Kris Safarova  00:45

Welcome to the Strategy Skills podcast. I’m your host, Kris. And our podcast sponsor today is StrategyTraining.com. If you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the Overall Approach Used in Well-Managed Strategy Studies. It’s a free download, and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/overallapproach. And you can also get McKinsey and BCG-winning resume, which is a free download. And you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/resumePDF. And today, we have a very special guest with us, Caroline Adams Miller, who for over three decades, has been a pioneer with her groundbreaking work in the areas of science of goal setting, grit, happiness, success. She’s recognized as one of the world’s leading positive psychology experts on this research and how it can be applied to one’s life and work for maximum transformation. She’s a magna cum laude graduate of Harvard University and attained one of the first 32 degrees in the world in applied positive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania. Welcome Caroline. So great to have you.

Caroline Adams Miller  01:51

Thank you so much for inviting me. It’s a pleasure to be here, an honor, really.

Kris Safarova  01:55

Same here, and we are going to talk about very important topic, big goals. So before we dive into that topic, which is incredibly important, of course, I feel we need to talk a little bit about your career, because you’re such a fascinating, incredible person, woman, and I would love to dive a little bit deeper, give our listeners an overview and maybe some insights and Aha, moments from your career, before we go into the topic.

Caroline Adams Miller  02:20

Okay, I didn’t I don’t find myself that interesting, but tell me where you would like me to be interesting. I’ll tell you whatever you want.

Kris Safarova  02:29

So maybe we can start with, how did your time at Harvard shape your perspective on success and achievement?

Caroline Adams Miller  02:35

Wow, no one has ever asked me that question. So let me pause for a second that is such a good question. How did my time at Harvard impact? How I saw future success and achievement and even happiness? So one of the things that I know in hindsight from positive psychology is that you can attain these goals that you think are the most important goals in the world. When I grew up here in Washington, DC, it was like the holy grail is to get into this school, or to get that scores, those scores, or play the piano this way, at this age, are swimming. And I got to Harvard, and there was a certain amount of emptiness. I felt. It’s like, is this all there is. I mean, now the people around me were undeniably brilliant. Many of them, there was, you know, legacies who may or may not have, you know, earned their place there. But I remember feeling elevated by the quality of brilliance around me and just thinking, wow, this is really fantastic. At the same time, I had an eating disorder and I had bulimia, back when there was no cure for it, and I was a competitive swimmer, the runners and swimmers at Harvard were studied, and what they came up with as a result of that was this famous finding the female athletic triad of not having your period, low bone density and Eating disorders. So I had a hidden eating disorder. I feel like I was in a fog for four years, and when I graduated, I was in worse shape than when I got there. So it just didn’t make a lot of sense. You get to this place, you’re supposed to be happy. Other people want to be you, allegedly. And then you get there, it’s like, wow. So I got sicker and sicker and sicker, but what I learned from that is that, you know, you can find achievement in smart people anywhere in the world. They’re not just at Ivy League schools. I’ve been surrounded by people since then who didn’t go to college, who didn’t grow up on third base, the way I was born on third base, in many ways and and that there’s just a lot of wisdom in the world that you don’t find at Ivy League schools. And so I’ve grown very grateful for the number of people I’ve met who didn’t have my background, but have taught me more than you could ever imagine. So I think that would be my best answer, having never been asked that question before.

Kris Safarova  05:00

Sure. Thank you for being so honest and open. It is incredibly helpful for people on the other side listening. So you have been struggling during those years, but you also did really well. Academically. You did very well. How did you manage to do that? Because that’s very hard.

Caroline Adams Miller  05:16

Yeah. You know, it’s another good question. I think I was coasting along on the fact that I was smart enough. I went to a really good prep school in DC that, in many ways, was harder than Harvard. It’s hard to get into Harvard. It’s not hard to stay at Harvard. And I think I just was waking up and just checking the boxes and not pushing myself a lot. I feel like I was a billboard. I looked good on the front, but on the back, there was nothing there. I was checking the boxes, just waking up, trying not to be bulimic, failing most of the time, and just kind of lost. So I did graduate magna cum laude. I remember my spring of my senior year, I thought, wow. Wonder what it would take to graduate Magna. And then I was like, Okay, I’ll take a course on gorillas, and that’s all I had to do at that point. What I had was talent and success, but what I did not have was grit, and so I wasn’t pushing myself out of my comfort zone at that point, it was my eating disorder recovery that started a year or two after I graduated, that is what really taught me the most valuable lessons in life, and one of them was to really go outside of your comfort zone in pursuit of something hard. And I don’t feel like I did that at Harvard. So I did well enough, but I think I was coasting, and that is a sadness I carry with me, and carried for years, like, why didn’t I take more advantage of this wonderful time I could have had there?

Kris Safarova  06:50

Do you remember why the eating disorder started? If you’re comfortable sharing? Was it connected to this tremendous pressure to do well?

Caroline Adams Miller  07:01

Yeah. No, I’m very comfortable. I would say it’s many things. I wrote the first book by anyone who did overcome bulimia, so the cat’s out of the bag on this one. So that that that autobiography came out in 1988 because I thought the world should know that there was hope that people could get better. So that was my first book. And I was a competitive swimmer, and I remember two girls. I followed them after lunch one day at our private Girls School in Washington, and I heard them in the bathroom throwing up, and when they came out, I confronted them. I was like, Well, what were you doing? Were you doing that bulimia thing? And they said, Yeah, it’s great, you know, you can eat all you want and you can get rid of it. And one of the girls was a swimmer, a very good swimmer, and I thought, gosh, if she can do it and she’s fast, wow, maybe I could do it too. Problem is, it’s an addiction that sucks you under, and it’s just a downward spiral that you’re almost helpless to get out of, especially back then, because nobody had any idea what to do with in the face of bulimia. So I think part of it was to just look thinner, because that was the coin of the realm. You know, that’s what women are supposed to do, look pretty and wear the right size clothing. And I hope we’ve come a lot further than than then. And there was family pressure. I look back now, and I looked fine, but certainly my parents didn’t think I looked fine. So it was internal pressure. It was swimming pressure, it was cultural pressure. Probably all the same reasons why young girls are still succumbing to eating disorders all over the world, really. And I think Instagram and social media have made it even harder to be a young woman, so I’m just fortunate. I live to tell the story.

Kris Safarova  08:47

Do you remember the defining moment when you decided no more control this?

Caroline Adams Miller  08:53

I found myself in a free meeting in Baltimore. I got married a week after I graduated from Harvard. I proposed to the guy my sophomore year, because I thought, well, if I get married, I won’t be bulimic. How could you be bulimic and be married? So I thought, I’ll just get married. So I had not really dated in my life, so I proposed to the captain of the lacrosse team, who was two years older than me. Said, Okay, let’s let’s do it. Okay, let’s do it. So I got married two weeks after I graduated, and it got worse, and in complete despair, I found myself in a free meeting for compulsive overeaters in Baltimore. Because, honestly, where else was I going to go? They talked about food. I thought, okay, I do food, so maybe there’s something there for me. And I heard this magical sentence, February of 1984 so that was 41 years ago. I’m sitting in a church at night and a woman who looks a lot like me says this sentence that changed my life, and I think she gave me my life that night. She said, My name is Betsy, and I’m recovering from bulimia one day at a time. And. And I remember thinking I’d never heard all those words together in the same sentence. I didn’t know people could get better. And I was just like, oh my gosh, if she did it, I can do it too. So I attached myself to her, and whatever she told me to do, I did. And that was the night I had hope. And we know from goal setting that having hope is the key to the kingdom. If you have hope, there’s so many things you can do that you didn’t think you could do before. And for the first time in my life, I had hope, and that’s what changed. That’s what changed my life and gave me my life back.

Kris Safarova  10:36

Having hope is so important. It’s very easy to lose it when something happens that you think you cannot control, and when there’s so much uncertainty ahead of you, especially when it is related to health, I feel this is when hope is the hardest to find.

Caroline Adams Miller  10:52

Yeah, and I’ve read your back story, I have to say that you’ve been through moments probably harder than mine, and I know you resonate with the whole story of being helpless in the face of a diagnosis you can’t do anything about, or an illness an addiction, like eating disorders or or alcohol or drug addiction. I mean, you can feel helpless because, you know, the person doesn’t want to do that behavior. I never woke up thinking, Oh, today I’m just gonna go from, you know, store to store, and eat as much as I can, and then find a bathroom and throw up. I never once woke up thinking, that’s my day. But when you’re in the grip of an addiction, you’re almost helpless. And so I know you understand that story, and it’s just so good to be alive.

Kris Safarova  11:37

How did you manage to find hope from that sentence. How did you build from there? For those of our listeners who currently may feel that they don’t have hope.

Caroline Adams Miller  11:49

Yeah, so there’s this fancy word in psychology, self efficacy, and that’s Albert bandura’s work at Stanford that’s very well accepted and replicated, and that is when you believe that you can do something. You don’t know how you’re going to do it, but you think, well, I’ll find a way. I’ll find a person. I’ll find a YouTube video, you know, but I will find a way. You almost develop a superhuman power that allows you to do hard things. And it was that feeling now that I know self efficacy. She did it so I can do it. It’s It’s like somebody puts this Supercharged gasoline in the tank of your car, and off you go. Now it’s not to say it’s easy. It’s very, very hard. There’s lots of setbacks when you’re trying to recover from an illness. But then I had people who believed in my potential around me, who saw me the way I wanted to be seen, and who believed I had what it took to one day be better and gosh, I mean, you can’t pay for that kind of love and support. It’s called The Michelangelo effect, when people sculpt you with their words and their feedback, when they know how you want to be seen, what your goals are, and they give you feedback that says, gosh, you know, I’m getting closer. I’m on the right path. That’s what keeps you going, and that’s what kept me going.

Kris Safarova  13:11

For someone who doesn’t have people in their life who sees them the way they can be, can they be that for themselves? Somehow?

Caroline Adams Miller  13:19

Wow. Another great question. I think, I think some very strong people who have an internal kind of confidence that they can do hard things that often comes from. When I wrote the book Getting grit, I found that grandmothers came up a lot, and I think my grandmother was one of the most important people in my life. She believed in me, and I think she gave me that internal fire that said, Yeah, I could be that person for myself, but it’s so much easier when you find people and they they’re attracted to your willingness to do hard things. So is it possible? Yes. Is it easier to seek out people who have more of what you want and who see you the right way? I think it’s much, much easier. But you know, why go it alone when you don’t have to? So I didn’t have to.

Kris Safarova  14:19

I’m so glad he didn’t. And it’s interesting that grandmothers come up a lot for me. As you know, my grandmother was really Yes, this person without whom I probably would have absolutely no hope growing up. So she created that light at the end of the panel that things can be different, maybe not right here, not right now, but somewhere, someday.

Caroline Adams Miller  14:39

Yes, and I can I just say, I love the I love the little part in the story where she asked you not to go to a shaping exercise class. And it’s just so interesting that you know, when someone is that important to us, says something that’s important to them you are. So you know how important they’ve been to your who. You are that. You know, my grandmother was a Christian Scientist, and so if she said the sky is green, I’d go, yeah, the sky is green because it mattered to her. So anyway, I love that part of your story.

Kris Safarova  15:12

I think that one of the ways you can explain is in our society now, in the United States, for example, same in Russia and so on. Many places I lived you have children when you’re young, generally when you yourself a child. Yeah, you don’t yet know much about life. You have to raise yourself, and you’re not ready to raise someone else, right? And because in our society, I mean, in the United States, Russia, places I lived in, children are raised primarily by those who give them birth, who are generally very young adults and don’t know much about life and not ready yet. Many of them not ready yet, to play that part. You have so much trauma and so much pain growing up. And those grandparents, for those of us who were lucky enough to have them, have the ones that care about you, they make such a big difference because they’re actually ready to give their child what child needs?

Caroline Adams Miller  16:03

Yeah, in positive psychology, I was just going to say there’s so many interesting studies on how you don’t need a lot of people necessarily, to break free of desolation or despair or hard things like addictions, you need about three, and it’s so interesting that they brought it right down to three or four people. So you don’t need an army. It would be nice, obviously, but you want to go deep with the right people who have that capacity for love and respect. And I think too often in this society, people have shallow relationships, so they never get to the place where they have a grandmother or somebody else that they can go super deep with. And that’s where all the valuable benefits come from. Is going deep. And I’m very fortunate, and I know you are, that I could go really deep with this one woman. I only had one grandparent I knew, and she was a home run. She was the best thing in my life. And boy, am I. Am I? Every day I think about her with gratitude.

Kris Safarova  17:11

I completely understand what you mean. I know we are kind of a little bit away from all the topics we wanted to discuss, but I feel like we have to mention this, but someone who is listening to us right now and from outside, they’re incredibly successful, and they lead within the organization. They have a team reporting to them, and they have a family, they have parents and they have siblings, and they have a spouse and they have children, but they don’t feel they have even one person with whom they can go deep and who actually loves them, yeah, would be your advice? How can they build relationships like that?

Caroline Adams Miller  17:44

Such a great question. I just finished starting with a new client of mine, and I’ve been talking to him for the last two hours, and he said exactly that to me. He said he’s very successful. He is. He’s, you know, got money, he’s got houses, he’s got all this. But he said, nobody really knows him. He doesn’t really have that one person. And part of it is because I think when you might grow up not trusting the environment around you, you put on a protective shield. And in order to find those people, I think you have to be vulnerable, not with everyone, but you need to find a place where there’s more honesty than dishonesty and more authenticity. I happen to find that in 12 step groups in the United States, like Alcoholics Anonymous. I mean, you don’t even know people’s last names. I’ve been sober for 40 years too, and so I think it’s easier to find people who don’t need or want something from you, but who are there to give that you can learn to trust and have those kinds of relationships, but you need to be careful when you take off that suit of armor. And there’s one way that we’ve learned in psychology that tells you that somebody has your back, and that is if they respond to your good news with what’s called active, constructive responding, curiosity and enthusiasm. And so in order to start the process of figuring out, who can I trust, who might have my back, who wants me to be successful, look at how they respond to your good news or someone else’s good news and make up some fake good news if you’re not sure, just see, do they respond with curiosity and enthusiasm. There is an untranslatable Yiddish word fear gun, which means joy in another person’s joy that’s hard to come by, but when you come by people who have that emotion on your behalf, that’s someone you can usually trust. And so I start there. Look for, look for the behavior that tells you that this is a good person.

Kris Safarova  19:44

That is very powerful and very rare to find. You may think someone is your friend, but when something happens good, you notice that something is going on. They’re not happy for you, even though, for example, they knew that you worked so hard for this.

Caroline Adams Miller  19:57

It’s something women unfortunately do to other women. And there’s an enormous amount of research on Mean Girls and scarcity theory and bio social theory. But the bottom line is, women are not raised to have this behavior for other women, and so I think a lot of women are very lonely, and I think a lot of women die in silos, wondering if anyone ever saw them, or if they ever achieved the real purpose that they were born to live. And I really thrive on sharing the tools that will help people who feel that way identify big goals that are life changing goals, and then give them, you know, evidence based tools to it to achieve those goals, because women are burning out in silos, and the research shows we’ve got all these women at midlife who are dying from diseases of despair, alcoholism, suicide, depression, eating disorders, gambling, whatever. So I think we need to pay special attention to the women in our lives, and do we really know them the way they want to be known? Do we know what their dreams are? And if we don’t know what their dreams are, are they really your friend? And how can we help them achieve those dreams and goals? So that’s my answer to that question.

Kris Safarova  21:16

And for people in your life that are not happy for you when something good happens, that the healthiest thing is to just step away from those relationships, especially in situations when it is your sibling.

Caroline Adams Miller  21:32

Ah, that’s always your siblings. Oh, gosh, if I had $1 for every time somebody said, but what if it’s my mother? It’s like it’s always your mother or your sister or your sister in law. So there are people you cannot always cut out of your life. It’s not feasible, because you might live with them. It might be your spouse, it might be your best friend. The problem is, we know the damage that’s done to people’s goals and dreams if they share something important to them and somebody else doesn’t respond with, you know, gosh, tell me more. Or I’m sure you can do that, like when Betsy spoke. I, my name is Betsy, and I’m recovering from bulimia one day at a time, you know? I I knew this was someone I could trust and I could reach out to. There was no one in my family who was going to play that role. So I stuck with the winners, and I stuck with people who had the attitude towards life and the behaviors that I witnessed that told me that these are people who want to leave the world better, and so I think you have to create boundaries. Maybe don’t take the phone calls. That’s why caller ID exists. You know, don’t take the calls from people who make you feel empty when you hang up, or angry or worse. We can quickly identify the Debbie downers if we just check with ourselves. How did I feel after that conversation or interaction? And isn’t there another kind of person or person I can draw closer to me so that I don’t feel that. So I guess that my advice is, cut them out if you can. But remember, there’s this wonderful phrase memento mori. We’re all dying. We’re all dying. We only have 4000 Mondays in life. You know, live as if, live as if your life is on fire and you’re dying. And remember that, because we can’t tolerate that kind of negative energy and still achieve our potential, it is not possible.

Kris Safarova  23:34

So you have only so much time, as you mentioned, but there was so much time in the day, so much time in the week. You can have relationships only with so many people collaborating?

Caroline Adams Miller  23:44

Yeah, that’s right. I think there’s research on how many people you can have in your life. It’s like 130 you know, before you’re overwhelmed and not tracking them. So you do have to be thoughtful. There’s only so much room.

Kris Safarova  23:57

So very true. So if you would go back to your youngest self at Harvard. What advice would you give yourself?

Caroline Adams Miller  24:03

Oh, gosh, what advice I would give myself is to there was no one really to trust because there was no help available. I don’t know what advice I would have given myself, because I’m not sure what would have helped other than you know, we know in positive psychology, other people matter. Put more energy into people, the right people, than in trying to make your body look a certain way. You know, life isn’t about perfection. Life is about progress. And I don’t know if I could have heard that, because I was in the grips of something bigger than myself, but if I just felt loved, if I just felt loved, other than my grandmother, you know, life could have been a little bit easier, but you know, my journey is my journey, and I’m. Here because of that journey, and I actually think my eating disorder is the best thing that ever happened to me. So it all worked out, okay, but I don’t know. I actually don’t know how to answer that question.

Kris Safarova  25:13

It’s an interesting experience to live life where you know what love is, because you experienced it from your grandmother when you were very small, but you have never witnessed it again.

Caroline Adams Miller  25:24

Well, I am married, and he does love me, and he loves me through all the ups and downs, but I did not have that from my parents, and that was a huge hole in my heart. In fact, one of the last things my father said to me before he died was that my mother had never loved me, and for some reason he needed to tell me that, and instead of it being awful, it was validating, because I didn’t have to wonder anymore, am I imagining this terrible behavior? So I knew what grandmother love was like, but I never really knew what it was like from the people who made me and I filled that in with a family of choice and my own family at this point. But I’m not sure you ever really get over not being loved by your own mother. You just work around it.

Kris Safarova  26:17

What is interesting as you know, is as children, we do not blame the mother, we blame ourselves.

Caroline Adams Miller  26:24

Of course, yeah, yeah. And in my darkest hours. Now, if somebody were to say, why did that happen, I might just default to I’m unlovable. That’s not my story anymore, but there are moments when I’m very vulnerable, in spite of five different therapists and group therapy and lots of coaching. I mean, I’ve done the work, but there’s some holes in your heart that don’t go away. They get smaller, and, yeah, it’s it’s been hard at times.

Kris Safarova  27:02

I’m so sorry, and I really understand what it is like, because I had similar situation. Yep, so at what point did you get really interested in call setting?

Caroline Adams Miller  27:13

Um, I think I was interested because there were stories in the family of my great uncles who won the Olympics, set world records in the 1912 Olympics. So I grew up knowing that they had, you know, won the Olympics, got first second and third. I’ve two uncles. I got first, second, second, third. You know, they were in the 1908 1912 Olympics. And that was when my father told me the story about how my uncle Platt jumped to a world record in the standing high jump in 1912 when he was behind going into the final jumping round. That was when I learned very early that it’s not just about the work, it’s about the mindset. And that fascinated me. And then when I overcame bulimia, again, I was just fascinated like, gosh, how did I do that hard thing, and how do you unpack this and make it possible to do other hard things. And then I started reading everything you could read about goal setting and so I was ready. I was ripe for the plucking when I went back to school in 2005 and was assigned goal setting theory by lock and Latham. And I realized there was no such thing as goal setting theory in a single not one single goal setting book that I own, not one tape I listened to, not one. Brian Tracy Zig Ziglar, Steven COVID, Tony Robbins, none of these men had any science in their work. It was all urban legends. And that’s when I thought, you know, everyone sets goals. Companies set goals. And here is this thing, goal setting theory ranked number one of 73 management theories in academia, and nobody seems to know it. That’s when I was like, Okay, I’m on fire, and I gotta bring this out to the world, because people don’t seem to know it. And so that’s been a mission I’ve had since 2005 really.

Kris Safarova  29:03

Can you explain to us a little bit what it is, what people need to know?

Caroline Adams Miller  29:07

Yeah. So it’s a very simple, elegant theory. It just says that goals come in two kinds. One is called a learning goal, and that’s when you are pursuing something that you’ve never done before, or you don’t have the skills, the knowledge, the training. You’ve never been mentored, but you just don’t know how to do something. In that case, they say you will always get the best outcome if you pursue challenging and specific ways to acquire that knowledge, not just maybe I’ll watch a video here and there you really go after flattening your learning curve as fast as possible. In order to do that, you also cannot have a deadline by which you have to have a certain level of excellence. So you take all the pressure off, you know someone at work yourself, and you just basically say, I need to acquire these skills and knowledge. That’s a learning goal. The other thing they call is a preferred. Performance goal, but I call it a checklist goal. That’s something you have done before. You’re a pilot who has flown a plane before. You’re a surgeon who’s done surgery before. You’re a maid who’s cleaned a hotel room you’ve packed for a trip. You have a checklist. What that means is you know how to do it, and what you can continue to do is try to get better and more efficient. And they said both kinds of goals will always have the best outcome if they’re challenging and specific. And it sounds so simple, except that most people mix up learning goals and performance goals, and that is where you have every business disaster in history, every one of them, it was companies that set out to accomplish some big goal in doing something they’d never done before, and they made themselves accountable to the public, to the shareholders, usually to make money or to get some kind of PR and yet they had never taken the time to learn how to do it. So they cut corners, skip steps, and sometimes people died, like Boeing with the 737 MCAS, the Ford Pinto car, you know, the Titan submersible going underwater to the Titanic. But we do this in big and small ways in our lives as well. Give yourself the time and the grace to learn how to do something and do it well, and then you can put on the pressure to accomplish it at a certain level by a certain date. So that’s what they said. And it’s been replicated 1000s of times. And for the life of me, I can’t figure out why people are not using it in companies or in dashboards, or some people are, but very few, because it’s the fastest, best way to be successful, is to start with goal setting theory. So that’s what it says.

Kris Safarova  31:47

Thank you. That is such a good explanation, very easy to understand. So if you look at these two types of goals, mixing them up, would you say this is the biggest misconception about setting and achieving goals? Or is it something?

Caroline Adams Miller  32:01

I think so. Well, I think there’s a lot of mistakes people make. One of them is they, they think all goals are created equal, and they just go for it, like, Okay, I’ve set goals before, I’ve saved money for a car, I’ve done other things. You know, a goal is a goal is a goal. So I think just not giving credence to the fact that there are different kinds of goals. That’s number one. Number two is, I think people are very vague about the things they’re pursuing, which means they can’t measure their progress. And I think people do that to protect their egos. And so that’s one another big mistake. The third thing, when I was writing big goals, that really struck me is that we’re just now really beginning to understand that the ways in which people have been motivated and told to pursue their goals work differently for men than it than they do for women. And so a lot of the ideas that have been put out there about women, you know, asking for what they want, you know, being bold, being ambitious, doing what men have done because it succeeded for them. What we finding is that there has been zero progress in the last 90 years in terms of whether or not women get rewarded for being ambitious and goal directed. And so as a woman, also a person of color, when you’re pursuing a goal, you have to be very careful to get feedback from the sources that have pursued the goals that you’re pursuing to success, who look like you, who sound like you, who have your background. The workplace has been dominated by white men since 1880 and so all of the productivity systems that started back in time and motion studies were written by men, enforced by men, and they’re all about men. And so we’re just now finding that the workplace needs to be divided more carefully when it comes to goal setting.

Kris Safarova  33:56

That is so true. So what woman should know about goal setting. How should they do it differently?

Caroline Adams Miller  34:03

So there are a couple things that I go through in the book that I probably can’t encapsulate very quickly, but one of the first is simply to know that if you just wholeheartedly swallow whatever advice you heard on a podcast or in a book or whatever, make sure that women’s names are involved, or there are role models you can look to who have accomplished the same goal. Because unfortunately, in Wikipedia, 82% of the biographies in there that inspire and motivate people are of men. Only 18% are of women. If you look at Amazon, the top leadership books, 82% of them are written by men, 18% by women. So I think that we’re getting too much advice and and kind of talk about men, and then we do about women, Special Forces. US presidents, you know, all men anyway. So first question, where you’ve gotten your your motivation, your. Ideas about how to do the things you do. I also think we have to enlist the help of other women. We have to amplify the success and good news of other women in order to get the same support for ourselves. Because when women act on their own behalf, they’re seen as cold and ambitious and driven, even if it’s not true, even if they do exactly what has been rewarded in men, one of the things we find is that they will pay a penalty. I’ll give you an example, a couple examples that I just couldn’t believe. One is that women who are onboarding in companies who go to social events to get to know their coworkers, and they do so at the advice of the people who hired them, women are penalized for that behavior, and men are seen as more dedicated to the company. Women are just seen as cold and ambitious and too self absorbed. But it’s the advice both got. So women get penalized. Secondly, if you have a big role, a job at work, and you accomplish it on time as a woman, and you do it well, you need to know that a man who takes longer and who doesn’t maybe do as good a job, he’ll be seen as more dedicated to the company. He’ll get more rewards. It’s really important that you understand that you have to get feedback based on exactly what you’ve done and not rely on what’s typically given to women. Scrutinize the feedback, hold people to account for whatever your job description is, or when you did it, keep track of what you’ve done, but enlist the support of other women, but also men who see you the way you want to be seen. Don’t just assume that it’s a level playing field, because it’s not.

Kris Safarova  36:38

Very powerful words. So for someone setting a goal, how do they know it’s a big goal versus just another ambitious target?

Caroline Adams Miller  36:45

That’s a good question. So the phrase big goals for me and for Wiley, the publisher, came from goal setting theory lock and Latham, because what they found is, whether it’s a learning goal or a checklist goal, you’ll always get the best outcome if it’s past your fingertips, challenging and specific, that is a big goal. And the reason why I focused on big goals is because those are the goals that tend to change your life. Those are the goals that tend to show you what you’re made of. Those are the goals that show you who has your back. So big goals are the ones that actually help us to achieve our dreams and awe and inspire other people in terms of how we pursue something that is somewhat risky. I mean, when you pursue big goals, you really don’t know if you’re going to accomplish them, but you know you’re driven, because it’s your passion. You set it for yourself. So a big goal challenges you. It takes you out of your comfort zone. It’s past your fingertips, and it’s usually not attainable. It’s usually somewhat unattainable. And that’s the beauty of it, and that’s why using SMART goals is not a particularly helpful thing to talk about. And this is what the research shows. If you talk about realistic or attainable goals. You’re not talking about the kinds of big goals that people often point to and say that thing changed my life.

Kris Safarova  38:08

Can we clarify a little bit what you mean by challenging and specific? Just to make sure.

Caroline Adams Miller  38:15

Okay, good. So challenging means it’s hard. There’s three kinds of goals, challenging and specific. Low goals and no goals. So no goal speaks for itself. You didn’t set any goal. You just went out see, hey, I’m going to do my best. You know, do your best. Second is low goals, meaning if you set the goal and you want to get a bonus and you want to make sure you set a goal, that’s something you know you’re going to achieve. So it’s not very hard. You reach your hand out and you pick the apple off the apple tree. That’s an attainable goal. That’s a low goal. Challenging and specific is something that you are not necessarily sure you will be able to accomplish because you’re asking yourself to do something out of your comfort zone that’s hard. My challenging and specific is not someone else’s challenging and specific. So we have to know ourselves. Specific speaks for itself. If you are somebody cutting down trees in you know, in a logging organization, it’s not about just go out and cut down trees, it’s I’m going to cut down 30 trees today, not see how many I can cut down, because it’s the specificity of the goals that also makes them measurable. They give people a sense of purpose and pride in what they’re doing. So you hold yourself accountable. Other people can hold you accountable when it’s specific but challenging. Means if you reach your hand out, or you know you can figuratively you’re reaching your hand out, you may not get there, but damn, you’re going to find out so much about yourself if you leave it all on the line, and you’re going to go so much further than you did, than if you set a logo and reached your hand out and just pulled the apple off the tree, because it was right there.

Kris Safarova  39:56

Very true. And how can someone stay committed to big goals?

Caroline Adams Miller  40:01

I’m going to go back to the importance of other people in your life, so that one of the things you can do is be accountable to the right people who know your dreams and goals, and we’ll ask you about it. I believe everyone should be in a mastermind group where they have other people challenging them, who know what their dreams are, who are supporting them and kind of asking them how they’re doing. So that’s one way you want to be in environments where you see other kinds of behavior, like the ones you want to achieve, or the values that you want to have in order to achieve your goals. See the role model, because this stuff is contagious. You can prime your environment. You can put very, you know, carefully selected pictures and words on vision boards or on your computer screen saver or, you know, just somewhere where you’re likely to see it. So you can also put money on the line. There’s a kind of accountability where you pledge to pay a certain amount of money to a cause you absolutely don’t believe in if you do not accomplish your goals. So there’s kind of a negative aversion there, but it works for some people. So that’s some of how you do it, writing your goals down, breaking them down into steps, celebrating each successful part of the mastery. That’s another way to keep going, because you get the wins coming in over and over.

Kris Safarova  41:22

When you work with clients, where do you see them struggling the most?

Caroline Adams Miller  41:25

Gosh, that’s a good question. I’m not sure there’s one specific place. I think there’s usually some fear that if they articulate it, they’re suddenly accountable. When they hire me, there’s big things that they know they want to accomplish. Sometimes they can’t necessarily put it into words, but they know in the process of coaching they will figure it out. So for some people, it’s just a fear, if I articulate it, gosh, what if I fall short? Will I disappoint you? Know you myself. Other people, that’s one. Another one is they don’t want to measure their progress. They don’t want to disappoint themselves. So they’ll be a little bit vague, not with me, but that’s usually where they have come from. Is there a little bit vague? And then I think, you know, it’s over and over and over again, what I see is that people need to be held accountable to do hard things and this grit that we talk about, we robbed an entire generation of children in this country, the millennials, of understanding the importance of doing hard things, because we told them they were winners. We were told by parenting experts that if we dumbed down the playgrounds and took away, you know, valedictorians and, you know, made it easy for everyone to be told they were successful, they would then understand what hard work is. No that didn’t happen. The opposite happened. So I think for some people, they have never really known what it’s like to be held accountable to do hard things, and they haven’t felt how great it is at the end of the day to know they did it. So I think that’s something I run into more often than you can imagine. And then some people, it’s really interesting. Going back to my years at Harvard, how did I do it? Well, I was on autopilot, and I just think I had talent, and I just got through by checking the boxes. Some people who come to me are already very successful, but there’s this huge dream that they’ve never pursued because everyone else sees them as so successful, and they don’t want to risk losing that. So they’ve never really done anything hard, and that’s fascinating to me. We’re talking really high achievers, but they know they’re capable of more, and they really want to find out, what if I really went for it. So I see that too.

Kris Safarova  43:50

This one, a big one as well. I even noticed it in myself, this resistance, and I constantly push myself to put myself in situations where I know nothing. Have to start from zero, and it is visible, and I will look silly, but I will do my best, and I will build up from there.

Caroline Adams Miller  44:06

Amazing. That’s amazing. That’s an amazing quality to have that I want.

Kris Safarova  44:10

To wrap up today with my favorite question to ask over the last few years, or any amount of time, actually, beyond what we already discussed, were there any aha moments, realizations that really change the way you look at life, but the way you look at business.

Caroline Adams Miller  44:25

You know, yes, I think one of the things that occurred to me at my youngest son’s wedding, so he was the first to get married, and then the other two got married this year, I remember looking around at my son’s at his wedding, as we walked down the slopes in Napa Valley, and everyone was there, I just remember thinking, every emotion that’s positive in the world is inside of me right now. And I’ve never felt this. I’ve never felt them all at once. And I just remember thinking positive psychology is right. It’s just all about love and celebrating people and being there for each other. And I just remember thinking, this is the pinnacle of life right now. Is seeing my son getting married, being willing to gamble the rest of his life on this amazing woman. And that’s when I thought, you know, maybe we’ve been really good parents, because this is the greatest I’ve ever felt in my life. And then I got to do it two more times, and I remember looking around at all their weddings thinking, this is happiness. This is everything I could have ever wanted in life. And this is why they say money doesn’t buy happiness, because money didn’t buy any of those moments. I think theoretically, I knew these things, and then they happened to me, and I thought, I get it. This is what it’s about.

Kris Safarova  45:47

That’s incredible. Thank you so much for sharing this. Can I, can I say something about you?

Caroline Adams Miller  45:53

In reading about you on, you know, the website, there was that picture of you with, I think, your parents, and you said, Look, I was a happy kid, and you’ve just gone through all these really hard things that had happened with your great grandparents and your grandparents and your parents, and there’s this big smile on your face, and it just said it all, which is, you know, money doesn’t buy happiness, love. Love is what brings happiness. And you felt it. You had it. And that really resonated with me when I saw that picture of you, very cute. So you know what I’m talking about.

Kris Safarova  46:27

Thank you so much. Thank you for all your kind words. Thank you for being here. Thank you for being so open, for sharing, because you shared some things that most people will never share, and those are the exact things that can really be that moment for someone else the way you had that moment with Patsy.

Caroline Adams Miller  46:43

That’s so true. And thank you for sharing your story. I wouldn’t, probably wouldn’t have gone this this deep and unless I’d seen your story as well. So sharing our stories makes a difference to other people that I know. So very true. Thank you for having me.

Kris Safarova  46:59

Where can our listeners learn more about you, buy your books, anything you want to share?

Caroline Adams Miller  47:04

It’s easy to find my books. They’re all on, I hate say it, Amazon, they’re everywhere. And if you go to my website, which is my name, Caroline miller.com, you see everything. And then my most recent book has its own website. Big goals, book.com so I’m very public and very easy to find. So you know, if you throw a rock, you’ll hit me.

Kris Safarova  47:27

Caroline, thank you so much again for being here. I really appreciate you. Thank you. Our guest today, again has been Caroline Adams Miller, such a beautiful, beautiful name. And our podcast sponsor today is strategytraining.com. If you want to strengthen your strategy skills, you can get the Overall Approach Used in Well -Managed Strategy Studies. It’s a free download, and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/overallapproach. And there’s another gift for you, McKinsey and BCG-winning resume, which is a resume that got offers from both of those firms. You can take a look see what you can improve on your resume. Having a good resume is something we all should have at any level in our career, and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/resumepdf. And the last gift I will leave you with is a copy of a book I co-authored with some of our amazing clients. It’s called Nine Leaders in Action, and you can get it at firmsconsulting.com/gift. Thank you everyone for tuning in, and I’m looking forward to connect with you all next time.