​​KF #37. Drives Vision and Purpose Archives - How to be Awesome at Your Job

Pete Mockaitis
Chris, welcome back for round four.

Chris Bailey
Round four, Pete. Are you serious?

Pete Mockaitis
It is. It is round four. The last round was, oh, about five years ago, so it’s been a while. But we are using the same pen and the same microphone so I feel like, since I respect you and think you’re a genius, that maybe I, too, am worthy of some sort of props, but maybe that’s reading too much into things.

Chris Bailey
Has the pen helped?

Pete Mockaitis
It’s been pleasant. This is the Pilot Precise, by the way, RT, for those listening.

Chris Bailey
It’s the best pen.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well, you raved about it in a previous episode, and I was like, “Oh, let’s check it out.” It was like, “Yep, I’m just going to buy dozens of these things.”

Chris Bailey
Yeah, I have friends who are into fountain pens and they have all these fancy pen rituals, pencil rituals, all these different weights. They send me these pens. They’re all garbage. I’m sorry if you’re a pen person. They’re all garbage, except for the Pilot Precise V5 RT. Come at me, pen people.

Pete Mockaitis
Noted. We’ll put that in the pulled highlight quotes there. So, well, I want to hear, we’re talking about your book, Intentional. It’s been about five years since we chatted. Tell me, what’s the most powerful thing you’ve learned in your life of productivity over these last five years?

Chris Bailey
About values. Now, before your eyes glaze over, whenever I’ve heard the term values, my eyes have glazed over. I am not exaggerating. When I hear the word values, I think of the corny corporate exercises I’ve done in the past where somebody like brings in a sheet of paper and there’s a hundred values and they say, “Circle the values,” and I like them all, you know, grace, humor, whatever. And there’s very little research behind those.

But it turns out, there is a fascinating body of research behind what we value on a fundamental human level, and that there are 12 main values that drive pretty much everything we do. And that when we don’t want to do something, we’re usually going against the grain of our values. And so, I’ve been into this idea. You know, we’ve chatted about this three, going on four times, this idea of becoming intentional.

I’ve always wanted to write a book on becoming more intentional, but I’ve never found enough stuff around values to share, stuff around intention to share, until I encountered values, which are the research shows, that’s been validated across 60 different countries, hundreds of thousands of participants, full credit where credit is due to Shalom Schwartz for discovering this methodology of motivation, essentially.

It was kind of the missing piece that pieced together all of the things that I’ve been incubating on intentionality over the last decade. And it was an unlock for me. It was as if everything was aligned. And I don’t want to oversell. I don’t think I’m overselling.

Once you see what the values are and stuff and how the different levels of intentionality in our life fit together, there’s beautiful, fascinating science behind it. Of course, we don’t always accomplish our intentions, which is a whole other thing, but it’s fascinating, it’s beautiful, and it’s powerful.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that’s intriguing. And part of me is tempted to say, “Give me the 12 now. List them.”

But first, you say it’s a big unlock and there’s hard science and research. Can you tell me what are some of the main discoveries of this research and what impact does it make when you apply it?

Chris Bailey
So, there’s different fundamental motivations we have in our life. There are two kinds of axes of motivation that we have that motivates us in our work, in our life, any context that we’re in.

There’s whether we’re motivated to enrich other people or ourselves. And there’s whether we wish to conserve things as they are or improve things as they are. And so, these are the fundamental motivations in our life that our values fit inside of.

And the key to keep in mind is that, with all 12 of these values, we’re all different. Your values are different from mine. Although good pens aren’t a value, but there are associated values actually with a good pen and good microphones. We have the same microphone.

The key to keep in mind is we all have all 12 at a different level. So, there’s self-direction, which is going our own way. There’s stimulation, which is enjoying novelty in the moment. There’s pleasure, which is, you know, sense pleasure, it’s a good meal or a good bath or something. There’s achievement, so accomplishing good things.

There’s power, right, a power over resources and other people. There’s face is another one of the values, which is how we come across to other people. There’s security, so personal security and societal security.

Tradition is another value, so the customs that surround us. Conformity is very, interestingly, to me, a fundamental human value, you know, kind of this fundamental conservation of living within the expectations of other people. Humility is a fundamental value.

Universalism, I find to be a beautiful value, which is protecting and advancing the welfare of people and of nature. And benevolence is the final 12th value, which is kindness and serving others. And so, across, and all these values fit into those kinds of four motivations, ourselves or others, or improve and change.

And so, we all have all 12 in different extents. And anything that we could be doing in the moment, anything we could possibly be doing in the moment, fits inside of these values. A good pen is pleasure. That’s the pleasure value.

Pete Mockaitis
Pleasure. Stimulation. Power.

Chris Bailey
That’s stimulation maybe a little bit because it feels so good. Self-direction, if you chose it yourself. If you heard it from a friend, if everybody you know is using this same pen, that fits with conformity. Humility, using a simple $3 pen, or, however much this costs, instead of a fountain. Everything we do is motivated by these values.

And so, our values are the broadest intentions in our life. They’re what we ultimately hope to accomplish. And so, the more that the goals we have fit with these values, the more we actually care about them. And the more they feel like a natural extension of who we are. And then it goes down to the various levels of intentionality in our life, but this is at the very top.

Pete Mockaitis
Ooh, Chris, you know, as you were speaking, my natural consultant brain, thinking, “Is this a mutually exclusive and collectively exhaustive categorization set? Can I think of anything that does not fall into them?” And, well, I’ve only been thinking for about 40 seconds and I was having a hard time digging one up. So, we’ll say it’s pretty good.

Chris Bailey
Well, I can name one or two. I can name one or two.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, let’s hear it, yeah.

Chris Bailey
Yeah, health is one that doesn’t fit. But these values, they’re a motivational continuum. So, they are what could be possibly motivating us in the moment. And health is interesting. That was a big question I had when I looked at this theory, it’s like, “Okay, where is health in this?”

Pete Mockaitis
I think that’s power. I’ve got the power to get out of bed, the power to have the energy for the day, the power to walk up a flight of stairs.

Chris Bailey
Well, that’s the interesting thing. It depends on the person. So, women are more likely to see health as a pleasure value because they feel good in their body.

Pete Mockaitis
Being in pain sucks. Fix that shoulder with a physical therapist. Ugh.

Chris Bailey
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, it’s self-direction, right? You can go your own way. Some people see it as that achievement. Other people see their body as an achievement that they can, yeah, bro.

Pete Mockaitis
“Muscle ups, bro.”

Chris Bailey
Yeah, yeah, exactly. So, they’re a true motivational continuum. It’s beautiful that these are what drive everything we do. So, uncovering the ones that actually motivate us is paramount for achieving the goals that we set.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, it is interesting because I’ve noticed that I really like feeling like a winner – achievement – and I really don’t like feeling like a loser. And some of this can even be neurotically nonsensical, you know, in terms of, like, if I’m taking out my trash and I can’t fit the week’s trash into my trash bin, I feel like I am being a poor steward of the earth’s resources because it’s like, “Oh, you know, this huge garbage bin wasn’t enough for you, huh? So now the whole world has to see, ‘Oh, that family can’t handle consuming a moderate amount.’”

And so, it’s like, “But, like, who cares? Like, nobody actually cares.” And yet this is, this is inside of me. And it’s kind of, and I guess there’s maybe conformity, right, “Hey, all of us fit our stuff inside the trash bin.”

Chris Bailey
Yeah, there’s universalism in there, wanting to protect the nature. There’s face, right, looking at how you come across other people. There’s achievement, wanting to crush the garbage down to a certain extent. It’s all in there. And so, this is the fascinating thing about values, is because they’re essentially our ultimate intentions in our life. They’re what we care about most.

But every single intention that we set, whether deliberately or not, because that’s another curious thing, intentions don’t have to be deliberate, they can be automatic. A habit is our brain forming an intention that will do something automatically for us. Maybe that’s too much to get into on the podcast, but in every moment, especially when we make these deliberate intentions, we’re automatically evaluating a series of options before us using our top values as a trade-off.

And so, the values that tend to win out in the moment tend to be our strongest values. It’s interesting. They’re behind the scenes of our life pulling, because, of course, we don’t always follow through with our intentions. Intentionality, it’s incredible, it’s beautiful, but the road to hell is also paved with good intentions. But these values are behind the scenes because they’re our true motivational nature, pulling on the strings of what we will do and what we won’t do.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, what’s so intriguing is, as I’m thinking about, yeah, with any goal you could feel them at war. And I’m thinking about, I’ve been on both sides of the overweight threshold, according to the body mass index. And food, I mean, boy, it is stimulation, it is pleasure, it’s so good.

And yet, when I am having, on a hot streak of weight loss, what’s doing it for me is achievement in terms of, I’m tracking those calories, like, “Look at that, another day a deficit. Winning!” It feels good. And so then, they’re at war. It’s like, “Well, do I want the pleasure of this cheesecake or do I want the pleasure of winning a caloric deficit for the day?”

Chris Bailey
Yeah, and that’s the thing with these, like, weight loss goals, is an interesting one because 40% of the world’s population at any given time are trying to lose weight, so about half of us are. But we tend to go about goals like that the wrong way. So, we set a goal, ‘Yeah, I’m to lose 10 pounds this year so I look good, have six-pack abs by beach season.” We have this idea of ourselves.

But a goal like that is built around face, right, the value of face. It’s how we come across to other people.

But if your top value is pleasure, and maybe self-direction or something, a different goal would be better, right? Like, instead of that lose the weight to have six-pack abs by beach season built around face, maybe it’s, like, experiment with three different ways of eating – self-direction – to find the one that’s most enjoyable.

And so, you can have the same set of actions that lead you to different goals, but they are actually motivated. And this is something that is also interesting about intentionality, is there are many, and I love this idea. I love this idea.

So, there are many different layers of intentionality in our life. So, we set intentions across all kinds of different timelines, right? We have our values, which are our ultimate intentions. They last the length of our lifetime. Then we have the intentions that are a bit shorter than that, which are called our priorities. Like, “Be healthy” would be a priority.

Then we have intentions that are shorter than that, still, which we call goals, things we want to accomplish in our life, stories of change that we’re creating. Then we have, you know, we kind of go down in timeline. Then we have the plans that we have. Goals should ultimately lead to the plans that we set.

And then we have the smallest of intentions at the very bottom of this. I call it the intention stack in the book. It’s just, essentially, all the layers of intentionality in our life. And at the bottom, the very bottom, we have the present intentions we have in the moment.

So, somebody listening to this podcast, the present moment intention might be, “Listen to the podcast and enjoy it.” Then the plan might be, it might fit inside of a broader plan, like a chore to wash the dishes or something. Then it might fit inside of a goal, like in, you know, “Learn more about self-development and how to be awesome at my job.”

Then it fits inside of a priority, which is “Make a bigger contribution,” which fits inside of a value of, let’s say, benevolence, helping other people, plus achievement. And so, there’s always this stack on top of what we’re doing in the moment. But sometimes it’s aligned to what we care about. Other times we don’t care at all.

And so, it’s fascinating when you begin to deconstruct intentionality and look at the science of it, what it’s shaped like, and how it works, and how we can kind of, I got to say harness, it’s kind of a corny word, but like harness it to do the change that we want.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah. And I think this is, it opens up, and you called it an unlock. It does open up a lot of possibilities in terms of, “Oh, I wasn’t even thinking about approaching this thing with that value as a lens, but because I’m really into that value, it may well behoove me to explore how can I do such a thing to provide for more humility or universalism or benevolence or whatever the thing is.”

Chris Bailey
Exactly.

Pete Mockaitis
You know, Chris, I want to maybe take a little time out here because it almost feels as though some of these values are good-er, more morally virtuous, right, true, noble than others in terms of, like, let’s say universalism, benevolence, humility. We think, “Oh, what a swell fella, or a gal, who exhibits a lot of those things,” versus, “You know what I’m really about is pleasure and power and looking awesome. That’s kind of what’s important to me.” That almost feels hollow or like a less good life.

Chris Bailey
Yeah, I talk about this in the book, too. My top value is self-direction. It’s not even close. But my number two is pleasure. I love nothing more than to…well, I like self-direction more, but I love nothing second more than to just lie on the couch after a busy day and put on a good show or a podcast, and order some Uber eats, like a big sushi platter and just indulge for the night.

And this was a very reflective process that I went through in piecing together this book is, “Are there good values? Are there bad values?” And I’ve, ultimately, come to the conclusion that, “No, there aren’t good values or bad values. There are certain values that are more conducive to certain goals.” But if you’re able to accommodate the values of others, in addition to the values of yourself, I think you’ll be fine.

Power is one that comes to mind, too, because out of all the values, out of all the listed values, it’s the very least common. It’s at the very bottom across the population level, and, sure enough, it is for me, too. I never want to have power over any other person ever in my life.

But, power, if you look at the world around us, it has a place in what we do. Any organization that has a hierarchy, for example, you have different layers of the hierarchy, and you need power within that organizational structure. Every charity has a CEO. Every nonprofit has a CEO. Every congregation has a priest.

So even the most virtuous of places, these values have a place. Conformity, right, maybe also a frowned upon value. But there’s a great benefit to going along with the expectations of others in certain scenarios, right, for accommodating other people. I’m the most self-directed person you might ever meet. And I don’t want to listen, you know, if somebody else tells me to do something, it makes me not want to do it.

But I remember my grandma telling me, like, “Wash the dishes now,” and I’d do it because I had such a respect for her. And that conformity and tradition, all these values live relative to one another, too, which is interesting. They live right next to each other in these values pie, this pie hierarchy – pie-archy.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I think that is a really intriguing perspective there that these values, they’re motivational forces and they don’t necessarily lead to great or catastrophic outcomes for civilization or humanity when they all kind of come together. And what’s interesting about power is you said, you define it as, it is power over others or yourself or circumstances.

Chris Bailey
Or resources, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Or resources, yeah. I’ve got a, my buddy Ronnie, he had a funny saying, he said, “Laundry is power.” I was like, “What?”

Chris Bailey
What does that mean?

Pete Mockaitis
And then I think, one day, I had done all, I mean all of my laundry, and I’m beholding this dresser full of organized socks matched and shirts folded, underwear. And then, as I beheld this arsenal of complete laundry, it’s like, I really did, I was like, I’m ready for anything. I’m ready for anything. I felt powerful in that moment. I understood what he meant.

But I, like you, have no interest in controlling the legions of people. In fact, that sounds like a huge headache, like, “Oh, my gosh, that administrative load would be such a stressor.”

Chris Bailey
And that’s the interesting thing. I don’t want to, like, overload people with this value stuff right now, but I break it down more into, like, you can break down the 12 into 19, actually, of them, where you can break down power, for example, into power over resources and other people. Self-direction, you can break into self-directed thought and self-directed action.

And so, it’s very interesting that there’s this. It’s just a fundamental organization to human motivation that we don’t understand. But when you do understand it and you can fit through these different layers of intentionality, the goals that you have with your values, and then see how those goals connect with the daily actions that you need to take, what you get is your goals become a vessel between who you are on that fundamental level, so what motivates you, and what you do on a daily basis.

And so, we are sharing the fat loss example. Same set of actions, but with a different frame around them, with a different motivational frame around them. Imagine if your goals were all like that. This is actually the thing that bothers me about a lot of goals and goal books and stuff like that, is when you look at the actual research on goals, we have to achieve them by becoming more intentional across the different layers of intentionality in our life.

But we so often see them as static, something that shouldn’t change. But goals should evolve. We should be editing them. We should be dropping them. We should see them as fluid things. And goals, in my view, they’re basically just a story of change that we’re in the middle of creating in our life. And we need to see them as more fluid and ready to change, because so often a goal is really no different from a prediction of what we believe will happen.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, well, this is really juicy, and so, conceptually, we can hang here for a long time, but I’d love to perhaps shift gears into, “Okay. All right, Chris, my mind is blown with regard to these values, they’re important, and I should be considering them thoughtfully as I’m trying to go about making stuff happen.” Could you share with us a little bit of the step-by-step in terms of, “Okay, I got a list of values. That’s kind of cool. I got some things I want to be achieving, what am I doing with that?”

Chris Bailey
Yes, okay. So, let’s get tactical with this stuff, because, yeah, we have to be. So, you have your values, maybe you do a values test. I partnered with a company to build a test for the book. You don’t have to take that though, because there are certain ones that’ll kind of attract you more, and others that’ll naturally repel you.

And so, what you’ll find is that, when you look at those 12 values and the pie that they’re a part of, you’ll naturally gravitate to some and be repelled by others. Look to the ones that you naturally gravitate to and pick the top two, let’s say, two, three. Stop there. These are what you build your goals around. And then you have a list of goals, right?

How often do we actually sit down and capture the goals that we have that we’re in the middle of creating? And so, I highly recommend a weekly review where you sit down, you capture, and then you review, on a weekly basis, all the goals that you’re in the middle of creating.

And so, every goal, so in the book, I call it the intention stack. So, at the top, it is values, then priorities, then goals, then plans, then intentions, daily, weekly intentions. And, ideally, during this weekly review, or whatever cadence it makes sense for you to review these goals on, you want to look at both your values, which is the motivational force, and the actions, which is how you actually make progress towards these goals in the first place.

So, I think step zero is realizing that goal attainment, the process of goal attainment, is it’s not 99% action. It’s like 80% action, 20% planning. We need to plan more and act a little bit less, because by planning more, we actually act more over the longer arc of time, especially once the initial burst of motivation wanes.

So, during that weekly review, edit your goals, edit your goals, edit your goals. How can you edit them, like with that weight loss example, how can you edit your goals so that they fit more with what you value, so you actually care about them, right? Because the easiest way to tell if something’s a priority to you is you’ve achieved it already, right?

So, the fact that something is yet to be achieved, probably means, on some level, that it isn’t a natural fit for who you are, because it doesn’t fit with that motivational force, right? We do what it makes intuitive sense to do in the absence of intentional action.

So, during that weekly review, how can you edit your goals so they’re more in line with what you value? And how can you bite off a little bit of the goal until your next review, whatever cadence you’re doing this over?

So, if you’re doing it over a week, what do you want to bite off in the next week? Make sure it’s enough that you can chew, or not too much that you can chew, whatever the analogy is there, and schedule time blocks for it.

Practice intentionality on a more granular level. Set a few weekly intentions. Every day, set a few daily intentions so these intentions can actually flow down into one another. So, edit your goals. And, as well, if you find that a goal isn’t motivating that you can’t edit it to the point that it fits into your life, consider dropping it.

Because then we get a chance to try more goals on for size that are actually a fit with what we want to get out of our life and our motivational nature. So that’s one way is that goal review where we bridge, essentially, who we are with what we do.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, very cool.

Chris Bailey
There you go.

Pete Mockaitis
And then I’d love to dig into some of your perspectives for, if we’ve got a goal that is not so appealing, well, one, you might learn via the editing process that it needs to be dropped. But before that, do you have any cool examples of folks who were able to just turbocharge motivation and progress by thoughtfully tweaking their goals so they are better fits for their values?

Chris Bailey
This is interesting, right? Because is gray intentionality such a beautiful idea? And then the rubber meets the road, right? The road to hell is also paved with good intention. So, intentionality is both vital because any time we act towards our goals, there was an intention behind it.

But sometimes, it’s also useless because there’s a lot of times when we set an intention only to not follow through, or procrastinate on an intention, or lack the desire to accomplish it. And so, there’s essentially two factors in a goal, in an intention, in something we want to do, that attract us or repel us away from that thing.

So, there’s aversion, which, you know, it’s like, “Get this out of my face, this goal out of my face.” And then there’s desire, which attracts us to a goal. And both of these are forces that work with every single goal that we have. And they’re different over the timeline of a goal, right?

So, if you’re at the very beginning, the very inception of a goal, your desire is going to be through the roof. Your motivation level is going to be so, so high. But then reality sinks in, “Oh, there goes gravity,” and then our motivation level plummets, and our desire can turn into aversion.

So, a lot of it’s like realizing where you are on that timeline of goal attainment. But aversion is a very interesting feeling that we experience along the way, because aversion is what leads us to procrastinate on something.

So, the more aversive something happens to be, which is a combination of “How boring is it? How frustrating is it? How unpleasant is it? How far away is something in the future? How unstructured is it? How meaningless is it?” so lack of connected with our values, the more of these triggers that a task has, the more likely we are to procrastinate on it.

And so, that’s another key is realizing that and understanding what triggers a task sets off. So, if something’s unstructured, like meditation is a great example of this. We were chatting a bit about meditation before we hopped on the horn here and hit the record button.

It’s one of the most aversive things that you can do, right? It’s helpful because it’s so aversive, right? If you can focus on your breath, you can focus on anything. If you can become engaged with your breath, you could become engaged with anything because it’s so boring, because it’s so aversive.

But when you accommodate the fact that it’s so unstructured and unpleasant, by working within the aversion, so a simple example of this, shrink your resistance to it. So, this works for meditation, it works for anything you don’t want to do that takes a little bit of time.

You might have a conversation with yourself like, “Okay, do I want to meditate for half an hour today? No. No, I don’t. What about 25 minutes? No. What about 20? No way in hell. What about 15? Yeah, I could do 15.”

And so, you essentially shrink the task until you no longer feel that resistance level so that you’re at a point where you can get started on the thing. And that increases your desire to actually moving between different levels of this intention stack. You move from that goal layer to that action layer that’s at the bottom.

And so, when something’s unstructured, that’s a sign you need to add structure. When something’s meaningless, it’s a sign you need to connect a goal with your values. Edit it so it’s aligned with your values. When something’s boring, frustrating, it might be a sign you need to step back and plan out on a logical level how you want to become more intentional about that thing.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’m thinking about, well, these procrastination triggers, I think I learned them from you as well as what are the top researchers on procrastination. What was the book? I think we both read it.

Chris Bailey
Was it Tim Pytchyl?

Pete Mockaitis
That’s the one. Thank you.

Chris Bailey
Oh, Tim is fantastic, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, and he lists those out, and that’s helpful to think about it on those dimensions. And I guess that’s what, to your point about doing more planning, that’s what you can, you can get kind of meta with this. It’s like, “Huh, I have not done these three weeks in a row. It seems something is amiss here.” And so, rather than say, “Well, I just got to knuckle down and buckle up, you know, to get after it.” It’s like, well, maybe there’s some redesign that needs to be working here, or maybe the goal needs to be abandoned.

Chris Bailey
It’s interesting, in writing this book, I chatted with lot of monks, as well as scientists, because monks study intentionality on a different layer than scientists do. They’re not observational, they’re experiential. They observe the causes and effects and conditions in our mind, and we can learn a lot from them.

And one interesting thing that I asked one of the monks, I was deep into the research on where intention comes from, because we set all these intentions, right? And some of them we set automatically, which I call our default intentions.

‘Cause some come from automatic sources. We are on a road trip, we need to go to the bathroom, and so we set an intention at the next pit stop, “I’m going to go to the bathroom.” We don’t even think about this. We do it automatically. So, biological sources, sources to avoid pain and experience greater pleasure also lead to a whole other wealth of intentions.

The lessons we have learned in the past. So, the things we have learned changes, they change our relationship with what we know to be true, which leads us to set an intention differently the next time, whether we do it out of habit or energy, or whether we do it deliberately.

But one source that a monk mentioned that wasn’t in the research that kind of allowed me to piece together other areas of the research was – and he phrased it so beautifully – is our self-reflective capacity.

Our self-reflective capacity, by looking inward, asking questions of our inner world, we are able to set different intentions from the ones that we would do out of biology, or out of basic pleasure and pain, or out of lessons we have learned, to truly go our own way and set the best intentions that lead us to the outcomes that we want, whether we want to be more accomplished at work or lead a more enriching, meaningful life by connecting with our values at work, at home.

We need to tap into that capacity more often. And so, it doesn’t just have to look like meditation or journaling or something. It can look like just going for a walk and then letting your mind go to where “What problems are you in the middle of? How can you solve them with setting intentions that are more conducive to what you want?”

They could look like brainstorming with somebody, so somebody that really gets you thinking. It can look like asking questions of your inner world and looking at what arises out of them. Like, we all have these moments where we go from autopilot mode to being deliberate about what we do.

So, if your whole family was gone for one morning or something, and you woke up and your phone wasn’t there, and so you couldn’t rely on habit in bed and you just laid there. Eventually, a moment would come where your mind would set an intention to do something, where you would set an intention to do something, whether it was a habit or whether you waited for a little bit longer to look at what you truly wanted to do in that moment.

It’s the same like if you’re listening to music and a song ends, pause, and then eventually your mind will set an intention to listen to the next one, which will end up being more enjoyable than the one that you were just listening to on autopilot.

Life is the same way, right? It’s by charting this deliberate course that we experience more meaning because it’s in connecting with that self-reflective capacity that we can be with what we value. And so, our values that compete with one another in each moment, the ones that are truest to us can win out, and then we can truly, truly go our own way.

Tthe truest intentions that we can set, like you were getting at, they come from not just acting, but reflecting, whether that’s on a logical level or on a more intuitive level where we look and connect with that self-reflective capacity that we all have.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, I hear you. Autopilot is, in some ways, the opposite of intentionality. I mean, even if we establish those habits intentionally and we’re executing, living them out in an autopilot mode – I’m getting philosophical – on some dimension, the autopilot is intentional, but from like a presentness way of looking at it, it’s not so much.

Chris Bailey
Well, this is why, in the book, I delineate between our default intentions and our deliberate intentions, because we have these default intentions that we have. Habits are great. Habits are amazing. But when you look at an intention as just a plan that we will do something, this habit energy, as I refer to it in the book, and as monks refer to it actually, there’s quite a bit of power in that.

We don’t have to worry about making ourselves a cup of coffee in the morning. Our brain, our body goes through the motions automatically until we’re sitting there like with a cup of coffee. We don’t even have to be fully awake enough to notice it.

But you’re right that, eventually, that moment comes. It’s kind of like the movie montage where, like, somebody’s living their dull humdrum life and the scene is gray and it’s raining outside, they’re going through the same motions. But then, like, boom, somebody dies, or something pivotal happens, where that character has a fit of awakening and decides to do things differently, and decides to go in a different direction from the one that they were going in.

And then like cut to the badass working out montage, or like somebody writing for hours through the night, or piecing together some math problem, you know, something like that. But we all have these similar fits of awakening.

And all that is, is going from the habit energy of relying on our default intentions to the deliberate intentions that we can all set in the moment. Well, here’s something mind blowing about default intentions.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yes, please.

Chris Bailey
Our values are constructed out of our default intentions. Like, seeing that in the research, it sent shivers down my spine, I’m not going to lie. It all came together. Our values are who we are on a fundamental human level. They’re what motivate us on a fundamental human level. And what motivates us more than who we are by default? Our default intentions.

And our deliberate intentions, the life we want to live, the contributions we want to make, the work we want to do, that’s the layer of deliberate intentions we layer on top of who we are by default. So, it’s, really, when you look at the science of intentionality, it explains everything that we do, everything that we think, and everything that we are. And molding that is the ultimate skill, I think.

Pete Mockaitis
Whew, that’s good stuff and worthy of chewing on and reflecting upon in depth. I know we’re at our last few minutes, but I want to hear two quick things from you. One, tracking goal progress, something that you’re into, you write about. Do you have any favorite principles or tactics or systems in that zone?

Chris Bailey
Oh, yeah, tracking your goal pace is one of my favorites. So, I use this whenever I write a book, where I make a spreadsheet. Two lines. One is my pace line and the other is my progress line. And it works for any cumulative goal, miles ran, for example. And all you do is you print it off and so you track between today and your target day.

You have a pace, say you want your book to be 70,000 words, so you have the pace line that goes up at this beautiful linear pace. And then you have your actual word count relative to that. Simple tactic, but incredibly helpful for goal tracking.

Pete Mockaitis
I’ve made the spreadsheet myself in many contexts.

Chris Bailey
Oh, man, we’re living the same life, yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, absolutely.

Chris Bailey
Same pen, same mic, same sheet.

Pete Mockaitis
And you have said it a few times, and I love it, that any productivity intervention must earn back the time that you spend on it, or else it is counterproductive. Since I like to talk about favorite things at the end of each episode, can you share with us a couple favorite tools, tactics, productivity interventions that just crush it on this metric of yours?

Chris Bailey
Okay, I feel I’ve mentioned this on a previous one, but it’s five years ago, so maybe your listenership has cycled out or something. No, they’re probably still out here.

Pete Mockaitis
Never. They’re still there. They’re still there.

Chris Bailey
Yeah, okay. Hey, everybody, again, I hope you remember me five years ago. Rule of three. At the start of each day, fast forward to the end of the day, what three things will you want to have accomplished? It’s my favorite intention setting ritual. I do it every day, every week, every year, so that when I do my daily intentions, they can feed into the weekly and the yearly ones. They all work together like beautiful magic.

Tools. Tools. Man, you know what? I’m going analog these days. I love having a physical book, because I feel my eyes are glazing over from looking at screens all day long, and just practicing a bit of interstitial journaling between tasks. It allows me to really just reflect for one short little paragraph, “What do I really want to get out of what I’m going to do next?” So, an analog pen, of course, the Pilot Precise V5 or V7 RT.

Pete Mockaitis
Beautiful. All right. Well, any final thoughts, Chris?

Chris Bailey
After looking at the research on intentionality, I used to think intention is beautiful, and you see how complicated it is. And it’s in that complicatedness that I think we see our humanness, right? And so, I really think that it’s intentionality that makes us human.

And by connecting with that, you know, talked a lot about deliberate intent, we got to love our defaults, too. They’re who we are. They make up our values. Love your defaults and then you can layer on even better goals, better intentions on top of those.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Chris, thank you.

Pete Mockaitis
Caroline, welcome back.

Caroline Miller
Thanks for having me.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m excited to talk about Big Goals. And I’m curious, you’ve been around the block, doing a lot of research, positive psychology, and more, what would you say is your most fascinating discovery you’ve made about us humans and goal-setting, goal-achieving?

Caroline Miller
I think my biggest awareness aha moment is that, 20 years after I learned goal-setting theory, the number one ranked management theory of all time of 73 theories, also known as the 800-pound gorilla, everyone sets goals and no one knows this number one theory, and it floors me to this day that it remains one of the most unknown, but most validated theories ever to come out of psychology.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, I’m intrigued. So, if there’s 73 theories, how does a theory get to win number one? I’m imagining a reality TV show which the theories are competing against each other with judges and audience input. How does that work?

Caroline Miller
Well, I only report the news, but I do know I have research showing that academics, management theorists, people in the field who actually know what the science is about when you look at self-efficacy theory or different kinds of bias, etc., goal-setting theory is universally ranked number one because of its importance and because everyone does it.

And if we knew the science, which is so amazing that people don’t, if we knew the science, I do believe we’d be more productive, more engaged and more successful. And as a mother, I also feel strongly that our children would grow up with dreams that they have the tools to accomplish, which I don’t think they have. And I think that’s a huge error we’ve made as a society and as parents to not have this science and teach it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I’m intrigued. Like, what kind of lift might we see in terms of our goal attainment rates, peddling around as we do, ignorant of the science versus utilizing all these best practices?

Caroline Miller
I can’t give you a percentage, but what I can tell you is that most people disengage and become overwhelmed by the size of their goals, the fact that they have a big dream and they don’t know where to start. And so, as the mother of three adult children who grew up being told to tell them they were winners and that, if we did this, they would all grow up confident and happy, and they’d be very hard workers.

What instead we found out, now that this era of self-esteem parenting is over, is that for the most part, they’re fragile and they can’t always take feedback or performance reviews. Now, I’m not being universal, not all are like this, but the findings are pretty robust that this is a generation that doesn’t know how to do hard things and break goals down into small component parts and have mastery experiences. But I also speak for the parents.

I mean, I’ve known this thing for 20 years. I’ve been all over the world. I work with CEOs and leaders and companies big and small, countries big and small, and they all set goals and no one has this science. So, I think, universally, we are underperforming and underachieving. And one of the things in Big Goals that I’m really proud of is I dug into the research that shows that it’s mostly white men who have benefited from these productivity systems that started in the 1880s and do not benefit women and people of other cultures, partly because we weren’t around.

We weren’t in the workplace. This is not how we thought the workplace would be, but it hasn’t evolved, and it’s something that isn’t discussed. It’s time to have this bridge between the 20th century and the 21st, and my book addresses that gap that I’m happy to share more about.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, yeah, I guess I’d like to understand, if you don’t have a precise percentage, perhaps could you tell a story in terms of a transformation unfolding by utilizing the science?

Caroline Miller
I could tell you a million stories. I worked with one executive, a lot of executives, but I’m thinking of one in particular, a CEO of a major, let’s call it, outdoor remodeling company, who through COVID just kept setting the same performance goals for the salespeople and his senior leadership team, but the entire society turned upside down. We were in, what Locke and Latham would call, a mass learning goal condition where everything you did five, ten years ago can’t be done the same way anymore.

We’ve got a distributed workplace. We’ve got artificial intelligence. We’ve got all kinds of supply chain issues. And so, what he did was he hit pause on all of the goals that he had for himself and for his senior leadership team, and he said, “Caroline Miller’s going to come in and teach us about goal-setting theory, and we’re going to now slow down, and we’re going to take all of these goals and turn them into learning goals because we’re learning new ways to do things.”

The world is different. This is a period not unlike after the Black Death, which gave birth to the Renaissance, which became more evidence-based approaches to medicine and art and science and so on and so forth. So, what he did was he changed the entire goal-setting dashboard within the company. People were able to take the time to learn how to do their jobs in new ways because they had to. They couldn’t meet with customers in person anymore. There were different ways of working with computer systems that people had to learn, let alone artificial intelligence. That’s a whole different conversation.

And as people slowed down, they became more curious and engaged in what they were being asked to do, how the onboarding was done. And as a result, the company hit record profitability in the last few years, and he’s a very satisfied customer. But that’s just very typical of what happens when people learn about Locke and Latham’s goal-setting theory and realize that there are two kinds of goals: performance goals and learning goals, and you can’t mix them up.

And when you do, when you take something that the world has never done before, you’ve never done before, a learning goal, and you skip the time that it takes to gather the skills and the education, the knowledge to do this job, and the time to kind of try out “How do I personalize my approach to this?” what you end up is something called goals gone wild, which is embodied by Boeing’s 737 MAX disasters. The Titan Submersible was stocked in rush.

You can’t skip the learning component when you’re doing something for the first time. When you do, people lose their reputations, companies lose their reputations, and in the case of the Titan Submersible, Boeing, other companies, Ford, the Ford Pinto, people lose their lives. So, it’s a serious issue. It’s a simple theory, but the importance of getting it right cannot be overstated.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, so lay it on us, what’s sort of our fundamental misconception? Is it the performance learning stuff?

Caroline Miller

I think the fundamental misconception is that people think SMART goals is science, and it’s not. It was this dude, this manager in 1982, who was going to give a presentation. It was this sticky acronym, specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, whatever. I mean, the part of the problem that we’ve discovered with SMART goals, because it’s been studied, is not only does it undermine goal achievement, because if you use the word “realistic” for “R,”what you find is that people undershoot their ability to go after hard goals. And Locke and Latham found that the best possible outcome for all goals is challenging and specific.

So, imagine my arm reached out in front of me, or yours, and the goals that we should be shooting for that always get the best outcomes are past our fingertips. So, when you use “R-realistic,” what you find is that people undermine their ability to find out what they’re made of, and they usually shoot and get very mediocre results. But it’s called “jargon mishmash syndrome,” because “smart” means different things to different people. So, it’s not science. It’s just not science.

So, that’s one of the first things that I would say is that people labor under the conception or the misconception that they know the science of goal-setting, and I think we take it for granted that we have accomplished things in our lives, “And if I did this, I can do that,” when, in fact, the science came out in 1990, and it’s still the most unknown, undelivered piece of research from academia into the mass market, and it stuns me every day.

No matter where I’m talking, no matter who I’m working with, their productivity dashboard in their company or in their lives is based on an urban legend, or vision boards, or law of attraction, or some version of that. And we are not supporting ourselves and the people around us, and our children in particular, in the best possible way if we don’t go out and learn this science.

So, I think it is a crisis of unimaginable proportions because we have a generation that is anxious and depressed and disengaged from the workplace and quite often comes right down, as Gallup said in their State of the Workplace in early 2024, “The number one problem facing all workplaces is a lack of productivity based on faulty goal systems.” We don’t have good goal hygiene. And if we don’t know the science, it’s like trying to put a cornerstone down for a building that’s rocky or isn’t going to hold the weight of the building and everything’s going to crumble.

We have to know the science of goal-setting. This to me is an urgent plea for everyone to stop and say, “It’s time to go in an evidence-based direction,” just like we did during the Renaissance after the Black Death. Everything has to come up a notch and I’ve worked on that. Plus, in the book Big Goals, I introduced something called a BRIDGE methodology that then is the gap between “Here’s goal-setting, theory, here’s the right goal, but how are you going to accomplish it?”

And what I’ve brought to bear is all of this science that no one has heard of from academia, from psychology, from motivation, from mindset research, from grit, to help us understand how to accomplish those goals. And as I said earlier, there’s a gender component that people haven’t paid attention to. Not all approaches to productivity and goal setting fit everyone. You have to personalize it based on who you are and where you are.

Pete Mockaitis
Caroline, are you telling me that if I put my dreams on a vision board and secrete them to the universe, the universe is not going to bring them into my reality?

Caroline Miller
Hmm, let me think about that. No.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. Well, then lay it on us, let’s get these principles associated with the goals theory.

Caroline Miller
Well, what I will say about vision boards is the reason why they hang around so much, I call them these zombie theories, they’re just not dying like SMART goals. They’re dying. They’re hanging around but they won’t go away. There’s some little kernel of something important in vision boards, and that is the science of priming.

When we remind ourselves with pictures or words or aromas, things that enter our conscious and subconscious minds that prime us to act and think in goal-directed ways, we are more likely to accomplish our goals, but that’s a small subset of what must be done. It’s never enough to just have a vision board or to just chant or to write something in lipstick on your mirror.

I think that we’re not taking ourselves seriously if we’re going to just have this one-dimensional approach or magical approach to getting what we want. We can’t skip the hard work piece, that’s just not possible. And you know what, even little kids know that if you give them something that they haven’t worked hard for, they don’t tend to value it. None of us do.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. So, let’s hear the principles fundamentally. How do we set goals?

Caroline Miller
How do we set goals? So, we start with goal-setting theory, basically, “Do I have a performance goal or a learning goal?” In the book, I call it performance goal with checklist goal. So, this is something you’ve done before that’ll fit on a checklist, and you can actually give that checklist to someone else and they’ll have a shot at accomplishing that goal.

So, what it is, it’s like a hotel maid, it’s like a surgeon going into the operating theater and checking “Do I have all the right instruments or the right people around me?” or a pilot in a pre-flight checklist. Checklists are for things you’ve done before and you don’t want to skip a step. And for that reason, you know that you can set a specific outcome by a specific date. And again, Locke and Latham say challenging and specific. That’s a performance goal/checklist goal.

The other kind of goal is a learning goal. So, you start with that, and you can call it a moonshot goal, meaning you haven’t done it before, and the world hasn’t done it before. And then you have to say, “What is it I need to learn in order to accomplish this goal? Who has that knowledge? Is it on Wikipedia? Is there a YouTube? Is there a book? Is there a podcast? Where am I going to flatten my learning curve?”

So, then you go into this BRIDGE methodology I came up with, the brainstorming. But the brainstorming really ought to start with this one prompt that I keep coming back to, “What’s new? What’s new? What do I not know yet? What’s new in the world that would help me become more efficient and effective in this goal?”

And I’ll just tell you one little story that I’m just transfixed by, and that’s this Herculaneum papyri, how they’ve solved this library of charred scrolls. Julius Caesar’s father-in-law in Herculaneum, when Vesuvius dubious erupted, the biggest, most wonderful library in ancient history was charred and these scrolls became like little pieces of firewood. And for years, hundreds of years, I want to say 400 years, we’ve been trying to unroll them.

Guess what happened? During COVID, the former CEO of GitHub got fascinated and bored by the fact that he’s sitting at home every day and he goes on Wikipedia, and he starts looking up ancient tragedies and catastrophes, and he stumbles on this unsolved thing like, “Oh, my God, what do we know now from Silicon Valley, from high particle accelerators, from artificial intelligence that could help us unroll these scrolls?”

Long story short, they now have unrolled, by using artificial intelligence and beaming lights into these scrolls and virtually unwrapping them, they have started to read these ancient scrolls and it’s going to remake everything we know about religion and art and philosophy. It is just stunning. So, you always start with what’s new.

So, in the book, I talk about why traditional brainstorming approaches don’t work, but I have a long set of prompts I have in the book to help people through brainstorming. Relationships. Relationships mean not just “Who do I need to know and have in my life to accomplish this goal? But who do I need to put a container around and keep them out of my life while I’m accomplishing this goal?” People don’t look at that and that’s critical.

And we know research from Shelly Gable at the University of California Santa Barbara, she found that when you share a big goal, a dream with somebody else, their response has to be curious and enthusiastic. That’s the one signal that says to you, “This person has my back, they’re in my corner, and I can tell them more, and they are going to help me accomplish that goal.” So, “Who should be in my life? And who shouldn’t?” Relationships.

Investments, “How am I going to invest my character strengths in the pursuit of this?” We know from positive psychology that knowing your top five-character strengths and using them, deploying them in new and interesting ways to accomplish your goals, or to interact with people throughout the day, makes you more successful. It also makes you happier and it makes you more authentic.

So, the investments can be time, energy, money, character strengths, but you have to think through, “What am I going to sink into this process that I have to build a budget for, build a time budget for, etc.?” So, BRID decision-making. Oh, my gosh, I love this topic. So, when Danny Kahneman, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics for sunk cost theory and all of his work on how do we value the things that we spend time with, he also did a lot of work on bias.

But at the end of his life, he wrote this brilliant book with two other economists called Noise, and he was saying that the biggest mistakes we make in decision-making is when we don’t do a noise audit of how we’ve made previous decisions, identical decisions, “What are we being impacted by? Did our football team win or lose yesterday? And are we making the same decisions as judges in identical cases? Are we paroling these people and keeping these other people in jail?”

Noise is a huge part of how we make decisions. It’s rare for me to find someone who has sat down and made a list of their best decisions and the components of those decisions, and done a noise audit. And I think this is why there’s a big move to teach game theory and Poker, especially to women who don’t always learn how to take risks. Poker, and Texas Hold ‘Em in particular, is how we’re beginning to teach people how to take risks in decision-making situations that they must take, even if they have imperfect information.

Pete Mockaitis
With noise, we’re defining that as our historical track record of decisions? How are we defining noise here?

Caroline Miller
Noise is when we have the exact same decision to make about, let’s say, a referee on a football field, right? And it’s the same player going off sides, and it’s a Sunday or a Thursday night game, and you didn’t get a lot of sleep before the Thursday night game, and you see the same player or the same play unfolding in front of you but you make a different decision. You throw a flag or you don’t throw a flag.

Noise is when you have the same kind of decision to make but you make it differently on different days because of things that are going on in your life, and that’s different from bias. Bias is when you’re biased against a certain gender or a certain class of people, or you’re biased against people who didn’t go to your school and you’re a hiring manager. That’s bias. Noise is when you’re allowing the variables—usually you don’t know this is happening—to interfere with decision-making so that your decisions are uneven.

And what’s interesting is artificial intelligence is proving to be one of the greatest ways to spot and fix noise problems in decision-making because it’s just taking data and making a decision on an algorithm, and that’s really what we need to strive to do. Does that help?

Pete Mockaitis
Yes. So, could you just give me eight examples of noise variables?

Caroline Miller
Another example of a noise variable, I said about a hiring manager, would be, let me think, I’m going to go back to a judge, a judge who is making parole decisions. And during the course of a day, at 8 o’clock in the morning, they make a parole decision and a complicated decision where they give somebody parole instead of sending them back to jail because they had a good night’s sleep, their football team won, but maybe their willpower is a little bit higher in the morning. But they’re making a decision that they won’t always make at the end of the day from decision fatigue. That’s noise.

Pete Mockaitis
I see. So, the variables would have to do with the rest, their rested-ness is noise because it’s not actually a valid consideration in terms of what is optimal for a decision regarding that person’s fate. And so, if they’re tired, they’re hungry, they just got in a fight with somebody, it’s sort of like they’ve got an emotional thing going on.

Caroline Miller
They’re distracted, yup.

Pete Mockaitis
And I’ve also heard that we can estimate the steepness of a hill differently if there’s a friend with us or not. And so, in a way that’s noise. Friendship is noise. It’s somewhat ambiguous, but we’re assessing our prospects based on things that are not intrinsic to the situation on the ground.

Caroline Miller
I know the research you’re speaking of, that’s a little bit different than a decision. That’s a thought. That’s a thought you’re having, and you’re saying this is a more effortful climb or it’s not, based on whether you’re looking up, down, do you have a heavy backpack. I’ll give you another example of noise that I think most people can relate to is a radiologist reading mammogram screens and they look identical.

There’s very little difference between the two mammograms, but depending on the time of day, again, “Did you sleep? Did you have a good lunch? Are you distracted because you got a call from school and your child needs to be picked up?” What you might do is send somebody to come back in for a second mammogram, or say to the other person “You’re clear.” And again, I’ll just say, artificial intelligence is reading scans and removing noise from decision-making. It’s fascinating.

So that’s just another example of noise. Same screen, same X-ray, different decision, based on the noise that’s going on in your life. And what’s interesting is Kahneman said, at the end of his life, and he died in March of this year, he said, “This is a bigger problem that’s so not discussed, bigger than bias.” And we get all this bias training. Noise is a bigger problem and it potentially cost companies and countries billions of dollars.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, okay. And you said there’s a final component.

Caroline Miller
So, grit. So, I’ve worked closely with Angela Duckworth. I wrote a book called Getting Grit and I’m fascinated by the fact that we can break grit down into components like humility, and patience, and the ability to take risks, and persistence, and perseverance, the ability to stick with a task just a little bit longer.

When you have big goals, it’s baked into that idea, that fact, that you’re going to have to be more than just resilient. You’re going to have to do hard things for a long period of time. So, you have to essentially do a grit assessment on yourself, “Do I have what it takes to actually hang in there through the dark night of the soul? Do I have the people around me who will reflect back to me that I have what it takes to finish what I’m starting right now?”

Grit is a quality that can be cultivated and it can also be contagious. So, Angela Duckworth found at West Point that if you had a low grit score, because she does the grit scale on incoming cadets at West Point, because what they found is your grit score predicts whether or not you drop out that first summer, Beast Barracks, because they couldn’t figure it out.

For a hundred years, they couldn’t figure it out. Leadership scores, grades, whatever, nothing, nothing spoke to the dropout rate during Beast Barracks until the grit scale. And she found that when you room a lower grit score cadet with a higher grit score cadet, it’s contagious because you do a few things differently for longer periods of time. You might even be a mindset. I call it changing the channel. You can learn to change the channel in your brain to go to a place where you hang in there a little bit longer. So, you have to have what’s good grit, and you can build it.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, is the higher contagious to the low-grit person or vice versa?

Caroline Miller
Yes, high grit. Well, the lower grit person becomes grittier, yes.

Pete Mockaitis
The higher grit person does not become less gritty? They’re not infected by the lazy person there?

Caroline Miller
No.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Caroline Miller
Because the culture of West Point rewards grit. And that’s something that Locke and Latham also found is they found that people are less happy while they’re pursuing hard goals over a long period of time. They set, again, these challenging and specific goals and they were puzzled, “Why are you a little less happy while you’re pursuing these long-term goals but then happier at the very end?” It’s because society prizes and rewards that kind of behavior.

You want to have good grit. And I’ll quickly say, there are three kinds of bad grit that we all have to look out for. One is stupid grit. I call it stupid grit. It’s like summit fever in mountaineering where you see the top of the mountain and you’re so drunk on getting to the top, or you’re so arrogant that you don’t listen to the Sherpas and you’re not caring about the people you’re roped into. You see a lot of arrogance with stupid grit, and it’s people who think they know better and they won’t change direction. Good grit does not have that component because it has humility baked into it.

And then there’s faux grit. We have so much faux grit, you know, people pretending to do hard things, faking their PhD research, pretending they won the Medal of Honor when, in fact, they bought it on eBay. I mean, so much faux grit; performance-enhancing drugs. And then there’s selfie-grit, which is also bad, and that’s when you do hard things, but you are so obnoxious about it, because you tell everybody that you suck all the oxygen out of the room and that repels people.

So, good grit is important when you have big goals, because you will have to dig a little bit deeper and work harder to achieve them. And then excellence, people need to start at the beginning of their goal-setting strategy with “What am I attempting to hit here? What is my definition of excellence with my behavior, or with this particular outcome?” Because in goal setting, we say that which cannot be measured cannot be achieved.

You must have a measurement in place of the excellence you’re shooting for. And I’ll just remind you, Locke and Latham found that the best possible outcome was always past your fingertips, challenging and specific. Low goals and no goals got mediocre to no results whatsoever. And at the end of every day, believe it or not, we do scan our day subconsciously for what we’re proud of that we did that day. And the things that build what’s called authentic self-esteem are the things we did outside of our comfort zone in pursuit of meaningful goals.

We never build our confidence and pride on doing easy things. And this is why I believe we have really done a tremendous disservice to the generation of young adults now when we took away valedictorians and gave them comfort animals, and we dumbed down the playgrounds, and we just did a lot of things that ended up stripping elite out of their vocabularies, and they didn’t know “What does excellence look like? And how am I going to get there?”

And the minute you introduce that back in, people take more pride in what they’re doing and they change their perception of themselves, “What am I capable of doing? How did I do it? And I’m proud of myself and I also know who has my back. I know who was there for me when it was hard, and when I fell down, and when I needed to get back up.” That’s why we all need to do hard things, because it changes our lives, and I believe it changes the world. And knowing goal-setting theory makes it more possible that we can do these things.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Well, could you perhaps give us an example of a worst practice and a best practice approach to, let’s say, we’re tackling a goal to launch some new and improved marketing initiatives to reach record-breaking levels of revenue?

Caroline Miller
So, let’s say you’re at a company and you’re launching sweatshirts, and you’re trying to decide whether or not you’re going to have this font or that font, or this color or that color, and you just want to do a brainstorming session. So, you pull everyone in, 30 people into a conference room, and you start throwing around ideas. And at the end of the day, you’ve come up with maybe one or two good ideas, but, hey, that’s it.

And then you don’t set a target for, “Well, how quickly can we do it?” or, “Is there a better way to do this?” Remember, brainstorming, you also want to know what’s new, “Is there a better, more efficient way? How do we find out where to do that?” You don’t find out any of those things. It’s what we’ve always done before. This is the approach we’ve always used before for brainstorming.

You don’t even stop and think about relationships, “Who in this company also has to know that this is our timeline for achieving this goal? Whose support do we need?” You don’t figure out investments. You don’t even realize that the cost of the kind of material for these sweatshirts has gone up, “Oh, my gosh, your budget is blown.” Your decision-making, you’ve never figured out “What if I have to pivot? What if COVID hits? What if the whole world shuts down? Do I have a playbook for pivoting?” Probably not.

Good grit, “Oh, my gosh, I’ve never faced a situation where I didn’t succeed in this job.” So, then you maybe blame it on somebody else, and excellence is you probably never started with a target. What’s different, what to know what’s good, is when you have this goal, “Okay, I’m going to make the best possible sweatshirts with this font and this color and the rest of it.”

And then you go, “Okay, who around me, who in this world is doing it better than us? Who has set some kind of dimension of excellence that we can look to? Are they using the kind of fabric that doesn’t kind of go into the trash dumps? Is it biodegradable?” So, you study what excellence looks like. And instead of putting all the people who look like each other in the same room where you get, what I call the Habsburg-Jaw effect, where it’s sterile, there are no ideas that actually live past being in that room because they’re not interesting and they’re not diverse.

You do a very different approach where you maybe have people submit their ideas. Instead of being in a room, you want a diverse set of people brainstorming, and you figure out, “Is this a learning goal or a performance goal?” It’s probably a performance goal because you’re making – I hope this isn’t going on too long – because you’re making sweatshirts. So, you’ve done it before and you know you’ve sold 100,000 in six months at this price.

So, you say, “Hey, we’re going to do it with this new fabric, and it’s within our budget, and it’s a performance goal for us so we’re going to sell 200,000 more. And here’s how we’re going to do it because we’ve got this new factory process, we’ve got this new sweatshirt, we’ve got these people who are giving us better prices on fonts, etc.” You go into the decision-making, “What do we do if…?”

Let me give you an example on this, if you don’t mind. Abercrombie & Fitch was about to introduce what they called their best dressed guest line, and they had, just as COVID hit, they had taken pictures of all the models, they had all the clothes made, best dressed guests. It was designed to appeal to millennials who needed five outfits to go to weekend destination weddings, which was the big thing. So, suddenly COVID hits, and they’ve got this marketing line all paid for, they’ve got the budget, they’ve got the models, they’ve got the pictures, and it’s not usable because no one’s getting on a plane, no one’s going to a wedding, and no one’s buying clothes.

They pivoted quickly. They sent cameras to all their employees. They said, “Wear our lounge clothes. Take pictures of yourselves. Those are our ads for the next year and a half.” That kind of agility and that ability to pivot and do that kind of decision-making was such a plus for Abercrombie & Fitch. So, then they reintroduced best dressed guests when COVID passed, and, anyway, that ended up being a big hit too.

So, you have to know, “What’s going to happen if we have a black swan event like COVID?” And then grit, I already explained. And then excellence, you start with “This is a performance goal for us. This is what we’ve done before. What’s challenging and specific?” You name that number and then you measure along the way to make sure that you’re hitting those targets.

Pete Mockaitis
Now, let’s say it’s a learning goal that it’s new and never before done, how do we approach that differently?

Caroline Miller
Okay. So, let’s just take the Apollo spacesuits. So, there was that horrible implosion where three astronauts died in, I think, the Mercury capsule, Gus Grissom and his two colleagues, but Apollo was still going to put a man on the moon. That was their goal. So, they had to make these spacesuits that were going to withstand the kinds of pressures and fires and gases that could leak into the suit. So, what did they do?

They didn’t set an exact date and time by which they would have the suit, but they went and they found people who knew how to deal with stretchy fabric and who could sew with great precision. And what did they do? These engineers went and found these seamstresses at Playtex, the girdle company, and they met with them. And in a room of brainstorming, they honored the knowledge and the wisdom of these teenage and young 20-year-old seamstresses quite often who could sew with precision to 1/32 of an inch.

And instead of saying, “This spacesuit will be ready by September,” they said, “We’re going to get this right and we’re going to incentivize everybody here to have the standard of excellence, that this is going to keep people alive, and it’s going to allow the United States to come back with what we need to learn about the moon.”

So, all the seamstresses had pictures of the astronauts hung over their sewing machines to remind them of the importance of what they were doing. So, they baked in the motivation, and so only the definition of what excellence looked like was “Could this spacesuit allow Neil Armstrong to move and twist and maneuver and reach down and pick up lunar rocks?” It wasn’t, “We’re going to have it done by a certain date.” Excellence is, “It’s got to work and it’s got to pass these tests. And that’s when we’re going to say we have a spacesuit that’s going to go to the moon.” That’s a learning goal.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, thank you. Well, tell me, Caroline, any final do’s and don’ts that we should know about setting and achieving big goals?

Caroline Miller
I think the most important one is to assume that you know nothing. And I hate to say that, but 20 years ago when I was handed goal-setting theory at the University of Pennsylvania as one of my first assignments in this Masters of Applied Positive Psychology program, I own Zig Ziglar, Brian Tracy, Tony Robbins, Stephen Covey, every single person, I had their books and I got goal-setting theory and I went home and I looked at all of them. They were all urban legends.

And yet, this is how we have built companies. This is what we’ve instilled in productivity systems. If you don’t know goal-setting theory, you don’t know how to really set goals effectively. Just start with that one assumption, dip into Big Goals, and just learn goal-setting theory in the first three chapters of the book.

Get that and then move on to the BRIDGE methodology, because if you do that, there isn’t any dream that you have that you can’t have a really good shot at achieving because you’ll be able to create a strategy that’s going to get you as close as you can possibly get to that dream or get you there. Because I really do believe that the science changes our lives and it makes us more hopeful and optimistic.

I also want to say that one of the most important things in this book is that women do not typically do as well with all the motivational kind of programs and advice that’s been doled out for 50 years. I’ll just give you an example. When women perform jobs on time and tasks on time and get things done on time, they do not get credit for it. Instead, men often, who work longer hours and who don’t get it done on time, the men get rewarded for being seen as harder working and more committed to the company.

So, it’s really important that when you pursue a goal, you have to know what’s the culture you’re working in and how is that culture going to support you in the process of pursuing and achieving your goals, and that’s just one of many examples in the book. You have to know, “Does my company and does the culture I come from and my gender support using this advice to achieve my goal? Or is it going to backfire?”

Because men tend to approach goals as winning and domination and power and success and often money, and women are more communal. They’re not as agentic. That’s not what women get acculturated and rewarded for. So, you can’t just take the goal-setting advice that’s out there on lots and lots of podcasts.

Because, quite often, we don’t hear voices other than men talking to men about men, like Special Forces and presidents and examples that are unrelatable to a lot of us who are taking in really, really interesting stories and advice, but pause and say “Does this story relate to me and my life and what I do and what I look like?” Because if it doesn’t, make sure you do the research to find somebody who does fit that. That’s going to be the advice that’s going to help you the most.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay, thank you. Now, could you share a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Caroline Miller
My favorite quote is, “You can’t keep what you don’t give away.”

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Caroline Miller
My favorite study is the “Benefits of Frequent Positive Affect” by Sonja Lyubomirsky, Laura King, and Ed Diener. And they found, at the same time, 2005, as I went back to school, that all success in life is preceded by being happy first. So, any goal strategy plan has to start with how you boot up your well-being through positive interventions, like using your strengths, exercise, gratitude, meditation. So, all success in life is preceded by being happy first, so you got to start there.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite book?

Caroline Miller
Woman’s Inhumanity to Woman by Phyllis Chessler.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Caroline Miller
I love Perplexity.

Pete Mockaitis
I just started using that. Why do you love it?

Caroline Miller
Because it gives you the sources and citations where it’s getting information from, instead of just kind of being a wild scrape of the internet. And I’ll just say this, I just spent last weekend at Penn with the co-creator of the Google Notebook, which just got rave reviews everywhere. Google Notebook, Steven Johnson is the man I was with at Penn last weekend. He has come up with something extraordinary where you can drag all your sources and websites and links and podcasts and whatever into this one notebook and, oh, my God, you have your own brain.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And a favorite habit?

Caroline Miller
Favorite habit is swimming. I get up at five o’clock and I go to swim practice with other master swimmers.

Pete Mockaitis
And is there a key nugget you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks; they quote it back to you often?

Caroline Miller
“You can’t keep what you don’t give away.” And can I give you the backstory on that, because it’s very meaningful to me?

Pete Mockaitis
Okay.

Caroline Miller
Real quickly. When I was overcoming bulimia almost 40 years ago, at a time when nobody got better, it was really a death sentence. I started to get better one day at a time in a 12-step group in Baltimore, Maryland, and it was just a miracle. I didn’t think I was going to. I’m surprised I’m alive some days. And I was so thrilled and proud and happy that I was eating and healthy and just not doing all the destructive things I’ve been doing for seven or eight years before.

And someone said to me, “Caroline, it’s great that you’re in recovery, but you can’t keep what you don’t give away.” That taught me what gratitude and love and giving is all about. If you have something worth sharing that’s good, that will help somebody else, you can’t keep it unless you turn around and pull someone with you. So, people quote that back to me all the time.

Pete Mockaitis
Okay. And if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Caroline Miller
My website, CarolineMiller.com, or the book Big Goals has its own website. We just loaded lots of case studies on success and failure using the BRIDGE methodology and goal-setting theory and that’s BigGoalsBook.com.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. And do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks looking to be awesome at their jobs?

Caroline Miller
I would say choose to do hard things and choose to learn about yourself and your character strengths in the process of doing hard things. And if I have a bonus asterisk point, go to something I have no vested interest in, I don’t get anything for this, the VIA’s Character Strengths Survey. It’s free, 15 minutes, at ViaStrengths.org. And, boy, it ranks your character strengths from 1 to 24. Lock onto your top 5, and use them every day in new and creative ways to show up and succeed. It’s proven and it makes you happier to just find out what your top five are.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Caroline, thank you. This is fun. I wish you much luck with all your big goals.

Caroline Miller
Oh, you, too. Thank you so much.