Caroline Adams Miller

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.

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.

And I'm so proud of the fact that I have done that.

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.

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?

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.

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

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

They should be dead by now, but they're just zombies walking around. They don't work. Let's kill them off.