Caroline Adams Miller || Getting Grit

have Carolyn Adams Miller on the podcast. Carolyn is a certified professional coach, author, media personality and keynote speaker and educator. In twenty fifteen, she was named one of the ten Positive Psychology Coaches to Follow by Positive Psychology Program. Her latest book is called Getting Grit, The Evidence Based Approach to Cultivating Passion, perseverance, and Purpose. Thanks for being on the show today, Carolyn. Oh, I'm such a fan of yours.

This is like a red letter day in my life. Oh, honor to hear that it's true. Well, I have a bunch of questions for you. You know, I can't prepare. That's good, great questions are great, But I want to start by asking you, like, what is a positive psychology coach. Maybe you can total listeners, because I don't think i've covered that yet on my podcast. That phrase, well, it's an interesting phrase. I'm not sure. I'm not sure how it started, and I'm not even sure what it means myself.

I've been called that, but I think there is designation and training that exists in positive psychology coaching. I haven't done that, but I think if you're a coach, and especially one of the first coaches to get this master's and applied positive psychology, people put two and two together. But I do tell people, while I use the tools of positive psychology as a coach, particularly around goal setting and self efficacy and self determination and all that, it's

not all I do or you. So I'm not exactly sure what the term means because I don't really use it on myself, but it's out there. It's out there. Well, you are a certified professional coach. You use that phrase. Can you tell me at least what that is? Oh? Good question. So I'm certified through the International Coach Federation, and many coaches choose to go through that particular credentialing program.

I mean to have that particular credential because otherwise I think coaching gets sometimes an unfair knock about as lack of professionalism, and I think it's been an effort to have standards in our field. So there are a bunch of core competencies you get tested on every few years. I'm a PCC MICF certified coach. Oh that's great, well, congratulations, And how many clients do you have on average? Like do you see a week? A week? So I've worked mostly virtually. I think it's been as high as twenty

four to thirty at times. And yeah, not obviously not every day and sometimes not every week. Because of the book launch and because of a pretty aggressive level of speeches I've been doing, I have really cut back. But I work with people in Hong Kong and Japan and Australia and you know, in the United States. But it tends to be people who want to play bigger and do bigger, and they really like the evidence based approach

I set forward in not creating your best life. And now they're intrigued by grit obviously, Yeah, that's a good segue. Grit is a pretty hot term these days, right it is. It's a little controversial. Like everything else. Well, I think anything that becomes hot, then becomes immediately controversial, even if it wasn't controversial before. Great, no matter who you are, no matter how nice you are, no matter how awesome you are, like you become controversial if you're famous enough.

I agree, So, yeah, I'd love to get your thoughts on why are you so interested in grit? First of all, you know what research inspired you? And how does your own model differ? Good questions? Questions, aren't they? Yeah, I'll just try to take them in the order that makes

sense to me. So, as you know, I was in the first class at Penn in the Masters of Applied Positive Psychology, So that was two thousand and five, and I was a certified coach to then, obviously, But I became intrigued by the fact that all this research that was being put in front of us, goal setting theory, self determination theory, self efficacy were all things that I'd never heard of, and I'd certainly never seen in coach training.

Goal setting theory in particular fascinated me because one of the core competencies put forward by the ICF is that you have to manage goal progress and accountability with your clients. And yet I wasn't aware of anybody who knew there was a science to goal setting. So I told Marty I was going to link the science of well being with the science of goal setting. And I think, I know I'm the first person to do that, and so

Creating Your Best Life is my fifth book. So in it I became fascinated by not just goal setting and goal setting theory, but also the fact that you know, the harder the goals, the happier you are. So there's some good research in my book. Bruce Hetty is one of the people whose studies I worked with that the happiest people do wake up every day to clear cut, hard goals that aren't just about SERVI themselves, but they

tend to involve other people and serve others. And at that time I saw Angela Duckworth running in and out of the classrooms at PEN. None of us knew who she was. She was pretty new, I think, to working with Marty. At that point, we didn't have her as

an instructor. But as I was working out in my capstone that year was the book Proposal for Creating Your Best Life, which then got picked up and published in early two thousand and nine, I realized that if I was going to talk about goal setting, I needed to address this issue of grit, which she was just starting to get results around. So I think that was a

piece of what fascinated me about grit. But I also had this weird experience in the MAP program of replaying my life and my other books in my head and realizing there was a reason why I was alive, and that was because in hindsight, what I put together was that I had had talent and success when I was younger in life, but I hadn't had grit. And I think that's something that comes up in my coaching practice

that's so fascinating. I mean, I can work with very successful people and when we talk about what's the hardest thing you've ever done, they'll sheepishly admit that they really haven't done hard things. They've simply picked areas where they knew they'd succeed. So that speaks to Carol dwax work,

of course, fixed in growth mindset. But what I realized was I had had to cultivate grit in my twenties to overcome boliema, and that if I could cultivate it, I realized that it probably had a cultivatable quality to it, which then I you know, I followed Angela for a few years, well actually all these years I have, and she put forward the idea that you can cultivate grit, and so I masked a lot of studies around that and other components of grit, and that's why I wrote

Getting Grit. I really felt it was important that people understand that it's not a quality that's reserved for special others. And then I think it has an incredibly important role to play in society. Is that my three kids have grown up in the last twenty eight years, I've been stunned at the dumbing down of standards in their lives. I mean completely stunned. I could just war you with

anecdote after anecdote. But I wrote the book as a mom, as a as a coach, which is a consultant, just because I felt that, you know, I was seeing grit disappearing and it concerned me. So that's how I got into it, and that's why I'm so passionate about it. Well, grit is I don't think grit is disappearing right now, do you think it is? I think that the millennial generation from the research I looked at from the studies that include in the book. I don't think it's set,

it's missing completely. But I do think that it's harder for people to be in situations where they are rewarded for doing hard things. I think there's too many winners. Everyone's a winner approach, and I saw this in my kid's lives, the trophies, the ceremonies, the Color Run, it's the most popular run in the country. There's no times, a lot of throwing colors at people. So I think the situations have changed where it is easier for high, hard,

transparent standards to exist for people. I do see, I see what you're saying. I see you're saying. I guess the concept itself is not disappearing, but the actual amount of people that are enacting it might still be need. Yeah, I hear you. Yeah yeah. And I want to be careful to say because I've been attacked for saying that all millennials are not gritty and that's not the case at all. And this is something that came up at the MAP Alumni summit last October, and even Marty said, no, no,

that's not what she's saying. She's saying that it's the proportion of young adults who seem to not be as resilient as previous generations. And there's a lot of reasons why, which I cover in my book. Can you give me one reason, I can give you a lot. You talk about great inflation. You know, the average grade in the nineteen sixties was the sea and now just my alma mater, you know, at Harvard, the average grade is in a minus.

I look at the math made easy, phonics made easy, kind of approached education where students begin to think that it's got to be easy in order for you to do well in that. I look at the dumbing down of playgrounds. I really cover that, where kids just don't get hurt anymore. Consequently, you've got these woodships and these really ridiculous plastic contraptions. They've taken away all these metal slides because I guess they're too dangerous, so they get

hot or whatever it is. So you've got the playgrounds, You've got this whole industry around babyproofing the house so people won't get hurt. You get into the comfort animals, you know, on the college campuses, and it's a good idea gone too far. I mean, colleges are overrun with you know. I mean, I've got stories around kangaroos and ferrets and turkeys and pigs just all showing up on campuses and students saying they simply cannot get through the

day without this comfort animal. And then you go into the fact that we have a whole new profession called cuddlers in this country. I mean, have you ever heard of that? No, I've actually never heard of that professional. It's a profession with a certification. You can hire somebody to hold you for a dollar a minute. They'll even

spend the night with you. But it's a real profession, and it's being seen as an extension of you know, a generation that does not have the ability to self soothe because they've had so many things instantly given to them, instant gratification. There's a real lack of solf regulation in this group. I mean, apparently our attention spent is one second less than a goldfish. You know, goldfish can focus

for eight, humans for seven. So it builds on all of these things, the technology, the instant gratification, the lowering of standards, the self esteem, parenting movement, trophies for all great inflation saram. I saw my kids getting retests in high school. I mean, are you kidding me? Why bother to do your best for the first test if the teacher has this ability to just give you a retest.

I've got stories of students not able to wear their National Honor Society regalia because it'll hurt other students' feelings at graduation. I mean, there's one school system in Columbus, Ohio that named two hundred and twenty two students valedictorians. I mean, what does this do to the pursuit of excellence when everyone is excellent and told they're awesome, but they haven't really done anything. Yeah. What I'm trying to understand is how some of those examples relate to grit

In particular. I've heard of cuddle parties, by the way, in New York City they have cuttle parties. The thing about the lugging profession is really interesting to me because it speaks to me as well about the unacceptable rates of loneliness we have in this world and on campus

and among people. I see that less the reflection of lack of grit, but more that there just really is such disconnection among people and the basic need for intimacy and when it's really severely thwarted, I mean seeking out a cuddle partner is makes sense, I think evolutionarily least well, I get that, but I also see it another way. I don't think it's either or I think it's both, because I think the inability to self soothe also leads

to this inability to not be impulsive. And so what you see is people unable to sit with sadness, and therefore they can act on discomfort or not be able to deal with something being hard. I've talked to many sports coaches who say that this is a generation that the minute you know it's too hot outside, they're immediately saying, we can't go on anymore. Just kind of this proportion of kids who don't have a resilient mindset. And so

it's not that these things are all bad. But when I put together this whole chain of stories and research and people I interviewed, what I saw was this increasing inability to sit with discomfort of any kind and be able to self soothe and or change the channel in your brain, which I find that people who are gritty are able to do to persist to a finish line, and the finish line can be changing professions and hanging in there through the learning curve of you know, learning

a whole new set of knowledge. It can also be something physical. I mean, I'm a competitive swimmer. You know, there is in a single day, I wake up and I want to go to swim practice at five in the morning. I think you have to have the ability to be uncomfortable and be okay with it. Maybe be helpful to step back a second ask what is your definition of grit? Okay? Well, so I think we all are familiar with Angela's definition, which is passion and perseverance.

By the way, I think everyone knows immediately who angel is. See I'm assuming the whole world does who she is. But you're right. So it's her research that I have cited, particularly in the beginning of the book when I explained how I became interested in grit. But what I realized is that it was a definition that stopped short of helping people understand that grit can be both good and bad. And my definition of grit is something I call authentic grit.

So my definition is the passionate pursuit. Okay, so it's still the passionate pursuit of hard goals. But I believe it has to all and inspire other people to become better, to become better, to flourish emotionally, to take positive risks and live their best lives. So, for me, grit is good when it elevates the collective and when other people are actually better for being in the presence of people with this kind of grit. And so I have good grit and bad grit in the book, and I divide

it into categories. And I've had a huge number of people say it grit made sense to them. They could buy into it once they understood that it's not about just stupid grit, you know, seeing something through to the finish line. I mean it's like I'm at fever and mountaineering, are in scuba diving like the rapture of the deep, or you know, you see people who won't listen in corporate settings. They get this idea and they've got to get it to the finish line, and they won't take

advice from anybody else. They have a lack of humility, you know, you see selfie grit. You know, people who do hard things, but they have to brag about it all the time, and that doesn't inspire and elevate anybody either. And I've listened to your podcast interviews with people who talk about AWE, and I think the research on AWE is particularly fascinating because people say, we live in an

AWE deprived society. We don't see greatness, we're not inspired to give standing ovations because a lot of times what we're being told is awesome is actually kind of mediocre. It's not you know, innovative and new and completely different and out of your comfort zone. And so I think it has to awe people and to make them ask themselves, what if I, you know, played a little bit bigger? What if I went out of my comfort zone and

had this big dream that I pursued? Because I think we all know that this number one regret of people in hospice care is that they live someone else. I know, they didn't live the life they felt they should have lived. And I interviewed Gary Latham, the co founder of goal setting theory. So, you know, Caroline, at the end of people's lives, you know, eighty percent of them or coded what a should have you know, they just they didn't go for it. They were afraid and it's not a

fear of success, it's fear of everything. And as a coach, I see this and I see it every single day. So that's my definition of grit. And to me, it's a fundamental different characterization that makes it relevant and alive for me. Oh for sure. I love the concept of

authentic grit. I wrote an article which I'll send you later called Authenticity and Grit, talking about a research that was conducted that I really do think supports this idea that when you combine you know, there's an authenticity scale, Like there's actually an authenticity scale you could take and measure how much are you self alienated? How much are you do you speak up about how you really feel and stuff. The extent to which you scored higher in authenticity,

the more grit was associated with well being in your life. Ah, I'd love to see that. That sounds fascinating. Yeah, So I just love this idea. So the idea you know of authentic grid is that you are persevering and passionate in so there's like a continuity in who you are, Like standing up for yourself is that part of it. This is why I love your podcast. That's brilliant. You just kind of tweaked it in a way that made

it shinier. So yeah, you're becoming more of who you really are, which makes sense because people who have this kind of grit are not pursuing other people's goals, and you can't do that because goals that require grit have i think baked into them the fact that it's not going to be easy. You're going to be alone at times, you're going to be discouraged, you may have nothing but setbacks for a while, and so you have to have

passion to keep going. And that means it better be your own goal, because people don't get fired up about other people's goals. And I think I've even seen something I call Sygaronnic grit because I think it has to pull you forward, just like the Zygarnic effect. You know,

things that are unfinished that pull you forward. I think this kind of grit has a Zygarnt quality to it, where you just keep going because you know your goal, you're invested in it, and you want In some ways, you see it as you know, individuating you or leaving you without the regrets you're sure you'll have if you don't go in that direction. So I love the spin you just put on it around becoming more authentic by having this kind of grit. Yeah. I just really influenced

by the humanistic psychologists and the idea. You know. Rogers talked a lot about the importance of not alienating yourself from yourself, not becoming a stranger to yourself, and Karen Horney talked a lot about self alienation. And these are really core ideas about what it means to be a human, what it means from a next you know, there's an existential perspective to a lot of this that you don't really talk about a lot in positive psychology. So this

is a needed concept and I support this idea. You said earlier, you said, like grit is a little bit controversial these days. Could you unpack what is controversial about it? Do you personally have any criticisms at all? Do you agree with any of the criticisms, Like I don't love

to just to hear your thoughts. Well, I think this could probably be a full hour in and of itself, But as I was going into the editing stage and the final edits, Marcus creates criticism of Angela Duckworth's work being more about conscientiousness than about anything new called grit. I mean, I looked at all of it, I read it, and what I keep coming back to is conscientiousness is

not this quality that I see people develop. And I think what we're talking about here, which really does involve this passion, I think you can be diligent and persevering and conscientious without having that extra secret sauce of it's my goal. I'm passionate about it. I'm going to keep hanging in there. I think conscientious people can also pursue the goal of being admired or fitting into a community

without necessarily being authentic. So I took a look at all the conscientiousness research, and then when I was in New Zealand and Australia, I met with Peggy Kern in a variety of other academics at the University of Mail and we talked about Yeah. Well, she was the one who said, Caroline, this is great what you've done, because

this fits into systems theory. Because the way you're defining grit and the way you break it out into good grit and bad grit and that has to on and inspire other people fits right in with systems theory, which she's working on right now. So she said, I can see how I can use your work. And I'm not an academic. I come in here as a competitive athlete and a journalist and a historian and a coach, and I take, you know, I have one of those disruptive

brains that looks at it really differently. But to have her kind of give me that seal of approval that academics could really buy into this was really helpful to me. And so we talked about this whole issue around is it resilience because someone came up and criticized me after I gave the opening keynote at Positive Education conference in Australia, and she said, look, that was lovely, dear, but you know, you don't know the difference between grit and resilience, but

you got the audience quite excited. And I thought, you know, that's not fair, because I don't think it is simple resilience. And of course I thought through all of that, you resilience as a shorter term component of grit. So I see and understand that criticism as well, but I don't believe that they're the same thing, and I talk about

that in the book. I also agree with Angela that you don't want to introduce the idea of grit at all costs in situations such as some of the underprivileged school systems where kids are just fighting to be in a classroom and have food and be there and be ready to learn, who come from environments where there's domestic violence and so on and so forth. So I don't

think grit is the secret to success for everyone. My point is that as I've raised my children over the last thirty years, and what I've seen in sports, and what I've seen in societies, and what I've seen in clients when I go into corporations and the HR managers are tearing their hair out that they can't give performance reviews without people crying and saying they're hurting their feelings.

What I'm saying is that this definition of grit, this opportunity for us to take a look at do we have high transparent standards and high support for actually pursuing hard goals, and do we recognize the people who actually achieved those standards. I think that's the piece where I want to make the biggest difference. I don't think grit is useful in every conversation, but I think it's useful

in the conversations. I've mentioned in one of the stories I told my ted X talk and that I tell in the book that you know, really struck me as a mom was my kids. We all joined this little summer swim team outside of Washington, d C. It was a parent that our oldest son in particular was you know, really really good swimmer. So we joined and we heard, oh my gosh, you know these three men they used to swim here, their Olympic gold medalists and NCAA champions.

And my husband and I said, well, where's the record board? Can we see how fast they were when they were younger? And this mother looked at us dead on, you know, didn't miss a beat, and said, we hid the record board. We were afraid it was going to hurt the kid's feelings and they would be you know, too discouraged to pursue it. So I actually went and commissioned the largest

record board ever made for summer swimming. And what I found was that the kids were magnetized by it, and they were inspired by a record board, and so records started to get broken. It was actually really exciting to see what happens when you embed excellence and transparent standards. And then I brought all three men back. I found that it was a level of excitement that I hadn't seen in the team before. Because when everyone is the same and we can't celebrate excellence and there is no

record board, what does that mean? How does anyone know if they're achieving? So I talk about the law of hunt, I talk about the tall Poppy syndrome. I talk about communities where we've actually or people have actually taken out the celebration of people really being excellent in Scandinavian countries and other situations where the tall Poppy syndrome exists. So I really took a look at this from a cultural

perspective as well. Wow, you've said a lot of things just then that I could respond to, like ten things I could respond to. One of the first things you addressed was the meta analysis paper of measures of conscientiousness and GRIT and IQ predicting academic achievement, and the researchers it wasn't an argument they're making, it was data they're presenting.

They found that when you do the genetic analysis, you find that the measure of grit, as it's currently measured doesn't add predictive value above and beyond measures of conscientiousness. But that's a measurement issue, and I think you know what you're talking about. You clearly define grit. Let's put it this way. The way you define grit is clearly not well captured on a twelve item grit scale that

Angela developed. I mean, there would be many kinds of like if you were creating your own grit scale, it would be different, which you probably are, would be different, And then therefore it's an open question scientifically whether your scale adds additional predictive value above and beyond existing measures of conscientiousness. And you may not even be interested in that question. You know, there's different things for different purposes.

You know, when you're working as a coach and you're trying to help one on one someone, a certain language might be more motivating to that person. It might be more votivating to that person to say, Wow, I love the grit you've done, as opposed to I love your conscientiousness. So there's just all these complex issues. I don't think that their analysis was incorrect because it was a very

well rigorous analysis. You're right, but they're about measure but it was about the scale, right, and it was about

the measurement. I should have made that clear. What I should have clarified was that I was talking about the criticism of conscientiousness, which I've heard above and beyond his paper and what they presented, because I think even Angela said that even the way you look at the conscientiousness and the GRIT scale in the West Point Cadet research, that it was a very very small difference that it

made above and beyond what they showed. So it was generally though, what I hear is people criticizing the definition and the measurement of conscientiousness as opposed to what are you really trying to capture with grit? So I think maybe her grid scale could be tweaked if she wanted to go about really further refining what good grit is.

And she actually likes my book very very much because I did that, and she's been incredibly generous with her praise for what I did because one of the things that separates us is that she studies it and I help people cultivate it. So I think there's so much good work in academia that really needs to be brought out into the world and applied to real people. You know,

what can you do with these findings? And what I tried to do was take what she had done and mix it in with what I know works with the human beings I know who want to get more not just more resilient, but they want to have something that is a passion of theirs that they will not regret not pursuing when they get older. So that's hark, Yeah,

I hear you. One could argue that it'd be better instead of combining lots of seemingly separate things like passion, persevereance and resist that into a single word, that we should be treating these things separately from each other and then try to develop those things separately. That by reducing it all into a single construct, we lose the nuances of each individual thing. Now, how would you respond to that?

I would say, you know, I interviewed Bob valorand about passion and his passion scale, and I've looked at doctor Keltner and aw and I mean, I've really looked at all of these things ensure you can unpack it to the point where it's granular. But I didn't see a lot of value in that when it came to real world people wanting to capture the kind of quality that

I think makes the biggest difference. And I talk about baking the grit cake because there are books out there on passion, there are books out there on grit, and they're books out there on resilience, and they're books out there on awe. But I feel like you're going to be buying a million books to try to figure out how to pull together what I keep seeing makes the

biggest difference. And what I'm really fascinated by is what I call ordinary grit, and it's people just doing extraordinary things in ordinary settings, and they have this requisite quality

of humility. They're not selfie grit bragging about themselves. But what I found was that these were the people who I guess who would also fit the Positive Energizer research by Kim Cameron, who elevated the environment simply by virtue of being there and being role models of simply not being a whiner and you know, finishing the job and not requiring a lot of special attention from other people.

So I have this great story of this guy, Heavin Downs at Harpeth High School in Tennessee, who lost his limbs. You know, he was in a horrible ied accident in two thousand and five overseas, and when he came back, he had been a three sport athlete in high school and he just wanted to have a purpose again. He wanted to feel useful, so he asked if he could cut the grass on the football field where he used

to play football. And the most interesting thing happened, and ESBN covered this, which is how I found out about it. But boy did it make me think. The coach said that this fascinating thing happened when the players saw Kevin Downs just cutting the grass silently, back and forth with these, you know, prosthetic arms and legs, And he said, the kids stopped whining. They stopped whining about the heat, the two a days, how difficult it was, how much their

bodies hurt. And it made me start to think about what if, you know, what if there was a real effort to find and embed people like that in a variety of settings, corporations, classrooms, just about anywhere where we need to elevate the quality of play in the sense of the quality of being exceptional, Because I really do think we've gotten away from that. And I do think there's just been far too much of an effort of trying to make everybody feel better without necessarily calling out

and saluting the people who are exceptional in this way. Yeah, that's totally fair. What is selfie grit? Though? Selfie grit is one of the forms of bad grit that I identified that it's about people who actually do hard things, but they want everybody to notice them, they want everybody to pay attention to them, and they just brag. They relentlessly brag. So I've got, you know, stories in my book about people who just feel the need to overshadow

other people's achievements by talking about themselves. And interesting because when you look at Jim Collins' book Good to Great about the best CEOs, what you find are the ones you know with the best results and you know turned around companies. They have this humility. So you find that selfie grit is not present when you have people who need to talk about themselves. And I find this it's

really kind of interesting. I mean, I do think this whole selfie culture where people have to or feel compelled to put their relationships status or document everything they see or do and just want likes, I sell my kids being impacted by this. I do think it takes away the whole idea of noticing other people's accomplishments and celebrating other people, so you get away from this active, constructive responding when it's all about me all the time. So

people lose the opportunity to just be that person. And then this faux grit. I mean, you see this in academia. The case is of people faking their research to get their PhD. I mean, I found all these interesting studies and articles about you know, this fake research and people being caught for it. But one of the most egregious examples of faux grit. Really, I can't believe people do this, But they are people men who go to flea markets and on eBay and they buy the Medal of Honor,

which is our country's highest military honor. In credible. They don't just buy the medal, they freaking wear it in parades and they put it on their resume. There's an entire commission in our government to track these people down. When I wrote the book, I think there were only seventy eight currently living Medal of Honor winners. And the fact that people would want others to think that of

them is just so disgusting to me. But now we have a president who actually said that he felt like he had actually gone to war and been under fire, and that he didn't need to actually be in a war because he'd gone to military school. Therefore he knew exactly what it was like to have courage under fire. So when you have that as your commander in chief, I mean, you can imagine how hard it is for people to think it's wrong to do that. Well, I just want to know this medal of honor I'm wearing

around my neck right now, it's real. This is real. Yeah. Can you see mine in my hair? Yeah? I see it? Ours is real? Okay, Yeah, but screw those fakers. You know, there's there's fall. There's fall. Who pho like the Korean food? Like the Korean food? No? No, not like the creative food. Okay. So here's another controversial question, when to grit and when to quit? That's become like everyone's saying to asking that

question these days. It feels like, yeah, I mean, so I address this and creating your best life before I dug too deep into grit, Because I think there is a fine line between quetting and being gritty, and I think this requires knowing the difference between when you're hurting yourself or hurting other people. And so there is research

that I have in creating your best life. I can't remember if I slipped it into getting grit, but you know, when you continue to pursue goals that no longer are relevant to who you are, and the situation is such that it's like someone who wants to be an Olympic gymnast, but suddenly they become five to eleven. I read some research showing that you actually compromise your immune system by continuing to do something that simply doesn't fit your life

any longer. And one of the things I find again I keep going back to humility, is that the people who know the difference are the ones who actually have like a peanut gallery around them or a board of advisors, and they listen, they listen to their feedback, and they ask, you know, is this something I should reconsider. You see entrepreneurs who have stupid grit, who keep throwing good money after bad and they don't know when to disengage from

their product. And yet you know, you see Google X now paying people to stop you know, the projects that they say have no longer they don't appear to be viable, or they'll be too expensive. So I think Google x has found a really interesting way to have the moonshot

dreams and pursue these huge goals. But they've also found a way to cut their losses and reward people for knowing the difference between pursuing something and then saying, you know, we're going to quit now because it's just not the right time and it's causing more damage than actually being good. You know. I have a great quote in the book from the tennis player Serena Williams, who has, you know, seen this in herself. And of course a lot of athletes,

top athletes are really driven. Got some great stories about good and bad Gritten in the book. But Serena Williams has recognized this inability in herself to know when to quit and when to push, and so she has told the people around her, whom she knows believe in her, support her and have her best interests at heart, that they need to tell her when it's time to get off the tennis quarter. She'll play through injury. And the great quote I have is she said, there's no control

all delete button in my brain. I don't know how to stop, so I have to trust other people. So it's very interesting. You know, people with this authentic grit, they have two kinds of humility. They have social humility and intellectual humility, and so they seek out people who actually, you know, have the information or the knowledge or the foresight that they lack about themselves. So I think it's a variety of things you have to look at. But you know, I think we air more on the side

of quitting than we do and persisting. And I'm particularly interested in people learning how to be a little bit more resilient and gritty then learning how to disengage. Although that's certainly a problem that is out there. I definitely hear that as a common thread across a lot of this interview is your frustration at that, So I totally I hear it. It's a lot and clear. So I want to leave you know, my audience they love practical and you're what a great opportunity you're are a certified

professional coach. Could you leave our listeners a little bit with what they can start doing today to grow their grit? Thank you for asking me that. I believe a lot in the best Possible Future Self exercise. I've seen Jordan Peterson's work with Maps of Meaning. Are you familiar with his work his little online profile. I actually love that book. Yeah,

oh okay, great, so you know about that? So you know, I think he's done this fascinating mixture of goal setting and identifying obstacles and fixed and growth, mindset and strengths and all the rest of it. But I think at the heart is who do you want to be? Not what do you want to do? Who do you want to become? And so I'm a big believer in just asking people to take some time and think about what's my best possible future self? Who do I want to

be in five or ten years. So I have that available as a free download on my site, Caroline Miller dot com, just because I think everyone should have it. I also believe that people need to take a look at who's around them, who's taking the oxygen in the rooms where they are, because women in particular don't identify

quickly enough the black holes in their lives. And so there's this great research showing that eighty four percent of women admit to having frenemies, you know, friends who are enemies who are passive aggressive or active destructive or whatever you want to say, but they're not supportive of their goals. So you need to have goals shielding. And that's a great part of the goal setting research. You have to shield your goals from people who are going to diminish

you or make fun of you. So I think you have to take a look at who are the people around you and how supportive are they, and how do you know they're supportive. So I love the active constructive or they're curious and enthusiastic or not. I also encourage people to play a little bit biggers. That's lock and lath them. You know, set hard goals, not just you know, low goals or goals you're sure you'll accomplish, but take those kinds of risks with those big goals because people

just feel better. The University of San Francisco has this great research at the end of every day, people scan their days for what they're proud of. And the things we're proud of are the things we did outside of our comfort zone. And I followed Jessica Tracy's research around authentic self esteem, and I think that you have to go out of your comfort zone on a daily basis.

I've spoken at colleges where I talk about this, and I'll ask the audience call it, you know, twenty twenty one, twenty two year old, how many of you did something hard today? Nobody raises their hand. Nobody, And when I dig in, they say, we don't have to do hard. We pick our courses based on how late we can sleep, you know, the gray we find somebody who's an easy greater. So I think it's more easy than I thought it was to actually go through your day without doing something hard.

So do something hard. But I also think you should have fun in the process. I mean, my license plate is we have fun, because I will remind myself constantly. It doesn't need to be this, you know, slog through the desert where you're miserable all the time. But I believe that you have to also give to others because in my twelve step group where I overcame my eating disorder and also gave up alcohol, I kept hearing you

can't keep what you don't give away. And I think people who come up or come together with this you know, mixture of grit and optimism and the rest of it turn around helps somebody else. I don't get dragged down by other people who don't want it, but make sure that you're reaching your hand out to somebody else and making a difference in someone else's life. I love that. And you know, being next door to Angela Duckworth's lab,

I hear her talk a lot about grit. For a lot of people may not know this, but she often used it in the same phrases pro social purpose. A lot of people don't realize, like that's really what she's focused on a lot I know. So look, I want to thank you today for your fresh take on GRIT. I think Angel's proud of you for a reason. It's you're not just creating her theory and putting out a book. This is how science, this is how the world works.

People extend things, they move it in other directions, different populations, et cetera. It's your book adds a lot of value and I wish it well. Thank you. We'll Live Happy magazine said it it's one of the ten books that'll change your life in twenty seventeen, and I thought that was just one of the kindest things that could have said. So I appreciate your time because I say, I'm a huge fan. You have brilliant people on I just I still can't get over the podcast I listened to where

you talked about Adoppelganger. You know the goal of that particular kabalistic religion was to create a doppelganger in the twelfth century that you would ask about your future. I don't know if you remember that, but I was driving to pitt and I just remember going what out loud to myself and I rewound. I was like, you got you have the most interesting interviews and guests. I have to say, so honored to be on this now. Now

you're in that, you're in that group. I'm in the circle of the circle most interesting parents, right, yeah, yeah, thank you, thank you. Thank you so much for listening to The Psychology Podcast with doctor Scott Barry Kaufman. I hope you found this episode just as thought provoking as I did. If something you heard today stimulated you in some way, I encourage you to join in the discussion at the Psychology podcast dot com. That's the Psychology Podcast dot com.