Maya on Brené Brown's Podcast

We recently shared a conversation between Maya and Brené on A Slight Change of Plans where they talked about Maya's appearance on Brené's podcast, Dare to Lead. Today we are sharing that conversation with you!

In this episode of Dare to Lead, Brené and Maya discuss how unexpected changes can disrupt our paths, challenge our identities, and require us to build new ways of navigating the world. They delve into the science behind change and its impact on how we live, love, and lead.

Check out Brené's Dare to Lead podcast wherever you get your podcasts. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:14):
Pushkin.

Speaker 2 (00:26):
Hi everyone, I'm Brene Brown and this is Dare to Lead.
I have a really beautiful, powerful conversation for you on
this episode. I am talking to doctor Maya Schunker, a
cognitive scientist, and we are talking about everything from the
science of change, what it means to lead, We're talking

(00:48):
about love, and what we're really digging into is what
happens when we are so surefooted on our path. We're
so surefooted in fact, that we've built identities around what
we're accomplishing and what we're doing, and all of a
sudden life happens and we're not just noted down on

(01:09):
the path, were knocked completely off the path. How do
we get back up, how do we figure out who
we are without that path? And how do we start
building a new way to walk through the world. It
is just truly a meaningful conversation. I'm so glad you're

(01:30):
here to be a part of it. Before we jump in,
I want to tell you a little bit about Maya.
Doctor Maya Schunker is a cognitive scientist who is the creator,
executive producer, and host of the Pushkin podcast show A
Slight Change of Plans Beautiful Conversations. Maya was a senior

(01:54):
advisor in the Obama White House, where she founded and
served as chair of the White House Behavioral Science Team.
Just the story of how she landed there is basically
the lesson from our conversation in a nutshell. She also
served as the first behavioral science Advisor to the United Nations.
Maya has a post doctoral fellowship in cognitive neuroscience from Stanford,

(02:15):
a PhD from Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship, and a
BA from Yale. This woman's gone to school, y'alle. She
is a graduate of the Juilliard School of Music's pre
college program, where she was a private violin student of
Ishtac Pearlman's and performed alongside of him at Carnegie Hall,
which is another story that'll just This is a podcast

(02:39):
about mastery, love and courage. Let's jump in. I have
to say Maya that you have been on our podcast
list since we imagined the podcast, so welcome to dare
to lead.

Speaker 3 (02:56):
Oh my gosh, that's such an honor to hear. I'm
a huge fan, so thanks for saying that.

Speaker 2 (03:01):
We're very grateful that you're here. And we always start
our podcast with the same question, will you tell us
your story.

Speaker 3 (03:08):
So I would start my story at the age of six,
when my mom went up to our attic and brought
down my grandmother's violin that she had brought with her
all the way from India when she immigrated to this
country in the nineteen seventies. My grandmother had played Eastern
classical music in the very traditional Southern Indian style, and

(03:28):
my mom just opened the violin case, just eager to
show her young daughter the instrument. She had shown my
older three siblings the instrument and they were like, this
isn't cool.

Speaker 1 (03:37):
But I thought it was very cool.

Speaker 3 (03:39):
And I was enraptured by the instrument so quickly, and
it was stunning for my mom because I so quickly
asked for a pint sized violin of my own. It
was a quarter sized instrument, and she never had to
tell me to practice. It's like even as a six
year old, And I assure you, Brene, there were many
things I did not want to do as a six
year old, but violin just felt like it was such

(04:02):
a core part of me, like it spoke to me
in an important way. And it's overwhelming to think about
how emotionally close I felt with something so quickly you
know that's incredible.

Speaker 2 (04:14):
I mean, was it ancestral? Was it you just saw
it and thought, yeah, this is me.

Speaker 3 (04:20):
Yeah. I loved the way that it sounded, I love
the way that it felt, and I loved the process
of getting better at something. It was just so motivating
for me to feel like there was an input output
model of sorts, which we don't always get handed in life, right,
but I always felt like, oh, by and large, the
more I practice, the better I get. And when I

(04:44):
was nine years old, I had big dreams really early
on forney, and my parents did not know how to
translate their daughter's dreams because my dad is a theoretical
physics professor and my mom helps immigrants get green cards
to study in this country, and so they had no
inns in the western classical music space. I was always
telling my mom, oh, I want to go to Juilliard.

(05:05):
You know, Juilliard's the pinnacle for me, and she's like, well,
I don't quite know how to make this happen. So
one day my mom and I were just on a
trip to New York, and I happened to have my
violin with me, and we were walking by the Juilliard
schools building, and my mom said, why don't we just
go in? I was like, what do you mean to

(05:26):
just go in? She's like, what's the worst thing that
can happen? And I'm thinking, I'll tell you the worst thing,
security cards escorting us out of the building.

Speaker 1 (05:34):
That's the one thing that can happen.

Speaker 3 (05:36):
And she's like, Okay, let's just go in and see
what happened. So we walk in unannounced. My mom strikes
up a conversation with a fellow musician and says, oh,
do you mind if my daughter meets your teacher after
your lesson? And they very generously said yes. I continue
to be in all of how many times people are
willing to just say yes if.

Speaker 1 (05:53):
You ask right?

Speaker 2 (05:54):
Oh my god, it's incredible.

Speaker 3 (05:55):
And I auditioned for this teacher on the spot. He
accepted me into a summer music program basically a boot camp,
and I ended up auditioning and getting accepted into Juilliard
in the fall. And that was such a critical learning
ex experience for me because it taught me life might
not always hand opportunities to you on a silver plate.
Sometimes you have to make the damn plate, you know,

(06:16):
you just have to walk into the building or cold
call or cold email or whatever it is. And that
fearlessness is ultimately what got me to a point where
I was even good enough to get into this school,
and it really changed my life forever. That began an
extremely intense violin life for me. So, starting when I
was nine, every Saturday, I lived in Connecticut. So every Saturday,

(06:38):
my mom and I would get up at four thirty
in the morning, take the train from Connecticut to New York,
and I would engage in ten hours of classes.

Speaker 1 (06:46):
And again this was the remarkable part.

Speaker 3 (06:49):
She'd wake me up at four thirty and she says,
I would just jump out of bed, and she didn't
have to be like, Maya, come on, get ready, it's time,
Like I just couldn't wait. I felt like those were
my people. Musicians were my people. And then the greatest
honor came when I was a teenager. When I was thirteen,
and it's a Pearlman, my violin idol asked me to

(07:10):
be his private violin student.

Speaker 2 (07:11):
Okay, let's just pause for a minute here, Let's just
let that soak in for a second. How many people
in the world do you think can say when ishtak
Pearlman asked me to be his private violin student.

Speaker 3 (07:27):
It does feel remarkable to say, and I still pinch
myself about it, and I still question it. I actually
I asked Pearlman's wife recently. We were just hanging out
having coffee, and I said, Toby, we both know I
was not as technically gifted as my peers. Why the
hell did he take me on as his student? And

(07:47):
she said because he felt you had something to say.

Speaker 2 (07:51):
Wow.

Speaker 3 (07:53):
And that moved me so much because it is so true.
I had so many insecurities about my technique. As I mentioned,
my parents were not steeped in the classical music world.
They were having me work with graduate students who had
never taught someone before. I didn't even know how to
read sheet music when I got accepted into Juilliard. That
was a big secret, Like I was just makeshifting my
way into this world. And I loved that he felt

(08:16):
like I had these emotions that he wanted to tap
into through my music.

Speaker 2 (08:20):
You know.

Speaker 3 (08:21):
I love that he did feel I had something to say,
because I felt like I had something to say. That
was in large part why I loved the violin. Reflecting
back and trying to figure out, like, what is it?
That I loved about the violin. As a kid of
you had asked me, I would have said, I feel
like I loved how it sounded, and I loved the.

Speaker 1 (08:37):
Phrases I could produce.

Speaker 3 (08:38):
But I think actually what I loved about the violin
is that I could go on stage and within moments,
I can make a room full of thousands of strangers
feel something that they may never have felt before, Like
we could forge this deep emotional connection, and that was intoxicating,
you know, And so that's really what made me tick.

(08:59):
And so I felt like Pearlman saw that he saw
the craving that I had within me to connect with
other people, and he saw that thirst and that desire.
And I felt so heard hearing Toby tell me that,
because I never really quite understood why it is that
he gave me his vote of confidence.

Speaker 2 (09:19):
Yeah, it's just so beautiful. I just want to sit
in it for a second. It's just I don't know
what that unnameable thing is that makes you pop up
at four thirty. It's like love. It's like you loved
what you were doing, and he had to have seen that,
you know, it's just incredible. So you become his student.

Speaker 1 (09:38):
I do, and I'm on the fast track.

Speaker 3 (09:40):
Like I'm convincing my Indian American parents that I'm not
going to the liberal arts college that they'd hoped i'd
go to and have a well rounded education, but instead,
I'm going to go to a music conservatory. And so
finally everyone's on board with this whole plan. My older
three siblings had gone to normal colleges. My parents, I
think it always hoped that I would have that path,

(10:02):
But Peerlman taking me on, I think, was that vote
that everyone in the family needed to get behind this.
So when I was f fifteen, I was studying at
Pearlman's music camp and it was, oh gosh, these moments
you never forget.

Speaker 1 (10:15):
So I woke up.

Speaker 3 (10:15):
It was a July morning, it was very cold, it
was on Shelter Island, and I woke up and went
to my practice room and I was playing a very
challenging piece. It's by Paganini, Paganini Caprice number thirteen for
any musicians out there, they know Paganini stuff. And I
just overstretched my finger on a single note and I
heard a popping sound and I knew in that moment

(10:39):
that something was terribly wrong. But I was also fifteen Forney.
So I entered denial mode immediately. I was like, I
can play through the pain. There's no issues here, ignore it.
And I kept resisting doctors telling me, sorry, kid, you're
not going to be able to play the violin anymore.

Speaker 2 (10:58):
And oh my god.

Speaker 3 (11:00):
Yeah, and my dreams just ended like that in a moment.
And like I said, I resisted it. I played through pain,
I kept performing in concerts, and suddenly I had to
confront the harsh truth that everybody else had accepted before
I did, which is this huge dream that I had
that I poured everything into. Like to this day, Brene,

(11:21):
my right shoulder is slightly higher than my left because
of all the years that I spent in the violin position,
Like my spine is slightly curved, Like my body literally
grew around the ergonomics of this instrument. It was an
extension of my body. And now suddenly it was no
longer a part of my life. And I think the

(11:43):
best way to describe it is I was thrown into
this existential spiral where I was asking myself all sorts
of questions like who am I? Who am I without
this instrument? And I think as kids, sometimes we can live,
at least for me. Maybe precocious kids aren't like that,
But we can live in this unreflective mode where we
just go about our business and we do the things

(12:04):
that we love, and we don't take the time to
ask ourselves what to finds us, what makes me Maya?
And suddenly I was forced to ask myself the question.
And it's like I didn't like what I found because
every answer didn't involve the violin.

Speaker 2 (12:20):
Were you just untethered? Was it an untethered feeling? Was
it a like you had lost your mooring? Like what
I mean? You're young too, You're in the height of adolescence.

Speaker 3 (12:30):
Yeah, I think I was despondent. I was impatient. I'm
an extremely impatient person. I was listening to you and
Angela duckworths, she and I share this dream, deeply impatient.
I want to ask yeah, yeah, and you too. I
want things to have happened yesterday. So I felt this
huge urgency to find the next thing. And of course
you've already picked up on the depth of my love

(12:51):
for the instrument, right it's hard to even put into words.
You're not going to find that right away. And it
was just like push and pull in my mind of acceptance,
acceptance of the loss, and then also trying to figure
out I need to move on, I need to find
something else, not wanting to and that's what created this
tension in my mind.

Speaker 2 (13:13):
So then what happens? Do you stay at Juilliard?

Speaker 3 (13:16):
So oh yeah, this is a little known story, but
it's that Pearlman actually continued to teach me and I
would play open strings in my lessons. That's how dedicated
a teacher he is. I could not use my left hand,
so I just rested on the instrument and we would
just focus on making a beautiful sound for lesson upon lesson.

Speaker 1 (13:38):
Nice is.

Speaker 3 (13:39):
It was remarkable, right, And then finally he also had
to accept that my violent dreams were over.

Speaker 1 (13:44):
We both did.

Speaker 3 (13:45):
It was a joint process of acceptance, and I stopped
playing entirely. And then there was another turning point. I
was helping my parents clean out their basement the summer
before college, as a dutiful daughter does per day. In
the counterfactual world, I was supposed to be in China
touring with my musical classmates. So like, equally cool summer

(14:06):
situation going on here, and I'm just exploring their bookshelf
and I come across a book by Stephen Pinker called
The Language Instinct, and it detailed our remarkable ability to
comprehend and produce language. And up until that point, I
had completely taken my language abilities for granted, right, I

(14:28):
never even really thought about them. And what Pinker did
is he pulled the curtain back for me, and he
revealed the complex cognitive machinery that's at work behind the
scenes fueling this mental ability. And I felt in awe.
Awe is the best word to use to describe that.
I thought to myself, Oh my gosh, if this is

(14:50):
what's behind language, what is behind the ability to do
complex mathematics. I can't do complex math, but my dad
can't write. Or like falling in love or high level
decision making or pondering about philosophical questions, like what's behind
all that? I just became insatiable. I wanted to read

(15:12):
every book there was on the mind. And I ended
up studying cognitive science and undergrad and I was really
lucky because my undergrad institution had a cognitive science program.
It's more common now that back in the day, it
was a relatively new program, and it's an interdisciplinary program
that blends psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, computer science, anthropology, basic biology.

(15:38):
Like you're studying the mind from multiple different angles to
try to arrive at some conclusion. And that's where I
studied non human primates and nonverbal abilities and language and
visual perception. Like again, I just had the time of
my life, right, I was for doing research in all
of these labs, and I ultimately got my PhD in

(15:59):
cognitive science and ended up getting a post doc in
cognitive neuroscience. So it was very much on the academic
path at that point.

Speaker 2 (16:07):
I love the threat of passion and purpose. I bet
if you had to go study cognitive science at four
point thirty in the morning on a Saturday, you would
have popped right back up too, just like maybe four
forty five.

Speaker 1 (16:20):
I thought, yeah, yeah, I'd gotten older by this point.

Speaker 2 (16:23):
Okay, so then tell us what happens. You finish your
postdoc and you're on your trajectory. Is probably an academic position.

Speaker 3 (16:30):
Absolutely, Yeah, I'm gonning to be a professor, right, That's
what you do when you've just spent ten years studying something,
and I think is so common. Sometimes I felt like,
finally I've got it. All figured out.

Speaker 1 (16:41):
That's that as a feeling that we all, you know,
we all aspire for it. It's a fiction.

Speaker 3 (16:46):
I'm like, I finally got it all figured out. My
dad's a professor. I've always wanted to be a professor.
I admired professors. And then there's this again turning point
where I'm sitting in the basement of an E. Fhor
Marie laboratory, so I'm doing brain scans. It's at Stanford,
That's where I was doing my POSTOC and I've been
scanning people's brains all morning in this windowless laboratory and

(17:09):
this guy comes in and within moments I'm like looking
at as amygdala and I.

Speaker 2 (17:14):
Don't know so personal so quickly I mean yes, I mean,
are you happy to see me? Or is that your amygdalah?
I mean, it's God's kind of funny, but it's probably
funny for you and me, like party of two, we're laughing,
the nerds are laughing, but it is kind of oh absolutely.

Speaker 1 (17:32):
I mean your point.

Speaker 3 (17:33):
That was exactly the challenge for me, which is it
felt like the order of operations was off given my personality,
because I wanted to know, what does this person love
to do do they have a family, do they have kids?
What's their favorite ice cream flavor, what's their favorite book
that they've read? Like, those were the questions that I
was so excited, how do they make decisions? And instead

(17:53):
it felt like a depersonalized version of the process. Now,
kudos to neuroscientists everywhere, we need them out there, but
I just knew in that moment, this is not a
good match for me. This is not a good match
for my personality. I want to be working on teas.
I need to be in a window windowed office, not in.

Speaker 1 (18:15):
A dark Stanford laboratory office.

Speaker 3 (18:17):
And so there were just things like that where I
just realized this is not quite right. But I felt
so much inertia because again I poured it was similar
in some sense to the violin. I mean, this was
on my own polition. Maybe that was departing, but you
still feel that same poll like, oh my gosh, I've
just spent so many years doing this thing and now
I'm not sure that I want to do it anymore.

Speaker 2 (18:38):
God, You're like, it's like sunk cost.

Speaker 3 (18:40):
Hell absolutely, oh my gosh. And I was studying the
sunk cost fallacy at the time, but man, I fell
prey to it for Nay.

Speaker 1 (18:48):
None of us are reviewed.

Speaker 2 (18:49):
None of us are Yeah, it's a really certain you
would explain it real quick for everyone that's listening that
doesn't know it.

Speaker 3 (18:55):
Yeah, I mean, we tend to overvalue the investments we've
made in stuff, and we cling onto that stuff far
beyond when it's rational too, And it's deeply painful to
incur losses, right for the things that we've poured so
much time and energy, but when actually we should just
cut our.

Speaker 1 (19:11):
Losses and move forward, right totally.

Speaker 3 (19:13):
Yeah, And so I at this moment, I think this
was around yeah, twenty twelve, So behavioral science was just
kind of like a burgeoning field at that time, and
I didn't know what my options were, right, I thought, well,
what does a cognitive neuroscience postdoc do? They either become
a professor or they become a general management consultant. Like
those are the only two options that I knew about.

Speaker 2 (19:34):
So that sounds right.

Speaker 1 (19:35):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (19:35):
So I called it my undergrad advisor, Laurie Santos, who's
known me since I was seventeen, And I said, Laurie,
so you know that thing I've been doing for like
a long time, don't want to do that anymore. I'm
thinking of trying to apply for a general management position
consulting position, and she's like, Okay, Maya, before you do that.

(19:57):
I can see her like clinging on to the student
that she's coached for so long, being like, I don't
want to lose you in the field. She tells me
about this remarkable work that's happening in the federal government
at the time. So this was in the Obama White
House where they were leveraging insights from the field of
behavioral economics from the stuff that I was studying in
real time to help feed hungry children. So, long story short,

(20:21):
the government offers what's called the National School Lunch Program,
and despite the fact that millions of kids are eligible
for the program, millions of kids were still going hungry
at school every day because their parents hadn't filled out
the application form for the program, and a behavioral audit
of the program revealed that the reason for this is

(20:44):
the application process was extremely burdensome. It required referencing multiple
tax documents, it required going to the post office at
a certain moment in the time, moment in time, and oh,
if you fill out something wrong, there's a potential penalty
that you might incur and put yourself in the shoes
of a single mom who's working three shifts to make

(21:05):
ends meet, who's trying to make sure that her children
thrive at school, and we're putting these demands on her
just to make sure that they gave access to lunch.
That's unreasonable, right. And then another barrier was that there
was a stigma associated with signing up your kids for
a public benefits program. Or later on, when I was
at the White House, I talked to principles and parents
who said, look, I work really hard for a living.

(21:26):
I don't want my kids depending on the government. So
what they did, in turn was they leveraged the power
of the default option, and basically what that means is
they turned the program from an opt in program to
an opt out program. So now all eligible kids were
automatically enrolled in the school lunch program and parents had

(21:47):
to only take a step if they actively wanted to
unenroll their children. And as a result of this very
elegant change in the behavioral design of the program, twelve
and a half million more kids were now eating lunch
at school every day, and I.

Speaker 1 (22:02):
Was blown away.

Speaker 3 (22:04):
The emotional resonance of this example just oh my gosh.
It lit me up, and I think out to myself,
this is what I want to be doing with my life.

Speaker 1 (22:12):
I actually want to be.

Speaker 3 (22:12):
A practitioner of behavioral science. I didn't even know that
was a thing, but if I can make that into
a thing, that would be awesome.

Speaker 1 (22:20):
Right, And so.

Speaker 2 (22:22):
I have to trust off you here because I'm looking
at my sister who's sitting across and it's like every
time I want to do something, I always I am
always like, hey, can you google if this is a
thing or not? Like am I allowed to be doing this?
Like I want to be a social worker with a PhD,
But I really want to do this kind of Is
that a thing? Is anyone else? Where's the blueprint for this?
And sometimes there's not a blueprint? Right?

Speaker 1 (22:43):
Yeah?

Speaker 3 (22:43):
There had been the seminal book written by Cass Sunstein
and Richard Thaler called Nudge, and some work that was
happening overseas, but the federal government was not hiring for
a behavioral scientist. And so I so desperately wanted to
this role that the role didn't exist.

Speaker 1 (22:57):
And so what do I do?

Speaker 3 (22:59):
I recruit my mom's Juilliard method the cold I.

Speaker 2 (23:04):
Was going to guess that you pulled your mom's Juilliard.

Speaker 1 (23:07):
I pulled the mom's Juilliard methods.

Speaker 3 (23:08):
So what I did is I ended up sending Cass Sunstein,
right author of this book Nudge, and a former Obama official,
a cold email in which I basically said, Hey, I'm Maya.
I am a postdoc who's published nothing of significance, and
I have no public policy experience, but I'd love to
work in government at the intersection of behavioral science and policy.

(23:29):
It was just like seeping with insecurities.

Speaker 1 (23:31):
Brene.

Speaker 3 (23:32):
I even wrote, I know I'm not cool enough to
work with the likes of Obama, but if there's a
state or local government opportunity, please do let me know.
And thankfully for me like pass ignored all the insecurity
and he wrote back within minutes saying, so great to
hear from you, Maya. I'm connecting you with President Obama's

(23:52):
science advisor. Let them know I passed you along. And
within days two days later, I'm buying a business suit
because I had an interview with White House officials where
I'm pitching them on this idea of creating a new
role for me, a role that is dedicated to the
translation of behavioral science into improvements in public policy. And

(24:16):
I remember I had the meeting, you know, I had
this interview, right, and can I just share there was
like a Michelle Obama moment, just.

Speaker 2 (24:23):
Like totally coming away.

Speaker 3 (24:25):
So I had been waxing poetic for some time about
the potential virtues of applying behavioral science to policy, right.
It had been mapped out by many researchers. We were
all kind of getting excited about the translation space. And
I remember I was pitching the person who would become
my future boss on some changes I would love to

(24:45):
see in the messaging around Michelle Obama's Let's Move initiative,
and his response was, oh, yeah, I know Michelle Obama
and or her team, we can make that happen. And
I was like, you want shit, Oh shit, Okay, I
guess this is like a real thing now, you know.
And it was in that moment that I was filled

(25:06):
kind of with that same excitement and adrenaline and enjoy
that I felt when I was playing the violin. I
was like, Wow, this sky it felt like a sky's
the limit situation. And so at the end of the interview,
he said, Mamaya loved talking to you. I love to
stay in touch, and I'm like, why stays touched? Do
you mean like, don't call me, I'll call you. Like

(25:27):
we're going to be besties, hang out on the weekends,
we're going to work together. Do you mind just clarifying?
And so he says, well, there's just a couple things
that need to happen. One, Obama needs to get reelected
in a few weeks. This was in October of twenty twelve.

Speaker 1 (25:40):
Two.

Speaker 3 (25:41):
I need to run this up the chain and make
sure that everyone's on board. In three, we need to
make sure there's a desk for you. And that's also
when like my West Wing dreams were kind of shattered.
I'd imagined the White House as this like resource rich environment,
and it turns out everyone's really scrappy in there.

Speaker 1 (25:58):
We're all just trying to.

Speaker 3 (25:59):
Make ends meet. And so I end up moving to
DC with a very informal verbal offer. So before I
even have a formal offered at my bags, I've sold
everything in California except for my bike, just in case,
and I move across the country. I sign a one
year lease in DC, and I essentially just show up

(26:19):
on the doorsteps of the White House and I'm like,
I'm here, let's make this happen. And sure enough the
job gets secured and I started at the beginning of
Abam the second term.

Speaker 2 (26:32):
So one of the things I want to do because
I want to know the rest of the story. We're
in it, but I know there are Yeah, no, it's great,
but I want to pause for a second and say something.
I want to share a thought and then get your
feedback on it. The walking into Juilliard kind of uninvited, unannounced,
the calling folks and saying, hey, I'd really love to

(26:56):
do this. I've had some real slighting door of moments
like that in my career, Like moments that I just
were not supposed to work, but they did. But there
was a shit ton of work. It's not like you
picked up a violin on Monday and on Friday you
thought you should be at Juilliard. How many hours do
you think you had practiced from the time you first

(27:18):
picked it up to the time your mom said let's
just go in.

Speaker 1 (27:21):
I mean thousands, right, yeah, right.

Speaker 3 (27:24):
You raise an extremely important point that I think is
sometimes easy to overlook, Like these moments only work when
you come immensely prepared. So the minute that I get
this potential White House interview, I mean, I'm spending forty
eight hours in the most intense prep mode of my life,

(27:45):
right Like, every minute is accounted for in terms of
prepping for this interview. And of course, now I don't
want to make it seem like I did all the
prep in two days. I had done years of work
as an actual cognitive scientist, so I obviously knew all
the research stuff, but certainly with the violin, it wasn't
enough to just show up and have the audition. I
had to do a good job in the audition. I

(28:06):
had to show up having done the hard work.

Speaker 2 (28:09):
Yeah, there's just a super powerful combination of competency and
just ballsiness and love and passion that is just the
swirl of it is so powerful. But it all has

(28:30):
to be there. There has to be a passion and
love for what we're doing. There has to be the work,
the competency, the mastery, and then there has to be
some really courageous Anyone seeing what I'm doing right now
would think I'm nuts to even ask moments, but I
think it's very easy to kind of become magnetized to

(28:53):
an idea without understanding every variable that's at play. Well said,
it's complicated for people to I think sometimes I'm thinking.
I just interviewed James Clear for the Dare to Lead
podcast which will air in December, and talking about habits
and change, and we were talking about this thing of

(29:14):
consistency over intensity, and I'm thinking about the consistency in
your violin plane, the consistency in your academic preparedness. It's there, right,
It's not just the intense moments of reaching out and
trying something ballsy.

Speaker 3 (29:30):
Yeah, And in many ways, there's this positive feedback loop,
which is when you put in the hard work, it
fuels you to make these courageous decisions because they actually
feel less courageous because you think you deserve it. You
think that there could be a chance because you have
put in the hard work.

Speaker 2 (29:48):
Yeah, that's really interesting.

Speaker 3 (29:50):
So I almost see them as really interconnected. People will
say sometimes why did you and your mom walk into
that building? And it's like, because I felt like I
could have what it takes. I didn't feel I had it,
but I felt like I could because I'd put it
in so much hard work and I had seen progress.

Speaker 2 (30:09):
It's funny that you say that, because one of the
things that's been really important for me is this idea
of mastery over success, kind of always learning. And one
of the questions I ask when I'm getting ready to
do something really may feel outrageous in an area of
mastery for me is if not me, whom you know?

(30:33):
Why not? It's not like I'm going to I'm walking
into Juilliard, never having held a violin in my life.
It's just the relationship between the two things, between mastery
and courage is really interesting that you think absolutely.

Speaker 1 (30:47):
It actually reminds me.

Speaker 3 (30:48):
You know, one of my favorite movies is Free Solo
because I don't know if you're.

Speaker 1 (30:52):
Familiar with this movie, but oh god, yeah, Alex Hunneled.

Speaker 3 (30:55):
Just for listeners who haven't seen the movie, but Alex
hunneled Free solos El Capitan in Yosemite Park, and free
soloing means literally no gear, no ropes, You're on your own.
And the reason that I loved the movie is that
I think it's I think it taught so many viewers

(31:18):
that they were laboring under a false understanding of what
it is that Alex does so a lot of people say,
oh my gosh, do you have a death wish? Why
are you willing to put yourself in these insanely high
risk situations?

Speaker 1 (31:31):
Are you out of your mind? But what the movie
does is.

Speaker 3 (31:34):
It teaches you that Alex saw his climbing essentially like
a choreograph dance. Every single move was mapped out in
his head with incredible detail and precision and practice. He
had redone all of these moves with ropes countless times,

(31:55):
such that by the time he decided to actually make
the ascent, it no longer felt risky to him. Now, granted,
there are exogynous variables that play a role in humpy
free solo. You can't saw for the rock falling from
you know whatever? Yeah, of course, so yeah, I mean
I'm never going to be a free solo er. Also,

(32:16):
I probably don't have the athletic ability, but that's another
that's an aside, But that illustrates to me. I think
what you're getting at and what I felt with Juilliard, right,
which is you get to the point where you have
such mastery it no longer feels as risky to do.

Speaker 1 (32:36):
The outrageous thing.

Speaker 2 (32:39):
And what's interesting too, there's something beletic about it for
me as well, because sometimes true mastery is perceived as easy,
and that's because it looks easy because of the level
of mastery. Does that make sense?

Speaker 1 (32:55):
Absolutely? Yeah.

Speaker 3 (32:56):
I mean I was talking with Angela Duckworth about this, right,
We were talking about grit and deliberated practice and all
these things, and exactly those same themes were emerging from
our conversation. Which is in the same way that you
see only the success stories and not the failures. Right
when you see the mastery, it's really hard to see
all that went into it.

Speaker 2 (33:17):
So interesting, all right, So tell us, I've got, as
you can imagine, I've got five gagillion questions. What have
you learned about change and how we change, how we
resist change, how we approach change. What have you learned
about change that still shocks you?

Speaker 3 (33:41):
Yeah, that's a great question. I'm having a new thought
in this moment, which is I think the reason why
we can have so much discomfort in the face of
change is because it threatens our sense of self identity.
Say that again, I think the reason why we can
have so much anxiety or trepidation in the face of
change is because it can threaten our sense of self.

(34:05):
It can threaten our self identity.

Speaker 2 (34:09):
So if change is threatening our sense of self or
our identity, what is the what's it whispering? What is
change telling us that feels threatening? Yeah? Let me's a messaging.

Speaker 3 (34:20):
Let me call upon my own experience right to help
unpack this a bit, which is, as you and I
know from my story, I lose the violin and I
don't know who I am. I don't know what my
value is in this world. I don't know what I'm
going to attach myself to next. And what that taught me.
The lesson that I learned from that experience is that

(34:42):
it's much more sustainable to attach my identity to the
features of pursuits that light me up and make me tick,
rather than a very specific activity or thing. And as
I mentioned to you, what I learned is that the
actual thing that made me light up about the violin

(35:02):
wasn't necessarily the violin itself. It was an instrument, uh
there with the puns, but it was an instrument and
for forging emotional connections with other people. So I learned, ah, okay,
that's a trait of the violin that I loved. Let
me see if I can now find that trait in
other things, because life will present barriers and obstacles and

(35:24):
twists and turns that many of which are out of
my control, that deny me the ability to pursue certain
things that I love. Let me see if I can
find it elsewhere. And I was able to find it elsewhere.
So I found that same desire for human connection in
studying cognitive science. I literally study how it is that
we relate to other human beings and we make decisions

(35:45):
and move about in this world. I found that kind
of same connection when I was working in the Obama
White House and I was on the ground in Flint, Michigan,
working on the Leaden water crisis and talking with residents
of Flint about how decades of disenfranchisement and racism led
to this problem in the first place and they needed help.
And I feel that human connection today with my podcast,

(36:08):
The Slight Chain Plans, which is all about connecting with
other people who have gone through extraordinary changes in their lives.
And I feel like I have licensed through this podcast
to go into a room with you know, Hillary Rodham Clinton,
or Tiffany Hattish or Tommy Caldwell or Casey Musgraves or
Riz Ahmed and to say, hey, so I know we

(36:29):
just met, but what was the most challenging moment of
your life? Like, what's your deepest, darkest secret. You know,
it's another way of forging intimacy. And so for those
people who are listening, who are struggling because life has
thrown them a change of plans and they feel this
loss of control and they feel like they've lost the
thing that they love near and dear, just do an assessment.

(36:51):
Ask yourself, Okay, I know I can't have that thing,
but what about that thing did I love? And then
mine the world for other places where you might find that.

Speaker 2 (37:05):
I'm really just taking it all in. I just I
just have to warn you that we call this the
pause cast. Sometimes. I know, I love that I feel
no need to fill in just open air sometimes because
I think you've just said a lot of really important
things that I think is worth sitting with and also
worth kind of unpacking a little bit. What you're saying

(37:30):
to me reminds me very much of some purpose work
that I've done before, where every time I tried to
figure out, like in these exercises, what's my purpose? What's
my purpose? The question was always deeper, deeper, deeper, And
then I got to this really core thing of using

(37:56):
images and words to connect the seemingly unconnectable to help
people live braver lives. And then it's so weird because
that what you're talking about, that thing that is just
part of me is can survive unwelcome change because I

(38:24):
can find that and express that through a myriad of things.
And when I choose to do things that are only
surface level connected to that bigger thing for me, that
purpose for me, I freaking hate them. I end up
hating them. I end up having no passion for them.

Speaker 1 (38:45):
Can you give an example?

Speaker 2 (38:46):
I can? I mean weekly examples, like I have a
team of thirty people and we go through a lot
of incoming request to do things, and there are a
lot of bright and shiny things, and we ask a
simple question of everything I do, does it serve the work?

(39:08):
And for me, work is using words and images to
connect the seemingly unconnectable to help people better understand their
lives and be braver. And so if it's do you know?
So when we ask does this serve the work? And
the answer is no, I normally don't do it. You know,

(39:30):
does it serve the ego. Maybe I'll do something that
doesn't really serve the work because it sounds fun. But
I don't think in the past five years I've done
anything mistakingly thinking it would serve the work and it wouldn't.
Just because we're so to use your word about free solo,
there's so much precision in our vetting of those things.

(39:53):
When I think about the violin and being on stage
and connecting to people yourself, and there's something that just
makes sense to me, just intuitively about the violin and
the free lunch program. It's about inextricable human connection. Music
does that, and making sure that kids are eating does that.

(40:18):
It says no one's full until we're all fed, you know,
And what are the barriers do that? So let me
throw something at you, just kind of going so like you,
I go into organizations a lot, and we work with
leadership teams, and we work with teams to better understand
what's going on in culture, what's getting in the way
of innovation, what's getting the way of productivity. And I

(40:40):
want you to diagnose something from your lens that we
have found in our research. The greatest shame trigger at
work is the threat of being irrelevant, and in the
midst of change, whether it's a merger and acquisition, digital transformation, reductions,

(41:03):
in the midst of change, people get very scared. They
double down, and irrelevance almost becomes a self fulfilling prophecy
for them, because instead of leaning in and learning what's
new and how are we changing, they get territorial shut down.

(41:24):
This is bullshit, This is not the way we've always
done it. What's happening in that situation?

Speaker 3 (41:31):
Yeah, I mean it's so interesting you share this story
because I think it really does trace back to back
to identity and self worth and how much people are
defining their identity and self worth in their particular jobs right,
which is very understandable. We have lots of research in
labor economics showing what a morale boost just being in
work gives you. I think that's a beautiful thing. I

(41:54):
will say that, by and large, even though I've had
guests on a slight change of plans with so many
diverse stories, the connective tissue between all of them is
that they've been able to see their identities as far
more malleable than they otherwise would have.

Speaker 2 (42:15):
Say more about that, So.

Speaker 3 (42:16):
What I mean by that is, they have allowed themselves
to embody new ways of being, new ways of moving
about in the world in the face of a big change,
which has allowed them to navigate that change with less
anxiety and less fear or you're in the specific case

(42:38):
of the work like less fear of quote irrelevance. So
the story that's screaming out to me is around this
notion of like identity. Specifically, there's this guy named Scott
who I interviewed. He's actually just a colleague of my husband's.
He is in his early thirties, he's a cancer researcher,
he builds breast cancer detection tools, and he's a self

(42:58):
proclaimed health nut. So he's spent the last decade of
his life trying to optimize his life. So I'm talking
intermittent fasting, high intensity interval training, chi as seeds, turmeric,
the whole shebang. And last year in twenty twenty, he
gets a stage four bone cancer diagnosis Jesus that within
weeks leads him to have to amputate his right leg,

(43:23):
move to M d Anderson in Texas, receive eighteen administrations
of chemotherapy and remove a vertebra from a spine and
multiple other surgeries.

Speaker 2 (43:34):
Oh God.

Speaker 3 (43:36):
Now Scott is telling me I have this identity as
a fit person, right as someone who is super healthy
and can conquer the world, and who's got all the
potential in the world. And he said, And I'm sitting
here now, six months into my chemotherapy, having a cup

(43:56):
of coffee, and I'm realizing that maybe these parts of
my identity are more negotiable than I thought. That's the
word that he used.

Speaker 2 (44:09):
Negotiable's the word negotiable.

Speaker 1 (44:10):
Negotiable.

Speaker 2 (44:11):
Wow, Okay, I say more that I'm still.

Speaker 3 (44:13):
Scott at the end of the day, that the things
that I find joy in, I can still find joy in.
I still love that bite of food, I still love
that sound of music. At the moment, I can't walk,
I can't run a marathon. But I'm realizing that Scott
in many ways he was telling me, Brene, that Scott

(44:34):
was bigger, was more robust than maybe the Scott he
had thought he was before. You know that Scott inhabits
a much broader array of wonderful traits and characteristics and ability.

Speaker 2 (44:51):
He's transcended a very small identity.

Speaker 3 (44:54):
He's transcending. So I do want to pay amens to
the fact that he's in the middle of this process
and it's not complete, but he's in the throes of it,
and he's realizing for the first time ever that he
needs to start seeing his identity in this way. And
an another thing that really surprised him is this guy's
worst nightmare came true, right, And he's also sitting there

(45:17):
having this cup of coffee, telling me, I feel like
the psychological thermostat has prevailed, my psychological immune system has prevailed,
because I more or less feel as happy as I
did before. And he said, sure, the lows are lower,
you know, the treatments are deeply uncomfortable. He described having

(45:39):
Civil War pain with the amputation. But I, Scott, feel
whole and I feel more or less again just as happy.
And I am stunned by that because this completely ran
counter to his old model of himself. How Scott would

(45:59):
respond to this experience. And so, look, this is not
everyone's experience with illness or disease or any kind of change,
but it is Scott's experience.

Speaker 2 (46:09):
What a beautiful story. I'm going to send all my
good prayers and just thoughts to Scott in this process,
because what an incredible story of I love how you
caught me and said he's transcending, like he's in process. Yeah,
and sometimes that lasts three days and sometimes at last
thirty years. Sometimes every morning we recommit to transcending, I

(46:32):
think after a big change. So let me ask you
this question. The podcast is fascinating, and you know I
can't help, but as a qualitative researcher or think, what
are the themes and patterns that I'm hearing here that
are saturating across the interviews which you're sharing with us.
Help me reverse engineer into what we can do or

(46:59):
think about on a daily basis to become more malleable,
to become bigger than the identities that we rest in
all often, how can we what's the word I'm looking for,
build resilience to change now as opposed to trying to
build it in the midst of it.

Speaker 1 (47:21):
Yeah, it's a great question.

Speaker 3 (47:23):
I think it is to appreciate what complex ecosystems we
are just by virtue of being human. And the reason
I say that is any given change in our life
doesn't happen in a vacuum. So I think we tend
to think, oh, I'm just going to be I'm going

(47:43):
to be me Maya. But it's as though I'm going
to walk through this magic mirror and this one thing
will have changed about me. But that's not actually a
human's word, no, right, there's all sorts of unexpected spillover
effects on other parts of our lives and our sense
of self that we simply can't predict. And again we

(48:04):
do fall prey to this cognitive fallacy like, oh, you know,
I'm going to change this one thing, but like everything
else is going to stay firmly intact and constant. And
I think when we appreciate that, we won't have the
whole equation figured out. Kind of ironically, it might lead

(48:26):
us to embrace change more than we otherwise would have,
because we're constantly going to surprise ourselves, and we might
surprise ourselves in the wrong direction. So, for example, there
was a woman I interviewed named Elna, and her lifelong
dream was to become thin. She really felt that if
she could lose the weight, all of her big dreams

(48:46):
would come true, and she achieved that goal through very
unhealthy means. In five and a half months, she lost
over one hundred pounds, and for a while there she
did think that she was leaving her dream life until
she started to realize that she was becoming a worse person.
She was actually losing her self confidence. She felt less
emboldened in situations, she felt more judgmental, she felt more superficial.

(49:11):
She was losing these core parts of Elna again that
she felt would almost certainly stay intact. Right again, she's
walking through the magic mirror where she's Elna through and through,
who was before this transition, extremely bold, audacious, outspoken, and
all of a sudden, she feels like she's losing these
parts of herself. And so that's an example where she

(49:31):
was willing what she thought would be a positive change
and then all of a sudden, it turned out to
be a negative one. But then you take Scott's story,
which is he so anticipated that this was going to
be the worst change of his life, and he's now
realizing there's all these positive spillover effects in terms of
how he's developing as a person and how he's seeing himself.

(49:52):
And so that unexpected element, the richness of the change experience,
the multifaceted nature of the change experience, is hopefully more
appealing to people than the black and white model of
change they may be carrying in their minds. It's going
to be hard, but it is going to be transformative
and filled with growth of some kind, and you can

(50:15):
always hold on to that.

Speaker 2 (50:17):
It's powerful. Yeah, I think people don't think about the
physics of systems once small change reverberates in places you
can never even anticipate.

Speaker 3 (50:29):
Absolutely, And look, we know from research, right Brene, like
we are, we're typically very bad cognitive forecasters. We are
terrible at predicting how we will respond emotionally to things.
And look, change circumstances are no different. They're falling into
the same camp.

Speaker 2 (50:46):
Yeah, it's interesting. Just it's really interesting, like change is coming.
Maybe the best thing you can do is get an emotional, spiritual,
physical shape for reverberation.

Speaker 1 (50:55):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (50:56):
You know, another thing that you're making me think of,
just in terms of advice for embracing change, is to
share a personal experience. So in twenty twenty, I was
feeling absolutely overwhelmed by the change that was happening. I mean,
there was the pandemic, there was racial injustice upheaval, there
were personal losses I was experiencing in my own life, miscarriage,

(51:20):
and I just felt overwhelmed and disoriented. I felt like,
all of this is so new, and I don't know
how to manage any of it. But then I put
on my cognitive science hat, and I realized, while the
specifics of what twenty twenty is throwing my way and
throwing our way may be unprecedented, our human ability to

(51:41):
navigate change is absolutely not unprecedented. We've done this rodeo
so many times before as a civilization, as individuals, our
minds are wired for change because it's such a core
part of the human experience.

Speaker 1 (51:57):
And so.

Speaker 3 (51:59):
What that taught me is it is possi it is
possible for us to recruit learnings and insights from our
prior change experiences from other people's change experiences. I mean,
in many ways, this was the genesis for a slight
change of plans. I'm like searching the world for people
with the most fascinating change stories so that I can

(52:19):
learn as much as I can, so listeners can benefit
as much as they can.

Speaker 1 (52:23):
And to see that.

Speaker 3 (52:26):
While you might be intimidated by the specific nature of
the change, don't forget that human psychology can often transcend
those specifics. There are many episodes where people have reached
out to me, and the recent divorcee is finding more
resonance in the cancer patient's story than they are in
a story about someone who's recently divorced, Because again, it's

(52:50):
all about human psychology, it's about how we respond to change,
and so that fills me with optimism at hope for
a few reasons. One, when I'm confronted with a change,
I build my confidence by saying, Maya, you've done this
change thing before, like fear not right. But number two,
try to dissociate yourselves from yourself from the specifics of

(53:12):
the change for just a moment. Try to see it
with some distance and try to figure out what are
the psychological strategies that you can recruit that you've learned
from your own guests on a slight change of plans
to help you navigate this moment. I'm sorry, I'm gonna
get emotional for a second. This played out in my
own life recently, where my husband and I lost identical

(53:37):
twin girls to a miscarriage via surrogacy. So it's our
third pregnancy loss, and it happened recently. It happened like
two months ago. It happened in September, and I was
so overwhelmed again, and I started feeling those things like well,

(53:58):
I haven't gone through this before, you know. And then
I called it my producer and I said, I need
this show right now, like I need a slight change
of plans for me right now. And so he turned
on the mic, and two days later he interviewed me
about my change story, and I shared that with everyone,
and I processed out loud. I did the thing that

(54:20):
I'd asked my guests to do so many times with me,
to be raw and vulnerable and to process their own
change experiences out loud, but I had never done myself.
And as I was doing that exercise, I was realizing
I have learned so much about the psychology of change
from people who have gone through wildly different experiences from

(54:40):
my own than I'm using right now. And one of
those had come from a close friend of mine, Michael Lewis.
He's obviously a extremely famous author and podcaster. He has
a heart of gold, He's an incredible human being, and
the Lewis family tragically lost their daughter. Michael lost his
nineteen year old daughter in a car crash earlier this year,

(55:04):
and Michael and I talk off and but when this happened,
we were talking about grief and he was telling me, Maya,
no one knows sit about grief. Everyone's telling me, you know,
I was visiting his house shortly after the passing of
his daughter. Everyone's telling me how to feel and what
to read and which therapist to see. And then I

(55:25):
should journal this and I should journal. No, that shit's
not working for me. I need to figure out the
Michael Lewis plan. And he figured out his own plan.
He figured out what brings him joy, he figured out
what brings him healing, and he structured his own plan
because he was realizing that a one size fits model
does not work. And so Renee, when I was going

(55:45):
through this traumatic experience of my own, I called upon
that wisdom. I said, I have to create a Maya plan.
What does healing look like for me specifically? And it
turned out healing for me looked like trying to turn
my pain into something good, and that meant sharing my

(56:06):
experience with all my listeners so that the person out
there who has felt stigma around a miscarriage, the person
out there who has felt the pain of loss, can
feel less alone. And so I just feel like we
have so much to learn from one another.

Speaker 2 (56:26):
It is a brave and breathtaking episode.

Speaker 1 (56:31):
Oh wow, I didn't know you'd heard it. Thank you
for that.

Speaker 2 (56:34):
First of all, let me say I'm incredibly deeply sorry
for your miscarriages. That is a huge loss. Was it
hard to be vulnerable and share on the kind of
the quote unquote other side of the microphone.

Speaker 1 (56:48):
It was, and it wasn't.

Speaker 3 (56:49):
In many ways, I saw this sharing as almost the
love letter to my surrogate Haley. We can't work with
her anymore, as I describe in my interview, but sometimes
surrogates can get kind of relegated to the footnotes of
these sorts of experiences. Creating families is complicated and hard,

(57:11):
and sometimes you have the gift of having an amazingly generous,
magnificent woman enter your life who tries to help you
make your dreams happen. And so much of this episode
is about her and how much I love and admire her,
And so that part felt easy, That part felt joyful.
I was sharing with the world about this special person

(57:32):
that I'd gotten to know in this extremely intimate way,
and I wanted everyone to recognize how wonderful she was.
But the parts that were really hard, where that I
was processing several grief layers all at once, and I
myself didn't know what my conclusions were. It's scary to
go into an interview when you don't know what You

(57:53):
don't even know, you know. It's like when I go
to interview my guests, I do my homework Renee, you know,
I spend hours practicing the violin. I'm spreading hours studying
my guests, listening to every interview they'd done. Like I
come prepared, and I did not come to this interview prepared.
I came a total mess. And one thing that was
beautiful about it is I had this really important insight

(58:18):
in real time that I love to share right now
because I do hope it can help others, which is
I think we tend to see life as an outcome
oriented process.

Speaker 1 (58:30):
I do. I have.

Speaker 3 (58:31):
I often see things as achieve the goal. And to
summarize my experience for listeners, we had a surrogate, Haley,
and she was pregnant with our baby and miscarried, and
then she was pregnant with our identical twins and miscarried,
and so we had these losses and we did not
get the outcome that the three of us wanted in

(58:51):
this relationship, and I think the insight that I gleaned
was that life is about more than just achieving outcomes.
It's about creating space that invites these unexpected gifts into
your life. And that gift for me was Haley. And

(59:14):
all I needed to do is just make room for
that and to see that in and of itself is value.
You can not get the end goal, but you can
get so much love and growth in enrichment and humanity
from an experience, and that is enough. And I just
want people to hear that like that, that is enough.

(59:37):
That can be the finish line sometimes and it's really
hard for me to say that sort of thing. I'm
that type a personality, you know, As I mentioned, I'm impatient.
I want the thing to have happened. But this experience
taught me that, like that beautiful relationship that my husband
and I formed with Haley was enough, and it was beautiful.

(59:59):
It was something that I will cherish forever.

Speaker 2 (01:00:03):
The Maya Plan for grief, it sounds like, is a
love base plan.

Speaker 1 (01:00:12):
Yeah, I guess that's right. Never thought about it like.

Speaker 2 (01:00:14):
That, And I don't think there's anything more different than
an outcome based plan than a love base plan.

Speaker 1 (01:00:20):
Yeah, I mean the and and the love.

Speaker 3 (01:00:23):
I was, of course scared like anyone when this was
going out into the world. I didn't know how people
would respond. And Brenee, I have been overwhelmed by the
outpouring of love and care and virtual hugs from all
over the world and people sharing their experiences of loss

(01:00:44):
with me. And it's a loss, a wide ranging loss,
you know, to our earlier point that our circumstances can
be very different, but the same psychology might come into play.
And that is felt like a true silver lining in
all this, to feel in some way like I have
helped people heal. So many people heal, it's been all

(01:01:05):
came Yeah what came back? Wow, well said what came
back with love? And I guess I just didn't know
that I could expect that. And I'm so glad that
that's what came back.

Speaker 2 (01:01:16):
There's so much wisdom that you've shared with us today.
It's really interesting. It's I bet you were really good
in that lab at Stanford, but I'm so glad you're
not there anymore, you know what I mean? Yeah, I mean,
I just there's got to be something core to you

(01:01:38):
that's about connection and love between people. There's just got
to be something there because that's what radiates. I guess,
you know, maybe that's that thing that you were describing
that Ishtuk Pehlman saw.

Speaker 1 (01:01:52):
I love that. I think that's so true. I think
that's so true.

Speaker 3 (01:01:57):
I mean, I'm the one who's like writing these a
fusive love letters to the people that I love in
my life all the time.

Speaker 1 (01:02:03):
They don't get back.

Speaker 2 (01:02:05):
That doesn't surprise me.

Speaker 3 (01:02:07):
They don't hear it enough. I can't hear it enough
because I do feel that effusiveness. I've always wanted to
share that. So I think you nailed it.

Speaker 2 (01:02:16):
Are you ready for some rapid fires?

Speaker 1 (01:02:18):
Oh yeah, okay, let me pivot.

Speaker 2 (01:02:22):
Well, bring your love with you's freeing love? Yeah, fill
in the blank for me. Vulnerability is.

Speaker 1 (01:02:31):
Okay.

Speaker 3 (01:02:32):
I'm saying this from the vantage point of being a
woman in particular, but being willing to admit when you're
good at something.

Speaker 2 (01:02:39):
Hmmm? Does that for everything? Yes? It does. I don't
like it, but it's true. Okay. What's one thing that
people often get wrong about you?

Speaker 1 (01:02:55):
M Okay?

Speaker 3 (01:02:58):
So I'm a petite woman, like five to four in
a good day, five three and three quarters. I mean
you probably talking an abundance of enthusiasm.

Speaker 1 (01:03:07):
Like I tend to have a.

Speaker 3 (01:03:07):
Very cheerful, exuberant, smiley disposition, and I love that about myself,
but I also think it can lead people to underestimate
just how much I'm willing to fight for things and
how much I'm willing to stand up for other people
and to stand up for myself, you know, like I
may be small, but I'm fierce inside for Nay, oh.

Speaker 2 (01:03:28):
Yeah, I mean I yeah, yeah, no, I'm clear on that.

Speaker 1 (01:03:32):
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (01:03:33):
There are many times in government where these older dudes
would kind of be like, oh, Maya the bright eyed,
bushy tailed, energetic woman or girl or whatever they use,
and you know it, say, you know, I could tell
she has big dreams, but I'm not really sure if
she can really make it happen, you know that sort
of thing. And I have resisted dampening the enthusiasm. I

(01:03:55):
won't do it because that is so core to who
I am. So instead I listen, but then I really
show it to them. On the other side, I'm like, Nope, actually,
you can't talk to me like that. Because bullied as
a kid, not willing to be bullied as an adult.

Speaker 2 (01:04:10):
My problem. I would love to observe this just once
with an old white guy, especially just yeah, Okay, what
is one piece of leadership advice that you've been given
that so remarkable you need to share it with us?
Are so shitty you need to warn us?

Speaker 1 (01:04:29):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (01:04:29):
I love these questions. Okay, all right, this one's coming
from my White House boss. Uh, always think like an entrepreneur,
no matter what circumstance you're in. So quick aside, when
I was in the White House, so you know, the
challenge just didn't stop just in getting the job. I'd
made it my goal to build out a whole team
of behavioral scientists, and I didn't have a mandate and

(01:04:51):
I didn't have a budget to do so. So I
couldn't just be like Obama says we should do this.
It was Maya says we should do this. And it
was a really hard, scrappy process moving forward where I
felt like I was building a startup in my parents' basement.
But I really tried He called this policy entrepreneur, So
I really tried to see this job as though I
was creating my own company within the federal government, and

(01:05:13):
I was trying to like do the equivalent of fundraising
and getting quick wins here and there, and it was
a crucial change in mindset.

Speaker 2 (01:05:21):
Yeah, scrappy, hungry. Yeah, I think that's great advice. What
is the hard lesson for you? That the universe just
keeps putting in front of you over and over and
you just have to keep unlearning and relearning.

Speaker 3 (01:05:36):
Oh wow, okay, yeah, okay, I've got one. This is
also recently relevant. So I have like intermittent I have
intermittent vocal strain issues, and it apparently emerges from a
condition in which I get so excited when I talk
I forget to breathe. This is literally what a doctor
told me once. And so what that means is that

(01:05:58):
I can very easily strain my vocal cords. And there
have been long stretches of time where I have had
to be on complete vocal rest. I'm talking like Adell
Celendi style vocal rest. Geez hard, It's very hard. I
felt like this news and meditative maya came out. But
what I learned from that experience was so valuable, Renee,

(01:06:21):
because you really do learn how to be a good
listener in those moments, and because there are moments there
were times where I could talk a little bit but
not a lot. For the first time ever, you could
tell them a total chatterbox, right. I had to be
so judicious about what it is that I chose to

(01:06:44):
say in meetings, in conversations, and it made me, I think,
just a better human being because I tend to talk
in this kind of unfiltered way a lot. I just
say everything that I'm thinking, and it was just, Yeah,
it was just a very different experience for me to
have to really be thought like, is this worth saying?

(01:07:07):
That's a question we should all ask ourselves as leaders.

Speaker 1 (01:07:10):
I can't tell me.

Speaker 3 (01:07:12):
It's like I can say it. I mean, I lead
this team. I can technically say it, But is it
worth saying? I think that's such an important question that
we should ask ourselves.

Speaker 2 (01:07:24):
WHOA, that's a good one. All right, what's one thing
you're really excited about right now?

Speaker 1 (01:07:31):
Okay?

Speaker 3 (01:07:31):
Well, I'm all about the small stuff. So I'm a
vegetarian and this local ramin place that my husband loves
now has a vegetarian faced broth and it will knock
your socks off. In fact, my meat eating husband, well,
he's kind of trying to be vegetarian, but he's like
a pseudo vegetarian. He opts for the vegetarian version over

(01:07:54):
the meat version. That's how good it is.

Speaker 2 (01:07:56):
That's impressive.

Speaker 3 (01:07:58):
Like I love just I mean, you can tell from
my answer, like I love food. I feel like it
was in my it was implicit in my marriage contract
that like I loved food and then I love my
husband second. So that's a well greed upon understanding of
their home.

Speaker 1 (01:08:11):
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (01:08:12):
Absolutely, what's one thing you're deeply grateful for right now?

Speaker 1 (01:08:18):
Oh?

Speaker 3 (01:08:18):
Wow, you know, I'm honestly really grateful for a slight
change of plans that I've created because it was there
for me when I needed it most, Like I need
it as much as it needs me, if that makes sense.
And yes, it is such a gift to have this
artistic endeavor that fuels you on an emotional level. It's

(01:08:39):
like feeding all the parts of my brain from various
parts of my life. It's like there's the musical side
of my brain that's like working on the soundtrack and
actually recorded and I've picked up my violin for the
first time and forever recently, I actually recorded music for
the soundtrack, and just like the artistic qualities of piecing
together an episode. And then there's the cognitive science part

(01:08:59):
of my brain that's weighing in with questions and insights
and everything. And then there's the the human emotion connection part,
which is just like through the roof because I get
to meet these incredible people and so I just it's
hard for me to remember something that I love as
much as this thing. I would wake up as the

(01:09:19):
thirty five year old that I am at four thirty
in the morning on Saturdays for a slight change of plans,
and it's been a while since I felt that way.
It's been Yeah, it's been an utter joy.

Speaker 2 (01:09:30):
I love how you light up when you talk about it.
That's that's that's what we need, all right. We make
mini mixtapes for all of our guests, and we ask
you for five songs you can't live without. This is
what you gave us. The Leaves that are Green My
Simon and Garfunkle, Blinding Lights by Weekend, Forever and Always,

(01:09:51):
Shania Twain, slow Burn, Casey Musgraves, and Halo by Beyonce.
In one sentence, what does this mini mixtape say about you?

Speaker 3 (01:10:01):
Maya one sentence, mm hmm, I'm all about a good hook, says.

Speaker 2 (01:10:11):
The cognitive behavoralist that you gotta tell me that you
thought of this before. Did you come up with this
line right now, sitting right here?

Speaker 1 (01:10:21):
I did. I didn't know this was a question. I
just thought you were gonna load up the mixtape.

Speaker 2 (01:10:27):
Oh my god, that was the best answer. This has
been such a just a joy. Thank you so much
for joining us on Dear to Luis Well.

Speaker 3 (01:10:34):
Thanks for having me, Brene. I love it when an
interview is just a conversation, and that's what this felt like.
So thank you so much for having me.

Speaker 2 (01:10:41):
Yeah, you really radiate love and joy and it's so powerful.

Speaker 3 (01:10:45):
Thank you for saying that. That's the highest compliment that
I can receive. So if I'm giving that off, awesome.

Speaker 2 (01:10:51):
You're giving it off and I'm receiving you can see
my migdala anytime. Let me just say that I hope
y'all enjoyed this conversation as much as I did, and again,
thank you so much for being a part of it.

(01:11:12):
You can find Maya's podcast, A Slight Change of Plans
wherever you like to listen to podcasts. We'll also post
a link to it on the dare to lead episode
page on Brene Brown dot com and if you haven't visited,
we have a brand new Brene Brown dot com. H
It is so beautiful and so many people worked their
asses off. I can't even tell you months and months
and months of sprints and designs and redesigns and testing

(01:11:36):
and it's just it's gorgeous, and I hope y'all love
it as much as I do. You can find Maya
at m A y A s h A n k
R dot com. She's also on Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn,
and we'll have all those links on the episode page
as well. Really appreciate you being here very much. Appreciate

(01:11:57):
you being a part of Dare to Lead. I just
learning by ourselves is not as effective as learning together
and having conversations about what we're trying to learn and
learn and relearn. Thank you, stay awkward, brave and kind, y'all.

(01:12:17):
Dear to Lead is produced by Brene Brown Education and
Research Group. Music is by the Sufferers. Get new episodes
as soon as they're published by following Dear to Lead
on your favorite podcast app. We are part of the
Voxmedia podcast Network. Discover more award winning shows at podcasts
dot voxmedia dot com.

Speaker 1 (01:12:37):
I just got to get out most days.

Speaker 2 (01:12:39):
You see, I like it's good for me. Well we
go ahead, take me to the towns.

Speaker 1 (01:12:47):
I just got to get out those days.

Speaker 2 (01:12:49):
You see this work for me