Confidence Good Pride Bad - I Get It - No Wait I Don't Get It

Here's a tricky one. When is confidence a Wicca thing, and when does it become arrogance? How do you tell the difference? What makes this tricky is consolidate school loans a confident person may be accused of arrogance. Does that make him arrogant? No, it just makes him accused by someone.

Confidence is about faith, and faith is one of the highest values in God's kingdom. We also know that confidence is a free car insurance quote online to personal success--you know, setting goals, believing you can do it, not devaluing yourself--all that. But on the flip side, consider this passage from James 4:13-16:

Now listen, you who say, "Today or tomorrow we will go to this or that city, spend a year there, carry on business and make money." Why, you do not even know what will happen tomorrow. What is your life? You are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. Instead, you ought to say, "If it is the Lord's will, we will live and do this or that." As it is, you boast and brag. All such boasting is evil.

So what do you do with that? If you want to be successful AND spiritually mature, how do you take that? Honestly, this one has kept me puzzled for some time. I want to be spiritually mature, godly, and humble, but I also want to make my mark on the world. I want to make a difference; I want to do great things in my lifetime.

How about you? Maybe you've had the same confusion. Well, I think I have an answer...
I've been reading a great book by John Eliot called Overachievement: The New Model For Exceptional Performance. There's one chapter in particular called "We All Should Wear Ray-Bans to the Office", in which he demonstrates the amazing power of confidence--even what some might call "overconfidence" (aka "arrogance"). People who have a ridiculous amount of confidence really do better than those that are constantly soft-pedaling themselves to stay "humble."

But there's that internal dilemma again: "Isn't this all just ungodly pride, that may make a person successful in the world, but contaminates their soul with pride and arrogance?" How does this square with the passage from James I just quoted?

Well, it's important to know what confidence is NOT, for starters. In Overachievement, the author points out several misconceptions people have about confidence. In its purest form, confidence is simply taking action on something have you confidence in. Here are things that confidence is not:
1. Confidence is not your track record. Confidence is not that thing you feel when you do well--it is the thing that causes you to do well.

2. Confidence is not a button to be pushed. It's not like you push the confidence button and success pops out. Confidence is something you have whether or not you happen to succeed that time.

3. Confidence does not change your physical skills. You actually have to be able to DO the thing you have confidence in. If not, you need to develop your skills.

4. Confidence is not about "building self-esteem". Unfounded self-affirmation statements don't help anything, because everybody knows they're not really true.

5. Confidence is different from "false confidence". More of the same--if you can't do something, expressing confidence won't make you magically able to do it.

6. Confidence should not be confused with strategy. Sometimes when someone has a lot of confidence, and yet still fail, it gets said of them that "they just got overconfident." That is not true. Confidence is always good; but what's missing is a better strategy for achieving the desired success.

7. Confidence is not arrogance. True arrogance is when you think you are actually better than other people in general. This is not about your value as a human being; it is only about your particular ability to do something well.

So all this is good stuff, right? It's important to know what confidence and what it isn't.

But what about that nagging feeling that to be confident is to violate what the Bible says?

Check this out. It's one more quote from Overachievement; it is in the chapter on confidence, but it sounds astonishingly similar to our quote from James:

Trying to control your life or steer it in one direction or the other is a recipe for frustration; too many things can happen that are unpredictable. The people who say, "I'm going to work here for five years, then get married, then get promoted..." will not be prepared for accepting a great but risky job offer, not to mention walking around the corner tomorrow and bumping into the man or woman of their dreams.

So THAT's the real problem, in both cases--having such an inflexible view of your future that you don't allow for anything outside of your preconceived view. The problem here is not confidence, it's inflexibility and lack of faith! It's a lack of faith that things may work out in a way you hadn't anticipated!

So enough with feeling guilty for having confidence, thinking you're doing God a favor by going passive. Confidence does not equal sinful pride; however, inflexible attempts to control your life's outcome are a whole different ballgame. That's the real thing to watch out for.

Go ahead and be confident! God's ok with it.

Mike Major Matt Mason Life TARGET Consultant, is the founder of Appleton mortgage refinance For This, a revolutionary process that identifies a person's calling based on the "signs" within that person's life--their passion, their ability, their personality, their supernatural gifts and their most life-changing experiences. For more information, visit www.iwascreatedforthis.comhttp://www.iwascreatedforthis.com or email Mike at href="mailto:mike@iwascreatedforthis.commike@iwascreatedforthis.com.