Do you ever have problems you find particularly difficult to solve? Pehaps you even have one or two problems you've been working on for years that are still ongoing? It's particularly frustrating because you want to change, you want to know how to change, you make attempts to change but your efforts don't get you anywhere other than back to the starting point.
If you listen to people talk, you can hear it in their language - "I'm going round in circles", "I just keep on banging my head against a brick wall", "I take one step forward and two steps back the whole time".
The French proverb according to which the more something changes the more it remains the same relates to the relationship between persistence and change. You work hard at trying to change something but nothing really changes. It's like making a resolution each evening before you go to bed only to fail at the first hurdle the next morning. This can relate to diets, exercise, homework, lifestyle, etc, and this pattern can go on for years.
So not only do you get despondent about not being able to make your desired change, you get despondent about being despondent about not being able to make your desired change, and the cycle thickens and intensifies and you just feel worse and worse.
So what can you do about it? According to The Theory of Logical Types, the first step is to realise that there are two different types of change so you first need to understand where you are before you attempt to make any change. This could save your hours and years of hardship.
The two types of change include:
(1) 1st Order Change: change within a given system which itself remains unchanged, ie. you're dreaming at night and within that dream you are changing because you move from one thing to the next, ie. running, jumping, skipping, etc but you stay within the system, that is, your dream.
Your behaviour can change within the system but you are locked within the dream system. You can persist at change yet the system remains the same and you can change but only within the system, and over time this can get frustrating!
(2) 2nd Order Change: change which changes the sytem itself, ie. you wake up from your dream. You're now operating from a different system altogether and have moved from a dream state to a waking state which are two different systems.
If you decide to run, jump or skip within a waking state, this will create different results because you are operating from a different system altogether!
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So the saying, the more things change, the more they remain the same refers to 1st order change because you are still locked in the same system, and can go round in circles, backwards and forwards, endlessly!
So, as a starting point, when you want to make a change, it's good practice to understand the system you're operating in so you can be more in control of achieving better results from the word go.
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