Why Smart Goals Are Setting You Up for Mediocrity – Caroline Miller Reveals How to Achieve the Impossible

Hey, I'm Kwame Christian, and you are about to step into the world of Negotiate Anything, the number one negotiation podcast in the world, where we teach you how to make difficult conversations easier while getting more of what you want in the process. Each episode is packed with practical tips and strategies from the experts. We delve into negotiation, conflict resolution, and leadership skills that are crucial in both business and and in life. Whether you're closing a deal, managing a team, or navigating personal relationships, Negotiate Anything provides you with the tools you need to succeed. Our conversations are real, relatable, and most importantly, rooted in practicality. So if you're ready to transform your conversations and elevate your negotiation skills, join me on Negotiate Anything. Subscribe and listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you love to listen. Let's make every conversation a winning negotiation. Caroline, thanks for joining us today.

Oh, thank you for having me.

Yes, it is our pleasure. So let's start this episode off by talking directly to the person listening to this episode. So for them, what will change in their life if they absorb what we talk about today?

What will change today if they listen from the beginning to the end is that they will be hopeful that they have the tools that to accomplish any dream they have and that they will understand how to accumulate, cultivate, and actually create a contagion of grit that will help them accomplish the hardest goals.

Oh, this is so good. And we did some studies. We found that our listeners have goals. So this is perfect. And now let's talk about the why for this book, Caroline. Because one of the things that's interesting about this, you have an incredible repository of thought leadership already. And there have been so many books written on the topic of goals and goal setting from the performance perspective and the psychological perspective. What drove you to write this book today?

Well, that's a good two part question. What drove me to write the book and what drove me to write it today? I'm going to answer separately. So what drove me to write the book is In October of 2005, I was introduced to goal setting theory, Locke and Latham's Goal setting Theory. I returned to school at midlife to get a master's degree in Applied Positive Psychology, the science of flourishing at the University of Pennsylvania. First time in the world they had ever offered a master's degree program like this. And part of it was studying goal setting theory. As an executive coach, I thought I understood goal setting. I had all the books on goal setting. I had Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy, et cetera. I thought smart Goals was goal setting theory. I immediately found out that goal setting theory was not only ranked number one of 73 management theories number one, but that no one I worked with, no schooling I'd ever had in coaching or goal setting or anything. None of them included goal setting theory. That led to my capstone. I connected the science of happiness with the science of success. And that book, Creating youg Best Life came out in 2008 and it became a real bestseller in many, many languages. And it was the first mass market guide that included goal setting theory. What's different? Fifteen years later, people still don't know goal setting theory. So I broke it out and I said, basically everybody who has a dream needs to take this piece of information that I was lucky enough to get in 2005 that still stuck at academia, Goal setting theory. And on top of that, given these 15 years, I created a bridge methodology that you put right on top of it that answers any question that you have to answer before you actually get going on goal accomplishment. So it's the strategy creation. So you start with goal setting theory and, and you add the bridge methodology. And that's because I think we live at a time when most people feel anxious and depressed, confused. And because of the self esteem parenting movement, many millennials were told they were winners without doing anything. So many of them had dreams they didn't, couldn't accomplish because no one ever gave them the tools for being resilient or gritty. And so I really want to reach as many people as possible because you will feel less anxious, less depressed, more motivated, more empowered, more optimistic if you have the tools to make make your dreams come true. And that's why I wrote it today.

Oh, that is powerful. And when you conceptualize it like this, and especially with the timestamps too, you can recognize, yeah, now is the time for a book like this. And when just giving an outline to the listeners, because we're going to talk about the difficult conversations that surround goal setting and goal achievement. We have the external negotiations and difficult conversations with other people, but also the internal conversations we have to have with ourselves. But before we even get into that, recognizing now and after reviewing your work, there is a fundamental misunderstanding of what a goal is and how to go about achieving them. And so maybe what we can do is start with a little bit of unlearning. What are some of the most common misconceptions as it relates to big goals?

I think the most common misconception is that all goals are created equal. That is a goal is a goal. Is a goal. That's not true. Locke and Latham, after decades of scholarship in the field and in the lab, discovered their two kinds of goals. And you have to get that right from the outset or you will end up with what I call goals gone wild. And you will probably shoot yourself in the foot from the very moment you begin to pursue your strategy. So there are learning goals and then there are performance goals. And from here on out in this interview, I'm going to call them checklist goals because it's much easier to understand what a checklist goal is. So a checklist goal is a goal that you've actually accomplished before and you can put the steps on a checklist and you can, because of that, approximate by when you will accomplish a goal and the standard of excellence that you'll be able to achieve because you've done it before and you know how to make it harder and get a better outcome. Learning goals are the opposite. Things you've never done before. And let me go back to why now the whole world is in a learning goal condition. Since COVID this Black Swan event that hit us a few years ago, the whole world suddenly had to learn how to do everything they had done ever done before. From banking, from buying a dress, from getting groceries, from education to medicine. Everything had to be done in a brand new way. So we're in a huge learning goal condition. AI throw that in. My goodness, everything's different. And the last thing I'll say about that is this is identical to where we were in the Middle ages, right after the bubonic plague when everything was thrown out the window and you had to learn how to bury people. Banking systems change, you know, social, you know, the ability to move classes, Everything changed. A third of the world died. So everything had to become new. And as a result, things were evidence based at that point. Here we are, it's time we have evidence based goal setting approaches because too often people are pursuing zombie goal approaches because it has not been updated in decades, if not a hundred years. So we need to have evidence based goal processes now. It's time, it's overdue. And it's just like after the bubonic plague or the Black Death is what it's also known as.

This is revolutionary. And as you say this, it becomes almost obvious. But I think one of the things that's great about a brilliant insight is that it seems obvious in hindsight because this is something that everybody missed, right?

I come at this as the background of a competitive swimmer, a martial artist, history, magna cum laude, graduate from Harvard. I came at psychology from a very different background, from people who've done nothing but be in a silo. So I brought that kind of disruptive thinking. This is like immigrants who come to the United States. The reason why they usually win the Nobels is they have disruptive thinking. They come from another culture and they apply their way of thinking and living and they apply it to a new problem or idea and the culture. So I brought a disruptive way of thinking to this field and as a result it was obvious to me, but it wasn't obvious to anyone else that I'd ever met or read about. There's only one other mass market book that's ever mentioned goal setting theory, and he got better known than me because he's a white man in Silicon Valley. It's John Doar. John Doerr wrote Measure what matters 10 years after creating your Best Life, and because he's one of the founding partners of Kleiner Perkins in Silicon Valley. And he said, well, I brought goal setting theory to Google and the rest of it. But I read the book and he only mentioned goal setting theory in the introduction. But it didn't include all the things I brought into big goals. So for that reason it was obvious to me, but I can see why it wasn't obvious to anyone else because they had a silo that they were in.

It makes sense. And for you there's a. There's an immediate tangible applicability that was necessary because for the big goals that you were able to accomplish, you had to set goals in a way that led to a specific outcome. And that's one of the things that I think has been missed. Just when we think about theoretical approaches to almost everything and negotiations as well, we kind of lose sight of what's most important, the outcome. We are orienting ourselves toward an outcome. And the efficacy of our strategy would be contingent upon the degree to which we achieve our goals. But now we're recognizing that the way that we set our goals, create our goals and create the strategy around them, just from the very, very beginning, can lead us astray. And so I want you to make this really, really clear before we get into the actual communication aspect of it, because it's so important. So I want you to paint the picture between somebody who has a big goal and they use the old school mentality, those zombie goal setting strategies versus your approach. What changes in the outcome?

Gosh. First of all, you're the first person to say that the reason it was obvious to me was because I had had Specific outcome goals in my life, you're the first person to connect. And I think it was actually sports, to be honest with you. So I was in that first class at Penn and maybe it would have occurred to an athlete coming through later, I don't know. But that's a really. What do people get wrong the first time? I learned goal setting theory, which said that both learning goals and checklist goals always benefit from being what's called challenging and specific. You want your best possible outcome. It has to be hard and outside of your comfort zone. So then the minute you turn to smart goals, which everyone had told me was the science of goal setting, and you look at their 55 variations of smart, by the way, it means 55 different things, which is why it's called jumbo mishmash syndrome. I mean, it's just, you know, it doesn't mean anything because it has so many definitions. But the minute you look at smart goals in it, you hear attainable or realistic, some version of that, you realize that's not goal setting theory because it's not hard attainable and realistic goals are what's called mediocre goals or low goals. You will not get best performance. So let's just stop right at that point. When you set attainable, measurable goals, you are probably undershooting your ability to do something really hard and new in your life. And we know that at the end of every day, what people do is they scan their days subconsciously for what they did that day. That was hard. Why do we do this? We do this because we are looking to build our self esteem and our confidence and even our self efficacy. And it only happens when we do hard things. Period. Full stop. And so attainable and realistic doesn't fit. So I'll just start. That's the first thing I see people getting wrong. Should we discuss that?

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. This is, this is great. Because now we can briefly. Let's briefly create that nexus between this and negotiation too. Because what, what blew my mind is that I'm recognizing that the smart goal approach could really have a detrimental effect on people who want to be creative, ambitious deal makers and negotiators. Because what ends up happening is that we are victim to anchoring bias that we don't even realize that we're putting on ourselves. So we're setting our goals so low based on precedent that we don't even push ourselves to consider what else could be achievable. So it inhibits our creativity and it inhibits our ambition. So we don't drive as hard in the negotiation. And even if we achieve the smart goal that we set at the beginning, we still might be undershooting. Hello my friends. Before we get back to today's episode, I want to ask you a question. Have you ever wondered how to elevate your team's negotiation game and how you can help the folks on your team have better, difficult conversations? At the American Negotiation Institute, we offer transformative keynotes and workshops tailored to empower professionals with top tier negotiation and conflict resolution skills. Whether it's a keynote for your next event or hands on training for your team, we've got you covered. Don't just negotiate. Master the art with the American Negotiation Institute. Click the link in the description to find out more. Elevate, negotiate and succeed.

Right? And we may have not divided it correctly to begin with. It might be a learning goal for some people. They've never negotiated the purchase of a car. That would be a learning goal. So what do you do when you have a learning goal? The first thing you do is you access as much education as possible. You flat flatten your learning curve fast because you have to learn how to do this thing because it does become a checklist goal. Later you will then buy more cars, presumably, if there are no tariffs in the world. You know, if the world comes to an end, right? And then it becomes a checklist goal. And you know, you go in certain times of day, you just have certain people with you, you have the buzzwords, whatever. So there are learning goals, things you've never done before. So that could be a new negotiation for somebody. It's a checklist goal. When somebody is a very, you know, somebody who has negotiated many, many times with terrorists or people who take hostages and they know what to do, they know what words to use, they know what tone of voice, they know how to follow the conversation. So anyone who's going into any kind of negotiation needs to know how do I make my best decisions based on conversations where I'm negotiating something that's to my benefit, something that's to the benefit of someone I care about, but how do I want to come out this conversation? What's the goal of the conversation? And so there are different ways to approach negotiations. There's different ways to approach getting what you want. And you have to sometimes learn how to be better at it based on previous experiences. But you also have to learn how to just do it by going through your first experience like a surgeon who's doing their first gallbladder removal. Learning goal, right? It's the first time you've done it, you've got someone watching you, but you're suddenly response dog. In 10 years, it's not a big deal. You've done the surgery many times, and now you're passing that information on how to do that for somebody else.

So, so this is. This is great, because now we can start that internal negotiation conversation. Because as we are discussing the difference between the learning goals and the performance goals, also known as the checklist goals, we can recognize that the same. The same outcome that we're driving toward for one person can be a learning goal, but to another person, it can be a checklist goal. And because of that, that means that we need to approach the achievement of that goal in a very different way.

Correct. Just imagine a server at a restaurant during COVID who's never seated, people who are frustrated and belligerent and not a server, the hostess, the host or hostess. And this happened all the time during COVID where angry, frustrated people who didn't want to wear masks would punch out the host or hostess because they didn't want to be faced with got to put a mask on, sir or madam or whatever. It's a learning goal for people who've never been in a situation with customers like that. And then there are people who are experienced at things like that. So how they would approach a difficult situation like that would be very different. Because maybe they had role played it with actors and actresses. Maybe they had used augmented reality to experience it. Like quarterbacks, like my wonderful quarterback Jaden Daniels, the Washington Redskins commanders. You know, he trained how to read defenses with augmented reality. He learned how to play against all these different defenses from all these other teams with augmented reality. So first you have to learn how to be in these frustrating situations. So you hold yourself to a different standard, which is maybe I just need to get through this and survive and not lose my cool with people who punch me out or tell me that they're going to report me to, I don't know, God knows who. And then people who are really skilled at it who can talk people down, and then they can have a goal of seating a certain number of customers that night and having them rate the restaurant want five stars out of five. So it's a different kind of goal depending on how new you are to the task itself.

You're answering questions that I didn't even know I had because I was wondering why Jaden Daniels was a rookie but never played like a rookie. So now I get it.

Right? That helps, right?

That really does Help.

I wrote about the Stanford Striver Lab in my book Creating youg best life in 2008 because I immediately saw the benefit. Immediately. And I don't know why did I see this? I don't know. But I immediately saw that the Striver Lab that was teaching it was the Stanford quarterback. And he and the head of the Striver Lab, they formed a company, da. And I could see that this was going to flatten people's learning curves fast. Now it's like pro forma. This is what you do in the National Football League. It's even what you do in a lot of college football teams if you have the money and the backers. But yeah, that's why he doesn't play like a rookie. Plus he took five years and got a lot of coaching. Five years out of college and lots of coaching. He's a very coachable man. He's an extraordinary man and he's changed my city's happiness on every level. Every level.

Man, that's incredible. And I'm getting so much clarity now too because it also helps us to protect ourselves because we have the internal metacognitive conversation that needs to happen as we're talking to ourselves, ourselves figuring out what strategy we're going to use. A lot of times we use our resources and the resources can be online asynchronous from people we don't know and also from mentors and friends who have their our best interests in mind. Now for those mentors and friends, they might be at a level that we're not at and for them it might be a performance or checklist goal, but for us it could be a learning goal. And so they might give us well meaning advice that puts us in the performance checklist mentality. But then that, that doesn't serve us. So we have to be able to have that conversation with ourselves to understand what we really need, but then also respectfully engage with our mentor and friend or whoever it happens to be, while at the same time setting boundaries and doing what we need to do to accomplish our learning goal.

So there are two things I want to say about that. First is you're a black man, I'm a white woman, and we are not the majority. White men have mostly had the power in terms of, you know, offices and negotiations and you name it. And so if you, if a very well meaning white man says to both of us, you should be a giver at work, you should be a giver because givers always succeed when it comes to goal accomplishment and you don't want to be a taker or give, Take and Match. But you'll always succeed if you're a giver. Well, guess what? Women in particular who are givers don't get the benefits that men do, period. They don't get because they're expected to be givers. If they have boundaries, they're called all kinds of of words, you know, cold, self absorbed, whatever. And if you're a black man or a black woman, how you actually go about getting people to support you and get around all the obstacles that are both obvious and not obvious. You've got to take advice from people who have been there before, who know all of the hidden things that other people would not know. So Adam Grant has gone back on his book Give and Take and said, I got it wrong. He said, I got it wrong. And you know, it was a business book of the year in 2017. He said in Give and Take, it was very clear, if you're a giver, you're gonna get all the benefits. If you're a matcher where you just, you know, give. If someone gives to you, you're not gonna get all the benefits of givers. And if you're a taker, you know what? People are gonna figure out? You're a taker and they're gonna stop giving to you, and then you won't get benefits. He got it wrong. Cause I emailed him when I was writing a book about women giving to women, and I said, where's the research on women getting all these benefits? And he said, caroline, I got it wrong. I got it wrong. If I had to write that book again, I'd get it right from the gender perspective. So you have to get advice from people who've walked in your shoes, who know what you're up against, and I have to do the same. And we have to question all of the well meaning motivational and success advice we've been given, because it has not been broken down by culture and gender until very recently. If people have asked the right questions.

That's so good. So good. I remember one of my friends who was on the podcast, I won't name names, but there were a few guests who were on the podcast. I remember I had one guy who was on the show, he was like 6, 7, 6, 8, like a tall guy. And then another woman who was on the show, she made a post one time. She said, when I enter the boardroom in a negotiation, nobody sees me coming. No, literally nobody sees me coming because I'm very short.

And.

And so she He's. He was talking about how in his life he's never felt small, except one time when he went to a courtside game and he was standing next to Patrick ewing, who's like 7. And then I said, out of curiosity, because you're a professor and you're teaching negotiation, have you ever thought about how your size has an impact psychologically on other people? And he's like, I've never thought about it. And a lot of times we are kind of blind to our own privilege, our own advantages, or even our own disadvantages. And the more you can understand psychology, the more you can take the underlying principles of advice and theory and recognize, hey, sometimes this applies, sometimes it doesn't. And when we think about it through the lens of emotional intelligence, through. Through cultural intelligence, through personality, through gender, through race, all of these different things, now we can see, oh, it's not as simple as it seems. And we have to do a lot of work to determine what is right for us under the circumstances.

That's why strategies have to be well formed. All of the work that has to go in ahead of time. Once you figure out, do you have a learning goal or a checklist goal, then you go through all the prompts of my bridge methodology. And one of them, in brainstorming it, who. Who looks like you has achieved this goal? Who has actually, you know, or. Or who has come the closest to achieving this goal? Maybe it's a goal the world has never accomplished before, but you have to. You have to do that. And. And I wanted to say one other thing that's really, really important about, and I think this pertains to women more than anything, is women have a tendency to surround themselves with frenemies, friends who are enemies, because we have been socialized. It's called biosocial theory. To be nice and accommodating and warm and communal, because that's what gets rewarded. However, when a woman goes after a big goal and is ambitious and proud of something she's accomplished, the first people who cut her down are other women. It's often friends and family members. And so there's something called goal shielding in goal setting theory. It's a subset, and what it says is that you have to be very careful who you share your goals with with. Women really have to watch out more than men because women need other women. It's oxytocin tend and befriend. That's our response in times of stress. Women need other women. So it hurts us when we're ghosted or thrown out of the tribe for no reason. And what we'll get are passive aggressive comments like, why are you setting such a big goal? No one's ever done that. You know, who's going to raise your children if you go do that? You know, you get all kinds of comments. And I want to say another thing. If I had a dollar for every time someone said it, it's. But what if it's my mother? What if it's my sister? It's like it's always your mother and your sister who are not supporting you. Right? So you have to be really careful. The first person you share your goal or dream with has the ability, both male and female, has the ability to make you code your dream as stupid or, wow, I can't make it. So that first person you share it with better be someone who has what we call an active, constructive responding approach, which is curious and enthusiastic. Anything else, that person's response is liable to make you just, you know, stop pursuing your goal and leave it in the past. And then you live with regrets. Mm.

There's so much to explore here. And so is this. And it's been a while since I've reviewed this particular literature. Are we talking about the. Not referring to Beyonce, but the queen bee phenomenon?

Well, that's the mean girls. So that's another. That's my name. Next book, actually, is about how women need to learn how to support other women because it's not a hardwired quality. If it were, the Miso tribe in southwest China wouldn't exist, where women have all the. All the power, matrilineal and matriarchal. So it's not hardwired, but there is a mean girl phenomenon. But what we're really talking about is Shelley Gable's research on what happens between friends when things go right. What happens when you have a big goal or an ambition or something you're proud on, Proud of? Women tend to go silent in the face of other women's success for all kinds of reasons. We've been socialized, both men and women have been socialized to see ambitious women as mean and cold and self absorbed, et cetera. In fact, in the last 90 years, this is the one area where there's been zero progress, psychological, social, zero progress in terms of how women are seen. If they are agentic, they're dead. They're dead. Oh, the things that happen to women who are goal oriented are just unspeakable. So what we really have to do is bring up the whole idea of when women are bold and brave and they do hard things. We need to uplift and support them and cheer for them. And I had to make up a word because if the word doesn't exist in a language, it means the behavior doesn't exist either. And so I came up with the word amplachet, which is when you hear another woman's big goal or success, you amplify it in front of witnesses. That's in capital letters in front of witnesses. Because mentorship, sponsorship, and allyship don't have the muscular verb of doing it in front of other people. So you can say you do it and not do it.

That certainly needs to be another book because there's a lot to explore there. And this brings us to the external side too, when we're talking about goal shielding here, because you hear so many people saying, say, you know what? Forget the haters. Forget the haters. They're trying to hold you back. But we don't talk about how the lovers inadvertently hold us back. And when I think about the. The people who care about me the most, and I've seen it before, a lot of times they're trying to protect you. They're like, hey, okay, we. If you stand out too much, you know what happens. You know, if you make this goal too big, then you're going to be disappointed. And there's a little bit of protectionism, or whatever we would want to call it, where they try to hold us back. So can you talk about how. Just let's explore that a little bit more. And then, because I think it's important to separate intent from impact because that can make it very confusing. And then let's talk about how we navigate those conversations, because especially forget the haters, we're talking about the lovers here. How do we still maintain a strong connection with these people while at the same time staying focused on our big goals?

Such a good point. I get asked this a lot, but not quite the eloquent way you just asked me. There's something called the Michelangelo effect. And the Michelangelo effect is what happens when you want to be seen a certain way. You have a dream or a goal, and you want to change what you're doing. Maybe you're a stay at home mom and you want to go back to work and you want to, I don't know, go back into science, which always intrigued you or whatever. And you bring that up with your spouse who has always benefited from you being the carpool person or making the meatloaf or whatever. And then he would say, you know, that's great, but you know, you make this great meatloaf, you know, and the kids love it. And who would make meatloaf, you know, if you weren't around? So he is not sculpting her in the way she wants to be seen. And so the Michelangelo effect is what we're all looking for, even if the comments are benevolent. You know, there's something called benevolent sexism where men are trying to shield women from disappointment or being hurt or whatever, but what they're really doing is holding them back. So you have to find out what's the intent behind someone else's comment is that they love you so much that they don't want to see you fall, because maybe you need to have a conversation about how resilient you really are, what other things you've overcome and what tools you now have, and what kind of bench do you have that has your back? So maybe that's the intent. It might not be benevolent. It might be someone who says they want to protect you, but in fact, it will be disruptive to them, their lives, because you're daring to break the social fabric of the family. It's called family systems theory, where suddenly you might be disrupting kind of the. The. The way the family's always operated. This person did this. This person did this. That was the good daughter, that was the bad daughter. And suddenly you're holding up a mirror to everyone else, saying, I'm out of here because I'm going to do something different. You know, now what are you going to do? And so it's. It can be very disruptive to people who suddenly don't know what's their role. Why is that person changing? Am I being left behind? So, but I think the Michelangelo effect is the thing I think about most often, because everybody longs to be seen, and a lot of us swallow our goals. And women in particular do get dinged for what I've said already, which is being ambitious and bold and. Oh, bless your heart. You know, I remember this guy at his swim practice I was at. Knew that I was checking into hotels with Priceline bids on the weekend to write creating your best life. Actually, you know, I was with my kids all week, and I'd check into. Into hotels on weekends on very cheap beds, and he looked at me and he said, with no irony whatsoever, he said, well, my wife would never do that to my family. And I was like, are you kidding? You know, how about, I was there all week, and my husband was gone all week. Is anybody saying he, you know, my husband would never do that to his family, you know, so we want to be sculpted. We want to be sculpted, which means we have to voice our dreams and goals in front of people who can give us the feedback that allows us, us to see ourselves as moving closer. One last thing I'll say about that. In my book, I have Dara Torres, who won in 2008 at the Beijing Olympics. She got a silver medal in the 50 meter freestyle. Oldest person ever to medal at the Olympics in a swimming race. And in the last year or two of her training leading up to the Olympic trials, you were not allowed in her presence unless you believed she could win because she knew the damage that would happen consciously and subconsciously. Passive aggressive, active, destructive comments. So you want to surround yourself with enablers and catalysts, not Debbie Downers and people who don't believe in your dreams. So how do you deal with that? You really have to put a container in a boundary around the people you know, not spend as much time with them. End phone calls a little bit earlier. Maybe you don't want to read their emails late at night. Maybe you need to have a sit down and say, this is so destructive to my focus on what I'm doing that I need to take a little break from this relationship. I think everyone I know has ever done anything really, really hard has had to do that.

There's so much to explore here. And Caroline, to explain my reaction for me, I travel, you know how it is as a keynote speaker. We travel a lot. And so I'm usually the person who says, whitney, you need a hotel weekend. You know, please take this weekend. You know, so for me to hear that, it's like you're holding up the whole house and then you just want a little break at the.

That.

That triggering to me. So yeah, I'm glad that you mentioned that. I also recognize that there is a. For a lot of people, the reason that they listen to this show is because they want to transform their negotiation identity. Like how they show up in tough conversations. So it's like, I used to negotiate this way, now I want to negotiate that way. I want to be more effective, more strategic, whatever it happens to be. The majority of people are struggling with, with some conflict avoidance or people pleasing. That's my origin story. And so they need to transform. So when I'm thinking about the Michelangelo effect, we really have to overcome that. And we also have to recognize that when you think about it in terms of setting that goal of transforming yourself into a more confident communicator, whatever that means to You. A lot of times we listen to advice of people who have already done it and they approach it it from a performance goal slash, checklist goal type of way. I've done it. You do this, duh, just do those things.

Oh, and you didn't succeed. What's wrong with you?

And it's. Then it's your fault if you don't make it. And so now this is helping so many people to recognize, hey, the reason I, I need to learn how to be confident. I need to learn how to be resilient in these tough conversations. And it's going to be a different approach for me because I can't just listen to somebody who has always been awesome at this. I have to listen to somebody who actually understands how to overcome the real barrier. So I. To sculpt myself into the person that I ultimately want to become.

Right. You know, when you're traveling to another country, like I'm going to Italy for work next week, you can be darn sure I'm looking up all the cultural things I need to know. You know, where the fork and knife. How do you. Where do you cross your legs? Do you know, cross your legs? Are there words you don't use in conversations? You have to learn that. And one thing we know about women in negotiation that's really fascinating is that when women lean into negotiations and on salaries, for example, like getting a gym membership instead of, you know, a raise or whatever, what's been found is they might get what they want, but they're going to pay a serious price later. Because again, women can't do that without paying a price. But when women negotiate on behalf of others, if it's worded in like, in, in the way, like, you know, I'm sure you would want to see the first Latino woman becoming an SVP here. Because all the women coming behind me, they're looking at me and they need help. And if they see someone with my credentials reaching that level, you can imagine what it'll do for this group of people. When you negotiate on behalf of a group of people, if you word it in that way, you're more likely to get it and not pay a social penalty. So that's for women. But there's all kinds of restrictions on women in terms of what they can and can't do in conversations and negotiations, they have to read the tea leaves. Women who are joining companies for the first time, who are told to go on board, just go to, go to happy hours, go to golf outings, do whatever you have to do to Meet the new employees. When the women follow through, they are criticized and they pay a penalty because it looks like they're too self absorbed. Men who take the exact same advice when they're joining a company are seen as ambitious and committed to a company. I mean, I can't tell you how important it is to look at whatever advice you're being given and then run it through the filter. Does it work for people who look like me from my background? And you have to go, do your due diligence. Do not skip this step. And this is why the Women in Red project, by the way, exists at Wikipedia. Because 82% of the biographies at Wikipedia are of men, 18% are of women. Which means that it's really hard to go find role models in places like Wikipedia because there's this drive by editing where quite often women's biographies are edited out because they're seen as not noteworthy enough. They haven't hit all the criteria that may have been accessible to men, let's say. And I have, I'm married and I have two sons, so I'm not anti men. I'm just pointing out there are all these, there are all these hurdles and biases that are out there that you have to, to learn about in order to make sure your strategy is comprehensive and well thought through. And this is one of them. Find role models. You can find them on YouTube, you can find them in Wikipedia, but you know, there's a whole code a thon thing going on to make sure that more women's names are actually red links that have been turned into blue hyperlinks on Wikipedia.

That's smart. That's smart. And I love this approach too, because this isn't kind of one of those woe is me types of situations where we're saying the world is against us and there's nothing we can do about it because a lot of times it can turn into learned helplessness very, very quickly. And the way that I think about bias is that it's just a strategic consideration. Every there's going to be bias. No matter who you are, there are going to be some biases working for you and some working against you. And so for me, in my approach, when it comes to relationship building, negotiation, persuasion, whatever it happens to be, is that I want to ethically mobilize the positive biases like trust, affinity bias, those types of things, while at the same time trying to circumvent or avoid or minim the negative biases. And once you have this more empowering mindset, then you just it almost becomes a game. It's like, all right, I'm cooking a dish. Every dish is going to be different for everybody who's in front of me. So I'm going to find the right ingredients while still being authentic to accomplish the goal that's in front of me.

You just described a checklist goal, because a checklist goal is a recipe. So if you've gotten what you wanted in different, you know, negotiations and conversations, because you knew you were walking into biases of all of kinds, and you figured out that you gotta have a dash of salt here and a little bit of empathy here and a little bit more laughter here, and you get what you want. You have a recipe, you have a checklist. It's a checklist goal for you. That might change a little bit depending on what environment you're in, but it's up to you to learn that or to know that going into it. And you said something about learned helplessness. And I put this in the book too, because I don't think most people know that. Marty Selwigman, who's my mentor, so he's the father of positive psychology, he ran the master's program I was in 2005. He overturned his own theory of learned helplessness about seven years ago. And not a week goes by where people don't talk to me about learned help. I know. Listen to this. This is really, really good. This is before we started recording. We were talking about how we used to study nothing but misery, depression, anxiety, you know, all the bad things. And then that overruled or outnumbered by 18 to 1. The studies of what's good, what's awe, where's love, where's gratitude, where. Where's all the good things? Why aren't we studying all those good things that happen with people? So Marty overturned his own theory of learned helplessness about seven years ago, because there are new ways to study saliva, the quality of saliva, or, you know, ask different prompts and questions when you're watching dogs escaping from cages. What he determined is that it's an upside down theory. We are actually born helpless. We're not not born masterful. And then you learn to be helpless. You are born helpless. And our job as human beings is to learn how to be masterful. How to be masterful in the environments we're in. That is our job. That's our job as parents, is to make sure our children grow up armed with the tools, to have big dreams and actually pursue them with resilience and grit. But we must master our environments that's self determination therapy. So it's been overturned. It's actually learned mastery. There is no learned helplessness.

Oh, wow. Wow. First of all, thank you for this. I will remove that from my vernacular.

Most people don't know that it's not on you. Most people have never heard that.

That's so fascinating. So essentially what is happening is that it is what we were considering learned helplessness is we are essentially unlearning, feeling capable in a scenario.

Let me think what you just said. In a situation where dogs are in cages, the ones who escape are the ones who have learned how to be masterful. They didn't automatically know how to get out. They were born helpless. The dogs who lay down and got shocked and didn't move, that was their default condition, not their learned condition. So. Oh, right.

Oh, okay, okay. That makes so. Okay. Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha, gotcha. That's. That's fat.

Now, you can hit all kinds of obstacles and you can learn to be depressed. You can learn to be anxious in certain situations. But it's on you to develop the tools to overcome the situations that make you feel that way. But you're not learning that. That's probably our. That is our default condition. We have to learn to do hard things. Which is why this self esteem parenting movement, which was in vogue when my three kids were being raised, was so silly. You know, give your kids whatever they want, make them happy. If they're happy, they'll be confident, they'll do hard things. That's not true. The sociologists and psychologists have now found that it created narcissists and sociopaths. And they didn't actually have the tools to be resilient. They didn't have the tools to sit through the dark night of the soul. If someone broke up with them, you know, they. They did bad things possibly to other people. We took away the tools for being resilient and gritty from an entire generation of young adults. So quite often when they got into the workplace, the first people to hold them accountable for doing hard things was our first boss. And there are all kinds of stories that I put in my book, Getting Grit about people who would sob during performance reviews when they were told they had met expectations. One woman said in a law firm, when she was being evaluated, she said, that's the meanest thing anyone's ever said to me.

What an incredible life to live. Where that's the meanest thing I know, right?

Yeah. That's why great inflation is so unbelievable. I had to get my transcript from Harvard to apply to this program. I'd never gotten it, I'd never seen it. And I got it. And my kids looked at it and go, man, mom, what's this C in computer science? You know you got terrible grades. I'm like, you know, dude, not everyone gets an A minus in the world. But it used to be harder to go to school. So that's another reason they don't always know how to do hard things. Because when you survey that generation, they all think they deserve a B for walking in the door of a class room. A bee. A bee. So, you know, there's all kinds of stories I could tell you, but all the record boards have been removed from their lives too, because it'll hurt their feelings.

Unbelievable. And I think we have something else in common. I got a C in computer science and engineering too. I was like, you know what? We just found something I am not going to focus on. I tried my best.

I tried. I remember feeling terrified, like last in, first out in the exam. And I just remember I broke into a cold sweat. I'm like, I don't even know where to start. You know, it's just. But I tried. It was a learning goal. My dad said computers were the future. He was right. But you know, the grade inflation is so real. The average grade at Harvard or Yale and most ivies is A minus. That's not real.

Yeah.

So anyway, you gotta learn to be resilient. You have to learn how to be masterful. You have to do hard things. You have to. You will build confidence, you will build courage. You will know who has your back. You'll be able to use your top five character strengths in new and creative ways. But don't go for the attainable realistic goals. Certainly not on everything. Big goals are life changing goals. Big goals are the things that awe and inspire other people to say to themselves, wow, what if I live like that? What if I pursued things outside of my comfort zone and did it with dignity and self respect? I mean, think about history turned pivoted right around people who displayed what I called Mount Rushmore grit. They did hard things without giving speeches, without expecting a trophy at the end of the day. Think about Mahatma Gandhi. Think about Martin Luther King. You know, think about the people who actually stood up to the worst in the world, but did it in such a way that it ought to and inspired other people to also do hard things. And that is the goal of really good grit.

Amazing. I, I think that is a perfect place to land the plane. Caroline, this has Been fantastic. Thank you so much. And again, remind the listeners about the book and how they can work with you.

Oh, okay, Great. So I have two websites. The book Big Goals has its own website and have lots and lots of case histories of how to use use goal setting theory and the bridge methodology and see how it works with different goals. So that's biggoalsbook.com CarolineMiller.com is my website. All kinds of ways to work with me or bring me into your organization to give a workshop on goal setting theory, how to actually set, pursue and achieve goals. I'm about to go to Europe and coach an entire international company on goal setting. I'm going to Lagos, Nigeria in December. I mean, the word is out that if you're using smart goals goals, you're in trouble. You better understand the science. So there's lots of ways to work with me. Thank you for asking.

Amazing. Thank you for joining us. Really appreciate this. Congratulations. You've just joined an elite club by listening to a full episode. You're now officially on the Negotiate Anything team. So welcome aboard. What most team members do is they subscribe to the podcast because that allows them to automatically get the latest episodes of the show. The best things in life lie on the other side of difficult conversations. Keep learning, keep practicing and keep getting better. Your relationships will improve, your career will soar, and you'll have the confidence you need to get the most out of these crucial conversations. Again, thank you for joining the team. We're excited to have you and I will see you in the next episode. I'll catch you later.

So I want to thank you, Caroline, for that. It's the most incredible episode we've had in my view. Right. And it's because I have a personal story related to that. I have always been a dreamer and I've tried to get the biggest goals ever, but I fail a lot.

I fail.

I fail. And then a person was hired and I was forced to work in a smart methodology methodology. So I protected myself and I said, okay. I said it has to be achievable. So I'll constrain myself and I'll stick to that goal.

Wow.

So my performance was low, but I didn't have any other option because I didn't know how to defend my position because I didn't know how to do it. Then that person left and then I went back to my usual actual way of setting goals that I don't know. I don't have that methodology right because I'm not an expert. So I went back to my ideas. So I decided to change what I thought. And then I said, okay, if I fail, I fail, because now I am in a safe place. So I decided to do it. And then I went back to my regular performance. And Kwame is a witness that. That I've been achieving incredible things. Then, for a period of time, I had to stop. And then after I could come back to my regular way of setting goals, I restarted to achieve incredible things as I did in the past. I knew that at some point it had to exist. And the answer is you.

My God. Gosh. Who taught you to believe in yourself like that?

I don't know.

There's got.

There's got you.

They.

Oh, that's not. That's not a real answer. Simone has an incredible story. Like. Well, I mean, we could just start with, you know, growing up in Venezuela under Chavez, like that. That. That's a great place to start. Then Argentina next. That's a great place to start. Then Portugal and now Ontario. You know, like, there's. There's so much depth.

Wow.

And I've seen it. You're. You're absolutely right. And Simone, I was thinking the same thing, because I was realizing anytime we use the kind of smart goal methodology never worked. Anytime we put that methodology, never. No project has ever succeeded. It's. I. And it's funny, because I. I'm struggling, too, to think about, what was it that worked. It was more of an authentic style, a constant experimentation, focused on learning and experimenting all the time, embracing those failures and adjusting. But whenever we tried, like, the very rigid methodology of goal setting in a traditional type of way, literally zero percent.

Hit rate, I. I would love you both forever if you went on Amazon and put a book review that somehow synopsized that smart goals really are zombie goals. I am going upstream, fighting against AI, which seems to have embedded it into its entire architecture, that that's how you set goals. I mean, look at. Look at what we're up against. But what was I going to say about doing hard things? So I'm curious. All the adversity that clearly you've been through, did you have a grandmother or a person who played big in life and then you looked at them and said, I can play big, too?

Well, I don't know. I don't know. My biggest mentor is Kwame, and I've seen him. I've been working with for. For five years.

Wow.

And I've seen him playing very, very big. And when I gather with Kwame, we always say things like, okay, let's Create a series for Netflix and Big Things. So I am used to those goals. And, and I can give you a small, small example that I worked to bring William Urie, which is one of the, the biggest negotiators in the world, to bring to, to bring him to the podcast. And that was not part of my smart goals. That was my dream.

Love it.

So I worked to bring William Muri to the podcast or to get Kwame on big, big podcasts. So I work on that. But if I said that in a smart goal approach, I would fail.

Wow.

So I, I have to do it. And I don't say anything. I just work, work and, and I don't say things until I got them because I don't, I don't want to be perceived as a fail in a smart methodology.

Oh my God, you know, I'm speechless. You know, this is, this is the dominant system in companies also because people pick attainable goals for their bonuses. So you are working against yourself. Oh wow. You're working against yourself. When you're asked to pick a target that will allow you to either be seen as achieving your KPIs or getting KPIs or getting a bonus is. There's no incentive to do hard things. So I, I think it's incumbent upon everyone who's learned this science to give it away somewhere else, you know, because you can't keep what you don't give away. And that's those stories right there are just breathtakingly, you know, great examples of what's wrong with this world. Why, why are Zig Ziglar and Brian Tracy and all those books, Stephen Covey, all those books are best selling books and none of them have footnotes or research in them. And no goal setting theory, again, number one of 73 management theories ranked number one by all the scholars and everybody. Number one. Why did nobody notice this? Like, why?

Yeah, well, it's kind of like I, I've thought about this a lot, especially because with the, the way that I approach negotiation, of course, you know, you have the, the classical training and all that stuff. And then as I started to do more of the podcast and started to embrace my authentic approach, I'm like, yeah, there's some things that I would apply, approach differently. And so what I recognize is that in negotiation and in, I'm recognizing this is everywhere, it's not so much that people are trying to get the best advice and then helping people with the fundamentals like what are the psychological truths that underpin what is what we're experiencing. In the world and then giving you the tools and the discretion to take that, mold it, and make it authentic to you. What they're doing is they are codifying their personality. This is my life. This is what works for them. And it is, in fact, their truth. And it did, in fact, work well for them. And then for people who are like them, it worked well for them. So then they are centers of influence, and then they spread that as the gospel truth. And then there are a lot of people who don't fit that mold who are sitting there saying, well, maybe something's wrong with me.

Exactly. I mean, that's what's so incredible and so debilitating about following an influencer or a movie star or someone who doesn't look like you or sound like you or have your background. I mean, because people will start to. This was the law of attraction bugaboo, too, you know, if you wanted it badly enough and wrote it on a mirror and you wanted a red Mustang, if it didn't appear, something's wrong with you. So it would fold back on people that it was somehow their lack of something. So all these approaches have actually doubled back and hurt people.