Caroline Adams Miller
Appearances
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Madison Marsh on Courage, Confidence, and Compassion
People think SMART goals is a thing, and it's not. It was a guy in the 80s, George Doran, consultant, just wrote an article for a management magazine, and he created an acronym that was sticky, but it's what I call jargon mishmash syndrome. That acronym means different things all over the world, relatable, realistic. It could be measurable, meaningful.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Madison Marsh on Courage, Confidence, and Compassion
There is no one acronym that fits SMART goals. It ain't science.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
coming up next on passion struck people think smart goals is a thing and it's not it was a guy in the 80s george doran consultant just wrote an article for a management magazine and he created an acronym that was sticky but it's what i call jargon mishmash syndrome that acronym means different things all over the world relatable realistic It could be measurable, meaningful.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
So I have no shame and I've been trying for 30 some years to take the shame out of it. And I fear we're falling behind other addictions. So it was lonely. It was sad. I was in a household that was not particularly warm and loving. It was all about achievements. My great uncles made Olympic history.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
They were the first siblings to go one, two in an event in the 1912 Olympics, the standing high jump, Ben and Platt Adams. Platt got the gold, Ben got the silver. And those were the stories I heard. And my parents were intelligent and smart. We were supposed to have great grades and go to the right schools and all the rest of it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
So the standards for me were extraordinarily high and failure was not tolerated. And there was abuse in my home. And it's not something I want to go into publicly, but too publicly, because I do talk about it in my books. But there was a lot I had to overcome in order to love myself and to feel like I was worthy to live. And so it was lonely. It was sad. It was my secret for seven years.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
I kept thinking if I just did something else, it would go away. Like if I got into Harvard or Yale or Stanford or whatever, the bulimia would go away. If I did a swimming time that was great, made junior Olympic cuts, it would go away. If I brought great SAT scores, it would go away. And it, nothing ever helped. And so when I went to Harvard, it was my last hope. I'm at Harvard.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
This is the pinnacle of achievement for so many people and I'm miserable and I'm getting worse. So I had this double life. I had all kinds of medical complications. Again, Nobody knew what to look for because nobody knew how to treat it. So I had crumbling teeth. I'd never had my period. I didn't even get my period till I was 22. And I was losing all of my passions, playing the piano, swimming.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
I had to drop out of swimming. I couldn't keep it up with this double life. So it was the hardest, saddest, most suicidal period of my life. And then I was asked on a date, one of my first dates in my life, my sophomore year, I'm five, 10 and a half. I think I just looked, I didn't look like somebody you could approach and I was miserable on top of it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
So this man approached me and he asked me out. And on our third date, we agreed we'd get married. I got engaged at 19. He was captain of the Harvard lacrosse teams, really handsome guy. And I thought this is it. I'm going to get married and I'm going to get married and it's going to go away. So I got married nine days after I graduated from Harvard and I went on my honeymoon and it was a disaster.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
I was purging on my honeymoon. And that's when I looked in the mirror and said to myself, this thing is going to kill you. It's going to kill you unless you figure out how to overcome it. And the last part of my story I'll just say is I was living in Baltimore at the time and just by the grace of God, and I do mean just sheer luck.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
There were 12 step recovery meetings there for compulsive eaters where I found and met people in recovery from bulimia. I just got goosebumps thinking about this. It was life changing. It was February of 1984 and I was sitting there defensive and not talking. And then this woman said this sentence, she said, my name is Betsy. I'm changing her name.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
My name is Betsy and I'm recovering from bulimia one day at a time. And I remember I put my needle point down, I looked at her, she was tall, she was blonde, she was an athlete and she was saying sentences I'd never heard anybody speak. And I looked at her and in that moment, I knew if she could do it, I could do it. And that was really when my life began. I learned what joy was.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
I learned what grit was. I learned how to cultivate it. I learned about goal setting. I learned what love was. Someone said to me one day, Caroline, it's great that you're getting better, but you can't keep what you don't give away. And that one sentence was what I found brought me joy, that I could sponsor other people, that I could be a role model.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
It's something I was proud of, that I could share with other people. I had months, weeks, months, years of recovery. And in positive psychology, we know that's one of the positive interventions is giving. Being a giver brings you joy. And I learned it by hitting the worst bottom of my life. And I'm just so grateful. I was bulimic and it gave me the path to find out what all those things meant.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
They weren't just phrases on a wall or speeches I heard. This is when I found out what life was all about. And it's, I don't regret a minute of it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
Thank you. And same to you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
It's so funny. I lived my life in hindsight. When I was at Penn, I'm sitting in Huntsman Hall, which is where Wharton is. I would hear this research and little puzzle pieces would start to come together in my mind. Oh, that's why all those things that I did, those achievements didn't bring me success. the happiness I thought it was because happiness precedes success.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
I mean, just that one equation. Oh my gosh. By the way, Sonia is replicating all of that research now. And it's even more robust that happiness precedes success. And she's been looking at other cultures. So I checked in with her when I was writing Big Goals. So I think that's an important thing to note. So another assignment I had at Penn was goal setting theory by Locke and Latham.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
And I remember I said out loud, I didn't care who was around me. I just said in wonderment, there is a science to goal setting. I was shocked. I didn't know there was a science. And as much as I'd read about goal setting, I didn't know They didn't know goal setting. I didn't know Locke and Latham existed. And they're still not known well enough, which is why I wrote big goals.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
But when they talk about goals, there's learning goals and performance goals. And we can go into that in more detail if you'd like. But one of the divisions, learning goals, is what my bulimia was. I had to learn something I'd never done before. I had to learn how to behave. I had to learn how to eat. I had to learn how to deal with cravings.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
I had to learn how to deal with sadness without binging. So they're very careful to say that when you have a learning goal, you have to flatten your learning curve as quickly as possible. You've got to go find the places where you can get the skills and the knowledge that you don't have. in order to achieve this goal. You cannot say, I will be over bulimia in six months.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
You cannot do that to yourself. You cannot do that for any goal that's a learning goal. Because when you assign performance goal metrics, and you can only do that if it's a goal that fits on the checklist, you've done it before. You know what excellence looks like. You know what it's going to take. in terms of time, money, energy, people around you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
If you assign that kind of metric or outcome to a learning goal, you're likely to quit because it's just too hard. You don't know how to do it. So that's how it relates to overcoming bulimia. It was a big learning goal. And any learning goal we have, you want to engage curiosity. You want to engage the ability to have a growth mindset. And that's how people stay engaged in the process of
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
having disappointments, not having the first way they learn it work out. But that's how you persist longer in goal accomplishment is when you correctly separate them and follow the guidelines that I've laid out in big goals, but people still don't know about it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
And the last thing I'll say is if you mix them up, if you mix up learning goals and performance goals, you have the biggest disasters in business history, bar none. It's example after example of people and companies having a learning goal. Lee Iacocca with the Pinto, the Ford Pinto, they'd never made a small car. But in his arrogance, he said, oh, I'll have a 2,000 pound, $2,000 car.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
And in one year, he wanted to be like the small European cars. Ford hadn't built small cars. What happened? The Pinto became the death trap. More lives were lost because of the Pinto and the ways in which engineers were pressured to sign off on safety checks and they knew the car was a death trap. So same thing with the Titan submersible.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
Skipped all the learning, just wanted to make money and get people down to the Titanic. I mean, I could go on and on. Don't mix them up. It's a simple, elegant theory. It is number one of 73 management theories without ever having a replication crisis. And that's significant. Just learn this simple, elegant theory. And I promise you, all of your goal pursuit is going to be a whole lot easier.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
And these two men are still alive. They did the work. They did the scholarship. They just didn't pursue fame. And I'm so grateful to put a spotlight on their work.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
So that's a case study I have in the book. I have spent just hundreds of hours looking at Boeing and the MCAS failure, because again, people lost their lives. Because what you see when you mix up a learning goal and a performance goal is companies lose their reputation. Sometimes they never get it back and people lose their lives like they did with the Boeing 737 MAX with the MCAS failure.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
It is such a good example that American Airlines, Boeing's biggest customer, just went to them and said, we're about to place an order for 200 planes with Airbus. They've been innovating while you've been sitting still. And so they had this board of directors that was, sorry to say it, it was mostly white men doing what I call planning. the Hobsburg jaw effect.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
They were all sitting around inbred ideas and it became sterile. There were no good ideas coming out of that. It was a lot of groupthink. And in the eighties, Jack Welch and other CEOs began to demand higher pay packages. And they used to cut, cut, cut to get more productivity and squeeze workers to the max while giving themselves these avaricious pay packages. Jack Welch is the
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
absolute poster child for avaricious, just greedy pay packages. It was just one of the worst in 2005. And so this is what happened is these companies just wanted to make more and more money. They wanted to pump up the stock price. Boeing did that and Boeing lost its edge and they stopped innovating and they started to cover up. It became a culture of sloppiness, of lying, of poor quality.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
And they knew it. And it was just like the Ford Pinto. These engineers knew that they were signing off on things like drills being left in planes. They would drill and then drop it. And they go, it's OK, just seal it shut. So this has now come out more and more. And they didn't let the pilots train in simulators to just cut costs. Again, it comes down to money.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
They wanted to make as much money as possible. So they cut costs. They did not develop what Airbus had developed with more strict guidelines. They didn't develop this long haul carrier that could have more fuel. So it'd be heavier and go longer distances because that's what the world was asking for. So they just retrofitted one of their other workhorse planes, cut corners, lied, cheated,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
and took more big pay packages and basically just threw the planes out there. And we now know what happened. These things are predictable and goal setting theory predicts this. When you mix up a learning goal, Boeing had a learning goal. They had to learn how to make this kind of plane. And normally I think it takes six to 10 years to develop a new plane.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
They didn't want to lose their customers, particularly American Airlines. They just took shortcuts. I call this faux grit, fake grit. You're not doing the hard work to do something great at the end of the day. So you fake it. So that's what happened. So Boeing is just one of the examples in the book.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
Yeah.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
So Huberman went from one to several million followers, just as I was recovering from cytomegalovirus, which had me in a hospital for three days. And it took NIH infectious doctors to figure out why I was literally dying. They thought I had leukemia. And so anyway, I was told there was no cure to cytomegalovirus. I had to just relax. Really? Okay.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
So I started taking these long walks on the beach. We had just bought a beach house in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. And I was practicing a concept called Utweiden, which is a Dutch word for airing your soul out in windy, salty, cold air. And I did that for miles. And it coincided with Andrew Huberman's podcast, which was three hours. So I was out there for three hours airing my soul out.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
And he kept talking about how there was all this research stuck. in medicine, these trials going on and on, but there was already ample evidence to show that these things, whatever they were making a difference in how people lived, how they healed, how to approach supplements, sleep, light. And so he developed protocols. And so these multi-hour podcasts, the public wanted it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
And I could see the hunger as it grew and grew and he became a star. People wanted these protocols. And I realized that even to this day, even though I brought goal setting theory to the mass market in 2008, and then John Doerr, the venture capitalist who invented it, I think he invested in Google and some other startups.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
He had goal setting theory in the introduction to his book, Measure What Matters. But other than the two of us, me first, and then him 10 years later, goal setting theory still wasn't known by anybody. And so I'd go around the world and I'd give webinars and talks to hundreds of CEOs and executives. And I would say, how many of you set goals for your companies? Every hand goes up.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
How many of you do it with goal-setting theory? No hands go up. And so for 15 years, I watched this and I thought, the world really deserves better. We're over a barrel now. We live in a VUCA environment. Our kids are anxious and depressed. Suicide has gone up and companies have to learn new ways. We're in a
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
vast learning goal condition in the world right now because of COVID and artificial intelligence. And I said, now we have to know goal setting theory. And I'm going to put protocols in this book that people can now use to experiment with creating success. And every bit of my book is going to be evidence-based.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
And I'm going to explain the history of goal setting from time and motion studies to how we got here today and how we can use goal setting theory. But then I added my bridge methodology. which is how I created other protocols. And because what that does is goal setting theory was published in 1990.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
There's been a raft of findings around mindset and grit and all kinds of things, priming, you name it, that also impact success. And no one had really pulled together a goal setting book that included everything you need to know. So I did it. And everything in this book is a protocol.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
If you buy this book, any manager in the world will be able to set goals correctly with themselves, with their companies, every teenager who wants to make a sports team or make the orchestra in the oboe. This book will tell you how to accomplish your goals. No longer will people have dreams and no idea how to accomplish them. I have dragged goal setting out of the magical law of attraction
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
the 1980s, 1990s into the 21st century. It is now evidence-based. If you buy this book, everything about it is evidence-based and my protocols will change your life. And the last thing I wanna say, I'm just militant about this. Smart goals isn't science. Period exclamation point. Another exclamation point.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
People think smart goals is a thing and it's not, it was a guy in the eighties, George Doran. He wrote an art consultant, just wrote an article for a management magazine and he created an acronym that was sticky, but it's what I call jargon mishmash syndrome. That acronym means different things all over the world, relatable, realistic, It could be measurable, meaningful.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
There is no one acronym that fits SMART goals. It ain't science. There's research showing it undermines it. Finally, the last thing I'm going to say about SMART goals, because I really feel so strongly about this. It's even in artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence has embedded it in its answers about goal setting. What was I going to say about SMART goals?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
Oh, if you take the first definition of SMART goals and you make are realistic, that immediately undermines goal setting theory. Red flags started to fly in my brain in 2005 when I saw that challenging and specific goals, learning goals and performance goals, they have to be challenging and specific if you want the best possible outcome.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
Using the word realistic immediately causes you to set what's called low goals. So forget smart goals, buy my book and learn the real science, period.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
I think it's really important that we look at this. And again, I don't think this question has really been asked or addressed ever in a book. And it just struck me in February because I signed the contract last December and the book was turned in May 1st. So and it's out November 27. So this was huge. And in February, as I literally drowned 14, 16 hours a day.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
I realized one day that all I had listened to that day or that week were what I call dude podcasts. I'd heard nothing but men talking about men to men about success and goal setting and motivation. And I realized that I hadn't heard a single woman even referenced as an example of excellence or curiosity or genius. The criteria for being a genius are skewed against women.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
And that's when I realized that self-efficacy theory, Bandura's theory, where you have to have relatable role models, was working subconsciously and unconsciously against anybody who didn't fit that model of mostly white men, because face it, they've been in leadership, they've had the power forever. That's not debatable, really.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
That listening to podcasts, reading these books, for the most part, you weren't going to hear or see relatable role models. And I began to ask myself, Are we, and I'm a woman, are we by and large setting smaller goals because of how the world seems to be skewed against us? We don't hear or see relatable role models.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
Wikipedia says that 18% of the biographies are of women, 82% are of men, because there's this drive by editing that says women haven't been notable or noteworthy enough, so they delete their bios. So that's just one aspect is what are we hearing and seeing? And for the most part, it's dude walls, dude panels, but now dude podcasts, which is mostly how women get a lot of information.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
The other thing I want to say, and there's so much research in the book about this, so it's really important, is that since 1940, perceptions of women have changed in many ways. particularly around competence. Women are now seen as competent because we're in the workforce now. 50% of the workforce, maybe more, is female. So we have many chances to be seen as competent.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
Where there has been no change at all in how people perceive women, and that includes how men and women see women, is in this area of agency and being goal-directed and being ambitious. And the research shows very conclusively that any woman who sets pursues and achieves big goals, she is going to pay a huge social penalty.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
And the research on it is all over the place because what's happened is you violated stereotype norms. It's called the black sheep effect. You will be ghosted. You will not have your success celebrated. You'll be held to different standards than men are. But for the most part, you will be excommunicated by both friends and other people, both men and women.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
They're the rare few who celebrate and build up women who've succeeded. But for the most part, this is the one area that's held constant and we've had no growth whatsoever. So just being me, a woman talking about goal setting is blowing up norms. Blowing up norms because people sitting in audiences are not used to hearing women talking about goal setting. and how the science impacts them.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
So I think companies have to realize that many of the reward systems, many of the ways in which people are encouraged to get feedback as they're pursuing goals and part of goal setting theory says you have to have feedback that tells you that you're getting warmer, you're getting closer, or you got to pivot. Women don't get accurate feedback. When they succeed, they often get no feedback.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
People go silent. It's very painful. Women are also by and large, not given leadership feedback while men are. And there are a few other studies that came out literally recently, like in the last month that I didn't get in the book. One is about how women, female CEOs are given 1.7 years to succeed. And men are given more than two, almost three to succeed.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
Women are deemed failures much more quickly with different criteria. Not only that. quote unquote, failed female CEO, the halo effect follows any female who might be considered by a board of directors to be the next CEO. She's already considered a quasi failure simply because that role model was quote unquote, failed male CEOs. No such halo effect exists. That doesn't happen.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
So here's another one. In the workplace, women and men who are given the exact same goals and tasks to accomplish, women who achieve those goals with excellence and on time do not get credit for being that person.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
The research shows that men who take longer and work nights and weekends and maybe have the same outcome, maybe it's excellent, they're seen as more successful, more dedicated, more disciplined, and more... dedicated to the company. So all over the place, the ways in which we set goals, value progress, give feedback and reward excellence skews against women.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
And I'll give you one last example, because a lot of people study Amazon for goal setting success. They've got this big goal setting program. A program where people are squeezed to death and they're encouraged to rat on their friends and call these anonymous lines and say so-and-so isn't doing their work. I mean, it is a cutthroat Darwinian culture.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
There is no one acronym that fits SMART goals. It ain't science.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
But one of the things is they encourage managers to give brutal feedback in front of other people, shame them. And the problem is when women do that, when women adhere to those standards in any culture, They'll pay a penalty. They will pay a huge penalty. So they might be following the criteria, the 14 criteria that Amazon says, this is how you must act to be an Amabot.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
So they'll be doing what the company wants them to do, but it's going to completely undermine their success. It will not pay off in the end. So those are just a few examples.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
We have to wake up to the fact that we do not have goal-setting productivity systems embedded in the world or in companies that are evidence-based or that ask people as they're setting their strategy, will this strategy work for someone who looks like me? Can I find a woman, a person of color,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
who has also achieved or built this character trait or done this hard thing who I can relate to, because you know what? How they did it is not gonna match many of the stories they've heard on podcasts, is not gonna match some of the people we see in documentaries. You have to step back and say, will it work for me? And then just like I did with overcoming my bulimia, find a Betsy.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
I looked at that woman across the room in that church in Baltimore, Maryland, who said, my name is Betsy and I'm recovering from bulimia one day at a time. I just got goosebumps again, because it changed my life. There was my role model. She was good. And she did. She taught me how to overcome bulimia one day at a time.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
You can't just follow a recipe that has worked for people who don't look like you sound like you come from your culture, be vigilant, be thoughtful, be awake at the wheel, not asleep at the wheel.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
Thank you. Really nice to be here.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
So there are four ways to build self-efficacy. One is a vicarious role model, somebody in your environment. It's also someone who believes in you, and that's a big one, having a mentor or sponsor. But by and large, Bandura found that the number one way to build self-efficacy was to break big goals down into smaller pieces and have mastery experiences. So
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
Don't be daunted or overwhelmed by the fact that you have a big goal. I have this whole methodology and worksheets in this book that'll walk you through how to set the right big goals and make sure your strategy matches it. But we have to set goals that are appropriate for us, our goals, intrinsically motivated. and then break it down into different steps.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
But we also have to take a look at my bridge methodology is brainstorming relationships, investments, decision-making hygiene, good grit, and your standards of excellence. You have to look at all of those because every one of them is going to involve steps that need to be taken that will build up mastery.
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And another thing I'll say, when you look at relationships is people catch behaviors in their environments. And if you want to do hard things and it requires grit or resilience or the ability to have more self-regulation or willpower, take a look at the tribe that you spend time with. Take a look at the emails that you open.
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Take a look at the conversations that you listen to in the hallways, wherever you work or live or spend time, because those are going to have a massive impact on whether or not you have the support you need to accomplish your goals. And this goes to Shelly Gable's research. Shelly Gable's research on active constructive responding really makes people wake up.
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You see the shade snapping open in people's eyes when they hear about active constructive responding. She found that there's only one right way to respond when someone tells you they have a big goal or they've done something hard and meaningful that they feel proud of. The only one right way to respond that your brain says, this is a good thing.
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And I'm going to do more of this is if that person responds with curiosity and enthusiasm. Her research found that there are three other ways to respond, which is passive, aggressive, passive, destructive, and active destructive. And they're all about either changing the subject or saying mean things or whatever, devaluing that person's excitement about what they've done.
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And if you share your big goal or your success with the first person who responds to that, the first responder research is what I call it, that person has the power to make you disengage from that goal and just stop doing it. So think really carefully about who has your back, who's in your circle.
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Do you have a mastermind group that believes in you and you respond with curiosity and enthusiasm to their goals? This is again, where I want to call out women for a moment. There is research showing that 84% of women admit to being surrounded by frenemies. Friends who are enemies. And why do women do this? Because they don't want anyone to think they're not nice.
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And as I learned this research, what I realized was we're doing this at our own peril. And we're thinking, well, one day my mom will say something nice about what I've accomplished. One day, my sister-in-law, my cousin, my best friend, they'll be happy for me, but they must not mean what they're doing. When someone tells you who they are, believe them.
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And this is where you have to really take active steps is when you've got big goals, Bandura talks about the importance of being around people who believe in you, vicarious role models, supporters, and people who help you achieve mastery. And so do not make the mistake of being around people who suck more than they give. So I'll stop right there.
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So Amy Edmondson was in my husband's class at Harvard and I'd followed her work for years. She's a professor at Harvard Business School. And what's really important at work is when you're in a meeting that your voice is heard. And I'm going to go back to women again.
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So it's a safe place to express your feelings, even if you're the newest employee, to give your ideas, to not be interrupted or mansplained or eyes rolled or being cut off. So you have to have that. But Phyllis Chesler is someone I've really followed her research. She's at NYU. And in her book, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman, she has this unbelievable line.
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And again, the whole book is evidence-based. It weighs as much as a brick, but it's worth it. She said, no one mourns little girls to expect incoming fire for the rest of their lives. that it will come in the form of passive aggressive comments. I put up with it. You could mean girls. That's just how women are. Just accept it. She talks about the fact that we have all of this incoming fire.
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And what I realized when I wrote the book is, Many of us don't have psychological safety outside of the workplace. So the workplace is one place that has gotten an enormous amount of publicity and justifiably so, but what about a lack of psychological safety elsewhere?
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When you're at home eating dinner, when you're out sitting on the soccer field, watching your kids play, what are you absorbing there? Again, be vigilant. It's not just at work. So that's what I have to say about psychological safety.
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Good question. And I think your book is great, by the way. So Angela was doing this research while I was at Penn, and that's where I met her. And then we became friends later, and I decided to write not just about the quality of grit, because she found that passion, perseverance, and pursuit of long-term goals was this X factor in success. And she gave a wonderful TED talk about it.
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And then she wrote this bestseller, Grit, bestseller all over the world, really. What I wanted to write about was the quality, how to get it, not just that it's great and that it's important, but how to get it. And so for me, intentionality is intrinsic motivation. And it's the decision to actually do whatever it takes to accomplish that goal, because it is something that you want to accomplish.
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It's something that's so important to you. And this is the passion. that you will persist through dark nights of the soul. And what's baked into grit and big goals is that will happen. That will happen. The Stoics talked about premeditatio malorum, premeditate the evils that are coming in the path before you, because it's going to be hard to do hard things. So they knew it thousands of years ago.
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So you have to have this passion along with this realistic optimism. I'm going to do it. It's hard. I'm going to have to unleash passion. And that passion is what's going to keep me going. Even when I'm alone, even when I'm doing hard things and nobody's doing flashcards or giving me a trophy or whatever. And so that to me is what intentionality is all about.
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And the last thing I'll say about my book, getting grit, as I wrote it about how to cultivate it, how do you break this down? What are the qualities? It's humility. It's persistence. It's the ability to set goals correctly. It's about self-regulation. But I realized and wrote about a definition that I felt was a little bit different from Angela's because I believe
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That grit is good grit when the display of that good grit, the pursuit of hard things that are important to you and you do it with dignity and self-respect and you do it without a cheerleading squad and you do it because it's important to you and you do it for all the right reasons.
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I call that authentic grit because I believe good grit awes and inspires other people to ask themselves, what if I acted like that? What could I do? What would my life be like? What if I went out of my comfort zone and did hard things too? And so for me, good grit isn't just about a person doing hard things. It's about the quality of uplifting the people who see you, the people who are awestruck
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by seeing what you do and how you do it. And there's so many examples of that. So for me, grit is all about not just doing hard things, but it's how you do those hard things. And what is the impact? Because this is systems theory. I believe it has to impact other people in order for it to make a big difference. During COVID, I came up with a term that
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was too late because the book was out already. Compassionate grit. What I saw were people doing hard things so that other people could live. If you didn't want to wear a mask for two years, but it meant grandmom and granddad and the neighbor next door who you went and knocked on her door and asked if she needed her walkways shoveled or leaves raked. There was so much compassion
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Wow, okay, thank you. And so I think it was more the bold step was the University of Pennsylvania took me, but what I did see was in January of, I think, 2005, the cover story of Time or Newsweek was the new science of happiness, big smiley face.
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for other people by many to do hard things that they didn't want to do. They didn't want to stay home from their jobs. They didn't want to wear masks. They didn't want to cancel their kids' graduations, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I saw a new kind of grit that I think Mother Nature brings about every hundred years, maybe because of a black swan event.
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When we get to see what we're made of, and I think grit comes from how we deal with those black swan events, those unusual hundred year events.
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So Best Possible Future Self is a well-known exercise in positive psychology. I don't know if Laura King wrote it or Sonia Lubomirsky.
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I don't know who to give credit to, but it's been studied that when you write about your future as if it's gone as well as possible, five years, 10 years into the future, and you do this three, four days in a row in tremendous detail, 15, 20 minutes of writing, it's been found that people are more in touch with their goals
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They have more empathy or sympathy for who they're going to be in those 10 years. They begin to imagine an older version of themselves. They clarify something called goals and conflict, which is not talked about enough. Many of us have really good goals. They're both good goals, well-formed goals, but the pursuit of one means the other one cannot be accomplished, at least not at that time.
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This exercise makes you forcibly move one up and one down, clarifies goals and conflict. If you do the via character strength test, again, via character.org, and you look at in this set of writings, journaling that you do, Who am I going to be in the future if everything works out as well as possible? And I write about in detail who's around me. How did I do these things, et cetera, et cetera?
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And how did I use my top character strengths to make it happen? You're more likely to be happier, more optimistic, more zestful. It's a phenomenal intervention into people's well-being. In the book, I include more recent research, though, that I want to add to this. So...
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Sometimes we're encouraged to write a letter to our future self, maybe a year from now, we do a time capsule kind of things like where am I going to be at the end of 2025. And we stop right there. Well, some Canadian researchers found that it's even more powerful to write that letter to your future self.
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And every article in that issue was about positive psychology and how it was so important and wellbeing mattered and Marty Seligman's book, Authentic Happiness. And there was an article in there with one paragraph, one little paragraph that was flashing neon lights at me.
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And talk about what are you doing it's December 31 and look at these things you did and here's how you did them and here's why you're proud of yourself. And these things were hard but you overcame them by doing these strategies etc and you change your circle and you practice more gratitude but that future self needs to also write a letter back to present self. about how they're going to do it.
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So it's the reciprocity future self, and then future self back to present self with kind of this air of wisdom and lessons learned. And this mirrors Gabriel auditions work, which many people are familiar with about mental contrasting. It's not enough to just say, here I am today. And that's where I want to be in a year. So let's goal set. I'm going to do this too many people just rush into it.
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skip all these steps. But Gabriel Otigen, a lot like the ancient stoic said, it's not enough. You start to have these fantasies that you've done these hard things and you fool yourself into thinking you've done more work than you have. No. And I think vision boards are really big culprits in this. And people spend too much time with these positive fantasies.
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She says, do that briefly, but don't spend too much time there. Come back and have a realistic assessment of what you're going to have to deal with. What obstacles? Again, premeditatio malorum, the Stoics. Premeditate the evils in front of you. So that's also part of letter to the future, future self back to today. So there's a lot of great research on this.
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And I took phenomenal care to not just do an N of one. What worked for me? Everything in my book is evidence-based. You ask me where I got the research. I'll open the drawer in my head where it is. People deserve to have a science-based approach to making their dreams come true personally and professionally. And up till now, there has been no book that brought it all together.
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And I'm so proud of the fact that I have done that.
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I'm a big fan of Adam Grant's by the way. I love his work and he's been really generous and kind in the ways he has talked about my other books and and now I'm nominated for his club. It's just amazing. But the scaffolding of my bridge approach, I believe is most analogous to the stages of change by Prochaska, Norcross and DiClemente that came out in the seventies about overcoming addiction.
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It said the University of Pennsylvania is going to take 32 men and women from all over the world in its first ever Masters of Applied Positive Psychology in the world, the science of happiness. And all I remember thinking was I have to get into that. I just have to get into that program. I had never seen or heard of a graduate program that spoke to me. So I had this intuition. I had to get there.
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And what they found is that the stages of creating change, particularly with things like quitting smoking was pre contemplation before you even know you want to quit smoking contemplation. I want to quit smoking. Gosh, it's going to be hard. How am I going to do it? preparation, beginning to learn what you got to learn. Where do I have to be? How do I have to do this?
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Do I need a course, whatever preparation. And then you go into action. A lot of people just look at action and go, oh, that's what you got to jump into. No, it's this long preparation and thinking about it and scaffolding of the resources you need. And then you achieve your goal, you maintain, and then you disengage. So as I wrote the bridge methodology and I've been fine tuning it for 15 years.
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What I realized is you can't skip any of those steps. You can't skip the brainstorming, really effective brainstorming, especially if you are achieving a learning goal and you've never done it before, you better have the right prompts like artificial intelligence, because it's the quality of the prompt that gives you this high quality answer. So if you skip the brainstorming and
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Even for performance goals, you have to do it. The relationships, you skip who's around you. Who do you need to know? Who needs to be around you? But then who needs to not be around you? Really important. Investments. What kind of time, money, energy am I going to have to use? And then decision-making. To me, this is fascinating.
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Every CEO I've ever worked with has not done a decision hygiene worksheet before. They've never analyzed the quality of their decisions for particularly what Daniel Kahneman talks about, noise. which, and he died earlier this year, he said, noise is a much bigger problem and costs businesses much more money than bias.
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And he spent a lot of his life talking about bias, but he said, no, as I go through this noise research, noise is the biggest problem in our judgment. You got to do that. So decision-making and then grit, what do I need to do? Do I have to up my self-talk? Do I have to learn how to change the channel in my brain when I want to be a When I want to quit, do I have to build up my willpower?
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And then excellence. What are those challenging and specific standards that you need to set before that Locke and Latham talk about? You skip any of those steps, it's going to be like stages of change. What Norcross and Prochaska and all found is if you skip any of those stages, you're doomed. You got to go back. You're going to have to go back to contemplation. So you can't skip them.
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And you can't do it with my bridge methodology either. And I call it goals gone wild in my book. When you mix up learning and performance goals, you can't skip the learning steps. You can't. Because if you do, you're going to cheat, you're going to lie, you're going to steal. And in the worst cases, people will lose their lives. So do the work.
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And I think we became such a quick fix society that told our kids how great they were before they did anything. Even if they didn't do anything, we've got great inflation and comfort animals and Everyone's a valedictorian. Some classes have like 400 valedictorians.
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I mean, we decided in a very misguided way to the self-esteem parenting movement, to take all difficulties out of our children's lives. We bubble wrap the generation. And as a result, they learned because of the adults in their lives. And so it's all on the adults. they learned that you didn't have to do much to be called a winner.
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And so what I'm trying to do in my most recent books is a call to develop the grit and the ability to take the hard steps. to get this sweetness at the end of doing hard things. In Chinese, it's called shiku, eating bitter, so that you do hard things. So at the end of the harvest, the fruit is sweet. You do the work. So I just want people to learn that, and this is what society values, by the way.
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I had not gone to graduate school before this. I was an undergraduate from Harvard university and I'd never seen my college transcripts. So I had to write to Harvard. It's like, do you still have them? I'd never looked at it. Boy, they didn't have great inflation in the late 70s and early 80s. I saw C's and B minuses, and I was magna, but still, I was not the great inflation we see today.
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Society values and puts a premium on hard things, people who do hard things. That's why we all tune into the Olympics because no one gets a participation trophy. I mean, they're winners and losers. Okay. That's what happens. We got to get back to that. And I think we'll all be happier. We'll be more confident. We'll have more self-efficacy and the world would be different.
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I think the most important thing is Locke and Latham's goal setting theory. It's just not known. Even if you go to Harvard Business Review and you type in goal setting theory, three articles come up. Do you know how many articles in Harvard Business Review have been about goal setting and success? People don't know it.
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Learn goal setting theory, divide your goals into learning goals and performance goals, and then add my bridge methodology on top of it. You can Google, if you don't want to buy my book, Google goal setting theory, and just take a look at the goals you're pursuing and ask yourself, is this a learning goal? Is this something where I've got to build in the time
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and the energy to be more curious about how to acquire these skills and knowledge, and then hold myself to high standards in the process of doing it. Or did I just rush into setting a time goal? So learn that. Tell someone else. Start a chain of people knowing it. Because I want to kill off the zombie goal approaches like smart goals and law of attraction.
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They should be dead by now, but they're just zombies walking around. They don't work. Let's kill them off.
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Two places, carolinemiller.com, my name, Think Princess Caroline, like you and I were talking about. Caroline, it was not a common name when I was born. CarolineMiller.com. And then the book has its own website, BigGoalsBook.com. And there's all kinds of case studies broken down throughout history. Here's how these goals were achieved.
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And the very top of it is a learning goal or performance goal and then bridge. So I've given examples from sports, from history, from business, so that people can see how this works in real time. So it's all there.
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Thank you. I really appreciate this. And again, listeners should buy your book and read it because as I went through it, I was just like, wow, this book is great. And it honors all the things that I hold dear, like credit the researchers who did the work and then do that and create protocols like you did too. So I really appreciate you putting your book in the world and this podcast.
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I think you're right. Absolutely both. Thank you.
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And so I applied to the University of Pennsylvania. I wanted so badly to get in, I added a question to the application. It was, why should you take me? And I remember I typed I'm fun in big letters. So I have this zest for life, this passion. It's like you talk about passion struck. I became so passionate about this topic. And then in particular about its connection to the science of goal setting.
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That was my fifth book. My capstone from that year at Penn became this global bestseller, creating your best life. And that was the first two things. And then I'll stop talking. The first time that the mass market got a goal setting book that had evidence, footnotes and science in it.
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That still blows my mind that until that book came out in 2008, the only books on anyone's bookcase were Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy. I mean, none of which had any science footnotes, certainly not goal setting theory, which is my latest book. And the second thing was there was this meta analysis that came out.
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right before I got to Penn, and it said, all success is preceded by being happy first, which completely changes any discussion of goal setting. If you don't address the issue of emotional flourishing, not just happiness, it's not happyology, then you're really not being professional in terms of talking about goal setting, if you have access to this information.
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So for several reasons, that book became a real pioneering book. in the field of goal setting and in positive psychology, it's still selling. But my latest book is an updated version of that. So, so that was when I was passion struck.
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Yeah. It was like being drunk all the time and I don't drink. I haven't had a drink in 40 years, but I just felt drunk. I would call my husband at the end of every day. So it was like five days or three full days every single month. And I remember I couldn't speak. And the only analogy I could come up with is I was an unformatted computer disc that had too much information on it. My brain
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hurt all the time. And I love school. I love school. I didn't care about my grades. I love school. And this spoke to me. This informed my practice as an executive coach because there was so much research. There was like Gosh, my coaching can now have an evidence-based to it because back then it didn't. Coaching was the wild west. But talk about brilliant people.
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Chris Peterson wasn't just brilliant. He was funny and Marty is brilliant. And so Sonya Lubomirsky and Barbara Fredrickson have become my friends. Angela Duckworth was not one of my instructors. She was doing her PhD work. And I think I was the first mass market book to put her new groundbreaking work on grit, which she had just done under Marty.
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She became an instructor later in the program, but not my year. I just got to know her because of her research on grit and the West Point research. So it was life changing and it was life changing in some surprising ways. It changed my profession. It changed me as a human because after you hear things like the number one strength of happy people is gratitude.
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And you look at the via character strengths and you look for where's gratitude. Maybe it's not in the top five. Maybe it's not even the top 10. You pay attention and you can't forget the fact that gratitude is closely linked to a flourishing life. So you hear these things. It's a minute past midnight. You can't go back and live that life anymore that you lived before.
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So you come out of this master's program. I think fundamentally altered as a human being. And I don't know of any master's program anywhere that I've ever heard of where you don't just come in and learn something. You change as a human being. And I changed as a mother. I changed as a wife, as a sister, as a daughter, as a friend. I'm not the same person I was before 2005.
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And I think a lot of people have that reaction.
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That's such a good question. I'm sorry I didn't address that in the second part of that last question. First of all, it's never too late. You just have to have curiosity. And also one of the five character strengths, I use the VIA character strength. I don't use anything else in my work and that's free. It's viacharacter.org.
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I get nothing from it, but it ranks your character strengths from one to 24. And zest is one of the five Chris Peterson told us to look for. He said five of those 24 are more closely associated with being a flourishing person. And zest, he commented, and other researchers who came to work with us commented, it starts high as children, and then it drops to bottom five in most adults.
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And I think zest is closely aligned with passion and curiosity. And I think we have to look for ways to be alive while we're alive. And by following my intuition that I had to do this and having the, not everyone thought I was being a good mother or I was juggling too much with my business, but I had the backing of some key people.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
We know that you need at least three to four people who have your back in order for you to take creative risks in life and believe in yourself. And I think that's what allowed me to feel not just that I was passion struck and that I was passionate about this new addition to my life, my world, my writing, my everything, my work.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
It made me feel like I mattered in a new way because I now had this knowledge. Marty told us he wanted to go out with this knowledge and apply it. apply it to the world in whatever division of life we came from. We've had UN peacekeepers go through that program.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
We've had priests, we've had politicians, we've had so many different kinds of people, but our mandate is to take this amazing education, go out and apply it to the fields where we are most passionate, where we work, where we can make a difference. And I have brought that feeling that I matter and I can make more of a difference with this because of the incredible good fortune I had
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
not only to get in, but to have the ability to go. It's not free. They do have scholarships now for some people. And so there's several areas where I've made a huge difference with this knowledge. One is in the field of goal setting, which we can talk more about. And the other one is in the field of addiction.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
Because as we've discussed, I cultivated grit in my 20s when I became, I think, the first publicly known recovered bulimic. When I wrote my first book, my name is Caroline. I just talk about passion struck. I had to tell the world that I was in recovery at a time when nobody got better. It was a death sentence, but I wanted to live and I wanted to live for myself.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
And it was really my first goal that my teachers didn't set. My parents didn't set, culture didn't set. I wanted to live and I needed to figure out how to recover from bulimia. So I, in my book, Positively Caroline, which was the second part of my name is Caroline is I got in recovery people. The world needs to know you can get in recovery from this thing.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
The second was in 2013, 2013, when the other book came out, Positively Caroline, it was about the fact that I stayed in recovery. And that is really the bigger challenge that I don't think we talk about enough, not just getting in recovery. Now we know it's possible, but staying in recovery.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
So that book, the last part of it is how I feel like positive psychology could be used in the field of addiction, particularly with eating disorders to help people cultivate the behavior, the mindset, the ability to overcome addictions. And I think it's more and more accepted that can be done and those can be combined. So I was passion struck in two different areas.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
Thank you for asking. Obviously you can tell I have zero shame about this. It's the thing I'm proudest of, the fact that I overcame bulimia at a time when people didn't know how to do it. And as I said, it was a death sentence, is the thing to this day that is my touchstone. If I could do that, then I can probably do anything.