“When we pursue excellence it doesn’t have to come at the cost of our emotional and relational health.” (Ben Houltberg)

How do we form an identity and sense of self? Do we define ourselves based on the fragile glass shelter of what we achieve or how well we perform? If so, how does that affect our sense of meaning and purpose in life?

With the 2024 Paris Olympics underway, it’s easy to imagine how an elite athlete at the top of her game might form an identity based on her athletic or competitive performance.

In this episode, Mark Labberton welcomes developmental scientist Ben Houltberg to reflect on the pursuit of achievement and excellence, exploring what’s at stake for our psychological and spiritual health when we find our identity and life’s meaning in our performance.

Together they discuss: the glass shelter of athletic achievement and the opportunity that emerges when it inevitably shatters; the various performance contexts of family, relationships, education, sports, career, and religion; the dangers of conditional acceptance based on performance; the performance-enhancing impact of healthy coaching and mentoring relationships; the transformative effects of unconditional love; and ultimately, how to be free from a performance-based identity.

About Ben Houltberg

Benjamin Houltberg is a developmental scientist, experienced marriage and family therapist, and president and CEO of Search Institute. He is associate research professor at the University of Southern California, and was previously associate professor of human development at Fuller Theological Seminary’s School of Psychology. Follow him @benhoultberg, and learn more about Search Institute online.

Show Notes

About Ben Houltberg: developmental scientist, licensed marriage and family therapist, and CEO of Search Institute

About “performance-based identity”

Olympics and athletic performance-based identity

“When we pursue excellence it doesn't have to come at the cost of our emotional and relational health.”

“What is my purpose?”

Olympic athlete Simone Biles’ public breakdown and dominant return to gymnastics

“If you think about the natural trajectory of an elite athlete, it is towards a performance-based identity.”

How elite athletes form their identity in their athletic performance.

“A Glass Shelter” of athletic achievement: what happens when that glass shelter breaks?

When the glass shelter breaks, it becomes a transformative opportunity.

“Whether it was youth sports and training for a marathon, or whether it was in elite athletes or whether it was in different large organizations and their staff employees … the profile emerges that it is in some ways a human condition: that performance-based identity can really trap us into an approach to life and an approach to relationships and approach to competition that is undermining us and will eventually lead to a shattered sense of self.”

Actor vs performer in the world (Action vs. Performance)

Influenced by what other people think we are

How to understand “performance context” across domains of sports, education, career, relationships, family, morality, and society at large

The dangers of limiting our identities to performance

Conditional acceptance based on performance

Human relationships, connectivity, and collectivism as performance enhancing

Coaching and mentoring to deal with the stress of performing

NCAA sports

Helping young people find “the spark”—their passion and potential and purpose

How the Search Institute studies performance-based identity

Christian faith and unconditional love

How to be free from a performance-based identity

Finding our identity in beauty, connection, and commonality

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment Magazine and Fuller Seminary.

People have been given so many reasons to despise Christianity. What would it be to communicate with and for the “cultured despisers of the faith”? This was the audience Friedrich Schleiermacher wrote to in his seminal work, The Christian Faith, and it is the audience Mark Labberton sought to speak to when preaching at First Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, California.

In this Conversing Short, Mark considers the importance of communicating the gospel in its fullness to a culture that understandably despises Christianity, rather than domesticating it as the ecclesiastical industrial complex has.

About Conversing Shorts

“In between my longer conversations with people who fascinate and inspire and challenge me, I share a short personal reflection, a focused episode that brings you the ideas, stories, questions, ponderings, and perspectives that animate Conversing and give voice to the purpose and heart of the show. Thanks for listening with me.”

About Mark Labberton

Mark Labberton is the Clifford L. Penner Presidential Chair Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of Preaching at Fuller Seminary. He served as Fuller’s fifth president from 2013 to 2022. He’s the host of Conversing.

Show Notes

19th-century theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher

"Cultured despisers of the faith” (introduced in The Christian Faith and On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers)

Darwin, Freud, and Nietzsche

“If you were a cultured person, you would have abandoned the faith.”

“People's life circumstances have, for understandable reasons, left them in a position to despise the faith.”

Reflecting Jesus or reflecting the “ecclesiastical industrial complex”?

Christian questions about what really matters

“The gospel itself, by God's revelation in Christ, if that's true, is a shocking surprise to the world.”

How the Gospel has been domesticated by the Church

Annie Dillard: if we understood the power of what we’re dealing with, we’d hand out crash helmets and seatbelts in church.

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment Magazine and Fuller Seminary.

“Out of the greatest misery and the most devastating loss can come unimagined growth, and, in some cases, joy and happiness.”

Mark Labberton welcomes pioneering social entrepreneur Mawi Asgedom, an award-winning innovator, author, and advocate for social-emotional learning (SEL). Sharing his story of struggle, resilience, and redemption, Mawi describes his extraordinary journey from war-torn Ethiopia to a Sudanese refugee camp, to a childhood on welfare in an affluent American suburb, to Harvard graduate, to sharing a stage with Oprah Winfrey, to reimagining educational technology to improve youth mental health and thriving.

Together they discuss the essential life lessons Mawi has learned and taught through his remarkable personal history, including the difficult cultural transition as an Ethiopian refugee in the Chicago suburbs, the pain of losing his brother followed by the pain of losing his faith, the power of positivity and mature Christian faith, and his vision for helping children develop social-emotional skills to navigate life.

About Mawi Asgedom

Mawi Asgedom is an award-winning innovator, author, and advocate for social-emotional learning (SEL). He has spent over 20 years helping youth unlock their potential, training millions of educators and students, and collaborating with leading youth development organizations. His book, Of Beetles and Angels: A Boy’s Remarkable Journey from a Refugee Camp to Harvard, is a survival story of overcoming war, famine, suffering, and countless obstacles. He is the creator of Inner Heroes Universe, and his work has been featured by various media outlets, including Oprah Winfrey, who named her interview with Mawi one of her top 20 moments. A father of four school-aged kids, Mawi can often be found coaching youth sports on the weekends.

Show notes

Read Mawi Asgedom’s book: Of Beetles and Angels: A Boy's Remarkable Journey from a Refugee Camp to Harvard

A story of challenge, struggle, pain and suffering; but also a story of God's faithfulness, and Mawi’s resilience, joy, devotion, love, intelligence, and hard work

Mawi’s childhood and origin story

Life in Tigray, Ethiopia

Civil War that led to the establishment of Eritrea

Mawi’s mother’s incredible journey from Ethiopia to Sudan, facing the dangers of hyenas, rebel forces, and homelessness with her three children

The normalcy of suffering

Describing the refugee camp in Sudan

How Mawi understands his personal history and life experience

A Nail Through the Finger: how parents in dire circumstances teach children to survive

“Where I come from, people expect a lot of bad things to happen. It's just part of how life is. In the States, people get really upset if any bad things happen.”

Mawi’s experience of cultural assimilation

His family’s relocation to Wheaton, Illinois, outside of Chicago, through World Relief

“Sweetness passed us by before we called it sweet.”

The cultural shock of moving to the U.S. and being the only Ethiopian family.

Challenges of isolation, language barriers, and racism

"Facing bullying and discrimination tested my resilience."

“That took me quite a long time to be able to step into who I really was and be like, ‘I got nothing to be ashamed of. I am proud of my mom and dad. I'm proud of my background. I'm proud of every part of who I am.’ It took me a long time to be able to feel that and say that. I think that was probably the invisible kind of scar from that experience.”

“On the rise to become an exceptional achiever…”

The greatest poverty is a poverty of relationship: “I spoke one time at a correctional facility outside of Chicago … and he said, ‘I'd rather be a refugee and go through stuff you went through with a family that I was close to who loved me than be in this country by myself.’ And I thought about it and I was like, this student is correct. The greatest poverty really is a poverty relationship. It's when you have no one.”

Mawi’s relationship with his brother

Mawi’s friend, Mark Linz, missionary to Ethiopia

Philippians 4:13: “I can do all things through Christ Jesus who gives me strength.”

“I believe that Mark. I believe there's something I could do. I don't have to worry about the fact that I live in a Section 8 housing. I don't have to worry about the fact that my father is unemployed, but these other kids in my school, their parents have great jobs. I believe that the creator of the universe loves me.”

The terror and grief of losing his brother in a drunk driving accident

Maintaining positive momentum through horrific, unimaginable, devastating challenges

“Out of the greatest misery and the most devastating loss can come unimagined growth, and, in some cases, joy and happiness.”

The agony of loss and the healing and learning that came from the experience of grace

Mawi’s Harvard experience

Losing Christian faith at Harvard: “I still remember one of the most shocking moments in my life. It was so shocking to me, Mark. I woke up, I think it was my second day of my sophomore year in my room. And I realized something: I didn't believe in God anymore. And it was a shocking existential moment. One way to think about it is: Losing Jesus was a different version of losing my brother. … When you're a true follower of Christ and you are connected to Christ and you pray every day, read the word every day and you put your faith in him. It's not a small loss. It's a massive loss.”

Depression and hopelessness

Maturing past a faith that had no room for doubt: “My faith now is rooted in doubt. It's rooted in the idea that there's so much I don't know, and, and yet I choose to have faith in Jesus.”

Social-emotional learning

Mawi’s entrepreneurial mindset

Mawi’s adolescent struggle with confidence and self-esteem

Mawi’s foray into working with children

“One of the most important things I learned, Mark, is the best way to help kids is to help the adults in their lives.”

Mawi’s new venture: Inner Heroes Universe, inspired by Pixar’s Inside Out

Using metaphors to make the abstract concrete: “an incredible inner world”

“I believe to reach the next generation, it's not going to work to try to convince them to do less media and to do things the way we had, the old way. We have to go to where they are and create rich media.”

“Imagine if you could only communicate positive psychology using art and storytelling. And you couldn't be didactic and you had to use imagination and creativity.”

Seeing through Mawi’s eyes and background: “a great instance of harvesting pain, of harvesting joy, of harvesting deep cultural difference, of harvesting challenging childhood experiences…”

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment Magazine and Fuller Seminary.

Imagine preaching in front of a crowd of protesters holding a banner: “HOW DARE YOU?” That’s what Mark Labberton did every Sunday preaching in the clear, glass-walled sanctuary of First Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, California.

In this Conversing Short, Mark reflects on this foundational, animating question that defined his public leadership during his sixteen years as senior pastor of First Pres.

About Conversing Shorts: “In between my longer conversations with people who fascinate and inspire and challenge me, I share a short personal reflection, a focused episode that brings you the ideas, stories, questions, ponderings, and perspectives that animate Conversing and give voice to the purpose and heart of the show. Thanks for listening with me.”

About Mark Labberton

Mark Labberton is the Clifford L. Penner Presidential Chair Emeritus and Professor Emeritus of Preaching at Fuller Seminary. He served as Fuller’s fifth president from 2013 to 2022. He’s the host of Conversing.

Show Notes

• The clear glass walls of First Presbyterian Church in Berkeley, CA
• “You’re doing everything that you’re doing in public.”
• “I wanted to welcome the outside, inside.”
• Berkeley protestors
• An imaginary poster: “How dare you?”
• Accepting responsibility, being held to account by the City of Berkeley
• Preaching in God’s name
• Mark on the question, “How dare you?”: “And it felt like the question was legitimate. How dare you get this land? Why should it be given over to this purpose? What is it that you're worth? What are you actually bringing to the city? On what grounds can you make such outlandish claims? What are the implications of it? How will it show up that you actually live what you're saying? And therefore, how dare you do this both intrinsically? How dare you do this existentially? How dare you do it theologically? But also, how dare you do it culturally and politically and socially.”
• “What does it mean in this place at this time, surrounded by this community of believers and unbelievers, skeptics and critics of every kind?”
• Preaching to the “Cultured Despisers of the Faith” (a term coined by 19th century theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher in The Christian Faith)
• “Having grown up largely outside the life of the Church … I was one of the cultured despisers.”
• Representing classic Christian faith in an entirely unclassical community like Berkeley
• “I felt like if the Christian faith can't show up and make some kind of intelligent, purposeful, meaningful, transformative difference, then there is no case to be made and I should just walk away.”
• What’s worth giving your life to?

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment Magazine and Fuller Seminary.

“The Constitution is neither a left-wing or right-wing document. It is ultimately about how to hold a society together.”

American political life today is fractured and splintered, but many still yearn for unity. How can we find social cohesion amid sharply felt differences? Political scientist Yuval Levin wants to bring us back to our founding document: the American Constitution. After all, the Preamble identifies as its primary purposes to “form a more perfect union” and “establish justice.”

Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where he also holds the Beth and Ravenel Currie Chair in Public Policy. His latest book is American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again. He’s founder of National Affairs, senior editor at The New Atlantis, a contributing editor of National Review, and contributing opinion writer at the New York Times.

Levin joins Mark Labberton to discuss the US Constitution’s purpose in fostering social cohesion and unity; the malfunction of Congress to build coalitions across disagreement; the values of social order and social justice; the fragility of democracy; the difference between a contract and a covenant; and the American aspiration to live up to the covenantal relationship and mutual belonging implied in “We the people.”

About Yuval Levin

Yuval Levin is the director of Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where he also holds the Beth and Ravenel Curry Chair in Public Policy. The founder and editor of National Affairs, he is also a senior editor at The New Atlantis, a contributing editor at National Review, and a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times.

At AEI, Levin and scholars in the Social, Cultural, and Constitutional Studies research division study the foundations of self-government and the future of law, regulation, and constitutionalism. They also explore the state of American social, political, and civic life, focusing on the preconditions necessary for family, community, and country to flourish.

Levin served as a member of the White House domestic policy staff under President George W. Bush. He was also executive director of the President’s Council on Bioethics and a congressional staffer at the member, committee, and leadership levels.

In addition to being interviewed frequently on radio and television, Levin has published essays and articles in numerous publications, including Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, The Atlantic, and Commentary. He is the author of several books on political theory and public policy, most recently American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation – and Could Again (Basic Books, 2024).

He holds an MA and PhD from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.

Show Notes

• Get your copy of Yuval Levin’s American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again
• Yuval Levin’s background as a Jewish American and his childhood immigration to the United States from Israel.
• Yuval has “the kind of vision that sometimes immigrants have, which combines a really deep gratitude for this country with a sense of what's unique about it, and what's wonderfully strange about it.”
• Yuval’s religious practice at a Conservative Jewish synagogue in Washington, DC.
• How Torah has shaped Yuval Levin’s life and thought.
• Torah is Hebrew for “law.”
• Annual cycle of reading and immersing oneself in a text.
• “The American Constitution is not divine. It’s the work of a patchwork of compromises, it has a lot of problems, by no means do I think that it’s analogous to the Hebrew Bible.”
• Why write a book about the American Constitution?
• How to understand the constitution as a framework for social cohesion and unity.
• “Even in the private lives of a lot of Americans, I think the sense of isolation, of alienation, breakdown of social cohesion is very powerful in the lives of a lot of people.”
• Constitution is intended to unify, but it’s been used to divide.
• James Madison as a primary figure in Yuval’s new book.
• “Americans tend to approach politics by thinking of other Americans as the problem to be solved.”
• “In any free society, there are always going to be divisions.”
• James Madison in Federalist 10: “He just says, simply: As long as the reason of man continues fallible, and he’s at liberty to exercise it, different opinions will be formed. The fact that we disagree is not a failure. It is a reality. And yet, that doesn’t mean that we can’t be unified.”
• Unity doesn’t mean thinking alike, it means acting together.
• “The Constitution compels us into building coalitions with precisely the people we disagree with.”
• Yuval Levin explains the premises behind his book The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left
• Social order versus social justice
• “There are, as a general matter, more or less two ways of thinking about the purpose of a free society like ours. There is a way of seeing it as intended to address the challenge of chaos and disorder, and there is a way of seeing it as intended to address the challenge of inequality and injustice.”
• “… the premise of human fallenness, which says that we begin unready for freedom. And we need to be formed and shaped to be capable of freedom.”
• “I think it’s worth our seeing the Constitution is neither a left-wing or right-wing document. It is ultimately about how to hold a society together, which has these two sides to it. And so it has a lot to offer us.”
• Social order as “patient to a fault” and “prejudicial toward white or elite culture.”
• Ideological extremism.
• “The most dangerous kinds of abuses of the weak happen at the hands of majorities. And therefore, democracy itself has to be constrained by principles of justice that are kept beyond the reach of majorities.”
• The question of “simple majority rule.”
• Populism.
• Two minority parties, rather than a majority party.
• Coalition building is just not being allowed to play out.
• Shared action versus shared ideas.
• Congress is about acting together when you don’t think alike.
• “Clearly there is something broken about Congress… Everybody agrees the institution is dysfunctional. I don't think everybody agrees about what function it isn't performing.”
• “Their job is actually to negotiate with the other party.”
• “I think that's fed a kind of attitude among a lot of prominent politicians in America that says, fighting for my constituents means yelling at the other party, and refusing to give ground, refusing to give an inch. That's actually not what fighting looks like in our kind of democracy. That's what losing looks like. Fighting looks like effectively bargaining and negotiating so as to achieve something of what your voters want or need.
• Partisanship, reactionary politics, and cynicism
• “I've come to think that cynicism about politics is actually very naive.”
• “The people you're dealing with are not cynical Machiavellians. They really believe they're doing good here, and there actually is room to have an argument.”
• How does justice operate in the political approach Yuval Levin advocates?
• The first two purposes of the Constitution: form a more perfect union, and establish justice.
• Who gets to decide what is just?
• Human equality and dignity as the premises for justice
• Why wasn’t slavery abolished in the Constitution itself?
• Native Americans and the abuse of human dignity
• Analogy: relating to our political or religious tradition as analogous to the child–parent relationship
• Seeking a mature relationship with our traditions
• Yuval Levin on the fragility of democracy: “Our democracy is often at risk.”
• Contract (an agreement that can be broken) vs. Covenant (a relationship of belonging)
• “’We the people of the United States.’ That “we” is an aspiration.”
• Yuval Levin’s perspective on the American Church, and how it contributes to the current social crisis
• American evangelicals coming to identify as an “embattled minority” or a “moral minority”
• Judging the success of a religious community by their influence as a political block
• “The particularly Madisonian logic of the Constitution is that everyone is a minority. … And that is not a position of weakness, necessarily, in this society. This is a society that is unusually solicitous of minorities. And when it's at its best, it is especially solicitous of minorities.”

Production Credits

Conversing is produced and distributed in partnership with Comment magazine and Fuller Seminary.