The Other Side of Change: the book Maya Shankar didn't write for us — and why you should read it anyway
By Allison Zelkowitz, Founder and Director, Center for Utilizing Behavioral Insights for Children (CUBIC) at Save the Children International
Seven years ago, when I decided to see if I could shift my career as an international aid worker into becoming a behavioural scientist, I made a vow: I would stop reading novels (which I loved) and only read behavioural science books. This would help equip me for a role I was passionate about, but admittedly, unprepared for.
Since that time, I’ve stuck to my vow (with only one exception, I think – Jodi Picoult’s Small Great Things, which I read because Dolly Chugh describes it in The Person You Mean to Be . . . so that kind of counts, doesn’t it?)
Last month, while I was reading Dr. Maya Shankar’s The Other Side of Change: Who We Become When Life Makes Other Plans, my husband asked, “Don’t you want to read something else for once?”
“I am,” I said, “This one is different.”
You see, Shankar did not write this book for us – behavioral scientists, recent graduates from LSE or UPenn, senior consultants, or basically anyone reading this blog. She wrote it for everyone else. And that’s what makes it so delightful.
As Maya writes (can I call her Maya? Her writing feels like a warm hug, so it feels right), “I’ve written this for anyone who is currently in the choppy waters of a change, is trying to make sense of a past change, or is anxious about a future change.”
So, yeah – essentially everyone in the world.
A tip for fellow behavioural scientists
If you have a hard time taking your “behavioural scientist hat” off, and you know you’ll miss the paragraphs explaining randomised controlled trials and caveats about replication, here’s my tip: flip to the back of the book and skim the 15-page Notes section first. This book is based on science. It’s just so enjoyable to read, it sometimes doesn’t feel like it.
What the book is about
The Other Side of Change focuses on the stories of seven people who’ve lived through difficult, life-altering experiences, including a mother whose baby is born with a serious heart condition, a teenager who ended up in prison, and an undergrad struck with locked-in syndrome. Maya narrates each story in such detail that it feels like she was trailing her subjects in person – which, in a way, she was. In her podcast about the book, she mentions interviewing them for over three years.
Through each story, she highlights the personal challenges each person had to overcome, draws connections to the psychological phenomena that underpin them, and explains research-backed strategies readers can use when they face the same hurdles.
Many of these phenomena and strategies will be familiar to GAABS readers: the end of history illusion, cognitive closure, and psychological distancing, to name a few.
What the book is about
What I found most interesting were the insights I hadn’t yet come across:
We conjure up "possible selves" as we go about our lives — a concept introduced by psychologists Hazel Rose Markus and Paula Nurius. Maya explains, “Hoped-for selves reflect our aspirations, feared selves embody our worries, and expected selves represent what we think is most likely to happen.” But our beliefs and biases often shrink the range of selves we can imagine. To help readers build new hoped-for selves, Maya suggests using techniques like the fresh start effect, breaking big goals into smaller steps, and forging a community of people who believe in our new identity.
Attachment styles aren’t fixed. I was familiar with the primary attachment styles – secure, anxious, and avoidant – but Maya taught me that we may have different attachment styles with our parents, our partners, our friends, and our children. And, as Maya writes, “Recent research shows that attachment styles are far more malleable than psychologists once thought – new life experiences can continually reshape them.” (This is good news I plan to share with my husband… he may not have an avoidant wife forever!)
Affect labelling can quiet a mental spiral. To reduce rumination – common when we’re going through a big change – one tool Maya recommends is affect labelling: stepping back, identifying what we’re feeling, and simply naming it. She explains, “Naming it fosters psychological distance by shifting your perception away from ‘being’ the emotion to simply ‘having’ the emotion.” A small move, but one that can offer some relief in the worst moments.
Why this matters for practitioners
As I neared the end of the book, I started to worry. I had been doggedly highlighting the new concepts that stood out to me – but would that be enough when I, too, faced my next big change? In the next few years, my family will be moving back to North America, and my two decades of international life will be over. Would I need to read this book again to help me through it?
To be honest, I probably will read it again. But I don’t have to. My favourite part of the book is actually the Appendix, Getting to the Other Side of Change: Your Change Survival Kit. In just nine pages, Mayasummarizes what the science says often happens when we experience change, and lays out more than twenty techniques we can use to navigate these transitions.
For practitioners, this appendix is a useful resource – not just for our own lives, but for the clients and colleagues we speak to about major transitions. It’s an evidence-grounded list of ideas we can suggest that could make a difference.
The Other Side of Change is the book I will recommend to friends who need more than empathy – when they’ve lost a job, are getting divorced, are grieving a death, or are facing any of the other dramatic shifts that can make life feel impossibly tough.
Thank you, Maya, for handing us a toolbox for the hardest times – and trusting that we’d figure out what to do with it.