The Meaning in Life

Seeking a Life that Matters

Michael Steger, Ph.D., is a faculty member in the Counseling Psychology and Applied Social Psychology programs at Colorado State University. See full bio

October 9, 2009

How Deep is the Divide between Therapy and Science?

Is there a Mackenzie Phillips-sized family secret lurking in the heart of psychology? I take a look at the often-profound disagreement over how can our profession best serve our clients. Read More

September 14, 2009

Parenthood and the Intentional Life

With kids heading back to school, parents can be stretched thin. So it's time to get back to the basics with three strategies for better parenting. Read More

August 21, 2009

What the Health?!?

Assault rifles, death panels, and the end of democracy. No, it's not Invaders from Mars, it's the health care debate. Here's a look at some of the reasons why this debate has gotten so out of control. Read More

August 12, 2009

Are We Ourselves?

Our bodies apparently have 10-20 times as many foreign, microbial cells in them as they have human cells, and research increasingly focuses on our colonization by these critters as a factor in our health. Are we simply Microbe Motels? Read More

August 5, 2009

Living Longer. And Better.

We tend to focus more on living long than on living well. Why can't we do both? Read More

June 13, 2009

Sucker-phobia: The fear of being taken

A recent report suggested that we prefer confident rather than diffident experts...even when the confident ones are wrong. There are two kinds of experts: the folks who are very, very confident about what they know - and the folks who are very, very aware of the limits of what they know. A football running back is a confident expert - hit the hole, hit it fast, hit it hard. (Even the Minnesita Vikings recognize this!) Running back-style experts say things like - DRINK TWO GLASSES OF RED WINE A DAY!!!!! A scientist is usually a tentative expert - see the data, see the limits in the data, present the highly qualified possibilities of what the data might mean if we can get more data that look a lot like the data we just reported. Can we get people to listen to the second kind? Read More

June 9, 2009

Meaningful Work

A famous story relates the following encounter: Three men are found smashing boulders with iron hammers. When asked what they are doing, the first man says, "Breaking big rocks into little rocks." The second man says, "Feeding my family." The third man says, "Building a cathedral." To many of us who study and consult in occupational and organizational contexts, we would call what this third man does meaningful work. Read More

May 18, 2009

Definitely Sweat the Small Stuff!! (and it's mostly small stuff)

The Flash of Insight, The Grand Gesture, The Rousing Speech, The Last Straw. All of these are doppelgangers of The Big Thing, which too many of us wait for to come along and change our lives. The secret is, of course, that it's not coming. Worse, by waiting for The Big Thing, you could let the little things that make life rich, and accumulate into the important experiences of your life, slip away. Read More

April 21, 2009

Coffee, Community, and the Quest for Meaning

One Friday evening in January, I went to the lone, independently owned coffeeshop on my side of town to do a few hours of work. When I got there, though, I found out that the coffeeshop was going out of business. What happened next was a stirring brew of passionate leadership, meaningful work, community mobilization, with a little new social media to sweeten things up. Read More

April 16, 2009

Searching for Godot: Fulfillment Won't Necessarily Come Find You

In Samuel Beckett's masterpiece "Waiting for Godot," two characters anxiously wait for a man they both claim to know but whom neither would recognize. Too often, it seems like people act like Beckett's characters, passively waiting for a meaning for their lives to come up and poke them in the chest and shout, "I am here!" How can we break out of this passivity? Read More

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Research on how to increase positive moods and capitalize on your strengths has proliferated lately thanks to the positive psychology movement, and has shed light on ongoing insights into personality, mood, and cognition.

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