Caroline Adams Miller

And I think a lot of people have that reaction.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.