198: Creating Your Best Life – Featured Interview with Caroline Miller, MAPP

Author, Speaker, and Owner of Caroline Miller Coaching

Caroline Adams Miller and Bill Ringle discuss goal setting and achievement in depth for the benefit of small business leaders.

>>> Visit MyQuestforTheBest.com for complete show notes and more expert advice and inspiring stories to propel your small business growth.

Interview Insights

Top Takeaways from this Interview

  • What it means to be a goal setter.
  • The importance of environment when it comes to unlocking abilities.
  • The formula for developing grit, and why some people never do.
  • How to train Millennial employees in the workplace to learn course correction.
  • Understanding the Losada line and why teams benefit from psychological safety.

Read the Show Notes from this Episode

  • 3:10 Readers of Caroline’s newest book are entitled to new worksheets for the rest of their lives.
  • 3:41 “I believe I am born competitive, my top Gallup strength is a competitor.”
  • 5:40 “Half of your happiness is hard-wired, and the other half is completely up to you.”
  • 6:13 “The environment unlocks and refines certain qualities that you can turn into the best possible strengths you have.”
  • 7:22 How Angela Duckworth first stumbled across the idea of grit.
  • 7:49 “You can have too soft a life where you don’t discover what you’re made of because you’re constantly being rescued from your own misdeeds.”
  • 8:23 “We all need to have 3-7 major setbacks that cause us to challenge our belief system and ask ourselves ‘Is this really the direction I want to go in?”
  • 9:49 “Instead of seeking excellence we have a lot of mediocrity.”
  • 10:28 The relationship between student-athletes and grit
  • 10:54 “If you don’t show up the boat doesn’t go out on the water.”
  • 11:16 “In order to get to the fruit at the end of the vine at the end of the growing season to find out what your made of and what your best possible outcome is, you’ll have to eat bitter first.”
  • 13:02 The psychology of the near miss – “For many people, it wasn’t their appetite to go back and do more.”
  • 13:33 “If you don’t grow up with that kind of experience in your life, woe to you.”
  • 13:57 “How do we hire people who’ve never held themselves to high standards?”
  • 16:08 On Millennials – “A lot of them are chasing likes and not seeking respect.”
  • 18:12 “I bring research and evidence-based tools to people so that they can understand that smart goals are just the tip of the iceberg.”
  • 19:20 The two aspects of goal-setting theory
  • 20:00 “If I know people’s top 5-7 strengths, I can help people use those strengths in the proper context so they can maximize their chances of achieving their goals.”
  • 21:55 “I’ve made it my mission to always turn around and pull people with me.”
  • 24:33 Why smart goals just don’t take it far enough – “The best performance doesn’t come from only setting realistic goals.”
  • 26:00 Case study of how Caroline helped a team use their measurable goals to determine new learning and performance goals.
  • 30:03 “Optimal relationships where there’s flourishing, where work teams are doing better and better, they have a ration of about 5 positive interactions or facial expressions or pats on the back or 5 positive to 1 negative tend to predict work teams and organizations and marriages where you have optimal amounts of flourishing.”
  • 33:45 Why it’s important for a leader to have a sense of humor.
  • 35:10 “People who have humor, or have the ability to lighten the mood or make other people laugh are basically saying ‘it’s not all about me.’”
  • 38:43 The problem with stupid grit.
  • 39:04  “People who don’t give up on old goals that live past their usefulness have what I call stupid grit.”
  • 42:19 The research surrounding lost possible selves
  • Click to listen and subscribe on your favorite place to enjoy podcasts below so you are the first to know when a new episode is released. My Quest for the Best is the podcast where ambitious small business leaders discover strategies and tactics to unlock their growth potential.
  • Give us a 5-star rating and positive review to make it easier for other small business owners to find and benefit from our work!

Subscribe to Your Favorite Podcast App

Click to listen and subscribe to your favorite place to enjoy podcasts below so you are the first to know when a new episode is released.

My Quest for the Best is the podcast where ambitious small business leaders discover strategies and tactics to unlock their growth potential.

Give us a 5-star rating and positive review to make it easier for other small business owners to find and benefit from our work!

Expert Bio 

Caroline is one of the world’s leading positive psychology experts on Goals & Grit ™. She’s spent more than 30 years helping individuals, leaders, and companies to cultivate grit, one of the top indicators of success. Caroline is the author of six books including Getting Grit (Sounds True 2017), Creating Your Best Life (Sterling 2009), Positively Caroline (Cogent 2013), and My Name is Caroline (Doubleday 1988). Live Happy Magazine named Creating Your Best Life one of the top 10 goal setting books ever published and Getting Grit one of the 10 books that would change your life in 2017. Caroline’s work has been featured in media around the world including BBC News World, The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC, NPR, and CNN.

Angela Duckworth, the winner of the 2013 MacArthur Genius grant for her research on grit, said of Caroline: “I don’t know anybody who has thought more than [Caroline] about how to apply the scientific research on grit and achievement to our own lives!”

Caroline’s TEDx Talk “The Moments That Make Champions” explores the three things that we can choose to do differently to improve our chances of developing grit. Caroline has worked with clients around the world, including Morgan Stanley, Lululemon, The Wharton School/UPENN, RE/MAX, Booz Allen, Young Presidents’ Organization, Harvard Law School, and Swisse Wellness.

Caroline has a Masters of Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and graduated magna cum laude from Harvard. She is a top-ranked Masters Swimmer in multiple events, has a black belt in Hapkido, and has more than three decades of unbroken recovery from bulimia.

Contact Info for Caroline Miller

Web address: http://www.carolinemiller.com/

Travels from: Washington, DC

Phone: (214) 543-0844

Social Media Links

Books Authored by the Guest

Creating Your Best Life by Caroline Miller

Resources Mentioned During the Interview

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