About Us
About the Worth and Excellence Initiative
We exist for a single conviction: we believe that everyone needs to be reminded of their intrinsic worth to achieve excellence and flourish in life.
Too often, worth is seen as conditional — you matter as much as you perform. We want everyone to know that a person can be loved without condition and called to grow without limit. Acceptance and aspiration, dignity and development, belong together. Separating them stunts growth and flourishing.
The Worth and Excellence Initiative helps individuals and communities live from secure worth and grow toward their full potential — so that no one is reduced to their performance, and no one's potential goes unrealized.
Why this work matters
We focus on those whose worth is most at risk, in two opposite ways:
The first are high-performers whose identity has fused with achievement — athletes, students, professionals, and leaders in pressured environments where the self quietly becomes a scoreboard. The research on contingent self-worth is clear that staking one's value on outcomes predicts anxiety, fragility under failure, and burnout, even among the most capable people.
The second are those marginalized by circumstance or society, whose potential is denied, suppressed, or never invited — people told, implicitly or explicitly, that they are worth less and can become little.
These look like opposite problems. They share one root: a person's worth has been made to depend on something other than their inherent value as a human being and a child of God.
What we believe
Our work rests on a conviction we find affirmed across disciplines — in the psychology of human motivation, in the long moral tradition of virtue and human flourishing, and at the center of the restored gospel of Jesus Christ: that every person is loved without condition and called to flourish without limit. Worth is the ground we stand on; excellence is the direction we grow. One is gift, the other is becoming, and a whole human life needs both.
What we do
We pursue this through three integrated channels:
Research — advancing rigorous, interdisciplinary inquiry into how secure worth and healthy striving develop together, drawing on empirical psychology, moral philosophy, and theology rather than any one of them alone.
Education — translating that evidence into curricula, programs, and practical tools for the people and settings where worth is most under pressure.
Ministry — meeting people personally, in the lived and spiritual dimensions of worth and growth that research informs but cannot replace.
Who we are — Dr. Jenae Nelson is an assistant professor of psychology at BYU, and Dr. John White is a theologian and ethicist at Maxwell Institute at BYU.
