Full transcription:
Tracy: Hi, and welcome back to the seventh episode of results may vary. In our last episode, we talked to Jessica Semaan, the founder of Passion Co about helping people turn side projects into their own passion-based businesses. Today, we're excited to introduce you to a woman who after completing med school decided to change course in order to dig deeper into the science behind behavior change. After graduation from Harvard School of Public Health, Dr. Kyra Bobinet worked in the healthcare industry, building programs and algorithms to change behaviors at the million person's scale. Today, she is the founder and CEO of EngageIn a design firm to help people and organizations change behavior for the better. like Chris and I, she believes that every individual is a designer of their own life every day. And that all we need is to recognize and expand this intuition into full-blown life design skills. In her new book, Well Designed Life, she gives you many of those skills, as well as the approachable science behind it all.
Just reading the first few pages, and then yes, you're explaining everything so clearly. And we really value your perspective. Bringing it from the point of view of science, I think is really interesting and important. So thank you so much for being on the show. We're super excited to have you. And yeah, we'd love to just hear what you're doing. What is it that you've been doing for the past few years? And how does design fit into your life?
Kyra: Yeah, so I am the CEO of EngagedIn which is a behavior design firm and the inspiration for that came from working in BJ Fogg's Lab at Stanford, as well as my history in doing health intervention work and health design work for large, at large scales, you know, 18 million person scales, as well as public health background and being a physician in the remote past. I think that the the inspiration for me came from you being a medical student at UCSF and starting a program for young people who were repeatedly incarcerated who were going in and out of the system, and who were chronic violent offenders as their label, and really seeing them as human beings and equal to everybody else. And what I found was that in trying to help them change their behavior, there was a lot of hypocrisy that we all face, but in them, it's more dramatic. So I don't want to do this anymore. I don't want to go back to jail, I don't want to be in this situation. And then of course, the flip side of that was going back in even despite their best efforts, or their best intentions, and I really thought to myself, you know, is how is that any different from what I'm experiencing, or from what anybody I know is experiencing, you know, people try to quit smoking, who are my patients, and they just couldn't, people tried to lose weight, and they just couldn't. People tried to change their lives or get out of, you know, bad patterns with relationships, and they just couldn't. And so, I've been on this quest for about two decades now of figuring out what it is that would resolve this disparity between what I know I should do and what I actually do. And in that journey, in that quest, I found two things. One was neuroscience tended to come as an obvious choice to source you know, what's going on, and then design thinking as sort of the prescription, if you will, the way in which to solve the problem. And I feel like those two confluence together really inspired me to go towards this as a vision as a full time career.
Tracy: How did you get introduced to design thinking through your medical work?
Kyra: You know, really, as a physician, you're not taught anything about behavior change, even though you're in the role of a behavior changer and you know, wherever that is a change maker. And the way that design thinking kind of came into my purview was actually quite recently, you know, I had heard of idea when I was a corporate executive, I had heard of design firms, I had done a design challenge, you know, one of the first ones ever, back when I was in that role, and became fascinated with design as designers, as a discipline as a way of approaching problem solving. And so I really liked the creativity, nature of it, I thought it was better than your standard business practices of brainstorming, or strategy making or those kinds of things, it really added a twist of really listening to what the problem was trying to convey, and taking it deeper than just the surface. And understanding and asking about the human patterns in the human behavior patterns that were underneath the problem itself. And that definitely resonated with me, because of my background in human service. And being a clinician I really had grappled early on with what it means to listen to human beings and try to figure them out. And I think design thinking is a perfect tool for that.
Tracy: How would you describe what design thinking is or how you understand it to be?
Kyra: My modern understanding of it is that you essentially, approach a problem with the expectations that you are going to have multiple versions of something, and you're going to repeatedly go at it, and that your failure to do so, to solve the problem the first time around or to understand it, you're not going to hold against yourself. To me, it really conveys this combination of compassion for yourself and for the problem, as well as relentlessness of pursuing and tweaking and improving. Because you're asking a different question. You're asking, how does this get solved in a beautiful way? How does this get solved in a relieving way in a soothing way? Like those kinds of questions, as opposed to just maybe approaching it differently, like a classical engineer stereotype would just say, How do I get this to do this thing? And it's almost this force of will or even as a physician or surgeon, you ask, how would I just fix this and move on? You know, it's a different immersion into the problem. It's intimacy with it, if you will,
Tracy: In your book, you mentioned an interaction that you'd had with a patient with you called it a gout-ey toe? Yes, I'd love that. Could you share a little bit of that? It seemed like it was a pivotal moment for your career.
Kyra: Absolutely. So I was doing clinical work alongside my nonprofit work with the expectation that at some point, I would want to go back to residency and practice medicine. I didn't know what I was going to do with that. But it just it's kind of one of those conveyor belt things in MD careers that you you do this, then you do that. And so it had this clinic day, and this gentleman came in late 50s. And he had a typical garden variety gout in his big toe. And I had 10 minutes with him in the typical clinic visit. And he started sharing with me, oh, yeah, you know, my toe, there's my toe that we went over the basic symptoms and signs. And I looked at his toe, and yes, he had gout. And I was writing the prescription physically in those days. And he then drops this bomb, which patients often do right at the last minute so that you don't have a chance to deal with it. It's like, Yeah, I was, I've been up, you know, since Sunday on meth. And this was Wednesday. So he'd been up for three days, gotten dehydrated, because he wasn't sleeping, he wasn't taking care of himself. And that then resulted in the gout. And here I was literally at the end of the line. And I said, you know, there's something about this, that's so symbolic to me, there's, this is not the conversation, I want to be happy with the world. I want to deal with the behaviors that cause the meth. I wasn't interested in Addiction Medicine, that's not the signal. There was something else about it that intrigued me that was drawing me to it. And that's really where I pivoted pulled out of residency, I was going to match in two weeks, lots of turmoil in my in my heart around that. But I just had to follow my heart that there was something else for me to do. And I ended up applying to and going to Harvard for graduate school in public health and that opened all these doors to go in this other direction and pursue behavior as a design substrate.
Chris: What got you into medicine in the first place?
Kyra: I was not that enlightened back then, Chris. I would say I was the typical pre surgeon. I had a very academic mindset. I had been doing six plus years of bench science. I was awarded a Dean's prize for research. I was present in my class. I had all these things going for me.
Chris: A real slacker.
Kyra: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And I was a gunner, as they call it and I basically had kind of a an awakening experience in my first year of medical school where I realized that all these amazing talented people were going to go do that and pursue that golden ring. And that there was something else for me to do that was much more exploratory, I guess is the and much more heartfelt and much more journey like and so I just pulled off that path. And I just started asking different questions.
Chris: What did the other physicians think about what you were doing? And how did you keep on the path? Despite what I'd imagine were a lot of headwinds saying this is the wrong thing to do?
Kyra: Well, that's just the thing. I've always had this knack of picking really good mentors, and I love to mentor people. And I love to be mentored. I think it's just a daisy chain of skill flow that we all must plug into. And if you're not plugged into that, then you're stagnating. And so I was fortunate enough when I had that experience with the patient. And I went out to lunch with my clinical mentor who had been with me for years. And she had written a recommendation letter for me for the match all those things. And I just said, I'm so sorry, Dr. Ramsey, but I think I don't want to do this. And she did not blink, she just said, You know what, Kyra, you would be an amazing clinician. She said, your, your skill, everything is right about you, she said, but I always thought that you do something bigger. Those words just gave me permission to break from tradition, and to not care what other people think because I had her blessing.
Tracy: I just got chills from that. Because I feel like in many people's minds, they would feel like what you were originally doing was the bigger her wisdom and that I just think is so profound.
Kyra: And it's right for a lot of people, I don't want to mistake the fact that it wasn't the path for me to assign generalities that it's not a wonderful path for many people, because it is all of my colleagues, all of my peers who have done clinical work, we have a shortage of physicians in this in this country. And that concerns me a lot. But, you know, we need to redesign that experience to I mean, I think one of the things that intrigues me lately is, how do we make the clinician and the patient experience equanimous in our care for them. Because right now, what we're doing is we're draining Person A, the clinician, to serve Person B. And that has been a trade off that has been paid off with ego in the past, meaning that we give person a power and ego and you know, being self righteous and being invincible and playing God, those things are breaking down now. So how can we design an experience, where it upholds the humanity, and the kindness and the compassion for both parties, That, to me, is the definition of healing. And we need to restore that in our healthcare system.
Chris: You have this experience with the patient with gout, you decide to go back and rethink what you're doing get on this journey. And you end up at Harvard in Public Health. One of the things we see here in Silicon Valley is the real lack of patience. And I'm curious how you had the patience to pursue this second degree when you knew the world sort of needed you?
Kyra: That is a really loaded question for me in particular, because in those days, I was a single mom, I had, you know, a nonprofit salary. So I was financially at the bottom of the barrel, I had a non supportive ex at that point, who was not supportive of me going back to residency or going to graduate school or anything, when we broke up originally, is our peaceful but then this was not because we disagreed, and we had to go through the court system and, and it was extremely terrifying for me to think that I would lose my kids that I would, you know, not be able to afford it financially. And all I can say is that every person I know has been at those moments. And the only way to get through it is to get comfortable with being completely in the dark, and not having any idea that what you're doing is going to work out. And I think that applies to design too. Because all of us in the design process go into this dark night of the soul, you know that? Were you just confused or you don't know the answer or, and that that's where the power of iteration as a design thinking discipline, I think, is a very important point to keep in mind. You know, I had this experience on a client project the other day, actually, and I was going through it and I just couldn't get it right. And I just said to myself, Kyra, this is just iteration. If you keep iterating if you just keep pressing on through this, you will find the right image, you will find the right look, you'll find the right words, it will happen. It's always happened. And I think that having that confidence, then lends itself to impatience because impatience is really at its base, a lack of self confidence. You feel like you have to control and over, exert and make things happen because you're not comfortable in your own skin. You're not, you're not experienced enough to know yet that repeatedly it works out if you just keep iterating.
Tracy: And I would say, as a practitioner of design, it's really hard. Even after seven years of doing it myself, it's hard to believe in this process of iteration and exploration. You do doubt yourself, even if you have the confidence in the experience to know what works. When you have gigantic challenges, insurmountable challenges, challenges that people have tried to solve in the past and can't brilliant people. It's, it's very daunting.
Kyra: Yeah, exactly. And it's humbling, because you can't come from a place of arrogance to say, I'm the one I'm the chosen one who's gonna solve this, you just have to say, I'm going to, I'm going to stay the course i'm going to continue to apply their creativity and the skills I know, and that's where I think mentors are very critical, because they can say, they can look from the outside and say, yeah, just keep doing what you're doing. Just keep pressing on, because we can always see in other people, that they're close, or that they're able or those kinds of things, but when you're in it, it's super hard to have that self awareness.
Chris: Kyra, would you mind, you have me really hanging on the crossroads that you went through? You're in Harvard, now you're in public health, will you keep going on the story and take us up to how you ended up where you are now with a new book coming out, etc?
Kyra: Yeah, this is a lot more investigative and personal than I thought this was gonna get.
Chris: It doesn't have to be by the way,
Kyra: Oh, it's fine.
Chris: I read it's fascinating and then I think we can get to the book and that would be amazing.
Kyra: Absolutely. And it does tie to the book, because the book for me is kind of baring my soul. I thought about this, when I was writing the book, I said, You know, I could go from this very authoritative. Here's how you do X, Y, and Z. And I started writing a book like that, and something in me was like, No, you have to share yourself, you have to let people in on the surface, you look so successful, or you have all these credentials, or that kind of thing. But what is it like to just be a human, and what are the pains and the processes that you went through? Because my single objective is to help people realize they are not alone. They're just like everybody else. And that hopefully, we'll reduce or remove their suffering and their barriers to their own greatness. So going back to the Harvard thing, first of all, it was a privilege to go to Harvard. And it's a short program, because I have an MD degree. So that was very beneficial. And I survived it by taking out extra loans, frankly, and flying back to my children in California every other weekend, or every weekend, and going in the hole tremendously. And then I had this focus on not just the public health curricula, but I took courses at the business school, I took courses at Graduate School of Education in Cognitive based Curriculum design and Media based design of education materials. So I really had a flexible degree, to be able to compile all the skills, I needed to come back to the Bay Area, and to be somebody different. And I just saw it as an investment period in myself, where I was going to go into the mode of just soaking up as much of the experience of the beautiful, wonderful talents that exists there. And bringing those back and making something new out of myself. So I had this vision that I had a certain salary amount in my mind while I was in graduate school. And I talked to a company and I and they asked me how much I would want and I told them, and they had to go back and figure it out. But they created a position for me. And they gave me exactly what I had imagined for the salary I needed to come back and not only financially recover, but you know, support my kids and get ready for their next phase because they were going to go to college.
Chris: So you come back. What did you, what were you doing?
Kyra: So I was designing programs and products for a large payer, and they had about 18 million lives that we covered. And I was creating wellness interventions, disease management interventions, population health management interventions, which was my thesis at Harvard. And I was creating research studies that would test certain interventions and discover new interventions in mind, body and metabolic medicine. I was creating apps, I really just had a fun time. And at the same time, there's always a restlessness, I think whenever you're in a particular role, or you know, have a particular place in your career, there's a little restlessness of what you what you can't do or what you don't know or what you don't have. And for me that restlessness was, I'm creating all of these b2b products, but there's a little bit of a cheat factor here in that even if it's Crap, it'll sell, you know, it may not help people. And I really wanted to create things that helped people. And so for me, breaking from that role and going to Stanford and working with BJ and also just applying all this kind of closeted neuroscience studying that I always do, really combining that was my answer to how do I take my own self as a designer to another level? You know, so I've done it at scale? How do I now do it in a more effective way? I know how to do it intimately one on one from the youth work, and to change that behavior in person. Now, I know how to do it somewhat digitally? How can I combine those two and really infuse everything I do with the knowledge of how people really live? And how they what they really care about? And what is stable with them within them? And what is ephemeral within them? And what outcompetes other things in their lives, and, and all those dynamics that I've witnessed, you know, in the various roles that I've had, I'm wondering, for people who may not be as familiar with the medical system, what were some of the actual things that you developed? Or how did that look, from the patient point of view, the kinds of things that I would develop at scale would be, you know, like a metabolic syndrome program, you know, that would help people to lose weight. And to get out of the risk level of cardiac and metabolic risk, meaning pre diabetes kind of things. I also launched and developed an initiative around Mind Body stress reduction at scale, and tested that online and in person to see what the equivalencies or the differences were in the efficacy. And I also helped to design apps for senior care and for sharing of data. And I also developed an algorithm that helped to identify and match people's needs at scale, that would be the next thing for them based off of their health data.
Chris: So at this point in your journey, are you feeling like you had arrived?
Kyra: Again, you know, I would define my quest, as at least as I know it right now answering the question of I know what I should do, I don't know why I don't do it. That's what I have on my wall. And I approach that with science and design as a combined mixture. And my intent is to reduce suffering in this world at scale. So I will always probably be restless, I imagine, I will probably want to do more to like, take my last breath. Certainly, I feel very satisfied right now with the kinds of understanding that is available to us, you know, through research through this sort of tipping point in behavior, science and neuroscience that's now infusing its way into design thinking and those kinds of disciplines. I really am excited to be one of the people who's weaving that together.
Tracy: So did you leave the job that you had to start your own company? Or was there another step in between?
Kyra: Yeah, I did. I left I started my own company, I had sort of my vision for what I wanted it to be called, EngagedIn, because I felt like how to get people engaged in their health was always the problem. Now, just and it's took off immediately it when something's right, I find that the door flies open at first, it doesn't mean that you won't work eventually to make it happen. And startups have almost like a fixed amount of energy that you need to put into them no matter what their size is to get them going. Because it's almost like having a baby, you know, all babies need food. I've been through that process several times now. And it's never easy, but it's exhilarating. Because it shows that the universe is working with you to put it in a more mystical fashion. You know, you can't do anything on your own. And I don't know what the how to describe those forces. But certainly, it just was like, Yes, yep, you're supposed to do this and come this way.
Tracy: So what does EngageIn look like today? And how do you engage with people and patients?
Kyra: People approach us typically I do a speech or something and somebody comes up to me and says, Hey, I work for so and so company. And we have this broken product that's not working to engage people or we have a new product idea we want to go in or we have communications that suck or we have communications want to do. So we typically do products and communications either new or revisions using may or design and neuroscience design. We also do a form of market research that involves designing for the unconscious mind. I find that a lot of the market research out there tips its hand, you know, example was we did this study with people with diabetes. And the person we had hired as a contractor to help us with the ethnography portion of it was like okay, well then we go in and we say, hey, do this task or do that task and we said, No, no, no, you need to just give them a different task from what you're wanting to observe. And then they'll show you their habits of how they go about this thing on the way to this other objective that you've distracted. to their conscious mind with. So those are the kinds of ways that we get the deeper, more reliable truths about how people live, and what kinds of fast brain algorithms they're running off of.
Tracy: Why don't we jump into talking about your book a little bit? Because I know it's coming out. It's called Well Designed Life, what's the main message? What are you trying to accomplish with it?
Kyra: Yeah, so if I could have one wish that the book would achieve, it would be to shift the paradigm of everybody who reads it from being whatever they think they are to being a designer of their own life, I want to put people in charge of their design process and to approach their life and the problems, they're trying to solve the behavior change, they're trying to get out of themselves as a designer. And the advantage that I think that paradigm offers is to instead of go to this, you know, I want to set a goal, which is very traditional, I want to set a goal that I achieve set goal, then I relapse off of said goal, and then I hate myself, I want to break up that pattern and free people from that disaster by instead, I'm a designer, I'm going to go towards this goal, my role as a designer is to process how to get there, how to improve the way I get there, how to sustain the way I get there. And then when I see it slipping, because I set an expectation in the book that all designs fail at some point, they all have expiration dates, especially when it comes to behavior change. What used to work for you no longer works for you at a certain point, either because you get bored of it, or you move or you get injured, or whatever it is that changes, you have to then go back to the process mindset, which is that of a designer and say, Okay, next design. You know, it wasn't me that failed. It was the design that failed, or is the design that expired. And I think that frees people from over identifying with the outcomes of what happens to them. One of the more inspiring people I think, that I'm listening to these days is Carol Dweck, who did a bunch of work at Stanford about mindset of successful people, and students, college students in particular. And what she found was that people who focused on the outcome didn't do as well and weren't as happy as people who focused on the process. So I think at very base, the book sets up a process mindset, in people that I think will be very liberating for them.
Chris: You know, your book starts with saying, why can't people change what they say they want to do? Why is that?
Kyra: It's a very simple answer at this point, because the science and the fMRI data and all that stuff has really elucidated this in most head last decade. And so now what we understand and that my shorthand way of naming it is fast brain, slow brain, you know that there's a fast brain, which is your unconscious mind, which governs and runs scripts, if you will, of up to about 90 95% of your behavior, so that it can free your mind up to not have to remember to put your shoes on every time. And then there's your slow brain, which is I want to set an intention to stop doing this or to start doing this. And the asynchrony. between those two is the gap into which all this hypocrisy and you know, I intend to do a but I end up doing B. That's where that all comes from. Because frankly, the slow brain is at the very beginning of what we call neuroplasticity, which is when you grow and sprout new neural networks. And those new neural networks are too young and puny to compete with the sort of super highways of our habitual behaviors of our fast brain behaviors that are myelinated that are, you know, our go to even knee jerk responses, our assumptions, our biases, all those things. And you almost have to compete with those by building up the slow brain to either be more in control. And that includes, you know, removing things in your environment that would work for the fast brain, you could also slow down the fast brain by creating friction, you know, an example that I give in the book is putting cookies in the freezer so that you don't just scarf them down, one after the other, there's some barrier there that helps you to think about it before you do it. Everything that is behavior change related in my mind is either trying to make things slower for the slow brain to catch up to the fast brain or make the slow brain faster by slowing the fast brain and that habitual response. So I recently got married, remarried, and my mother was super excited about coming to the wedding. And since the beginning of the year, she had been trying to diet, which is usually her response for going to a special event. And so she's been yoyo dieting her whole life and she's had various successes with the cabbage soup diet or doing this instead of that and so she tried all of her normal tricks, and of course, she did not succeed because she's bored of those designs or those designs were expired for her. This is not her language but mine and she would call me and lament and complain and grieve over the fact that she wasn't getting anywhere and I didn't want it anymore. Fear at all. Because of course, when you're in your own family, it's very hard to play this brilliant designer role. It don't always accept that off of you. They'd rather listen to an infomercial on TV than you. And so finally, after months of this, I said, Mom, do you want some help with this? And she said, Yeah, I'm at the end of my rope. I said, All right. So you have shared with me that you've got this popcorn addiction. She's like, yeah, I can't not eat popcorn. You know, it taken months for her to realize that popcorn or carbs, and carbs crave belly fat. So we've gotten that far. And so now it was up to designing for popcorn reduction behaviors, you know, how do we get less popcorn into my mother, and her habit was to pop a giant bag and sit down in front of HDTV. And so I said, Okay, well, let's get some mini popcorn bags. Next time I talk to her. Mom, did you get the mini popcorn bags? She's like, no, I went to Costco and I bought the gigantic bag thinking that I would put it into smaller bags, and then I would eat them one at a time. I was like, What happened? She said, I ended up eating the whole big bag. And I was like, Alright, well, let's go back to the drawing board. iteration number two, I want you to go back and get the mini popcorn bags. She's like, okay, so she went to go purchase them instead bought something else she bought, like nuts that were coated in honey and caramel and, and she ate that whole tin. And so now she's frustrated with that. I said, Okay, well, that didn't work, you definitely want the popcorn, your behavior is to eat the entire volume of whatever you have in your hand. So we have to design for that heuristic, which is a mental shortcut that your brain is making. So let's go back and do the mini popcorn bags. And then she says well, but the mini popcorn bags have this many carbs. Now that she's aware of carbs, and it's too many carbs. And I said, well, mom is way less carbs than that giant bag of popcorn that you ate. And she started laughing. So she finally got the mini popcorn bags. And she it finally got her popcorn habit under control. And the good thing about that is that her fast brain was eat the entire volume that you have in front of you, her slow brain was I already bought the mini bags. So I'm preventing my fast brain from taking that too far. And the other thing that's magical about it is that you pop one of these mini bags, you have almost a whole minute in the microwave where your slow brain gets to have a chance to be in control. And if I need jerk and go get another bag, I have a minute to feel guilty, hopefully, to stop myself. So those kinds of things are examples of how you can speed up and slow down different parts of the brain.
Tracy: And so what was the eventual outcome for your mom?
Kyra: She looked fabulous. She was beautiful as always. And the other thing is that now she eats healthier, I think the most amazing part is she knows that she has to make herself happy in order to stick to something. This is the thing I think people do all the time when they design something harmful to themselves or harsh. Eventually, they will rebel. And in the book, I talk about your future self and your past self and the relationship between those two, because your past self could say I have a great idea. I'm going to buy this treadmill for you and you're going to run on it every morning at five and your future self is like hell no.
Tracy: Yeah, I think it's really hard for people to imagine their future selves. I mean, with behavior change in finances where save for retirement, and you think Yeah, I totally want to do that. But it's so removed from your daily life that you never do or flossing your teeth. I think it was Elizabeth Gilbert, who was talking about for her, it was easier to imagine giving a gift to that future person. And that's helped me with flossing. I'm like this is for you 70-year-old lady who wants to eat corn on the cob?
Kyra: Yeah, exactly. It should be approached with the tenderness of a good relationship,
Chris: A lot of the context that you're designing for their substantial and significant a patient with uncontrolled diabetes. And unless this behavior change happens, the future looks extremely grim, sort of taking the stairs instead of the elevator. It's just not going to do the trick. How do you apply your thinking against substantial change?
Kyra: That is such a powerful question, Chris. The first thing that comes to mind is the chapter in my book where I talk about relapse and reboot. I was blessed enough to work with some really gnarly habits in the youth that I would serve and that I'm still on the board for an organization that serves. There is such a consequence for them and the people around them if their behavior doesn't change, and we would always lose one or two of our close friends and youth participants in our program to murder or some other disaster in a year's time. And I found that much more traumatizing than anything I experienced in patient care. Because it was so personal. It's so close. There was a lot of grief that came from that. But on the flip side, because the stakes were so high and because it was such a different problem to try to solve, I feel like I came out of it with a really good sense of what works. And in the chapter that I share kind of my equation that the youth taught me, which is, people need to know three things in order to keep going. Number one, that they're not bad, them or two, they're not alone. And number three, that there's a way out. And so in the case of these dire disease states like diabetes, if you can check off those three boxes, with the way they're communicating, and the way that your intervention is experienced by people, they will respond, because that's the unmet need is they either feel like they're bad for what they've done to themselves, especially with type two diabetes, there's a tremendous shame elephant in the room that needs to be addressed. And then, you know, they're not alone. There's other people who are going through and have experienced and have felt what you're feeling. And number three, there's a way out, yeah, maybe you can't stop your foot from being removed. But you can do these things, here are things that you can do. And that's that empowered mindset of designing.
Chris: Do the same behavior principles apply to some of this sort of opportunistically trying to change something in their life versus doing it because they have to or shirt or for their health,
Kyra: For a lot of people taking care of their grandbaby or something like that is more dire than taking care of their diabetes and a common strategy in design is to link those two, there is a chapter in the book on motivation and emotion, which this question is kind of leaning in that direction. So I'll just go ahead and go there. Our brains, we need to have a certain emotion in order to activate around anything, a certain level of emotion. And so I talk about a two by two table where you're trying to assess what quadrant is this behavior sitting in, and the two by two is strong emotion, weak emotion down one side, and then motivation is either stable or unstable. So in the case of a peak performance question, Chris, the way I would map that to the two by two is, you might be inspired, at some point, to be motivated to go to that next level within your career or yourself. And that may be an unstable motivation. And it might be a strong emotion, meaning I really, really want this I really, really want to be that person. But because it's an unstable motivation, it's not always on. And so life takes over. And what may happen is that either the emotional crest will bump that over the edge into action, maybe your current work situation starts to heat up, you're not happy anymore, or those kinds of things to kind of poke you in the in the rump to get going. Or your motivation becomes more stable by not just a fleeting idea now, but this is my self-image of who I am, dammit. And I'm going to do this now I have to fulfill this. And this motivation stays on all the time. And therefore you get action by those two alignments between the emotion and the motivation centers.
Chris: What's more productive for people to motivate? Is it fear or inspiration?
Kyra: Motivation is highly contextual. So the way I best understand it right now is that it's a some vector of everything that's happening. So you might have a little bit of discomfort with my current job, you might have a lot of turmoil at home, or a lot of need to please other people. And somehow, the sum vector of those adding and canceling and forward and backward energies come up with some sort of direction. It could be a net-zero, or it could be pointing north, or could be pointing wonky. Who knows? But that's kind of what is happening. And it's happening on a microscopic level, you know, do I want to order this at Starbucks or that at Starbucks, and it's happening at a macro level, big shifts? Do I want to move this year? Do I want to marry this person? Those bigger meta-questions.
Chris: Is there a question that sort of, we wouldn't know to ask that you wish we would?
Kyra: I think that, you know, if I were to bet on one human practice, what would it be? And for me, it's being able to release the darkness that the shame that lives in somebodies deepest, deepest secret vault, because I find that people who take care of that are able to run much more energy in the world, that they're not as tied down, they're not as funky in their decisions, they're able to just fully be who they are. And design thinking, of course, is one tactic to manage that. But the implication there is that there's this kind of secret grief, if you will, the secret shame and exists in all of us. I mean, I I teach Stanford students and they're completely paranoid that they have imposter syndrome and people who were multiple times in jail, they have a different complex around their shame. Like they think they're going to hell. Everybody has their thing, and I think it's just about healing that thing.
Chris: Yeah, what do you suggest there for people? I think that's so interesting. And I think a lot of people would be nodding their heads right now listening to you, including us.
Kyra: Yeah, I mean there's, there's this many answers to that, as there are people, for each person there is their own remedy. I would say that again with the book I just want people to design for it. I want them to be relentlessly designing and busting for what that is for them, and it won't always be stagnant, because you might have the answer in 2015, and that may change in nature, or need in 2016. And just to have the quality of relentlessly pursuing the truth in themselves and being courageous enough to face what they find and creative enough to respond to what they find, and have that confidence in themselves. That's what I wish for people.
Chris: That was amazing, Tracy. I think the things that really stood out for me one on a personal level her process and journey, just that idea of, you can see the finish line at your residency you've got two weeks ago, you have this one patient that comes in, and ultimately tells you the truth, and that rockets you into a completely different mindset, go to Harvard public health school single mom with no money it's just mind-blowing.
Tracy: There were such high stakes.
Chris: I think what makes that even more significant is medicine at that stage is a fairly well-defined path. You check this box then you check this box and as she put it, it's pretty much mapped out for you you just start going through all the hurdles and jumping through hoops, and then you come out the other side so you're actually not in much of a position to question everything or redesign it to reimagine it and there she was wondering how she's gonna pull off what was mostly just an instinct, man. It wasn't like she said, Oh, turns out I want to be a lawyer, she said turns out I want to do something. I don't even know exists.
Tracy: At that point, she hasn’t met BJ who was really influential in her career later.
Chris: So we've got to talk about cookies. I said if I put cookies in the freezer. I would probably just eat more frozen cookies.
Tracy: That is true.
Chris: But our point was well taken which is can friction be added in your own particular personal way. Yeah, for me, for example, if the cookies just aren't there, and now I need to actually go to the store and get a cookie that might be enough though I can say I have done that before. It's not gonna happen as frequently as it would if I've got a cupboard full of cookies.
Tracy: What I thought was more the point maybe with her mom was that her mom figured out that her trigger was eating the entire volume. And so, just by reducing the volume that could work for her.
Chris: You know the fast mind slow mind thing I hadn't heard of it described in that way before but it makes a ton of sense to me. It's just a different way of describing this conscious subconscious more thoughtful and considered versus habitual parts of ourselves, I think we're constantly in this pattern of those two things tripping each other up
Tracy: Absolutely, I mean we've talked about it. Pretty briefly in one of our earlier shows, it might have been our first show, but the whole idea that you're bringing it uses so much energy, and all it wants to do is conserve its energy in case of danger. That's why you start to create these habits and she mentioned, I don't know she called it myelination or something but there is a chemical reaction sort of happening as you're doing things habitually laying down these tracks and making them thicker and thicker so that it becomes easier and easier for you to do the habits that serve you. So I just find all of that fascinating. And the fact that we're starting to understand that better I think will just go such a long way to helping us understand our habits better and then how we can change our behavior
Chris: So the ultimate Aha that I know you and I both agree on is this pushing together design thinking and the best of science and Kyra to me embodies that in such a powerful way because she came from the most aggressive side of science, and then merge design thinking to it at a later date, which is, it's a story you rarely hear frankly and I think it's so powerful, and it blends that the humanity and the emotional factors, with the hard scientific factors that ultimately do a great job of describing how it really works. If you go too emotional, then you don't really incorporate things like natural habitual habit, if you go pure science as we've seen many many times, it's like, Wait, where did they come up with that report it doesn't sound like a human being actually works that way.
Tracy: When I first heard of the work that she was doing. I mean, I am a science enthusiast. So, by no means an expert but my passion and interest lies in understanding people at a scientific level as well as the level of what a designer would be interested in. I couldn't believe that she existed. And then she's already doing this work, we talked on the phone before interview, and I was telling her that while I was at IDEO working on a lot of work in education. I started getting really fascinated about learning how the brain works and what we need to be able to learn best, how much sleep you need, how much rest how much play, all of those things and I started to dabble in the space that she is fully immersed in, and I was trying to think of how could we create design principles around humans like their physiology, psychology, biology, how can we create design principles around that and give that as almost a toolbox for designers to start from. And I don't think that that's something that happens very often in a project or in a company at large, we're looking at populations of people, and we're saying, Oh well, if we're talking to cookie eaters, what types of cookie eaters but we don't look at things at a physiological level.
Chris: Yeah, my more basic way of playing that back to you is that there are these universal truths that are more sort of physiological genetic human condition traits, and then we add on to that, what becomes more personalized and emotional and that's what I really loved about her work was she fully recognized that there are as many ways to go about the changes there are people, but there are still these universal human traits that sort of bind all of us, and can hold us back or advance us. So let's start with the fact that those are there and then overlay the fact that these are highly personalized and personal experiments that you run for yourself, that will work for you, that may not work for all of America or the developing world or whatever.
Tracy: And I think that's so powerful because it gives individuals autonomy, that gives them choice and a role to play in discovering this and the iteration that she talks about being so important and just so many times I feel like when people start off to do something they feel like they need to know the answer. I need to know what my passion is I need to know what exactly is going to work for me I need to know what's going to make me happy. The reality is you don't know. And if you just start trying is hot or cold, should I move more in this direction, or less than this direction, you'll start to get there and you'll get that clarity and it's not required from the beginning.
Chris: Exactly.
Tracy: I also think it's important. I mean, you were talking about it before where you don't question, the path you just take the path and everybody's kind of on it together, but she has such a humility, about her, that is so refreshing and I think that's what makes her able to do the work that she does. My dream for society would be that more of us had that.
Chris: I can’t agree more
Tracy: Alright, that’s a wrap! Thanks so much for listening. Our dream is to build a community of people who can create and take advantage of any opportunity that interests them to do as well. Your participation is key. If you want to try out and share back your own life design experiments, or if you've already got a great story from how you've designed your life, we'd love to hear from you on our Facebook page or at resultsmayvarypodcast.com. Our website is also where you will find show notes and links to all the things we mentioned in the show. And if you would be so kind, subscribe to the show and read us and write a review on iTunes or Stitcher, that'll let even more people start designing their lives. A big thanks to Kyra Bobinet for sharing these results with us today. And as always, special thanks to composer and filmmaker HP Mendoza for the Results May Vary theme music and Graphic Designer Annessa Braymer for our logo and David Glazier for audio mixing. And of course, thank you so much for listening to Results May Vary.
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