AJV (00:02): Hey everybody, welcome to another episode on the Influential Personal Brand podcast, a j Vaden here. Super excited to introduce you guys to a new friend of mine. And also super excited to get to have this conversation literally on the eve, right this as this podcast is reaching your ears. This is the eve of her book launch her new book called Big Goals. We’re gonna be talking to Caroline Miller today who is an eight times, let me say that again. An eight times bestselling author, an international speaker, and a globally renowned expert and positive psychology. And let me just say, we all need a little bit more positivity right now. with a still focus on goals and grit. And I am so excited to have this conversation. One, because it’s the perfect time of year to be having it as we’re rounding out the end of the year. AJV (00:56): Looking forward to next year, we should all be in the mindset on what are the goals that we have for the next year. Or some of us are thinking three, five years, 10 years, but oh yeah. One of the things that we wanna challenge is, but are we setting the right goals and are we setting big goals? And so this is a conversation today about what’s the science and the power behind big goals. And Caroline, how, how, how long have you been actually writing this book? Like, not just the physical words, but the, the, the research and the, the data. Like how long has this book been in progress? CM (01:38): I would love to say my whole life I’ve been obsessed with goals, but really ever since the science of goal setting lock and latham’s goal setting theory was introduced to me in 2005. That’s when my life changed. And this book is the result of squeezing the tube of toothpaste earlier this year to get out a brand new streamlined guide to this science. ’cause Most people don’t know it. And it’s extraordinary to me that most people don’t know it. AJV (02:04): Yeah. Like, I just wanted to hear, it’s like, that’s like, we’re talking about almost 20 years of data and research and just experience and all of the things in that’s gonna go into the next hour. So Yeah, when we think about the amount of time and expertise and just dedication spent on this subject matter, subject matter, I would just highly encourage, like, think about this for a second and then we’re gonna jump into the interview. What if in the next hour you could get the consolidated data and findings from 20 years of research that can empower you to set bigger and better goals for your life, would it be worth it? And I bet the answer is yes. So stick around, stay for the whole episode and we’re gonna start that now. So, Caroline, welcome to the show. CM (02:52): Well, that’s galvanizing. I’d stick around . It’s worth it. It’s a secret I’m gonna share is the secret. Everyone should know. It’s like the 800 pound gorilla that people don’t know about. AJV (03:04): Well, I, I wanna know. So I mean, a part of why I wanted to have you on this show is like, you know, the first question I had for you, and we had talked just a little bit about this before I hit record, is like, what do you think separates big goals from all of the other goals that are being set? ’cause If, just for context for, if you’re listening, as you’re reflecting on the goals that you had for this year, as, as I did kind of prepping for this interview, and as you look forward to the goals that you’re setting next year, it’s like, are these big like or am I playing small here? Am I just setting goals on the paper that I know I can achieve? Or am I setting big goals that could be life changing or world changing? So that’s what is a big goal and what separates that from all of these other goals we’re all setting? CM (03:53): Well, I think it’s baked into the word big. I think big girl goals are the ones that have some of our passion and the things that we’re most excited about baked into them. So, big goals change our lives. They do change the world. They change our world. Sometimes they change the entire world. And because they’re so big, they require a different set of skills and talents and focus and grit that regular local goals don’t have. And we know from the science, I’m gonna share with you the big secret goal setting theory. We know the best outcomes across the board come from setting challenging and specific goals. And those are big goals. And most people set no goals or low goals that they’re pretty sure they’re gonna accomplish. And what happens is the world, the world rewards people who set big goals because of what goes into achieving them and how much awe they can inspire in you and others. So we all need to have big goals, and we all need to find out what we’re made up in the process of going after our own big goals. AJV (05:02): As someone who does typically set goals, how, how could I even define for myself what’s a big goal? CM (05:11): A big goal should be if you stretch your hand out and your fingertips are at the end, a big goal is past your fingertips. Mm-Hmm. it’s something that you are actually gonna take some risks on because you don’t know for sure that you’re gonna be able to achieve it. It’s gonna require your character strengths. It’s gonna require patience, passion, it’s gonna require a certain amount of persistence and grit and resilience. And yet those are the goals that at the end of the day, in the process of pursuing them, we know that everyone scans their day at the end of the day for what they did that that they’re proud of. And the things that we’re proud of, violently proud of are the things we did outside of our comfort zone in pursuit of a big goal. And that is the only way we change our perception of what we’re capable of. And the more we do it, the more that muscle is built and the more flourishing we have in life. And that’s really, you know, that’s the whole shooting match is are we flourishing? AJV (06:11): Hmm. That’s so good. And I love, I literally like wrote this down, it’s like big goals change you in the process. CM (06:19): Yeah. They change you. They, yeah. That’s so Yeah. Well, they change you because it’s, it says that you have audacity, that you’re willingness to push all your chips in the middle of the table. You’re willing to find out what you made of, you’re willing to find out who has your back. In the process of doing this, you often find out who really has your back. Not people who say they do, but who’s there. And there’s a, a trick I can share with you from psychology where you, you know, who has your back by one thing that they do. I’ll get back to that. But it does change you because you begin to ladder up to more and more things that you’re passionate about that are important to you when you play a little bit bigger. Now, let me just say, asterisk has to be your goal. It can’t be your parents’ goal, your spouse’s goal, your culture’s goal, your religion’s goal. It has to be something that lights you up. Mm-Hmm. . And that will sustain you in the dark night of the soul when you have failed, when things haven’t gone your way. It’s really important that you have intrinsic motivation to use the big, fancy word because that’s what keeps you going when it’s extrinsic. When it’s about money, status, power, somebody else’s approval of you. You don’t have what it takes to pursue and accomplish big goals. Mm. AJV (07:37): You know what I, what I love about what you just said is like, what I heard is that big goals take work. CM (07:46): Oh, what a concept. do. I have a lot to say about that. AJV (07:52): You know, and it’s, I think a lot of people want big things, but they don’t wanna have to do a lot of work. CM (08:00): And that has really changed in, in the last few generations. That’s a piece of what drove me towards this book because I raised three wonderful adult children, and I happened to be raising them during the self-esteem movement when we were told as parents, tell your kids they’re winners. Give them trophies even if they don’t make the team valedictorians, were taken out of school. Playgrounds were dumbed down so that nobody could get hurt, comfort animals for all. I mean, I gotta tell you, the whole world became a dumbed down bubble wrapping of this generation. And so for many of them, the first time that they get any real honest feedback about who they are, this grades are so inflated that’s been proven is when they get a real performance review in the workplace. And for some, it’s like, what do you mean I didn’t exceed expectations by showing up? CM (08:57): I mean, whatcha whatcha saying? So yeah. So I think this concept of doing hard things was filtered out of society and not just in the United States. Really everywhere. It was a movement that swept the world. And there’s always pockets of exceptions there, there athletes, they’re Eagle Scouts. There are people who pursue, you know, passions. They start companies. They have, you know, instruments that they play. However, there was a zeitgeist, there was a cultural revolution against doing hard things because you’re not supposed to be stressed. And in the process of removing stress from our children’s lives, we didn’t make them resilient. They didn’t develop grit. So I wrote a book called Getting Grit that came out in 2017 because I really wanted to talk about the fact that I cultivated grit when I set the biggest goal of my life in my early twenties to, to save my own life. CM (09:50): I had bulimia. And it was a time when there was no cure, no hope you were gonna be bulimia for the rest of your life. If you made it that long, you’d probably lose your teeth. You probably wouldn’t be able to have children. I mean, it came with all kinds of side effects, but it was hopeless. And I decided I wanted to live more than I wanted to die, more than I wanted to chase an image of what my body could possibly look like if I got good enough at this bulimia thing. But I lost everything. I lost, I lost my sport. I, I lost piano. I limped through Harvard. I’m not sure how I got through it, but I did. And I hit my left bottom at 21 and decided I wanted to recover. My parents who didn’t know about it, nobody. CM (10:33): It was my goal. And because of that, I cultivated grit One day at a time. I failed. I failed, I made mistakes. But you know what? I kept getting up and I had this big passionate goal. I wanna live and I wanna survive ’cause I must have more to give to this world than my swimming times and my SAT sports and I survive. And I wrote a book called, my Name is Caroline. That really set me on a course of sharing how you have a big dream like recovery or going to the moon or living in a foreign country and, you know, pursuing a dream job there, how do you do it? And I decided that in order to cultivate grit, you have to have certain qualities that are not inborn, but you have to decide. You wanna work hard and have passion, and have persistence, and have patience and have humility and all the qualities that go into it. That’s what it takes to achieve big goals. And we all should have them, but we should all know, going back to your point, work is involved and it’s gonna be hard. And that’s just the way it is. AJV (11:42): So I wanna talk about that for just a second in this, you know, concept of setting pit goals. Because inherently that means you’re doing something you’ve never done before, which is, is gonna require you to learn things you don’t know, try things you haven’t tried, work with people you haven’t met. There’s a lot of that Right. Associated with that. Yeah. So a question that I have is, I would imagine, and I’m pretty certain many people struggle staying motivated when tur when working towards big goals like this. And so, mm-hmm. I would be curious to hear from you, like what are the, some of the strategies that you’ve uncovered or even some of the science and the data of how do you drive and resilience when you’re trying to achieve something that’s real hard? CM (12:29): Well, this goes back to the secret I promised I’d share with your listeners. Okay. It’s all about goal setting theory. So I was introduced to goal setting theory when I went back to school. I went to the University of Pennsylvania to get a master’s degree in applied positive psychology. So it was the first 33 people in the world to get this degree in the science of happiness. And in assignment that fall 2005 was goal setting theory and Lockman latham’s goal setting theory is ranked number one of 73 management theories. Number one, never a replication crisis. None of these challenges that exist for so many theories. And it divides goals into learning goals and performance goals. And it’s simple and elegant, but if you get it wrong, you can really screw up businesses. I mean, it can cause businesses to fail. It can cause you to disengage from your goals. CM (13:18): My recovery from bulimia was a learning goal. And so whenever you’re doing something for the first time, maybe the world’s doing it for the first time, you have to give yourself the grace of learning the skills, finding the right people, learning how to make the best decisions learning how to have resilience and grit as you fail and get up and have hope. And so you have to set those metrics in the process of having a learning goal to tell you, I’m going in the right direction. Because goal setting theory says you have to have feedback. You have to have the kind of feedback that tells you that you’re on the right track, you’re doing the right thing, this is going well, or it’s not going well. And then you pivot. And you always have to have the humility to be teachable by the process of pursuing goals. But also because you have the humility to have people around you who are your board of advisors, and you listen to them and you trust them and you seek their advice. And ca counsel, because something called stupid grit is when you don’t have any of that and you’re sure you know how to do it, and you’re just gonna bulldoze your way to whatever the outcome is that you think is the right way to go with the strategy, you’re sure it’s gonna help you. AJV (14:30): Mm. And I, and I, and I love that it’s like the difference between a learning goal and a performance goal and learning is realizing, Hey, I’m doing this for the first time. Yes. Or be some trial and error. There’s likely gonna be successes and failures. It’s gonna be one of those, like I take two steps forward, take five steps back. Right? CM (14:51): Right. Like AJV (14:51): That. I think that’s a really good and helpful kind of this way of even going like, Hey, am I, as I’m setting goals, are these learning goals IE first time things? Or are these performance goals which are right improvement? Is that a a good assumption? CM (15:07): Yes. So I, in the book, in big goals, I call them checklist goals because these are things like recipes. You’ve done them before and there might be a way to fine tune the recipe. Maybe another teaspoon of sugar is gonna make the banana bread taste better. But performance goals are things where you can reliably say, if I follow these steps and I do it in this order in which I’ve gotten the best outcomes before I can expect this outcome by this date. So there are lots of things that we do that we’ve done before. And what we need to do when we set out to, you know, pursue learning goals or performance goals, is first ask ourselves what’s new? If it’s a performance goal, a checklist goal, what’s new? What’s come out in artificial intelligence, or what’s new in the world in technology that I can use to actually use this checklist goal, this performance goal to get faster, better, stronger. CM (15:58): I’ll give you an example from the Paris Olympics. There were nine swimmers from the United States in the Paris Olympics who were training with something called digital twins at the University of Virginia. And so the fast suits are gone and poach have really expanded as much knowledge as they can have at the moment to train these elite athletes. But they found that you could create a digital twin of yourself doing the perfect stroke, perfect streamlining coming off the walls with no friction or drag with your head. And what they found was they compared the current swimmer with the perfect digital twin, and they would use the digital twin to make little tweaks in their strokes. I’ll just give you an example. Kate Douglas set a world record and won the 200 meter brushstroke with the digital twin training. And so for a year and a half, she worked on moving her head just like half an inch because the computer model said, you do that, you’re gonna set, you’re gonna set lots of records. CM (16:58): So it’s work. So that’s a performance goal. She knew how to swim, she knew how to train. She, she had to coach, she had the teammates. But this digital twin was new. Learning goals. The first thing you have to do is flatten your learning curve as fast as possible. Not, oh, I’ll just do my best. And I’ll see how it goes. It’s where am I gonna get the knowledge? Who do I need to meet? Is this knowledge on YouTube? Is it in Wikipedia? Is it in a book? Is it in a documentary? Who’s doing it really well in the world? And I can study them by reading a biography or whatever it is. And that’s how you eventually turn learning goals into performance goals. And this is the biggest mistake being made in the workplace right now. And I’ve been all over the world. I’ve worked with lots of companies, everyone’s setting goals. Nobody is using goal setting theory, but they all have fancy productivity dashboards and they’re paying a fortune for ’em. And I am mystified that the number one theory, the number one theory with decades of rigorous scholarship behind it is still unknown by most of the world. And most of the world is setting goals. And I’m gonna, I’m fixing that with the book. Big Goals, goals. I had to, we’re in a dire situation right now, partly because of Covid, but that’s another point I can make. AJV (18:14): Yeah, I know. It’s interesting. In my prior life for prior to Brain Builders Group, you know, I was a sales consultant and I did that for 14 years and all, all I did was monitoring performance metrics and word performance metrics. Right? Never once or did I come across what would be considered a learning goal. These were all, CM (18:36): Wow, AJV (18:37): All performance goals. Mm-Hmm. it was how do you do more of it or do it better, but it, CM (18:43): You don’t know how to do it, AJV (18:44): Right. It was, I never heard that, ever. Right. Never saw it. Think about dashboards. And so can you just give the audience like a tangible example of like, what, what would it look like on paper to have a learning goal versus a performance goal? Like what, what would that sound like in like real world? CM (19:04): I have so many examples I could give you. I’ll just give you one of my, one of my clients who was a superstar working in a big department store system. She had risen as high as she could and she knew how to do her job and she always did it well. She got lots of awards, bonuses, you know, stars on the wall, et cetera. And she had a dream of being an entrepreneur. And there was this very specific kind of company she wanted to start. So she got money from family and friends. She used all her bonus money and she launched this company. And by the time she found me, she was about to throw in the towel on her big bowl, her big dream. And here’s what she said to me, Caroline, every Monday morning I dial into a mastermind group and we all announce our goals for the week. And, and mine are always aggressive because that’s the way I’ve always operated. It’s always worked for me. Big goals. And then by Friday we’re, we call back and, you know, we talk about our progress. And every Friday I’ve failed at all my goals. And I asked her one simple question, I’ll, I’ll make up a name. Natalie. Natalie, how many of the goals that you’re announcing on Monday for this new business, this entrepreneurial business, are things that you’ve done before? CM (20:12): Yeah. And she thought about it and she went, none of ’em. I’ve never opened, done Shopify. I’ve never put booths together. I’ve never gone to trade shows to sell things. I’ve never walked into pet stores to try to sell this. I’ve never done any of these things, but that doesn’t matter ’cause I just work very hard and I should be able to do all these things. And I said, eventually you can. But what you did was you assumed that you could perform and have outcomes that you wanted by Friday or the next Friday or whatever, without giving yourself the grace of learning these things. You haven’t gotten a mentor. She was very proud. She hadn’t gotten a mentor, she hadn’t worked with a small business administration. She hadn’t taken on the time and the willingness to learn all the things that were the fundamentals. So on paper, what does it look like? CM (20:58): You know, she had to learn Excel, she had to get a mentor, she had to build a budget, she had to find an internet consultant who actually put Shopify on a website. She was trying to make her own website. I got, I could go on and on and on. But whenever you are superstar, you’re doing really well in one department of life and you try to go to another department, but you’ve never, you’ve never done those things before. You’re just thinking, I’m a high achiever, I can do it. You’re setting yourself up for failure, disengagement, depression, feeling overwhelmed, and then coding yourself as someone who just can’t do those things. And we live in a quick fix society, and this is common. We want instant results. And we think that we can just transfer hard work from one area to hard work in another area. It doesn’t work like that. Goal setting theory breaks it out beautifully. AJV (21:45): I love that so much. And you know, what I love about that so often is that so resonates with so many of the conversations that we hear at our company, brand builders group about people come in and they, they have big, big dreams of, yeah, I want to rock and launch a New York Times bestselling book. I want to build this coaching program. I want to impact a million people speaking on stages. I wanna do these big things. And when all of those haven’t happened in a year, they’re like, I failed. CM (22:15): I’m just, you failed. Blame it on you then , right? It’s like, AJV (22:19): No that those things take time, right? There’s, you know, there’s a process, there’s a, there’s a system of, back to what you said, it’s like we expect all these results and we don’t Yeah. Actually give credit to what you have to learn and the process to get the results. And those are CM (22:39): Right. And how do you learn? Those are perfect examples. And sometimes what we do is we deputize, we hire a company or we go to some guru and we think, well, that person’s gonna give us all the secrets and if we just work with them, it’ll all just magically happen. There’s always work involved. And what I’m sure you’re describing is the process of learning the steps on the way to being able to accomplish these things. And what do you do? You study exemplars of success in whatever that area is. And let’s say it’s a woman who wants to make a, you know, make it, make it big on a stage. And all she’s studying are men who’ve been able to do the same thing. That doesn’t transfer either. And we’re just now realizing that age agentic women have to operate differently from men because women get penalized for displaying that kind of behavior. CM (23:30): So you have to make sure that the role models, role models you’re studying look like you, sound like you, maybe they’re from your culture and that what worked for them will work for you. So often what we see is somebody on YouTube or on Instagram or whatever, saying, well, this is how I lost weight, or this is how I built my business, or this, this, this, this, this. And we think, ’cause it worked for them, it’ll work for us. Stop and ask yourself this question. Will it work for me, my learning style, the kind of money that I can invest in this? Mm-Hmm. , you know, the way I see the world. And people don’t do that. We don’t ask enough questions. So in the book, I start with goal setting theory, which really is the engine. It’s the engine of all goal accomplishment. And I’ve spent 20 years assembling the best research that you also have to know and understand. CM (24:18): And it’s the how, how are you gonna accomplish these goals? And my acronym is bridge. You start with brainstorming a certain kind of brainstorming. You go to the relationships. Who are the people? Who are the people who have to be with me on this journey? And who shouldn’t be with me on this journey? Who’s gonna be negatively contagious? People don’t ask themselves that question. What kind of investments do I have to make up time, energy, money, character, strengths, whatever. Here’s a big one. Decision making. People don’t understand their own decision making processes. They’ve never done, for example, a noise audit on the noise that has entered into the decision making. And that’s Danny Kahneman’s work on. And it’s bigger than bias. What kinds of decisions are we making when we’re impacted by the north in our lives? And then grit. Good. Grit is the G. CM (25:06): How do we cultivate grit if we’re gonna need it? It’s a big goal. We’re gonna need it. And then excellence. What are we shooting for? Not, which cannot be measured, cannot be achieved, and vice versa. And you can’t hit a target. You can’t see, you have to set a standard of excellence for your big goal. And I’m gonna go back to lock and Latham. The best results for both learning goals and performance goals are what’s called challenging and specific past my fingertips. Stretch your arm out. That’s challenging and specific. So that’s what we’re shooting for. So you always have to go through that, that rigorous strategy building before you get going. You skip a step, you’re gonna have to go back anyway, so you might as well do all the work at, at the very beginning. AJV (25:46): You know, it’s the, so in parallel to what we teach at Brain Builders Group, ’cause we’re a strategy firm and we go strategies like the architectural blueprint where you wouldn’t start building a house until you had a solid detailed, you know, well-defined plan. And you don’t start building up until you go down. Right? Yeah, yeah. And CM (26:07): It’s gotta lay the cornerstone. AJV (26:09): People like to skip through strategy, they like to hurry through it ’cause it’s not the fun stuff. Yeah. it’s, it, it’s the hard stuff, right? It’s the stuff that feels like no progress is being made. However, when you do it right, everything else allows to go faster. Now, you have said something a couple of times, and I’ve jotted this down. You mentioned the swimmer with her team and her coach. You’ve mentioned mentors and coaches and role models. I am assuming that the people component of this plays a role. So I’m just curious, like when, when you’re looking at big goals, like what is the people component and, and probably specifically accountability, right? How much does that really play in? And I love what you said, it’s like you gotta pay, pay attention on who should come along for the journey and who shouldn’t. Like who’s positive, who’s negative. So how do you decide like who should come along and what people I need and what accountability support that’s required? CM (27:10): Yeah. Big question. Important question. So Shelly Gable at the University of California, Santa Barbara did research that found that when you share a big goal or dream with somebody, there is one way to respond that tells you that that person has your back and wants you to succeed. And that research finding is this, if they respond with curiosity and enthusiasm called active, constructive responding, that person just signaled to you that they’re gonna be with you to celebrate, to pick you up. When things aren’t going well, they’re gonna check in on you. Those are the people you wanna surround yourself with. There are three other ways to respond, but they’re all negative. But that’s what you’re looking for. So you’re looking for accountability. That’s one. You’re looking for people who support you. You are looking to isolate yourself from the negative contagion. And I wanna say something very special about women. CM (28:02): Women make massive mistakes in this area. What women do is they surround themselves with frenemies friends who are enemies. Because the research shows that 84% of women do this because they don’t want anyone to think they’re not nice. And so women endure a lot of what I call incoming fire. A lot of microaggressions, a lot of comments about passive, passive aggressive. Oh, why do you want a goal that big? Are you gonna see your children enough? I mean, I could go on and on and on, but there’s a robust set of studies at, its kind of sickening when you look at them showing that the number one detractors of age agentic women are other women. It comes from men too. And a recent meta-analysis found that the one area where women have made zero progress since 1940 in other people’s eyes in the workplace is in being goal directed. CM (28:58): And nagen, we’ve gone up in terms of being seen as competent and warm and communal. But when it comes to being ambitious, this is where we pay a social penalty because we’ve violated stereotype norms. And this is the hidden hand, I believe that’s holding women back. I truly believe it’s holding women back. So the answer to that is every woman should be in a mastermind group, a self formed mastermind group that is full of people who have proven through active, constructive responding and other methods along the way that tell you, this person is really here for me and I wanna support this person as well who meet monthly. Maybe it’s virtual, maybe it’s in person, doesn’t matter. But you must be around a team of people who believe in you because then we have more hope. It’s, it becomes bidirectional and we develop this upward spiral of wellbeing. CM (29:53): We become more creative, we take more risks. We’re, we’re happier. I could go on and on and on. And men are more transactional. It’s just a fact. Men, men develop the kinds of relationships where you get a piece of pie that means I get a piece of pie. Let’s all have pie. You know, unfortunately women have been socialized and wired to think you got pie. That means I don’t get pie, so I’m gonna take your pie. Or I’m gonna tell everyone that your pie is terrible. Or some version of that. And I’m not being general, I I, I vowed not to speak about this part unless I knew the research called because everyone has an N of one. Everybody has their own experience. I have all the research to back what I’m saying. And that makes a difference. So you must know who has your back, who’s who do you need to learn from? Who’s gonna be your accountability partner? Who’s gonna be your coach? Who’s gonna be the people that you pay, who have the knowledge or the training or the skills to teach you how to be on stage to teach you how to do social media, et cetera, et cetera. Or you delegate Mm-Hmm you must find people you can delegate things to. And that’s been important to me as I assembled my team, is I have to be able to delegate wisely and well to superstars in their own lanes in life. AJV (31:02): Yeah. I think that’s so good. And I think so much of that kind of comes back to even some of the other interconnected parts of, you know, all of your expertise and experience just around positive psychology, right? Yeah. It’s like doing big things requires you to be around people who believe you can do big things, right? Right. CM (31:21): Yeah. Because it gives you hope. And I have to say this too. So my, my fifth book, creating Your Best Life was the first book for the mass market that brought this brand new at the time, Meta-Analysis out that showed that all success with all goal is proceeded by being happy first. So we’re talking about all goal, professional goals, personal goals, relationship goals, religious goals, whatever the goal is. You must be flourishing first. You don’t have to be happy Dappy, but you do have to be content serene, joyful, you know, flourishing because it sets you up with all of the chemicals and all of the mindset and the outlook to actually attract other people to you. So you build relationships, you take in more information from the environment, you’re more optimistic. I mean every good thing happens when you’re flourishing. When you’re cynical and pessimistic. CM (32:17): It’s the absolute opposite. But the first step in any strategy session is, are you flourishing and do you know how to flourish? And when was the last time that you were a seven or an eight on a scale of nine, you know, one to 10. And what did it take to get you there? ’cause We know from positive psychology, there’s several positive interventions that work for everybody. Hmm. And we might as well know what they are. But then we all have some of our own that might be hybrids of some of those music, you know, being with the right people, gratitude practices, prayer, yoga, meditation, journal writing practice of forgiveness. I mean, there are a few things that work for everybody and we better know what ours is and boot ourselves up every day. ’cause It’s our job to do this. The Happy Fairy is not gonna fly through the window every day and make you happy. CM (33:04): It’s work too. This is all work. And guess what? Work is not a bad word. Work is something that’ll make you proud at the end of the day. In fact, lock and Latham found when they studied the Pope Wood Association in this, I think it was the 1970s, they found that loggers who knew how to cut down trees the minute they said, go cut down like 10 more trees than you’ve ever cut down with this logging crew that you’re familiar with. And you all have the right tools. So you know how to, there’s nothing left to learn, but go cut down more trees than you’ve ever cut down. Suddenly there was a sense of pride. Mm-Hmm. in what they were doing. Their jobs had more meaning and, and they did better. So we always wanna challenge ourselves because it’s doing those hard things that make us proud of ourselves. CM (33:50): But I could really go on a rant about this, but this is the way we all need to live. Because as we come out of the Coronavirus Pandemic, which is a black swan event, just like what preceded the Renaissance, which was also when things became more evidence-based art, science, music, education, all of it became more evidence-based. That’s where we are. And we ought to embrace evidence-based goal setting theory because we are in a renaissance right now and the train has left the station and you better have a guidebook for all the evidence-based practices that we know make a difference in success. AJV (34:24): Hmm. And you know, I think that one of the most significant things of just like that was like an aha in my head is this idea. It’s like in order for you to set and achieve big goals, you have to be in a good place. CM (34:36): Yeah. AJV (34:37): You know, you gotta be in a healthy, happy state of mind of Yeah. You know, otherwise, you know, you know, and it’s like, it’s like before you even begin that venture, it’s like, Hey, do I have the right would? You said the seven, what did you call ’em? Positive, CM (34:55): Positive interventions. Interven. AJV (34:57): Yeah. Yeah. CM (34:58): And they’re, they, they tend to work for almost everybody depending on whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert or wherever you’re located. Some might work better for some people than others. Sometimes your first interaction with something like mindfulness or meditation, whether or not you fall in love with it and it has an impact on you predicts whether or not you’re gonna kind of continue to do it. But I have zest, that’s one of my top character strengths and I’m a master swimmer and I get up at 4 35, whatever it is, and I go swim with people. I like them. We work hard. And so by six 30 the hardest part of my day is over. Yeah. We know that rigorous exercise is positive intervention. And if you start your day with that, the rest of the day is a domino effect. It’s just easier. Everything’s easier. But you’ve booted up your chemicals, you’ve booted up all of the testosterone and all of the emotions and the oxytocin, everything you need for the day to be better, be better. The exercise, I think is the best way to start the day. Maybe meditation rivals it, but I haven’t done anything better than exercise. AJV (36:02): Yeah. I love that this came up because I literally, this morning at like 6:45 AM I was talking to my husband ’cause my business partner and he’s traveling, so I’m just, me and the kids are home. And I got up extra early to do like my devotional some reading. And and I had, that’s one thing that’s really important to me is my morning routine. And I always get up, I do my devotional, read the Bible I do some sort of like book that I’m reading and then I go on a very fast paced, rigorous walk and it’s about five minute I wear my weighted vest and it’s just kinda like, ah. And he’s been traveling a ton the last few weeks. And so I haven’t had the opportunity to get in my walk and I him this morning, literally this morning, I’m like, I’m in a funk because I’m not getting my morning walk. Yeah. And he would, it’s so funny you said that. I literally had the same thought and I was like, you thought wow funk because I’m not. He goes, yeah, I guess he goes, because I have noticed you’ve been a little off schedule. And I’m like, yes. I put two and two together literally this morning that I am off schedule with my walks and I am in it. Yeah, CM (37:13): Yeah. No, it’s true. And I’m so impressed with your routine. I just got waited best myself so I know what you’re doing and that’s impressive. But you found your routine and you intuitively, I’m telling you now, the research is matching what you’re doing. You’re booting up your wellbeing probably to the highest level of the level that you were born with. We all have a set point, so we have a range. So you’re probably getting about as high as you can get or at least close to it. And that wellbeing is the rocket fuel of success with goals. Yeah. And so to start the day that way and to feel better and to just have everything pumping in the right direction is the way I think most people should consider making at least one change to their lives. Because if you wanna succeed at your goals, start here. Yeah. Start with upping your flourishing. It’s like what are the ways to do it? It’s AJV (38:02): The pre-work, right? You gotta do the pre-work. Yeah. To be in the right place, to do the right things, to hit big goals. CM (38:10): I think so. I mean, at least that’s what the research shows. I, I am completely evidence-based. I really do believe that there’s so many opinions out there and I’m trying to kill off zombie goal approaches ’cause I can’t stand anymore. These, these approaches that won’t die like smart goals. That’s not science. In fact, it’s detrimental to have smart goals. ’cause When people use r for realistic, that’s a violation of goal setting theory. You don’t set realistic goals. Those are what’s called low goals. But there’s also something called jargon, mishmash syndrome. And smart goals falls prey to that because S-M-A-R-T means a lot of different things depending on where you are. The M and the R and the A can all mean slightly different things. So smart goals is in science, law of attraction definitely isn’t science. I’m sorry. But if you want it and you write it in lipstick, uhuh, it doesn’t work. CM (39:08): Now maybe a vision board is gonna prime you. That’s real science. A a vision board can make you think goal directed thoughts and everything that matches that thought can be sticky and could stick to you. But you got, you know what, we have one life, one life to go pursue our dreams and to make a really positive impact on the world with what we do and how we do it. Use goal setting theory and then add my bridge methodology on top because I’ve been testing it for 20 years. The only thing I have found that includes all of the science that really makes a difference on grit and resilience and mindset and motivation every in relationships and character, strengths and happiness. The only thing I’ve ever found and work it, learn it, work it. I have so many worksheets in this book so that people can practice. CM (39:55): But I think this is the most important book I’ve ever read. And I’ll say one more thing as a mother, because I I know you’re a mother. My children have all lost friends to suicide. And my husband and I didn’t lose any friends to suicide growing up. And I know that there’s suicide clusters and suicide contagion and we live in an anxious, depressed world. And it’s become harder for this generation to survive difficult times because they want things to pass so quickly. Now this is a real simplification, not all suicide, it’s because of this. But I really do believe that many of the people we’re familiar with who’ve taken their own lives. They had big dreams and they were hitting stumbling blocks. One young man, we know it was online gambling and he had lost money and he was hiding it from his family. And, and there’s shame. But if you have a big dream and you want to accomplish goals, there is a way to make those goals happen without just wishing for it and hoping for it and thinking you’re gonna have some quick get rich scheme come at you from YouTube, do the work because it pays off. AJV (41:09): You know, I personally cannot relate more to this message because it’s a testament of hard work actually makes you feel better. CM (41:21): Yeah. It does. AJV (41:23): It like a gen like when you know that you just laid it on the line regardless if you win or lose. Yeah. It’s like, man, I just laid and I it feels good. And part of what feels good is the amount of practice and preparation and learning. And that came through the process of regardless of what happened and you started this interview with this. And then I know we’ll wrap it up, but I thought it was so interesting because I was right before this like self-esteem generation and we didn’t get trophies for showing up. Like my, my dad’s an entrepreneur of alum, a lumber company and it was just very, to earn it right. It was like his dad was a genuine lumberjack and it was just a very hard work work culture and I’m so grateful for it. Yeah. But my kids are in this soccer league and this is so funny that this is coming up. So at this last Saturday, it was their final game of the season. Right. And he’s like, I have five and seven year olds, they’re littles. But at the end it’s all up to the coach’s discretion of like, does he hand out a little trophy or a little rib or anything? And on my five-year-Old’s team, the coach didn’t hand anything out. CM (42:37): Oh wow. And my Oh wow. AJV (42:40): My five-year-old said, mom, where’s our trophy? And I, he, he was looking at the other ones and I looked at my husband, I was like, they didn’t hand out it like a ribbon or a trophy. And we literally looked at each other and they’re like, well, did he win anything CM (42:55): ? And we like, no, no. And AJV (42:57): It was like, we literally had, and my husband was like, you think we should like buy one off of Amazon? And I was like, CM (43:01): No. Oh my gosh, no. AJV (43:03): And it was like, we literally had this debate and we both had to like gut check ourselves of going, yeah, what does he need a Ruben for? What’s he gonna do with the trophy? And it, but it was like this like instinctual thing of like, what? And then we both like came to our senses and we’re like, no, he didn’t win anything. He played a five-year-old soccer league. No, we’re not, he usually CM (43:23): Has a mercy rule. They stop keeping score ’cause they don’t wanna hurt anyone’s feelings. AJV (43:28): That’s not the case with our kids. Our kids make us the scorekeeper. So we have to tell every ah, CM (43:34): Interesting AJV (43:35): 12 to one . CM (43:37): Yeah. AJV (43:37): They, it was a really interesting thing. And we told our 5-year-old, I was like, Hey bud you know, they don’t technically keep score here. There is no champion. There is like no, like championship. And he goes, but we won. And I said, we did technically win, but . And it was like this amazing CM (43:55): Conversation AJV (43:56): To have with him. Interesting. And after at the three minute, like, well, you know, technically da da da da. And he was like, okay. And off he goes, CM (44:05): Ah. And it was like this, that’s a great story. AJV (44:08): And it was an aha moment to me and my, I’m like, the only reason it even came up to him is he saw it and as soon as he realized, oh, like there’s a process to how you win these. He has now asked us since Saturday, what do I have to do to win one of those trophies? CM (44:24): No way. AJV (44:26): Multiple times. And so now he’s got a goal. He wants a soccer trophy and we’re, we’re, we’re practicing out in our backyard. And, but it was an amazing revelation of if we had just given it to him, yeah. It would’ve destroyed this inner competition, this inner drive CM (44:45): Incentive incentive to work or something. And now AJV (44:48): What do I have to do to win one? I’m like, well, you have to be in a league that keeps score and you have to like try out. And he’s like, now he’s like, okay, okay, okay. CM (44:57): Wow. You know, it’s interesting because the research finds that even children who are given an award or a reward that they haven’t earned, they know and they devalue what they’re being given to. They know there was nothing that really went into it. And that’s what’s so fascinating to me. I have a a, a story very similar to yours where we joined a swim league and the team had gotten rid of the record board even though three Olympians had swam there in the seventies, eighties and nineties, and had gone on to win world championships in the Olympics. Seventh in the Olympics. One of them too. And we, we were like, what did you do with the record board? Well, we hit it. We hit it because the kids would be so discouraged if they saw how fast they’d been before. Well I, they made me the, a rep and I had the biggest record board ever made for summer swim teams made in Austin, Texas. CM (45:52): And it was sent to us in Bethesda, Maryland. And the, we invited these three very scary men back and we had this big party Breakfast of champions. And that record board is still the talk of the entire swim league, which has produced lots of Olympians. First thing kids do when they arrive at a swim meet is they go stand in front of the record board. ’cause Like your son, people long to know what does it take to be elite? Mm-Hmm . And they prize the work that goes into it. And we cannot rob ourselves or our children or other people of the process of getting there. And if we’re honest with them and we lay out the steps and you can measure that, you know, you’ve given people the keys to the kingdom and that’s what life’s all about. AJV (46:38): I mean, genuinely like just even having this conversation at the same timing of this like little soccer league wrap up has been also I think a really big testament. Not just to us who have teams and employees or just even us as an individual setting goals, but I would say specifically as a parent, it’s like, don’t rob your kids of hard work. CM (47:01): Yeah. No, it’s true AJV (47:03): Of hard work. Don’t try to make it easy for them. It’s like there is power and the grit and the perseverance and the resilience. How else do we learn that stuff, CM (47:13): Right? Well, you don’t, you can’t, you can’t buy it. You can’t chant it. It only comes this way. And the other thing is we have to show them that we are resilient when bad things happen to us, when we don’t get the job we want, when we’re fired, when you don’t get a book contract, when you get bad speech reviews, whatever it is, kids need to see that you too are resilient and that there’s mom and dad and they survived it. My gosh. You know, I bet I could survive not making the travel soccer team or whatever, not being the lead in the play or not getting an A on everything. That’s our responsibility as parents, even though you might as well take a knife and just plunge it right into my heart. Because watching your children not succeed or get what they want is heartbreaking. But to this day, my three adult children, the absolute best things that ever happened to them in life, in life that had the best outcomes were the worst things that happened to them. And you know what they survived and boy, what a lesson. Not even just to us, to them it made them all better. Men and women. AJV (48:16): Yeah. This is so good. Thank you so much for coming on. This has been so insightful and just chock full of day backed reasoning on importance of setting big goals. Big goals comes out November 27th. Yeah. Grab a copy at anywhere where you buy books check it out. But then also if you go to big goals book.com, if you pre-order the book, then you also receive a 20 a page PDF workbook to help you through this process. Yeah. So go to big goals book.com, get your copy. Comes out officially November 27th. Caroline, thank you so much for being on the show today. And y’all, thank you. You guys wanna connect with Caroline? Where should they follow you online? What’s the best platform? CM (49:05): I, I think LinkedIn. Linkedin, Caroline Adams, Miller. But I’m on Instagram and Facebook, you know, I have a social media team that keeps me active, but you know, and then my website, caroline miller.com. AJV (49:18): So I would just encourage go to your platform of choice. Go to caroline miller.com, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram pick your platform of choice, but grab a copy of big goals to help you have a life changing year next year. Thank you for being on the show. Everyone else, stay tuned for the recap episode and we will see you next time on the Influential Personal Brand. CM (49:40): Thank you.