Standing Up Strong

Standing Up Strong with Caroline Miller

• The Nancy & David Wolf Holocaust & Humanity Center • Season 2 • Episode 2

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0:00 | 29:30

True resilience and success don’t start with striving harder—they begin by standing firmly in who you are at your best. 

“Happiness precedes success.”
- Caroline Adams Miller

In this episode of Standing Up Strong, Dr. Jillian Coppley speaks with positive psychology pioneer and author Caroline Adams Miller about the science of flourishing, goal setting, and meaningful achievement.
Caroline challenges the myth that success creates happiness, explaining instead that well-being fuels goal attainment and long-term success. Drawing on research and personal experience, she highlights the power of character strengths, supportive relationships, and her concept of ampliship—publicly and intentionally uplifting others, particularly women, as they pursue ambitious goals.
Her best advice: do hard, meaningful things, surround yourself with people who believe in you, and create spaces where everyone can rise together. This conversation reminds us that true happiness and wellbeing are critical to building a community of upstanders.

More about host Jillian Coppley:
Dr. Jillian Coppley is a visionary executive recognized internationally for her expertise in character strengths, wellbeing, and organizational transformation. With deep experience in positive psychology, strategy, and change, she has led large-scale collaborations, built global programs, strategic partnerships, and thriving organizational cultures that empower individuals, teams and organizations to flourish. Her leadership blends strategic vision, research-based innovation, and deep personal care for others —creating environments where people and programs thrive and where meaningful, lasting impact takes root. 
 
This series is part of the Cynthia & Harold Guttman Family Center for Storytelling at the Nancy & David Wolf Holocaust & Humanity Center in Cincinnati, Ohio, where the science of character strengths is integral to our work creating a community of upstanders. 
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Our thanks to the Mayerson Family Foundation and the VIA Institute on Character for their support of this series    
https://www.mayersonfoundation.org/      
https://www.viacharacter.org/   
    
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Episode Resources
Take the free VIA Character Strengths Survey https://www.viacharacter.org/survey
Caroline Adams Miller’s latest book, "Big Goals"  https://biggoalsbook.com/ 
Caroline Adams Miller’s website: https://www.carolinemiller.com 
Nancy & David Wolf Holocaust & Humanity Center https://www.holocaustandhumanity.org


Jackie Congedo:

Inside you lie unique character strengths just waiting to be used. Standing up strong is where we harness them to build resilience, spark hope and inspire courage. Lean into the best parts of who you are and lift others as you rise.

Dr. Jillian Coppley:

Hi and welcome. I'm Dr Jillian Coppley, and in my role at the VIA Institute on Character and in the last decade of positive psychology work that I have done, I have been incredibly fortunate to meet some of the biggest hearts and biggest minds in the field. Today, we're going to be joined by one of those luminaries. These are folks who have thought about human flourishing in every sense of the word, in the places we learn, in the places we work, in the places we play, and communities we live. I am so incredibly delighted to welcome Caroline Adams Miller to the program today. Caroline is one of those bright lights in the field. There are so many things I want you to know about her, but we don't have time to share them all. I'm going to share just a few. And Caroline, I hope you'll appreciate this. I have to look at my notes, even though I know you so well and love you so much, because if I don't, I'll just go on forever. So I want to share with you that Caroline is one of a very small, prestigious group of people, 32 people around the world who were invited to study with Marty Seligman and to earn a Master's of applied positive psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Carolyn has written, eight. Count them. Eight groundbreaking books that have been translated into multiple languages. Her most recent, "Big Goals," is one of the... one, one of the topics we'll be focusing on today. So if anybody has ever thought about a goal, attempted to achieve a goal, made a little short of a goal, Carolyn's your girl. She has been a champion of other people's success. It is a beautiful thing to witness. She's bringing that natural proclivity of hers to her work and something she's calling amplifyship, and we'll talk just a little bit about that too, dealing with women in the workplace. So all of those things are absolutely positively true about you as a professional, and I'm going to share one more thing that I know about you as a professional, and that is this, I have never seen anyone who could hold a room of 1000 people or more like Caroline and then show up for coffee an hour later and be as real and personable and vulnerable and authentic one on one as you. So thank you. Thank you for holding both of those spaces with me. I appreciate you. So happy to welcome you. Welcome Caroline.

Caroline Adams Miller:

Wow. Thank you. No one's ever said that. So it means a lot to me.

Dr. Jillian Coppley:

Thank you. Of course, of course. So we're going to get right into it, because, like I said, I could talk to you all day like we we do, but we're going to start with your most recent work around goals, right? So you have written this really comprehensive, groundbreaking book about goals. Obviously, there's a lot of books about goals out there, but you've taken an incredibly, I think scientific and unique approach to it. And one of the things that I find, of many, so captivating, is the way, you know, we think about goals is okay, I want to achieve something. I'm going to work really hard at it, I'm going to achieve it, and then I'm going to feel happy. But what you say to us is, in fact, we've got it all wrong. We flipped it on its head. So let's, let's start there. Talk about that for a minute.

Caroline Adams Miller:

So I was one of those lucky 32 people 20 years ago to to join Marty Seligman at Penn - University of Pennsylvania. And since then, there have been, this is the 20th year of admitting 30 some people a year. So I was, you know, there. And while there, immersion week, October of 2005 this research from Sonja Lyubomirsky, Ed Diener and Laura King just was part of our assignment, and it blew my mind, and it was called the benefits of frequent positive affect. And basically it boiled down to this one irrefutable conclusion, and that was that all success in life is preceded by being happy first. Just blew my mind, and I thought, why doesn't the world know this? And then it was followed closely after that, with goal setting theory by Locke and Latham. My mind was blown again that month, and I thought, I specialize in goal setting I do this with CEOs and people all over the world. Why am I talking about S.M.A.R.T. goals when that's not a real thing? That's a voodoo theory. And so I married them together. Happiness precedes success and goal setting theory, which divides goals into performance goals and learning goals. And that's essential, because if you do that wrong, it's called goals gone wild. And I married them as my capstone, and then brought to the world for the first time, really this research in 2008 with my book, "Creating your Best Life." And I continue to just have reverberations throughout my professional and personal life by the fact that I start to think, "Everyone knows this," and then I realize most people have never heard this. So, "Big Goals" was my mission, 15 years later, to further distill goal setting theory and happiness precede success, which, by the way, has been replicated by Sonja very recently in other cultures and countries, so that people have a real fighting chance of achieving their dreams. Because if you have a big dream, and no one's ever taught you how to really accomplish it, with the science behind it, you know, people begin to feel disengaged from life, anxious, depressed, so I really feel like the world is owed a better shake of the research, because this relates directly to whether or not you're going to flourish in life, and that's been my mission ever since October of 2005.

Dr. Jillian Coppley:

I love that, and it's beautiful to hear you talk about it, because it is clearly your personal mission. I mean, you are clearly lit up when you are talking about this topic. And I've seen the results of you working with people from from my experience and background, and thinking through the lens of character science, which I know you think a lot about as well. This sense, we know that when we're tapping into our signature strengths, that can really be a superpower to help us get to that place of positive emotion, to really bring us to well being to, you know, buffer against depression. Can you talk a little bit about that and how you see the intersection?

Caroline Adams Miller:

Oh my gosh, the VIA is the number one tool I use, and bar none, it is everyone's favorite. Not only is it free, but it's so powerful and so well validated. And so I use the VIA with all my clients and with audiences everywhere, because, as you know, once you're introduced to your strengths, you have a new superpower. Wow, that's who I am at my best. Look at my top five, gosh. And what the research also shows is, when you turn to your top five strengths, you're more likely to accomplish your goals and to flourish. And so it all goes together really beautifully. Zest is my number three strength, and so I think that bubbles right out of me,

Dr. Jillian Coppley:

Really? I can't believe it

Caroline Adams Miller:

and and bravery, because I always write the first of its kind book. But I can't say enough about the VIA, and I can't say enough about people knowing what their strengths are, because we take them for granted. We assume the whole world sees the world the way we do and we don't. And if we don't own and know our top strengths, we're missing out on the chance not only to have a superpower, but to impact people in the best possible way and to feel authentic in the process of doing it.

Dr. Jillian Coppley:

Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think about, you know, our signature strengths, how they show up in our life, and how they are a pathway to happiness. I think about what you've already shared. I mean, you know, the work that you cited from Lyubomirsky and others, you know, that's 20 years ago, right, that we were talking about happiness, preceding these efforts. You know that once we are, you know, brought to the place of using our signature strengths, that in fact, that happiness that we might experience from doing that is the predictor of financial and health, and, you know, relationship and career success. But why in the world do you think that is so hard to sink in, even given all the the research that's out there. I mean, and people

Caroline Adams Miller:

we're in the Yeah, oh, I'm sorry to interrupt.

Dr. Jillian Coppley:

No, no, no, go ahead

Caroline Adams Miller:

We're in the United States. And this is the whole Protestant work ethic. This is how the country was founded. You know, go go west, young man. But, but the DNA of our country is really about people who strive, people who do hard things, people who emigrate from other countries. My ancestors are all from other countries, Germany, Sweden, you name it. And so in many ways, we are the products of people who took a risk to come here. And those are the family stories we hear. Those...that's our DNA. And I think we have as a society and as a country and a culture we have valued achievement over, you know, just basic amplification of what's good in the world. And so instead of being aligned with who we are at our best, we look at, you know, competitions, and we think, Oh, being number one is what's going to bring us joy. Being raised in Washington, DC, and really tough girls prep school surrounded by, you know what's here in DC, all the competition and the dog eat dog and the rest of it. The message I got was, gosh, if you get great SAT scores, and you play Beethoven's Concerto Number one in C major at the age of 13 on the piano, and you swim really fast, then, gosh, you're going to be happy, and then you're going to go to Harvard or Stanford or MIT, gosh, then you're going to be set for life. And so fast forward my life. I ended up at Harvard with a lot of accolades, miserable, dying from an eating disorder, you know, really thinking I wasn't going to live through every week. And I looked around, I saw all these other women who were like me dying on the inside, who had all thought, well, if we did all these things, and men too, but you know, it's mostly women who had eating disorders, a competitive swimmer. I just thought, what's missing? And I didn't know what was missing till I got to Penn, and that's when all the puzzle pieces fell into place. Oh, this is what was missing. Thank you, Lord, for putting me in these classrooms and then giving me the mission to go forth and help people do hard things, hard meaningful things, which then bring them joy and allow them to live without regrets.

Dr. Jillian Coppley:

Yeah, yeah. It's so interesting to me in listening to you, Caroline, and I've never thought this before when we've talked about these things before, but I had this thought - in our attempt to almost like short circuit the thing we need to do, we've made the thing we want even harder. Do you know what I mean? Instead of just thinking about our internal happiness, our presence, who we are, and being good with that, we've decided to short circuit that and try to make ourselves something we're not. And of course, that's converse to what we're actually after, right? Is that true? Right?

Caroline Adams Miller:

Well, and I think as women, I think the research is pretty clear that women are socialized to put other people's happiness ahead of our own, and this starts as young as two and three with the Disney rule. And you know, princesses can't sparkle in the same room as each other, and we have to be communal. And you know, another interesting thing is, in the last 100 years, the one area where perceptions of women have not changed internally or externally, is in being agentic, being goal directed, doing the things that we want to do. We are now allowed to be communal and warm and competent. But I think in particular, women put themselves at the bottom of the list, partly because we're not allowed to care about ourselves or to be ambitious or to be proud of what we've done, it always has to be about other people. Thank my team. Thank you. So I think that a lot of us have never felt it was safe to both flourish and succeed at the same time, but it is possible.

Dr. Jillian Coppley:

Yeah, I love that. It's such a good message that those things are simultaneous. I mean, we think about it in our organizational work all the time, this sense of a parallel track of enhancing well being and enhancing performance is absolutely possible. As a matter of fact, they're intricately related. Yeah, I love that. So you started to hit on something that I was hoping we would get to, which is... What I think of, and I'm curious if you see this kind of the intersection of this massive body of work that you've had over your years, which is the goal setting, but also this more recent concept of ampliship. And the way I kind of see those two things relating is, again, you've talked so comprehensively about goal setting and what it really takes. And one of the things you've talked about is this kind of grounding in really significant relationships. And yeah, I mean, boy, at this time in our world, and all of the research on loneliness and disconnection and lack of connection, even micro connections, are disappearing from our lives. And you're talking yet about relationships as being so key, right? And your goal setting work. But then you also, more recently, are talking about amplship, this notion of particularly women's relationships in the workplace. I know I said a whole lot of things there, so, but I would love to just hear you talk about both of those things, and also to ask you the question, do you see an intersection between what I just shared? I could be way off base here?

Caroline Adams Miller:

No, I mean, one of the things that Ed Diener, one of the co founders of positive psychology, said every month to us at Penn, because I was executive education, once a month, we would go marinate in the latest research at the feet of these brilliant people, and Ed Diener and Chris Peterson, who helped with, obviously, you know, Marty to co create the VIA character strength survey, he would stop lectures Chris Peterson in particular, he'd say, "Okay, everyone, guess what all this research we're out there doing. It all boils down to three words- other people matter." He must have pounded that into our heads 1000s of times. And so he really drove home the message that good relationships, flourishing relationships, relationships that bring out the best in you are really at the heart of the happiest among us. So he said, You can be happy, but you're never among the happiest unless you have positive relationships. So I became fascinated by that, and I know you need to be in good relationships in order to flourish. I know for goal setting, there's no invention, no no, nothing that any of us ever accomplished without other people around us. Very few things are accomplished in solo activities, even if you have grit. And you persist alone through the dark night of the soul, other people are there for you when you exhibit grit. What really began to fascinate me more as part of this topic was the fact that women have this biological tendency to tend and befriend. So that's that very famous UCLA nurses study from 2000 where they found that men fight and flee, whereas women tend to befriend in times of stress. But what I found in my work is that the sisterhood does not show up for other women when women succeed, and so we come together when we're failing. We come together when you've lost something, we come together when you lost your job, you had a relationship that broke up, your children got in trouble, whatever, the casserole brigade begins. But what I noticed over and over and then began to dig into the research was about, why don't women show up for other women when good things happen, why don't they amplify their ideas in meetings? And so that research really, really hurt my soul in many ways, because, like many other women, I've had countless instances of Mean Girls demolishing positive things in my life for all kinds of reasons, and I wanted to understand why, and so I spent a lot of years looking at, why do women do this? Part of it is that Disney rule I just mentioned, we're primed from very young ages to see other women as competition. So Disney, if you're drawing two princesses in an illustration, they're not allowed to look in the same direction in any one image, because if they do, it means they're in the same room. And that's not allowed to be because you they have to look in different directions, up, down, sideways, but whatever. And if you don't believe me, go look at any Disney book out there.

Unknown:

Now you've got me curious. That's, gonna have to do it.

Caroline Adams Miller:

You can't have two women sparkling in the same room. So it's that. It's many other things. And then I also ran into research thanks to Adam Grant and Angela Duckworth about how women often say they mentor and sponsor other women. But research has been called off in places because they couldn't find the mentees. They couldn't find the women who were supposedly being mentored. And what I realized is there was not a word that existed that meant that you did all those things, but you did it in front of witnesses. So I scoured in every language known to man, and I realized I had to make up a word- amplishship - is what I came up with. And I think it's something that ought to be on every performance review. Did you have moments of ampliship where you saw another woman interrupted at a meeting, squashed at a meeting, and you amplified her idea, she succeeded. You put it on your social media. You didn't expect her to just always promote herself, which is something that both men and women demolish other women for. They cut them off at the knees. Last thing I'll say is that one of the things that women do that's the cruelest punishment known to all cultures across all of history, is that they go silent. Women go silent when another woman succeeds. So it's not so much that they're active destructive, it's that they go silent, and it's like being excommunicated from the tribe. And so McKinsey Lean In surveys, they all talk about this, these microaggressions, this silencing, this ghosting that goes on... you lose your best friend when you get a promotion. And that is so powerful and so painful that one of the lines in a recent McKinsey Lean In survey was a woman saying she had to choose between her mental health- being included at work, feeling like she had friends. She had to choose that over ambition and success, because she needed to have a tribe. We don't often have tribes when we succeed, and that's the loneliest place a woman can be, yeah?

Dr. Jillian Coppley:

And what I hear you saying is, so it's so cyclical, right? This sense of, you know, we need that to both stress in our well being, etc, but we also need that to set bigger and better goals. Right? On top of that success just received, you need that community to set the next highest goal, right? So it's kind of self reinforcing,

Caroline Adams Miller:

yeah, and there's so much good research on this. When you're in a mastermind group, where other other women are in the group, and they allow you to be an expert on something, or they know what your dreams are, they're your soft place to fall. They'll tend and be friends, but they'll also believe and achieve when good things happen. So all this research exists on what happens, particularly with women, when you're in a group that you're proud of, that values you, you're in a tribe, you begin to take more risks, more creative risks, you begin to believe that you can do things you've never done before. It builds your self efficacy. There's just an enormous number of things that happen, but you have to find what's called active, constructive responders and the and the tell, as you know from Shelly gables research, is if you float a piece of good news around someone who you think should have your back, your mother, your sister, your best friend, how do they how do they respond? And if they don't respond with curiosity and enthusiasm. Enthusiasm. They just told you who they are. They're not in your corner. They will not amplify you. And so you need to have people around you whose first reaction at your good news is curiosity and enthusiasm. And too many women just make the mistake of wanting to be seen as nice. Just nice. And you know, I don't want to rock the boat. You know she didn't mean it, or, you know she should be happy for me, it's just a bad day. No. I mean, we got to protect our goals and our goal pursuit at all costs, because we got one shot at this life, and you can't let your dreams die inside of you. And that's another reason why I'm so motivated to share the research on goal setting,

Dr. Jillian Coppley:

as always, Caroline, you spark so many ideas in my mind. And this is something I don't think we've talked about exactly before, but that idea of thinking about, you know, needing this community to set to be with you and set these higher goals, and why it's challenging,woman to woman, sometimes to do that. And I was thinking about the, I don't know, potentially overused quote, Roosevelt quote about comparison being the thief of joy. And I wonder if it's that dynamic that could be going on and like the research, oh my gosh, this is not one that's as close to me, but from Cornell. I think it's Gilovich, if I'm not mistaken, who did, yeah, all the work.

Caroline Adams Miller:

Tom Gilovich

Dr. Jillian Coppley:

Yeah, thank you. Yeah. Who did all the work on exactly that? This comparison that really robs us of of our well being. And I wonder if that plays into any of this, or have you even thought about that? Maybe that's way far afield too.

Caroline Adams Miller:

I have, I've quoted their research. It's shell of it, Gilovich and Shea. I think, I mean, I've used their research a lot, so upward social comparisons and downward social Yeah, both, both men and women do that. I think it does play a role. I think what's more more likely, to be honest with you, is the fact that we as women have settled for the trope of Mean Girls, that this is just who we are, and we just need to Is know. accept that there's one seat at the table for a woman and tables of power, and that, again, starts early. I mean, just one example, you know, you go to the grocery store and there's, you know, international delight has a coffee creamer flavor called Mean Girls. I mean, I didn't see another coffee creamer there that was about mean men. It's unbelievable, by the way. It's the worst coffee creamer I have ever had. It's like, pink and insipid. It's horrible. I had to buy it, of course, you know. But once you become aware of this, you start to see plot lines in these shows that are pushed at us, The Real Housewives of whatever you know, the Secret Lives of Mormon wives. I mean, I grew up with Madeleine Albright in my life. Her her twin daughters are some of my best friends. So I I saw her go from a housewife carrying around a bassinet their younger sister, Katie, to becoming, I think, the most decorated woman in US government history, and her quote, there's a special place in hell for women who don't support other women is because of the mothers in my my group, my class, they were horrible to her, and she never got over it. And most women do not ever get over the cruelty and the silencing and the shaming of women who do this to each other. And I think we just chalk it up to mean girls, when, in fact, I did a lot of research on this. And this idea that it's somehow hardwired is not true. And if it were true, this place in southwest China wouldn't exist. The Mosuo tribe, where women have all the power. They have all the legal power, the real estate power, they they they basically decide where their child will be raised. I mean, it's unbelievable. They stand up straight, they look in each other's eyes, they support each other's goals. It's not hardwired, but we've accepted it absolutely because we're just, I don't know we're we're just accepting stupidity, and now we're at a time when women's rights have been imperiled all over the world by governments of strongmen. It's terrifying. So there's another reason why I'm on the warpath about women learning early to support other women's success, and our daughters have to see us doing it because it's a learned behavior.

Dr. Jillian Coppley:

Yeah, yeah, like so many of the positive things so interesting to me, Truly, this is one of the things I after all this time being in this work that I never get over, the things that seem so simple, so obvious are so hard for us to learn and adopt. It's why I think this topic of goals and topic of, you know, setting your sights and changing the way you behave, is so critical in every aspect. I mean, not just our relationships at work and and everywhere else, but these things of supporting one another that seems so obvious are just hard to master.

Caroline Adams Miller:

We can choose right

Dr. Jillian Coppley:

that we can choose as always, as always. I mean, yeah, we could talk at length about the things, the things we don't realize we can choose and phantom rules and all of all of that. So So Carolyn, we have covered in a very swift half hour a lot of ground, as I knew we would, and I knew I could ask a million more questions with every sentence you shared with us, which I'm always grateful for. But if you're going to have the folks who are listening right from everything we've talked about, just the quickest introduction to goals, a little bit about ampliship. What would you want people to really know and or do either one just know or to do? What would you really encourage people to focus on?

Caroline Adams Miller:

I think for me, it boils down to do hard things and surround yourself with people who believe in your ability to do hard things that are meaningful and important to you and that will help you develop grit. And grit is also one of those important ingredients of flourishing. And I'll just end with I am in my 40th year of recovery from bulimia and unbroken recovery, and I chose to live at a time when there was no cure, no treatment. I had to figure it out myself. And truly, I look back, and I think that was the first goal I set for myself that my city or parents or teachers or Harvard, that nobody set for me, and it came from within me, and I was willing to fight to the death to get better and live. And because of that, I wrote the first book by anyone who did recover from bulimia,"My Name is Caroline," and I think the thread through all of my work, through all of the learnings from positive psychology is when you choose to do hard things and go out of your comfort zone in the service of meaningful, important goals, life gets better, your... the people around you get better, and you begin to believe that you can accomplish even the hardest but most important things in your life, and that gets us away from this idea that everyone's a winner. You have to create your own winning. It doesn't get conferred on you with a trophy. So I'll just leave it at that. Do hard things, because your life will change when you do hard things.

Dr. Jillian Coppley:

Oh, that is a beautiful, beautiful message to share, in the spirit of the name of this podcast, Standing Up Srong, I mean really encouraging people to stand up strong and do the hard things, you know, and when you were talking, excuse me, it reminds me of Neal Mayerson, the founder of the VIA Institute, will say of one of his many, excuse me, I don't know quick epiphanies that he shares his words of wisdom is the encouragement to go from what's wrong to what's strong. And I feel like that's an embodiment of what you're you're sharing here, right? To focus on where we can make achievements, with whom we can bring along, and how we can be better together. So I'm just, I'm so appreciative of you and for sharing this time with me again today and for all that you bring to the world. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here, and thank you,

Caroline Adams Miller:

well, thank you for choosing to include me.

Dr. Jillian Coppley:

Yeah, it's a delight. And thank you to everyone who's joined in listening today. Let's just keep showing up and standing up and looking for the very best in one another and ourselves moment to moment, that's how we create a better world.

Jackie Congedo:

Standing up strong is a production of the Nancy & David Wolf Holocaust & Humanity Center, in partnership with the VIA Institute on Character. Find a link in the show notes to take a character strengths survey for free. Managing Producer is Anne Thompson. Technical Producer is Robert Mills, and Technical Director is Josh Emerson. This series is part of the Cynthia & Harold Guttman Family Center for Storytelling and is generously supported by the Mayerson Family Foundation. It is recorded at Technical Consulting Partner studios in Cincinnati, Ohio.