Who We Are

Our Story

Your Life Lived Well, LLC, led by Dr. Kevin J. Payne, is dedicated to making healthcare more humane. We focus on enhancing the human dimensions of care through science-backed consulting and educational services. By partnering with healthcare organizations, wellness programs, and therapeutic institutions, we improve patient outcomes, boost staff well-being, and elevate overall organizational performance.

Our mission is simple: improve the quality of life for both patients and professionals. We help healthcare organizations improve on several crucial indicators, including:

  • enhancing patient retention & loyalty
  • improving patient experience, engagement & satisfaction
  • raising treatment adherence, chronic care management
  • advancing long-term quality of life and health outcomes
  • reducing practitioner burnout, enhancing engagement & performance
  • boosting employee satisfaction & retention
  • fostering a resilient & supportive organizational culture
  • optimizing organizational efficiency

With decades of experience, deep commitment, and genuine empathy, we deliver practical strategies that help your team thrive and your organization grow.

Healthcare is a profoundly human endeavor, and our solutions reflect that. Explore how Your Life Lived Well can help your organization deliver better care and achieve sustainable growth. With decades of expertise in social, behavioral, and organizational science — combined with the lived experience of navigating chronic illness — our solutions are reliable, research-driven, and shaped by empathy. We tailor every strategy to support your mission of delivering better care and achieving sustainable growth.

Consulting

Our consulting combines data-driven insights with a deep understanding of the human side of healthcare. Through comprehensive organizational evaluations, we address critical KPIs (key performance indicators), such as reducing patient churn, improving treatment adherence, boosting patient satisfaction, enhancing employee retention, raising job satisfaction, and preventing practitioner burnout.

Our science-backed strategies are tailored to each organization’s unique challenges, ensuring sustainable improvements in care quality, staff well-being, and operational efficiency. With over three decades of experience in social psychology, research methods, data science, and consulting, Dr. Payne delivers empathetic, actionable solutions that empower healthcare teams to thrive while enhancing patient outcomes.

Your data are a critical window into the health of your organization. We also show you how to ethically leverage your data to generate creative, real time insights into your operations and relationship management.

Healthcare Consulting

Education

Professional & Patient Education

Your Life Lived Well™ trains front line healthcare professionals, as well as patients and their families, to improve quality of life and care in the face of demanding health challenges. Our education equips healthcare teams with the tools they need to thrive in high-pressure environments while delivering compassionate, patient-centered care — particularly for those living with chronic illness.

Our seminars focus on the cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and social aspects of health often missing from traditional medical education, providing evidence-based strategies that improve professional performance and well-being. These programs empower teams to foster deeper relationships with their patients while reducing burnout and boosting job satisfaction.

We also offer seminars designed directly for those living with ongoing health challenges, as well as their loved ones and caregivers. 80% of the challenges faced by those living with chronic illness go beyond their narrow medical symptoms. Drawing on behavioral science and our collective lived experience with chronic illness, we guide participants toward proven methods to meet the mental, emotional, and social obstacles they will also face.

Speaking

Educational & Inspirational Keynotes

Dr. Kevin J. Payne’s keynote presentations blend the rigor of science with the heart of lived experience. His thought-provoking presentations inspire, educate, and transform audiences. Drawing from his extensive background as a social psychologist, professor, data scientist, and healthcare consultant, as well as his personal journey living with multiple sclerosis, Kevin delivers engaging talks that focus on improving healthcare outcomes, fostering resilience, and enhancing the well-being of both patients and professionals.

He also inspires individuals facing the relentless stress and trauma of health challenges to renew their courage and continue their journey toward living well. His keynotes offer practical, science-backed strategies that empower healthcare organizations to create lasting, compassionate change — making them ideal for healthcare conferences, wellness initiatives, and professional development events.

Podcast

The Your Life Lived Well™ Podcast, hosted by Dr. Kevin J. Payne, explores the real-life challenges of living with chronic illness, while providing actionable insights and evidence-based strategies for improving quality of life. With a blend of personal stories, expert interviews, and cutting-edge research, we explore the cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and social aspects of health that are often overlooked by traditional medical approaches.

This podcast is a must-listen for healthcare professionals, patients, and caregivers alike — offering fresh perspectives on managing chronic conditions, fostering resilience, and living well despite life’s health challenges. Whether you’re looking to better understand chronic illness or seeking practical advice on improving everyday well-being, the Your Life Lived Well™ Podcast delivers both empathy and expertise in every episode.

Episodes

Apple

Amazon

Spotify

In the Media

Dr. Kevin J. Payne is a captivating speaker and media guest who blends science, personal resilience, and an inspiring story of living with multiple sclerosis to engage audiences worldwide. Kevin brings expert insights on healthcare, chronic illness, and personal well-being — all through the unique lens of someone who has reclaimed his childhood dream of skydiving despite the challenges of MS.

Through his media appearances — including interviews and expert panelist appearances in television, radio, podcasts — he shares his story of overcoming fear, pushing limits, and living fully, while offering practical, evidence-based strategies to improve patient care, resilience, and well-being. Explore a selection of Kevin’s past appearances below, and get in touch to book him for your next show, podcast, or event.

About Dr. Payne

Dr. Kevin J. Payne

Kevin is a social psychologist and entrepreneur, consultant, speaker, teacher, podcast host, and frequent expert interview or panelist. He shares the results of his extensive research concerning how to live a quality life with chronic distress, pain, and illness — and how to give care without giving your whole life away.

He also shares his personal exploits as a collector of experiences — even while battling Multiple Sclerosis for decades. Life is too remarkable to sit on the sidelines, even when we’ve got to get more creative about how we get in the game!

He was born and raised in the Kansas City Metro area. He can’t have too many books, is a lifelong tech geek, loves collecting new experiences, is devoted to his animals, and never misses a chance to jump from a perfectly good airplane.

Researcher

Kevin holds a Ph.D. in Sociology and Psychology from the University of Missouri–Columbia. He spent 15 years as a professor and headed a large program with 150 instructors serving over ten thousand annual enrollments.

In an active research career spanning over three decades, he’s authored over 40 peer-reviewed academic articles and presentations. He has also designed, analyzed, managed, or consulted on hundreds basic and applied projects in the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences. His academic specializations are in social and behavioral research methodology, and in studying why people succeed or fail under challenging conditions.

A lifelong tech geek, he first set down in front of a computer in 1977 and was hacking into the ARPANET by the early ’80s. He has always employed computer modeling and digital technology in his research approach, effectively doing “data science” long before the field formally existed.

Entrepreneur

In 2012, Dr. Payne left the academy to become a full-time tech entrepreneur. He’s led enterprise generating millions in annual revenue and double-digit growth. He served in founding, co-founding, and chief data scientist roles.

Through decades of consulting, he has advised dozens of enterprises. Now, his advising focuses on helping medical, therapeutic, health, and wellness organizations more effectively serve the needs of those with chronic health conditions.

His current company is his labor of love. Your Life Lived Well, LLC brings a better approach to supporting the cognitive, emotional, behavioral, social, and environmental quality of life challenges faced by those whose lives are touched by chronic illness. It delivers the education we need to perform under the strain of living with — and caring for — chronic distress, pain, and illness.

Living with MS

Dr. Payne has lived with multiple sclerosis for decades. He’s faced chronic pain, fatigue, trauma, and depression. He once gained and lost 120 pounds in the span of four years (and has kept it off since early 2002). He spent a decade supporting a wife on the verge of dying of cancer. He’s lived the challenges of chronic health conditions, both as diagnosed and caregiver.

Those experiences radically changed the course of his life. As a researcher, he did the only thing he knew to do: turned himself into a guinea pig and experimented relentlessly. But he wasn’t happy finding answers just for himself, so he interviewed hundreds, surveyed thousands, scraped 2.23 million data points from the open web, and re-analyzed over 8,000 studies on more than a hundred conditions to build practical solutions.

He discovered that most of our challenges aren’t directly from our medical symptoms, but from the practical, mental, emotional, and social fallout of managing a condition that will never go away. Medicine doesn’t have our solutions, or our conditions wouldn’t be chronic. We need quality of life care: grounded in science, driven by data, delivered with compassion, and personalized for everyone.

Skydiver

Kevin had a childhood dream of flight. He was serious about it, but fortunately managed to avoid major injuries from his youthfully misguided experiments with homemade parachutes. In the ’90s, he first took the Accelerated Free Fall skydiver training and logged a handful of jumps.

Then a lot of life intervened: after years of enduring the unpredictable challenges of a body plagued by Multiple Sclerosis, he despaired of ever returning to his dream.

But he vowed to find a way. In the summer of 2019, he threw himself into figuring out a way to make his wonky body safe and functional at terminal velocity, and to stand up a parachute landing even when he couldn’t feel his legs. With a lot of support and creative problem-solving, he managed to log more than 500 jumps (earning his coach rating) over the next year-and-a-half — 370 jumps in 2020, alone.

Now, weather permitting, you’ll find him in the sky.

Why Skydiving?

What does skydiving imagery have to do with healthcare or living with a chronic condition?

For Dr. Payne, reclaiming his childhood dream of skydiving is a meaningful part of his personal story. But more than that, it’s a reminder that, as individuals and as a healthcare system, we’re all limited by the expectations that accompany “sick.” We can do so much more. And we can live so much better. Too often, illness becomes the reason we let go of our dreams — but with some effort, creativity, and support, that doesn’t have to be the case.

Skydiving is also a powerful metaphor for the challenges of chronic illness and caregiving because living with (and caring for) serious illness, day in and day out, is overwhelming and exhausting (like being flung out of a perfectly good airplane). But skydiving is the ultimate act finding your agency against long odds and choosing life for yourself.

Most important, skydiving is a direct, functional analogue to living with sickness and caring for others — highlighting what we often overlook in those everyday experiences. Living with (and caring for) serious illness may be normal, but it is far from ordinary. We forget that it is momentous, difficult, and draining. Our bodies and brains only have one set of tools to deal with all of life’s challenges — the obvious, flashy ones like falling at terminal velocity, and the quiet, common ones like facing another day making a meaningful life in the face of devastating illness and its consequences.

This experience also led Dr. Payne to sport psychology as another surprising source of insight for our practice. Why? Because elite, endurance, and extreme athletes voluntarily court “edge” experiences (and succeed). Chronic illness and a lifetime of giving care are also edge experiences — and emotionally and physiologically, an edge is an edge.

There’s a lot more to it that this, but you get the idea!