From Money to Meaning

I am both a researcher and a practitioner, and the two halves feed each other: research gives my practice its rigor; practice gives my research its questions. My path here is more continuous than it looks. I spent the first decade of my career as an academic psychologist studying human relationships — how people connect, communicate, and grow close or apart — directing a university research lab, publishing in peer-reviewed journals, and learning to measure the things people feel but struggle to say. At the center of that work was a simple question: how do people exchange value with one another — because that exchange is what a relationship is.

My focus hasn't changed. Only the context has. My work now extends that same question to a relationship nearly everyone has and almost no one examines: our relationship with money — how we store value, and how we act on our values in the world around us. As both an academic psychologist and an applied researcher who built my own behavioral science practice from the ground up, I have studied it through controlled experiments, surveys, and cross-sectional studies. These insights have become a source of thought leadership for financial advisors looking to sharpen how they practice.

A growing focus of my work is existential psychology — the study of how people find meaning, purpose, and direction in their lives. The central struggle is rarely a lack of options; it is an abundance of them, untethered from a sense of what they're for. In a world governed by choice, each option can come to feel equally meaningless. I now weave this lens into how I sit with people: helping them examine their values, confront the fears and frictions that keep them stuck, and find a meaningful path through a sea of possibilities. Increasingly, it is the heart of how I think about this work — because wealth questions are meaning questions in disguise.