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Self-confidence doesn’t exist. Only holy confidence does.
I spent most of my life looking for confidence in a place it doesn’t exist. I lived chasing an idea, attempting to prop myself up enough to believe I had what it took, and if I believed it, then I would be confident.
It’s similar to assuming you’ll be more confident when you look a certain way or secure a set amount of money in your bank account. While those may bring some confidence, they don’t make you confident.
Unfortunately, I chased a version of confidence that left me getting swallowed in the pit of endless self-help books, leaving me longing to uncover what my problem was. No amount of self-help led me to true confidence because true confidence is not found in self-power or self-perfection. It’s found in something outside of yourself, which stems from recognizing, even owning, the weaker parts of yourself.
Confidence is being comfortable with what you lack.
It may sound backward, but confidence is getting comfortable with the places and parts of yourself that you don’t always like. It’s knowing that you will experience failure and rejection. You will fall into your weaknesses. Confidence is acknowledging and owning your shortcomings.
You don’t acknowledge or accept it to live complacent within it. You do it out of the reminder of your need for something greater than yourself. That’s why confidence isn’t a self-proclaimed idea; it’s holy.
True confidence is founded in holy confidence. Confidence comes from your relationship with God. From this, you understand who he is, why you were created, and your purpose here, living out the Gospel promises that provide a grounding force – a solid foundation – for you to live confidently. Out of that, you shift your entire biology.
This podcast discusses the importance of building a sense of holy confidence. I teach you how to get outside of yourself and why you should. It’s the opposite of neglect. Many people are so close to confidence they can taste it, but they haven’t experienced it because of one overlooked misstep. Learn what that is inside.
How Confidence Changes Your Biology
Both prove confidence can change your biology.
If you understand the basic biological needs for safety and energy, this makes complete sense. Your level of confidence is a lens through which you view the world. A lack of confidence could mean viewing the world in a negative light, out of fear and scarcity rather than courage and tenacity.
How you view life changes what you do with it. When you perceive threats, your biology shifts accordingly. A lack of confidence can become just as unsafe as any other trigger. Insecurity changes your hormone response and cells’ response, often making you your worst enemy. Where confidence helps you heal, live energized, and thrive.
The feedback loop of confidence.
Like everything inside your body (and in life), biological patterns related to confidence run via a cycle. A lack of confidence produces unhealthy, tired, and stressed cells, which perpetrate a lack of confidence. Likewise, confidence increases a healthy physiological response, shifting your cells to accentuate confidence.
If you want to change the cycle, you must break it.
Breaking the cycle requires the activation of new patterns, or in the case of confidence, new beliefs about what confidence is and isn’t. True confidence is holy confidence.
True confidence is holy confidence.
Like most good things, living confidence is a choice. You may not feel like it or experience it, but that doesn’t mean you can’t exist within it. Getting there requires shifting from self-confidence to holy confidence. It takes shifting your attention away from yourself and onto God.
The difficult part is that when we redirect our attention away from ourselves, we do it out of a place of self-hate or self-abandonment. But it’s not that. Just as it’s not self-inflation or self-obsession
Both of those are common patterns of extremes. Self-inflation or obsession is linked with a perceived idea of self-confidence, like self-hate or self-abandonment, which is related to insecurity and lack of confidence. Neither of these is true.
Creating holy confidence.
True confidence is found in the middle. It’s a way of living that allows you to step outside yourself, not in a way that belittles you or one that thinks too highly of yourself, but true confidence is the freedom to think about yourself less.
None of this means your sense of self doesn’t matter. It does. Your sense of self is called your ego, and that is God-given. In balance, or reverence to God, your ego is relatively unnoticed because it has no need to be. It’s fully secure and content, living out your purpose.
Your ego becomes inflated when your sense of self feels threatened, whether through self-inflation or isolation. An inflated ego becomes very attentive to your sense of “self” as a means of protection, attaching itself to any form of stability. Unfortunately, your sense of self is rarely safe, creating the perpetual problem of self-fixation.
Your self is broken, but you need it to be okay, leading you to fall into the trap of self-help that leads to self-inflation, perpetuating the problem, not fixing it.
You will never be the answer you are looking for. Only God can be because he’s the creator of it all. You need God to feel safe. The type of safety that allows your cells to rest deep.
It’s only God that you can build a foundation that sustains your life, allowing you to fully live life. That is confidence.
The discipline of holy confidence.
Confidence doesn’t just happen, and it won’t, even when you come face to face with the parts of you that you don’t like. Confidence requires the right view of God. I think we struggle here.
As Jackie Hill Perry states, “If you don’t have a solid foundation of the theology of the nature of God, then you won’t find value in being made in God’s image.”
If you don’t understand God, you won’t be moved to know Him more. You won’t be moved to see yourself as part of His story. Without that, you’ll live isolated in your own story.
True confidence requires you to know God when you know Him, you know yourself.
But that requires the daily discipline of falling back into the Savior’s feet. It’s a daily reliance on him, his truth, his help, his wisdom, and his power. Stop trying to be your security and let go, surrendering your life to your Savior. He is the only real security we have.
Want to learn more about God & Your Health?
God cares about your body. Your body is a valued part of your faith, just as your faith is a valued part of your biology. If you want to take a deeper dive, I rounded up some of my favorite posts devoted to faith and your biology.
