Caroline Adams Miller
Appearances
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Wes Adams and Tamara Myles on How to Create Meaningful Work | EP 589
coming up next on passion struck one of the big misconceptions that we see all the time is that well we'll make work meaningful by making it really fun so let's have happy hours and free snacks and kombucha on tap and a ping pong table and that's all going to be really meaningful
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Wes Adams and Tamara Myles on How to Create Meaningful Work | EP 589
I would say meaningful work is work that provides more than a paycheck. How's that? Is that tight enough?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Wes Adams and Tamara Myles on How to Create Meaningful Work | EP 589
A few different things, right? I think most of the discovery that we do starts with just one-on-one interviews, asking people about their experiences there and people at different levels. And you hear so many rich stories and examples when you just ask people, right? People love being asked about their experience. And so that's one way, discovery interviews. Another way is observation, right?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Wes Adams and Tamara Myles on How to Create Meaningful Work | EP 589
Do some observing of like how are meetings being run and what processes are in place. And then another thing that we do is audits of processes like onboarding and exiting employees to see how well are you doing these things? How are you building meaning into these things? A really surprising finding from our research, which was
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Wes Adams and Tamara Myles on How to Create Meaningful Work | EP 589
The first time in any research on meaningful work that this came up is that beginnings matter, that the sense of meaning that employees get from a job starts even before the job itself. It starts during the hiring and the onboarding process.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Wes Adams and Tamara Myles on How to Create Meaningful Work | EP 589
And those first impressions carry a lot of weight because they influence how meaningful that job is going to feel for the lifetime of that job, of that employee's career with the organization. So those are some of the ways we would talk to people, we would observe things, and then we would audit processes.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Wes Adams and Tamara Myles on How to Create Meaningful Work | EP 589
And while those things are great and fun is good because it can help us build relationships, meaning is much deeper, right? Meaning is really about having those relationships, that sense of belonging.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Wes Adams and Tamara Myles on How to Create Meaningful Work | EP 589
I'll answer this one. And I want to say, I wish we could have interviewed you for our qualitative study because you are such a meaning driven leader and you were doing all the practices that we uncovered and embracing authenticity is a big part of that. One of the most powerful questions we asked in our study was, it was a yes or no question, a Likert scale.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Wes Adams and Tamara Myles on How to Create Meaningful Work | EP 589
So they had to answer from one to five. My leader knows what's happening in my life outside of work. And so the people who answered four or five, so yes, agree, highly agree with this statement. They were much more likely to find their work meaningful, to feel like they had strong relationships and a strong sense of community at work.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Wes Adams and Tamara Myles on How to Create Meaningful Work | EP 589
And it's about genuinely wanting to know what's happening in your team's life outside of work. Do you know their spouse's name? Do you know that, you know, what their kids do with sports or what their hobbies are or what they did over the weekend? And these are simple things that really matter, that make people be able to show up authentically, to be able to bring change.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Wes Adams and Tamara Myles on How to Create Meaningful Work | EP 589
different parts of their lives to work and to the conversation. And what you seems like you did a practice that we call everyday storytelling, which is making this a part of how you show up every day. And so it could be behind you on your home office, having pictures of your kids or little symbols or the books you love that can spark conversation.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Wes Adams and Tamara Myles on How to Create Meaningful Work | EP 589
But it could also be what Wes talked about earlier, this insights group. So inviting people to bring in parts of themselves into work and ask questions and foster connections in that way. You asked a good question about like, how do you balance like authenticity with respect? And the true authenticity is about being able to bring parts of your life that are important to you to work.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Wes Adams and Tamara Myles on How to Create Meaningful Work | EP 589
It doesn't mean you're forcing people to. There are parts that people might not want to bring, but it's inviting them to do that. But it requires vulnerability from a leader to lead that and bring parts of themselves as well. So If I show up at work and I talk about my kids and my son's wrestling match over the weekend, it allows other people to do that as well. We work with a leader who schedules
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Wes Adams and Tamara Myles on How to Create Meaningful Work | EP 589
time on her calendar to go watch her kids play sports during the week. And she will say out of office, so-and-so's lacrosse game. And that's a great tone for others to say, okay, that's allowed as long as the job is getting done. And of course it depends on the culture, but that's another way that we call everyday storytelling, like sending signals of what's
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Wes Adams and Tamara Myles on How to Create Meaningful Work | EP 589
allowed and renee brown what's that quote that she has wes about authenticity and discerning between ability without boundaries isn't vulnerability it's just working your out with other people right so that's how you thread the line with the respect it's not about coming to work and like working out your personal issues it's about sharing parts of your identity and allowing others to do that too is it something that moves a relationship forward
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Wes Adams and Tamara Myles on How to Create Meaningful Work | EP 589
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Wes Adams and Tamara Myles on How to Create Meaningful Work | EP 589
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Wes Adams and Tamara Myles on How to Create Meaningful Work | EP 589
Thank you. Thank you. free lunch and ping pong tables and all of that. So that's one misconception. And we're really happy that he didn't go that way and that he focused on growth mindset and the model coach care and other leadership practices he implemented. And I think another misconception is
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Wes Adams and Tamara Myles on How to Create Meaningful Work | EP 589
is this idea, which we've talked about a couple times, that meaningful work is about the work that you do specifically, and so that it's only reserved for some professions. And what we find is that meaningful work is about how we experience the work that we do, no matter what that job is. And so those are a couple ways that he could have gone wrong. Wes, what else?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Wes Adams and Tamara Myles on How to Create Meaningful Work | EP 589
There's something magical that happens when we experience work as meaningful. When we feel like what we're doing really matters and like we matter and that our growth matters in the organization, it ignites this fire inside of us that makes us feel unstoppable. We bring the best of ourselves to what we're doing.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Wes Adams and Tamara Myles on How to Create Meaningful Work | EP 589
Yeah, I think for me recently, so I teach, I'm a professor at BC, at Boston College, and I teach graduate students there about leadership. A recent moment of meaning that I experienced was gratitude emails from students at the end of the semester telling me specifically how they are applying the things they've learned in class and how that's making them better leaders.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Wes Adams and Tamara Myles on How to Create Meaningful Work | EP 589
I think when you hear firsthand, when you get that, we talked about positive feedback, but when you hear about the impact of your efforts and your work and how you're making a difference and creating ripples, that's really powerful for me. And it reinforces that, you know, the research and the work that we do can really change lives.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Wes Adams and Tamara Myles on How to Create Meaningful Work | EP 589
I think it can really ripple out and has the power to increase happiness, not just for us, but for the lives that we touch.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Wes Adams and Tamara Myles on How to Create Meaningful Work | EP 589
And so we thought ignite was a really fitting word to describe what happens when work is meaningful.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Wes Adams and Tamara Myles on How to Create Meaningful Work | EP 589
His book is amazing.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Wes Adams and Tamara Myles on How to Create Meaningful Work | EP 589
Well, the episode seven, I think on season two, the episode called Forks. I don't know if you remember specifically. I remember it because it was all about meaningful work. It was all, they're polishing the forks and they're polished like doing kind of a half-assed job. But then the person in charge says, every day here is like the freaking Super Bowl. People waited months.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Wes Adams and Tamara Myles on How to Create Meaningful Work | EP 589
Like it matters that the fork is clean and it goes into this whole like connecting to the impact of what they're doing. And it ignites that passion and performance. It's amazing. Yeah.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Wes Adams and Tamara Myles on How to Create Meaningful Work | EP 589
So important.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Wes Adams and Tamara Myles on How to Create Meaningful Work | EP 589
Great conversation.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Wes Adams and Tamara Myles on How to Create Meaningful Work | EP 589
I think too many people try to create something that is really broad. And when they create something that is really broad and hits the most number of people, what they find is they're actually not communicating to anybody because it's just not specific enough. If I said to you, I have a great podcast for human beings. Do you have any idea what that podcast is about? You really don't.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Wes Adams and Tamara Myles on How to Create Meaningful Work | EP 589
But if I said, I have a podcast for human beings who collect Matchbox cars. Okay, I actually might listen. I don't collect Matchbox cars, but I'm fascinated by you guys who do this.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Wes Adams and Tamara Myles on How to Create Meaningful Work | EP 589
It ignited.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Wes Adams and Tamara Myles on How to Create Meaningful Work | EP 589
That's so true because meaning is seen very often as something a little esoteric or leaders, the leaders we work with and interview and hear from, they know that meaning is important, but they don't really yet understand how to make work meaningful and how to drive those moments of significance and fulfillment. in the moments that matter.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Wes Adams and Tamara Myles on How to Create Meaningful Work | EP 589
And so I think it's easy for us to overlook something that we don't fully understand. And so I think that's a big reason. It's not fully understanding what makes up meaning and how to bring that to every job, not just helping professions or social impact work, but how can every job bring these moments of meaning.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Wes Adams and Tamara Myles on How to Create Meaningful Work | EP 589
And Ed Diener, who was a big leading researcher in positive psychology, had a very seminal paper on happiness where he talked about how it's the frequency, not the intensity of moments of happiness, like everyday moments. And we find that it's very similar at work with meaning. It's about the frequency, not necessarily the intensity of moments, everyday moments that are infused with meaning.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Wes Adams and Tamara Myles on How to Create Meaningful Work | EP 589
And so I think that when we focus exclusively on productivity, engagement, retention, and all those metrics that are very important, It's easy to just not be as intentional and deliberate as we want. We're just putting out fires and reacting to problems.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Wes Adams and Tamara Myles on How to Create Meaningful Work | EP 589
When we go upstream and focus on creating those moments of meaning and making work meaningful, all those outcomes that leaders care about improve, right? Because meaning is a leading indicator of all those outcomes.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Madison Marsh on Courage, Confidence, and Compassion
People think SMART goals is a thing, and it's not. It was a guy in the 80s, George Doran, consultant, just wrote an article for a management magazine, and he created an acronym that was sticky, but it's what I call jargon mishmash syndrome. That acronym means different things all over the world, relatable, realistic. It could be measurable, meaningful.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Madison Marsh on Courage, Confidence, and Compassion
There is no one acronym that fits SMART goals. It ain't science.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
coming up next on passion struck it doesn't matter if i'm hindu or christian or catholic or jewish or muslim there's one spiritual brain and of course there's one source of life so we have one spiritual brain and we have one source of life we're all spiritual beings and we're on this common shared there's one spiritual journey now we can call it different things there's beautiful faith traditions hashem god jesus a lot but but we're on one spiritual journey together
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
I mean, just the worst of the worst that we have to have support for that post-traumatic growth. Then another scientist that's the size study, Tedeschi, looked at, well, what are the predictors of the extent to which we really do grow? How do we help ourselves grow?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
And Tedeschi helped us understand that there were four ways in which we can take a really unwanted, upheaving, traumatic experience and harvest it, that very experience for growth. And one is being able to sit with a group of other people, like you said, not be at this alone. access that very experience and put it into words.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
So it's not just floating around and deep and dark, but we weave it together. So other people access the experience, put it into words and share it, and then shine the light of our higher power, whether it's prayer for some people, it's some form of meditation for others, it's laying on of hands, but
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
When you shine the light of your higher power on that really shocking, unwanted, unforeseen moment, there's an awareness, there's an awakening. And it can be that I was held through it, carried as in your beautiful image of the footsteps. It could be that I was guided through it because in that image of the footsteps, there's a direction. There's a direction.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
It could be that I realize now, God, that I was not to blame, that we both can be forgiven, that You're with me all along, but that breakthrough post-traumatic spiritual growth leaves us stronger and more resilient than if it had never happened at all, because we have built a spiritual response to suffering.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
Achieving awareness versus awakening awareness is in all of us. John, every single one of us has the capacity to look at life and say, to your point of your beautiful story, okay, I have kids. I have a mortgage to pay. I've worked really hard to get to this point of building and creating and providing for my family.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
So in a very good spirited way, every one of us has the capacity to think about, okay, how am I going to move ahead? How am I going to create financial stability? How am I going to cultivate being the type of person I want to be? And these are markers of growth and building and accomplishment.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
But that way of thinking, while necessary, is alone insufficient to fully fulfill our human destiny, our human journey. And your breakthrough moment, really, it sounds to me like a very sacred moment spiritual moment of being given a calling. Does that feel right? A calling?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
So it goes from being tapped, hey, look over in this other direction, to maybe directed to being pushed. And I call this sacred guidance. And it can come in the form of synchronicities. It can come in the form of very unprobabilistic doors opening and doors slamming shut. It really... it can get tougher and tougher until we hear it. But it's all because God does have a calling for you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
And God always picks the right one for the right calling. So it's a marvelous, miraculous gift, even if it's not what a priori we had ordered or planned for ourselves. It wasn't in the cards that we planted. It wasn't in the five-year plan. It was far bigger than anything we humans could have envisioned.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
That's an awakened awareness as compared to an achieving awareness that plans and research and gets everything lined up, A plus B plus C. Our awakened awareness is a direct connection with God or a higher power, what one's word may be. In an awakened awareness, we go places we didn't know we were going. We have a calling that we had never envisioned. It is
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
absolutely the opportunity of our lifetime but we've got to listen because as you say john the message heats up until we do and in awakened awareness we quickly realize that there's very little we control in life that people show up that opportunities show up uh We don't control who shows up. I don't control who's coming around the corner next.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
And I don't control the wonderful opportunity to speak to you here today, John. And these are gifts. These are gifts. Awakened awareness does not say, what do I want and how am I going to get it? Our awakened awareness says, what is God asking of me now? What is God revealing to me now? What am I being?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
called to do and that is a dialogue with a living universe a dialogue with a dynamic personal relationship with god so we go from thinking that we control things to really listening and watching every bit of life is alive and animated with dialogue direction contribution and we get to start showing up as you've done for so many
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
Oh, yes. Thank you, Jay. So one thing that I think is very helpful in our current day culture to clarify through the lens of science is that religion and spirituality go hand in hand for many people. They do for me. They perhaps do for you. My faith tradition is the language through which I connect with my spirituality. But religion and spirituality are not the same identical exact thing.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
Religion, the prayers, the texts, the ceremonies, the ways that we might learn to connect with one another and with God. Religion itself is a gift of our parents and grandparents, or we might choose a faith tradition. Religion through the lens of science is environmentally transmitted, all that knowledge, all the way in. But spirituality built into every single one of us is innate.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
Spirituality is inborn, just like we're physical or emotional or cognitive beings. We're born, every baby is a spiritual being. And what does that mean to be a spiritual being? We've looked through the lens of an MRI. We've tracked through fMRI, functional MRI, tracks the blood flow in the brain, the circuits in the brain.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
And what we've seen, John, is that every human on earth has this neural circuits for spiritual awareness, and even more specifically for direct personal relationship to God, their higher power. again, whatever their word may be. And what's even more awesome is that there's one spiritual brain and everyone on earth has it. There's 7.2 billion spiritual brains.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
And it doesn't matter if I'm Hindu or Christian or Catholic or Jewish or Muslim, there's one spiritual brain. And of course there's one source of life. So we have one spiritual brain and we have one source of life. We're all spiritual beings and we're on this common shared. There's one spiritual journey. Now we can call it different things.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
There's beautiful faith traditions, Hashem, God, Jesus, a lot, but, but we're on one spiritual journey together. And we know some things through our faith traditions, but also through MRIs about how our spiritual inborn gift is built.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
When we look through the FMRI, we see that the neurocircuits in our brain are built to be able to perceive, not just believe, but see and know that we are loved and held. The bonding network comes online as we connect with our higher power. We are loved and held. We are guided.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
There's a shift in the attention network from the top down dorsal to the bottom up ventral, which means we're able to see that God lays on our path. Messengers, synchronicity, symbols, bottom up awareness, not just what do I want? I'm going to drill through life. My roadmap says left and right. Wait a minute. Something today is saying go right. Loved and held, guided. And we are never, ever alone.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
The parietal, which puts in and out the distinctions, the boundaries between us. You know, you're sitting in your chair and I'm sitting in mine. You have your zipped up bio bodysuit. In this life, you were born a man and I'm born a woman. Our differences. We might have different race, different orientation. These are markers of, yes, we all sit in our chair. We're magnificently diverse.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
But the parietal lets us see that we're also all children of God. We're all emanations of one source. We are one. So we are distinct, but we are also one, loved, held, guided, and never alone. That means that anyone could be an ambassador sent by God. I don't care what they look like. I don't care what they're from. I certainly don't care if they're from a red or blue state.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
God loves us all and sends us all. Loved, held, guided, and never alone. And we're all designed to see and live that way, to live that way.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
Intuition, premonition. gut instinct. For some people, it's a deep knowing, inner wisdom. Sometimes it's a mystical experience or a dream or a daydream, but this way of direct knowing is real. This is real, hard data. This is essential information for our path. John, you heard your calling to serve the broken and those who hurt, and you knew that was real.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
Knowing that is not just, you know, okay, I'll pay attention to that. That is profoundly important. The most important information that we might perceive or receive. We're built for that. And our whole life fulfilling our purpose hinges on knowing the profundity and the ultimate importance and significance of knowing.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
John, you have put your finger directly on the epidemic of our time. So the epidemic in all decades of life, but particularly for people right now in their teens and 20s and 30s, the rate of death by suicide rivals the rate of death by auto accident is the number one killer of high school students. I mean, this is a dystopic. I'm in my 50s. If you told me 40 years ago,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
that young people were going to die foremost by suicide. I wouldn't have believed it. I didn't know anyone who'd taken their life. And yet I have three children in their twenties and every one of them has talked a friend back from suicide. And when my daughter was in middle school, she came and she said, mommy, Peter's not in school today. Something's terribly wrong.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
And I said, oh, here's the flu. She was in eighth grade. And she said, no, mommy, I know something's wrong. We have to call his home. So we do. The mom picks up and she asks us to forward another number onto an inpatient unit to talk to Peter, who has carved a heart in his leg with a knife because his parents are separated. There's just a level of suffering in young people.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
And you have hit the nail on the head. Statistically speaking, through the lens of research with the decline of in family faith tradition, whether they're Christian or Jewish or Hindu, whatever their tradition may be, with the decline in personal spiritual life has concomitantly been a statistically related skyrocket
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
in the diseases of despair, suicide, addiction, depression, the two go hand in hand. So the most important thing we can do for ourselves is to cultivate and open up our spiritual life. And the only thing I need to do as a parent beyond love, protect and keep safe is cultivate my child's spiritual life. It is the most important contribution we make.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
The uncertainty in our times, not getting my way is profound. My team may well not win the election. My community is shifting in a way that's unfamiliar to me. There's so much going on right now, and certainly the natural disasters. And in this time of real flocks, Right.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
We can't control what comes next and we can't anticipate and plan in the way that perhaps we thought we could certainly 20 years ago there was more of an illusion of total radical control. But what we can do in genuine flux the flux is real. is adopt a different stance. And in particular, I call this an awakened stance. It's a one of quest.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
And then quest, we say, okay, I don't know what's coming around tomorrow. And I don't know if I'm going to live in this town or a town two over, or we might go to another state. I don't know what's in the next five years or the next five months. But what I can do is be firmly rooted in a stance of quest, which is to say, I am open to what life is showing me now.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
I'm on a journey and I'm bringing along my kids and I'm teaching this to my kids because the illusion of control is actually a very fragile illusion that is getting smashed right now. And it's not very helpful to tell your kids implicitly or explicitly you can control and plan everything.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
But it's profoundly helpful to the resilience and health and peace of mind and heart of your children to say, you know, what our life is a journey. It's really a spiritual adventure. And we don't share what's coming. But at every turn, we can say, hey, do you want to sit down right now and let's ask ourselves, what is God showing us now?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
And even more in our family, we might pray and we might say, loving God, creator of heaven and earth and everything we see and know. What, as we open our hearts, do you reveal to us now? What do you ask of us now? And sometimes it's the parent who receives an answer. And sometimes it's a child who says for the family, dad, mom, God told me that as long as we're together, we're okay.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
You don't know what's going to come, but it's bigger and better than what we've planned. Family prayer with a common question. Here we are, we're in a hotel. We were just evicted from our home. What loving God do you lay upon us next? What do you want us to know? We feel your presence. We feel we're loved and held. We know we're guided and we'll look for your guidance.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
We do our part, but then we're open to what comes. And that way of being together as a family, some people called it inviting in the third presence. I call it the first presence inviting in God. And we are a family. We're a family in God. That's a quest and it's much more resilient and it actually takes you somewhere much better than you ever thought you might be going.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
Yes, that's a very beautiful work. And those folks are all good friends and colleagues of many years, wonderful people. I would say that transcendence is built into the awakened brain, the capacity to perceive and receive. a transcendent relationship.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
But where I would say that the awakened brain takes us perhaps another step along is that we are built not only to be able to see beyond ourselves to something more, but to receive and perceive a real relationship with God, our higher power, a real lived relationship with our loved ones who are on the other side, who are no longer embodied, but present on the other side of existence.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
So the awakened brain goes perhaps a step further in showing the neural correlates of the inborn human capacity to have a real relationship a real transcendent relationship with God, with our family members who've crossed like your sister. And so that's not just something bigger than ourselves.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
That is through all history, through all faith traditions, through wisdom traditions, bringing us back through the lens of MRIs and peer review science to what humans have already known that we're never at this alone. That's a relationship.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
I think that we absolutely do have a capacity for, I take through the awakened brain to be a witness of God, that things aren't just beautiful, but they're beyond beautiful. That the sparkling autumn leaves and the sun in them are not just glorious, but wow, they are expressions. They are actually the hand of God.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
It is the sense, whether I've put my finger on it or not, of the sanctification of life. That's how I understand awe through the lens of the awakened brain. And I think Docker's work is beautiful. I'm very fond of Docker. And I think his capacity to say nature is a place of awakening is so very true.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
And in fact, science shows us that a 20 minute walk in nature, instead of eat at your desk or go to a restaurant, a 20 minute walk in nature. awakens our deep connection to the sanctity of life, the glory of life, that we really matter and every bit of life matters and the whole thing is a gift. So nature is a cathedral. It simply is. And it is a place where God's very present.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
Awe is a way into that.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
That's beautiful. I would call that awakened relationships, that it's not just you, John, and me, Lisa, in a discussion, but there's a force in us of profound, ultimate significance, goodness, love, direction. We don't totally steer this conversation. God's been working through us every minute, every second. So relational spirituality is when we take the transcendent awareness and infuse that
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
in our families, in our colleagues, in our friendships, that sanctity, including towards, as you were called, the broken and the homeless and those in need of help.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
Very often there's people who, you know, every one of us, and I've certainly had times in my life myself, John, where I get up and I'm not that excited to go to work and I'm not that excited to be at work. And maybe I go out for a drink afterwards and it's just, you know, making the sounds and I'm just not feeling alive. So it's not that everything's falling apart or everything's terrible.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
It just feels like the bucket's about 50 to 60% full, right? And that's a common condition. And some people, it reaches, it stays around for years. It becomes dysthymia. Life has a gray hue over it. And that's really an invitation to say, you know what? You may have the home or the apartment you want, or you might be working and you're getting there.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
You're not, but no matter what you have and don't have, does your heart feel alive? Do you feel excited to get up this morning? Do you feel Like your life matters and that life matters and that everyone you encountered is an opportunity. Is the lights on or are the lights dim? And that's really, that's not a trap.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
That is the door swinging open and saying, hey, let's go look for a landscape that's a little bit brighter. And I think in my understanding of what I've seen in the awakened brain and the neural correlates of the transcendent relationship, it's really turning to God or your higher power that awakens the lights.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
And it's really doing that with other people, whether it's in a faith community or a service community, go out on Saturday and be part of the Habitat for Humanity that's rebuilding that fellow's house.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
Go out on Sunday and be part of the service community that's bringing hot meals to people who've been evicted from their homes or who are displaced from their homes right now, right in a time of upheaval. When we serve, We are using the same part of the brain through which we talk to God. And what you do to my children, you do for me. And it's extraordinary.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
John, the same neural circuits through which we talk and feel God's presence are the same neural circuits through which we feel God's love towards one another. So service is a direct way in. Even if you could be sour on your faith tradition, you could be someone who says, I didn't like how I was brought up and I didn't like how my grandma or my mom or my dad talked about religion.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
If you go serve, you're literally walking the walk of a spiritual life. And the lights start to come back on.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
Go ahead. Three legs to the stool, right? You need a practice, prayer, meditation, church, synagogue, mosque. I don't care where you go or how you, but a practice to connect with your higher power to the transcendent. You need people, the second leg. people with whom you share a spiritual life. So much of a public square these days is not about, I see God's light in you. I'm so happy to see you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
It's very transactional. It's very, I'm going to buy this from you. I'm going to sell this to you. People barely connect half the time. I will walk down the street and people don't lift their head up from their phone. So that God's presence in you. See the light in you. I am so happy to see you. So your practice, your people.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
And the third leg of the stool is purpose, by which I mean ultimate purpose, which means figuring out what is the nature of life itself spiritually. But why am I here on this earth? Who am I spiritually? I don't mean, am I going to go into business or teach or be a EMT worker? I mean, spiritually, what has God called me for? And what is the nature of my walk in this bigger sacred world? People.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
practice, purpose, spiritual purpose. And it doesn't matter what tradition or some people find it outside of tradition, but the stool is stable. You need all three legs. I can't tell you how many young people are looking for a one-off. I'm going to go into the woods and do ayahuasca. I'm going to go on this one retreat.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
And that might be a momentary awakening for some people, an altered awakening, but that is not a fully integrated spiritual life. A fully integrated spiritual life is intentional and builds and God comes forward to us as we go forward to God.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
But the spiritual capacity through the lens of science, the neural correlates, all that we've been talking about, the notion that when we build our spirituality, it's 80% protective against addiction. It is 82% protective against suicide, the epidemic of our time. We have the antidote. It's spiritual life when it's shared. Well, this spiritual life, like you say, John, is our birthright.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
But through the lens of science, it is only one third innate. It's built into us. It is two thirds cultivated, environmentally cultivated, our inner environment, how we talk to each other and our prayers and our outer environment, how we spend our time, how we treat people, where our service is. One third innate, two thirds environmentally formed means spiritual life is a practice.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
John, thank you. I am so grateful for your ability to dig deep with such a range of people and to bring this right to the hands of everybody. So thank you for what you bring to us.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
See, John, you've already been an active mystic. And science only mirrors and applauds you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
Yes. And that is so important because we are actually built, and science is very clear about this, in our times of despair, we have extraordinary potential to deepen our connection to God, to awaken spiritually, to deepen. The depth of our spiritual life can increase. So post-traumatic spiritual growth we talked about.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
Another is developmental depression, that suffering does not mean we're off our path or that we've stepped away from God. No, suffering is part of the spiritual path. And in fact, The same parts of the brain, you can hear my dog saying it's important. She knows what's true.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
The same parts of the brain that are involved in perceiving and receiving spiritual life in times of despair are also engaged, okay? So depression can be a knock at the door to spiritual awakening. Depression can be a yearning. And basically as we start to grow and seek, and when things happen to us that we didn't expect, we're in a place, not just of disappointment, but existential turmoil.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
Like what is my purpose and point? And what is this life about? And is it all worth it? And do I matter? And this bottom of the barrel is a knock at the door for, hey, wait a minute, everything I wanted, I didn't get. Everything I thought I was, I wasn't. What God am I really? And what do you want from me really? And am I really alone or wait a minute?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
As horrible as I feel, as awful as the dread can feel, I'm actually buoyant. God is holding me. The image of the footsteps on the sand that you shared. So often, the majority of the time, depression is an awakening. It hurts. It's hard. It's real. But it's the start of a discovery of a spiritual answer of a way forward. And this builds a way of living that is a stance of quest.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
what we want to give our kids. It's hard to watch our kids go through this. We can't do it for them. We can't pull the strings like a marionette, but we can help our children. Okay, you're suffering. We can help those we love, our partners, our friends, you're suffering ourselves.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
Let's take that into our prayer life or what we opened with today, John, take that very problem to counsel and lay that problem at the feet of counsel. And say what those who truly have your best interest in mind, perhaps your ancestors, your higher power, what do you make of this? My prayer in the morning is may I be of you, loving God, be like the trees and the sun, be of you in my being.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
So John, I've shared in the awakened brain and a bit with you that I am a spiritual person as are many people in our country. And I think the most precious thing we have is our experience. I mean, really in our life, what is our gift from who I call God is our experience. And you bring that experience right into the center of our society.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
May I see you in one another, see you in the light and the leaves, see you in this opportunity here now to serve or help. May I be you, may I see you, may I act in you. And that's the spiritual path that's there for all of us. You're certainly living it, John, yourself in this work.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
I have one more practice to share that might help people see through hard times as moments of opportunity and direction. Would you be open to sharing a practice? 90 seconds?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
Practice and practice. This is also in the language of life. And this is a gift of all of us to use our awakened awareness, to engage our birthright, our awakened brain, to see in our road of life, what is God showing me now? What is God asking of me now? So I invite you to close your eyes, take five breaths, open up your inner chamber.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
I invite you to locate a moment where you wanted something so badly and you did everything right to get that goal. You wanted that job, that internship, that home. You wanted him or her to say, yes, that red door was yours. A plus B plus C. You may have researched it and you went for your red door, doing everything right. Grab the handle, but it stuck.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
And you can't believe the red door stuck because you've done everything right. You might kick it. You might be shocked or despairing and angry or depressed. But in time, you have no choice. The red door stuck. You have to pivot 50, 60, 120 degrees. And over there is a bright, shining yellow door. You might've said yellow doors don't exist. You'd never heard of yellow doors.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
On the other side of the yellow door is someone who is more right for you, who made you feel alive, is a job where your boss sees in you gifts beyond what you knew you even had, is a community where you feel you belong. The yellow door was not what you had wanted. It was better. And better for you, more right for you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
And as you sit back now and you think of the stuck red door and the hairpin turn that took you to the wide open yellow door, was there anyone there at that hairpin turn pointing you along? Maybe someone showed up you'd never met before. Two minutes, two minutes at the bus station, at the diner. It could have been someone you know well who told you a story they'd never told you before.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
A trail angel pointing you. the bright shining open yellow door that has so much to do with who you are and where you are today. And now finally, as you sit way back, stuck red door, hairpin turn, trail angel, and wide open shining door that has so much to do with who you are and where you are today. How really are the most important parts of our lives found? Is it narrowly
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
You bring together really the gold nuggets of what it is to be alive. And you put that right into the center to form almost like a bonfire for our society. So I really want to elevate and appreciate you. Thank you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
through control, planning? I mean, sure, we have to do our part, but are the most important parts of our lives found in a dialogue with life? Are we messengers and trail angels for one another? Are there yellow doors that we have yet to discover better than what we might have imagined? And finally, as you sit back and look at your road of life, where in your journey is God?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
Where's your higher power? Is God in the wide open yellow door and the stuck red door, the openings and the impasses? Is God in the trail angel, the messenger, and your ability to be an open heart in relationship with God? And when you're ready on your sacred journey, I invite you back.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
50 million lives, 50 million hearts. That's a very big stage, John.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
Well, Lisa, it's been in the awakened brain that the red door in our lives, my husband and I wanted to start a family and the impasse was that nobody came, no children. And it was devastating. And people don't talk about infertility. And my husband was devastated. He was lying on the floor, depressed. Oh, I have the job I want. Oh, I have the house I want. You know what? My life's empty.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
Nothing matters. Our lives are hollow and meaningless without children. And that was the beginning. That was the red door of our spiritual path to finding our beautiful son on the other side of the world, to conceiving two girls and to having a spiritual journey where we realized that actually parenting is not about having my good looks. Parenting is about deep love and commitment.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
And that opened into a life that was a dialogue.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
All around five sacred miracles. Exactly. Exactly. And that's how I feel and know our beautiful family. God is miraculous. And the yellow door is so much better than anything we could have planned.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
Oh, thank you, John. I try to keep up on Instagram. It's just dr.lisamiller on Instagram. And I try to share interviews or new books, things that share in our community, people like yourself who are leaders of making, I call it spiritual activism, people of deep service.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
It was really a joy and very meaningful to connect with you and share this together. Thank you. It's an honor.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
So, John, I am a scientist. I'm a 25-year scientist at Columbia University. But before I get into the science, I find it's very helpful to not just talk about our human capacity for spirituality, but to offer people a real taste to put both feet in. Would you be open to perhaps starting with, in the language of life, a brief practice today?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
Okay, beautiful. So I'd like to invite you into a practice. It's 90 seconds and it's an invitation. To get ready to do the practice, I'll invite you to close your eyes and take five nice deep breaths to open up your inner space. Five nice breaths with your eyes closed. In your inner chamber, I invite you to set before you a table. This is your table. And to your table, you may invite anyone.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
living or deceased, who truly has your best interest in mind. Anyone living or deceased who truly has your best interest in mind. And now to your table, you may invite your higher self, the part of you that's so much more than anything that you may have done or not done, anything you might have or not have, your true eternal higher self. And ask you if you love you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
And now finally, you may invite your higher power, God, whatever your word is, and ask if they love you. And now with all of those people sitting there right now, what do they need to share? What do you need to know? What do they need to let you know right now? What do they need to tell you now? When you're ready, I invite you back.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
I'm back. This is your council and they're always there for you. Always.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
Was there anyone who showed up that surprised you?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
And she came?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
Well, that's very moving and very, I find, reassuring. Did she share? Did she talk to you or convey a presence or say anything to you?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
Oh, that's wonderful. That's wonderful. So here, all of Florida and North Carolina and a lot of our country is in flux.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
It's generous of you to share that. And a lot of people join you losing homes, losing everything they own, being displaced. And any psychologist will say it's traumatic to lose your safe place of living, your home, your apartment. It's traumatic. And when everything that we have, the ground that we stand on shifts or falls apart, the world as I counted on it isn't holding, that's traumatic.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
And in times of total disorientation, the ground shifted. Really the only way through is a spiritual response to trauma, a spiritual response to uncertainty that we don't control so very much in our lives as humans. The human being, our human experiences, we just don't.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
And what you invoked, your sister's loving, steadfast presence, or the higher power who I call God, always there, always loving, always reassuring.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
So that's the image we can all walk with, that really we are being carried. Everyone who's lost a home right now, everyone who's lost their worldly possessions, everyone who's lost the certainty. This was the home I could count on. What you've just shared, John, is the gift. That's the image that there are footprints in the sand. They're not ours. God is carrying us. You are being carried.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
And that we really face that we don't, we have a tiny little... layer now and then of control on a big life that's full of flux. And I think one way to be with that is to shift from a sense of what do I want and how am I going to get it? And how am I going to make this work to what is life showing me now? Or if you are someone who feels a relationship to God, what is God revealing to me now?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
What is God asking of me now? What is real? What does endure? And in moments like this, we're drawn closer.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
So through this then, it's not just that the upheaval is resolved, it's that we're actually made more by this. It's not just recovery, it's a form of renewal and growth and expansion that And I've worked extensively with the Pentagon and we talk a lot about post-traumatic spiritual growth that through hard times, we actually deepen our relationship to one another.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
People show up, we're ambassadors of God. We show up for one another. We help each other. We guide each other. Like the story you just told coming back for the men. We have guidance in places we didn't know it was coming. I mean, to make your way off the iceberg, you didn't do that alone. We never get off the iceberg alone.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
We're guided, we're held and looking and watching for God's presence and God's guidance. And whatever your tradition may be, you might say Jesus or Hashem or the universe or whatever your words are, but there's one source of life. And when we look and listen for that guidance, people show up at remarkable moments. There's what people call synchronicities.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
God lays on our path, symbols, guidance, turn right. No, today, every day you go left, today turn right. knowing of the heart. So trauma can be the gateway to a deepening of our spiritual life. And the Army works a lot with post-traumatic spiritual growth.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
There's a lot of data actually, that when you look at people who all of whom are traumatized, all of whom even meet the diagnostic criteria for PTSD, post-traumatic, right? They really are traumatized, every single one of them. The more trauma we have, the more we tend to grow. So trauma is not a showstopper in our lives. It is actually an accelerant. It doesn't feel good.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Dr. Lisa Miller on How Struggle Fuels Spiritual Growth | EP 532
It feels awful and it's shocking and it's ungluing, but the more that we face, the more that we become. That's in the data. There's a great study in the awakened brain. I referenced it by Tsai, T-S-A-I. He looks at 3000 plus vets and he showed there more trauma, the more post-traumatic growth. until we're so flooded.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
You want to figure out, OK, I'm passionate about helping veterans, but that's not a story. What is opposing veterans? Well, a feeling that they matter less and less as they get older. Okay, so we oppose the wisdom of veterans being wasted. Now we've got a story because we have an enemy. We have something that we are fighting.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
We are fighting the diminishing returns we're getting in terms of the wisdom pool of our veterans. Now, what do we want to do about that? We want to elevate veterans who are getting older into sage and guide positions. OK, now we've got something that we're for and we have something that we're against. We're making a story.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
And then we go out and give a keynote somewhere at some workshop and just say, hey, I'm part of veterans that... Wise Guides, an organization of veterans who mentor younger veterans. And what we do is we connect wise veterans with younger veterans to help shepherd them through life. And here's how we do it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
Now we are inviting people who are heroes in a story who are being overlooked into being people who are championed and honored in the room. That's how you take a passion and you turn it into a story that you invite people into. What are you for? What are you against? What are the challenges that we have to overcome in order to accomplish what we are for? What are the steps?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
What are the products that we need to sell in order to oppose and bring down that which we are against? That's called narrative thinking, taking a passion and turning it into a structure or a framework that people can step into. And that's what I'm passionate about, is helping people figure out how to do that for what they're passionate about.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
Oh, I love that. Hope for Cynics. I'm going to write that down.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
Well, I can. And I'll tell you, loneliness is not good. And the reason that it exists is because you're not eating something you need to be eating. And that is community. Loneliness is starvation of the soul. And so I'm entirely against it. I am somebody who is more introverted than extroverted. I do not get lonely very easy.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
But long ago, more than a decade ago, I realized that I need to be around people. I need to be with people. And I ended up, I've created now a few different communities of people that I'm with. One was just in town. We call ourselves the Lions. We go fishing every summer.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
And then every winter, every one of the lines, about 15 to 18 of us, depending on who can show up at my place, and we watched the college national championship. So we had just spent three nights together watching four NFL games and one college game, and it was a blast. We buy a bunch of beer, we buy a bunch of meat, and we just watch football and smoke cigars and all that kind of stuff.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
But in the middle of that time, we stop and we do something called five things in five minutes. And that's almost everybody in the group stands up and says, what are five things that I think this group should know in five minutes? It went from half of it was how to be a better dad and a better husband.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
The other half was stuff like how to protect your ears as you get older, just random stuff that people know about investment ideas, how to protect your heart health because somebody had a heart incident. So they learned and we're sharing wisdom and best practices with each other. So there's some intentional time around our time together.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
But it struck me as we were together and literally they just went home Monday. They just went outside. They went home Tuesday morning. So just yesterday, as we record this, it struck me as to how much the intentional time and the little lectures were really great, but how fulfilled we all were and full from the encouragement that you get from just being with each other. We tend to eat healthy.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
We know that we're supposed to eat healthy. We know that we're supposed to exercise and move our bodies. We know that we're supposed to stretch or we'll lose our flexibility. You're also supposed to spend time with people. And when you don't spend time with people, you atrophy in many ways. And one, let me just paint a dangerous picture of loneliness. Now, let me give you a lot of hope.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
A lot of people are looking to join a community. I would encourage you to do that if you want to, but I would encourage you even stronger to create one. Actually just create a community. You invite six or seven people to breakfast once a month, and then you understand how it works.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
If you invite six or seven people to breakfast every month, probably two years later, you're going to have six or seven people having breakfast, and none of them will be in the first group. They will be people who heard about it, came. But it takes a minute to dial in who those people are going to be. And it takes, I believe, in the rule of three.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
It takes three of those meetings for people to feel comfortable, and three years of those meetings for people to actually bond. And so you have to stay at it for a long period of time. I actually went to, that's my community. We call ourselves the Lions. I went to a friend of mine who was taking a year off as a pastor.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
And he was a pastor of a very large church, taking a year off before he maybe moved to another church or something like that. Wanted to get a sabbatical in. And I went to him and I said, I will give you $10,000. If you create a group of men who get together once or twice a month, I will pay $10,000 to be one of those men. And he was like, are you being serious? I go, yes.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
And I think there's many other men who would do it. Three months later, he launched the Sycamore Society, which was 35 men, each paying $10,000 just to get together. And the first meeting was awkward. The second meeting was less awkward. The third meeting was great. And we've been doing it almost a year, and he's not going to go back to pastoring, I don't think.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
He's going to do this another year because it's been so fulfilling for all of us. And these are great leaders. That's how important I think being in community is. Loneliness is a villain, and it needs to be opposed in some ways. I also think there's a benefit to loneliness because it calls you into community. and connects us to each other, so it's not necessarily a terrible dark thing.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
It is if it wins. You don't want loneliness to win. You want to feel it and have it drive you like a warning light on your dashboard to take action. But I would just say, look, I can join a community, but I can't think of a single community in the world that is more tailored for me than the ones I made. This is the community I want to live in. I want to tell stupid dad jokes. I want to fish.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
I want to be around a group of guys who are committed to their wives and their children. And I want to be around winners who know how to lead companies and know how to lead people. I don't know where I'm going to find that community unless I just make it. So you want to sit there and say, well, what would be a dream community? Who would be in this community?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
And then you want to start inviting them into that community and keep bringing them together. It takes consistency, but that's how you do it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
And I almost said food. It's about food. Just make sure there's food there and you'll grab you'll get people need to eat, but they need to eat more than food, right? They need their souls need to eat, too.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
Well, there are a couple of things I didn't put in building story around 1.0 that I didn't realize until later needed to exist. One is the controlling idea. And so basically the controlling idea is what your story is about. And there are ways to come up with the controlling idea. The controlling idea for the movie Rudy is Rudy wants to play for Notre Dame, but he's too small. Right.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
So if I were coming up with an organization controlling idea, it might be as veterans get older, they tend to be ignored and we think they should be elevated. That's a controlling idea. And what the controlling idea gives you is a filter
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
through which you're going to throw out everything that doesn't serve the controlling idea so it gives you a in or out filter if you want to say well we're going to start a bowling league for the children of veterans we would say that doesn't serve the controlling idea so we that's a great idea but it's its own controlling idea and you need to do that separately it doesn't get to go here
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
And that's really important if you want to lead anything as to what to say no to and what to say yes to. So the controlling idea is now in the book. There's a lot more on the villain, what opposes the objective of the hero. There's a lot more in that. But the main thing for building a story around 2.0 is there's about 10,000 words, which is about 100 pages.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
more stories and examples than there were in building a StoryBrand 1.0. Stories from national security, from pet food companies, from all the different people that I've met with who we've been able to help. So it's a lot easier for somebody to get their mind around building a StoryBrand 2.0 and the concepts than it was building a StoryBrand 1.0.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
The biggest difference, though, is the addition of AI. So building a StoryBrand 2.0 leads you to StoryBrand.ai where we've created a free way to get seven sound bites that help you invite people into a story and also a tagline that can help you summarize what your offer is in just a few words. Eat more chicken is the tagline for Chick-fil-A.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
I gave an organization the tagline, kids love aquariums. They were a pet food, fish food slash aquarium company, dominates the American market in pet stores.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
does about a hundred million and when they started using in a test market the tagline kids love aquariums they saw a ninety nine percent increase in sales so the words we use matter and we have i wrote over a hundred pages of single space text with instructions for OpenAI. We put it inside of an interface at storybrand.ai.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
And it will give you your controlling idea, your tagline, your brand script. It'll wireframe websites for you, write nurture emails, lead generators. It'll give you 16 different business building concepts. We timed it. And what would normally take 60 hours, 60, six to zero hours, in terms of creating a marketing funnel now takes 29 minutes. And the writing is really good.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
So the book leads you to StoryBrand.ai every step of the way. Because normally, in the first book, I tell you how you need to come up with your tagline. And in the new book, I just write it for you. And it's very powerful. We have about 10,000 people since the book came out, which is about a week ago, using StoryBrand.ai. So that's the biggest difference.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
And by the way, right now, if you go to StoryBrand.ai, I will give you a tagline for your business. In fact, I just went there. I've got a buddy who's been a struggling musician For 30 years. I live in Nashville, Tennessee. He's a very dear friend. He's one of my fishing buddies. Just spent the weekend with him with this group of guys. And he struggles to make money.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
Every once in a while he writes a song and he gets a sink. They're called a sink on some sort of show or commercial and he makes some money. But he hasn't been able to develop the fan base and Spotify doesn't pay. These music streaming services don't pay him anything. So I gave him the idea. I said, what if you start a mastermind for music lovers? Not for musicians.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
for music lovers, for people who love singer-songwriter. They spend a year. They get a newsletter. They get interviews with musicians that you get to interview. They get some of your music for free. They get to come to Nashville and attend one of your concerts. They get to attend a big breakfast where you interview a famous singer-songwriter.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
They have the best year of their life with front row seats to the singer-songwriter community and world that exists in Nashville, Tennessee. You could charge $5,000 a person. You could have 100 people and cap it at 100. You're making half a million dollars a year if you do this?"
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
So I go to StoryBrand.ai, I answer about six questions, and it prints out a brand script with all the talking points he would need to say in order to get people to buy into the community, wireframed a website for him, created a lead generator to capture the interest of people who would be interested in that, and gave a nurture email sequence to email them once a week and convince them to sign up for the community.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
All that was done, I think I did it minutes before getting on this podcast, so I could email it to him. I think I did it in about six minutes. And so you can actually take your passion and turn it into a business with all the collateral you need to sell that product inside of StoryBrand.ai. It will even, if you answer a few questions, it'll even give you product ideas.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
You should turn that into this product, and here's what it would be called, and here's what you should charge for it. So all of that now exists at StoryBrand.ai.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
There's a need for family. Our family meets that. There's a need for God. God meets that. There's a need for food. Food meets that. Where's the need for community? And especially for old connections, for connections that you've had for a long time, because friendships are one of the things that just get better and better over time. Very cool story to hear.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
I think too many people try to create something that is really broad. And when they create something that is really broad and hits the most number of people, what they find is they're actually not communicating to anybody because it's just not specific enough. If I said to you, I have a great podcast for human beings. Do you have any idea what that podcast is about? You really don't.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
And also an example of somebody being very intentional about creating community.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
what i thought was the main purpose of this podcast and it's living proof that what you're saying works and it works in magnifying ways if you can define in order and rory's right rory's a genius and i love him he's also by the way just a good human being but if you can define first and this is going to sound kind of cynical and i don't mean it to i just mean it as a thought exercise if you want to know what your life is about
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
and what you want your life to be about, ask yourself what you're against. What bothers you? What do you wish didn't exist? And you may come up with bullies. I can't stand bullies. Okay, well, what's the opposite of a bully? Probably somebody who's generous. And so that's how you actually discover your values. And then you would want to create a podcast or a brand around generosity or whatever.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
Generosity is not necessarily the opposite of being a bully, but... Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
But if I said, I have a podcast for human beings who collect Matchbox cars. Okay, I actually might listen. I don't collect Matchbox cars, but I'm fascinated by you guys who do this.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. And I'll think the end zone is about whatever. And I read my eulogy and I'm like, oh, that's not the end zone. The end zone is great husband, great father, great friend. And so there's some exercises that you do, I think, to help yourself enter into a story that can be really helpful.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
Great to be here with you, John.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
Well, there are a myriad, and you can create them in any kind of way you want. There's all sorts of structures, seven habits of highly effective people, getting things done. There's a couple of professors out of Stanford who have spent a lot of time figuring out how to create a plan for your life. I wrote a book called Hero on a Mission that has a life plan inside of it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
There's a million different ways, but we're all trying to accomplish the same thing. And when I say a plan, it usually is a vision of what you want to accomplish, milestones to get there, and habits that you have to do every day in order to accomplish that thing. I think it's a matter of sitting down, sometimes with help from somebody, to create a life plan. My life plan involves a eulogy.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
Thank you. It's been a fun ride and I'm grateful that it's helping so many people, especially you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
That is my overall life vision.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
a 10-year vision what does it look like when i'm 10 years toward my eulogy five year one year plus goals plus a daily meditative practice in which i prioritize three things i'm going to do today come up with five or six other things that are not a priority but things that i'd like to do things that i'm grateful for actually at hero on a mission.com i had my team create software
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
that I use as a daily morning ritual. And we've since, it was $10 a month until we paid for it. And once we paid for it, we made it free. So thanks to the early adopters, it got paid for, and I think it was a couple hundred grand. And now it's paid for, and anybody can use it for free. And about 10 new people sign up for it every day, which is really fun.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
But you just create, you just do a morning ritual, and it'll walk you through it, and it's a life plan.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
Well, I'm always trying to figure out which book comes next. And it's being air traffic control. You're watching planes circle the airport. You've got to figure out which one to bring down based on who's got gas and who doesn't have gas and who else is in the area. But there's a book called The Story Driven Dad. that I'm playing with.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
And there's another book called A New Story for America that would take a couple years probably to write. And so I'm not sure which one is going to start landing next, but I've narrowed it down to those two. Both of them, I believe, will be written. At what order? I don't know. But that's what's next for me.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
Yeah. Talk about communicating clearly. Yeah, I've only done 560 of these episodes.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
StoryBrand.ai continues to just blow our minds in terms of how well it's succeeding and how helpful it is to those who subscribe. And I'm keeping an eye on that. But ultimately, I'm probably, John, in a place where I'm enjoying my life
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
more than i ever have and i'm enjoying it because quite honestly i'm less ambitious than i've ever been in my life i like being a good dad i like being a good husband i like being a good friend and i don't want to work with anybody i don't enjoy working with and so i've created this perfect life
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
of about 35 people I get to work with, and we're all having a great time and a really fun marriage and a really fun dad. I think when you get married older and you become a dad when you're older, the way I did, you make a lot fewer mistakes because you've got a trillion mistakes behind you. And so I think just to keep doing what I'm doing, and to me, it's fulfilling the promise
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
that I've made to my friends that I'm going to be there for them, that my wife, I'm going to be there for her, that my daughter, I'm going to be there for her, that my team, I'm going to be there for him. It's fulfilling that promise. I think that is the driving, you know, plot in my life right now.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
If you're inviting me, I'm there. I don't want to assume.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
The human brain spends about 30% of its time daydreaming. It's actually a survival mechanism. When the brain can't figure out how the information it's being presented with is going to help it survive and thrive, meaning your body stay on the planet and your resources grow, when you're encountering information and you can't figure out how this is going to help you in some way, you daydream.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
And it's the way that your brain says, hey, there's nothing here that we need that is useful, so we're going to go into rest mode. And it stops paying attention. That's why you daydream so much in church, right? Because you're having trouble figuring out how the second chapter of Numbers is going to do anything for you. And so you daydream.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
Until the pastor says, it reminds me of when my cousin and I tried to jump across the Grand Canyon on a motorcycle. All of a sudden everybody in the room is paying attention because he started into a story. So story is the only tool known to man that can stop people from daydreaming for not just 10 minutes, 20 minutes, for hours on end.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
When you're watching a movie, when you're binging something on Netflix, you pay attention and your brain engages. And so the reason it's so important to understand story, how it works, how to invite people into a story is because if you have a passion
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
that you want other people to know about or understand or join with you in working on, you need to invite them into a story in which doing that and taking action on that passion actually benefits them in some way. And so understanding story and story structure is really about how to understand how to communicate in such a way that people listen to you, they hear you, and they join you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
And if you don't use story to do that, you've got a very low chance of anybody engaging your ideas. So story is very important as understanding how to communicate if you want people to pay attention.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
Not just religion, but political movements, autocracies grow almost exclusively through narrative propaganda. Not often true when it's an autocracy, but horrible things have happened in the world because leaders have understood how to tell stories that scare people into doing what they want them to do, which is almost always to the benefit of the autocrats.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
It's important to know how story structure works so that you can use it yourself to invite people into doing good things, and so you can understand when it's being used to benefit something that is very harmful for the world.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
Well, yes, both and. Hitler was arguably the world's best, perhaps in history in terms of world leaders, at using narrative structures and propaganda to fool a lot of people. And of course, the way that you know that this is harmful is if it's filled with lies. Like if you actually test the story and discover that's not true, this is not true.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
Arguably the second best, and maybe the best because he won, was Winston Churchill, who used the same powerful narrative structures to counter. So you had one story that was being told that from our perspective, of course, was true. defeating a story that was filled with lies.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
That was a story war, the story of the allies standing up to evil versus the story of the German people being superior beings and needing to spread that propaganda for the betterment of the world. Of course, those are absurd ideas. But even in... A lot of people don't think of the emperor of Japan
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
who told the story that he was a descendant of the gods, literally, that his family were descendants of gods, designed and brought to Earth to protect and offer security and provision for the Japanese people, which is going to necessitate taking over the mainland China. and the Philippines and a bunch of other islands over there. And that was the story that he was telling.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
So we had to go over and deconstruct all of that. But all those bombs that were dropped and the people who were killed and the atrocities that were committed started with words. And they were defeated with words from Harry Truman, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and so forth and so on.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
And then Stalin continued to use that playbook after World War II to kill millions of people in Russia. If you understand these things, you can... And I wish more people did. I wish that more people could understand when they were being hijinked and when they weren't. What that does speak to is how powerful story is at...
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
brainwashing of hijacking a human brain it is very difficult for a human to know what is fiction and what is not fiction at the emotional level pretty easy on a cognitive we know that the marvel comics are fiction. But while you're sitting there in the theater, you certainly feel like it's true.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
Your emotions are up and this Thanos is going to destroy the world and you're on the edge of your seat. Well, why? It's pure fiction, isn't it? Well, yeah, it's fiction, but it feels true right now in this theater. Well, there's a lot of people who cannot help but suspend disbelief when they're listening to political rhetoric that is not remotely true.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
And in America, you see it on both sides of the political aisle. Democrats stirring up fear and anxiety over what Republicans are doing and Republicans stirring up fear and anxiety over what the Democrats are doing. And almost nobody working on actual practical solutions because they're using this propaganda to stay in personal power or party power.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
And you understand it and you roll your eyes a lot watching the nightly news.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
So I appreciate, especially it's not just, I'd say the worst culprit is the media. How many times have you read a headline and oh my gosh, is that what's going on? You click it and you realize that's a very exaggerated take.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
on what's happening in order to get me to click and read this article, which, by the way, is this advertisement for toilet paper right next to it, which is the whole reason they created the clickbait in the first place was to sell that ad. And now you're realizing they're lying to all of us in order to sell toilet paper.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
I don't want to have a cynical view of the world, but when it comes to the media or... political parties, I tend to be about as cynical as I can get.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
It's because it cuts through noise. Let me explain what I mean when I talk about story and story structure. The basic plot points of a story that have been passed down through generations and centuries are a character that wants something, who has to overcome conflict. in order to get what he wants and avoid a tragic result. Those are the basic plot points of a story.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
And so if you want to invite somebody into a story, for instance, let me just go through the mission statement of my personal family, the Miller family. There are three of us, me, my daughter, and my wife. We live inside of a story that is based around a mission statement, and our mission statement is, in a world tempted by cynicism, we believe life can be beautiful.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
If there is a world tempted by cynicism, we know that there's a darkness in the world. We have called that darkness cynicism, and we know that it is tempting. That in itself creates a story. You have somebody who doesn't want to be sucked into the dark vacuum of cynicism. We believe instead that life can be beautiful.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
Not that it is beautiful, but that it can be made beautiful by us and the actions that we take. So even in that mission statement, you have an opposition, which is necessary to tell a story. You have a group protagonist, which is necessary to tell a story, either a protagonist or a group protagonist. Ours is a group because it's the Miller family. There's something that the Miller family wants.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
They want to hold to a perspective and participate in the making of a beautiful life. Now, that can be defined many ways, but just our mission statement places the Miller family squarely in a story of good versus evil, darkness versus light.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
So now my kids grow up in an environment where they get to play a character inside of that story, and that character that they play is going to transform them. And then we talk about the characteristics of of the group protagonists, and they are helpful, grounded, attuned, and fun. Those are the four values of our family.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
And so what it does with my three-and-a-half-year-old daughter is when she says, Dad, I want to play. I don't want to do this work today or whatever. It's like, you know what? Millers are fun. Let's take a break and play, and we'll finish these chores later. When somebody comes in and they're hurting, we are the sort of people who are attuned
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
And so we notice that somebody's hurting, and we stop what we're doing, and we sit down, and we say, hey, what are you feeling, and how are you feeling? Because we are attuned. If we get really cocky and arrogant, we are not grounded. We think more of ourselves than we should, and the Bible says don't think more or less of yourselves than you should.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
In other words, have an accurate view of yourself. We would consider that being grounded. And so those are the four characteristics that we've identified that are necessary to participate in the making of a beautiful world. And so even in my own life, we have framed a story and I have invited my family and myself into a story in which we get to play a role
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Donald Miller on the Secret to Making People Care About You
that ultimately will transform us into better human beings and also make the world more beautiful in some small way. And so that's what I mean when I talk about narrative leadership or a narrative structure shaping the reality. So let's say that you're a passionate leader and you're passionate about veterans and helping veterans.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
coming up next on passion struck people think smart goals is a thing and it's not it was a guy in the 80s george doran consultant just wrote an article for a management magazine and he created an acronym that was sticky but it's what i call jargon mishmash syndrome that acronym means different things all over the world relatable realistic It could be measurable, meaningful.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
So I have no shame and I've been trying for 30 some years to take the shame out of it. And I fear we're falling behind other addictions. So it was lonely. It was sad. I was in a household that was not particularly warm and loving. It was all about achievements. My great uncles made Olympic history.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
They were the first siblings to go one, two in an event in the 1912 Olympics, the standing high jump, Ben and Platt Adams. Platt got the gold, Ben got the silver. And those were the stories I heard. And my parents were intelligent and smart. We were supposed to have great grades and go to the right schools and all the rest of it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
So the standards for me were extraordinarily high and failure was not tolerated. And there was abuse in my home. And it's not something I want to go into publicly, but too publicly, because I do talk about it in my books. But there was a lot I had to overcome in order to love myself and to feel like I was worthy to live. And so it was lonely. It was sad. It was my secret for seven years.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
I kept thinking if I just did something else, it would go away. Like if I got into Harvard or Yale or Stanford or whatever, the bulimia would go away. If I did a swimming time that was great, made junior Olympic cuts, it would go away. If I brought great SAT scores, it would go away. And it, nothing ever helped. And so when I went to Harvard, it was my last hope. I'm at Harvard.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
This is the pinnacle of achievement for so many people and I'm miserable and I'm getting worse. So I had this double life. I had all kinds of medical complications. Again, Nobody knew what to look for because nobody knew how to treat it. So I had crumbling teeth. I'd never had my period. I didn't even get my period till I was 22. And I was losing all of my passions, playing the piano, swimming.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
I had to drop out of swimming. I couldn't keep it up with this double life. So it was the hardest, saddest, most suicidal period of my life. And then I was asked on a date, one of my first dates in my life, my sophomore year, I'm five, 10 and a half. I think I just looked, I didn't look like somebody you could approach and I was miserable on top of it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
So this man approached me and he asked me out. And on our third date, we agreed we'd get married. I got engaged at 19. He was captain of the Harvard lacrosse teams, really handsome guy. And I thought this is it. I'm going to get married and I'm going to get married and it's going to go away. So I got married nine days after I graduated from Harvard and I went on my honeymoon and it was a disaster.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
I was purging on my honeymoon. And that's when I looked in the mirror and said to myself, this thing is going to kill you. It's going to kill you unless you figure out how to overcome it. And the last part of my story I'll just say is I was living in Baltimore at the time and just by the grace of God, and I do mean just sheer luck.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
There were 12 step recovery meetings there for compulsive eaters where I found and met people in recovery from bulimia. I just got goosebumps thinking about this. It was life changing. It was February of 1984 and I was sitting there defensive and not talking. And then this woman said this sentence, she said, my name is Betsy. I'm changing her name.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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My name is Betsy and I'm recovering from bulimia one day at a time. And I remember I put my needle point down, I looked at her, she was tall, she was blonde, she was an athlete and she was saying sentences I'd never heard anybody speak. And I looked at her and in that moment, I knew if she could do it, I could do it. And that was really when my life began. I learned what joy was.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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I learned what grit was. I learned how to cultivate it. I learned about goal setting. I learned what love was. Someone said to me one day, Caroline, it's great that you're getting better, but you can't keep what you don't give away. And that one sentence was what I found brought me joy, that I could sponsor other people, that I could be a role model.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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It's something I was proud of, that I could share with other people. I had months, weeks, months, years of recovery. And in positive psychology, we know that's one of the positive interventions is giving. Being a giver brings you joy. And I learned it by hitting the worst bottom of my life. And I'm just so grateful. I was bulimic and it gave me the path to find out what all those things meant.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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They weren't just phrases on a wall or speeches I heard. This is when I found out what life was all about. And it's, I don't regret a minute of it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
Thank you. And same to you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
It's so funny. I lived my life in hindsight. When I was at Penn, I'm sitting in Huntsman Hall, which is where Wharton is. I would hear this research and little puzzle pieces would start to come together in my mind. Oh, that's why all those things that I did, those achievements didn't bring me success. the happiness I thought it was because happiness precedes success.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
I mean, just that one equation. Oh my gosh. By the way, Sonia is replicating all of that research now. And it's even more robust that happiness precedes success. And she's been looking at other cultures. So I checked in with her when I was writing Big Goals. So I think that's an important thing to note. So another assignment I had at Penn was goal setting theory by Locke and Latham.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
And I remember I said out loud, I didn't care who was around me. I just said in wonderment, there is a science to goal setting. I was shocked. I didn't know there was a science. And as much as I'd read about goal setting, I didn't know They didn't know goal setting. I didn't know Locke and Latham existed. And they're still not known well enough, which is why I wrote big goals.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
But when they talk about goals, there's learning goals and performance goals. And we can go into that in more detail if you'd like. But one of the divisions, learning goals, is what my bulimia was. I had to learn something I'd never done before. I had to learn how to behave. I had to learn how to eat. I had to learn how to deal with cravings.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
I had to learn how to deal with sadness without binging. So they're very careful to say that when you have a learning goal, you have to flatten your learning curve as quickly as possible. You've got to go find the places where you can get the skills and the knowledge that you don't have. in order to achieve this goal. You cannot say, I will be over bulimia in six months.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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You cannot do that to yourself. You cannot do that for any goal that's a learning goal. Because when you assign performance goal metrics, and you can only do that if it's a goal that fits on the checklist, you've done it before. You know what excellence looks like. You know what it's going to take. in terms of time, money, energy, people around you.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
If you assign that kind of metric or outcome to a learning goal, you're likely to quit because it's just too hard. You don't know how to do it. So that's how it relates to overcoming bulimia. It was a big learning goal. And any learning goal we have, you want to engage curiosity. You want to engage the ability to have a growth mindset. And that's how people stay engaged in the process of
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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having disappointments, not having the first way they learn it work out. But that's how you persist longer in goal accomplishment is when you correctly separate them and follow the guidelines that I've laid out in big goals, but people still don't know about it.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
And the last thing I'll say is if you mix them up, if you mix up learning goals and performance goals, you have the biggest disasters in business history, bar none. It's example after example of people and companies having a learning goal. Lee Iacocca with the Pinto, the Ford Pinto, they'd never made a small car. But in his arrogance, he said, oh, I'll have a 2,000 pound, $2,000 car.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
And in one year, he wanted to be like the small European cars. Ford hadn't built small cars. What happened? The Pinto became the death trap. More lives were lost because of the Pinto and the ways in which engineers were pressured to sign off on safety checks and they knew the car was a death trap. So same thing with the Titan submersible.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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Skipped all the learning, just wanted to make money and get people down to the Titanic. I mean, I could go on and on. Don't mix them up. It's a simple, elegant theory. It is number one of 73 management theories without ever having a replication crisis. And that's significant. Just learn this simple, elegant theory. And I promise you, all of your goal pursuit is going to be a whole lot easier.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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And these two men are still alive. They did the work. They did the scholarship. They just didn't pursue fame. And I'm so grateful to put a spotlight on their work.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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So that's a case study I have in the book. I have spent just hundreds of hours looking at Boeing and the MCAS failure, because again, people lost their lives. Because what you see when you mix up a learning goal and a performance goal is companies lose their reputation. Sometimes they never get it back and people lose their lives like they did with the Boeing 737 MAX with the MCAS failure.
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Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
It is such a good example that American Airlines, Boeing's biggest customer, just went to them and said, we're about to place an order for 200 planes with Airbus. They've been innovating while you've been sitting still. And so they had this board of directors that was, sorry to say it, it was mostly white men doing what I call planning. the Hobsburg jaw effect.
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They were all sitting around inbred ideas and it became sterile. There were no good ideas coming out of that. It was a lot of groupthink. And in the eighties, Jack Welch and other CEOs began to demand higher pay packages. And they used to cut, cut, cut to get more productivity and squeeze workers to the max while giving themselves these avaricious pay packages. Jack Welch is the
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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absolute poster child for avaricious, just greedy pay packages. It was just one of the worst in 2005. And so this is what happened is these companies just wanted to make more and more money. They wanted to pump up the stock price. Boeing did that and Boeing lost its edge and they stopped innovating and they started to cover up. It became a culture of sloppiness, of lying, of poor quality.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
And they knew it. And it was just like the Ford Pinto. These engineers knew that they were signing off on things like drills being left in planes. They would drill and then drop it. And they go, it's OK, just seal it shut. So this has now come out more and more. And they didn't let the pilots train in simulators to just cut costs. Again, it comes down to money.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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They wanted to make as much money as possible. So they cut costs. They did not develop what Airbus had developed with more strict guidelines. They didn't develop this long haul carrier that could have more fuel. So it'd be heavier and go longer distances because that's what the world was asking for. So they just retrofitted one of their other workhorse planes, cut corners, lied, cheated,
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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and took more big pay packages and basically just threw the planes out there. And we now know what happened. These things are predictable and goal setting theory predicts this. When you mix up a learning goal, Boeing had a learning goal. They had to learn how to make this kind of plane. And normally I think it takes six to 10 years to develop a new plane.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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They didn't want to lose their customers, particularly American Airlines. They just took shortcuts. I call this faux grit, fake grit. You're not doing the hard work to do something great at the end of the day. So you fake it. So that's what happened. So Boeing is just one of the examples in the book.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
Yeah.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
So Huberman went from one to several million followers, just as I was recovering from cytomegalovirus, which had me in a hospital for three days. And it took NIH infectious doctors to figure out why I was literally dying. They thought I had leukemia. And so anyway, I was told there was no cure to cytomegalovirus. I had to just relax. Really? Okay.
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So I started taking these long walks on the beach. We had just bought a beach house in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware. And I was practicing a concept called Utweiden, which is a Dutch word for airing your soul out in windy, salty, cold air. And I did that for miles. And it coincided with Andrew Huberman's podcast, which was three hours. So I was out there for three hours airing my soul out.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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And he kept talking about how there was all this research stuck. in medicine, these trials going on and on, but there was already ample evidence to show that these things, whatever they were making a difference in how people lived, how they healed, how to approach supplements, sleep, light. And so he developed protocols. And so these multi-hour podcasts, the public wanted it.
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And I could see the hunger as it grew and grew and he became a star. People wanted these protocols. And I realized that even to this day, even though I brought goal setting theory to the mass market in 2008, and then John Doerr, the venture capitalist who invented it, I think he invested in Google and some other startups.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
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He had goal setting theory in the introduction to his book, Measure What Matters. But other than the two of us, me first, and then him 10 years later, goal setting theory still wasn't known by anybody. And so I'd go around the world and I'd give webinars and talks to hundreds of CEOs and executives. And I would say, how many of you set goals for your companies? Every hand goes up.
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How many of you do it with goal-setting theory? No hands go up. And so for 15 years, I watched this and I thought, the world really deserves better. We're over a barrel now. We live in a VUCA environment. Our kids are anxious and depressed. Suicide has gone up and companies have to learn new ways. We're in a
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vast learning goal condition in the world right now because of COVID and artificial intelligence. And I said, now we have to know goal setting theory. And I'm going to put protocols in this book that people can now use to experiment with creating success. And every bit of my book is going to be evidence-based.
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And I'm going to explain the history of goal setting from time and motion studies to how we got here today and how we can use goal setting theory. But then I added my bridge methodology. which is how I created other protocols. And because what that does is goal setting theory was published in 1990.
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There's been a raft of findings around mindset and grit and all kinds of things, priming, you name it, that also impact success. And no one had really pulled together a goal setting book that included everything you need to know. So I did it. And everything in this book is a protocol.
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If you buy this book, any manager in the world will be able to set goals correctly with themselves, with their companies, every teenager who wants to make a sports team or make the orchestra in the oboe. This book will tell you how to accomplish your goals. No longer will people have dreams and no idea how to accomplish them. I have dragged goal setting out of the magical law of attraction
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the 1980s, 1990s into the 21st century. It is now evidence-based. If you buy this book, everything about it is evidence-based and my protocols will change your life. And the last thing I wanna say, I'm just militant about this. Smart goals isn't science. Period exclamation point. Another exclamation point.
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People think smart goals is a thing and it's not, it was a guy in the eighties, George Doran. He wrote an art consultant, just wrote an article for a management magazine and he created an acronym that was sticky, but it's what I call jargon mishmash syndrome. That acronym means different things all over the world, relatable, realistic, It could be measurable, meaningful.
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There is no one acronym that fits SMART goals. It ain't science. There's research showing it undermines it. Finally, the last thing I'm going to say about SMART goals, because I really feel so strongly about this. It's even in artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence has embedded it in its answers about goal setting. What was I going to say about SMART goals?
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
Oh, if you take the first definition of SMART goals and you make are realistic, that immediately undermines goal setting theory. Red flags started to fly in my brain in 2005 when I saw that challenging and specific goals, learning goals and performance goals, they have to be challenging and specific if you want the best possible outcome.
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Using the word realistic immediately causes you to set what's called low goals. So forget smart goals, buy my book and learn the real science, period.
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I think it's really important that we look at this. And again, I don't think this question has really been asked or addressed ever in a book. And it just struck me in February because I signed the contract last December and the book was turned in May 1st. So and it's out November 27. So this was huge. And in February, as I literally drowned 14, 16 hours a day.
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I realized one day that all I had listened to that day or that week were what I call dude podcasts. I'd heard nothing but men talking about men to men about success and goal setting and motivation. And I realized that I hadn't heard a single woman even referenced as an example of excellence or curiosity or genius. The criteria for being a genius are skewed against women.
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And that's when I realized that self-efficacy theory, Bandura's theory, where you have to have relatable role models, was working subconsciously and unconsciously against anybody who didn't fit that model of mostly white men, because face it, they've been in leadership, they've had the power forever. That's not debatable, really.
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That listening to podcasts, reading these books, for the most part, you weren't going to hear or see relatable role models. And I began to ask myself, Are we, and I'm a woman, are we by and large setting smaller goals because of how the world seems to be skewed against us? We don't hear or see relatable role models.
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Wikipedia says that 18% of the biographies are of women, 82% are of men, because there's this drive by editing that says women haven't been notable or noteworthy enough, so they delete their bios. So that's just one aspect is what are we hearing and seeing? And for the most part, it's dude walls, dude panels, but now dude podcasts, which is mostly how women get a lot of information.
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The other thing I want to say, and there's so much research in the book about this, so it's really important, is that since 1940, perceptions of women have changed in many ways. particularly around competence. Women are now seen as competent because we're in the workforce now. 50% of the workforce, maybe more, is female. So we have many chances to be seen as competent.
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Where there has been no change at all in how people perceive women, and that includes how men and women see women, is in this area of agency and being goal-directed and being ambitious. And the research shows very conclusively that any woman who sets pursues and achieves big goals, she is going to pay a huge social penalty.
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And the research on it is all over the place because what's happened is you violated stereotype norms. It's called the black sheep effect. You will be ghosted. You will not have your success celebrated. You'll be held to different standards than men are. But for the most part, you will be excommunicated by both friends and other people, both men and women.
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They're the rare few who celebrate and build up women who've succeeded. But for the most part, this is the one area that's held constant and we've had no growth whatsoever. So just being me, a woman talking about goal setting is blowing up norms. Blowing up norms because people sitting in audiences are not used to hearing women talking about goal setting. and how the science impacts them.
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So I think companies have to realize that many of the reward systems, many of the ways in which people are encouraged to get feedback as they're pursuing goals and part of goal setting theory says you have to have feedback that tells you that you're getting warmer, you're getting closer, or you got to pivot. Women don't get accurate feedback. When they succeed, they often get no feedback.
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People go silent. It's very painful. Women are also by and large, not given leadership feedback while men are. And there are a few other studies that came out literally recently, like in the last month that I didn't get in the book. One is about how women, female CEOs are given 1.7 years to succeed. And men are given more than two, almost three to succeed.
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Women are deemed failures much more quickly with different criteria. Not only that. quote unquote, failed female CEO, the halo effect follows any female who might be considered by a board of directors to be the next CEO. She's already considered a quasi failure simply because that role model was quote unquote, failed male CEOs. No such halo effect exists. That doesn't happen.
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So here's another one. In the workplace, women and men who are given the exact same goals and tasks to accomplish, women who achieve those goals with excellence and on time do not get credit for being that person.
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The research shows that men who take longer and work nights and weekends and maybe have the same outcome, maybe it's excellent, they're seen as more successful, more dedicated, more disciplined, and more... dedicated to the company. So all over the place, the ways in which we set goals, value progress, give feedback and reward excellence skews against women.
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And I'll give you one last example, because a lot of people study Amazon for goal setting success. They've got this big goal setting program. A program where people are squeezed to death and they're encouraged to rat on their friends and call these anonymous lines and say so-and-so isn't doing their work. I mean, it is a cutthroat Darwinian culture.
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There is no one acronym that fits SMART goals. It ain't science.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
But one of the things is they encourage managers to give brutal feedback in front of other people, shame them. And the problem is when women do that, when women adhere to those standards in any culture, They'll pay a penalty. They will pay a huge penalty. So they might be following the criteria, the 14 criteria that Amazon says, this is how you must act to be an Amabot.
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So they'll be doing what the company wants them to do, but it's going to completely undermine their success. It will not pay off in the end. So those are just a few examples.
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We have to wake up to the fact that we do not have goal-setting productivity systems embedded in the world or in companies that are evidence-based or that ask people as they're setting their strategy, will this strategy work for someone who looks like me? Can I find a woman, a person of color,
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who has also achieved or built this character trait or done this hard thing who I can relate to, because you know what? How they did it is not gonna match many of the stories they've heard on podcasts, is not gonna match some of the people we see in documentaries. You have to step back and say, will it work for me? And then just like I did with overcoming my bulimia, find a Betsy.
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I looked at that woman across the room in that church in Baltimore, Maryland, who said, my name is Betsy and I'm recovering from bulimia one day at a time. I just got goosebumps again, because it changed my life. There was my role model. She was good. And she did. She taught me how to overcome bulimia one day at a time.
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You can't just follow a recipe that has worked for people who don't look like you sound like you come from your culture, be vigilant, be thoughtful, be awake at the wheel, not asleep at the wheel.
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Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
Thank you. Really nice to be here.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
So there are four ways to build self-efficacy. One is a vicarious role model, somebody in your environment. It's also someone who believes in you, and that's a big one, having a mentor or sponsor. But by and large, Bandura found that the number one way to build self-efficacy was to break big goals down into smaller pieces and have mastery experiences. So
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Don't be daunted or overwhelmed by the fact that you have a big goal. I have this whole methodology and worksheets in this book that'll walk you through how to set the right big goals and make sure your strategy matches it. But we have to set goals that are appropriate for us, our goals, intrinsically motivated. and then break it down into different steps.
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But we also have to take a look at my bridge methodology is brainstorming relationships, investments, decision-making hygiene, good grit, and your standards of excellence. You have to look at all of those because every one of them is going to involve steps that need to be taken that will build up mastery.
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And another thing I'll say, when you look at relationships is people catch behaviors in their environments. And if you want to do hard things and it requires grit or resilience or the ability to have more self-regulation or willpower, take a look at the tribe that you spend time with. Take a look at the emails that you open.
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Take a look at the conversations that you listen to in the hallways, wherever you work or live or spend time, because those are going to have a massive impact on whether or not you have the support you need to accomplish your goals. And this goes to Shelly Gable's research. Shelly Gable's research on active constructive responding really makes people wake up.
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You see the shade snapping open in people's eyes when they hear about active constructive responding. She found that there's only one right way to respond when someone tells you they have a big goal or they've done something hard and meaningful that they feel proud of. The only one right way to respond that your brain says, this is a good thing.
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And I'm going to do more of this is if that person responds with curiosity and enthusiasm. Her research found that there are three other ways to respond, which is passive, aggressive, passive, destructive, and active destructive. And they're all about either changing the subject or saying mean things or whatever, devaluing that person's excitement about what they've done.
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And if you share your big goal or your success with the first person who responds to that, the first responder research is what I call it, that person has the power to make you disengage from that goal and just stop doing it. So think really carefully about who has your back, who's in your circle.
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Do you have a mastermind group that believes in you and you respond with curiosity and enthusiasm to their goals? This is again, where I want to call out women for a moment. There is research showing that 84% of women admit to being surrounded by frenemies. Friends who are enemies. And why do women do this? Because they don't want anyone to think they're not nice.
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And as I learned this research, what I realized was we're doing this at our own peril. And we're thinking, well, one day my mom will say something nice about what I've accomplished. One day, my sister-in-law, my cousin, my best friend, they'll be happy for me, but they must not mean what they're doing. When someone tells you who they are, believe them.
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And this is where you have to really take active steps is when you've got big goals, Bandura talks about the importance of being around people who believe in you, vicarious role models, supporters, and people who help you achieve mastery. And so do not make the mistake of being around people who suck more than they give. So I'll stop right there.
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So Amy Edmondson was in my husband's class at Harvard and I'd followed her work for years. She's a professor at Harvard Business School. And what's really important at work is when you're in a meeting that your voice is heard. And I'm going to go back to women again.
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So it's a safe place to express your feelings, even if you're the newest employee, to give your ideas, to not be interrupted or mansplained or eyes rolled or being cut off. So you have to have that. But Phyllis Chesler is someone I've really followed her research. She's at NYU. And in her book, Woman's Inhumanity to Woman, she has this unbelievable line.
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And again, the whole book is evidence-based. It weighs as much as a brick, but it's worth it. She said, no one mourns little girls to expect incoming fire for the rest of their lives. that it will come in the form of passive aggressive comments. I put up with it. You could mean girls. That's just how women are. Just accept it. She talks about the fact that we have all of this incoming fire.
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And what I realized when I wrote the book is, Many of us don't have psychological safety outside of the workplace. So the workplace is one place that has gotten an enormous amount of publicity and justifiably so, but what about a lack of psychological safety elsewhere?
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When you're at home eating dinner, when you're out sitting on the soccer field, watching your kids play, what are you absorbing there? Again, be vigilant. It's not just at work. So that's what I have to say about psychological safety.
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Good question. And I think your book is great, by the way. So Angela was doing this research while I was at Penn, and that's where I met her. And then we became friends later, and I decided to write not just about the quality of grit, because she found that passion, perseverance, and pursuit of long-term goals was this X factor in success. And she gave a wonderful TED talk about it.
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And then she wrote this bestseller, Grit, bestseller all over the world, really. What I wanted to write about was the quality, how to get it, not just that it's great and that it's important, but how to get it. And so for me, intentionality is intrinsic motivation. And it's the decision to actually do whatever it takes to accomplish that goal, because it is something that you want to accomplish.
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It's something that's so important to you. And this is the passion. that you will persist through dark nights of the soul. And what's baked into grit and big goals is that will happen. That will happen. The Stoics talked about premeditatio malorum, premeditate the evils that are coming in the path before you, because it's going to be hard to do hard things. So they knew it thousands of years ago.
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So you have to have this passion along with this realistic optimism. I'm going to do it. It's hard. I'm going to have to unleash passion. And that passion is what's going to keep me going. Even when I'm alone, even when I'm doing hard things and nobody's doing flashcards or giving me a trophy or whatever. And so that to me is what intentionality is all about.
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And the last thing I'll say about my book, getting grit, as I wrote it about how to cultivate it, how do you break this down? What are the qualities? It's humility. It's persistence. It's the ability to set goals correctly. It's about self-regulation. But I realized and wrote about a definition that I felt was a little bit different from Angela's because I believe
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That grit is good grit when the display of that good grit, the pursuit of hard things that are important to you and you do it with dignity and self-respect and you do it without a cheerleading squad and you do it because it's important to you and you do it for all the right reasons.
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I call that authentic grit because I believe good grit awes and inspires other people to ask themselves, what if I acted like that? What could I do? What would my life be like? What if I went out of my comfort zone and did hard things too? And so for me, good grit isn't just about a person doing hard things. It's about the quality of uplifting the people who see you, the people who are awestruck
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by seeing what you do and how you do it. And there's so many examples of that. So for me, grit is all about not just doing hard things, but it's how you do those hard things. And what is the impact? Because this is systems theory. I believe it has to impact other people in order for it to make a big difference. During COVID, I came up with a term that
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was too late because the book was out already. Compassionate grit. What I saw were people doing hard things so that other people could live. If you didn't want to wear a mask for two years, but it meant grandmom and granddad and the neighbor next door who you went and knocked on her door and asked if she needed her walkways shoveled or leaves raked. There was so much compassion
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Wow, okay, thank you. And so I think it was more the bold step was the University of Pennsylvania took me, but what I did see was in January of, I think, 2005, the cover story of Time or Newsweek was the new science of happiness, big smiley face.
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for other people by many to do hard things that they didn't want to do. They didn't want to stay home from their jobs. They didn't want to wear masks. They didn't want to cancel their kids' graduations, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I saw a new kind of grit that I think Mother Nature brings about every hundred years, maybe because of a black swan event.
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When we get to see what we're made of, and I think grit comes from how we deal with those black swan events, those unusual hundred year events.
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So Best Possible Future Self is a well-known exercise in positive psychology. I don't know if Laura King wrote it or Sonia Lubomirsky.
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I don't know who to give credit to, but it's been studied that when you write about your future as if it's gone as well as possible, five years, 10 years into the future, and you do this three, four days in a row in tremendous detail, 15, 20 minutes of writing, it's been found that people are more in touch with their goals
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They have more empathy or sympathy for who they're going to be in those 10 years. They begin to imagine an older version of themselves. They clarify something called goals and conflict, which is not talked about enough. Many of us have really good goals. They're both good goals, well-formed goals, but the pursuit of one means the other one cannot be accomplished, at least not at that time.
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This exercise makes you forcibly move one up and one down, clarifies goals and conflict. If you do the via character strength test, again, via character.org, and you look at in this set of writings, journaling that you do, Who am I going to be in the future if everything works out as well as possible? And I write about in detail who's around me. How did I do these things, et cetera, et cetera?
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And how did I use my top character strengths to make it happen? You're more likely to be happier, more optimistic, more zestful. It's a phenomenal intervention into people's well-being. In the book, I include more recent research, though, that I want to add to this. So...
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Sometimes we're encouraged to write a letter to our future self, maybe a year from now, we do a time capsule kind of things like where am I going to be at the end of 2025. And we stop right there. Well, some Canadian researchers found that it's even more powerful to write that letter to your future self.
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And every article in that issue was about positive psychology and how it was so important and wellbeing mattered and Marty Seligman's book, Authentic Happiness. And there was an article in there with one paragraph, one little paragraph that was flashing neon lights at me.
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And talk about what are you doing it's December 31 and look at these things you did and here's how you did them and here's why you're proud of yourself. And these things were hard but you overcame them by doing these strategies etc and you change your circle and you practice more gratitude but that future self needs to also write a letter back to present self. about how they're going to do it.
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So it's the reciprocity future self, and then future self back to present self with kind of this air of wisdom and lessons learned. And this mirrors Gabriel auditions work, which many people are familiar with about mental contrasting. It's not enough to just say, here I am today. And that's where I want to be in a year. So let's goal set. I'm going to do this too many people just rush into it.
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skip all these steps. But Gabriel Otigen, a lot like the ancient stoic said, it's not enough. You start to have these fantasies that you've done these hard things and you fool yourself into thinking you've done more work than you have. No. And I think vision boards are really big culprits in this. And people spend too much time with these positive fantasies.
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She says, do that briefly, but don't spend too much time there. Come back and have a realistic assessment of what you're going to have to deal with. What obstacles? Again, premeditatio malorum, the Stoics. Premeditate the evils in front of you. So that's also part of letter to the future, future self back to today. So there's a lot of great research on this.
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And I took phenomenal care to not just do an N of one. What worked for me? Everything in my book is evidence-based. You ask me where I got the research. I'll open the drawer in my head where it is. People deserve to have a science-based approach to making their dreams come true personally and professionally. And up till now, there has been no book that brought it all together.
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And I'm so proud of the fact that I have done that.
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I'm a big fan of Adam Grant's by the way. I love his work and he's been really generous and kind in the ways he has talked about my other books and and now I'm nominated for his club. It's just amazing. But the scaffolding of my bridge approach, I believe is most analogous to the stages of change by Prochaska, Norcross and DiClemente that came out in the seventies about overcoming addiction.
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It said the University of Pennsylvania is going to take 32 men and women from all over the world in its first ever Masters of Applied Positive Psychology in the world, the science of happiness. And all I remember thinking was I have to get into that. I just have to get into that program. I had never seen or heard of a graduate program that spoke to me. So I had this intuition. I had to get there.
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And what they found is that the stages of creating change, particularly with things like quitting smoking was pre contemplation before you even know you want to quit smoking contemplation. I want to quit smoking. Gosh, it's going to be hard. How am I going to do it? preparation, beginning to learn what you got to learn. Where do I have to be? How do I have to do this?
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Do I need a course, whatever preparation. And then you go into action. A lot of people just look at action and go, oh, that's what you got to jump into. No, it's this long preparation and thinking about it and scaffolding of the resources you need. And then you achieve your goal, you maintain, and then you disengage. So as I wrote the bridge methodology and I've been fine tuning it for 15 years.
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What I realized is you can't skip any of those steps. You can't skip the brainstorming, really effective brainstorming, especially if you are achieving a learning goal and you've never done it before, you better have the right prompts like artificial intelligence, because it's the quality of the prompt that gives you this high quality answer. So if you skip the brainstorming and
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Even for performance goals, you have to do it. The relationships, you skip who's around you. Who do you need to know? Who needs to be around you? But then who needs to not be around you? Really important. Investments. What kind of time, money, energy am I going to have to use? And then decision-making. To me, this is fascinating.
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Every CEO I've ever worked with has not done a decision hygiene worksheet before. They've never analyzed the quality of their decisions for particularly what Daniel Kahneman talks about, noise. which, and he died earlier this year, he said, noise is a much bigger problem and costs businesses much more money than bias.
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And he spent a lot of his life talking about bias, but he said, no, as I go through this noise research, noise is the biggest problem in our judgment. You got to do that. So decision-making and then grit, what do I need to do? Do I have to up my self-talk? Do I have to learn how to change the channel in my brain when I want to be a When I want to quit, do I have to build up my willpower?
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And then excellence. What are those challenging and specific standards that you need to set before that Locke and Latham talk about? You skip any of those steps, it's going to be like stages of change. What Norcross and Prochaska and all found is if you skip any of those stages, you're doomed. You got to go back. You're going to have to go back to contemplation. So you can't skip them.
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And you can't do it with my bridge methodology either. And I call it goals gone wild in my book. When you mix up learning and performance goals, you can't skip the learning steps. You can't. Because if you do, you're going to cheat, you're going to lie, you're going to steal. And in the worst cases, people will lose their lives. So do the work.
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And I think we became such a quick fix society that told our kids how great they were before they did anything. Even if they didn't do anything, we've got great inflation and comfort animals and Everyone's a valedictorian. Some classes have like 400 valedictorians.
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I mean, we decided in a very misguided way to the self-esteem parenting movement, to take all difficulties out of our children's lives. We bubble wrap the generation. And as a result, they learned because of the adults in their lives. And so it's all on the adults. they learned that you didn't have to do much to be called a winner.
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And so what I'm trying to do in my most recent books is a call to develop the grit and the ability to take the hard steps. to get this sweetness at the end of doing hard things. In Chinese, it's called shiku, eating bitter, so that you do hard things. So at the end of the harvest, the fruit is sweet. You do the work. So I just want people to learn that, and this is what society values, by the way.
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I had not gone to graduate school before this. I was an undergraduate from Harvard university and I'd never seen my college transcripts. So I had to write to Harvard. It's like, do you still have them? I'd never looked at it. Boy, they didn't have great inflation in the late 70s and early 80s. I saw C's and B minuses, and I was magna, but still, I was not the great inflation we see today.
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Society values and puts a premium on hard things, people who do hard things. That's why we all tune into the Olympics because no one gets a participation trophy. I mean, they're winners and losers. Okay. That's what happens. We got to get back to that. And I think we'll all be happier. We'll be more confident. We'll have more self-efficacy and the world would be different.
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I think the most important thing is Locke and Latham's goal setting theory. It's just not known. Even if you go to Harvard Business Review and you type in goal setting theory, three articles come up. Do you know how many articles in Harvard Business Review have been about goal setting and success? People don't know it.
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Learn goal setting theory, divide your goals into learning goals and performance goals, and then add my bridge methodology on top of it. You can Google, if you don't want to buy my book, Google goal setting theory, and just take a look at the goals you're pursuing and ask yourself, is this a learning goal? Is this something where I've got to build in the time
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and the energy to be more curious about how to acquire these skills and knowledge, and then hold myself to high standards in the process of doing it. Or did I just rush into setting a time goal? So learn that. Tell someone else. Start a chain of people knowing it. Because I want to kill off the zombie goal approaches like smart goals and law of attraction.
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They should be dead by now, but they're just zombies walking around. They don't work. Let's kill them off.
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Two places, carolinemiller.com, my name, Think Princess Caroline, like you and I were talking about. Caroline, it was not a common name when I was born. CarolineMiller.com. And then the book has its own website, BigGoalsBook.com. And there's all kinds of case studies broken down throughout history. Here's how these goals were achieved.
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And the very top of it is a learning goal or performance goal and then bridge. So I've given examples from sports, from history, from business, so that people can see how this works in real time. So it's all there.
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Thank you. I really appreciate this. And again, listeners should buy your book and read it because as I went through it, I was just like, wow, this book is great. And it honors all the things that I hold dear, like credit the researchers who did the work and then do that and create protocols like you did too. So I really appreciate you putting your book in the world and this podcast.
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I think you're right. Absolutely both. Thank you.
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And so I applied to the University of Pennsylvania. I wanted so badly to get in, I added a question to the application. It was, why should you take me? And I remember I typed I'm fun in big letters. So I have this zest for life, this passion. It's like you talk about passion struck. I became so passionate about this topic. And then in particular about its connection to the science of goal setting.
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That was my fifth book. My capstone from that year at Penn became this global bestseller, creating your best life. And that was the first two things. And then I'll stop talking. The first time that the mass market got a goal setting book that had evidence, footnotes and science in it.
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That still blows my mind that until that book came out in 2008, the only books on anyone's bookcase were Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy. I mean, none of which had any science footnotes, certainly not goal setting theory, which is my latest book. And the second thing was there was this meta analysis that came out.
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right before I got to Penn, and it said, all success is preceded by being happy first, which completely changes any discussion of goal setting. If you don't address the issue of emotional flourishing, not just happiness, it's not happyology, then you're really not being professional in terms of talking about goal setting, if you have access to this information.
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So for several reasons, that book became a real pioneering book. in the field of goal setting and in positive psychology, it's still selling. But my latest book is an updated version of that. So, so that was when I was passion struck.
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Yeah. It was like being drunk all the time and I don't drink. I haven't had a drink in 40 years, but I just felt drunk. I would call my husband at the end of every day. So it was like five days or three full days every single month. And I remember I couldn't speak. And the only analogy I could come up with is I was an unformatted computer disc that had too much information on it. My brain
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hurt all the time. And I love school. I love school. I didn't care about my grades. I love school. And this spoke to me. This informed my practice as an executive coach because there was so much research. There was like Gosh, my coaching can now have an evidence-based to it because back then it didn't. Coaching was the wild west. But talk about brilliant people.
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Chris Peterson wasn't just brilliant. He was funny and Marty is brilliant. And so Sonya Lubomirsky and Barbara Fredrickson have become my friends. Angela Duckworth was not one of my instructors. She was doing her PhD work. And I think I was the first mass market book to put her new groundbreaking work on grit, which she had just done under Marty.
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She became an instructor later in the program, but not my year. I just got to know her because of her research on grit and the West Point research. So it was life changing and it was life changing in some surprising ways. It changed my profession. It changed me as a human because after you hear things like the number one strength of happy people is gratitude.
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And you look at the via character strengths and you look for where's gratitude. Maybe it's not in the top five. Maybe it's not even the top 10. You pay attention and you can't forget the fact that gratitude is closely linked to a flourishing life. So you hear these things. It's a minute past midnight. You can't go back and live that life anymore that you lived before.
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So you come out of this master's program. I think fundamentally altered as a human being. And I don't know of any master's program anywhere that I've ever heard of where you don't just come in and learn something. You change as a human being. And I changed as a mother. I changed as a wife, as a sister, as a daughter, as a friend. I'm not the same person I was before 2005.
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And I think a lot of people have that reaction.
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That's such a good question. I'm sorry I didn't address that in the second part of that last question. First of all, it's never too late. You just have to have curiosity. And also one of the five character strengths, I use the VIA character strength. I don't use anything else in my work and that's free. It's viacharacter.org.
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I get nothing from it, but it ranks your character strengths from one to 24. And zest is one of the five Chris Peterson told us to look for. He said five of those 24 are more closely associated with being a flourishing person. And zest, he commented, and other researchers who came to work with us commented, it starts high as children, and then it drops to bottom five in most adults.
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And I think zest is closely aligned with passion and curiosity. And I think we have to look for ways to be alive while we're alive. And by following my intuition that I had to do this and having the, not everyone thought I was being a good mother or I was juggling too much with my business, but I had the backing of some key people.
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We know that you need at least three to four people who have your back in order for you to take creative risks in life and believe in yourself. And I think that's what allowed me to feel not just that I was passion struck and that I was passionate about this new addition to my life, my world, my writing, my everything, my work.
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It made me feel like I mattered in a new way because I now had this knowledge. Marty told us he wanted to go out with this knowledge and apply it. apply it to the world in whatever division of life we came from. We've had UN peacekeepers go through that program.
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We've had priests, we've had politicians, we've had so many different kinds of people, but our mandate is to take this amazing education, go out and apply it to the fields where we are most passionate, where we work, where we can make a difference. And I have brought that feeling that I matter and I can make more of a difference with this because of the incredible good fortune I had
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not only to get in, but to have the ability to go. It's not free. They do have scholarships now for some people. And so there's several areas where I've made a huge difference with this knowledge. One is in the field of goal setting, which we can talk more about. And the other one is in the field of addiction.
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Because as we've discussed, I cultivated grit in my 20s when I became, I think, the first publicly known recovered bulimic. When I wrote my first book, my name is Caroline. I just talk about passion struck. I had to tell the world that I was in recovery at a time when nobody got better. It was a death sentence, but I wanted to live and I wanted to live for myself.
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And it was really my first goal that my teachers didn't set. My parents didn't set, culture didn't set. I wanted to live and I needed to figure out how to recover from bulimia. So I, in my book, Positively Caroline, which was the second part of my name is Caroline is I got in recovery people. The world needs to know you can get in recovery from this thing.
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The second was in 2013, 2013, when the other book came out, Positively Caroline, it was about the fact that I stayed in recovery. And that is really the bigger challenge that I don't think we talk about enough, not just getting in recovery. Now we know it's possible, but staying in recovery.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
So that book, the last part of it is how I feel like positive psychology could be used in the field of addiction, particularly with eating disorders to help people cultivate the behavior, the mindset, the ability to overcome addictions. And I think it's more and more accepted that can be done and those can be combined. So I was passion struck in two different areas.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Caroline Adams Miller on the Keys to Achieving Big Goals | EP 548
Thank you for asking. Obviously you can tell I have zero shame about this. It's the thing I'm proudest of, the fact that I overcame bulimia at a time when people didn't know how to do it. And as I said, it was a death sentence, is the thing to this day that is my touchstone. If I could do that, then I can probably do anything.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nausheen Chen on How to Embrace Your Unique Voice | EP 530
It doesn't matter if I'm Hindu or Christian or Catholic or Jewish or Muslim. There's one spiritual brain. And of course there's one source of life. So we have one spiritual brain and we have one source of life. We're all spiritual beings and we're on this common shared, there's one spiritual journey. Now we can call it different things.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
Nausheen Chen on How to Embrace Your Unique Voice | EP 530
There's beautiful faith traditions, Hashem, God, Jesus, Allah, but we're on one spiritual journey together.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
The Battle of a Lost Mind: What Andy Dunn’s Life Teaches Us | EP 531
It doesn't matter if I'm Hindu or Christian or Catholic or Jewish or Muslim, there's one spiritual brain. And of course there's one source of life. So we have one spiritual brain and we have one source of life. We're all spiritual beings and we're on this common shared, there's one spiritual journey. Now we can call it different things.
Passion Struck with John R. Miles
The Battle of a Lost Mind: What Andy Dunn’s Life Teaches Us | EP 531
There's beautiful faith traditions, Hashem, God, Jesus, Allah, but we're on one spiritual journey together.