Shankar: Cultivating Layered Identities Protects Self-Worth Against Career Disruptions
Maya Shankar · Maya Shankar: The Toolkit to Accomplish Your Hardest Goals · Jul 9, 2024 · at 15:38
Cognitive scientist Maya Shankar discusses identity framing and psychological resilience in goal pursuit with Shane Parrish on The Knowledge Project.
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“What I'm proposing is having multifaceted identities. So you have multiple layers of abstraction when it comes to where you derive meaning and how you define yourself. And so at one level, you can absolutely say, okay, I'm a lawyer, I'm a doctor, a stay at home mom, I'm a tech worker. And then you can have deeper layers of identity that can be your safe landing, you know, almost like a parachute. When life throws you a change that you can fall back on so that when that thing maybe is threatened for whatever reason, I mean, maybe you get into an accident and you don't have the same abilities that you had before. You get a chronic illness that prevents you from doing those things. You don't feel that your entire self-worth has been stripped away in the process.”
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