Caroline Adams Miller

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.

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.

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.

There is no one acronym that fits SMART goals. It ain't science.

Thank you. Really nice to be here.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.