EPI 235: BIG GOALS - The Science Of Setting Them, Achieving Them, And Creating Your Best Life. With 9X Best Selling Author Caroline Adams Miller

Welcome back to another episode of the Peak Performance Life podcast. Today, we have a very special guest on a very important topic. We have Carolyn Adams Miller. She is the author of Big Goals, the science of setting them, achieving them and creating your best life. She is a nine times bestselling author, keynote speaker and educator. She's one of the world's leading experts on the science behind successful goal setting and the use of good grit to achieve hard things. And for more than 30 years, she's been a pioneer in the self-help and positive psychology worlds. Her bestselling books, executive coaching, educational courses and motivational speaking and personal stories bring audiences research based actionable strategies to help them cultivate more grit and dig deeper to clarify and achieve their toughest and most important goals. Carolyn, thank you so much for joining us here today. That's a long intro. I'm going to have to talk to my assistant about that. But thank you. Sounds good. Yeah, it's amazing. I mean, what you've done is incredible. I know you've been around the industry for so many years. So, yeah, we'd love to start with just a little background of your story. Oh, gosh, I don't know where to begin, but we were talking just before we started recording. And really, I think that I date my happiness in my life and the cultivation of grit to overcoming bulimia. And that was in the mid 1980s. I'm going to say 1984. I hit my last bottom after seven, almost eight years of bulimia as a competitive swimmer, Harvard graduate, the rest of it, but driven by the fury of this addiction and like many other women and athletes of my time and still going on now. And there was no cure back then. And I hit my last bottom in Baltimore and by the grace of God, truly, I found one or two other recovering bulimics at a 12-step meeting and the rest is history. Once you meet someone who's done something you want to achieve, you have hope. When you have hope, pretty much anything's possible. And I had hope. And then as I got better and I had four years of recovery, I realized no one had talked publicly about it and identified themselves as somebody who would overcome this disorder. And it was just rampant. It still is. So anyway, I wrote the book, My Name is Caroline. It was published in 1988. And I was the first person to write an autobiography about recovering from bulimia. So when you look at, My Name is Caroline. And then I've written a lot of other books in the middle of there, then Creating Your Best Life in 2008 and Getting Grit and Positively Caroline. And then big goals. The thread through all of them is how do you do really hard things? How do you do really hard things that are meaningful to you, that are intrinsic goals, that you know you'll have regrets, not pursuing it, at least trying. And so that's who I am. I'm a competitive swimmer, very fit. I'm a mom of three, grandmother of two, happily married for multiple decades. But in some ways, healthier now in my 60s than I was in my 20s. And that's really saying something. And that's my story and I'm sticking with it. That's incredible. That's incredible. Yeah, you mentioned like it developed this grit. And it's something I want to talk about. And I know there's a famous book. I think it's called Grit, right? No, it's called Grit. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. And yeah, so let's talk a little bit about grit and how do people develop this grit? Right. So that book was by Angela Duckworth, who's a friend and mentor of mine. She was doing her PhD work on grit at the University of Pennsylvania when I was in the first class at the University of Pennsylvania in a master's program on applied positive psychology. So 20 years ago, this cohort of 32 men and women from all over the world were admitted to study, you know, the science of happiness. And Angela was running in and out of the classrooms and they were saying, well, what is she doing? Well, she's studying this thing called grit. And my capstone that year became the book, Creating Your Best Life. And in that, in that book, I have a chapter on grit because I realized that the happiest people have hard goals, wake up to hard goals. And if you have hard goals, you have to understand this quality of grit. But then how do you cultivate it? So in the process of going through getting that master's degree and then researching grit for 10 years and then writing the book, getting grit, what I realized is that I had cultivated grit in the process of overcoming bulimia. Because although I had success, I realized it was just talent that had not really been explored or, you know, I just, I had the billboard, the grades, the scores, the whatever. And I had always thought those would make me happy. And they didn't. They only drove me to more despair, you know, something's missing. And so when I hit my last bottom at the age of 22, that was my goal to recover. It wasn't anyone else's goal. And I wanted to live more than I wanted to die. And I was willing to do whatever it took. And the way you cultivate grit is by picking hard things and not being a quitter. And by finding ways to augment your willpower, it's called self-regulation, the research. I know you've referenced the Marshmallow study. I talk a lot about Walter Michele in my books and that early research that's now been, you know, deepened. And I did it by delaying gratification, by sticking with people who had stories of recovery. I became happier by giving service to people who also needed support. I stopped drinking. And that, you know, was also part of delaying gratification. I kept my eye on the prize. And, you know, I just had a passion for living. And the way people cultivate grit is by having a meaningful goal. And you probably are familiar with the word, sits flesh, which is put your, your butt on the seat and just apply yourself. It's a great Yiddish word, I think. And I just wanted to live and be married and have children. And, you know, unfortunately, I was part of this first group at Harvard that was studied, the athletes, the swimmers and runners. And that's where they came up with this very famous finding on the female athletic triad. You know, never getting your period, bone density issues and eating disorders. I almost couldn't have children. And so I wanted all of those things and I had to want them for myself and not for someone else. You cultivate grit by doing hard things that are meaningful to you and you're not going to get a trophy at the end of the day, but you'll have the satisfaction of knowing that you did it and you gave your best. And that's what grit is. Oh, that's so good. I'm already getting inspired here because I have to admit, I feel like I've reached a little bit of a place of a little bit of, I wouldn't know if it's, I don't know if you'd call it complacency or maybe just like, you know, my kids are a little older now and I used to just spend every moment, free time I had with them and now they're a little older and I find myself having more free time. And, you know, my business is kind of set up with good systems and structures where I don't have to be, you know, grinding in the business 12 hours a day anymore. And so I'm personally reaching myself and I know many other people as well. I have many friends who listen to this podcast who, you know, work their job and they want a little more, but they're just kind of like, you know, it's kind of like coasting or cruising and you kind of get comfortable. So yeah, how can we, like, how do we get inspired and set these bigger goals? Maybe this is a good transition into your new book called Big Goals. Yeah. Yeah. Well, there's a lot of questions there and I'm not sure how to address all of them at once, but I will start with the fact that zest is a quality that's very high in children and very low in adults. And one of the things we know in positive psychology is that quality of Joao DeVieve, of like waking up and being curious about the world, what's out here for me, taking risks, like children learning to walk, falling down and getting back up. We as adults begin to play it safe. We don't want to lose our reputation. We don't want to fail. We want to feel good about ourselves. You know, the more money you have, the more you worry about keeping that money. So you start to just really kind of pull in. I've heard this great quote, I don't know who authored it, but in my area in Washington, DC, it's like women sometimes think or people in their fifties think taking a risk is going to a new restaurant. It made me laugh so hard because I know people who live like that. And you don't want to lose that childlike sense of enthusiasm, which is what's out here that has novelty to it. What can I pursue that I won't regret as I look back on my life? Because most people do have a regret. When they're on their deathbeds, one of the top five regrets of the dying is that they live somebody else's life, not the one they were meant to live. And they stop taking risks. And so we know that novelty is coded in the brain as a surprise and a good thing. So when was the last time you did something for the first time? When was the last time you were spontaneous? When was the last time you said yes, but you really wanted to say no, I want to stay in and watch Netflix. Those are just some of the things that many people have decided to wrestle with. Some of that happened after 9-11 when people thought life is fragile. I just saw 3,000 people die. In one day from a terrorist attack, anything could happen. I think COVID brought about the same thing. In many ways, it's like the Black Death in Europe when a third of the population died from the bubonic plague and then that gave birth to the Renaissance. Because everything had to be done new. Everything had to be new. Medicine, education, science, everything was new. We are in a period just like that right now that I hope is going to lead to the Renaissance, where we really have to identify new ways of doing things. And that's what led me to evidence-based goal setting. Because I really do believe this goal setting world has never been disrupted since the 1880s. And I discovered a lot of anomalies in it that led me to see how some people have been disadvantaged by what they've been taught. And the other thing I'll just end with here, smart goals is not goal science. It's a zombie theory that ought to die, but it's still walking among us. So during this time together today, I'm at least going to destroy smart goals. So that's a long way of answering a lot of your questions, but I hope I did a little there. Yeah, that was really good. And yeah, I definitely want to get into, because I'll have to admit myself. When I was younger and had these huge dreams and I would set these enormous goals, like goals that were near impossible. And the problem with that was, I just kept missing them. When you're making $50,000 a year and your goal is, I'm going to make millions a year. And then I just kept missing them. And then eventually I started getting discouraged that I wasn't hitting my goals. And then I said, oh, what's the point? I'm just going to do my best. And so I've kind of gone both ways, been on both sides. I'm sure many people listening have. So I'm now though, I am feeling it now. I got to get back into this goal setting. I got to do something. I got to get this done the right way and really make it impactful. So yeah, let's jump into that. Yeah, I mean, people have a lot of ideas about what goals are. And for a lot of people, it's a dirty word because they've set goals and not achieve them. Or they've set goals and not known where to start. They felt overwhelmed. They set too many goals, particularly too many willpower goals. And we know you can't pursue too many of them at once because willpower, you only have so much that you can apply towards self-regulating. So typically a lot of New Year's resolutions involve things like quitting smoking or starting a weight training program or eating less or whatever it is. But all of those involve delaying gratification. So you don't want to pick too many of them. But the important thing is, and this really is the most important thing, there is a science to goal setting. And what stunned me 20 years ago when I went back to school at Penn was one of our earliest assignments that year, October of 2005. Talk about iconic. I just remember this assignment and I opened it up and it was Lock and Latham's Goal Setting Theory. And I remember saying out loud, people remember me saying this, there's a science to goal setting? Because I thought I was a goal setting expert. I thought I was. My great uncles went one, two in the Olympics in the same event in 1912. They made world history by doing that, set world records. I grew up as a competitive swimmer, competitive school. Everything was competitive. And I really thought I understood goal setting. I had the books, Brian Tracy's, Zig Ziglar, Stephen Covey, all the books. And then I get to Penn in 2005 and find out that all of its bogus. There is no science in any of those approaches. And so Lock and Latham's Goal Setting Theory is simple and elegant. And it's ranked number one of 73 management theories. The problem is no one knows it because everyone thinks smart goals is the way you set goals or Brian Tracy or Zig Ziglar or an influencer says, this is how I did it. Or you hear a special forces guy on a podcast talking about how they do it. And the problem is that's not necessarily the right way for everybody, nor is there a one size fits all approach to goal setting. So it blew my mind. I came home from Penn that weekend and I went into my office and I started pulling all the books by Brian Tracy and Zig Ziglar and everybody off my shelves. And I found there were no footnotes. There were no footnotes in any of these books. And what I realized is every one of them had anecdotes like the Harvard study of 1950. And they were all garbage. They were urban legends. So I realized that the world and companies and CEOs and people like you and me have just been setting goals on sand, trying to build castles on sand. And when we don't achieve our goals, sometimes it's because they've been set poorly from the get go because the science wasn't involved. So I think I was pretty sure I was the first person to bring goal setting theory to the world in 2008. And I married it with the science of happiness. Do you want me to say more about that or should I stop for a second? Oh, this is amazing. No, please keep going. Yeah. Okay. So there were some mind blowing assignments that year. I have to say everyone who goes into this program, if you're lucky enough to get in, it's so popular. But they take about 32 people every year from all over the world to study the science of flourishing. What makes people better? What makes institutions better? What makes countries better? How do you flourish? So I was in that first class and along comes this study that's basically happiness precedes success. And it was a very potent meta-analysis of all studies done on success across all categories of life. And it conclusively found that any success that you achieve in life, whether it's money or your professional life or your religious life or your friendships, is all preceded by being happy first or being in a flourishing emotional place. So I realized, my God, I'm a goal setting expert. That's what I do as an executive coach. But I can't talk about this goal setting and goal setting theory until I first tell people that you have to up your well-being if you really want to create the rocket fuel of success. So I married those together in my capstone that year. That book became Creating Your Best Life, which really blew the doors off the world. That became an instant bestseller, translated into a lot of languages because I think people were suddenly stunned. They didn't know there was a science to it either. But now 15 years later after that book came out, post-COVID, and a world filled with anxious and depressed teenagers and people who get overwhelmed and even suicidal if they can't achieve what they see on YouTube or Instagram, big goals. I think we owe it to the world and to our children and to young adults to give them the tools of how to really make their dreams come true. When I'm convinced it will cut down on the anxiety and depression we see all around us with our children because they've been sold a bill of goods. My children I raised during this self-esteem movement where we were told by parenting experts to tell our kids they were winners, even when they didn't do anything. They were winners, trophies for all, comfort animals for all, band sledding. It's dangerous. Take down the record boards. They'll be discouraged if they see how fast people used to swim at this pool. I mean, that's a real story, by the way. That generation produced more narcissists and sociopaths than confident, well-adjusted children. The research was in on that. I think we have to go back to understanding the goal-setting theory says that the best outcomes for all goals is only when they're challenging and specific, meaning past your fingertips. Stretch your arm out. The goals that energize you, that put you in a state of flow, that make you want to wake up and jump out of your bed or past your fingertips. That's when workers are engaged. That's when they stop disengaging and thinking this isn't the right job for me. They find meaning and purpose in their jobs. There are other parts of goal-setting theory too, but I'll just stop there. Is that we have to wake up with a certain amount of zest and curiosity about the world, care about helping other people with their goals as well. Do hard things because the satisfaction of pursuing something with passion and purpose and leaving it all on the floor, but not waiting for someone to pat you on the head or give you a gas card because you made three sales calls. That's where you have the satisfaction of knowing, I did the best I could today and this is the best version of me that showed up today. Yeah. Yeah. That's one thing I always try to think about myself is like, am I doing my best? Did I do my best? Am I an old man looking back at my life? Will I be proud that I did my best? That's kind of a framework that I definitely use quite a bit. Many people might be thinking, okay, so happiness is a precursor to success, but I need the success in order to be happy because right now I'm in debt and I'm a little overweight and I'm struggling with this and that and whatever the case may be. I guess maybe backing up a little bit, how do people who are maybe not in a place of happiness, because that seems to be the prerequisite, right? Well, flourishing. So, first let me go back to do your best for one second, doing your best. Lock and Lathem found in goal setting theory that saying do your best is actually the worst outcomes to all goal setting. Doing your best is not a goal at all. It's a very fuzzy kind of way of fudging the results and feeling okay about yourself even when you didn't actually set a goal or achieve anything. So the worst thing we can say to our children or to ourselves is actually do your best. That's the worst outcomes. The next outcomes are low goals. Goals we're pretty sure that we can achieve, it's like low hanging fruit. Like somebody setting really low sales goals because they know the bonus is attached to the number, so you set something you know you'll get. You never really find out what you're made up if you do that. And then there's challenging and specific. But let me answer your question about flourishing. So I understand that we have to have some success before we flourish. But what's really true is that flourishing is what we call happiness now. And flourishing has many components to it. It's not just smile on the face, happy ology. It's also about being content, being proud, feeling awe, feeling love, feeling joy, feeling all the emotions that come with the opposite of depression and anxiety. Why does that matter? Broaden and build theory by Barbara Fredrickson found that when you're flourishing, when you're emotionally flourishing, when let's say you recall a moment when you were proud of somebody or yourself or something you did that made someone else's life easier or you remember a moment you're nostalgic about, it broadens your ability to see things. It creates more curiosity. Your eyes are a little bit wider open. You build relationships with other people. Broaden and build is about broadening your thought action repertoire and building relationships with other people. And guess what? Those are two of the top ingredients in achieving goals. Is building relationships with other people, having good social engagements with other people? We know that happiness usually boils down to three words, which are famous in positive psychology, other people matter. So if you're just in a silo worrying about yourself and your own success and your own happiness, you're probably never really going to find it. It's about doing it in community and caring enough about other people that you're willing to sacrifice or help them achieve something. Success by yourself is very hollow. And so those are all parts of building a flourishing lifestyle. And that is what allows you to have the optimism, to have the persistence, to have the curiosity, to have the social skills to then go and achieve your goals. You can't do it when you're sad and down and depressed and cynical and pessimistic. It doesn't happen because you don't even want to help yourself, let alone anyone else entering your life. Yeah. Yeah, that's great stuff. I have to ask then a couple of things. So one, the whole giving the kids confidence, telling them they're great or whatever, that part of things. And then do your best. So if we're not, because in a way, don't we want to help try to build our kids' confidence? And I know that's not, I don't mean participation awards and get rid of all the competitions. I don't mean that. But in some ways, we do want to build their confidence, don't we? And then with regards to do your best. If do your best is one of the worst ways to do it, what is the proper way to do it then? Well, there are two kinds of goals. There's learning goals and performance goals. And learning goals are things you've never done before. And you need to acquire the skills and the knowledge to actually achieve those goals. And if you just do your best, you're not actually setting a metric by which you can gauge how quickly or how effectively you're adding those skills and knowledge. There has to be some kind of hard metric associated with learning skills and acquiring the talent or whatever that you need to achieve the goal, the talent and the knowledge or the skills and the knowledge. So if you don't, so if you, if you're like, oh, well, I'm just going to do my best, but I don't really know what I'm doing here and I'm not going to bother to go learn how to do it the right way. I'm just going to do my best with the no skills that I have. That's not really, that's not really a good thing. That's bad. Yeah. Right. I just looked back on it. It was like the skills fell from my eyes at Penn. My kids were 16, 13 and 10 at the time. And I just remember thinking, oh my God, the mistakes I've made. If I could go back and redo my parenting just based on a lot of the positive psychology that I've absorbed in the last 20 years, it would be around building their self regulation. The ability to delay gratification, say no to yourself. That would be where I would put most of my energy and time. And that's in fact what Angela Duckworth's next book is about is the architecture of grit. How do you scaffold your life so that it's more likely that you're going to develop grit and resilience is different. That's more short term grit is long term. So the do your best just doesn't really have a metric associated with it. So if you're acquiring knowledge and skills and you say to your kid as they're going down to the piano, do your best. What are they going to do? They'll do their best and they'll walk away probably. Instead of why don't you do the C major scales 10 times and then try your arpeggios and then why don't you practice your song for the recital or whatever. I mean kids learn that from watching us and from being held to account. Performance goals are things you have done before and they're like recipes. Like a surgeon going into surgery checklist. Check, check, check. When they started putting checklist into surgeons hands in 2008 fatalities dropped in the operating theaters dramatically. Pilots use checklist. Maids use checklist. I use checklist when I'm packing for a trip. I mean performance goals are the kinds of things where you can say by September 1st that's going to be that outcome that is really, really hard and I'm going to try to do it because I'm going to find a way to be more excellent and efficient because I already know how to do it. So now I can hold myself to higher standards and I can even put it on a checklist. So I have to send things and I will teach someone else. You can onboard more effectively this way. So that's my little speech on to your best. I love it. Yeah, I love that. And it sounds like so it sounds like you have knowledge goals and performance goals. Most people I know by the way don't even have knowledge goals. They just they just go straight to the performance goals, which is I think a huge mistake. I love that you're mentioning this because I'm now going to set out some knowledge goals in addition to my performance goals. And I think just learning I mean even when people ask me like what is whatever biggest what's your biggest secret to success or whatever it is, it's just just I'm just I'm a learning machine. I just love to learn. I just love to learn more information and be and I'm curious and I want to and I think just having that curiosity and wanting to read books and listen to podcasts of particular topics is so important that a lot of people just kind of skip that. And now I may think of something else. Maybe I need to you know, take some take some online course from Stanford or MIT about AI or something else or whatever. Right. Oh, you got my heart there. Yeah, there you go. Oh, I'm so down the hole on that rabbit hole on that. Yeah, well, so what you're saying is true. But when people are accurately setting their goals and they understand that something they've been asked to do they're they're doing it for the first time. Let's say they're joining a company that has a very different culture from a company you're coming from part of a learning goal there is learning how who are your colleagues? How do you submit an expense report? You know, how many sick days do I have you have to learn to be in that environment before you can go succeed for the most part. It's part of succeeding in that role. But when people are allowed to see things as learning goals and find a mentor or a source that's going to help them learn the skills and knowledge, they become more engaged in their lives in their work because they don't feel, you know, the heel on the neck. You've got to put you've got to do this by this date or you're fired or you'll be on a performance improvement plan or whatever. So I'm on a mission to get all managers and CEOs and everything to change performance reviews to make sure that they reflect learning goals and performance goals and to and to wait them appropriately because the problem is everything seems to become a nail and you're the hammer when in fact it's not all nails and a hammer. There's some screws over here that you got to pay attention to that are called learning goals and those are those are different tools. But you have success applied to both of them depending on how you acquire the knowledge, the talent or the efficiency or whatever. First question you should always ask yourself on pursuing a goal is what's new? What's the newest most efficient effective way to add these skills and knowledge even if I've done it before maybe there's an air fryer out there and I can do it better. So this recipe from grandma that I know how to do. I've got my checklist. Leave it the air fryer. I'll do it faster. So you always have to keep an open mind about what's new. As I said earlier, we really are in a learning condition all over the world. It's rare that everybody had their lives turned upside down all at once and we've all had to learn new ways to see our kids educated, you know, have medical appointments online. Everything's new. So we might as well take advantage of it and make sure we have learning goals and performance goals, not just performance goals. Yeah, yeah, I love that. I think a lot of things that a lot of people miss the fact that the learning when you learn new things, it builds your confidence naturally. You now feel like, Hey, I'm more comfortable because I learned a lot about this. I'm not like completely not know what's not knowing what's going on. So yeah, I think I think it's a really important point. I do want to transition a little bit into for people listening, I'm sure they are going to want to be able to walk away with this with some sort of more framework or better idea of how they're going to set their goals. So we talked a little bit about the two different types of goals that you mentioned. Is there more to it than that? Yeah, there's a lot more to it. So this is why I wrote the book Big Goals because I spent 20 years thinking through after goal setting theory, which the world just didn't seem to know. What else do you have to do? So it's not just what do you have to do? It's how are you going to do it? And this is where positive psychology and all this work that's been done on mindset, Carol Dweck's work on mindset and Angela's work on grit and the values in action Institute in Cincinnati, the character strengths, all of this research is now teaching us new ways to come in and prepare ourselves to be more successful, whether it's mindset or resilience or grit or well-being of the rest of it. So in the book Big Goals, I break this down in a way that everyone, everyone ought to be able, your teenager, your baseball coach, everybody should be able to sit down and go, okay, here's what a learning goal and a performance goal is and here's why I thought smart goals was a thing. And so I make sure that everyone has the evidence for why it comes down to goal setting theory. Then there's six pillars after that that very conveniently have turned out to be bridge. And you have to go through the prompts for each one. And then you have a success recipe. If you answer all the prompts that go along with brainstorming, for example, I mean, you have to do brainstorming in the right way. And the question is always what's new, but there are lots of other questions you need to ask yourself. You have to brainstorm in the right way. Go into that. Then there's relationships. And it's like, who's going to be in your life? Who needs to be in your life? Who do you need to keep out of your life while you're pursuing this goal? Someone who reigns on your parade all the time. Who doesn't have your back? Who doesn't want you to be successful? Those are some of the questions. And you have to look at the investments, time, energy, money. What do I have to invest in the process of pursuing this goal? What do I have to think through before I get going? Because everyone just wants to get going. And then D is decision making. A lot of people don't understand their own decision making process. And so you have to understand where the noise and the bias are in terms of how you make decisions. And do you have a quit coach? You have to know when to quit pursuing your goal. And so then there's good grit. Do you have enough resilience, self-regulation, et cetera? What do you have to do to up it? And then excellence is what is that high challenging and specific standard that you are shooting for, that you're going to measure? You're going to know if you're getting warmer or colder. So I have an AI tool that should be coming out in the next few months that will walk everyone through these prompts. And at the end of it, you get a success recipe. You get a plan. And let's say you're in a company. You can take it to your manager. Say, this is how I'm going to pursue this goal. This is how I should be graded on my performance reports. No more fuzzy performance reviews. This is going to be the accuracy that's missing in the goal setting process. So I'll just stop there. Those are some of the other areas. The book is very thorough going through them. Yeah. Yeah. Definitely highly recommend people get the book and really, really spend the time on this. One thing I'm really big on is my morning thinking time. I talk about it a lot. And I like to go out in the morning before I turn on my phone. I like to get some sunlight, do some gratitude and visualization and all that kind of stuff. But also thinking like high level. Like, for example, I don't know if I've ever told a story on the podcast, but many, many years ago, I had some clients. I was doing kind of consulting. And I had one client that was about two thirds of my income. And they just kept sucking more and more of my time. And I didn't enjoy the work with them at all. But I had two little baby girls. And I was actually getting myself out of debt at the time. And so I actually, in my morning thinking time, I said, if my goal is X, I'm not going to achieve it by working with this client who's sucking all of my time and energy and everything else. And so I actually made the decision to fire my biggest client that was two thirds of my income at the time. And when I did that, it completely freed up and opened my life to all these other opportunities. And I started a business that I later sold and all sorts of in this business that now that we're on this podcast and all of that came from it. And I could have just worked harder on the wrong goal. But luckily, because I actually, and so many people, we just wake up, we go on our phone, we start searching, and then we let other people. And we don't really stop and think like, hey, what do I really want? What would what would really be that ideal version of myself? And how can I change and set different goals around that ideal projection? Well, see, you just outlined perfectly what I said was this meta analysis that came out in 2005. Happiness precedes success. And you knew deep down that if you stayed with this client who was a vampire and just sucking your energy and your optimism out, I mean, there's all kinds of research on the positive to negative ratio of events and words in your life that you have to have. And it's four positives for every one negative. And it could be a nonverbal negative, but you were probably drowning in negatives, which would have meant four positives over and over and over again, drown the negatives. On some level, you intuitively know that you had to flourish if you were going to succeed and get out of debt and be a happy father. So it sounds like it came true for you as well. You know, you took a risk and that's part of creating your best life is taking risks and not always knowing what the outcome will be. When you play it too safe, they find that there's something called the midlife review where around 48 to 50, you begin to ask yourself, gosh, is this all there is? Is this the life that I'm supposed to have? And if you play it too safe, there are three ways to get through this. And only one of them seems to lead people to a better, happier life. So one way is kudas shodawoda, looking in the rear view mirror. God, you know, I could have done this, I could have done that, and then, you know, you do nothing. Second is to assess, gosh, you know, is this all there is? Well, I'll set a few goals. And that doesn't work either because you have no accountability. The third way is to assess what's going on, realize you have energy going in the wrong direction and you have accountability to actually change and pursue those goals. Because when you just make promises to yourself with no accountability, they don't go anywhere for the most part. Very rarely do people succeed. I mean, look at Olympic athletes, they all have coaches. You've got to be held accountable. And but many people choose to look away because they don't want to do hard. And doing hard is part of finding out not just what you're made of, but who has your back, who wants you to be successful. It's interesting, there's some research showing how to know who has your back too. And it's how they respond to your good news. So if you have good news or a big dream and you float it in front of them, if they do not respond with curiosity and enthusiasm, they just gave you enough information for you to wall them off to not take their calls all the time, to not have them at your birthday celebrations. Because they just told you that they are either passive aggressive, passive destructive or active destructive. And their energy, their words, their actions are all going to corrupt your approach to pursuing something hard. And so it's called active constructive responding. And the researcher, Shelly Gable, said, my God, you know, float a piece of fake news, just make it up just to see how people respond. She said, it's like hitting the red smoke alarm button, just find out. You know, so I tell everyone, float some good news and just see what happens. Here's the problem. I wish I had a dollar for every time someone said that people in their family were not happy for them. And they think, well, I got to have them in my family. That's my blood. Well, you know what? Not necessarily while you're pursuing these big goals. Maybe you need to have a whole different circle of people who have your back. So when you do hard things, you find out who has your back. And it might surprise you who does and who doesn't. Yeah. Yeah. I was just literally yesterday speaking with a good friend of mine. And he became successful and he got a nice house. And his brother told him, I can't bring my wife and kids to your house. Because then they're going to see what you have and what we don't have. And, you know, this kind of a thing. And he's like, I got the house so that we could bring the family together and like do things together. And, you know, I've seen this. I've had to let go of a lot of people in my in my life as well. So yeah, 100%. I absolutely agree. And the coaching and mentor groups that I've been involved where where, you know, these kind of mastermind groups or, you know, having a coach and having being part of these peer groups, those are the ones that have really, they've always seemed to have my back and spy on me. You know, they're they believe in my goals. And that's been one of the biggest keys to my success is I've developed new friends over the years. I actually have very few friends from from my childhood that I still keep in touch with. It's kind of sad in one one perspective. But on the other side, I've developed new friends who are into person of development and growth and having each other's back. So that's been a big, big key there. I want to go back to real quick, though. You mentioned that smart goals are not the right ones. So if I'm remembering correctly, some people probably know. So smart is like specific, measurable, actionable. And I can't even remember the other two. Just give away why why the research is disproved. It's efficacy. So it's called Jurgen Mishmash Syndrome. The SMART stands for 55 different things, it turns out. And so it could be specific. It could be measurable. It could be manageable. It could be metric based. It could be actionable, action oriented, attainable. It could be realistic, relevant. I mean, I could go on and on about all the ways it's been bastardized. The point is, if you just use one of the most common definitions, which is realistic for goals, you absolutely just violated goal setting theory. You just violated it because Locke and Latham found through thousands of studies in labs and in real world settings, studying loggers for God's sake at the American Pulp World Association. I mean, they did everything. These two men decided to join forces and with a lot of humility, do this work together as opposed to operating separately. And what they found over and over is challenging and specific goals are what always get the best outcome. So if you just take SMART and use realistic or reachable, you've already just blown up the number one theory and all management studies and business schools. That's not accurate. The problem is it's sticky. And this consultant in 1981, he wrote an article for like the American Management Studies thing, George Durand is his name. And it was sticky. And because it was sticky, it stuck. And I am on AI enough in all kinds of tools to see that it's been trained mostly by white male engineers who have put SMART in there as a goal setting approach. And it's wrong. And another thing I really feel compelled to talk about is that all the productivity systems that have reigned in this country, if not all over the world since 1881, when Frederick Winslow Taylor did time and motion studies at the Steel Factory where he was working, just saw how long to take each man to do this job. He thought, you just make it more efficient, you know, then you set goals and that's how you change it. That went to Henry Ford and Fordism and then, you know, Management by Objectives of Peter Drucker and on and on. Every one of these systems started in 1880 right through Andy Grove at Intel in the 70s with OKRs and KPIs. These were all set by white men and they were set by white men, endorsed by white men, implemented by white men. And it completely goes against the gender prescriptions for women. And so leadership is always associated with the kinds of behaviors that women are socialized to never put out there. And that is agentic behavior, goal directed behavior. So, for example, I have a lot of female CEOs who've had to get out of YPO because it feels like a bro culture to them. And they don't feel like the things that are discussed in the forums or whatever apply to them. The approaches don't work for them because women are judged by different standards. I'm sure you've seen this as well. And so in big goals, I tackled the whole issue of how do you know that this success approach you're hearing about or what you're pursuing in your own recipe? How will it work for you? Well, you better find someone who looks like you, has your background, has your gender and has succeeded. Because if you're just listening to Dude Podcasts and I listen to a lot of Dude Podcasts and one day I realized I'd listened to seven hours of white men talking to white men about white men. And I thought, whoa, this has become white noise. I like white men. I got two of them with sons. I got married to one. But my God, we've just gotten used to hearing success prescriptions from people who don't look like me, sound like me. We're not special forces. We're not US presidents. And so you have to step back from this whole conversation about goal setting and realize this is a field that has not been disrupted since 1880. And there are gender breakdowns on all the research now that we're just finding out. If it works for men, it doesn't necessarily work for women. So stop and ask yourself different questions. They're all in the book. How do you make sure this is going to work for me? Sorry. No, that's great. This is good stuff. And so a couple of things I want to kind of come back because I know we're kind of getting close to the end. Number one, actually, I wanted to ask you, what's your thought on setting specific number goals? Like I want to make X amount of dollars this year. Is that a good goal to have? Well, it depends on how you're setting it. If you made $250,000 last year and then there's been a technological breakthrough that allows you to be more efficient and how you do it or more productive because you can create agentic beings on the internet doing stuff. Then if I were to coach you, I would say, well, where did you come up with this idea of 10Xing it? I don't know. I heard that in Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich, or my YPO group said that, or they 10Xed it in Silicon Valley. That's not a good reason to set that goal. Now, I will say this. So you've got to set it on some kind of grounds where you have a challenging and specific strategy to go past your fingertips. So I'm not going to say be unrealistic completely because I happened to live near Katie Ledecky, who just last weekend became the first woman to go under 15 minutes in the 1650 freestyle, first woman in the world. She has always set unrealistic goals since the time I knew her as a six-year-old. And so some people need unrealistic goals. They respond to them. So don't tell me I have an unrealistic goal if you don't know my makeup, my energy, my background, my mindset. But it has to work for you and it has to be challenging, not easy to achieve. But you better have the ability to answer the question, where did you get that number from and why did you set it that way? OK. And so then let's say someone does set a goal. I want to make X amount of dollars. And, you know, it's not just because they're mimicking mimetic desire and they're kind of doing what other people want. It's truly a goal. They believe that is is. Well, again, maybe this is not the right way to think about it, but I was going to say within reach and maybe, you know, whatever the case may be. So then how would they go about then? Would they with like, I'm just trying to think of the other way. And I know people in the book we go, it goes into a lot of detail. But the other way aside from the smart goals, right? Like, OK, so I have a number goal. Now, how do I back into that? Or what's kind of the process for for setting that goal? OK, so the first question I ask everybody is, so what? So what if you make that money? What does it mean to you? Because you've got to make sure it's intrinsic or extrinsic. If it's intrinsic, it's yours. And you can talk about why that why that amount is meaningful to you. It allows you as an immigrant to be able to educate your children and make sure that your mother has, you know, comfortable, whatever, retirement and that you can be philanthropic or whatever. But you better be able to answer my questions. So what? Because if you're just out there throwing numbers around, then it may not be the goal that makes you happy. And there's all kinds of research on that. Because money doesn't make people happy. The more you have, the more you worry about maintaining it or getting more. But what you're saying is throw out a number. That's a performance goal. And a performance goal is something you've done before. So if you know how to accumulate this amount of money, this amount of this amount of money and, you know, who you have to hire, what you were saying, your business has systems. If your systems are efficient and all you have to do is improve a system, then you can probably say, yeah, I can hit that number. And maybe if I work even harder and find another way to be more efficient. Yeah, maybe I can get that too. But you've got to find new ways to do it. So be careful of the numbers. If it's a performance goal, you can set a number, but answer the so what question before you do that. Let me tell you really quickly what happens when you mix up performance goals and learning goals. Because this is really the thing everyone should understand. Is when you have a learning goal and you turn it into a performance goal, like Boeing, trying to quickly turn around and create a long haul jet that could take people further on the same amount of fuel. That's what created the Boeing MCAS system that cost, I think, 500 some people their lives. It's caused so many midair issues because Boeing skipped all the steps of learning how to make that plane in order to try to compete with Airbus. And they threw it out on the market by not letting pilots go in simulators or anything else. They just cut corners. Same thing with the IACOCA and the Ford Pinto. Same thing with San Bankman Freed. FTX, same thing with the Titan submersible, which just imploded and cost a bunch of people their lives. It was all situations where they didn't know how to achieve the outcome that they were seeking. So they skipped steps. And instead of learning how to do it right, they cut corners and threw something on the market to make money. And that's usually where companies or people lose their reputations, their lives often never recover from it. So that's called a goals gone wild scenario. And on my website, biggoalsbook.com, I have case studies of exactly this, the bridge methodology. How do you go through it? And then what are goals gone wild case studies where people skip those steps? So those are that's just free. That's on my website. Just go look at that. It explains it. And then it shows you what happens when you set them backwards. That's great. This is this has been amazing. Highly recommend people go to your website. Highly recommend people get your book. This is this is inspiring stuff. This is how we kind of live this fulfilling life, the best possible life as your previous book. And, you know, Caroline, this has just been an absolute pleasure. Where can people you mentioned the website? Let's mention it again. Make sure people got it and anywhere else people can follow you social media, all that kind of stuff. All of the above. So my my main website is my name. Caroline Miller dot com. But big goals also has a website that's attached to Caroline Miller. The case studies and all his big goals book dot com. I'm on LinkedIn and I'm on Instagram primarily Caroline Adams Miller. And I just love to hear from people. So it's easy. I'm easy to find and I'm always curious about what people are doing with this information to shake up their own ideas about goal setting. I love what I'm hearing, but I want to hear more. Amazing. Well, I'm certainly excited to jump into it. Thank you for all the work you've done over the years. You've helped so many people and hopefully we're going to we're going to spread the word even more with this recording here. And yeah, I hope we can do it again sometime. Oh, you're very nice. Thank you. And I hope your holiday season is blessed. Oh, thank you. Thank you for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, it would really mean a lot to me. If you would forward this episode along to any friends, family members, anyone that you think that would get value out of it and learn something important. The mission at Peak Performance is to help people prioritize and transform their health. And so if you think someone will get value, please, please, please do forward this episode along to them. Also, if you could please rate and review and subscribe on whatever podcast player you are listening to this on, we would greatly appreciate that as well. It means a lot. And I want to tell you about a couple of new products that we just released. You can get 20% off your first order at buypeakperformance.com. That's B U Y peak performance.com. We just released a brand new grass fed beef protein isolate. This is my favorite new protein powder because it's great for muscle building and recovering and all that kind of stuff. But it doesn't give the stomach discomfort and gas that a lot of people get from, you know, different types of proteins like whey protein, some types of plant proteins can do the same as well. It seems to be really, really easy on the stomach while still giving all the great benefits of muscle building and everything else that you want from taking in adequate protein. So check out our new beef protein isolate. We have it in unflavored, which I actually mix and blend with my morning coffee. Every morning we have a vanilla and we have a chocolate. You can buy it on Amazon, but again, you also do get 20% off your first order at buypeakperformance.com B U Y peak performance.com. We've also recently released organic mushroom coffee. We have these in curing compatible cake cup coffee pods. We have organic mushroom that also organic mushroom coffee with lion's mane, reishi, cordyceps, turkey tail and shaga mushrooms blended with the high altitude organic coffee that we've been using and what that we've been famous for for years. So that's been a big hit. That one as well. You can get on our website or Amazon, any of our products. And of course, we're always famous for our organic green superfood powder that has almost 5000 reviews on Amazon with a very high star rating. We're known as the best tasting USDA certified organic green superfood powder with over 25 plus organic ingredients. Again, we also have the organic red superfood powder. We still of course have the organic plant protein for those who do prefer the plant protein, but I'm really excited about this new beef protein isolate and all of our other products. We do have over 100 products. So just check us out if you type in peak performance supplements on Amazon or if you go to buypeakperformance.com. Thank you so much and we'll talk to you again soon.