The 10,000 Ways We Cheat Ourselves in Systems Change

Years ago, one of my teachers in Egypt said something that has followed me ever since:

“There are 10,000 ways we cheat ourselves.”

He had a particular way of helping people discover them.

Rather than beginning with what we believed about ourselves, he would ask questions designed to bring what was underneath into consciousness.

When was the best period of freedom in your life? The worst?

When did you feel most abundant? When did you feel the greatest scarcity?

What was the best period in your family? What was the most difficult?

What has love felt like at its best? At its worst?

Which relationships nourished you? Which depleted you?

Who were your closest friends? What happened to those relationships?

When did you feel most yourself? When did you abandon yourself?

The precise questions mattered less than what they revealed. He was looking for the distance between the story we consciously tell about ourselves and the patterns our lives actually reveal.

Someone might say they want love while repeatedly choosing unavailable partners. They might long for freedom while constructing a life in which they are indispensable to everyone around them. They might say they want abundance while becoming uncomfortable whenever they receive more than they are accustomed to holding.

We are extraordinarily creative in finding ways to move towards what we consciously want while remaining loyal to something underneath that wants something else.

This was what he meant, I think, by the 10,000 ways we cheat ourselves.

Light workers and light slaves

My teacher also used a distinction that initially made me uncomfortable. He spoke about “light workers” and “light slaves.”

By “light slave,” he did not simply mean someone who had suffered, or someone who still carried wounds. We all do.

He was pointing towards something more subtle: the possibility that even our service, spirituality or desire to change the world can remain organised around an unexamined wound.

We may devote ourselves to healing because we cannot bear our own pain.

We may become indispensable to others because being needed gives us belonging.

We may fight injustice while unconsciously needing an enemy.

We may speak constantly about abundance while organising our lives around scarcity.

We may give endlessly and call it service, while being unable to receive.

We may devote ourselves to creating freedom for others while having very little freedom ourselves.

The outer work can be beautiful. The intention can be sincere. Yet something underneath is still running the pattern.

This distinction stayed with me because I began seeing versions of it everywhere.

First in my Traditional Chinese Medicine practice.

Then in coaching and my work through LifeFlowTao.

And increasingly, in the world of systems change.

Because what happens when the person becomes a collective?

Can an organisation cheat itself? Can a movement? Can a regenerative project? Can a gathering devoted to creating a different world reproduce the very patterns it believes it has left behind?

I think it can.

The wounded change-maker can become the wounded system

If you are reading this, you probably already understand some version of this at the personal level.

The uncomfortable part is recognising that crossing into systems change does not make the pattern disappear.

We bring ourselves with us.

Our wounds around recognition enter our organisations.

Our relationship with scarcity enters our funding models.

Our need to be needed enters our communities.

Our difficulty receiving enters our projects.

Our fear of losing control enters our governance.

Our relationship with power enters the supposedly decentralised networks we create.

Our unresolved competition enters collaboration.

Our hunger for belonging enters the gatherings we organise.

Our need to be seen enters our service.

And because these patterns now operate through noble intentions—regeneration, consciousness, impact, healing, justice, systems change—they can become considerably harder to see.

We can hide from ourselves inside the goodness of what we are doing.

Perhaps this is one of the 10,000 ways.

We say abundance while organising around scarcity

This contradiction has become particularly interesting to me.

In systems-change spaces, we speak frequently about abundance.

Yet scarcity can still organise the field.

There isn't enough funding.

There isn't enough visibility.

There aren't enough investors.

There isn't enough time.

There aren't enough opportunities.

Underneath that scarcity, our perception changes.

The philanthropist becomes a potential donor.

The person with a large network becomes access.

The wisdom keeper becomes legitimacy.

The filmmaker sees a story.

The gathering becomes an opportunity to fundraise.

The collaborator becomes useful because of whom they know.

None of this requires bad intentions. In fact, it can emerge among people with deeply sincere intentions. But scarcity creates urgency, and urgency can gradually transform relationship into utility. The pattern I observed in a recent systems-change inquiry was striking: scarcity can lead to urgency, insufficient preparation, overextension, control, instrumentalisation and eventually relational rupture.

This is where my teacher's question becomes interesting at the collective level.

Instead of asking only:

What kind of financial system do we want to create?

Perhaps we also need to ask:

When did this project last feel abundant? When did it feel most afraid? How do we behave when funding becomes uncertain? What happens to our relationships when there is not enough?

The answers may tell us more about the system we are actually creating than our theory of change does.

We speak about decentralisation while needing to remain central

This is another beautiful place to cheat ourselves.

We want networks rather than hierarchies.

We want distributed leadership.

We want ecosystems.

We want people to step into their agency.

Until they do.

Someone we have mentored develops their own voice.

A collaborator creates relationships independently of us.

People begin going directly to someone we introduced them to.

Another person's idea receives more attention than ours.

Suddenly something contracts.

Again, this doesn't necessarily mean we are selfish.

It may mean that our identity has become entangled with our position in the system.

I am the founder.

The connector.

The visionary.

The healer.

The person who brought everyone together.

The one who understands the field.

The one who helps.

And if another person's flourishing changes my position, I discover whether my belief in abundance has reached the deeper layers of myself.

One of the most interesting questions emerging from our recent work has been whether we can support another person's gifts not only when those gifts strengthen what we are building, but when they allow that person to become more autonomous, visible and influential than we expected.

Perhaps the systems-change version of my teacher's question is:

When was the last time somebody else's success genuinely expanded you? When did somebody else's visibility make you contract?

Not what do you believe about collaboration?

What actually happens inside you when the relational field changes?

We serve because we need to be needed

This may be where the idea of the “light slave” becomes particularly uncomfortable.

Systems-change spaces attract extraordinary people who want to contribute.

We connect.

We facilitate.

We fund.

We heal.

We advise.

We organise.

We hold.

We give.

But there is a question underneath all of this that I increasingly find important:

Who am I when nobody needs what I have to offer?

Can I enter a gathering without becoming useful?

Can I listen without preparing my contribution?

Can I allow someone else to hold the centre?

Can I encounter a problem without needing to solve it?

Can I belong without demonstrating my value?

Our harvest revealed how contribution itself can become identity: doing good brings recognition; recognition creates a sense of place; and eventually the absence of a role can produce a surprisingly deep uncertainty about who we are.

This doesn't make service wrong.

It asks whether our service is free.

There is a profound difference between having something to give and needing someone else to need it.

Perhaps the “light worker,” in my teacher's language, is not the person who does more good.

Perhaps it is the person whose contribution is becoming increasingly free from the wound that once made contribution necessary.

We create freedom through structures that exhaust us

This pattern fascinates me because I have seen versions of it in both bodies and organisations.

We organise a gathering about regeneration and exhaust the organising team.

We build a movement for a slower, more relational world through relentless urgency.

We create a project about abundance while its founders work unpaid.

We advocate decentralisation while one person carries all the responsibility.

We speak about listening while filling every available hour with content.

We create transformational experiences without creating enough space afterwards for transformation to take root.

In my TCM practice, I often meet the equivalent pattern in the body.

Someone wants health so badly that healing becomes another project to optimise.

They add meditation, exercise, supplements, treatments, breathwork and a better morning routine to an already overloaded life.

Even rest becomes something to accomplish.

The content changed.

The pattern didn't.

Systems can do exactly the same thing.

We can build the new world with the metabolism of the old one.

A gathering may produce extraordinary experiences and still lack the relational infrastructure required to carry what those experiences awaken. Experience is not automatically transformation; there needs to be a return movement of integration, response, commitment and giving back.

Perhaps one of the clearest ways we cheat ourselves is by changing what we do without changing the pattern through which we do it.

Bringing the system to consciousness

This brings me back to my teacher's questions.

Their purpose was not judgement.

It was consciousness.

You cannot work with a pattern you cannot see.

Perhaps our organisations, movements and gatherings need similar questions.

Not another impact assessment. Not another set of values for the website. Questions that reveal the distance between what we say we are creating and what people actually experience.

We might ask:

• Abundance: When does money make us contract? What would “enough” actually be? If ten times more resources arrived tomorrow, could we receive and steward them?

• Power: Who becomes more powerful through what we are building? Who becomes more dependent? What happens when someone no longer needs us?

• Relationship: Which relationships would we still tend if they offered us no funding, introductions, legitimacy or opportunity?

• Voice: Who speaks easily in our spaces? Who becomes quiet? Do we mistake giving everyone the same space for creating the conditions in which everyone can actually be heard?

• Service: Are we responding to what is needed, or to our need to contribute? Can we remain present when our expertise is not required?

• Reciprocity: Who is carrying the work? Who is receiving? Is there genuine circulation, or have we confused generosity with reciprocity?

• Timing: Are we allowing something to develop at the pace it requires, or is our anxiety creating urgency and calling it momentum?

• Ownership: If something beautiful emerges through the relationships we convened, do we need it to belong to us?

• Impact: Are we only measuring what we produced, or whether the relationships, agency and living system became stronger through our presence?

• Integrity: Where is the system we say we want most contradicted by the way we are currently behaving?

These questions are not meant to prove that we are secretly bad people.

They are ways of bringing the felt reality of the system into consciousness.

Because there is an enormous difference between saying we believe in reciprocity and asking the people around us whether they actually experience reciprocity.

There is a difference between saying we are decentralised and noticing where decisions really accumulate.

There is a difference between talking about abundance and examining what happens to us when resources, recognition or opportunity become scarce.

And there is a difference between wanting to change a system and becoming conscious of the ways that system still lives through us.

The 10,000 ways are not the problem

I no longer hear my teacher's sentence pessimistically.

If there really are 10,000 ways we cheat ourselves, we will probably never become perfectly conscious of all of them.

Nor do we need to.

The practice is noticing the next one.

This is something Traditional Chinese Medicine continues to teach me. A symptom is information. Rather than immediately trying to eliminate it, we can ask what pattern it is revealing about the whole.

Perhaps our contradictions deserve the same curiosity.

When competition appears inside collaboration, it is information.

When scarcity appears inside an abundance project, it is information.

When hierarchy reappears inside decentralisation, it is information.

When exhaustion appears inside regenerative work, it is information.

When being needed becomes inseparable from serving, it is information.

When another person's flourishing threatens our place, it is information.

When a gathering about transformation becomes another experience we consume before moving to the next one, it is information.

These moments are not interruptions to systems change.

They may be where systems change actually begins.

Because perhaps there are light workers and light slaves not only within spiritual practice, but within our organisations, movements and systems too.

A project can be devoted to liberation while still organised around a wound.

A movement can speak the language of abundance while metabolising scarcity.

A gathering can celebrate relationship while unconsciously instrumentalising people.

A regenerative organisation can reproduce extraction through the way it treats its founders, employees or collaborators.

And a person can devote their life to changing the world while quietly recreating the conditions from which they themselves are trying to become free.

The deepest harvest for me has therefore become less about designing the perfect new system.

It is about developing the capacity to notice what is actually moving through the one we are creating. Our recent inquiry began with questions about finance, but repeatedly returned to the same insight: what is missing is often the living relational architecture that allows money, wisdom, responsibility and relationship to meet without one consuming, controlling or instrumentalising another.

Maybe this is what my teacher was pointing towards all those years ago.

We do not cheat ourselves because we don't want change.

Sometimes we cheat ourselves because one part of us is reaching towards the new while another is still organised around what it learned in the old.

The same may be true of systems.

So perhaps, alongside asking What future are we trying to create?, we need another question:

What are we still unconsciously asking the future to heal, validate or provide for us?

And perhaps the work begins there—not in becoming perfectly healed before we act, but in bringing enough of what is moving underneath into consciousness that we no longer need to build our wounds into the systems we hope will set us free.