Ever wonder why your goals keep falling flat—no matter how hard you try?
Forget everything you’ve been told about reaching for your dreams, because in today’s episode, we’re busting myths and revealing the evidence-based secrets to setting and achieving big goals—without relying on the decades-old (and often ineffective) SMART framework.
As we kick off a new year (and possibly a whole new you!), I’m excited to welcome Caroline Adams Miller, a globally recognized authority on positive psychology, grit, and the true science of goal-setting. We cover everything from mastering the difference between performance and learning goals to building a supportive community that actually cheers you on. If you’re done playing small and ready to step into your power, this conversation has your name all over it.
Before we get any further… ICYMI, we launched our first EVER exclusive community where you can get live coaching from me, accountability from likeminded financial feminists, and access to thoouussaannddss of dollars of content on everything from budgeting to debt payoff and more. Learn more about The $100K Club!
Key takeaways
Why SMART goals fall short
Caroline pulls back the curtain on why the classic SMART goal framework isn’t backed by research. Instead of empowering us, those “attainable” and “realistic” steps can box us into playing small. You’ll learn how setting more ambitious, growth-oriented goals—grounded in genuine science—unlocks greater motivation and better results.
Performance vs. learning goals
One of the biggest “aha” moments is understanding the difference between a performance goal (a clear, repeatable task that you already know how to do) and a learning goal (one that requires brand-new skills). Caroline explains how mixing these two approaches can seriously derail your progress, and shows you a better way to categorize and tackle your dreams.
Harnessing positive psychology
The field of positive psychology demonstrates that when you’re in a state of flourishing—feeling optimistic, curious, and engaged—you naturally achieve more. Caroline breaks down how cultivating an upbeat mindset and proactively managing stress can boost your creativity, decision-making, and overall success in goal pursuit.
Building a supportive network
Ever wondered why accountability groups and mastermind sessions get so much hype? Caroline references the “Shalane Effect” to illustrate how surrounding yourself with positive, like-minded people can supercharge your grit, keep you motivated, and accelerate your journey toward big achievements.
Navigating gender bias and self-promotion
Caroline gets real about the unique challenges women face, from subtle (and not-so-subtle) workplace barriers to the taboo of “bragging.” She offers actionable tips for amplifying the voices of women around you, advocating for yourself without penalty, and moving past the fear that you’re taking up too much space.
Using the ‘Bridge Methodology’
Caroline shares her comprehensive ‘Bridge Methodology,’ which layers proven research on mindset, relationships, and decision-making right on top of Locke and Latham’s original goal-setting theory. This integrated approach helps you plan more effectively, stay accountable, and pivot when needed—so you can achieve goals that genuinely transform your life.
Notable quotes
“We need to learn mastery, not helplessness, because at the end of the day, we only flourish when we do hard things.”
“Women don’t just lack confidence—we often lack the social safety net that allows us to show up unapologetically.”
“If you don’t specify quit criteria for your goals, you’re likely to hold on too long for all the wrong reasons.”
Episode at-a-glance
≫ 03:36 Setting goals for the new year
≫ 06:32 Understanding positive psychology
≫ 14:58 Overcoming systemic barriers
≫ 26:16 The Shalane Effect and relational grit
≫ 32:05 The subtle art of female communication
≫ 35:13 The science of goal setting
≫ 36:24 Performance goals vs. learning goals
≫ 47:26 Navigating gender bias in the workplace
≫ 49:53 Promoting women and amplifying success
Caroline’s Links:
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Meet Caroline
Caroline Adams Miller is a globally recognized authority in positive psychology, with a particular focus on goals and grit. With a pioneering spirit, she has dedicated over three decades to advancing these fields, helping individuals and organizations achieve their most challenging goals and enhance their overall well-being.
Caroline was among the first cohort to earn a Masters of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) from the University of Pennsylvania in 2006, a program initiated by Dr. Martin Seligman, the father of positive psychology. She graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University, laying a strong foundation for her future endeavors in psychology and personal development. She is a black-belt martial artist and Masters swimmer. Caroline is the author of nine influential books that have been translated into several languages, including German, Korean, Spanish, Chinese, Japanese, and Italian, reaching a broad international audience.
Caroline’s contributions to positive psychology have been widely recognized. Dr. Martin Seligman highlighted her work in his book Flourish, noting her significant impact on the field. Angela Duckworth, a leading researcher on grit, praised Caroline’s deep understanding and practical application of grit research, stating, “No one has thought more than Caroline about how to apply the scientific research on grit and achievement to our own lives!” She is a sought-after speaker and has presented at prestigious venues such as the Wharton Business School’s Executive Education program. In 2014, she delivered a TEDx talk titled “The Moments That Make Champions,” which resonated with audiences worldwide and has garnered tens of thousands of views.
Her expertise has been featured extensively in major media outlets, including BBC World News, The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC, NPR, The Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, and CNN. Caroline has worked with an impressive array of clients, including Morgan Stanley, Lululemon, Coldwell Banker, American Bankers Association, Blizzard Entertainment, RE/MAX, Booz Allen, Young Presidents’ Organization, Harvard Law School, The World Bank, and Swisse Wellness. She helps these organizations and their leaders identify and pursue their most ambitious goals, fostering environments of success and well-being.
Caroline’s detailed journey of overcoming bulimia in “My Name is Caroline” showcases her belief in the transformative power of grit and goal setting. She emphasizes that achieving hard, meaningful goals is one of the most rewarding pursuits in life, leading to profound personal and professional fulfillment. Through her books, speeches, and consulting work, Caroline Adams Miller continues to inspire and equip individuals and organizations worldwide to harness the power of grit and positive psychology, transform their lives, and achieve their highest potential.
Transcript:
Caroline Adams Miller:
I suddenly had this awful realization that I listened only to what I began to call Dude podcasts, and it was men talking to other men about men. So, I had heard about special forces in Navy SEALs and Green Berets and U.S. Presidents and transformational CEOs and people from history and inventors and the rest of it. And I realized that I hadn’t even heard a woman used as an example. And so then I really went down the rabbit hole and realized that we are all being hypnotized by Dude podcasts. And so, if we’re not asleep at the wheel, we have to wake up and realize that we are hearing stories that shape our goals. We’re hearing stories about unrelatable role models, and it doesn’t give us the self-efficacy, the vicarious belief that I can do that too.
Tori Dunlap:
Yes, Mary cosplay, virgin Mother Mary cosplay, producer Kristin has not had heat in her house for, what are we on, a week? Longer week, almost a week. And so you can’t see her, but to paint this picture, she is cosplaying the virgin Mother Mary. She is in a Walmart, which Mary definitely had, a Walmart like cozy sweatshirt, like snuggle-snoogle thing. And then, what do they call it? Snuggies? Snuggies, kind of one of those. She has this headscarf thing going on that’s either like … It’s giving cold woman without heat at home, and I didn’t know that this is what her attire would base. She has already informed us on Slack of how cold it is. I think it was 55 degrees in her house, but warming up maybe to 57. So send, I mean, this is going to be in the past now, but send producer Kristin good warm vibes as we head into the coldest time of the year.
Financial Feminist, I’m excited to see you. This is the first episode ever you’re listening of this show. Welcome. My name is Tori. I run Her First $100K, which is a money and career platform for women. I believe I was put on this earth to fight for your financial rights. If you want a free personalized money plan, if you’re confused about how to get started on your personal finance journey, you’re overwhelmed, you’ve been panicking, googling how to save money, question mark, at two in the morning. Cool, we got you covered. You’re going to go to herfirst100k.com/quiz. We’ll also link it down below, and you’re going to answer a couple questions for us about where you’re at in your financial journey. It’s not a pass or fail quiz, we’re just asking you some questions.
And then we will get you a free personalized money plan for wherever you’re at. Whether you are focused on paying off debt, focused on trying to learn how to invest, focused on saving money, all of that. So herfirst100k.com/quiz. If you listen to this show and have not completed the quiz, that is the best thing you can do. That is the best next step to take your personal finance education even further and is a great companion guide to everything we do on the show. And if you’re an oldie but a goodie, you knew that already, but maybe you haven’t taken the quiz, so go do that.
And if you want to go past and beyond the quiz, maybe you took the quiz and you got some good information, or maybe you need that personalized help, that accountability from me, we have our brand spanking new program called The $100K Club. It is a membership program that combines community and actionable information in your one-stop shop. So, we have so many incredible people who have already joined who are engaging in learning how to finally pay off their debt, finally manage their money and their money mindset to save money, and to do it in a community that feels accountable and supportive.
And that’s one of the things we talk about in this episode is that goals without accountability are really hard to achieve. Because if no one is holding you accountable, if no one is cheering you on, if no one is challenging you when things get tough, you’re probably not going to achieve your goals. For me, my $100K goal, my first $100K, I think the biggest reason that happened is because I had people around me who were keeping me accountable to it and who were encouraging me and who weren’t shaming me or judging me for trying to save that much money.
I would love to see you in The $100K club. If you’re listening to this in January of 2025, we have some incredible bonuses that you can get access to that are only available in January, so I would love to see you there in The $100K club. You can learn all about it in the description below. You can also go to herfirst100k.com/100K 1-0-0-K/pod, so herfirst100k.com/100K/pod. We would really love to see you there.
Okay, team, we have a great episode today. One of my favorite conversations and one that honestly kind of surprised me, sometimes I walk into episodes and I’m like, “You know what? Because we always get great guests and because Kristen and her podcast team do really good work, we’re going to have a great time.”
But this one was just really, really interesting. Because it’s the new year, everyone is talking about setting goals, of course, but no one is talking about how to do this correctly. And one of the things that blew my mind, and I’m not even going to bury the lead here, is that SMART Goals are not science backed. The acronym S-M-A-R-T is not science backed. There are so many things that we can do to set goals with a framework to actually achieve them. We’re talking with our guests today all about how to actually set goals and then actually get yourself a framework where you’re not going to be in the same place you were this time next year. Our guest today, Caroline Adams Miller is a globally recognized authority and positive psychology with a particular focus on goals and grit. With a pioneering spirit she’s dedicated over three decades to advancing these fields, helping individuals and organizations achieve their most challenging goals and enhance their overall well-being.
She’s the author of nine books, nine, including My Is Caroline, a powerful memoir about her struggles with bulimia, and Good Grit, which delves into the power of perseverance and how to cultivate it. We brought Caroline on to talk about her new book, Big Goals and How to Set Goals You’ll Actually Achieve. We talk about her science-backed goal-setting theory, and no, again, it is not SMART Goals, and why it’s important for women to think about goal-setting differently than men. We also get into positive psychology, what it is and how we can use its principles in our day-to-day lives. And her work that inspired her to write her previous book, which is called Good Grit, A quick content warning. We do briefly discuss Caroline’s history with eating disorders. So, if that’s something that is difficult for you to hear, I would still recommend the rest of the episode. It’s going to be obvious when we get to that part. Maybe skip forward a couple of minutes and then we’ll see you on the other side.
This episode is the perfect episode for the new year. So, if you are looking to actually set goals you’re going to achieve this year and goals that actually feel reasonable and doable, but also maybe a little exciting, you’ve come to the right place. Let’s go ahead and get into it. But first a word from our sponsors. We are really excited to have you. Let’s level set some definitions before we even get started. What is positive psychology, and what drew you specifically to wanting to do this kind of work?
Caroline Adams Miller:
Positive psychology is the study of people, institutions, and communities in flourishing. How do they flourish? Instead of, what makes people languish, it’s what makes people flourish. So, positive psychology is about amplifying the good. And then what made me want to study as I read Authentic Happiness in the early 2000s, and I was a certified executive coach and the credentialing process was a little Wild Wild West. And I wanted to use evidence-based approaches, and I loved Marty’s work. And then that big iconic cover from, I think it was Time Magazine, the cover was a big smiley face, the science of happiness. And in that issue was a paragraph, tiny paragraph saying that 34 men and women would be going to Penn that fall for the first time ever in the world to study the application of the science of positive psychology to different parts of the world. As a coach and as somebody fascinated by goal setting, that’s what I came in for. But it changed me, not just professionally, personally, positive psychology, the science of well-being, it changes who people are in fundamental ways, and that’s pretty fascinating.
Tori Dunlap:
How does your background as an executive coach help inform the work that you’re doing in positive psychology?
Caroline Adams Miller:
Sure. So in executive coaching, it’s often people, if not always, people who are seeking to accomplish things, whether it’s with their organization or themselves or on leadership or whatever. And there are credentialing criteria around managing progress and accountability and goal setting. I mean, you have to do it, it’s part of certification. And yet, until I got to Penn in 2005, I did not know that there was a science to goal setting, and that was the eureka moment. It applied very directly to the work I did, but also my life long fascination with competition, success and goal setting, the dark side of it, and also when and how we can flourish at our best.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and I would love to talk more about that. It’s very easy, let’s say, to hear the word positive psychology and be like, “Okay, I know we should be happy, that’s great.” But what is the science behind positive psychology? How do we know with that evidence-based science that this is something that is not only studyable, but that something that can concretely improve our lives?
Caroline Adams Miller:
Right. There’s a lot of research, very robust research.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah.
Caroline Adams Miller:
Research documenting how it can improve our lives. But the basis of the field is from the late 1900s, 1998 or so. When Martin Seligman called out to the APA, American Psychological Association, “We got to stop studying men’s ills, women’s ills, and start studying what’s good.” And it was a ratio of 17 to one negative to positive. But the field was informed by studies of twins, identical and fraternal twins separated at birth. And what was found is we inherit a set point, but we have a space, we have a cap in which we can continue to flourish above our set point. And by studying the identical and fraternal twin separated at birth they didn’t just discover there was a set point. They discovered that there was variability, based on what you did, what you thought about. And that’s why the field exists, is because when you amplify your well-being, when you take your set point and go to the highest level of your ability to flourish, happiness precedes success.
And that’s one of the findings I put in my capstone, which became the book, Creating Your Best Life. When you’re flourishing emotionally, you’re more likely to achieve all of your goals. And Barbara Fredrickson’s theory, foundational theory called Broaden and Build, found that from an evolutionary perspective, when we’re flourishing, we’re more curious, we’re more likely to build relationships with other people, which help us to survive, we take in more data from the environment. And we broaden our relationships and build the way we think and operate. So, it’s critical from an evolutionary perspective, but now also from a human perspective, flourishing people succeed more often in life, and they have better lives.
Tori Dunlap:
You mentioned in your book that as you were growing up you had success but not grit. Can you break that down and can you share an example of what that might look like to have success but not grit and how that impacts you?
Caroline Adams Miller:
Yeah, so my example in the book is that I had academic success, I had athletic success, I had success. But I also had bulimia. And this was back in the 1970s and early 1980s when eating disorders were everywhere, but there were no cures, no solutions. And so, as a competitive swimmer, I thought this was going to be the thing I died from. And so, I hit my last bottom the week after I got married in 1983, a week after I graduated from college, and realized this thing was going to follow me for the rest of my life if I didn’t find a way to recover. And I’d never had my period, my teeth were crumbling, but it was still my secret. So, what happened was I began to develop grit, and this was what I shared with Angela Duckworth and why I wrote the book Getting Grit.
I developed grit in my 20s in order to recover from bulimia and stay in recovery for 40 years. And that to me is the greatest credit that I can give to myself as I did something hard, bigger than myself, it was my goal. Just like saving money so that people can do the things they want to do, be philanthropists, whatever it is that money gives you. This was my intrinsic goal. And before that I’m not sure what had been my intrinsic goal. So, I had had resume virtues. I was succeeding in things that society said were important, but they didn’t make me happy. This didn’t just make me happy, it showed me what it’s like to be resilient and pick yourself up over and over and over again in pursuit of something meaningful that makes your life better. And in the process I made other people’s lives better too.
Because I ended up writing the first autobiography by anybody who got better from bulimia, and that book, My Name is Caroline, came out in 1988, hundreds of thousands of letters, people told me, and they still tell me, I’m getting goosebumps while I say this. They still tell me they remember where they were when they first saw the book in a library or a bookstore, and they realized they had hope, that someone out there had gotten better and that if that one person got better they could too. And so, that informed my work in grit. So, I put it in Creating Your Best Life. I wrote the book Getting Grit, but I remember saying to Angela and then writing in the book, I didn’t want to write a book about qualities that you’re born into, right family, the right country, whatever it was. I wanted to write a book about a quality that was the X factor to success, but that you could cultivate if you broke it down into different behaviors and mindset and the way you think. So, that’s what I did.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, you have an incredible story. First of all, thank you for sharing it with others. And I think what you’re really talking about, and I would love to dial even further, is the difference between either natural-born talent or cultivated talent even, and grit. And that light you up, but also that keep you going, even though it might be difficult. Is that what we’re talking about when we’re defining what grit is?
Caroline Adams Miller:
Yeah, it’s not simple resilience. It’s not about just twisting your ankle on the soccer field and limping through to the finish. That’s important, and resilience is a part of grit. But grit has baked into it this presumption that you’re pursuing something long-term and hard. There will be dark nights of the soul, there will be failure, and it’s how you handle that that’s all about grit. It really is important that you’re pursuing goals that are your goals. Because that passion that sitzfleisch, to use a Yiddish term, button seat, just sit down and get the work done. That’s a piece of what keeps you going. If it was someone else’s goal, I’m not sure you would have what it took to do really, really hard things, so you have to have that.
Tori Dunlap:
When I think about a common theme on the show, especially this year, we talk with millions of women all of the time, and one of the things I see is that they have their big dreams. They have their big passion, and patriarchy, the system, whatever you want to call it, constantly reminds them, or tells them, not reminds them, tells them, “You’re not good enough, or you’re not this enough, or you’re not.” So, it’s designed to shrink us. It’s designed to make us hate ourselves. How do we work to overcome that to discover and continue validating our own grit when every single systemic barrier exists to tell us that we can’t?
Caroline Adams Miller:
That’s a big question, and I’m going to-
Tori Dunlap:
Solve patriarchy please for me, please, please, please.
Caroline Adams Miller:
Yeah, I mean, I did my research in what you’ve covered, what you’ve done, the grit you had to just start this show with a $99 microphone. I mean, you brought your passion, your backstory to doing this, so that’s just a great example of grit. The patriarchy exists and the patriarchy has become an embedded process in the workplace around goal setting and around pay. And this is because, and I’ll just go straight to goal setting, the productivity systems that were invented in 1881, time in motion studies. And going on through the decade after decade, and then going to management by objectives, Peter Drucker, the Andy Grove at Intel. KPIs and OKRs, and then finally Locke and Latham’s goal-setting theory, which by the way is the only science out there on goal setting. SMART Goals isn’t science. OKRs and KPIs are just measuring a lot of data and not necessarily the softer skills, but first of all, we as women have to understand that the deck is stacked against us.
And I had a eureka moment when I was writing the book, or actually it was a few years ago, but I put it in the book. Where I’d been taking notes for seven hours on podcasts while I drove to and from our beach home in Delaware. And as I went through the notes and downloaded my Apple Watch, I suddenly had this awful realization that I had listened only to what I began to call Dude podcasts, and it was men talking to other men about men. So, I had heard about special forces and Navy SEALs and Green Berets and U.S. Presidents and transformational CEOs and people from history and inventors and the rest of it. And I realized that I hadn’t even heard a woman used as an example. And so, then I really went down the rabbit hole and realized that we are all being hypnotized by Dude podcasts and dude, not yours, of course. Dude podcasts-
Tori Dunlap:
No, it’s the bro podcast. Yeah, it’s the bro.
Caroline Adams Miller:
I like, dude.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, sure.
Caroline Adams Miller:
Yeah, bro podcasts, right? And so, if we’re not asleep at the wheel we have to wake up and realize that we are hearing stories that shape our goals. We’re hearing stories about unrelatable role models, and it doesn’t give us the self-efficacy, the vicarious belief that I can do that too. Then I’ll take it right to Wikipedia, which is in the middle of something called the Women in Red Project. There are so many women in history whose names have not become hyperlinked blue stories and narratives in Wikipedia because their stories have never been told. And there’s also this thing called drive-by editing. A lot of men will delete the bios of women. So, 18% of the biographies in Wikipedia are of women, 82% are of men. So, when you think about, where do I get my role models to set my goals, to save money, to become what I want to become, we have to look around and say, where are we getting stopped short? Where are we shooting ourselves in the foot?
And I can’t go without mentioning a really huge problem, that is the elephant in the room wherever I go in the world. And that is women undermining other women. And we can’t have this conversation without acknowledging that that’s been researched. It’s been found to be true, but we as women are not allowed to talk about it. It’s taboo, because we have to stay focused on the bad patriarchy. And I think it’s both and. And we have to wake up to the fact that other women, because of social conditioning, are often the first to rain on our parade. And you’re nodding, which tells me exactly what I’m talking about.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, I mean, we’ve talked a lot about patriarchy in the show, and we define it as something that hurts anybody of any gender, right? Patriarchy hurts women. It is internalized as well. Internalized misogyny affects all of us. Patriarchy hurts men very deeply. But yes, I mean, often the worst people in my comments are other women. And it’s because, you’re exactly right, it’s the social conditioning. I truly believe, it’s not because they’re bad people. It’s because we all have been trained to believe that there’s one seat at the table for women. There’s one seat, and so we have to fight everybody else who might be a threat to my own success or my own seat at that table.
Caroline Adams Miller:
Well, there are a number of reasons why women do it, and that’s just one of them. There are like six very distinct reasons, and I wrote about it in my eighth book, #IHaveYourBack. Because what I wanted to understand before I talked about it any more publicly on a stage or anywhere else, I wanted to understand, first of all, is this a real thing or is it just all an era one? I realized, of course, there’s this thing called kicking and climbing in male dominated professions where women kick and climb, they don’t climb and lift. But then there’s religious restrictions that cause many women to have honor killings in their families if women dare to have goals. There’s linguistics. We are held back by the fact that there are a lot of words in our vocabulary that promote the idea of things like cat fighting, and there’s no comparable word that talks about what men do to each other that’s negative.
Then we have show after show, after show, after show of Dance Moms. We’ve got the Real Housewives. We have Mean Girl Murders. And not only that, we have these very successful movies and shows on stage about Mean Girls. There’s even an international delight coffee creamer called Mean Girls. Now, if that isn’t telling us that this is a thing that is hardwired that women do, because it’s not hardwired. I’ve studied matrilineal and patriarchal cultures and it doesn’t exist in all cultures, so it’s not hardwired. This is learned behavior, and we are inculcating it in our youth by them not seeing women promoting other women or having the decency to hit like when they post something about themselves on LinkedIn that they’re proud of. Do you know how many women get ghosted the minute they achieve something big? This is a piece of what’s holding us back.
And so, if we’re going to talk about solutions, I want to go straight to mastermind groups. Mastermind groups are where you come together with other age agentic women who want to play bigger in their own lives. And your big is different from my big. But there is a key Rorschach test to getting into a group like that and trusting other people with your dreams and goals. And that is, when they hear your good news or your big dream, do they have curiosity and enthusiasm? Do they have this active, constructive responding that Shelly Gable at UC Santa Barbara has studied? And her piece of research that just lit up my life is called, What Happens between Friends When things go Right? There are three other ways to respond to good news, and they’re all negative, and they cause you to derail your goals and your dreams.
So active constructive responding, Shelly Gable said, “Okay, look up at the smoke detector, push the red button with a fake piece of news, fake piece of success, and then just watch your mother, your sister, your sister-in-law, your co-workers, watch how they respond.” They have just told you who they are. They don’t go in your mastermind group. A mastermind group ought to have psychological safety. Because women don’t have it, let alone at work. Are you kidding? We have incoming fire all day every day, and we’re supposed to just deal with it, right? I’m going to stop talking right there.
Tori Dunlap:
No, this is, yes. Okay, I want to tie this to grit, because when we’re talking about grit and we’re talking about finding the thing that really lights us up, even if it’s difficult, I think both of these can be linked back together, which is that you need that support system to keep going, and you need people to champion you. And your grit equation does not work unless you have people who are challenging you and supporting you, not constantly telling you that you’re not good enough or making you feel less than.
Caroline Adams Miller:
And making you feel less than sometimes by just avoiding acknowledging you just said something positive about yourself.
Tori Dunlap:
Or seeing it as a personal attack for them of like, “Oh, well, this person’s doing great and I’m not doing enough. So rather than see that as a me problem, I am going to not celebrate them.”
Caroline Adams Miller:
And why not lean into that person and not just celebrate them? Train yourself, overcome your envy, to then ask them, “How did you do it?” And so, this is a piece of what women are constantly dealing with is this negativity and the inability to find people who have our backs. And we have to just stop thinking that the people around us who should be happy for us will be happy for us. And that is just a huge issue that I see too many women failing to acknowledge, because the research shows that 84% of women surround themselves with frenemies, because we never want to not be seen as nice. And there you go right to the workplace where we have to be agentic and competent and warm. And I could go on and on about what the research shows about women who are agentic or who just follow directions and go to onboarding events, happy hours.
Women who do that when they’re hired are actually seen as too ambitious and unlikable and cold. Whereas the young men who go to these onboarding events, they’re celebrated. There are so many differences in how women are perceived and judged, and this research is now just coming out, because no one ever thought to challenge the existing research to say, “Does it work for women and people of color as well as it works for white men?” And that is why I have, in my book I start with goal setting theory, and I added onto it this bridge methodology. The R is relationships. Oh my gosh, the power of relationships to uplift you and support you and derail you is profound. And we need to be very thoughtful before we announce our dreams or go after them.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, in what you’re talking about at the workplace, it’s very easy then because of patriarchy and capitalism to go, okay, grit might feel at times a little like hustle culturally. So, how do we cultivate grit in a world that does feel like it’s set up to have us fail or more dramatically burn out because we’re just trying to get to where we want to be?
Caroline Adams Miller:
Yeah. I’ll answer by saying, have you ever heard of the Shalane Effect?
Tori Dunlap:
I don’t think so. No.
Caroline Adams Miller:
Okay, you’re going to love this because it’s part of the answer. Shalane Flanagan was one of the top middle distance/distance runners in our country for years, and she was very openly nakedly ambitious about wanting to win the New York City Marathon, and she had never won it. She had physical issues or whatever. But we have this tradition in this country of young female promising runners burning out in silos all by themselves. And so, what did Shalane Flanagan do when she had these huge goals that everyone knew about and people didn’t always support? She asked her competitors and her fellow female runners to relocate and train with her out in Oregon, and she created a training community where she was the mother hand, if you were ill, she got you to the doctor, if you wanted to quit she talked you back into believing in yourself and so on and so forth.
And a few years ago Shalane Flanagan won the New York City Marathon. And what the New York Times wrote about the following day was not just that she had won and how this was just the answer to a lot of her dreams, but it was about the Shalane effect. And what is that? Every woman who relocated to train with her has now won the Olympics, won the world championships, done their best times. This is the model for what women need. We need the Shalane effect. We need to be in communities where we build each other up and have what I call relational grit. We become grittier because of the power of the relationships we’re in. And women can’t do this, unless they are confident that they know who has their backs, because it’s been found at work that it’s not confidence that women lack. We have tons of confidence.
What we lack is the ability to speak up and go after our dreams because we’re afraid we’re going to be ghosted, excommunicated and torn down, and we will be. Last thing I want to say is I was sharing the stage in 2019 at a women’s conference with Sallie Krawcheck who founded Elevate. And she was speaking about how she became the CEO of Merrill Lynch and how amazing it was. It was like something she had wanted for years, and she was certainly qualified, and she added this one line about, she said, “I got the job at Merrill Lynch and I lost my best friend that night. And I turned around to look at a room of 200 some women behind me and what struck me was that nobody looked surprised.” This was just a, of course you lost your best friend.
So, I think we have to be, again, I’m just going to say it over and over again. We have to hit the red smoke detector button, float a fake dream or goal or piece of good news. Watch if someone responds with curiosity and enthusiasm, and if they don’t, they’re out. They’re outside of that first rung. I don’t care if it’s someone who’s a blood relative, because it’s always going to be a blood relative. I hate to say that, but it’s going to be best friends and sisters-in and all those people, plus acquaintances. And you can’t let it stop you, and too many women play small because of that.
Tori Dunlap:
I love the idea of floating almost a red herring, because if the response is not good you’re not emotionally tied up in it either. Because it’s a little white lie. And I can think about, if it was an actual accomplishment of mine and my parent or my best friend or my favorite coworker didn’t give me the champion response that I would hope, that would feel very crushing. Which I guess in a way kind of motivates you to maybe cut that person off. But I do kind of love because then you’re not emotionally tied attached to that thing and you can just see what happens.
Caroline Adams Miller:
No one’s ever pointed that out to me. Oh, that is a brilliant look at a piece of advice that people just follow and love. But you’re right, you’re not as emotionally invested, and it would be more painful if it was real news. And we all have examples. I have never met a woman whose eyes didn’t roll up and out of her head, but we’re not allowed to talk about this either, because if you publicly acknowledge that the sisterhood wasn’t with you, you essentially have been excommunicated from a tribe, because we’re supposed to be a sisterhood of supporters. And if you say, “Gosh, it didn’t happen to me,” it’s suddenly like you’re a leper, “Well, what’s wrong with her?” It’s a problem and we need to acknowledge it and take steps to avoid it in terms of, don’t let it, don’t let it derail your dreams. And make sure you’re there for other women. Don’t just take, be a giver as well.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, I think the reason that that can happen is saying like, “Well, the sisterhood wasn’t there for me.” And then the potential backlash to that I think comes from a lot of people’s blaming of individual women as the problem. People, even if individual women constantly are in my comments or in my email with very negative things to say, I don’t blame them. I blame the system that exists and the social conditioning that exists. And so I think that that is the problem that we have to solve that also affects men and affects men’s feelings of smallness when women take up space. I think that, yeah, just like you said, it’s a larger, and we know this, but it’s a larger societal issue. It’s the social conditioning, it’s patriarchy. It’s not specific people. It is the result of that social conditioning.
Caroline Adams Miller:
And yet, some people do more damage than others.
Tori Dunlap:
Totally. Totally.
Caroline Adams Miller:
When it’s the managing partner at the law firm where you’re working and that person has it in for you, and the research is so fascinating on this, it’s not because of anything you can point to. Sometimes it’s because you’re taller. Sometimes it’s because you went to a better college. Sometimes you’re prettier. And since girls become verbally agile so young, this is where women learn to fight. Because boys are encouraged to physically fight, women are encouraged to use their words. And so as adults, when women are throwing shade at you, the men often have no clue this is going on. They’ll say, “What? She’s the nicest person in the office.” And so, it leaves no fingerprints, therefore it becomes so embedded in the organization that it’s difficult to root it out. And then so many men have said to me, “That’s just the way women are.”
Tori Dunlap:
I have to take a deep breath.
Caroline Adams Miller:
I have one more thing I want to say, if you don’t mind about that?
Tori Dunlap:
Oh my gosh, please.
Caroline Adams Miller:
Okay. As I studied this problem up sideways, the linguistics of it, the religious, the cultural, the biological and social, what I realized, and this was also coming from coaching. A lot of female CEOs around the world, many of them in finance not getting a fair shake during performance reviews. But what I realized is that too many of them were hearing other powerful women saying that they mentored and sponsored women in their organizations. And these people knew for a fact it wasn’t being done. So, I really got curious about that. And what I found is that there’s research showing that sometimes when researchers go in organizations to find the mentees, the people who should be benefiting from the mentorship that is out there, and by the way, the McKinsey Lean in Report, Women in the Workplace this year said there’s less and less of this, no matter what.
What I realized is it’s too easy to say you mentor sponsor an ally with other women. So, I came up with a term that ought to be on every performance review in the world, ampliship, amplify, essentially ship, but ampliship, because I think we all ought to be judged on whether or not other people witness us saying positive things about another woman’s big ideas, successes, or goals. Because if there are no witnesses, my opinion is it may not have happened. And I think we need proof that women are out there supporting other women. So, I’ll just say ampliship ought to be the word of the year, if not the behavior of the year.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and also the responsibility, especially as white women, is we have a responsibility. We talk about a lot in the show, you have a responsibility to amplify your colleagues of color, make sure that they’re involved in decisions, if they are not having their voices heard, making sure that that is something that’s happening.
Caroline Adams Miller:
And if you’re interrupted, do you know how many women walk away with two strikes against them if they are interrupted in a meeting and another woman witnesses and does nothing to right it? And a lot of them are afraid to right it, but you walk away not just feeling disrespected because you were interrupted and either man’s blame or woman’s blame-
Tori Dunlap:
You feel alone.
Caroline Adams Miller:
You feel alone, you feel ghosted. But if somebody doesn’t right that wrong, immediately you walk out of there not with a lack of confidence, but a lack of believing that anyone has your back. So, why dare show your confidence?
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, this is super helpful and very insightful in stuff we talk about all the time. Okay, let’s talk about goal setting. You mentioned the helpfulness of breaking these big goals into smaller, manageable sub-goals, especially if you’re facing this very large, daunting task. Can we talk about the psychology perspective of why this works?
Caroline Adams Miller:
I would rather start, if you don’t mind, with the fact that goal setting science is not well known by most people.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah, sure.
Caroline Adams Miller:
Okay. So before you break a goal into steps you have to know what kind of goal you’re pursuing. When I went back to school in 2005 to get this Master’s Degree in Positive Psychology, that was the first time I had ever laid eyes on something called Goal Setting Theory by Locke and Latham. And I owned every single book that had ever been written on goal setting, all of them, all by men, by the way. Stephen Covey, Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy, John Maxwell, all of them, I had them all. And then after seeing Goal Setting Theory and seeing all the research and seeing that it’s ranked number one of 73 management theories, I was like, “Wait a minute. How am I setting goals without this?” So, I have been on a mission for 15 years, first in the book, Creating Your Best Life, and now with Big Goals to introduce everyone to this goal setting science.
So, before you break a goal into steps, you have to first understand that Locke and Latham found that there are only two kinds of goals. Performance goals, which are goals that fit on a checklist, like a recipe. You’ve done it before and you know how long it’ll take, you know how to make it excellent, et cetera. So, I’ll just call it a checklist approach, like a flight, a pilot doing a preflight check and a surgeon going in and doing a surgical checklist, a maid cleaning a hotel room, packing a suitcase. These are checklist goals. And then there are learning goals. And learning goals are things where you have to acquire the skills and knowledge in order to accomplish that goal, which means you cannot set a specific metric and excellent outcome to a learning goal yet. You have to give yourself the grace of flattening your learning curve as fast as possible from resources like this podcast, from YouTube, from whatever it takes.
And when you mix checklist goals up with learning goals, you have the biggest disasters in business history. When you mix them up, you will be derailed and you will not succeed at your goals. So back to breaking them down, if it’s a performance goal, what you break a performance goal, a checklist goal down into is, “What are the steps I’ve taken before in order to accomplish this goal?” And you write them down and you give yourself dates and times and what’s the metric? And Locke and Latham found that best outcomes are challenging and specific, not low goals, not do your best goals, not easy goals, challenging and specific. That’s a checklist goal.
Learning goals you have to break down into different metrics and also measure them. So, if you’re trying to learn conversational French, you don’t just say, “I’ll think about it, or I’ll look at different websites.” It’s challenging and specific. “I’m going to look at three different ways to learn conversational French. And by Friday I will have analyzed them to see which one has the highest likelihood of helping me to succeed.” And then you have metrics going forward from there. Is that helpful in terms of breaking goals down?
Tori Dunlap:
No, that makes perfect sense. And I think it’s so interesting to me that I feel like that has to be one of the most, if not the most written topic for books, especially all the dude bro books. But interesting that you’re finding, and you read all of them, that it wasn’t, I don’t know, it wasn’t actually science-based, yes?
Caroline Adams Miller:
Exactly. And artificial intelligence isn’t science-based. When you put in, give me a breakout on goal setting for, I don’t know, financial goals, it almost always, now I’ve checked perplexity, I’ve checked ChatGPT-4, I’ve checked Claude, all the rest of them. What seems to be embedded in all of them is zombie goal approaches like SMART Goals. And this should be dead by now. Because it was created by a management consultant in the early-1980s, and he just found a sticky acronym on his way to giving a workshop. And if you know Locke and Latham’s Goal Setting Theory, and you hear the most common definition of SMART Goals like reachable or attainable, you immediately know it undermines goal pursuit. So, research has found that if you use SMART Goals as a way to pursue goals, you’re likely to not achieve good outcomes, and it might even derail your progress. Should I just pause right there for a second for your reaction to SMART Goals?
Tori Dunlap:
That’s really interesting, because I’ve found it to be an okay tool to use, but I do agree that I think one of the things that always bothers me about goal setting, especially for women, is that level of obtainability. I’ve always said, it’s not a goal if it’s a Tuesday, right? If you set it and you’re like, “Yeah, I can do that, it’s a Tuesday,” it’s a random day, it’s not an actual goal. For me, I’ve always set goals that it should be slightly a beyond what feels comfortable, because then it’s a goal, it’s not just a normal day of the week.
Caroline Adams Miller:
That’s so interesting. I’ve never heard that phrase. You have some very unique ways of thinking about things that is really pretty fascinating. Your abstract thinking is fascinating. That’s interesting. It’s a Tuesday. So, this is what happens when people are setting goals for their bonuses or they don’t want to fail, let’s say, right? They have a fixed mindset. They don’t want anyone to know. They don’t know how to do something or do it well. They will set what Locke and Latham call low goals, and that’s inside of your comfort zone. And you will never find out what you’re capable of. You will never get your best outcomes, unless you’re struggling well. You have to struggle well outside of your comfort zone. And what most people do not know is that at the end of every day we subconsciously scan our days for what we’re proud of. And the things that we’re proud of are never the easy things. It’s the things we struggled well on to achieve mastery in something. And that’s how all of us build self-confidence.
Tori Dunlap:
How can we think about identifying what we truly want in a way that builds momentum without overwhelm?
Caroline Adams Miller:
Okay, so everyone’s got a different overwhelm. I think people have to first know what is it that is a healthy form of anxiety or apprehension that causes us to be more alert and to think a little bit bigger. Having a goal marshals all kinds of conscious and unconscious resources in us to scan our brains. What do I know? What do I not know? Who do I have to meet? What book do I have to read, yada, yada, yada. So, you need to have a goal that engages that process and puts you in a state of flow. If you have the book Big Goals, you will create a strategy that is going to make you not anxious so much, but you’re going to feel hopeful. And that was the goal in writing the book. Ask yourself, “What is the goal or what are the goals that I will regret not pursuing if I’m looking back on my life in 20 years?”
Everyone has a dream lurking inside of them. And you have to first articulate it around the right people, I’ve already covered that, and be challenged to flesh it out so that it becomes something that is something you can go after, something you can celebrate. And we know that, well, not everybody knows this, but it’s been around the field of psychology. Learned helplessness in the 1960s was devised by my mentor Marty Seligman and his partner Stephen Mayer, and they said, “These dogs who didn’t escape their cages when they were shocked to just lay down, they had learned to be helpless.” Well, we’ve gotten better at measuring different things like the cortisol in dog saliva. And what they found is the exact opposite. And this speaks to us with our goals.
They found that we’re born helpless. We must learn mastery in our lives. We must develop autonomy. That’s our mission in life, is to have goals that force us to create mastery, to do things step by step by step. Because that is what we as human beings are supposed to do, and that’s how we flourish. And we want to have flourishing lives. So, we don’t learn helplessness, we learn mastery, and that’s actually a positive.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and it sounds like if you don’t learn the mastery, the helplessness just continues. I know that sounds obvious, but I think it’s worth that point of, okay, if we can learn mastery, we can also unlearn helplessness.
Caroline Adams Miller:
Yes. And it changes your definition of yourself to yourself. I remember when I wrote Creating Your Best Life, they told me it was the most difficult deadline they’d ever given to an author. And my co-author ended up not being able to write a word of it. So I wrote Creating Your Best Life in a few months. And I didn’t think I could do it, but I did tell my mastermind group, I die trying. So they remember that. And as I wrote the book, borrowing people’s homes, working day and night, covered in hives at the end of it, I called my book agent because people would … I’d take my shirt off for a massage and they would gasp and they would go, “What is happening in your life?” I would say, “I’m writing a book called Creating Your Best Life. Can’t you tell?” I mean, it was horrifying what happened.
But I called my book agent as I crossed the Bay Bridge from the Delaware shores to go back to Maryland, and I said to him, “Ivor, I didn’t think I could do this. But I’ll tell you something, I’ve redefined who I am to myself.” And that is what I did when I recovered from bulimia. I can do that hard thing that is considered impossible. I can do other things. This is what we want to build upon. Doing hard things that cause us to take risks outside of our comfort zone, because good things happen.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and what it really sounds like we’re talking about too, although we haven’t said the word, is self-trust. So, if you continue to promise yourself things and you don’t follow through, there’s no self-trust, you’ve broken trust with yourself. Just like if I promised you I was going to do something, I was going to show up at four and I didn’t show up at four, you wouldn’t have as much trust for me. Maybe no trust at all. And it’s the same thing with ourselves. If we set goals and then we don’t achieve them, and then we don’t achieve them and don’t achieve them, if we say, “Hey, I’m going to do this thing today,” and you don’t do it, the trust has been broken between you and yourself, the contract you’ve made with yourself.
And so, I think the way, especially with all of the noise, with the patriarchy, with everything that’s going on outside yourself, women have to continue redefining and continue building that self-trust, especially if it’s been broken. And that’s the way we achieve anything we want to achieve. And to your point about overcoming these huge, monumental things, it’s the same thing for me. I can look at particular times in my life that were really hard and I got through them, and I like myself even more, and I trust myself even more, because I’m like, “If I got through that, I can get through this. If I did that and I moved on and I learned a lot, I can do this other really hard thing too.”
Caroline Adams Miller:
Right. And what you’re touching on also is when you talk about self-trust and breaking it, I think about shame. I think about-
Tori Dunlap:
Totally.
Caroline Adams Miller:
Right? We feel ashamed, and maybe we haven’t given ourselves the grace of learning how to do something yet. This is exactly what I’m talking about with goals gone wild. You may have a goal of saving a certain amount of money, but you haven’t learned to have a money diary. So, you have skipped some of the steps that make it possible for you to achieve that goal. And so there’s this shame, if you just knew goal-setting theory, that wouldn’t happen. But you’re touching on something even bigger than both of us. And that is a recent meta-analysis came out from some of the best gender researchers in the world, and they’re at NYU, they’re at Northwestern, Ellis Egley, Madeline Heilman I mean, Cecilia Ridgeway at Stanford. And what they found is in the last 90 years, when you look at how are women perceived in the world and in the workplace on different measures, what they found was women are now perceived as more competent than we were in 1940.
Why? Because there are more of us in the workplace. There’s more of an opportunity to see us doing things and doing things well. Where have women made zero progress in the workplace? Agency, agency. So, agency is being goal-directed. And so, what happens when women have goals and they’re agentic and they go after them? Well, we’ve violated stereotype norms, the black sheep effect. You’re not being warm and communal. And you’re not taking care of other people. You’re cold, you’re ambitious. This is not feminine behavior.
Tori Dunlap:
You’re a bitch.
Caroline Adams Miller:
You’re a bitch. Oh my gosh, the things that have been said about me, and to, well, self-absorbed, someone in my family said I was self-absorbed, because I was posting about writing my book, and I said, “Honey, do you want to see my contract where it says I have to do these things?”`
Tori Dunlap:
And also, who the fuck cares about a contract? And again, we’ve talked a lot on the show lately, because it happened a ton this year. Anytime I talk about my accomplishments, it’s so interesting what happens, most, 95% of our community, because we’ve cultivated a community of this, they will go, “Yes, yes, yes. That’s amazing. Congratulations. We’re honored to support you. Yay.” And then there’s the people who maybe are casual followers who have seen just this post, who have never seen any other posts are like, “Why are you bragging?” And I’m like, “I’m not bragging, I’m stating facts. And if the facts make you uncomfortable, that is a you problem, not a me problem.” And it’s the same thing that we try to champion in our community is like, “I want you celebrating the things you’ve accomplished. I want you screaming that from the rooftops.” And if people are not okay with that, to our point earlier, your point earlier is that those are not the people who are going to champion you for your life.
Caroline Adams Miller:
Well, I mean, I think the problem is that many, many, many women, it’s a sliver of women who are comfortable being around women who are self-promotional. Very few.
Tori Dunlap:
Because it feels uncomfortable, and it feels very foreign to us, because it is not something that we have been conditioned to do or that is “acceptable,” and I put that in quotes, to do.
Caroline Adams Miller:
Yeah. Well, so I have found a way around this, because we all know the research showing that if women negotiate and lean in negotiations to get a better salary, they’ll pay a social penalty later. And this is just very well known, but how do you do it? Well, you say, “I’m negotiating on behalf of all the other women coming behind me.” But even on very well-known women’s websites they talk about, “Well, if you can’t toot your own horn, who will?” And I remember screaming at my computer screen one day, other women, other women, why do we not even put that out there as an option that maybe what we can do is have this cabal, this coven, this group of women, and we agree ahead of time to amplify each other in the workplace, because we shouldn’t always be self-promoting.
We should have other people putting things out on our behalf. But we continue to tell women, “You just have to self-promote.” You’ll pay a price, and there’s just as easy a way around it is create allies and do it for them, and they’ll do it for you, and then you’re not going to pay the same social penalty.
Tori Dunlap:
My last question for you, I could talk to you for about 16 more hours, but we both have important work to do. In your TED talk you shared the three things that people with grit do. Can you share those with our listeners?
Caroline Adams Miller:
They flourish emotionally. They change the channel in their brains, and they do hard things. And so, I found without any exception that when I interviewed exemplars of good grit, authentic grit, people who did hard things, and in the process of doing those hard things for the right reasons, other people were awed and inspired silently by how they did it. What I found is they all changed the channel in their brains to either a word or a phrase. I interviewed a world record holder, mountain biker, and she sees herself going into a pain cave when she wants to quit, and she sees herself sitting in the pain cave with a big smile saying, “It’s okay in here.”
Some people have a song, some people have a spiritual phrase, but you have to agree with yourself ahead of time when you’re doing hard things that you’re going to want to quit, you’re going to want to quit for all kinds of reasons, not just physical. And you better have that backup plan in place of what you’re going to do mentally to stay in the game. Because if you don’t have that, you’re not going to get to the finish line.
Tori Dunlap:
So in some of the research you’ve found you’ve seen this very weird, these set of barriers that we kind of know exist but then are maybe even more dramatic or that we don’t realize are there when we’re trying to succeed in our goals, especially in work. What does that look like?
Caroline Adams Miller:
Well, it’s very diametrically uneven when it comes to men and women. So, all kinds of research shows that something like 76% of men get specific feedback on their performance and leadership attributes, and women don’t. Men are also hired and promoted on future potential. Women have to demonstrate certain things. Women who finish their work on time and do it well are not seen as dedicated as men are who take longer and work nights and weekends. They’re just seen as more dedicated and hardworking. And we also know that female CEOs don’t get as much time to succeed as men do. So, one of the things you have to be really thoughtful about when you set your goals, because every job performance review ought to have a set of specifically well-crafted goals that break them into learning goals and performance goals. Make sure you’re being measured and assessed by specific goals with metrics that you’re on top of, because without it you will not get agnostic feedback that is absolutely on target and neutral.
And if you don’t have that, you don’t have the right report card to be promoted, to take yourself somewhere else if necessary. And so, the workplace is really unbalanced against women, and that’s why when … I’ll just give you an example. I almost cracked the top 100 in leadership and motivation as a category on Amazon this week, I was like 109, and it’s a big deal to break 100. Because Pub Day was few days ago. So I went, it’s like, “Hmm, wow, who is in the top 100? 95 white men, a bunch of them dead, and a few women.” And so leadership in the workplace is still seen as male dominant. The behaviors that are aligned with men winning extrinsic stuff, money, power. And so make sure that you are being assessed, measured, and that you are pursuing goals with clear metrics from the get go so that you can advocate for yourself. Because your performance goal, by and large, is not going to be fair, unless you know how to advocate for yourself and you’ve got a document.
Tori Dunlap:
Yeah. We talked a bit about goal-setting theory. Are there any new additions to that, that we’re releasing this episode in January that we can do to even further achieve our goals or a way that is as pain-free as possible?
Caroline Adams Miller:
Yes. My goal was to create one book that every manager, man, woman, child, teenager, a musician, could just set a goal and pursue it. And so what I did was I started with goal-setting theory, Locke and Latham’s goal-setting theory. So you start with that, performance goal or learning goal, checklist goal or learning goal. And then I’ve got all of the newest research and the newest ways that people can succeed on mindset, on decision-making. I use a lot of Annie Duke’s work in game theory. And my bridge methodology encompasses all of this. And you have to prompt yourself in six areas, brainstorming, are you doing it right? How are you doing it? So I go into that, relationships, which relationships should and shouldn’t be in your life as you pursue this goal? Investments, what kind of investments do you have to make of your character, strengths of money, et cetera?
Decision-making theory. Decision-making is something people do not look at. We ought to be prepared to quit. If we don’t have quit criteria with our goals, then the tendency is to hold on too long for sunk costs. And so, decision-making and having a framework is important. G is good grit and E is excellence. And if you go through the worksheets and the prompts in the book and those six areas, I’ve brought all the newest, most relevant, important research together so that you start with the engine of goal setting theory and the rocket fuel is the bridge method. And I’ve been testing it for 15 years and it works. And I’ve never seen an approach that’s better. So, I’m proud of myself, I’m proud of it, but I’m building on the research of so many people who didn’t seek fame and fortune, but their research got stuck in academia. And it took someone with an applied degree to pull it out and apply it to a field to make that field more successful, so that’s what I’ve done.
Tori Dunlap:
Caroline, my favorite episodes of this show are when I leave buzzing, and this is the ultimate buzz. So, thank you for coming on. This was so impactful. Tell us where we can find your many, many books, including your newest one and where we can find out more about your work? Plug away.
Caroline Adams Miller:
Okay. First of all, thank you. I’m a fan of yours. My daughter’s a fan of yours.
Tori Dunlap:
Oh, that’s really nice. Thank you.
Caroline Adams Miller:
The work you’re doing is so critical to this world, so thank you for doing it. How do you find me? My name, carolinemiller.com is where you can find everything. But the book has a specific website, biggoalsbook.com. It has case studies, worksheets, you name it. And I would love to break into the top 100 in leadership and motivation. Why don’t we have more women there?
Tori Dunlap:
It’s the same thing with personal finance, it’s ridiculous.
Caroline Adams Miller:
Is that true?
Tori Dunlap:
Oh yeah. Rich Dad Poor Dad still, and he is so problematic. It’s Dave Ramsey. It is my friend who is a great, it’s a great book for Meet Safety and then it’s a bunch of us way down. Yeah-
Caroline Adams Miller:
Seriously?
Tori Dunlap:
Oh yeah. Oh, yeah.
Caroline Adams Miller:
Because it’s agentic behavior.
Tori Dunlap:
Well, and men are good at money. And also, other than I think Suze Orman is the original woman to talk about money. There’s not a lot of us, and there’s more of us now, but especially the book that gets bought is the gift of, oh, I’m going to give my niece for financial literacy. It is like a Rich Dad Poor Dad, and it just makes me want to die.
Caroline Adams Miller:
Wow. We all want to get together, women who are agentic in different areas of life and just literally promote each other. Because your work is critical. I’ve coached a lot of CEOs and companies like Lazard or Citibank or whatever, and after working there long enough and studying finance for most of their adult lives they keep coming back to, “If we don’t get money into the hands of women, we will never have the power that we need.” And it takes goal setting and it takes money. And these two together could really be hand in glove, so thank you for the work you’re doing.
Tori Dunlap:
Thank you. This was such an impactful episode. Everybody go by your book. I know I’m going to. So thank you. Thank you.
Caroline Adams Miller:
Thank you.
Tori Dunlap:
That was so good. Thank you so much to Caroline for joining us. You can find her at carolinemiller.com, and you can find her new book, Big Goals: The Science of Setting Them, Achieving Them, and Creating Your Best Life wherever books are sold. Thank you so much Financial Feminists for being here. I can’t wait to see you in The $100K Club, our brand new membership program that helps you get to your first $100K, whatever that looks like. And again, if you’re listening in January, there are so many additional access points and so many additional bonuses that we’re offering to really incentivize you to invest in yourself, to take your financial education seriously and to get started. So you can go to the link down below in the description to sign up for that. Would love to see you in The $100K Club. Thank you for being here as always, and I hope you have a kick ass rest of your year. Bye.
Thank you for listening to Financial Feminist, a Her First $100K podcast. Financial Feminist is hosted by me, Tori Dunlap, produced by Kristen Fields and Tamisha Grant. Researched by Sarah Sciortino. Audio and video Engineering by Alyssa Midcalf. Marketing and Operations by Karina Patel and Amanda Leffew. Special thanks to our team at Her First 100K, Kailyn Sprinkle, Masha Bakhmetyeva, Taylor Chou, Sasha Bonar, Rae Wong, Elizabeth McCumber, Claire Kurronen, Daryl Ann Ingram and Meghan Walker. Promotional graphics by Mary Stratton. Photography by Sarah Wolfe. And theme music by Jonah Cohen Sound.
A huge thanks to the entire Her First $100K community for supporting the show. For more information about Financial Feminist, Her First $100K, our guests and episode show notes, visit financialfeministpodcast.com. If you’re confused about your personal finances and you’re wondering where to start, go to herfirsthundredk.com/quiz for a free personalized money plan.
Tori Dunlap
Tori Dunlap is an internationally-recognized money and career expert. After saving $100,000 at age 25, Tori quit her corporate job in marketing and founded Her First $100K to fight financial inequality by giving women actionable resources to better their money. She has helped over five million women negotiate salaries, pay off debt, build savings, and invest.
Tori’s work has been featured on Good Morning America, the New York Times, BBC, TIME, PEOPLE, CNN, New York Magazine, Forbes, CNBC, BuzzFeed, and more.
With a dedicated following of over 2.1 million on Instagram and 2.4 million on TikTok —and multiple instances of her story going viral—Tori’s unique take on financial advice has made her the go-to voice for ambitious millennial women. CNBC called Tori “the voice of financial confidence for women.”
An honors graduate of the University of Portland, Tori currently lives in Seattle, where she enjoys eating fried chicken, going to barre classes, and attempting to naturally work John Mulaney bits into conversation.
