No. 1 Psychologist: How to Change Your Identity & Accomplish Your Hardest Goals
What this covers
Shane Parrish and Maya Shankar dive into the complexities of identity and personal transformation. They explore how significant life changes can reshape one's sense of self and explain how to navigate these transitions. Maya shares her personal stories and tips on making proactive choices and keeping a flexible, layered sense of self. They also discuss the psychological and philosophical aspects of identity, offering practical advice on goal-setting and personal growth.
Maya Shankar is a cognitive scientist and the creator, executive producer, and host of the podcast, A Slight Change of Plans. Shankar was a Senior Advisor in the Obama White House, where she founded and served as Chair of the White House Behavioral Science Team. She holds a Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from Oxford and a B.A from Yale.
00:00 - Intro 01:00 - Shankar's "almost unbelievable" story of getting into Julliard 03:50 - Why Shankar studied identity 09:58 - What is identity? 13:12 - Using your identity to accomplish your goals 16:20 - Using anti-identities to accomplish your goals 17:11 - What to do when your identity is "attacked" 24:50 - How to re-establish trust in institutions 30:50 - Use identity to start a positive habit 33:55 - How to debunk myths with stories and facts 35:38 - How does how we frame our goals help (or prevent) us from accomplishing them 41:31 - The one motivational technique Shankar uses every day 43:35 - On success
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Maya Shankar argues that identity is malleable and multifaceted, and deliberately constructing layered identities rooted in underlying values rather than specific roles or outcomes creates greater resilience, enables better goal achievement, and facilitates more productive conversations across disagreement.
- Identity foreclosure—premature commitment to a single identity—creates fragility when that identity is threatened; multi-layered identity architecture provides a resilience buffer
- How we frame goals and construct identity narratives (approach vs. avoidance, do vs. don't, skill-specific vs. value-based) directly affects motivation, persistence, and likelihood of success
- Tribal identity membership can override rational reasoning and block mind-changing; moral reframing, motivational interviewing, and understanding the psychology of belief formation enable productive discourse without threatening group belonging
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Identity foreclosure occurs when people prematurely commit to an identity before exploring other possible ways of being, which often happens in adolescence through modeling by parents, coaches, teachers, and community, but can also happen later in life when change-inducing experiences cut off opportunities and force reckonning with who comes next.
“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... 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”
Setting goals when in a low-willpower or low-motivation state (e.g., on a Sunday afternoon while relaxing) leads to failure because the gap between that mental state and the mental state required to execute the goal (e.g., 4 a.m. for a workout) is too large; better to commit when actually in or near the execution state.
“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”
Rather than relying on willpower to resist temptations, designing choice architecture and environment—making unhealthy options unavailable or difficult to access, and making desired options visible and readily accessible—is more effective at sustaining behavior change.
“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”
The concept of moral reframing shows that grounding arguments in moral terms that affirm rather than threaten the moral views of those you disagree with is far more effective at helping them change their viewpoints, because it allows people to update their positions while staying consistent with their underlying moral identity.
“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”
People should frame their goals as behaviors they will perform, not as fixed identities they must maintain, and should maintain 'wiggle room' and 'emergency reserves' in goal setting—building in expected days where they won't perform the goal—because this reduces the purity complex that makes people give up entirely after missing one day.
“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”
Group identity membership can cause people to base their attitudes and beliefs on tribal allegiance rather than evidence, because when identity is tied to group membership there is felt pressure to conform and fear of expulsion if they deviate from group orthodoxy, which makes people less scrupulous and critically minded than they would be if reasoning through situations independently.
“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”
Temptation bundling is a motivational technique where you pair an undesirable task (something you have to do) with a desirable activity (something rewarding) that you only allow yourself to do while performing the undesirable task, which makes the undesirable task more psychologically rewarding.
“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”
Research on identity priming shows that people behave in ways consistent with their perceived identity or aspirational identity: when people see themselves as voters they are more likely to vote; when they see themselves as eco-friendly they are more likely to recycle; conversely, when people hold negative identity labels about themselves they act in ways that align with those negative labels and needlessly hold themselves back from growth.
“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”
Asking someone 'How do you believe you arrived at your views?' can help them see holes in their own arguments by tracing their actual path of belief formation, which often reveals that they arrived at their views through random chance (what a friend said, what a colleague mentioned) rather than disciplined rational scientific thinking.
“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”
When setting a goal to accomplish something you're not currently doing (like running a marathon as a non-runner), framing the goal as an approach goal ('I want to eat healthier foods') is more motivating than framing it as an avoidant goal ('I want to avoid unhealthy foods') because approach goals are more inspiring and easier to track progress on.
“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”
When people set ambitious goals for themselves, they should introduce personal agency into goal-setting because humans have a strong preference for being in the driver's seat, and people achieve goals better when they feel they are setting the goals themselves rather than having goals imposed by authority figures.
“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”
Debunking myths by stating what is not true ('It is not the case that boiling your water will improve safety') is ineffective because people quickly forget the negation and remember only the connection between the claim and the domain, thereby strengthening the false association rather than correcting it.
“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”
Motivational interviewing and deep canvassing are psychological techniques that improve success in changing minds on political and social issues by combining several practices: showing genuine curiosity without threatening the person's humanity, increasing question-to-statement ratio, restating what the other person said to validate they've been heard, and asking what evidence would change their mind.
“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”
The 'middle problem' is a research finding showing that motivation is not stable across goal pursuit: people have high motivation at the beginning of a goal, low motivation in the middle, and high motivation again near the end (the goal gradient effect), and understanding this pattern helps explain why people lose steam in multi-month projects.
“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”
Rather than anchoring identity to a precarious specific role (like 'violinist'), a more robust approach is to identify with the underlying why—the deeper values, features, and traits that made that activity meaningful—so that when life circumstances force change, you can find equivalent meaning in other pursuits that share those core features.
“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”
Humans are territorial in nature, and just as animals react without reasoning when their territory is threatened, humans react without reasoning when their identity is threatened, which explains why people tend to reject ideas from groups or people they dislike even if those ideas are correct.
“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”
People who watch her podcast 'Slight Change of Plans' discover that beneath the external narrative of change, people are really grappling with internal identity shifts and trying to figure out who they can become when their previous identity is no longer possible.
“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”
Shane Parrish uses inversion—asking 'what don't I want' instead of 'what do I want'—as a problem-solving approach, and this principle can be applied to identity by thinking about identity in terms of what you don't do rather than what you do, which can be as effective as positive identity claims.
“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... you can just be like you know I'm a nonsmoker instead of identifying as a smoker”
Understanding why people are the way they are—understanding the causes of their behavior and beliefs—makes it much harder to hate people, and creating that understanding and compassion is a key part of being a successful person in Maya's view.
“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”
Self-narratives about identity must be grounded in reality and validated by feedback from people in your life; purely advantageous or well-being-promoting identity stories that lack evidence are not reliable and should be revisited when social feedback suggests they are inaccurate.
“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”
Even simple changes in messenger (showing up at someone's door and saying 'I believe in this document the government made' as a trusted community member) can be meaningful progress in rebuilding institutional trust and belief change, rather than requiring large-scale systemic reform.
“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”
Maya Shankar's mother modeled entrepreneurial risk-taking and door-opening (literally and metaphorically) by confidently approaching Juilliard's front door without an invitation and asking to meet the admissions staff, which taught Maya from childhood that you don't have to wait for invitations to pursue opportunities.
“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”
The erosion of institutional trust is itself a form of identity—once someone identifies as 'someone who doesn't trust government institutions,' that identity becomes self-reinforcing and resistant to change, and the solution requires understanding how to shift identity frameworks, not just presenting facts.
“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... 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”
Maya Shankar's definition of personal success is making people feel understood—creating moments where people are vulnerable with her and she is vulnerable in return, which she sees as one of the most beautiful human experiences and something she works to create through her work as a cognitive scientist and podcast host.
“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”
The Juilliard violin teacher gave Maya honest feedback that she did not have the ability to pass the audition at that time but believed she had potential with proper training, and invited her to a five-week summer music program which was directly responsible for her later passing the Juilliard audition.
“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”
When the federal government tried to distribute water safety fact sheets in Flint during the lead crisis, effectiveness improved dramatically when the message came from local trusted community members (church leaders, YMCA leaders, neighbors) rather than from the EPA, because the local community had experienced decades of disenfranchisement and systemic racism and had no reason to trust government authority figures.
“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”
When Maya was 15 and suffered a hand injury that ended her violin career, she experienced not just the grief of losing an ability but a more fundamental identity crisis because she suddenly realized how tethered her sense of self had been to the violin, which was defined primarily by what she did rather than why she did it.
“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”