and jokes that his own violin career ended because the neighbor's dogs howled.

She describes her mother walking her into Juilliard uninvited; within an hour she was auditioning for a top teacher, who wasn't impressed but liked her enthusiasm and invited her to an intensive summer program, after which she was accepted. That lesson in imaginative courage later led her to cold-email the White House to propose a behavioral science advisor role that didn't exist, and to be hired for it. The worst that happens, she says, is rejection. At Juilliard she studied with Itzhak Perlman but struggled as a self-critical teenager comparing herself to true prodigies, and found her joy lower after age 12. She now anchors herself to two traits nobody can take from her: deep curiosity and relishing getting better, which protect her from the uncontrollable reactions to her work.

Rebuilding Through Curiosity

Huberman loves her description that her body grew up around the violin; her right shoulder is still elevated and she has mild scoliosis from the posture. After the injury, when she should have been touring China, her father suggested she read widely. She picked up Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct, which revealed the hidden machinery of language and lit up her interest in cognition. Rather than asking whether she loved it as much as the violin, a bar nothing could meet, she asked a gentler question: am I curious enough to want to learn more? A few days later she was back at the library, then she talked her way into upper-level classes and research labs to test whether she enjoyed the actual process, not just the idea.

Both champion pop science books as an entry point to science, and Huberman criticizes academic arrogance toward them. He shares the quote he attributes to Dorothy Parker: "the cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity." Genuine curiosity, he says, is self-amplifying because it has no endpoint.

Why We Fear Change

Shankar calls herself terrified of change and a creature of habit, which is partly why she created her podcast. Humans hate uncertainty so much that, in one study, people were more stressed by a 50 percent chance of an electric shock than a guaranteed one. She describes the need for cognitive closure, a desire for definitive answers, and says research shows that reducing it and becoming more open to mystery boosts well-being and resilience. Another trap is Dan Gilbert's end-of-history illusion: we readily see how much we've changed in the past but assume our present self is here to stay. Because change in one area spills over into all others, she recommends auditing yourself during big transitions, asking how your relationships, well-being and preferences have shifted, and staying curious about yourself.

To see our blind spots, she suggests talking with people we disagree with, though some lessons only come from experience; she discovered during pregnancy losses with a surrogate during COVID that she grieved by withdrawing rather than reaching out. Huberman quotes Karl Deisseroth that we have no idea how others feel unless we ask, and that we often don't know how we feel either. Shankar argues it's healthy to care how we come across to others, and that her defining leadership trait is willingness to update her views, something she and her husband Jimmy practice too. From Ethan Kross's research, she recommends third-person self-distancing and warns that venting often backfires because friends offer emotional balm instead of challenging your narrative; ask them up front to poke holes. She also noticed herself skipping positive comments to hunt for negative ones, and reminds self-critical people to let the good count. Huberman adds that the strongest evidence for gratitude's effects comes from receiving it.

Group Identity, Changing Minds and Three Kinds of Empathy

Like-minded groups help goal pursuit because you see peers fail and persist, but they can narrow thinking. Shankar suggests imagining how your beliefs would differ had you been born in another era, family or culture, which loosens the grip of beliefs fused with identity. She describes a 1950s study in which loyal fans of opposing football teams judged the same controversial referee calls in their own team's favor, believing they were simply reporting what they saw. Because beliefs flow from group membership, facts alone rarely persuade. Daryl Davis, a Black jazz musician who has persuaded dozens of people to leave the Ku Klux Klan, says "I didn't convince them, they convinced themselves to change their minds." He preserved their agency, sought to understand their humanity and reasons, raised his question-to-statement ratio, and asked, "what in theory could change your mind?" Huberman argues public health communication during the pandemic often failed for lack of this curiosity about the other side, and neglected basic tools like sleep and circadian health.

Shankar says studying the mind has been the greatest driver of her empathy. Drawing on Jamil Zaki's research, she describes three uncorrelated types: emotional empathy (feeling another's pain), cognitive empathy (accurately diagnosing what's wrong and what would help) and empathic concern or compassion (wanting to help). Society overvalues the first, but she suggests "empathy languages," like love languages. High emotional empathy raises burnout risk, as she found in 2020 when she tried to shut down her feelings; cultivating cognitive empathy and compassion can protect against burnout without abandoning empathy.

Framing Goals

Shankar, drawing on work by Ayelet Fishbach, says small changes in how we frame goals have outsized effects. Approach goals (eat healthier foods, enter a relationship) produce pride and boost motivation and perseverance when you succeed, while avoidance goals (avoid junk food, avoid loneliness) produce only relief and are harder to measure. At the Department of Veterans Affairs, with only one email to promote a benefits program, her team changed a single word, telling veterans they had earned the benefit rather than that they were eligible, which increased access by 9 percent, an example of the endowment effect.

Who sets the goal matters, too: people will go to irrational lengths to preserve agency, even preferring their own judgment over a better-performing algorithm. She suggests asking coaches and managers for a set of options so you own your targets. Huberman shares that when he let lab members set their own paper deadlines, they consistently beat them, and he likes the phrase "as fast as I carefully can."

Setting Goals You'll Keep

Shankar offers several more tools. Set goals in the same physical and psychological state you'll be in when pursuing them, because of empathy gaps between present and future selves; 4 p.m. Sunday Maya on the couch shouldn't commit 6 a.m. Maya to daily gym sessions. Build in an emergency reserve, or slack, such as three get-out-of-jail-free days a month, so a single miss doesn't make a perfectionist abandon the goal. And use Katy Milkman's fresh start effect: big transitions like moving or a new job, and arbitrary ones like New Year's Day, the first of the month or a Monday, make it easier to adopt new habits. Huberman adds that the fresh start could be this afternoon.

The Middle Problem, Temptation Bundling and the Peak-End Rule

Motivation is high at the start of a goal and rises again near the finish line, the goal gradient effect, but sags in the middle. Since middles can't be eliminated, shorten them: a weekly goal has a middle of a day or two, while an annual goal has a months-long slump. Shankar's go-to strategy is Milkman's temptation bundling: pair an unpleasant task, like folding laundry or hard cardio, with something immediately rewarding, like a favorite podcast or pop album, and deny yourself that treat elsewhere to preserve its potency. She saves Kacey Musgraves for lifting weights, even turning it down while cooking with her husband.

Finally, the peak-end rule from Daniel Kahneman and colleagues shows we remember experiences mostly by their most intense moment and their end. In studies with hands in ice water and with colonoscopies, adding a few extra, slightly less unpleasant minutes at the end made people remember the experience more favorably, and colonoscopy patients were more likely to return for follow-ups, even though total discomfort increased. Applied to a brutal workout, tacking on a few easier minutes at the end may make you more likely to come back. Huberman notes that people who love intensity might do the opposite and finish hard, and Shankar agrees it depends on your psychology.

Conclusion

Maya Shankar's story and research converge on a hopeful message: identities anchored to why we do things are far more durable than those tied to what we do, and even devastating losses can reveal a through line that finds new expression. Curiosity, rather than a demand to recapture an old passion, is enough to begin again. Fear of change is natural, but lowering our need for certainty, recognizing that we will keep changing, and seeking honest feedback and diverse perspectives make us more resilient and more empathetic. For goals, the toolkit is concrete: frame them as approach goals, own the targets, set them in the right state, build in slack, use fresh starts, shorten the middle, bundle hard tasks with treats, and end difficult experiences gently so you'll return.

This is a summary of "Dr Maya Shankar How To Shape Your Identity Goals" from Huberman Lab, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST. Listen to the full episode.