Pushkin Hay Slite Changers. When I was thinking about a launch event for my new book, The Other Side of Change, the person I most wanted to be in conversation with was social scientist Brenee Brown. Brene's research has shaped how millions of us think about concepts like shame, vulnerability, and resilience, and her expertise felt so relevant to the themes of the Other Side of Change, and so when I asked Renee and she said yes, I was of course elated.
She hosted a virtual conversation to an audience of early readers of the book on the night before it was published. We covered so much ground and it truly felt like the conversation could go on for hours. It was a peak memory for me, and so I wanted to share it with all of you in the slight Change community. I hope you enjoy. Okay, now over to Brenee. Hey friend, Hey, Renee, how you doing.
I have read, I have learned. I have to tell you that I will. Oh, my name's on the front. Let's read what I say about the Other Side of Change. I say a rare combination of beautiful storytelling, cognitive science, and wholehearted wisdom. I am going to confirm this is true. I freaking love this book.
Thank you so much. That means so much to me. Oh my gosh, I love it.
And let me just tell you that I don't know how you thought of this appendix where you go through like every chapter, what the science says, what you can do. I mean, I'm going to make a bot out of this, and I'm going to name it my therapist name, and then I'm just going to live in the appendix. Okay, sorry for everybody that's joined. I'd like to use this
as my personal therapy session because it's that good. I'm going to read an introduction, which is kind of weird because Mysen Kursker and we all know her author, podcast creator, host, cognitive scientist. Her podcast A Slight Change of Plans one of my favorites, named best show of the Year by Apple, deservedly like the appendix. She served as a Senior policy advisor in the Obama White House, where she founded and
chaired the Social and Behavioral Sciences Team. She was also appointed as the first Behavioral Science Advisor to the un She has a BA from Yale, a PhD from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and completed a post doctoral fellowship in cognitive neuroscience at Stanford. Let me just skip to the part where she's a total badass but then writes in a way that we can actually understand, feel not alone, and make great changes. So you want to start with
a rapid fire, I do. Okay, what have you binged lightly that you loved?
Oh? Heated rivalry. My husband was like, my wife has departed the building because I just was watching the show obsessively all of last week. I'm like, you know, there is a book launched, a prep form, but I'm like, there are more important matters here. Okay, I need to know how this ends.
I mean, life made other plans.
Yeah, very important plan for Shane.
And yeah, I'm obsessed. I've seen it.
You know that the real life Ilia is from Texas. Yessian accent is Yes, I was so impressed. I really thought the dude was Russian.
So, oh my god, it's so good. It's such I love it. It's a great, a great love story. So I've seen it twice. I'm with you, Okay, favorite meal. I love Mexican food, so Enchilada's.
Cheese Andilada's chicken.
Enchiladasila's vegetarian.
Oh vegetarian, okay, cheese inchiladas.
I'm sorry, what about you?
I'm gonna get I'm not vegetarian. I don't no heat in the chat, but I'm gonna probably have a beefihita. But I will join you for a cheese inchilada as well.
Nice.
You can have that mine, thank you.
I'll take it and some welcome oley and chips of course, and icy.
Ideal superpower.
Sleeping on airplanes. That's how you know you turned forty. I turned forty to Zever, it used to be like to fly to read other people's minds, and now I'm like, I would like to have high quality sleep when I travel.
Official, if we're gonna, if we're gonna go with that, I'll go for risk free hrt oh nice.
Okay, yeah, that is what everyone's talking about these days. Okay, I'm that too, Yeah, yeah, okay. One song that would have to be on the playlist of your life. Oh my gosh. The Alex weren Ordinary song just took my breath away.
That's how I can give you goosebumps a little bit.
He's like twenty early nighties, I know, and he's the oldest soul. So I'm at my brother's apartment. I was just dancing to that song with my nephew. So it really transcends generations because he's eight and he's like, oh, Maya, I love that song. Maya. You and I have such similar music taste. And I was like, that's the coolest anyone's ever thought. I was in that age group, So this is great.
He he wants to be cool like you. I love this.
Okay, we've got to get into the book because I have a lot of questions, and then we're going to get some audience questions, which is really exciting. So let's talk about from the I feel like I know you, but I want everybody to know you like I know you. So I'm going to back it way up and say, tell me about tell all of us about what inspired you to write the book.
So I should start off by saying I never planned to write a book. I was happy to go to my grave not having written a book. And when I started a slight change of plans, I really doubled down on this. I was like, the podcast is giving you what I need, and so no book, no book, no book. And then something happened where I think I had done maybe fifty or sixty episodes of a Slight Change, and I started to notice these very interesting connections across stories,
and I wasn't expecting to find them. But there was one story in particular I talk about in the book where I just interviewed a young thirty something who had been diagnosed with stage four cancer, and I'd also interviewed a woman who found out that her late husband had cheated on her for decades, and they were both reckoning
with a similar feeling of betrayal. And I was like, oh, wow, there is something very universal about the way that we're navigating these changes in ways that transcend the exact topic, the exact issue. Andre and I just felt like in our society, when we're going through hard stuff, people direct us towards the area of interest. So I'm like, you know, if I'm saying I'm having a tough time at work, Oh, I have a friend who you know recently been laid off,
you should talk to them. I'm going through divorce. Oh, actually my friend went through divorce. Oh I've lost a loved one. Go to the bereef part of the bookstore that's sort of the generic advice, which is you need to find people whose stories look like yours. And I was having these insights from collecting the wisdom of my guests that no, actually we share a similar psychology. You don't need to find people whose stories look like yours.
There are lessons that will emerge irrespective of what you're going through, that are relevant for all of us. And so I felt like a book was the only medium through which I could connect and combine new stories that people hadn't heard on the podcast, which is primarily what the other side of changes, and then illuminate those universal
lessons that sat within the stories. And so this was truly a passion project because again, like didn't want to write a book, but felt compelled to write a book, which is sort of the best way to go about this process because it is not for the faint hearted, as I learned, No, And.
I think I just have to say, on behalf of everyone that's here, I'm grateful that you did that, because one of the things I love about your podcast is sometimes what I'm in a hard place, especially I mean, yeah, I mean I was going to say I was going to talk about a hard place that I'm struggling with right now because it's I've got a daughter getting married and a mom that died, you know, earlier than I thought, and I'm wrestling with the fact that she's not going
to be at the wedding. But none of the stories that helped me understand myself in the book were about grief and death. They were about other types of losses and other kinds of changes of plans. So I'm going to say you're a really good qualitative researcher, which might hurt your heart, but that.
Doesn't It really doesn't. I mean, as an academic, to your point, people are like quality stuff, narrative storytelling, but I have been humbled. I mean, the power of stories is immense, and I will I will go to that for qualitative research and storytelling. I'm a full on convert.
Okay, y'all, y'all are hearing it here, first team, heated rivalry team, qualitative research. I always used to say that stories are just data with the soul, like it's just you know, they're really important data. Let's go to your childhood dream of being a violinist, share that story with everyone and how that changed how you thought about change, And I would love for you to speak to something that I have learned from you, and I look for it immediately in my own life when I'm struggling, and
I help my kids with it too. How it impacted the way you thought of your idea?
Long story short, My childhood was fully centered around the violin. When I was six, my mom went up to our attic and brought down my grandmother's violin that she had played as a little girl in Burma and India. And I was so close to my grandmother. I mean when I would go to India in the summers, we were inseparable. I would stand next to her in the kitchen when she was cooking food. I would sit next to her in prayer physician when she like meditated and did prayers
to the Hindu gods for hours. I would sleep next to her on the linoleum floor with clothes, our pillows. I just felt a natural gravitation towards her. And so when my mom, I'm the youngest of four kids, offered me the chance to play the violin, I was like, yes,
that's what our grandmother did. You know. We were separated by thousands of miles, so I wanted anything to feel close to her, and it was like a magnet because my parents had to tell me to do lots of stuff, but for some reason, they never had to tell me to practice, which was kind of astonishing for them, like what six year old wants to practice the violin? Right? But I really did and I didn't have to be pressured at all, and so I start to develop big dreams.
I get accepted at Juilliard, the world renowned violinist. It saw Pearlman invites me to be his private student. I mean, it feels like it was a different lifetime ago, Brene. But I think like when Pearlman takes me out as a student that I might have the opportunity to go pro. It was sort of the vote of confidence that I needed to get outside of my imposter syndrome and to really believe I had it. And so everything was going according to plan until my slight change of plans, acute
hand injury ended my dreams in a moment. I was at summer camp. I was fifteen years old. I was also very very stubborn, very much in denial, kept playing through pain, had surgeries, alternative treatments, kept performing. I just I couldn't let the violin go, and I think I've only realized in recent years that the reason for that is my entire sense of worth and well being identity was entangled with the instrument, and so in losing the violin, I wouldn't just be losing an instrument. I would be
losing myself. And that just felt way too threatening. Not only did I feel such deep connection to it, but it was also filling these voids I felt in my life. So I was teased and bullied a lot as a kid. I was one of a few brown kids in a predominantly white school. The girls in my neighborhood were so cruel. At the lunch table one day, this one girl was like, you are so ugly, it's painful for me to look at you, and then just got up and left and
went to another table. By the way. Like a decade or two later, she saw my wedding photos and she was like stunning, And I'm like, where was that? Yeah, when I was in middle school.
There's two we have in common, folks. I'm going to keep it clean, but no.
Yeah, I digress. This is not relevant to the book. I just clearly haven't healed from my childhood with now I'm with you, let's go anyway. So I was teased a lot, but then when I went to Julia, I felt so at home because it was a very international group, so they embrace me for my indian ness and like
it just didn't seem to matter. And So what I learned from that experience, and it's taking me a long time, is that we so often anchor our self identities to what we do, to the roles or labels that we occupy. So that could be being a violinist, it could be being an athlete, it could be being a mom, head of the PTA, whatever it is that tends to be how we affiliate, and having those identities can bring our lives lots of meaning and purpose and stave off existential angst.
But the downside is that when life does throw you a curveball, it can threaten that thing and that can be very destabilizing. And so I have learned that it's really helpful to expand our self identity to include not just what we do, but why we do that thing. So I asked myself, what was it that I loved about the violin Emotional connection? That is what I that is what makes me light up that's what makes mya tick.
Just because I lost the violin didn't mean that I lost what led me to love it in the first place. That part of me was actually still intact. So even though I felt I'd lost everything, I actually hadn't, And it was just a matter of finding other outlets through which to express this very fundamental desire, which was to emotionally connect with people. And I have through my book the other side of change. I have through my podcast
a slight change of plans. There are other ways to figure out how to express your why, and it'll give you a softer landing when you do that, because it can serve as a compass. And one thing that was so unexpected about the book is the final chapter ended up being memoir. It turned out I was going through my own unexpected changes as I was writing the book, and as I was contending with the fact that my
hopes of becoming a mom weren't coming true. I actually had to ask myself those same set of questions when it came to motherhood. What was I craving from parenthood and could I find some of those traits and features elsewhere? So, yeah, I would encourage everyone who's listening to us right now, ask yourself what your why is, because life can't take that away from you. You can hold on to that in these crisis moments.
I love the story so much with your grandmother because I had a similar relationship with my grandmother. I was writing down words when you were telling this story and when I was hearing it again. You know, it wasn't just identity. It's belonging, yes, history, connection, worth. It's these things that are so huge and fundamental to being human
that we thumbtack to things we can't control. Where those things live inside of us, you know, and you thumbtack them to an event or an instrument or a role, And none of those things, over the course of a lifetime, can hold the weight of what we're talking about here, Do you know what I mean? Like, yes, they're so well said, hold the weight. That's exactly right. I mean, I learned this lesson too from Olivia. The first chapter turns out she's putting all of her self worth in
the opinions of others. You and I talked about this, and you're on a slight change of plans. We know how far that gets you? Yeah, we know how tenuus that relationship is.
Yeah, that is the ultimate thumb sack word.
Exactly, and she becomes locked in. She is literally unable to move any part of her body other than her eyes, and she can only blink to communicate with the world. Talk about a surrendering to the rawness of who you are because you can no longer curate any version of yourself for other people that you think is palatable. You're literally locked in. And so you're exactly right. You should ask yourself how much weight could this thing hold of my identity? And is it possible that I can put
more eggs and more baskets? And is it possible that I can diversify the loved? And by the way, it can be very uncomfortable to do this. I remember on the night of the second miscarriage where my husband Jimmy, and I found out that our surrogate and miscarried twins. We were just beside ourselves with grief, right, and I remember Jimmy came into the bedroom and said, Maya, let's just say a few things were grateful for And I was like, oh, hell nah, I'm not doing a gratitude
exercise right now. Jimmy, you take your Instagram nonsense and your toxic positivity. You go to the corner and you do the gratitude exercise. Okay, I'm lying here, miserable with the covers over me. And then he like kind of wore me down. I was like, okay, fine, I'll just do it. If anything, just like get him off my case. And he was like so sweet and earnest. So I also felt bad. And what I started to do, actually, he's a software engineer. He unknowingly was engaging me in
a self affirmation exercise. And what is a self affirmation exercise. It's when you list all the things that bring your life meaning and purpose and value that are not being threatened by the chain going through. And what that does is it staves off denial. It makes the stakes less high, and it makes you more okay with accepting your reality. So I start rattling off my list. I'm like, I'm so grateful to be an aunt to my sixties's nephews. I'm so grateful to host a slight change of plans.
I have the best listeners in the world. They write me these love letters all the time. I'm so grateful to gossip about the Bachelor with my fitness trainer, all these things. And it was like magic Brene, because I felt myself zooming out on my life right sizing what I was going through, I realized I developed tunnel vision. I was so laser focused on motherhood that nothing else
that seemed to matter for the last few years. And I suddenly saw, Oh my god, my life is so full of rich and meaningful identities I'd just forgotten.
Oh my god, I just love the Jimmy story. It's so great that he's still alive.
I mean, hij hi, Jimmy, we love you, We love you, Jimmy. M What is You know what I think of when I you know, as a social scientist, you know what I think of when I think about what Jimmy did. I think about the three p's, Like, this is not pervasive in every corner of my life. This is not permanent, and this is not personal. What is the what is the neuroscience of.
That?
Like that swallow us whole hole that we go into where we have no periphery at all.
Yeah, do you know what I mean?
Where I it seems like what Jimmy had you engage in actually created a vision beyond that.
It's classic focusing illusion from behavioral economics. That's what's happening. We've zoomed in our camera.
That is exactly what's happening, yeah.
To us. Yeah, so when we focus, when we so just literally imagine that everyone on this call, you have a camera and you press the zoom buttons so far it's literally getting blurry. But that's what our minds do in this moment of crisis, right, we literally forget that there is any background where so laser focused in. And interestingly, what happens when we have this focusing illusion where all we see is this little spot And for some person
this is an illness. For another person's the divorce. For me, it was the miscarriage. You will assign it massive significance, the exclusion of everything else in your life that could have meeting. And then something we were talking about before this call. It's like the starter kit for roomen. That is where rumination begins. You've zoomed in so closely to the problem and you just start going over it and over it and over it. We both talked about this
in Advanced Guys. We both have PhDs in rumination. Yeah, I devote a whole chapter to it in the book.
Yeah, and I've devoted like thirty years to it personally, Like I have every tag on here is like I have a rumination question. Wait, define rumination for us. Talk about why it's so hard on us, I mean, and also the new research are not just emotionally hard, but physically hard in our bodies, and then talk to us about the relationship between all in rumination.
Yes, So rumination happens often in the aftermath of change because in the face of so much uncertainty, which we know our brains are not wired to enjoy. My favorite study shows that we're more stressed when we're told we have a fifty percent chance of getting an electric shock than when we're told we have a one hundred percent chance. So we'd rather be sure bad things going to happen than to have to grapple with any ambiguity. I resonate
with this fully. I'm like, bring on the shocks, tell me out the story, and I cannot deal with that anticipatory anxiety, right, but.
Lock that shit down, yes, and get it over with, Just get it.
Over with exactly. And so we have these regrets or anxieties or worries or catastrophic thoughts about the future, whatever it is, and we just start, almost like on a hamster wheel, we start just running in circles. That's the analogy that Ethan Cross, one of the researchers who studies this uses, And you all know this feeling. You wake up at three in the morning, let's say you had
a negative interaction with your coworker. You can't get them out of your head, and you keep thinking you're making progress as you think through this, but you end up in exactly the same place over and over and over again. It is so maddening. And I had actually a version of this when I was in college. So the final chapter, I think people know from a slight change of plans one part of my path to motherhood story, which was the fertility surrogacy part, they don't actually know the story
that predates it. And I'm actually very excited for people to read this part because I never thought I would share that. It was very, very hard for me to write, but I actually developed an obsessive worry when I was seventeen years old about my future kids suffering, and I would just endlessly loop in my dorm room over and over again about all the ill fates they could experience.
It could be you know, what if they, you know, one day, experience massive debilitating depression, what if the experience of hate crime. Like I was just going through all the things, by the way, while everyone else was like getting ship faced and go yeah, I was like thinking about the future of humanity and how my children might hypothetical children would prosper, super cool, super fun friend. You guys would have all loved me in college obviously. But
here's the thing about rumination. We don't get to choose what our brains obsess over, and that's what's so annoying about it. It will just find you. And then one of the reasons I devote a whole chapter to it is that there are very effective strategies for us to actually break that obsessive loop and to forge what psychologists
call psychological distance between you and your current preoccupations. So one of my favorite, very easy to do strategies is to invite awe inspiring experiences into your life, so we can feel awe in the presence of anything that is
vast and that transcends our understanding of the world. The obvious ones are music, art, nature, but my favorite one that I feel doesn't get recognized enough and deserves to be at the front of the line is moral beauty, and that's when we just witness other extraordinary acts that human beings engage in. It could be their kindness or self sacrifice, or their courage, or the resilience in the
face of illness, whatever it is. It violates our assumptions about what humans are capable of and the best way possible, and in turn rewires our brains and makes us see what maybe we are capable of. It gives us that
incredible capacity for imagination around our potential. And so what aud does is that it dampens the parts of the brain that are associated with self immersion, like the ego eparts the default mode network, and in doing so, in dampening neural activity, it allows us to step outside of our individual wants and needs and anxieties. Oh, we get the necessary perspective we need. We are able to see our problems with a little bit more clarity and objectivity. And I want to hear how it worked for you.
I've tried it twice, and I tried two different things. I looked at Steve and I said at the end of last year and said I need to go fishing, and he's like, and we're big Gulf Coast South Texas fisher people, and where the sunset goes on for miles and it's just incredible.
And I was so deep in rumination.
I was almost having a little bit of a hard time getting out of bed, because you tackle, you tackle another word that's a really as an emotional someone who stays emotional granularity. Despair the belief that today will tomorrow will be just like today is the way I define it.
And so I was in some moderate despair.
And we went and I watched that sunset and it was it literally melted my rumination. This was this was deeply meaningful for me. And the second time I caught myself ruminating, I couldn't get to the Gulf Coast. But I listened to Bergheim, the new album, and yeah, just with my headphones on in the dark, and I was like, I don't know, there's something about I studied Awe for
Atlas of the Heart. There's something that is such a counterintuitive relief about being small in the vastness of beauty, that hey, I have to be honest with you.
It reminds me of you.
It does, it really does there's something vast about your beauty, so there is. And there's something incredible about how you lay out a landscape of pain and possibility that's bigger than you. So it's yeah, yeah, we can cry if we want. Okay, we're getting we're getting questions, so no, I know. Okay, So we've got a question from Andrea. What's the best thing we can do to help a friend or loved one who's in the midst of unexpected change and struggling to get to the other side of it.
It's a great question.
That's such a good question. Don't impose your own mental framework onto the other person.
Wa wait, wait, wait, wait, Okay, I'm going to stop you because this is so important defined before you go forward. What a mental framework is, Yeah, and how you might have one and your friend who's in struggle might have one.
Yeah. We have pretty quickly an immediate vision of what would make us feel better if we were in that person's situation, and we like empathy to be shown to us in a very particular way. We have a clear understanding of what we would want, and I think a lot of the time we don't do the cognitive work of trying to figure out what would pacify or help the other person think more constructively given the way that their brain is wired, and so providing support for that
person first requires really deep, deliberate listening. My instinct too, is like, let me just throw a bunch of solutions your way. Oh you're the other the other fifteen other things. And you know, we know there's different types of empathy, right, we know there's empathic concern and cognitive empathy and emotional empathy. You have to figure out how to step outside of yourself and understand that this person has had a totally different life experience than you've had. They have a different
way of responding to trauma. Potentially their needs in this moment might even be different from their needs yesterday. So first just listen and then try to do the diagnosis part or the helping part.
I think that's beautiful. I had my sister.
My sister and I have this question we ask each other because we really assume the same mental framework because we're sisters.
And so now we just say what does love look like right now?
And she'll say, I don't want any of your bullshit advice, but I want you to bring me a cheesy cast a role, leave it at the door and don't even knock because I don't want to see your face. I'm like, Okay, gotcha, I'm interested. Yeah, but it's almost like I never thought about it, Untilly, you just said this so smart. I almost struggle more with people that I'm closer to because I assume more familiarity with mental with the mental model.
Does that make sense? Oh?
One hundred percent? And sometimes it's even worse than that. For me, I'm prescriptive about it. I want them to see their problem in a certain way. I'm so annoyed when they don't see it the way I see it. So I can be I have to be very careful to not be sanctimonious as I'm giving them advice or even you know, this is how you should see it, and this is the thing that should make you feel better. Thank you very much. I'm done.
You're up in my number one ineogram, like, not only do I have the solution for your problem, but I'd like to define the problem for you. Okay, this is from Elizabeth. How do you distinguish between healthy real time emotional processing and maladaptive rumination? Damn, Elizabeth, as I'm gonna read it again, how do you distinguish between healthy real time emotional processing and maladaptive rumination, and what evidence based practices help people day On the productive side of that line,
her sign off is great, and you're already in our club. Sincerely, a chronic intellectualizer.
Elizabeth is smart AF That's a fantastic question. And the line, by the way, is very, very blurry. And I have found myself in my adult life not always knowing. So let's say you get an unexpected health diagnosis. There's some amount of productive thinking and research that you should be doing, and yet you'll pass some line in the sand, at
which point it becomes obsessive and it stops being productive. Unfortunately, there isn't kind of a one size fits all for any given circumstance other than you notice it is massively degrading your well being. The telltale, though, in terms of just generalized patterns, is you find yourself returning to the same thought, exact thought loops over and over again. So you are asking yourself a novel question. So you think
it's new. You think you're on the brink of having this profound insight about this problem that's been plaguing you. And if you could just crack the code on that, then you'll feel better. If I could just get reassurance that you know, I've been talking about these examples of the book. It's like, if I could just figure out why they stopped loving me, if I could just figure out why I lost this job, if I could just figure out all the things that could plague my family,
I'll be able to keep them safe. Right, we have all these If I could just questions, But then what will happen is we'll get that reassurance and then the next day we'll wake up and will be something else that we're seeking. And so I think that reassurance seeking is a very good indicator that you're in the obsessive space when you don't feel calm in the face of really good evidence, because you almost resistant and it's not enough. It's not enough, it's not enough. I remember I was
actually just talking this morning. I did CNN with boll Flizer and Pam and Pamela was like, I had this OCD postpartum where I just kept needing to know if my baby was alive, Like every second I was worried that like maybe like I needed to check on the health of my baby, and that is that OCD space where there's no amount of reassurance that feels acceptable.
It reminds me, and you know, I have twenty eight years of sobriety. It reminds me of something that I learned in AA very early on, as saying you can never get enough of what you don't need. And it's almost like it's for me. I never thought about to this split second when you were defining it that one of the lines for me might be with rumination. Is it healthy thinking and intellectualizing or is it rumination? Is
it something that I can never get enough of? And it's driving me deeper and deeper in this whole, like the focus in the hole.
Because the opposite of rumination is actually productive critical thinking. And so one thing I want to reassure Elizabeth about is that I share a lot of stories on I share a lot of strategies. It's really important for people to pay attention to the emotions they're feeling in their body when they're having these thoughts. When you're having like calm, deliberate thinking, you feel a certain way when you're having anxiety driven like obsessive. If I don't find this out,
my life is going to crumble. That's usually a sign that you're on the wrong side of it.
Helpful, Okay, Last question, I can't believe we're out of time, like this is a nuts.
Okay.
Last questions from Beverly. What was the biggest surprise you encountered during your research and your writing journey.
I love that question.
Oh my gosh. You know it's interesting. I'm deeply optimistic about humans, so I tend to see the good in people, and I tend to assume the best in people, which I'm really glad about. But I also don't believe the universe has my bad in any way at all. And I don't really have strong religious or spiritual leanings, and so there's no safe landing. I have like safety net that I fall into when a really shitty thing happens in my life, and that is hard. And for that reason,
I am very skeptical. When I hear someone say something like, oh, there's a silver lining to like a negative change, I'm like, really, is that just something you told yourself to make yourself feel better about it? Like I often say, I'm allergic to two things, soy and platitudes, because there can't handle either one and so one thing I was shocked to discover through writing this book was how grateful people who had been through harrowing change were about who they became
on the other side. They would never have willed their change to happen again. Who would Why would you ever invite illness or loss or heartbreak into your life? But they felt that they had emerged transformed, that the change had affected them, had transformed them, had left lasting change within them in ways that unlocked new found mental freedom and confidence and new capabilities, a renewed relationship with a family history that was troubled, just a new way of
seeing themselves in the world around them. And I was so moved by this because I just didn't know there was going to be some element of redemption in all of these people's stories, and then I had to experience it for myself, and that was the best proof. Like I was still a little skeptical until all of a sudden, I realized that I was transforming, going through my own change,
which I detail in the final chapter. And I realized, Brene, if you had asked me on the night member when Jimmy came in the room, if you had asked me on that night. Will you ever find true happiness again? I would have said no. Is there anything good that's going to come of this? I would have said no. Will you ever feel whole not having children? I would have said no, And yet here I am. It's going to make feel little emotional. Three years later, I am
the happiest that I've ever been. I'm the most hopeful, I'm the most whole. I've had to do a lot of work kind of unpacking why I'd anchored so much of my self worth to motherhood. That was a whole cultural like, oh my god, I need to challenge the societal norms and why is society so cruel towards child free women? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. But I felt myself developed new values and perspectives and abilities, and it was such a beautiful process that was unfolding within
me subconsciously. And I just like I'm beaming because I it was like it was one thing to see it and all the people I was writing about, but then I just didn't expect to see it in myself.
I mean, this.
Takes me to a line that you wrote in your preface. I just highlighted this. I made a post it note that had it. I wrote a quote and I hung it in my study. This is what you write? Can I quote you to you please? A negative change can feel like an apocalypse, as if the world we knew has now been destroyed. But apocalypse comes from the Greek word apocalypsis, which actually means revelation. This etymology is instructive. Change can upend us, but it can also reveal things
to us. What if we saw the hardest moments in our lives is a chance to reimagine ourselves rather than just something to endure. What potential change could be could be unlocked within us. In going on this journey with others, I've become far more curious about who I can be on the other side of change. I hope that after reading this book you'll come to feel the same way. I think you've done that for us.
Thank you so much, Thank you, Brenee. I so appreciate you blessing this book with breneis and I'm was so thoughtfully read it and it really moves my heart. How many people signed up to join this conversation, It's okay, of ninety eight percent of you signed up because Brene's name is on the flyer. I'm not taking it personally, I'm really not, but no, truly, I am so moved by the passion you have for the topic and for the work, and I'm just so happy that we could
all be together on this Monday night. So thank you.
I love this and I just want to say that one of the things I've taken away and my final thing, is that there have been things in my life that were unexpected, and there's also been a world that I live in right now that is not the world that I expected. And I have found your lessons here as valuable in the macro negotiations of life, a life that I didn't in a world that I didn't have in
my bingo card, as much as the personal. So you're making us better and I think I think of you what I think of moral beauty.
So thank you, Hey, thanks so much for listening. If you're curious about the other side of Change, you can pick up a copy at the link in the show notes or wherever you buy books. And if you're looking for more Brenee on a Slight Change of Plans, you're in luck. Brenee was on the show a couple of seasons ago for a conversation about identity and how we can find ourselves picking up and holding on to different
ones over the course of our lives. You'll find a link to that episode in the show notes as well. Back in a week with another episode of A Slight Change of Plans. I'll see you then. A Slight Change of Plans is created, written, and executive produced by me Maya Schunker. The Slight Change family includes our showrunner Alexander Garatin, our editor Daphne Chen, our lead producer Megan Lubin, our associate producer Sonya Gerwit, and our sound engineer Erica Huang.
Luis Scara wrote our delightful theme song and ginger Smith helped arrange the vocals. A Slight Change of Plans is a production of Pushkin Industries, so big thanks to everyone there, and of course a very special thanks to Jimmy Lee.