This Simple Goal-Setting Method Changes Everything (Science-Backed)

So you're nine books in. This is incredible. Best selling books, hitting the lists.

I am obsessed with goal setting and I've been obsessed since I was a child. I fell headlong into this behavior at the age of 14 and it nearly killed me. And in my recovery from bulimia, I did something really hard. I never thought of myself as courageous or brave. Female CEOs are not judged the same as male CEOs. There's a way to pay back and to open doors for people who have less power. Money, power, domination, winning. You will give up, you will get overwhelmed and you will blame other people. And let's get rid of the law of attraction. All this crap, real crap, the secret, the this, the that. You can't magically chant your way to success. Why rob yourself of the opportunity to find out what you're made of? Do you have enough grit? Do you even know what grit is composed of?

I thought I knew how to make goals, plan goals, work towards goals. But I sat down with Caroline Miller and she has went deep to define how we have been led down the garden path in the wrong direction when it comes to goal setting for all these years. Look, her ninth book is called Big Goals. It's the science of setting them, achieving them and creating your best life. You need to listen to this episode. It's so powerful. It is very scientifically backed, her approach. So if you want to move towards your goals and hit them, this is the episode for you. A very special thanks to NZ Mortgages for sponsoring this episode of the Lead On Purpose podcast. You can check them out at nzmortgages.co nz. Caroline, a huge welcome to the Lead on Purpose podcast.

Thank you. Love being here already.

I'm so delighted to have you here. I've wanted to sit down with you for a long time. We've got a very close mutual friend in Dr. Lucy Hone who said, james, you need to meet my friend because she knows that I geek out on performance, high performance, working with leaders and understanding that, hey, goals are important and setting them is important. However, most of us have read many books on goal setting who are involved in business or leadership and that might be something like 7 Habits of Highly effective people setting smart goals. Start with the end in mind. All that stuff and it's, it's good stuff, right? It gets people started, gets people going. However, yeah, I feel it's very heavily slanted, written by males, largely, possibly for males. And I'm saying that as a male and I think that a lot of the research, when you Start to dig into it. Well, actually, there's no research there and this is unfounded information. So you are shaking things up globally. You are challenging.

Good. I am. I'm obsessed with goal setting. First, let me say the world is better because Lucy Hohn was born. We're all better off because she's done the work she's done. And, you know, New Zealand just has a blessing with her and her partner, Denise Quindlen and what they've brought to your country. So anyway, just thank you. And she's a wonderful mutual friend. I am obsessed with goal setting, and I've been obsessed since I was a child, simply because there are Olympians in my family. And Platt and Ben Adams were the first siblings to go 1, 2 in the Olympics in the same event, the 1912 Olympics, Stockholm, Sweden, and set a world record flat. Adams set a world record. I think it still stands because they eliminated the event standing high jump. But anyway, I grew up hearing about high achievement and goals and being excellent, and those were the standards I was expected to adhere to. I took that to the dark side with my eating disorder, bulimia, which we can get into. That was the stupid grit, being persistent with all the wrong goals. But it was when I went back to school in 2005 to get a master's degree in University of Pennsylvania. Positive Psychology, Applied positive Psychology. I was already working as an executive coach, but one of our first assignments was goal setting theory. And I remember speaking out loud, no one in particular, as I looked at the assignment. There's a science to goal setting and there's a thing called goal setting theory by Locke and Latham.

I got the textbook. I copied every page. This was like the keys of heaven being given to me because I have worked with high achieving CEOs, leaders all over the world. They all set goals. To this day, 20 years later, I'd say fewer than five have ever heard of the science of goal setting or goal setting theory. And my mission is to share it as widely as possible.

Incredible. I'm here to help you on that mission. I think that every listener and viewer is going to be blown away by what they discover. And I want to just talk a little bit about, you know, go back to a deep why and a purpose, what. What drives you. And an eating disorder. I can't begin to imagine how that would have shaped you physically, psychologically, socially, relationally. So if you don't mind, know, how did that all come about and what led you to do what you do now?

So thank you for asking and I have Zero embarrassment or shame about it. So, you know, some people go, do you mind if we talk about whatever. It's. The cat's out of the bag, so. And I've been very public. In fact, my first book is called My Name is Caroline, and it's the first autobiography by anybody who overcame bulimia and lived to tell the story. And. And I got into it as a competitive swimmer. So there were two girls in my high school. One of them was a competitive swimmer. This was the mid-1970s, so title nine, which is what gives female athletes more parity in college sports. It's been an amazing game changer in the United States.

I followed them into the bathroom after lunch and I heard them vomiting their food. When they came out, I confronted them, like, were you guys doing that thing called like bulimia or the binge purge center or whatever? And they were kind of giddy and, yeah, it's great. You can eat all you want and you never pay a price. And it was not that well known at the time. There were like stories of sororities and the rest of it. But at that time there was very little known. Certainly no treatment available if you became bulimic. It was a hopeless situation. Highly addictive. Runs quite often in families with histories of alcoholism, depression, addiction. I fell headlong into this behavior at the age of 14 and it nearly killed me. And it was my secret. I was at this very competitive, fantastic girls prep school in dc. I love school, but this thing just took over my life and I was a shell of myself. At the end of being at Harvard, I got into Harvard, graduated magna somehow. It was like a billboard walking towards you. I looked in the front, but there was nothing behind me. I was a swimmer, but I. I had. I was like a soulless human being looking for food all the time and private places to purge. Hit my last bottom couple weeks after I graduated from Harvard. I got married at 21. I asked this guy to marry me. He's still my husband, the captain of the lacrosse team. We got married a week after I graduated. I hit my last bottom on our honeymoon because I remember looking in the mirror and thinking, what am I doing to myself? And it took a few more months for me to really bottom out. And I found a free self help group for compulsive eaters in Baltimore, Maryland. And I've been on the upswing since the age of 22. And I firmly believe that it's. I get goosebumps. It's the thing I'm proudest of, that I overcame this debilitating disorder when there was a hopeless. A hopelessness to it. And so when My Name is Caroline came out, I'd say I got 100,000 letters. It broke the post office. And I still get letters from people who remember where they were when they saw the book or saw me on tv because I gave people hope. And that's the thread between book one and book nine. My next book, which is I realized my icky guy, my reason for getting up in the morning, my purpose, you can see, right in my recovery from bulimia, I did something really hard and almost impossible, some would say. And I've stayed in recovery, which I think is even harder, through having children, midlife, all the rest of it, and never had a relapse. And when you go through all my books, my book's about getting grit, creating your best life and now big goals, et cetera. They're all about giving people hope and evidence based tools to do hard things so they live a more meaningful life and a more purposeful life. And on the way they flourish more. So that's what I wake up for. And that's my story. Wow.

Thank you for sharing that. You are an inspiration to millions and I'm not surprised. You got hundreds of thousands of letters and you probably still continue to. That is the power of being vulnerable. That's the power of being open and courageous and giving people hope. And I think when we see others who are in a similar position to ourselves, whether we've lost something or lost somebody, whether we're going through a really tough time and we have an addiction to see someone who looks similar to us. Yeah, man, oh man, that's inspiration.

It is, and it's very nice of you to say. There were, there were just a few recovering bulimics in Baltimore at the time, and I hung onto them for dear life. I, you know, I went to restaurants with them. What do you eat? What's a portion size? What kind of food do you keep in your house? I mean, I was like a child learning how to walk. And that's, that's where addictions take you and that vulnerability. But ironically, and I'm sure you can relate to this, I never thought of myself as courageous or brave. I thought, I have to publish this book because people have to know somebody got better and that even if my way isn't your way, you can get better. I just felt so powerfully about that. It never occurred to me not to do it. And to this day, people go, you're so brave. And I was like, Wasn't brave at all. And that's what the research on courage shows is people who have what other people think is courage often don't think they have courage. They think, well, I had no choice. So I'm sure you can relate to that 100%.

And for you to go on and continue. So you're nine books in. This is incredible, Bestselling books, hitting the lists. You are so talented at being a mission driven messenger, and you've got a mission and you deliver that through your writing, through your speaking, you know, just watching you speak and how you connect with your audience. Very inspiring. So I want to go a little bit into looking at goals. Do you believe that the way we set goals today generally is healthy and effective?

The answer is no. Let me explain. So when I wrote Creating your best life, that's my fifth book that came out as a result of my capstone at the University of Pennsylvania. So I went back to school, got this master's in applied positive psychology. I was in that first class. 32 people came to the University of Pennsylvania from all over the world, worked with Martin Seligman and whatever. And we were all told to go out in the world and apply the science of flourishing to the world and whatever our sphere was. And we had ministers and UN peacekeepers and the rest of it. I was an executive coach and my specialty was goal setting, or so I thought. So when goal setting theory, Locke and Latham's theory, by the way, ranked number one of 73 management theories. Number one. Don't forget that data point. It's never had a replication crisis. It's seen as the most useful tool, and yet nobody seems to know it because it's never been sexified like Dan Pink did in drive for self determination theory. It's never been sexified. These two men who are both still alive have just focused on doing good work. They don't, they don't have podcasts, they don't go on stage so much. I mean, they just do good research. And so I remember thinking, oh my God, I know nothing. So my capstone project that year was the first book to bring to the mass market goal setting theory, the real science of goal setting theory. Locke and Latham and I linked it to the science of flourishing because of one other piece of knowledge. And let me just tell you what that is, because that was a game changer too. That was Sonia Lubomirsky, Ed Diener, and Lauren King had this massive meta analysis that came out that fall that showed with complete slam dunk conclusiveness, all Success in life is preceded by being in an emotionally flourishing state first. So you don't become happy after you succeed. You succeed because you're flourishing first. And there's 11 words for that. It could be contentment, happiness, awe, pride, love, you know, all those states of contentment and well being. And I thought, my God, if only my life had been lived backwards. You know, I always thought if I got that grade or I got into that school or I had that body, I would, you know, I'd be happy and then everything would be fine. You're happy first and then you have collected the optimism, the hope, the relationships, the ways of persisting through difficult challenges. That's how people end up succeeding. So I connected the science of happiness with the science of well being.

The science of happiness with the science of goal success. And that was the first time it hit the mass market. And that book is still riding the top of list. However, what's brought me to today is that book is out of date because the research has exploded in ancillary ways that now make it imperative, especially with COVID that we completely disrupt the field of goal setting so that everybody has a shot at success. I'm going to say one more thing. I have three adult children. They've all lost friends to suicide and that didn't happen to me. And my husband and I connect some of that with what I wrote about in Getting Grit, which is they all have big dreams and they have goals and they see examples of success on social media and everywhere. But this is the generation that was told they were winners before they did a single thing that made them deserve that praise. We dumbed down the world around them, we dumbed down playgrounds, we took away valedictorians, we gave them comfort animals, we gave them great inflation. And then they had these big dreams and no one taught them goal setting and no one showed them how to persist. No one showed them how to be curious. And goal setting theory solves a lot of this. So I do believe that this book needs to become a classic on the corner of every teacher's table, every manager, because if you don't know how to set, pursue and achieve goals with science, you will disengage from life, you will give up, you will get overwhelmed and you will blame other people or you'll never find out what you're really made of, what you're capable of of. And so the world deserves to know about this theory and this amendment that I'm adding to it that Locke and Latham have agreed with. I have to Say Gary Latham has endorsed my book. The co founder of Goal Setting Theory has never endorsed another goal setting book ever, anywhere. But I'm bringing their theory to life and they're so grateful. So that's why I'm here.

I'm so grateful that they have endorsed it. That speaks volume. And I didn't know the conversation would go in this direction, but I'm glad it did. New Zealand has one of the highest teenage suicide rates on the planet. It's almost number one consistently in the oecd.

Wow.

I worked at a high school here for about 13, 14 years. A number of kids during that tenure did commit suicide in recent months. In the last six weeks, I've had two friends here in Christchurch, our little tiny town, take their own lives. One, one was 18 and one was 50 years old with a couple of kids. And I just scratched my head. I'm like, what's going on? I didn't see it. So I'm really interested in what you say. I've got a young boy, Finn, who's eight years of age. My goal, my dream is to raise him to be interdependent, to be independent, to flourish in the world without me. And I just hope and pray that we get through those terrible statistics unscathed. How do you feel that this goal setting theory and science can help us help others and ourselves navigate this mental health challenge?

Yeah, I'm so sorry to hear this. And I think it's a story. All of us are living now just lost. Friends of ours from college just lost their adult son and it really is an epidemic. I want to be careful not to put out the idea that goal setting solves everything. But I do believe that having the ability to do with self determination theory says the three basic needs, autonomy, relatedness, and competence. And so the ability to be autonomous in our environment means that we have to be able to take care of ourselves. And competence is doing things, being able to master our environments, being able to break down big goals into smaller chunks and get them done one step at a time. And that's self efficacy theory. But you know, I think that we have to be able to give children the tools to have a dream and see that there's going to be a certain kind of grit and resilience and waiting for things to blossom. As long as we kind of stay the course and learn how to sit with uncomfortable feelings. Because I really don't think we've given that generation the tools. I really don't. And now that Covid and ourselves, by the way, I Mean, I, as I said, I work with a lot of leaders and CEOs and I just flew to Malaysia and I worked with 230 CEOs, none of whom had ever heard of goal setting theory. And they'd all been to great business schools. I just, I don't even know what to make of it, to be honest with you. It was a nine hour workshop and they didn't even take bathroom breaks. And they would come up to me like, how come we've never heard of this? I said, I don't know, but this is my ikigai. This is why I'm here. And it'll help your companies, but for children, I do believe that will help them flourish if they understand how to break down big dreams or big goals and understand how to become more competent. And then Locke and Latham have one big piece of their theory that's critical. And if you get it wrong, then you get things like called Goals Gone Wild. You get the Titan submersible, for example, you get the Boeing MCAS system. You get companies that are, you know, going for big payoffs at the expense of learning how to do what it is they're trying to do. So Lock and Latham, do you mind if I go right into that?

Please go right into it.

Okay. So these brilliant men, Gary, I just want to say again, Gary Latham and Edwin Lock did this work, this scrupulous research for decades. And they joined forces, which is also unusual. Instead of both doing goal setting work and one trying to be better than the other, they joined forces and just did this meticulous scholarship in the lab and in the real world. And they had results. They didn't have a theory and go look for results to match it. It's an open theory. They had results and they created their theory around it. And it's simple and elegant and very parsimonious. And the key part of it that really makes a difference is not all goals are created equal. You have learning goals and you have performance goals. And what that means is a learning goal, which is what most of us have, is we have a goal where we've never done it before and we have to add the skills and the knowledge to accomplish that goal. To do that, we have to flatten our learning curve as quickly as possible, but not attempt to hit some kind of magical performance goal as if we've already done it before, as if we have the skills and the knowledge. And if we're in a company that's demanding that we do something that we've never done before with excellence in a short period of time without giving us the grace or the time to be mentored, to learn, to whatever. What you find is people disengage in life, in work, and they just give up. So learning goals are things you've never done before. Learning goals become performance goals, but performance goals are things you've done before. I call them checklist goals, because usually five to seven items go on a checklist and you perform those things like a pilot taking off a surgeon in an operating theater, and they might change a little bit from surgery to surgery or from one year to another. There's some new skill to add, maybe augmented reality, like the company Proximi, which is a brilliant company in London, that's beaming surgeons into operating theaters all over the world, like Star Trek. I mean, maybe something like that has come along. So, yes, you've got your checklist. You've done this hip replacement before, but wow, look, this surgeon from Seattle, Washington, can beam in and guide your hand and show you where the cut needs to be made for some new prosthetic. I don't know, but when you get that wrong, when you get a performance goal wrong and you. Well, it's mostly people who have a learning goal and they don't take the time to learn, they skip the step and they immediately try to go to having a high, good performance. That's the main part. The other thing I'm going to say that I'm going to stop is they found that for both kinds of goals, the absolute best outcome has to be challenging and specific. Not a low goal, something that's attainable, like smart goals says, or realistic, like smart goals says, it has to be something that's challenging and specific. So low goals are, yeah, I can go out tomorrow and not really work too hard and do that thing I did last week. Like the loggers that Locke and Latham studied, they knew how to cut down trees. They knew they could cut down 30 trees a week. But when they gave them a challenging and specific goal, because they already knew how to do everything and said, cut down 45 this week, that's when they got people engaged in the work, proud of their work, their work output, doing more than they'd ever done before. So that challenges, challenging and specific, low goals, and then no goals, which is the condition many people have, which is, you know, why bother? Goal setting doesn't work. So I'll stop right there.

Well, so much to unpack, and I love it. So you and I have probably both been two similar, if not the same people delivering big workshops Seminars that could be 7,000, 10,000 people. And they're beating their chest and we're jumping up and down and singing and shouting and it's like, go hard, hustle hard. You know, here's the smart goals and you know, get out there and you know, go all masculine about it, right? And I'm not saying masculine is bad in any stretch of imagination. We need masculine, we need feminine. But when it comes to goals, most of those seminars I attended throughout my life were like, go hard, hustle, hustle, hustle. What I'm hearing from you is like, actually that doesn't work. That doesn't. It might work for some, but there's a price to pay.

Well, so first of all, when people are talking about smart goals, they're not talking science. And that's the first thing people have to realize is that all the books that you have on your bookshelf that I had on my bookshelf, Brian Tracy, Zig Ziglar, Tony Robbins, Stephen Covey, I mean, look, there's some good ideas in them, but they're not science. If you flip through all of them, there's no footnote anywhere. I only work with evidence based theories because I want to maximize my chance of accomplishing goals and I want my clients to do the same. So when men are on stage, they're often coming from kind of a male wired perspective, which is think about the space race, first to the moon, dominate, win. And this is how men often judge. Success is extrinsic, rewards, money, power, domination, winning. Now it's not to say that women don't want to win and women aren't ambitious because we are too. However, you're more likely to get men on stage talking about it because of confirmation bias. People like to learn about goal setting for men because men have always set the goal, have always created the goal agendas. And this started in 1881 with Taylorism, Franklin forgetting his name, Frederick Lowe Taylor, who just did time and motion studies at the Midvale Steel factory. And he thought, well, you know, if you just study how long it takes him to do this one part of this job and you just make it more efficient, then we're going to all get more productive and then we'll make more money. And then it went to Fordism, Henry Ford, I'll just revamp the factory floor and then just tell people how many cars to make and they'll follow directions. And it just went like that. It was very cut and dried. And the soul of the worker, the characteristics of the worker, just seeing Them as thinking human beings who could bring something to the table, was always lost. Now, in my book, I bring two women back alive. One in particular. Mary Parker Follett is now considered the first person who ever talked about transformational leadership. And this was in 1910, and she talked about win win. She was the first to talk about that. But she also said goals change when you bring them into an organization. The people who you interact with, the leader, the manager, the other people. Goals shift. We need a democratic process. That's when you'll have harmony. Remember I said, happiness precedes success. That's when we'll have harmony. That's when we'll have success. Sheila's mansplained right out of history and rediscovered in England and France in the late 1990s. And now I'm bringing her ideas back to life, too, because she had it right 100 years ago. If we had listened to her, we wouldn't have just had productivity people saying, cut costs down to the bone, improve shareholder value, make more widgets, you know, cut salaries of workers. No, that's not how it goes. Let me stop right there.

Yeah, this is really fascinating because the idea of productivity. So a couple of things come to mind. One, we had Dan Pink on the show recently, and I really enjoyed talking about intrinsic motivation and autonomy, mastery, purpose. These ideas. I really resonated with that now. GTD methodology. I don't know if you've came across that getting things done. Now, how does that sit in terms of planning, goal setting and so forth? Is that quite on the far end of the spectrum in terms of a masculine approach? Smart goal setting, reverse engineering?

You know, I'm not going to say it's bad, but I'm going to say there's no real science to it. It's just another method that works for some people. There are many methods, 32 folders or whatever, getting things done. I mean, these are all productivity systems that people have made a lot of money off selling. But at the heart of them, what I'm looking for is good goal hygiene. Getting the goals right. If you're going to set a goal, understand first, is it a learning goal or a performance goal? And then what I've added is the bridge methodology, which is my unique kind of add on. Here are the prompts that you need to go through in order to make sure that you are maximizing every chance to accomplish either that learning goal or performance goal. Because what's happened now is the. The science on gender has really changed the conversation around goal setting. What works for men doesn't work for women. I'll just give you an example. At Amazon, you're supposed to give very harsh feedback. You're supposed to tattletail on your, on the people who work with you. They've got special lines set up so that you can just take people down. It's Darwinian at all costs. And when women are encouraged to give harsh feedback in these meetings, the problem is women get evaluated differently by both men and women. When they act like men, when they do things that are not role congruent, it's called stereotype threat. When women start to do things like have transactional relationships, try to just win or dominate at all costs. If they're not doing something communal, they pay such a price, and they pay it at every single level. Female CEOs are not judged the same as male CEOs. I mean, I could go on and on about that, but women approach goals differently. They're evaluated by others differently. Feedback is different. And I could just give you one piece of research that came out in the last couple weeks. Really, I got my hands on the research. When the same goal is presented to a man and a woman in the workplace, if a woman gets it done really well and on time, she does not get the same benefits as a man who takes much longer because the company sees him as simply more committed and more driven and doing more hard work. Whereas the woman who got it done just as well, if not better and faster, is seen as someone who just, you know, gets things done. No big deal expected of her. And Adam Grant's book, you know, Give and Take, also found that women who are givers in the workplace, who help other people show up, you know, early, help other people accomplish their goals, et cetera, they don't get the benefits of men who are givers in the workplace. In fact, when they give, they don't get the rewards. And when they don't give, they pay a social penalty and men don't. So that's one of the reasons why I had to completely disrupt this field of goal setting. Because what Locke and Latham came up with is brilliant, but we need, and it's an open theory, so they agree with me that it's time to disrupt it a little bit by looking at genders. And is the feedback the same that people, minorities and women get that white men, I mean, is it different? Is it the same? How are you going to account for that in the goal setting process? We also have brain imaging studies that show what lights up in the brain when people are performing different tasks. We know that relationships are different in the sense of, you know, women don't go to fight or flight. Men get aggressive. Women begin to bond with each other and to take care of each other. That's different.

So that's just some of what's going on. Then. We have mindset. We have mindset. We have grit. We have Angela Duckworth's brilliant work on grit. So how you persist that there's bad grit that nobody really talks about. And I call it, you know, stupid grit and selfie grit and faux grit. So we have to take a look at how is resilience operating in your organization. Is there stupid grit? Is it being rewarded, et cetera, et cetera? Let me stop talking.

No, this is brilliant. This is the gold. So a couple of things that just share. So the patriarchy and I often talk about how it plays out in modern day. The reason I talk about it so much is that my partner, Caroline, over the last five or six years has been challenging me in terms of, hey, look at the opportunities you get. Look at the doors that open for you. Do you think that door would open or that opportunity would have been presented if you had been female, if you had to be maybe a different color, if you had been different age or stage? And I started thinking about it, I was uncomfortable thinking about it. First reaction was kind of like, oh, I've worked really hard. You know, the harder you work, the luckier you get. But then I stopped and paused, and I realized that there are a lot of things that happen in my life because of my skin color, because of my gender. And I started bringing this up with some friends and even some clients who are successful white male business owners. Man, oh, man, it triggered them, and it continues to. And they think the patriarchy is a joke. They think that that whole side of it doesn't exist. I truly see it for what it is. And I love that you're this courage, again, to say, I'm going to challenge this and I'm going to show scientifically how this is playing out. How do we solve this, Caroline? Like, I want to be part of a solution. I don't know in which way I'll do it, but I think just talking about it is a starting point. But how do we solve this and give people opportunities to thrive?

Okay, well, first of all, I think it's very brave of you to say that you're bringing this up with white male clients. I think it's undeniable that they're born on third base. And it's not to say they don't work very hard. It's not to say they don't do good work. But there needs to be an acknowledgment that there's a way to pay back and to open doors for people who have less power. Confirmation bias is pretty clear. You hire people who look like you, who have the same kind of education. It's an unusual person who reaches outside of their culture and says, I want to bring you into this brainstorming group. I want some diversity here. I mean, we know that disruptive thinking and diversity is what gets the best results. No question about it. Otherwise, you have the Habsburg jaw effect. I call it the Habsburg jaw effect. You just have sterile children at the end of your line because everybody's inbred and just kind of passing around the same ideas. So it's become sterile. There's no good ideas. So I think we need to start by understanding and acknowledging that there's differences in goal setting, there's differences in relationships, there's differences in feedback. We have to just start with the fact that men and women and people of other cultures are not judged the same. They're not going to accomplish goals the same. But all everybody needs to start by understanding that there are learning goals and performance goals. And if you don't bake in time to learn how to build that rocket, if you don't build in time to learn how to be on that assembly line, if you don't build in time to understand what it's like to be in this organization to, you know, get along with people in different silos, if you don't build in time for the hostesses at that restaurant to know how to deal with disruptive customers who send back all their dishes and are rude. If you don't build that in and you only expect performance goal results, you're going to have turnover. You're going to have. And what. What Gallup has said is that there's very little role clarity. People don't know what's expected of them in the workplace, particularly since COVID and hybrid work solutions and managers don't know how to manage people they can't see. So we have to start by understanding that Gallup is called for high quality goal setting to be the solution to disengagement worker turnover, lack of role clarity. You have to set goals correctly. Now, I'm not going to upend everyone's dashboards because all companies are paying way too much money for Monday.com and.

Atlassian whatever. There's so many. The Wall Street Journal said that so many companies are stuck in these ruts of paying for like five dashboard systems, and then everyone's got a favorite dashboard in the company, they're paying 35, $45 ahead, when in fact people aren't even asking the question, have we set the goals correctly? Are these learning goals? Are these performance goals? This person I'm managing, does he or she know where to go to get this knowledge? How am I going to get them to give me feedback on a weekly basis, bi weekly basis of how they're learning, what they're learning so we can flatten their learning curve and get them to an excellent end result as quickly as possible, but doing it the right way. So I want to just start by educating people about goal setting. We can get to the disparities after people accept that this thing called goal setting theory is a real theory that has no replication challenges and is ranked number one. We'll start with that. Then I add this bridge system, which is the brainstorming approach. The first question I ask everybody to go through is, what's new since the last time you did this? Maybe it's a performance goal and you've made Oreo cookies before. What's new in the world since you did that thing really well last time? Ask yourself, what has technology brought to us?

Where in the world are people doing it better than us? But there's. I have a whole series of prompts in the book and I'm building my own large language model in artificial intelligence that will spit out strategy for people based on research that I am feeding into this brain. Then the relationships you need to know, who do I need to know? Who's going to be on my side? Who do I need to keep out of my goal setting strategy? Because they're people who are just bad apples in your personal life and your professional life, right? And they're Debbie Downers or they're people who just rain on your parade. There's, you know, what we know is that the first person who weighs in on your big dream or big goal, if they do it without curiosity and enthusiasm, you are bound to abandon that goal in the next two weeks. Think about that. Think about the fact that when you have a big dream or a big goal, there's some people you need to eliminate or containerize in your life. So I go through the relationships. The next thing is take time to think about the investments of time, of energy, of money. What are you going to have to set aside in terms of all of these different areas that are going to take the time, energy and money. Who do you have to hire to help you get the kids to school on time so you can take that micro course in the morning? And then there's decision making. Do you know how few people have actually thought through decision making? I have game theory in the book, but I also have the differences between noise and bias. A lot of people are making decisions without understanding that their decisions are tainted by noise. Daniel Kahneman, at the end of his life said noise. The problem of noise was bigger than the problem of bias. And he wrote some of the best books on bias. So people have to do a noise audit of their decision making, know when to pivot, when to disengage from this goal, et cetera, et cetera. Then grit. Do you have enough grit? Do you even know what grit is composed of? Humility, persistence, passion. I have all of that in the book. And I also wrote a book called Getting Grit that goes into that. And then excellence. You have to have a target you're shooting for. A lot of people have fuzzy kind of, yeah, I'm going to try to have a better golf game by September so I don't lose to my friends or I just want to go faster in the pool or something. The excellence has to be specific and challenging. And you have to measure. You have to measure along the way and know from the beginning. How do I know I'm getting warmer, I'm getting better? So I am content with introducing people to goal setting theory. Layer it onto your system in your company, but learn it. And then add this bridge methodology so that everybody is singing from the same hymnal. With science, no more smart goals, no more. If you have an OKR and a KPI, make sure there's science involved in it. Evidence. And let's get rid of the law of attraction. All this crap, real crap, 20th century crap. The secret, the this, the that. You can't magically chant your way to success. Now I'm on a soapbox and I'm going to get off it. But the Olympics comes around every few years and it's a perfect time for us to look at what does excellence really look like when you break it down. And you look at what they had to do to get here today. And often they have failed many, many times on their way to learning, learning goals, learning how to pole vault more efficiently. I'll tell you one last thing. Sorry, I'm on. I'm really on a rant.

Keep going.

This is the first time in the Olympics there were nine swimmers. Nine swimmers and I think they were all Americans who trained with digital twins. This is the coolest thing ever. And a lot of this is coming out of the University of Virginia where they're wearing, the swimmers are wearing accelerometers and they're creating avatars as essentially and these digital twins slash avatars are swimming their events perfectly, they're avoiding all resistance, they're aerodynamic, their head is down like one extra inch and they are creating perfect performances in digital twins and training to match the twins movement. Kate Douglas is just one swimmer at the Olympics I think she won the 200 meter im for women she trained by knowing that her digital twin lowered her head an infinitesimal amount on the pullout after on the turns and she worked towards dropping that half a second for a year and a half based on the digital twin. That's what's new. And so if you aren't going into your goal setting by asking yourself what's new in the world that's going to make me more efficient and more effective and you're just doing the same old I'm just going to show up and do a smart goal. I'm going to do something realistic because I know I can hit it and that's where my bonus is going to come from. You are robbing yourself of finding out what you're really capable of and that's what it's all about. What are you capable of doing? What makes you proud? Because we know that at the end of the day everyone scans their day for what they did that day that they're proud of. And guess what makes the list only the things that were outside of their comfort zone in pursuit of a goal they have. And if that's what we're all shooting for whether we know it or not, why rob yourself of the opportunity to find out what you're made of?

100%. This is literally upending decades of I think bad Science or Series 0 science backed goal setting. This is going to have listeners excited, thrilled, slightly freaked out, but also empowered to go, we've actually got a manual and that is your book. And I'm actually going to make sure that at this point to say it's available right now, get it in the show notes, hit the link, go and get a book. Get it for every member. If you run a team, get it for every member of staff. If you have family members who want to get better in life and have better outcomes in their health, their relationships are well, get them a copy. This is a great Christmas gift. Get it today.

Yeah, I'M going to for preorder right now. I don't know when this is going to come out, but it's preordered. Pre orders matter just as much as getting it. But if you have it, if you're a coach and you've got an athlete they look up to, you already give them the benefit of knowing how to, how to be as excellent as they can be in the short window. They have to be athletes. It'll. It'll hold them in, you know, it'll pay off for the rest of their lives.

So powerful. And I'm going to underline the idea of pre order for people who are listening who haven't written books, and there'll be many people who haven't. The reason pre order is so important is that if you get lots of pre orders, it allows you to hit some of the big lists. Why is that important? That's not a extrinsic status thing. That means that more people who need this book for their lives, their business, their relationships, they get to see the book because it sits in those lists. So please, folks, if you're even just considering getting it, get it today.

Yeah. So thank you very much. It does so many things that I hate the game that authors have to play. But if it helps you to have a bigger print run so that it's then in the airport bookstores, or somebody sees it in a bookstore and they give it to a niece of theirs who has kind of given up on feeling like she can be excellent at anything because she never knew that self efficacy, for example, is about breaking down goals and feeling like I can do it even though I don't know how to do it yet. I'll find a way. That's why pre orders matter. I actually want to say one more thing, because I'm sure you have an educated audience who know a lot of terms from psychology. And one thing that a lot of people also don't know is that learned helplessness is not a thing anymore. So Marty Seligman, the father of positive psychology, is one of my chief mentors. He's the one who encouraged me to just disrupt the field of goal setting in 2008 with my book Creating your best life. And a couple years ago, people still don't know this. It's just all this stuff is stuck in academia. Somebody reran the tests and measured something a little bit differently. And they found out that these dogs didn't learn to be helpless.

When the, when the cages were open and they were being shocked. They found out that the Ones who jumped out learned to be masterful. So it's not learned helplessness anymore. It's learned mastery. And we are born as human beings who need to learn how to become masterful. We're not born masterful and learn helplessness. We're born helpless. And it's incumbent upon all of us to learn mastery, to learn how to jump out of cages when we feel shocked and like we can't move. And this book is going to be your bible to help you figure out how to do this and how to know where to look for the guidance and the help and the peers around you who will help you get where you need to go, and the teachers and mentors. Actually, I have one more thing to say.

Yes, let me hear one more thing.

Okay. I get nothing for promoting Wikipedia, but I do want to say they started a brilliant program a few years ago called the Women in Red Project. And this is a very important project, because what they've found is that 82% of the biographies in Wikipedia are of men and 18%, and maybe it's a little bit more now of women. And why is that? Because there have been stiffer standards applied for women to be accepted, to be notable or noteworthy. And so there's been this drive by editing that has just knocked out women whose biographies were put forward. For example, the woman who got the Nobel in 20, 2018, a woman who got the Nobel Prize in 2018 for physics. Her lab had put her biography into Wikipedia earlier that year, like six months before it was eliminated, probably by men. I hate to say it, but that's what, you know, Wikipedia says, because she wasn't considered notable enough. And so if there aren't enough biographies that women can go to and vicariously learn from and say, I can relate to her. That's a woman. She was born in my tribe, or she's got my background, or whatever, then you. You begin to do something called occupational sorting. You begin to think you're only capable of doing this thing or this thing. And so your goals never become big. They stay small, because biographies that you can relate to and draw inspiration from don't exist. So there are people around the world who are making sure that they add one or two biographies a year to Wikipedia of women who they think should be in history. So that's another thing. If you don't see people who look like you, sound like you have your background, why would you ever set a goal that was bigger than what you see around you? You won't.

It's so powerful. Personally, I was confronted with this. It was my first year in podcasting. And you had 52 guests for the year. We did this thumbnail that had all of the guests faces on it and. Yeah. Oh, is right. So the second year going in, my first or second guest was this amazing woman called Nabila Extabalan. She's the current COO of Walmart Canada. We were having the most amazing conversation and she, she challenged me and you know, around who I interviewed and who I hung out with and who my friends were. I'd never been challenged on this before, so I find it really uncomfortable, but I was welcoming it. And after our call, I went and looked at this thumbnail and my face went bright red. Nobody was with me at the time. It was me. I was so embarrassed and shameful because literally I was looking at 95% of those 52 people, white males between 40 and 60. And hey, they were successful. They were good at what they did. Of course they were.

And you drew inspiration from them. I'm sure that was all genuine.

Yeah, 100%. But it was an unintended bias and it sat there. So she challenged me on this and she's just so incredible. One of the best minds in diversity. And so the next year, I was so proud on December 31st to look at it. And it was amazing. Like, such diversity. And I'll tell you what, when we look at studies and science around diverse workplaces or diverse thinking, often there's increase in output. Our podcast skyrocketed into 100% and I put it down to diversity.

Wow. Well, you know, 50% of the listeners are women. And there is a section early in my book for congratulations on having the humility and the open mindedness to hear hear a challenge that was probably not mean spirited.

Not at all.

But I have early in the book a eureka moment I had. I was driving to and from our beach house and it was like six hours in the car and I take notes on my Apple watch. I just, you know, listen to podcasts, I raise my hand, I take notes and I'm transcribing. And at the end of it, what I realized is I just spent an entire day in the car and all I had heard, and this is not a lie, I'm not making this up. I'm not embroidering this at all. I listened to some of the best podcasts in the world on excellence and success. And all I had heard all day were men talking to men about men. And I'd never heard a woman used as an example of ingenuity or creativity or success. It was all special forces, US Presidents, company leaders.

And I just went, oh my God. And I started to call him Dude Podcast. Then I hired a doctoral student. I gave her the top podcasts in the world from Apple Podcasts, and I paid her several thousand dollars to go through every single podcast, every guest, and to give me a list. I wanted a ratio. What was the ratio of male to female guests and male to female examples? And the average was 4 to 1. The worst, the most successful one, I'm not going to tell you who it was, was five men to one woman.

Terrible.

Imagine. And, and I know this isn't being done in a mean spirited way. I, I know that these are people who are legitimately exciting, but when we don't take the time and the energy to pull out the stories of other people who may not look like us, have our background, whatever, we are robbing the world of learning from diversity. And I have to say I had a moment, like, exactly what you're talking about with Brian Johnson, who has hundreds of thousands of followers around the world. And I got interviewed for his webinar and he has this.

This, all these pictures behind him of Socrates and all these amazing men, Gandhi, et cetera. And somewhere in the middle of the interview, I was like, brian, why do you only have pictures of white men behind you? And he very quickly said, oh, wow, well, I draw inspiration from them, so that's legitimate. And he changed it, literally, I think, the next day. And that very kind, generous man just wrote the forward to big goals because he took it the way you took it, which was someone who just with curiosity said, boy, you have so much power and influence. Just think for a second, what is the message you're sending? And I have to also say that I didn't expect this, but I probably got a hundred emails from people who were on that webinar who said, I can't believe you did that. And.

I started checking, like, why are you saying that? Is this something that. Are people afraid of giving him fee? I don't understand. Like, was it not obvious? And I think people are just afraid of speaking up. They're afraid they'll be judged. And when it lands in the right way, like it did with you, change in the world occurs. Good change. So thank you for sharing that story and letting me tell, you know, the story about Brian, because what a good man he is, that with his hundreds of thousands of followers, he immediately said, yep, you know, I know why I did it. I'm not Going to take it back, but damn, you're right.

So, so powerful. Thank you for doing that. And challenging because you're right, he does have a massive following and has such an influence on so many. And I think a change like that might seem small, but actually the ripple effect of that is just significant.

Yeah, it's priming. And this is where Gary Latham goal setting theory was introduced to the world in 1990. And again, it's just simple and elegant and it's an easy to get hold of paper. But in 2015 they updated it with the science on priming. And priming is when you see something in the world, a picture, you smell an aroma or whatever. When you're primed, you are more likely to accomplish your goals because something prompts you to begin to think goal directed thoughts. So these things around us are not neutral, they're impacting us. And so when someone's looking at you or looking at Brian or even looking at me, everything around me, if they're looking at me for an hour, is impacting them positively or negatively. And we have to take control of the primes because Gary Latham's research on priming changed the whole world of priming. And he stood up to a lot of scholars in the field who said it didn't make a difference. He found that not only did crimes impact goals that you have set, they impact goals that are subconscious, that you're not even really aware that you're pursuing. So take a look at your environment, the people whose emails you read, the, you know, the aromas around you, the pictures on your wall, the colors that you wear. This is why I wear this. It makes me happy. Zest is my number three trait.

I love it.

They all because I'm reinforcing one of my top strengths every time I do this. But we all need to not be asleep at the wheel about what we're staring at. And so it's not trivial to know that a wall that you're looking at with pictures is impacting you and making you think smaller or bigger.

That's really powerful. And I'm going to make sure that the team gets links to those research papers that you've suggested, suggested we need to read. If people are like me, you'll read it and you'll get it a little bit. But if you want to really fully understand it, get the book. Buy the book right now because you're able to distill it into amazing layman's terms. For me, the Irish guy that wants to know, how do I implement all the science and make my life better, other people's lives better. And Caroline, I really feel like we could have another three hours. And I want to invite you at this stage. I want to invite you back because there's two or three things I want to go really deep on, you know, decision making, the grit. And I know that we've got not too much time left in this session, but I really want to go deep on those things because I think they're critical to success. And in our next conversation, would you be open to me sharing with you a goal and then I can set with you, hey, here's how I'm planning for it. Here's how I. And then I give you full permission to rip me to shreds and say, jim, this is how we apply science. And I promise you I will commit to that. I will work that, and I'll report back to you over months and years how those longer, mid and longer term goals are unfolding.

That is such an invitation. Yes, I would love to do that. I do that on stage, with audiences, at keynotes, whatever. But I love doing this kind of thing. And I will give a plug to something else that I get nothing from, but I totally believe in it. That I think you and all your listeners should take right now because it'll help you today. It's the free test, the Values in Action Character Strength test from the VIA Institute in Cincinnati, Ohio. It ranks your character strengths from 1 to 24. And it's in language that everyone understands. It's not like Gallup, where it's like, win others over. It's kindness, love, bravery, leadership, judgment, and critical thinking. And the reason I'm saying this is, not only is it free, it takes 15 minutes. But look at your top five strengths. And the research shows that those top five strengths are what will bring you the greatest results when you apply them towards the accomplishment of your goals and you want to challenge yourself in new and creative ways. How am I going to use my curiosity to achieve this goal? How am I going to use it in a new and different way to make sure that I'm maximizing that superpower I have. People take their strengths for granted because they're so used to using them. That's why they're at the top. But no, those are your superpowers. Take that test, because when I coach you live, I'm going to say, how are we going to use your curiosity? How are we going to use your bravery? How are we going to use your zest, Etcetera, etcetera. And then you're going to answer me.

Amazing. I did via maybe five or six years ago and so much time has passed and I haven't went back and looked at it. So I'm going to retake it right now and I'll save it. And when we have our conversation, I'll make sure I'm well versed in what my top five are. I'm very excited to do that and I'm very excited for this book to get into the hands of the people that need it. And I'm going to order a bunch of copies and get them out to friends and clients because I want people to challenge their own bias around goal setting and understanding the theory and the science behind it. Because I want everyone to achieve their greatness and to get out into the world what they want to and if we can get them there quicker or get them there happier, more fulfilled, then great. I want to be a part of that mission. So just a huge, huge thank you for the work that you do. And if you don't mind, may I ask you one last question?

You may. Make sure your 8 year old son starts learning goal setting theory. If I could just put that out there. As a mom, I just would wish my kids had had access to this. Yes, any question you want.

I would love him to learn it. So yeah, I'll definitely. Well, I'll be passing it on to Finn. So I want you to imagine for a moment we'll fast forward many years into the future. You're highly aware that it's your last day here on earth and someone very young that you love dearly comes into the room and they say, caroline, how on earth do I go about leading my life on purpose? What would you say to them?

I would say, you can't keep what you don't give away.

Because somebody said that to me early in my bulimia recovery because I was so proud of myself just doing this impossible thing. And she basically taught me what, what giving and love and happiness is all about. She's like, you got to pull people along with you. It's not enough for you to get better. It's great, but you can't keep what you don't give away. And I think that's my mantra in life. And I think it's, it teaches you so much to make sure that it's not just a zero sum game about yourself.

And that whatever you have, turn around and give it to somebody else who can use it. Whether it's knowledge, a book, love, sitting quietly while they, while they just event can't keep what you don't give away. Wow.

That's. For me, I'm quite. I feel quite emotional just hearing that. And I don't. I asked that question to every guest and I don't always feel emotion. The answers are always beautiful and insightful. But for some reason that's really hitting me. And I guess a big part of my life is I want to help others and I want to. That's why I interview great people like you and bring on the world's leaders in different fields, because it's not enough for me to learn it. And it's not about me. It's like how many other hundreds or thousands or maybe millions of people. And that's why you write books and that's why you stand on stages. And it's not about you, it's about you empowering others. So you really do walk the walk. And it's. It's incredible to watch.

What a nice reward for sleeping on the floor of my office for four months.

Well done.

Thank you. I really, really appreciate it. And thank you for what you do. I've listened to so many of the episodes just getting ready for this. You're a great interviewer and the people just blossom as. As you. As you give them the space to. To be seen the way they want to be seen. It's really nice to listen to.

Oh, thank you. You're so kind. Well, Caroline, till next time, I want to wish you the best. With the launch, everyone's going to pre order that book. That's listen to it right now. And I look forward to welcoming you back on the show real soon.

Great. Okay. My website is carolinemiller.com. that's a place they should go. Yeah. Thank you.

All your socials in there as well. I promise.

Everything. Okay. Thank you so much.

Hey, thank you. A very special thanks to NZ Mortgages for sponsoring this episode of the Lead on Purpose podcast. You can check them out at nzmortgages.co nz.