October 10, 2013
Part two of an interview by Kathryn Britton, MAPP ’06.
This is the second of two interviews with Caroline Adams Miller, author of Creating Your Best Life: The Ultimate Life List Guide, a book about effectively pursuing life goals, and Positively Caroline: How I beat bulimia for good… and found real happiness, a book about her long-term recovery from bulimia.
The first interview focuses on setting goals, while this one explores actions that make goal achievement more likely.
Caroline runs an online course on setting and pursuing important life goals. The course is open to anyone in the world that can access the lessons by computer. A new cohort of the course starts October 21 with early bird pricing through tomorrow, October 8. Click on Your Happiest Life to explore and register.
Kathryn: Once goals are set, what can people do increase their chances of accomplishing them?
Caroline: There are a number of things people can do to enhance goal accomplishment. It depends on where they are in the change cycle.
In the Contemplation stage, they can search for more and stronger reasons that their goals are important to them, or perhaps make sure their goals have the qualities of powerful goals: approach-oriented, leveraging other goals, aligned with their values, and so on. If they are in the Planning stage, they can start to think about resources they need to acquire, people they need to meet, and research that can be done. There are also a number of other questions that will need to be addressed thoroughly to ensure that the next stage, the Action stage, goes smoothly. In the Action stage, people can use environmental primes, implementation intentions, accountability, and other techniques that make success more likely.
In my online course, Your Happiest Life, we work both on establishing high-quality goals and on establishing the primes and intentions that make goal achievement more likely. I’ve described primes and environmental cues in Creating Your Best Life. The license plate images on this page are primes I’ve collected over the last few years.
READ FULL INTERVIEW
