Before You Change Your Life, You Need to See What Is Running It
Most attempts to change a life start directly at the level of change itself — new habits, new routines, new decisions, applied with real effort and real commitment. A large share of these attempts produce effort without lasting movement, not because the effort was insufficient, but because change was aimed at behavior without first identifying what was actually running it.
Behavior, especially the recurring kind, is usually downstream of a pattern operating underneath it — a selection rule, a trigger-response loop, something that's been quietly producing the same category of outcome across many surface-different situations. Changing the behavior without touching that underlying pattern leaves the actual engine untouched and running.
This is why change so often reverts: the new habit or decision was installed on top of the old pattern rather than instead of it, and the old pattern, still fully operational, eventually reasserts itself through whatever channel is currently available — sometimes the original behavior, sometimes a new one serving the same function.
Seeing what's actually running the behavior — the pattern underneath it, not the behavior itself — has to come before change has a real target to aim at. Change without that recognition isn't wrong to attempt. It's just aimed at the wrong layer to actually hold.
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Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai