In this Season 2 wrap-up of With & For, Dr. Pam King reflects on the multifaceted nature of thriving, emphasizing that it's not a luxury but a necessity for navigating life's complexities. She and her guests reveal thriving as a relational journey that involves deep connection to others, self-discovery, healing, and aligning purpose with practice. Even amidst struggles and challenges, thriving is possible through an open heart, understanding ourselves as "God's masterpieces," and pursuing what is most sacred.
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Dr. Pam King’s Key Takeaways
Pam King: [00:00:00] With & For listeners, we are so grateful for you. I have so appreciated your curiosity and your enthusiasm about the show. If you're enjoying this episode and finding it helpful or inspiring, I would be so grateful if you would take a moment after listening to share it with a friend. Alternatively, if you took a moment to rate the show and leave us a review on whatever podcast app you're listening to, that is one of the best ways to grow a podcast is by listeners sharing with the people that they're with and for.
I'm Dr. Pam King, and you're listening to With & For, a podcast that explores the depths of psychological science and spiritual wisdom to offer practical guidance toward spiritual health, wholeness, and thriving on purpose.
With & For listeners, thank you so much for joining us on [00:01:00] season two as we've explored the complexity of living with and for others. My hope for this show is that it gives you insight, inspiration, and some practical guidance on how you can thrive and become whole. at the beginning of the season, just when I thought things couldn't get more precarious.
The world has only gotten more complicated, it is my true hope to help you be able to be resilient, purposeful. Become more whole and thrive even in the context of, change fear, and uncertainty.
I'm very aware that words like thriving might sound like a luxury in seasons like this, but I think.
When you understand the deep, gritty, purposeful work of thriving that grounds you in who you are, connects you deeply and meaningfully to others and directs you towards a sense of purpose, it's not a luxury. It's actually a [00:02:00] necessity for navigating life,
Pam King: The journey of thriving is not a solo journey. It is something that we do with and for others, and I believe in the deepest places of my heart and mind that we are relational people and it always boggles me that relationships can be so challenging.
In creating this show, I focused on inviting guests that would enable you -and me - to be able to be more loving; to both experience love, and to offer it to those close to us and to the world.
One thing that hit me was the importance of a true north. This season really helped me understand that this journey involves both self-discovery, even at my age, in my later fifties, that I am learning things about myself or relearning things about myself. For me, I've been really open on the show. My Christian faith supplies me a true North; offers me a community that helps guide me and supports me in [00:03:00] my journey, but we all work that out differently. And in a day and age when spirituality is really under construction people are renegotiating their relationships with their own spiritual or religious tradition, the work is on us then to figure out how we understand our true north, how we understand where meaning comes from, where hope comes from, where support, whether it's our community or support from something beyond.
One of my sources of support and inspiration are my colleagues at Fuller Seminary, where the Thrive Center is situated, and I've had a number of them on the show, the first and last season. I feel so fortunate to have colleagues who will really wrestle when things are hard.
Pam King: I don't know about you. I always blame it on being from the Midwest, but I'm a pretty gritty person and I can dig deep and try harder, and sometimes that masks the healing that I need to [00:04:00] do. And so I always need to be reminded about self discovery, not just discovering my strengths, which I'm happy to remind myself about, but also discovering those places that aren't so strong - that are weak, that need shoring up, that need, love, and attention and need company. And, so as the season wraps, I invite you to reflect on what are the places that need healing within you? Can you name them? Sometimes I don't wanna name mine. And who can you invite into those places in your life? Whether it's friend, family, spouse, partner, or maybe that's God, or maybe you're not so sure who God is, but you know someone who might have a little more idea. Think about who can accompany you and give you wisdom and guidance,
I continue to ask my guests the key question that has framed my research and professional life, what is thriving to you? Let's listen in to some short clips from the [00:05:00] season. To give you a sense of how my guests answered what is thriving to you,
Dave Wang: For me, Thriving is about accepting, making peace, and becoming friends with a truer story of yourself, others, and the world.
Laurie Santos: I think thriving is engaging in the behavior and mindset changes that you need to experience flourishing in your life, and ideally doing that in a way that's nonjudgmental and has some self compassion for the times when you fail at doing that really well.
Dan Koch: My intuition is that thriving is more like the Aristotelian good life. It is actually, you're buffered from crisis in that you have sort of resources built up in all these different domains at a personal level, at a family level, but also social connection.
Lerone Martin: Thriving to me, um, begins [00:06:00] with the love of God and the love of neighbor. I see thriving as much more about being in community, being in a space where you are working through your vocation and your calling and making connections to your loved ones
Kelly Corrigan: I probably thrive best when I'm in service to something.
Kelly Corrigan: I think everyone does, actually. And the way that I fail is that I try to divide my time between too many people and projects.
Pam King: Many of my guests spoke about the importance of beliefs, whether that's beliefs about God or what's most sacred to them, or the beliefs that orient their life. These are fundamental to their thriving. They help them make sense of our complicated world, and all the difficulties that all of us face.
They talked about the importance of discerning what truly matters in their life and [00:07:00] how that helps give them a sense of agency and a sense of purpose in life.
Varun Soni: It's the alignment of purpose and practice. So, it's like, what is my North Star and how do I get there? That's thriving. It doesn't matter if you don't get there. It doesn't matter if your North Star changes, but as long as you have some sense of purpose and practice and alignment at any given point in your life, even if purpose and practice change over the course of your life, the very act of alignment is the very act of thriving.
Makoto Fujimura: I think thriving actually is a realization that we are God's masterpiece already, and finding both joy and contentment in that, but, but then we have work to do.
Mary Helen Immordino-Yang: I don't think thriving to me is the same every day. It's something that is dynamic, just like experiences, just like being a person in the world. The world is an emergent, dynamic, changing place where we're adapting [00:08:00] all the time, moment to moment and year to year to the changing context, including our own internal context, right? So, if you situate thriving in that developmental rather than static lens, then I think thriving to me means, meaningfully engaging, in purposeful living.
Mona Siddiqui: So, I think that sense of how do I rely on or build a community that can do different things is really when I think people find that they can flourish. But I think it's hard to find that. I think you're very lucky if you have both the center and that sense of community that helps you thrive.
Pam King: So many of my guests spoke of thriving through challenges and difficulties. What helps us negotiate the inevitable bumps in the road? What they've continued to point out is that thriving is complicated, and it's really not just one thing. Thriving is a both and process. We can be struggling, [00:09:00] but still be thriving and the struggle is a really important part of it.
Jessica ChenFeng: Obviously my bias as a therapist, because we tend to see people in crisis. I think most of life is lived in seasons of loss, grief, transition, difficulty, relational stress.
Could we still be thriving even if life is often stressful? And I think the answer is, yes. I think of thriving as both this internal state and a relational reality that while I am still encountering a stressful day I'm thriving because I'm living my life with an open heart, an open mind, and my relationships are meaningful.
Scott Barry Kaufman: So much of the goal of therapy is to increase your mental health, to relieve your symptoms of mental illness. But even if you've done that, [00:10:00] you're not necessarily thriving. I see that as a much, much higher north of zero than just getting to zero - to getting to kind of just an existing part of where you're even just mentally healthy. You can be mentally healthy, but not thriving. Plenty of mentally healthy people who aren't thriving. And I would also say, are you ready for this?
Pam King: I'm ready. I got my pen.
Scott Barry Kaufman: …that you can be mentally ill and thriving.
Tina Bryson: You know, in the whole brain child, in the opening introduction, we talk about how oftentimes we think of our lives as either we're just surviving or we're thriving. And the truth is surviving and thriving aren't always separate categories. What we do in the survive moments can absolutely be thriving and what we do in the survive moments as parents, like with our kids, can lead to thriving.
It really depends on how we're responding and how we're taking advantage of those repeated experiences.
Terry Hargrave: Where is your best self? You know, where is your cured self? That's what I think that thriving is, [00:11:00] we all have that potential. I, for one, think that human beings are good at heart. That doesn't mean they don't do bad things.
They're nurturing, they're self valuing, they're balanced in relationships, and they're connected well. If we can get them to do that more…
It's doing more of their best self, less of their pain cycle, more of their peace cycle. That's what thriving is to me - is to being so habituated to doing good that people benefit from relationships and they can't wait to be around you because they just make you feel better.
Pam King: The key takeaways that I carry with me from these conversations are the following.
Pam King: With & For is going on a brief hiatus as we plan and record season three, which is scheduled to drop in January, 2026.
It's so helpful to hear what's on your mind, what's challenging you, what you're learning, to give us feedback. We have created a survey that's linked in our show [00:13:00] notes, or the Thrive center.org/podcast.
Please feel free to fill that out, or you can send us an email at the Thrive center@fuller.edu. We would love to hear from you.
Pam King: With & For is a production of The Thrive Center at Fuller Theological Seminary.
For more information, visit our website, thethrivecenter.org, where you'll find all sorts of resources to support your pursuit of wholeness and a life of thriving on purpose. I am so grateful to the staff and fellows of the Thrive Center and our With & For podcast team.
Jill Westbrook is our Senior Director and Producer. Lauren Kim is our Operations Manager. Wren Juergensen is our Social Media Graphic Designer. Evan Rosa is our Consulting Producer. And special thanks to the team at Fuller Studio and the Fuller School of Psychology and [00:14:00] Marriage and Family Therapy.
I'm your host, Dr. Pam King. Thank you for listening.