Hi everyone, so I’m really grateful that a lot of students have requested to talk to me and I’m apologizing that I have not been able to attend many BTR offline classes in person because of my professional commitments.
This is a heartfelt message from my side to all the students where I’ll try to explain a common query that a lot of students have asked me, sir, I feel stuck, I feel that there’s no progress I’m making and that sense of negativity starts cropping in.
So one day I was thinking that a lot of students have similar types of complaints.
So how do I help them? How do I explain to them that they should do? And I tried to think why it doesn’t happen to me very often. What do I do differently from other people? So, then I read somewhere there’s something called the loop theory of progress. So that is what I want to share with all the students how you can transform your life into a progression from one infinity loop to another growth loop.
So what I mean by the infinity loop is that many of us on a daily basis are stuck in a repetitive cycle of stress, anxiety, and depression.
So trying to understand why that happens to few people, this concept of infinity loop comes in. What we mean by an infinity loop is that every individual has a particular way of reacting to the environment. It might be during your preparation time.
It might be in your personal life. It might be a reaction you give to your boyfriend or your girlfriend. It might be a reaction you give to your teachers, to your parents, to your friends.
And the way you react to the environment is your intersection point. And that intersection point, if that keeps on happening repeatedly to you, it will keep on coming back to you infinitely and you will keep on having similar events in your life that form a particular habit. That is why people who have bad habits are in an infinite loop and they don’t make progress.
Whereas people who are successful, people who are happy in life, are not depressed, doesn’t mean they don’t have problems, doesn’t mean they are not facing difficulties, doesn’t mean they are not facing setbacks, or failures in their personal or professional life. They do. But they don’t intersect at the same point and that’s why they form what is called the growth loop or the helix.
They miss that intersection point. They don’t react in the way the environment expects them to be. So, let us suppose for a student who is giving a particular GT, let us suppose out of 200 that student scored somewhere around 130, 125.
In the previous GT also, the student was scoring around 125 and 130. So, after one time, people keep on asking themselves why my score is not improving, why my score is not improving. Your score is not improving because you are following a particular pattern of mistakes.
It is like a habit. It is like if you are addicted to smoking, you will find a room, any free time you get, and go and smoke, that’s a habit. Or if you have a particular way of reacting to particular things, if you have temper issues, you will react that way only.
So, similarly, when you are in preparation, there are some events that keep on happening on a daily basis which can take you towards a depressive infinite loop. How you react to that event will define whether you will grow or whether you go back into that infinite loop. Your reaction formation is your intersection point.
So, let us suppose a student gives that GT and is not scoring well or has scored terribly well. You don’t have to go into that negative cycle. That is your intersection point.
That is where you need to stop. That is the time you say it is okay. The only way to miss the intersection point in personal and professional life to enter an infinite loop is to accept and say it is okay.
And you move forward. You learn the lesson. Okay, fine. This didn’t go my way. These were the things I did wrong. But it is okay. It is human to make mistakes. And if I am not the attitude that it is okay, you have to move forward. It is the difference between the infinity loop and the growth loop.
Honestly speaking, a lot of self-pity and crying and babbling and saying only bad things happen to me or things don’t go my way despite working hard is not going to solve my problem. Things don’t go the way they should for most people in their life. How you behave and react to it is your choice.
So, every day you will have multiple small choices to make. If you think most successful people make big choices, no, they don’t. They make very, very, very small choices on a day-to-day basis.
As small as whether you want to eat a particular thing or not. Whether you would talk to one particular person or not. Whether you want to take a nap or not. Whether you want to relax or not. Whether you want to party or not. Whether you want to go to sleep at this time or not. They make very, very small choices. Very, very small. Whether you want to keep your mouth shut or not at some times.
So, you will have to make very, very small choices. And if you are stuck in an infinite loop of depression, sadness, and anxiety, it means on a daily basis, you are making that same wrong choice. Same small wrong choice again and again, which is taking you back.
So, what I would request of all students is to go and analyse their lives. Go and analyse your day. And identify that intersection point where you are making that same mistake again and again.
It is not that GT. It is not that person in your life. It’s not your parents. It’s not your boyfriend. It’s you who is making that choice. That choice of reacting to that particular intersection.
So, if you don’t react to that intersection in the same way, you react and say it’s okay and move forward, eventually you will enter into a growth loop.
How fast that loop will progress, depends definitely on your environment. But it will progress. Someone will progress by millimetres. Someone at centimetres. Someone will be very, very fast.
But at least you will get out of that infinite loop if you control your reaction formation. To any environmental event, there are four parts. And this is a very, very crucial concept for students to understand.
Because for any habit to form, there is a trigger, there is a thought process, there is a reaction formation, and there is a reward. What happens to most people who are either unsuccessful or sad is that they focus either on the trigger or they just directly reach the reward. So, your thought is stuck between the trigger and the reward.
What happens? Let us suppose I woke up today, and I had a trigger that okay, fine, watching Dr. Ravi’s video triggered me and I’ll study hard. I’ll change myself from today. Good enough trigger.
Some of you might get that trigger today. But over the years, I’ve gotten many students saying, okay, sir, I feel very motivated after talking to you. But that motivation dies off.
That motivation dies off because you shift from the trigger to the reward. You take up the trigger, you start preparing, you start working hard. And there are events where you keep and drift into your thoughts thinking about the reward, either a positive reward or a negative reward.
Some of you might get very excited and say, okay, fine, I’m working very hard. This is the thing. And you shift to a positive reward automatically and think, okay, fine, I have gotten my dream branch.
And some of you might get triggered and then shift on to a negative thought process and say, okay, I’ll not get the reward. So, you keep on shuffling between this trigger and the reward because everyone is too obsessed about the reward. What will be the endpoint? What will be the outcome? This is what you need to change.
The reward will occur on its own. It will happen. But you need to follow a proper process of a trigger having a thought process having a reaction formation and then having a reward.
What you need to focus is on your reaction and your thought process.
If your thought process is good, you will have to control your reaction formation to every external environmental thing, everything that happens in your environment, from your GT to your preparation, to your parents, to your family, to your friends, to your relations, everything you will have to control in the environment, the reaction formation. So, you don’t focus on the reward, you focus on the reaction.
When you focus on the reaction, that is when you enter a growth helix, a growth loop. If you focus on the reward, you will enter an infinity loop which will land you nowhere. So, it’s my request to all the students, please go back and on each day of your preparation, try to find that event where had you reacted differently, you would have met your target and those moments would be those where you would have failed.
Tell yourself when you fail on a small basis, on a daily basis, it’s okay and move forward. Don’t compare yourself with others, you don’t know how anyone else is doing, that is just your hypothetical assumption. Focus on your reaction.
When you think about your friends too much, how they are preparing, what they are preparing, you are again focussing on the environment. The reaction formation is wrong and there you enter that infinite loop. Change your reaction formation.
Even if you are told by your friend that he or she has finished this much of the syllabus and you are lagging behind, you say it’s okay. That’s how you react. It’s okay, I have my own journey, I have my own preparation, I have my own focus, and I’ll do what is needed for myself.
So, your reaction to that event has to change and the moment you change that reaction, you enter that helix and there is no intersection point. So, please if you want to get out of that infinite sadness and depression and want to be successful and happy in life, daily, find those small intersection points where you start entering that infinite loop and change the way you react on a daily basis.
You don’t need to make very, very big changes. You need to make very small changes. How you react to a phone call, how you react to a comment, how you react to your score in GT, as small as this, and move forward. That’s how you will enter the growth helix.