Recognizing a Relationship Pattern Is a Trainable Skill. Almost Nobody Is Ever Taught It.
By Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN"), Founder & CEO, weyoga Inc.
Recognizing a recurring pattern in one's own relationship is treated, culturally, as either an innate trait some people have and others don't, or a byproduct of general intelligence and emotional maturity that simply accrues with age. Neither is quite right. It behaves, on closer inspection, like a specific, learnable skill — and one that almost nobody is ever actually taught.
Compare this to almost any other trainable skill: nobody expects to spot a chess pattern, a musical structure, or a market trend without instruction and practice. Pattern recognition in relationships is treated differently, as something you either "just have" or don't, despite operating on the same underlying cognitive machinery as every other form of pattern recognition humans do learn deliberately.
This mismatch explains a lot of otherwise confusing variation: why some people seem to "just get it" while others, equally intelligent and equally invested, seem permanently stuck. The gap usually isn't ability. It's that one group stumbled into practice and feedback, informally, and the other never did.
If it's a trainable skill rather than a fixed trait, the entire framing changes — from "some people are self-aware and some aren't" to "some people have had the chance to practice this and most haven't," which is a solvable gap, not a permanent one.
Part of The Recognition Layer →
Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai