Maya Shankar

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.

All right, 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.

All right, 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 our 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 multisensory 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.