Read here the full transcript of Saurabh Bothra’s talk titled “Small Steps, Big Changes – The Power of Habits” at TEDxYouth@TheShriramMillenniumNoida 2024 conference.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
The Importance of Habits
So, I’ll begin with a question. Did you brush your teeth today? I hope yes. And if I ask you why, you would probably say cavities or my mouth should not smell and who doesn’t brush teeth today in today’s time, right?
But if I have to ask you another question, did you exercise today? Ah, come on. I know for a fact 80% of us don’t do exercise every single day. But when you say that I brush my teeth because I want to care for my oral health, we don’t do exercise when it comes to our physical health.
Why? You might say that brushing our teeth is pretty easy, but exercise is tough. No, here is where we are wrong. Brushing our teeth is easy because it has become our habit and exercise is difficult for us.
Why? Because we have not yet developed it as a habit, okay? Almost 40 to 60% of our day goes into autopilot mode. Like you use your mobile phone, you keep scrolling and you don’t even realize when it is half an hour, one hour, two hours and then suddenly you realize, “Oh my God, I have wasted so much time.”
This happens every single day. We are on autopilot mode for 40 to 60%, even 90% for some people. So here is what is important. When you talk about habits, it’s the most important thing.
If you talk about physical fitness, if you talk about your professional success or if you talk about anything that you want to learn, unless and until it becomes part of our habit or I would say if unless we are consistent with it, it’s not going to work for us and I’m sure we have had our experiences.
My Journey with Yoga
Now let me tell you why I talk about habits so much and what has it created in my life. So I started teaching yoga online. I was teaching it before also, but I started teaching it online, 22nd March 2020, the day of lockdown.
That was day one and I had three people joining my yoga session. After 1613 days, where I have taken a live session every single day, even after I had dengue, I had COVID twice, I had a knee injury or I have fallen sick once in a while, still I ensured that I follow a routine. I take my yoga session every single day. In the morning today, I had 279,140 people attending a live yoga session.
Now, thank you. This is absolutely magical. If you tell someone, when you are teaching three people in an online medium, that one day you will be teaching three lakh people, they would probably think you’re joking. And that was the case with me also.
I did not realize or I did not even think or even aim in my life that I would want to teach three lakh people in an online yoga session. But it happened. Why? Not because I wanted to come first, like we do in our classes or I wanted to reach X number of people.
I just wanted to follow a habit of teaching every single day. Now the interesting part is, of course, we just heard that we have the online largest online yoga class. We have a Guinness record on that. But the interesting part is not this.
The interesting part is, on day one, I had three people. After one year of regular teaching, I had 120 people in my yoga session. After two years, I had 1,130 people. After three years, I was at 81,000.
Here I have stopped expecting anything more than what I have in my life. I was so happy. But when you are happy and you continue following the process, this is what happens. In any habit, when you start doing it consistently, you never get results.
Never. If it’s a good habit, by the way. Whenever we keep doing it, keep doing it, keep doing it, you keep improving on it. Magic happens. And I still don’t believe today that I’m teaching three lakh people in an online session. In the past four years, we have touched 60 lakh people. Can you just imagine how many people we have taught? And honestly speaking, when I was teaching three people in my first class, I thought the maximum that I can teach is 1,000.
That was an impossible number. You say that you aim for the moon and then you reach the sky, some proverb like that. But this is phenomenal. And that’s why I keep telling people that focus on building a process, building a habit and becoming consistent rather than aiming for your target.
Because your target will always be limited by your mind. You will be able to think, “Oh, I want to just excel or I want to come first in my classroom.” But the life is much, much more beyond that.
Good Habits vs. Bad Habits
So now the obvious question is, bad habits are so simple, right? You just keep scrolling and time is gone. But when you want to build a good habit, it is challenging. Of course, yes.
What is the difference or why is a bad habit easy and why is a good habit difficult or challenging? The answer is pretty straightforward. Whenever you do something which is bad. So now we have to also define bad.
Bad is not necessarily bad, like scrolling your mobile phone or eating junk food is not necessarily bad, but we consider that for some time as a bad habit. Whenever you are doing something like eating pizza, burger or anything junk, you get some pleasure, right? And the second point is, you don’t have any negative impact if you do it once. If you know that eating cyanide is poisonous and it’s going to take your life, you will never dare to eat it.
But eating a pizza is not.
Once it’s not. But if you build it as a habit, eventually you end up having a sedentary lifestyle. Similarly, for good habits.
Doing a good habit might not necessarily be pleasurable or rather starting a good habit. Let’s take example for exercise. Starting that initial momentum of exercise is really difficult. But once you do it, you might feel that, “Oh, yeah, I’m feeling more energetic, I’m feeling more flexible.” Great. But starting is always tough.
And second point is, there is no immediate result. You do exercise once, nothing happens. You do it twice, nothing happens. You do it thrice, one month, two months, probably not like that result that you might be expecting. That’s why bad habits are easy to form and good habits are difficult to form. They are not difficult necessarily.
It’s just like brushing your teeth. And surprisingly, you know what, brushing your teeth is easy. But brushing your teeth before going to bed is still tough because it’s not your habit. And exercise can also become a habit and it can become very easy for you.
We have seen it across. Three lakh people join my sessions. Average daily attendance in our classes is 70%. You would not even get like in an offline setup, if 10 people have joined a yoga session, 7 people don’t come.
But in an online setup, building a habit becomes so, so easy and people want to exercise with us. And why does that happen? How do you make a good habit easy? This is what I’m going to share.
Three Simple Steps to Make Good Habits Easy
There are three simple things that you need to do. If you follow these three things, you can make any difficult habit, which might seem difficult literally easy for you, like brushing your teeth. Would you be interested to know? Perfect.
Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Thank you so much.
At least two people said. Okay. So if you want to make any good habit easy or you want to stay, okay, let me ask you one question. How many of you struggle with consistency of practice?
You can raise your hand. You have started something and you couldn’t follow it and you know that it is so important for you. Thank you. Hands down. But you couldn’t do it. Here are three things that you can do:
First, do not get into all or nothing trap. Let me ask you another question.
How many of us have got that super solid motivation on a Monday morning or first of any month or first of January and then you picked up, “Okay, I’ll wake up early, I’ll eat clean food, I’ll read a page every single day, I’ll read one book in a week and I’ll complete 52 books in a year” and you decided like multiple things. You probably followed it also for a week. But after that, when your motivation went down, you stopped doing literally everything. Raise your hands if you have experienced something like this.
This is precisely called as the all or nothing trap. Either we do everything or we stop doing everything. So next time, whenever you start a habit, never rely on your motivation. When your motivation is high, you take wrong decisions for your habits.
So whenever you are motivated to start something, always choose the least possible action that you can do when you are not motivated. Suppose you are not motivated to read, you can still read one page, at least a page. And I’m sure if you decide that you want to read one book a week, in 12 months, you will read zero books. But if you read one page a day, you will probably end up reading much, much more than even what you thought.
So never ever start doing everything at once. Take small steps. And so let me also give you another example of exercise. Whenever we think of exercise, we feel we should sweat, we should feel exhausted, we should feel like we have done something, then we feel that we have done exercise.
Not really true. Exercise can be as low as 5 minutes, 10 minutes, but our mind sets an expectation. What is the expectation? The exercise is complete only when I do it for an hour, for 45 minutes or I sweat. That’s not necessarily true. You can do even 10 squats, 5 squats, 5 minutes of high intensity exercise. Everything is okay until and unless it is non-zero. So when you are good, when you have energy, do 100.
But when you are not good, when you are not motivated, do 1. Just don’t do 0. Is that clear? Okay. Perfect. So that’s step number 1.
2. Set Clear Intentions
Step number 2. Very important. How many of you have said this? “I’m going to start doing X activity tomorrow.” And tomorrow we have said the same thing. Please raise your hand.
Thank you. Now, you know what, motivation is not the missing factor here. You are motivated. That’s why you are at least thinking about doing it.
You know what is missing? Setting intention. Now, what do I mean by setting intention? Let me tell you this first. Setting intention is going to help you 40, like it is more, 40% more likely that you will do an activity if you set an intention. Now, setting intention is as simple as taking the decisions before, like one day before and not just before the activity. Suppose like, I usually teach yoga, so my normal examples are all about exercise. But you can relate to your activity also.
So, someone says, “I want to start doing yoga tomorrow.” Very important for them to decide what time are they going to do, where are they going to do, with whom they are going to do, are they going to do inside the house or they are going to go to the gym or they are going to go to the garden or a yoga center. Why? Because next day when they get up and if they have to take 10 decisions, when, where, how, what, they will end up saying, “I’ll do it tomorrow.”
Is it making sense to you? Yeah. So, setting intention means simply deciding beforehand and probably writing it down so that you have more clarity. That is how you convert your motivation into an actual action.
Motivation is never enough. You always need an intent of when, what, where, how, etc. etc. to actually convert it into an action.
So, that is step number two. You always decide, write down, send a WhatsApp message to your friend or anyone whom you want to be your accountability partner so that you are clear what to do. And this is applicable not just for habits, it’s for everything. Any single task, if you’re not able to do it, just write down when, where, what, how will I do it.
And you are 40% more likely to actually attempt and do that task. That’s step number two.
3. Create a Positive Identity
Third and the most important task, set an intention. Very important. Very, very important. How many of you have said this, “I am lazy”? Come on, don’t be shy. Okay, perfect.
What you tell yourself is what’s going to happen. If you say you’re a lazy person, you will be a lazy person forever. No scientific tool, no motivational speaker, not even God can help you here. If you say you’re lazy, that’s true.
That’s just true. Yeah, very important of what you say. Now, I’m not saying you should lie to yourself. You’re waking up at 10 o’clock and you’re saying yourself, “No, no, I’m a very active person.”
I’m not going to work. So you don’t have to lie to yourself. But very important that you don’t have negative self-talk. Now what does this mean? If you say I’m an active person, or let’s take example of you want to become a morning person. For example, you’re waking up at nine o’clock and you want to become a morning person. That does not mean you have to wake up at 4am. You just have to wake up at 8:30.
You have to do something very similar, very small that justifies what you want to say to yourself. Is that clear? So very important what you talk and I’m telling you a secret to actually change this. Join a group.
If you want to be a morning person, join a group where everyone is a morning person. If you want to become an entrepreneur, join a group where everyone is doing business or talking about ideas. If you want to be a guitarist, join a group where everyone is playing guitar. Your group will create an identity for you.
So when you talk about habit building and consistency, identity creation is supposed to be the North Star. What you want to achieve eventually is not habit. It’s an identity. Today I say I’m a yoga person.
Why? Because I’ve done yoga for 1,600 days. Today I say I’m an entrepreneur because I’m running a company. It’s an identity that I live with. Once you have your identity set, you do not need any support, any motivation. You will do it. Is that clear? So that is the last thing and the most easiest thing to do.
Join a group where your desired outcome is a normal behavior. Everyone behaves in a way how you want to be. Is it making sense? Yes.
So your friends will define your identity. If they do wrong, you are very likely. I’m not saying you will 100% do wrong, but you are very, very likely to do wrong. And if they are doing good, you are very, very likely to actually do good.
So you have to ensure that your surrounding also supports your good habits. That’s the last thing I want to say. If you build your habits today, your habits will build you tomorrow. Thank you so much.
