Bobinet Kyra - Well Designed Life: 10 Lessons in Brain Science & Design Thinking for a Mindful, Healthy, & Purposeful Life

Copyright 2015 by Kyra Bobinet

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States by engagedIN Press,
offices in Walnut Creek, California.

www.engagedin.com

This book is not intended to take the place of medical advice from a trained medical professional. Readers are advised to consult a physician or other qualified health professional regarding treatment of their medical problems. Neither the publisher nor the author takes any responsibility for any possible consequences from any treatment, action, or application of medicine, herb, process, or preparation to any person reading or following the information in this book.

Book design by Katie Benezra

Editing and Neuroscience consultation by Stephanie Shorter, PhD

Copyediting by Ruth Strother

ISBN 978-0-9967345-7-8 (print)

ISBN 978-0-9967345-0-9 (ebook)

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For my husband, Josh Leichter,

My kids,
Shara, Memphis, Ethan, & Alecsa

And in loving memory of
Irene Shuster

W hy cant people change when they say they want to? And how can they?

I believe that unhappiness and suffering stems from not being able to change ourselves or our lives for the better. We may get stuck in grieving the loss of a relationship. We may feel stuck in a dead-end career. We may get injured or disabled and struggle to adjust. We may be a compulsive eater and out of control. Or we may have not achieved the peak performance we know is within us.

At one point or another, every person I know has been pinned down by lifeunable to wriggle free for a time. Developing the ability to affect what, when, and how we want to change is a universal struggle. Regardless of our worldly success, we all share the very human experience of trying to change our behaviors only to sometimes fail, relapse, or get lost.

But there is a way out.

I am writing this book because I have tried to help people change. I have done this as a physician, volunteer, corporate executive, product/intervention designer, public health professional, nonprofit founder, faculty instructor, mentor, friend, mother, and wife. Sometimes Ive succeeded; other times Ive failed. This includes when I was working on myself. And after decades of iteratively changing my own life, as well as playing those many roles as change maker and innovator, I have discovered a universally reliable solution that draws on the rigors of science and the creativity of the human spirit. This book is about sharing what I have found so that others may benefit.

Notice that I said iteratively? Making real change in your life requires repeating something over and over, iterating, to make small changes each time. In Silicon Valley where I teach, iteration is a creative practice of design. Designers iterate on many versions of a product, tweaking to improve it and make it more successful. Likewise, I am proposing that we can change and improve any part of our lives through constant, unrelenting iteration. Iteration in this case means that we try and try and tweak and tweak the design of our behavior changes until we transcend.

There are two main points to this book. First, you are the designer of your life and your behavior change. Second, designers iterate their way to successand that is how you will also succeed.

You may be surprised that I just called you a designerit may not be a familiar term to you or maybe you have never thought of yourself as one. In my eyes, every human is by default a designer of their life because we all have one thing in common: choice. We choose our relationships, we choose our responses, and we choose how we solve problems. And what else is design but making choices consciously? You are in the role of a designer any time you shop for groceries, help a friend, make an appointment, or clean your house. In each case, your actions are communicating to the universe who you are, what you want to experience, and how you want to live. You design all of thiswhether consciously or unconsciously.

The level of consciousness with which you do these actions is another matter. As the designer of your life, you may not act like it sometimes, maybe even often-times. Instead, you may give away your power or play a victim to lifewe have all been thereuntil you figure out how to stop. That is where I believe thinking like a designer brings empowerment.

The mindset of a designer is one of actively creating and problem-solvingiterating their way out of sticky situations. In this book, I hope to prove to you that you are already doing this and to give you the tools to do it more often, with more awareness and skillfulness, and with greater results. I want to make it so that you can choose not to ever be a victim to anything or anyone anymore.

Years ago when I used to see patients, I noticed that there were two types of peoplethose who were actively controlling and iterating on their health and those who were not. This was my first hint that there is a solution for those who were not taking the reinscould it be better for them if they were more like those who were taking control? In fact, the last patient I remember treating was a 57-year-old gentleman who came in with a gouty toe. He shared with me that he took methamphetamine three days prior (which made him dehydrated, which in turn gave him gout). As I wrote the prescription for his gout, something turned inside methis was not the conversation I wanted to have with people. I was far more interested in the behavior underlying his meth use. I wanted to go to the source of why he was not in control of his life and health.

So, I pivoted. I withdrew from pursuing residency and instead went to Harvard to study public health, behavior change, decision science, and population health. From there, I became a corporate executive, creating large-scale behavior change programs and products for millions of people. Then in 2013, the brilliant Dr. BJ Fogg invited me to Stanford to study in his lab and opened a whole new world to mebehavior design, a field he pioneered. From there, I started a design firm, engagedIN, as a practice that translates behavior and neuroscience into helping people to be the designers of their health, relationships, and lives.