You’ve built something real. The career, the relationships, the life that looks right from the outside. And yet there’s a quiet restlessness underneath: a sense that the next chapter should feel different, but you’re not sure how to design it.
Whether you’re navigating midlife’s first big questions or reimagining what comes next at 60, 70, or beyond, the feeling is the same: you’re not done growing, and you know it.
Barbara’s work starts here. Not just with what you need to fix, but with what you want to build: a life designed around your values, your energy, and what matters most to you, now and for the long run.
Filling the gap between living longer and living well means reconnecting daily choices with what matters—so success, well-being, relationships, and purpose stop competing and start reinforcing one another.
Sustainable energy replaces push; clarity replaces noise; an abiding presence returns. This is the shift from managing a life to actually living it.
Lifespan asks how long. Healthspan asks how well. Barbara’s TEDx talk introduces the question nobody else is asking: how fully will you inhabit the life you have? That question lives in the Thirdspan, the dimension of longevity where purpose, connection, joy, and meaning become the foundation, not the afterthought. Drawing on science, decades of coaching, and a deeply counter-cultural stance, she makes the case that a pro-aging mindset isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s a measurable multiplier of vitality.
Designing Longevity is four days at MEA’s Santa Fe campus, and a structured pathway that continues well beyond them.
It’s built on a simple premise: you are a study of one. Your biology, your lifestyle, your goals, your definition of a life well-lived. No one else shares your exact combination, which means no generic protocol will ever be the right answer.
Barbara has spent twenty years arguing something the longevity mainstream is only beginning to accept: that how you think about aging changes your biology. She works with adults, midlife and better, not to help them fight time but to help them design toward it, with intention, vitality, and the full expectation of getting better.
She is a gerontologist by training, a credentialed coach by practice, and a counter-cultural voice by conviction. That combination makes her work stand out: the science is real, the coaching goes deep, and the perspective is unapologetically pro-aging.
Barbara serves on the Advisory Council for the Stanford Center on Longevity, co-leads Stanford’s Lifestyle Medicine Gratitude and Purpose pillar, and is resident faculty at the Modern Elder Academy. Her insights have appeared on CBS This Morning, Thrive Global, and other major platforms. Her books, including The Middlescence Manifesto, have shaped how a generation thinks about midlife, energy, and what it means to keep growing.
Live, love and lead, better.
You want more than metrics. Turn added years into a life fully lived with Barbara’s science-informed Longevity Lifeplan™ and Seven Lifestyle Levers™ Assessment.
Midlife Fully Lived
Middlescence reframes this stage as fertile ground for clarity, connection, and meaning. Barbara helps you redesign roles and rhythms that fit your life now and beyond.
Whole-life Coaching
Work with a certified coach, caring truth-teller and accountability advocate. You’ll set clear priorities, cultivate your energy reservoir, and make values-aligned decisions.
Chief Innovation and Community Design, Modern Elder Academy
CEO
CEO Modern Elder Academy & NYT Best Seller
Board Member
Former CEO, The Nancy and Stephen Grand Family House
Director Alumni Programs and Community Development Modern Elder Academy
The most powerful longevity plan is the one built around how you actually live. Science-informed and grounded in Barbara’s Study of One© methodology, it meets you where you are and shows you where to begin. Most assessments give you a snapshot. This one gives you a practice.
Insight that changes how you think, practical direction for how you live, and the honest, pro-aging perspective that has defined her work for twenty years.
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Metrics are part of your map – you need them to orient yourself – but the real experience is the journey you take and the kind of life you want to lead along the way.
Maybe you’ve tried the protocol life, tracking biomarkers and chasing the latest hacks. Or maybe you’re experiencing well-being burnout from endless advice and guesswork, not sure where to begin.
There is a better way forward.
