Spiritual Design by Stephen Wendel

Spiritual Design by Stephen Wendel

It's hard to make time for a meaningful spiritual life. This book can help you do it: by making small, clever changes to your environment.

Spiritual Design offers a wealth of research to help you enrich your spiritual life, whether your goal is to meditate or pray regularly, follow a personal calling, or anything in between. You'll also learn about breaking bad habits and avoiding the moments of weakness we later regret.

You'll apply lessons from behavioral science - the interdisciplinary study of how people make decisions in their daily lives - to design your environment to support spiritual growth and practice. This process, Spiritual Design, includes:

1. Understanding how our minds are wired, and how our cognitive biases can lead us into temptation or hinder us from following through on our spiritual leadings,
2. Overcoming the common obstacles that we face, and building habits that help us make time for our spiritual life,
3. Learning why our daily lives are structured to distract us from what matters, and how to change that.

Dr. Stephen Wendel is a behavioral scientist, who leads a team of researchers that helps people overcome behavioral obstacles in their lives. In Spiritual Design, he offers practical lessons on applying behavioral science in one's spiritual practice regardless of one's beliefs or denomination.

To learn more about Spiritual Design, read Steve's blog at www.spiritualdesign.co.

Stephen is a behavioral scientist who studies financial behavior and how digital products can help individuals manage their money more effectively. He serves as Head of Behavioral Science at Morningstar, where he leads a team of behavioral scientists and practitioners to conduct original research on saving and investment behavior.

Dr. Wendel has authored two books on applied behavioral science, Designing for Behavior Change and Improving Employee Benefits, and founded the non-profit Action Design Network, educating the public on how to apply behavioral research to product development with monthly events in ten cities.

Prior to joining Morningstar, he served as the Principal Scientist at HelloWallet, where he helped build an engaging product for users take control over their finances. The impetus for this book comes from the challenges he and the rest of the HelloWallet team faced along the way, as they learned to apply the behavioral literature to consumer products and consulted with companies similarly searching for effective ways to enable behavior change. Before HelloWallet, he co-founded two IT companies, and conducted research on the dynamics of political behavior.