Couples Try to Change Outcomes Directly. The Outcome Was Never What Was Actually Editable.
By Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN"), Founder & CEO, weyoga Inc.
When a relationship keeps producing an unwanted outcome — the same fight, the same distance, the same disappointment — the natural instinct is to target the outcome directly: try harder to avoid the fight, try harder to stay close, try harder to not be disappointed. This almost never works, for a structural reason that has nothing to do with effort.
Outcomes are downstream — they are the visible result of an upstream pattern running its course. You cannot intervene on a downstream result directly, the same way you cannot fix a river's flooding by mopping up the water; you can only intervene on the pattern that produces the outcome, upstream, before it cascades. Trying to edit the outcome directly is mopping while the tap stays on.
This explains the exhausting, familiar experience of "trying so hard" to change something in a relationship and watching it happen anyway — the trying was aimed at the wrong layer entirely. Willpower applied to an outcome has almost no leverage on the pattern actually producing it.
The pattern, not the outcome, is the only thing that was ever actually editable. Once that becomes clear, effort finally has somewhere real to go.
Part of The Recognition Layer →
Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai