Google’s cognitive scientist explains the benefits of conducting ‘change audits’

In 2021, Maya Shankar’s podcast, A Slight Change of Plans —which chronicles how we navigate and grow through change—was awarded Best Show of the Year by Apple. So, it may come as a surprise that the cognitive scientist herself is a “huge fan of the status quo” and a self-described creature of habit, even after experiencing a drastic change as a teenager when an injury ended her career as a gifted violinist.



Years later, after serving as a senior advisor in the Obama White House, where she founded and chaired the White House’s first behavioral science team, as well as leading behavioral economics at Google, where she is currently a senior director, it was her personal relationship with change that inspired the show. 



“I realized that it was limiting me and that because change is so inevitable, it was worth trying to embrace the better aspects of it,” she says. “Whether you like it or not, change is coming for you. So, why not figure out what advantages there may be to enduring the change and extract as much value as we can?” 



Four years in, conversations with experts and individuals who share their own stories of change have evolved her perspective. “Before, I felt more like a passive recipient of change, like change is something that happens to me. Now, I see it more as a relationship that I have, where there’s a dynamic back and forth, and my own inputs inform that evolution and process as well,” she says. “So, what change can do is it can unlock a greater understanding of self as we run up against new challenges and, in the process, accelerate our understanding of who we are and what we’re capable of.”



In our conversation, Shankar shares practices to thrive through change by building a relationship with our future self, managing our internal narrative, and conducting change audits to identify how we’ve grown. 



In your episode with psychologist Hal Hershfield, you discussed the complex dynamics of our relationship with our future self. Through the lens of behavior change and achieving your goals, how do you approach your relationship with your future self? What commitment devices help with that? 



For a lot of people, the challenge is that they’re living with their present selves in mind; It’s hard for them to imagine the consequences for their future selves of their current actions and behaviors. I have the opposite problem, which is I’ve been living the future version of Maya for as long as I can remember; Only in recent years have I made the adjustment to remember that there is a present Maya who needs attending to. The joy of that conversation is that we could discuss where any given person falls on this continuum of how much time they spend thinking about the present versus the future. There’s some happy middle ground in there. 



For those who struggle to empathize with their future self, oftentimes the investments we make in our future selves only pay off later. You don’t get that immediate reward in present day of reading a book or calling a friend versus scrolling on Instagram. So, Hal proposes a few ideas. He uses a commitment device, which is quite fun. He has two young kids and knows that during dinner time he can be distracted. He really wants to be present for them because he understands that in the longer term, his future self will appreciate this investment in building these childhood memories for his kids and having been a present dad. So, every night when he comes home, he has this little box that he locks his phone in, so it’s inaccessible to him for the two-hour period of dinnertime plus bedtime rituals. It’s impossible for him to break the code on that. That kind of preemptive commitment [and] discipline can lessen whatever temptations we feel in the present moment and allow us to be very intentional as we go about our day to say: What would my future self appreciate? And, what rules can I impose on myself so that I can actually achieve those longer-term goals?  



We have the best versions of ourselves that we can imagine, but it’s okay if we need to nudge ourselves occasionally through these tactics, because it is really hard to avoid checking your phone or doing the thing that’s more immediately enjoyable. Understanding that we all have these weaknesses, and designing our lives accordingly, is not a sign of weakness. It’s a sign that we are building our understanding of what we as humans are really like into the way that we design our days. 



During your interview with Ethan Kross, you explored how to navigate the conversations we have with ourselves, which is an essential part of the change process. How do you shift the narrative around a change that you may be resistant to into a generative one? 



Ethan says that mental chatter is when our ability to introspect turns harmful and we get stuck in negative mental loops. I totally fall prey to mental chatter. The tricky part about chatter is that when you’re in it, it puts blinders on you and you think: This is the most important and urgent problem to solve in the universe. Ethan gives this wonderful analogy of being on a hamster wheel, where chatter makes you believe that when you’re obsessing over your thoughts, you’re making progress, when in actuality you’re not. One of the solutions for this is what’s called distancing. It’s a process of zooming out and trying to see your situation from a third-person perspective. This can take many forms. One of my favorite techniques is what’s called mental time travel, where you imagine how you’ll feel about some problem in the future. So, you can imagine: Right now at 3 a. m., I’m obsessing over this challenge I’m having at work. How am I going to feel about this six hours from now? How am I going to feel about this six weeks from now? How am I going to feel about this six years from now? Sometimes that distance can remind us how temporary the circumstances are and how things can change. 



You can also travel to the past for some degree of reassurance. You can identify moments where you found yourself to be a lot more resilient than you expected. I find this very helpful because sometimes when I ask myself: How am I going to feel about this problem six weeks or six years from now? I worry that I might feel the same way because, again, this thing feels so urgent and catastrophic. So, what can be helpful is when I mine my past for examples where I felt that exact way about a different problem, but eventually found some peace or resolution around it. Then, at least I have one data point showing that I’m bad at cognitive forecasting; I was wrong at predicting what was going to happen in my own brain. 



How can we process change together in a constructive way, as opposed to venting, which isn’t productive? 



When we’re working through our problems, it can feel tempting to unload everything onto the person you’re talking to. If they’re a compassionate person, they’re going to meet you with an appropriate amount of empathy and understanding. When in actuality, what we might need is for someone to provide an alternative way of thinking about our problem. This, again, goes back to Ethan Kross’s work. He talks about having what he calls a cognitive board of advisors; These are people who will challenge your point of view or allow you to see something through a new lens or angle. What I talked about with him on A Slight Change of Plans is that sometimes there’s value in being very overt and explicit at the outset of a conversation with someone about what your goals are. You might say: Look, all I want is to vent and for you to give me empathy and compassion . That might not be super productive long term, but maybe you have that emotional need and need to get it out. But, then you might say: I’m going to do that as part one, but then part two of the conversation, I really want to turn productive. I want you to help me get that fly on the wall perspective on my own problems, because I’m too mired in them to see things through a more objective lens. So, you can enable your peers, mentors, or support system to play the role of the distancers. 



In a past interview, you shared that we should care what people think and constantly invite people to share feedback with you. How do you create space for your team to be honest?



There’s a delicate balance here, but I think that other people can give us wonderful insight into our weaknesses and the ways that we can grow and improve. I pride myself on not being prideful in the work context. I’m very eager to point out times when I’ve been wrong about something; To say very explicitly that the other person has made a really good point, I’m updating, and that I was incorrect. I want to role-model for my team that it’s an environment where admitting to mistakes, failures, or weaknesses is celebrated because that’s how we get better, faster. So, I’m very open to people’s comments and criticisms. I often invite members of my team to share feedback with me. 



As I said, there’s a balance. You need to be selective about the criticisms and feedback you take. You should have a filter you send that through. This is one of the things I was talking about in my podcast with Adam Grant—how you filter through feedback—and that sometimes I’ve had the problem of over indexing on all the feedback I get. So, the filtering process can be an important part of it. But, over time, I feel that there’s a huge advantage when you have a more flexible relationship with the ideas you hold, and when you’re open to entertaining new ways of thinking. That doesn’t mean that you’re not principled. It means that in the face of new information or evidence, you’re willing to update your point of view. I’ve always admired and respected people who are willing to do that, and I aspire to be that way myself. I see strength when I see people updating their opinions for sound reasons .  



What is the value of doing a change audit and how have they led to new realizations about yourself?



It’s interesting because when we predict how we will respond to any given change, research does show that we tend to get it wrong. We’re bad at what’s called affective forecasting. In part, that’s because we don’t always do a good job of predicting future states. But, it’s also because when we imagine a future situation, we tend to imagine what our present day selves will be like in that new situation. There’s research by Dan Gilbert showing that we greatly underestimate how much we’ll change in the future. This is called the End of History Illusion, where we fully acknowledge that we’ve changed considerably in the past, but we also [continually] trick ourselves into believing that who we are right now is the person that’s here to stay. This is the end destination. 



Reminding ourselves that when we experience a change, that change transforms us internally, can be quite a hopeful message. It means that we’re not going to be limited to who we are in present day when we navigate that change. It means that we might tap into unexpected parts of ourselves or develop new skills we didn’t know we were capable of. All of that richness and development can actually lead us to be far more resilient in the face of a change than we might otherwise expect. I see a lot of hopefulness in that message, which is: Let’s say I’m experiencing a really destabilizing change. I can have that hope in the back of my mind, which is: It’s not just present day me battling the situation. It’s future me, and future me might be wiser, more enlightened, and have a new set of perspectives that I simply can’t imagine in present day. We sometimes forget that in navigating a change, we too will change. It’s not just our external environment that’s changing. It’s altering us.