Scripting Change

To be an effective learner, you must have a growth mindset – meaning you must be comfortable with change and all it brings to you.

Recently, I watched Maya Shankar, host of the podcast “A Slight Change of Plans’ deliver a TED talk on “Why Change is So Scary – and How to Unlock its Potential.” Here are excerpts from Maya’s talk:

“…change is scary for a lot of us, am I right? For one, it is filled with uncertainty, and we hate uncertainty. Research shows that we’re more stressed when we’re told we have a 50 percent chance of getting an electric shock than when we’re told we have a 100 percent chance. It’s wild, right? I mean, we’d rather be sure that a bad thing is going to happen than have to deal with any uncertainty. Change is also scary because it involves loss of some kind. By definition, we’re departing from an old way of being and entering a new one. And when we experience a change that we wouldn’t have chosen for ourselves, it’s easy to feel that our lives are contracting, that we’re more limited than before.”

“But when we take this perspective, we fail to account for an important fact. That when an unexpected change happens to us, it can also inspire lasting change within us. We become different people on the other side of change. What we’re capable of, what we value and how we define ourselves, these things can all shift. And if we can learn to pay close attention to these internal shifts, we may just find that rather than limiting us, change can actually expand us.”

“…today I’m going to share with you three questions you can ask yourself the next time life throws you that dreaded curveball. In the moment, I know it’s so easy to focus on what you’ve lost. And so I’m really hoping that you can use these questions as tools to discover all that you might gain.”

“…let’s start with question number one. This is inspired by a conversation I had on my podcast with a woman named Christine Ha, and it’s about out capabilities. Christine was 24 when a rare autoimmune disease left her permanently blind. At the time, she was learning to cook the Vietnamese dishes that she had loved in childhood. But now cooking even simple meals was tough. She told me that her frustration peaked one day when she was making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. She struggled to align the two slices of bread and sticky jelly dripped all over her hands and onto the counter. She threw the sandwich into the trash, and she felt really defeated by the limited future that she imagined for herself. Since Christine lived alone though, she had no choice but to keep at it. She remembers her delight when she successfully cut an orange for the first time and when she scrambled an egg without burning it. As she spent more hours in the kitchen, she realized that cooking was far more multi-sensory than she had thought. While she couldn’t see if the garlic had browned, she could rely on the smell and the sizzling sounds in the pan. But Christine also realized something bigger. Something new was emerging within her.”

“At the start of her vision loss she had cooked just to get by. I mean, it was really just a practical thing. But now she was thrilled by the challenge of it all. She tackled harder and harder recipes over the years and eventually became the first-ever blind contestant on the TV show “Master Chef.” And guess what? She won the entire damn thing.”

“…This brings us to the first question that you can ask yourself the next time you face something unexpected. ‘How might this change change what you’re capable of?’ When we predict how we’ll respond to any given change, we tend to imagine what our present-day selves will be like in that new situation. Research by the psychologist Dan Gilbert shows that we greatly underestimate how much we’ll change in the future, even though we fully acknowledge we’ve changed considerably in the past. Our psychology continually tricks us into believing that who we are, right now, in this very moment, is the person that’s here to stay. But the person meeting the challenges after an unexpected change will be different. You will be different…”

“…let’s move onto the second question. This one is about our values, and it’s inspired by a conversation I had with a science journalist named Florence Williams. One evening about five years ago, Florence and her husband were hosting a dinner party for their friends. AS she was preparing the salad, her husband handed her his phone so that she could read an email from a relative. But he’d mistakenly pulled up the wrong email. What Florence saw instead was a lengthy note from her husband, confessing his love to another women. Florence’s 25-year marriage came to an end, and she told me that she was taken aback by the physical and emotional intensity of her heartbreak. She said it felt like she’d been plugged into a faulty electrical socket. Since Florence is a problem solver by nature, she instinctively saw her heartbreak as a problem to solve and developed a year-long systematic plan to try and fix it. …But by the end of the year, [nothing] had healed her broken heart. And so Florence had no choice but to entertain a new philosophy altogether. Maybe a broken heart was not a problem to solve. And maybe closure wasn’t the answer. Research by the psychologist Dacher Keltner shows that when we reduce our need for what’s called cognitive closure, the desire to arrive at clear and definitive answers, our capacity to feel joy and beauty expands. Florence told me that when she freed herself from this goal-oriented mindset, a mindset, by the way, that she had valued for so much of her life up until this point, she began to find unexpected delight in the unknown.”

“This leads us to the second question you can ask yourself the next time you face something unexpected. How might this change change what you value? The unexpected implosion of Florence’s marriage has permanently shifted the way that she sees her life. From a puzzle in need of solutions to a more serendipitous path of discovery.”

“Alright, now on to question number three. This one is about how we define ourselves. It’s about our self-identities. And it comes from my personal story of change with the violin. When [an] injury took the violin aways from me, I found myself grieving not just the loss of the instrument, but also the loss of myself. For so long, the violin had defined me, that without it, I wasn’t sure who I was or who I could be. I felt stuck. I later learned that this phenomenon is known as identity paralysis. It happens to a lot of us when we face the unexpected. Who we think we are and what we’re about is suddenly called into question. But I since realized that there was something different, something more stable that I could have anchored my identity to.”

“And this brings us to that third and final question. How might this change change how you define yourself? When I re-examine my relationship with the violin, I discovered that what I really missed wasn’t the instrument itself, but the fact that music had given me a vehicle for connecting emotionally with others. I remember as a little kid playing for people and feeling kind of awestruck that we might all feel something new together. What this means for me today is that I no longer anchor my identity to specific pursuits like being a violinist or a cognitive scientist or a podcaster. Instead, I anchor my identity to what lights me up about those pursuits, what really energizes me. And for me, it’s a love of human connection and understanding. I now define myself not by what I do, by why I do it.”

…

Three questions for young learners in training to become their own learners:

How might this change change what you’re capable of?

How might this change change what you value?

How might this change change how you define yourself?

Powerful questions. I’ve heard coaches and fine art directors ask questions like these to kids. Math teachers? Not so much.

But what if these three questions served as filters for young learners as they maneuvered through change? How could we make the lives of our young learners different?

Til tomorrow. SVB