Maya Shankar

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.

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 MasterChef.

And guess what?

She won the entire damn thing.

Christine's a rock star.

She's an amazing, amazing person.

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.