How to be confident
For the past year, I’ve been thinking about what it means to be confident.
I struggle to operate in true confidence. I worry about being perceived as arrogant, so I sometimes present myself as overly “humble,” soft-spoken, and meek. At other times, I feel frustrated by my fear of arrogance, so I grit my teeth with the determination to pull up my “confidence pants.”
I’ve concluded that, like humility, confidence is shy. The more you think about it, the less you have it. So, I figured it would be good to think about it today with you. :)
The lie of arrogance
I suspect that confidence operates like humility because true confidence is humble.
Pride and arrogance is ultimately a lie. Arrogance highlights strengths while hiding, diminishing, or ignoring weaknesses. And in reality, arrogance is masked insecurity. It’s the need to make ourselves look better than we are because we aren’t genuinely okay with who we are. Arrogance has a hard time seeing or admiring strength in others because it’s so easily threatened. To be “okay,” arrogance needs to be strong and right.
The snare
Proverbs 29:25 has clarified for me how to take hold of humble confidence.
“The fear of man lays a snare, but whoever trusts in the Lord is safe.”
Fear of man is at the bottom of most of my insecurities. The fear of how others perceive me is what drives me to put on a false humility, and it’s what drives me to arrogantly broadcast my strengths and downplay my weaknesses.
The fear of man is a snare because it keeps us from being able to love others. To love someone, you have to see them. The fear of man blinds us and leads us to care about the wrong thing. Instead of caring about those around us, we worry about what they think of us and whether or not they like us.
C.S. Lewis explains this much better than I can,
“You will never make a good impression on other people until you stop thinking about what sort of impression you are making. Even in literature and art, no man who bothers about originality will ever be original: whereas if you simply try to tell the truth (without caring two pence how often it has been told before) you will, nine times out of ten, become original without ever having noticed it…Give up yourself, and you will find your real self.”
With fear of man, we either shrink back and do not stand up in the God-given strengths we have to offer to the people around us, or we present a puffed-up version of ourselves. Fear of man keeps us from finding our real self; it keeps us from finding true confidence.
A new desire for confidence
Even my desire for confidence is often rooted in the fear of man. I want to be seen as confident. That’s different than being confident.
But maybe there is a better reason to desire confidence.
Instead of seeing confidence as a way to feel empowered and super awesome, maybe we should long for confidence so that we can be free to love others and offer them whatever good God has given us.
How to find confidence
True confidence isn’t tossed about by the tyranny of perception. A truly confident person is free to offer all that they are in service to God and the world around them.
To find freedom from the fear of perception, we need to be okay with who we are.
Our culture would lead us to pick up the newest self-help book and find a deep love and appreciation for ourselves. But this doesn’t really work because it requires a good amount of self-deception. Instead of facing the parts of us that haunt us, worldly self-help says the solution is to gloss over reality.
Only the Gospel of Jesus Christ can give us the resources we need to find true confidence. With the Gospel, we are able to face the worst parts of ourselves and find that we are forgiven, loved, and cherished. The Gospel doesn’t diminish or gloss over our sins and weaknesses; it deals with them. When we trust in the God of the Gospel, we no longer worry about how men and women perceive us because, as the Proverb says, “we are safe.” Perceptions don’t matter anymore because our reality is solid and good.
Only Jesus can remove from our hearts the worries and insecurities that lead us to be unnecessarily reserved or arrogantly boastful. Confidence is the fruit that comes from trusting in the Lord. As I learn to trust that because of Christ, God is more than okay with me, I’m finding that I care less about how people perceive me. Without this distraction of worrying over myself, I’m finding I can better see and love others with all the resources, personality, and gifts God has given me.
Trusting in God’s love for me in Christ is what creates a true and humble confidence within me.
