How to Achieve Big Goals: Expert Insight from Caroline Adams Miller

Judy Oskam : 0:03

What's your dream? Do your goals get you closer to living your very best life? Well, this episode could set you up for success. You'll learn there's a better way to set goals that really do work. Welcome to Stories of Change and Creativity. I'm Judy Oskam, a university professor at Texas State University. I'm also a Gallup certified strengths and Thrive certified coach. Caroline Adams Miller wrote the book Big Goals the science of setting them, achieving them and creating your best life. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University and later earned a master of applied Positive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. She tells me she's a fifth-generation Washingtonian, has three adult children, she has a cute snoodle named Alpha and is married to her college sweetheart. I hope you enjoy our conversation. You explore the science behind goal setting. What drove you to write the book? We'll start there and then we'll kind of weave around.

Caroline Adams Miller : 1:07

Yeah. So what drove me to write the book is when I went back to school in 2005 to get a master's degree in applied positive psychology, I was introduced to Locke and Latham's goal setting theory as part of an assignment in October of 2005. And I had fancied myself a goal-setting expert. I'd always used goal-setting. As a certified coach, I was credentialed. I read every book.

Caroline Adams Miller : 1:36

I come from a family of athletic competitors and high achievers, so that was my shtick was goal-setting. So when I was assigned Locke and Latham's goal setting theory and I found out it was ranked number one of 73 management theories and I'd never heard of it, never been taught it I was floored. So for the last 15 years I wrote Creating your Best Life, which introduced goal setting theory to the mass market, and then this book 15 years later, with the addition of all the new research that I've put into an acronym that binds it all together. So you start with goal setting theory and then all the other, the six areas that you have to prompt yourself to go through questions, because the world needs this.

Judy Oskam : 2:20

We all deserve to have the tools work, yeah we do and I'm I'm teaching a graduate class in the spring and it's all about creative problem solving and we're going to talk about some of the theories and the information in your book and part of it is kind of and I'll ask you can you share a story, that a personal story from you, that where you've kind of seen this work in your real life?

Caroline Adams Miller : 2:47

Gosh, there's so many. Okay. So my book Big Goals is my ninth book. It for me, that's what I call a performance goal, what Locke and Latham call a performance goal. It's not a learning goal. I'm not learning how to write a book. I'm not learning how to set aside time. I'm not learning how to do page count. I'm not learning how to do the research. For that reason, if a publisher says, can you have it done in five months, I know what I have to do. So for me, it's about backing up and going through my checklist. So performance goals are checklist goals. You've done them before. What was the learning goal?

Caroline Adams Miller : 3:22

Component of this was integrating artificial intelligence into how I checked the research. So I used perplexity and chat, gpt-40 and Claude to and askmypdfcom to put in massive PDFs of research and have it summarize it for me. And so the performance goal was writing the book. The learning goal was how do I use this new artificial intelligence to make the book more excellent? Not write it for me, but help me gather the resources more efficiently, and it makes you more efficient. So learning goals are things you've never done before, the world's never done them before, and performance goals or checklist goals are things that you have done before that are like recipes, and that's how you can say the cake will be baked in an hour, because you know how to do this thing and you know what excellence looks like. So that's how I used it this year.

Judy Oskam : 4:14

So the two differences, then, and how you then combine them all. Take your cake analogy you put things in the mixing bowl and mixed it all up, right, so why don't we do that normally? I mean, why are we stuck on KPIs and the smart and all of that? Why are we just now hearing about this?

Caroline Adams Miller : 4:37

The reason why we're stuck on smart goals is because it's sticky and because a man named George Doran I hope I'm pronouncing his name correctly in 1981, wrote an article for a management journal and he just called it SMART goals and it sounded good. You know, specific, measurable. Whatever the reason I'm saying, whatever is, it has become many different things to many different people. So the smart does not actually represent what it originally represented. But the problem is goal setting theory. The science of goal setting, which isn't sexy, which isn't an acronym, which isn't as memorable, is stuck in academia. And so goal setting theory, as well known as it is, as highly thought of as it is again ranked number one of 73 management theories, it was stuck in academia until I brought it out in Creating your Best Life. So that's one reason so smart is sticky. And OKRs and KPIs are a very, I hate to say it, white male techie thing.

Caroline Adams Miller : 5:42

That started at Intel and because it's been done that way and integrated into so many dashboards, productivity dashboards it's become accepted without question that this is how you do it. Problem is it doesn't always measure what matters. So it doesn't always measure the learning component, and I'll just go back to my learning goal of integrating AI into how I researched and wrote the book. It would not be fair of me to expect a certain level of excellence in how I used AI or to know all the tools out there in the short period of time I had to write the book. That is where learning and performance goals get mixed up and cause tremendous amounts of grief to human beings, to companies, et cetera. So if I held myself to some kind of extraordinary high measure of achievement with artificial intelligence, I would have disappointed myself. I might have disengaged from the process of trying to learn it as I wrote it, and so we have to give ourselves grace when we have learning goals and when we skip that step, really bad things happen, and I can go into that.

Judy Oskam : 6:51

Well, I'd like to hear some of the bad things that do happen. I mean, what does happen when we don't really open ourselves up to that opportunity?

Caroline Adams Miller : 7:00

Well, we're not curious, we're not engaged in the process of learning, and one of the biggest problems in the workplace that's been so well documented is disengagement and a lack of connection. People don't feel like they have role clarity. That was what Gallup identified as the biggest problem facing the workplace less than a year ago. Know what's expected of you and a manager who might be managing you from a distance doesn't really know learning goals or performance goals and doesn't know how to measure whether or not that is the metric to use when you're learning it. Or is that the metric to use if you've done it before? If it's not being measured and you don't know what's expected of you, what you do is you often skip steps and you disengage and you're not curious.

Caroline Adams Miller : 7:46

And then people start to make things up. They make up their research with PhDs, um, because they're expected to have an outcome, but they don't know how to do it. So they lie, they cheat, they steal, they make things up whatever it is. So companies there are lots of examples of companies that have done that. If you want me to go into that, I can tell you about some disasters.

Judy Oskam : 8:06

Sure Share one, so we can kind of get a handle on that.

Caroline Adams Miller : 8:09

I'll just give you one, and this is a sad one, but lives are often lost when companies mix up learning goals and performance goals. So the Titan submersible Stockton Rush, who had never built a submersible that would go to the depth of where the Titanic was. He wanted to be an astronaut of the deep and his goal was to make money, so he decided to skip all the certification that went along with building a safe submersible. So he had a learning goal, which was building a safe submersible that was certified, that engineers signed off on. Engineers who raised red flags and refused to sign off on it. He sued them and so instead he started taking passengers down. And so he had a performance goal to make a certain amount of money by a certain date. But he skipped the learning process and people died, and that's happened in so many places. The Ford Pinto is the other biggest loss of life to a car, because Ford did the same thing with the Pinto.

Judy Oskam : 9:08

Well, and you write about that in the book it's got some great case study analysis in there. So I appreciate that. But how can we bring that down to the personal level? Because I think understanding on a personal level what's a learning goal versus a performance goal and how can we implement that, using creativity, maybe, and how can we help ourselves there?

Caroline Adams Miller : 9:31

Well, we have to have a dream for ourselves, so we have to start there. What is the dream that you have for your life in the next year? Just begin to engage in the process of if my best possible life occurs this year and I'm going to be doing hard work I'm going to choose to go out of my comfort zone. I'm. What do those dreams or goals look like, and how many of the components of accomplishing those different dreams and goals have I done before? So do I have a learning goal? Am I learning artificial intelligence? Am I learning to enter a new field?

Caroline Adams Miller : 10:03

I've never worked in a certain field before four. You're an accountant and you want to add a certain certification to how you do your work. You know how to do your work, but you're adding something to it. It's still a performance goal, even though you're adding this one component, because you know how to do your job. You know what excellence looks like.

Caroline Adams Miller : 10:26

Same thing for athletes, for example. So I'm a competitive swimmer, and so I don't need to learn how to swim. I don't need to learn any stroke technique. I might need to learn how to endure more pain if I want to get faster, and so I might have to do different sets in practice, so I can have a performance goal of making masters nationals, but I might have to learn how to endure more pain. However, I know how hard I have to work to get there. So you have the performance piece, which is showing up at workout, doing the workouts, and then the learning piece would be the small add-on which is how do I endure more pain in different kinds of sets to get there? Does that make sense?

Judy Oskam : 11:04

Yeah, and I think what I like how you I just I was skimming through this again I like how you put in there some of the personal things that you do, for instance, for your personal health and well-being. Can you talk about that and why that's important when we're doing these lofty dream goals, if you will?

Caroline Adams Miller : 11:24

Yeah. So in Chapter 10 on excellence, I write about the aura ring, and so I, because I was hospitalized with cytomegalovirus a few years ago and it really was a wake up call. There was too much stress in my life that I didn't always feel happening and finally my body gave out and I found myself in a hospital with NIH infectious disease doctors trying to figure it out. When I came out I realized I knew how to live, but I didn't know how to live in the most healthy possible way and what. It didn't mean food, it didn't necessarily mean drink. It meant tracking sleep. It meant making sure that toxic people were not part of my clientele or people I chose to spend time with. So I have the aura ring in there.

Caroline Adams Miller : 12:07

So I started wearing the Oura ring at the recommendation of one of my neighbors, and I was just tracking sleep, and so it was a learning goal for me learning how many hours does it take for me to really wake up feeling good? How restless am I? Did I get enough REM sleep? So I'm getting all this data. But one day this neighbor said to me well, I'm trying to get two crowns a week. I went, what? Two crowns? And she said oh, aren't you getting crowns?

Caroline Adams Miller : 12:32

So I ran back, I looked at the aura ring and I realized there were little crowns appearing on the days where I had great sleep over in 85. So what I realized is, as you gather data, you have to be trying to achieve something with that data. So I was just gathering data without really shooting for anything. I was in a learning process, but now I shoot for crowns, and two every, let's say, two weeks or so, and so I've been in the process of learning how to use the Oura Ring, learning what value I get from it, learning which data matters, and then I start to shoot for goals that stretch me outside of my comfort zone, that make me do things a little bit more excellently, and that are usually a little bit harder, because we know in research that people, when they're building confidence and self-esteem, they don't get it from doing easy things, they get it from doing hard things, and those hard things are things that light them up, that are intrinsic goals, and so that's a piece of how I live my life with my health now.

Judy Oskam : 13:37

Well, and that then became a performance goal, correct?

Caroline Adams Miller : 13:40

Yes, it is a performance goal. So I learned how to wear the ring, I learned how to look at the app. I learned, I learned, I learned. And then this person made this passing comment and I thought, yeah, I have to turn this into a performance goal around what matters in the data. So that was really important.

Caroline Adams Miller : 13:56

And the same thing with being a martial artist. You know, when you're a martial artist and you're learning how to do, I'm a black belt and hop keto. But when I was a white belt and a yellow belt, the stripes on your belt mean you're learning things. You see the black belts walking around the dojo and you know that's a goal you want to achieve. But you can't say I'm going to get there in a year, two years, three years. I got to achieve every stripe on here, every belt, all the way up there. So I can't dictate the time. I know what excellence looks like, but I have to learn a whole lot to get there and to do it with with grace and to do it well and to not skip any steps. So the martial arts is just a perfect example of learning and performance goals mixed together in order to achieve excellence. On the mindset problem.

Judy Oskam : 14:38

I always tell when I have clients or even students give yourself permission to learn something, give yourself permission to kind of give yourself a little grace. What do you recommend as far as mindset?

Caroline Adams Miller : 15:05

Well. So mindset is just a big, big topic, and what I found and I gave a TEDx talk about this in 2017, is when I interviewed paragons of grit good grit I found that the way they got to whatever this outcome was they were seeking. They had a mindset that they agreed upon ahead of time that they would go to if they wanted to quit, because mentally, emotionally, financially, something interfered with the accomplishment of doing this hard thing, and they agreed with themselves that they were gonna to have a growth mindset. They were going to learn how to deal with it, but they were going to have an if, then reaction.

Caroline Adams Miller : 15:42

If I feel the pain, then I'm going to sing a song to myself. If I want to quit, then I'm going to remember my cousin who died of brain cancer, who doesn't have a chance to do the things I'm doing. So they change the channel in their brains. But most of all, you have to have a mindset of curiosity, and that's where Locke and Latham's learning goal comes back in Having a mindset where you're engaged in the process of being curious and getting better and using the word yet I don't know it yet, but I'm going to keep applying myself in the best possible way to get there. That's the mindset that you need in order to accomplish anything, really.

Judy Oskam : 16:21

And I like using the word practice. Well, we're practicing this you know it's not an end goal, but we're practicing this, and do you want to leave it better than before? Not finished, but better, can you?

Judy Oskam : 16:33

go into a situation and leave it better, and then that pressure is not on you to succeed at every turn in whatever success is. Yeah, well, you know we're such a success driven country in America, and even our students are as well, and our faculty as well. But how do you help them kind of navigate success on a personal and professional level? And I know you've got some great worksheets in your book. Yeah, talk about where we start on this.

Caroline Adams Miller : 17:06

Well, I work with a lot of senior executives now who are setting goals not just for themselves but for their organizations, and everyone's level of excellence is a little bit different. So what's hard for me may not be hard for somebody else. And so what you want to do is you want to have a big goal, a big dream, something that's your North Star. You know, you're looking up at the top of the mountain. Where do I want to get? Where do I want to be? And so Lachlan Latham and Gary Latham in particular said to me that when he studied people at the end of their lives, it was a coulda, woulda, shoulda. So you do need to have a drive to succeed at something important. And I just want to throw in one more interesting piece of knowledge, and that is a lot of people know about learned helplessness.

Caroline Adams Miller : 17:47

My mentor, marty Selling, did the research in the 1960s with a colleague, and they decided the dogs had gotten shocked so often they lay down and became helpless. Instead, in recent years, what they realized is that we are born helpless and that the drive the human drive is to master our environments. So it's not just about having a big goal. We must master our environments in order to flourish, which could mean anything. It could mean you know learning how to drive a stick shift car. It could mean learning how to juggle children with an in-person work experience where you're going somewhere and you're trying to find childcare. It could mean so many different things. But you have to start with a dream. That's hard, that takes you to the next level of excellence, and you must be able to measure your progress towards that goal. Does that?

Judy Oskam : 18:41

help. Yeah, that helps a lot. And I remember, and you wrote about it, that when you were putting all these theories together and you kept going back to was it Latham or Lockton, Latham.

Caroline Adams Miller : 18:53

Yeah, I mean.

Judy Oskam : 18:54

Gary and you were saying to him you want to do this and that, and he finally just said just write the book. Oh, that's Marty, oh, marty, okay.

Caroline Adams Miller : 19:01

Talk about that a little bit because that was fascinating for me.

Caroline Adams Miller : 19:04

Yeah. So it's 2005 and I'm in this first class at Penn in this Masters of Applied Positive Psychology, and none of us really know what this degree is going to do for us. All we know is we wanted to be there because something called us. And so early in that year, fall of 2005, several staggering pieces of research came to me, and one was the benefits of frequent positive affect, by Sonia Lubomirsky and Ed Diener and Laura King, and it said that all success in life is preceded by being happy first. And it was a slam dunk. Finding success in every domain of life is preceded by being in a flourishing emotional state first. And so, as somebody who fancied herself as a goal setter, I was like this turns everything upside down. You can't talk about goals unless you talk about wellbeing. That actually became the thesis of my book Creating your Best Life.

Caroline Adams Miller : 19:58

But Marty wanted me to apply positive psychology to healthcare or to insurance or to something, because he thought that it would just get more attention and make a bigger difference in the business world. And I kept saying but, marty, people don't know goal setting theory A and B, they don't know that happiness precedes success. And I do think the world deserves science because this smart goal thing. I'm suddenly realizing that if you just use the word, let's say, realistic or reachable, as the R in smart, you're immediately undermining one of the most powerful parts of goal setting theory, which is the goals. If you just set reachable goals, those are called low goals. You want to achieve hard goals, not impossible goals, but hard goals, and so using smart immediately kind of dumbs things down.

Caroline Adams Miller : 20:48

And I said to Marty I'd like to make a difference in the world with goal setting. And yeah, so Marty just gave up. He threw his hands up and said you're going to write it anyway, just go write it. And then later, when he wrote the book Flourish, he called out my book, creating your Best Life. He said Caroline's added a huge missing piece to the world of goal setting. And, um, you know how you just get an instinct that you're on a path. Yeah Well, that was your dream right.

Judy Oskam : 21:16

That was your big mountain dream, right On the top of the mountain. It was my big yeah.

Caroline Adams Miller : 21:21

And I didn't know how to write a book that was that evidence-based. I had never done it and so, but I was given a hard performance goal deadline by the publisher and I said I don't know if I can do it. I'm learning how to write a book this evidence-based, this heavily footnoted, but I'm going to die trying. And I almost. You know, I was covered in hives when I was done with the book because my co-author ended up not being able to write a word. He didn't contribute anything to the book, maybe two pages, and that was out of my hands, and so I had this impossible situation.

Caroline Adams Miller : 21:56

But you know what? I think we only get a few opportunities in life to redefine ourselves, to ourselves, who we are, what we're capable of, what are our strengths, who has our back, what are we proudest of. And I remember I was calling my agent as I crossed the Bay Bridge, from where I'd written a big chunk of the book, to go back home, and I called him and I said Ivor, I did it, I did it and I can't believe I did it. And I said I think I'm a different person today. Yeah, and that moment has been a stepping stone to lots of other big goals. And that's what I mean is when you have big goals and you shoot for them and maybe you don't achieve them, but you've come close. So you get you know. As excellent as you can be, you redefine who you are to yourself.

Caroline Adams Miller : 22:51

And that's what a flourishing life is all about and that's what I really want people to feel.

Judy Oskam : 22:54

Tune in to part two of my interview with Caroline Adams Miller. We continue the conversation and talk about how women in particular can achieve their big goals. We also discuss strengths and the VIA or values in action assessment. It's a free online assessment that will identify your true character strengths and the via or values in action assessment. It's a free online assessment that will identify your true character strengths and I'll include information about Caroline and her books in the show notes. Thank you for listening to stories of change and creativity and remember if you've got a story to share or know someone who does, reach out to me at judy. oskam. com. Thanks for listening.