Confidence allows us to face life with boldness, openness, and honesty.  It enables us to live without worry and to feel safe.  It enables us to live authentically.    Joyce Meyer

Confidence.

When did it start slipping away from us?

If confidence does what Joyce says it does, the only time I can remember living that authentically and freely was as a little girl.

Somewhere along the way things started to eat away at my confidence and now I find myself trying to reclaim the confidence that so quickly eludes me.

There are a lot of enemies to confidence, but there are three that seem to occur repeatedly:

1) Fear

We fear not being good enough… not being beautiful enough… not having enough… not getting what we want… not being liked… not doing something significant with our lives… and the list goes on and on.

What’s worse is that we don’t want to admit our fears, so rather than face them we stuff them under airs of self-confidence.

2) Jealousy

Need I expound on this one?

As women, I think we have an innate propensity to compare.  We compare everything: our looks, our family, our things, our intellect… And once we compare, we determine where we don’t measure up and jealousy creeps in.

3)  Insecurity

This one breaks my heart because insecurity is defined as “a profound sense of self-doubt – a deep feeling of uncertainty about our basic worth and our place in the world.”

This tells me that we are so far from understanding who God says we are.  We’ve lost site of how He values us.

“For we are God’s workmanship, created in Christ Jesus to do good works, which God prepared in advance for us to do.”  Ephesians 2:10

I love this quote from Beth Moore:

“If we knew who we were and what God has conferred upon us, what everybody else thought of us would grow less and less significant.”

Most of our battles with confidence occur when we are focused on ourselves.  Our fears, jealousies and insecurities become self-fulfilling prophecies that keep us from confidently being ourselves and leading from a place of confidence and security in Christ.

Which one of these enemies of confidence do you wrestle with the most?  Is there another enemy to your confidence that you would add to the list?

Thank you for visiting the CultivateHer blog! My name is Trisha Davis and I am the Domestic Engineer for the Davis household. I live in Nashville, Tennessee, along with my husband Justin and our three boys Micah (13), Elijah (10) and Isaiah (7). Our family moved to Nashville in July of 2009 to become a part of Cross Point Community Church.

Justin and I met in College and started doing ministry together in 1994. I have had the privilege of leading in various student ministries and in 2002 planted Genesis Church in Noblesville, Indiana. As the church quickly grew so did the demands and seductions of ministry and in 2005 our marriage imploded. You can read our story here.

Through the good and bad of 15 years of ministry there is one leadership lesson that often comes back to haunt me… insecurity. Insecurity in my opinion is one of the hardest leadership pitfalls to overcome. I know throughout my own family life and ministry career there have been seasons where I have had to fight through the tendency to lead out of my own insecurity.

Insecurity can rear its ugly head in many different facets of our lives. Some deal with insecurity in the form of not feeling good enough to lead while others feel threatened by more capable leaders around them. We see this play out at home, at work and yes even in the church. Where there are leaders there are insecurities.  And when we lead through our insecurities most often dissention and stifled growth will follow.

So how do we push through our insecurities to become the leaders God called us to be?

Proverbs 3:3-5 (NLT) 3 Never let loyalty and kindness leave you! Tie them around your neck as a reminder. Write them deep within your heart. 4 Then you will find favor with both God and people, and you will earn a good reputation. 5 Trust in the Lord with all your heart; do not depend on your own understanding.

What I have learned over the past 15 years is that the root of my insecurity is distrust. When I start to distrust those I’m leading or empowering I become paranoid and overly sensitive. When I distrust that God has gifted me to lead I respond by not stepping out and getting involved. When I find myself in the pit of insecurity I need to remind myself to TRUST that God has a plan and a purpose for me and me alone to fulfill.

Have there been seasons in your life that you have tried to lead through insecurity? How have you learned to recognize it and fight through it?