It's Rarely the Same Situation Happening Again. It's the Same Response, Meeting Slightly Different Situations, Producing a Similar Result.
A recurring problem is usually described as the same situation happening again — the same kind of relationship, the same kind of conflict at work, the same kind of financial setback — as if the world keeps generating an identical scenario on repeat. Looked at closely, the situations are rarely identical. What's identical is the response meeting them.
A fixed response, applied across situations that vary just enough to seem unrelated, will reliably produce a family of outcomes that look similar without the situations themselves needing to be similar at all. The constant in the pattern isn't the circumstance — it's the reaction, running the same way regardless of which specific version of the circumstance shows up.
This distinction matters because it changes where the useful attention goes. Studying the situations for what they have in common leads to comparisons that only partly hold, since the situations genuinely do differ. Studying the response for what it does the same way every time leads directly to the actual mechanism producing the recurring result.
Once the response, rather than the situation, becomes the object of attention, the pattern stops looking like bad luck repeating and starts looking like what it actually is: one fixed reaction, meeting a series of different doors, and getting a similar result out of most of them.
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Momar Lissa Ndiaye ("MLN") is the Founder & CEO of weyoga Inc., a Delaware company. — weyoga.ai · mln@weyoga.ai