In Focus

I love tower defense games. For those of you who don't know what they are, the basic premise is you build a bunch of towers to prevent the bad guys from reaching your base. With each passing level, the bad guys get stronger, so you have to keep building more towers or upgrading them to keep up. I can literally spend a couple hours on a good TD game.

Yet these are hours I will never get back. Hours that I could spend doing something else. I could be learning another language, reading the Bible, helping people on Excel forums, writing, editing, sending my work off to publishers, promoting my online work more, volunteering, getting in shape, or even just cleaning my room. Instead of taking steps to become the man I want to be, I sit around dreaming that I am already that man.

This isn't to say that all diversions are wasteful. I don't advocate a Spartan, fun-free lifestyle. I think it is well past time, though, that I call into question how I spend my time. Certainly, I have done things that required hard work and dedication, so I cannot say all my time has been wasted, but I know I am capable of accomplishing so much more.

Are you? I don't mean this in an accusatory way, nor do I mean to doubt your abilities, but are you spending your time well? This doesn't simply mean that you're not wasting hour after hour playing games or watching TV; you could be working on something that has no real meaning or bearing on your life. It could be a dead-end job you stay in because you're too afraid to use your gifts to their full potential. It could be a relationship you don't end because then you'll be alone. It could be friends you hang out with, but who don't challenge you to grow as a person.

We are supposed to move forward with our lives. For far too long, I have been moving forward only incrementally, then patting myself on the back and rewarding myself with some downtime. The next week starts in an hour. I'm going to spend a little time in the Bible and get ready for bed. For this next week, though, I'm going to give up all online games. I'm going to use that time to do at least a couple of the things I mentioned in my second paragraph and see what kind of change it makes.

I challenge you to do the same thing. Find one frivolous activity in your life that is taking hours each week and either cut it out or severely limit it for this next week. Use that time to do what you know you should be doing. I'd be very curious to hear your stories.

Forgiven?

This is, so far as I know, the last part of the book I'm going to share on here. It's one of the 11 steps to become more confident, and it's one of the hardest for me. To have real self-confidence, you have to forgive both others and yourself.

Here's why this is so important: most of the grudges we have stem from things that made us feel bad about ourselves. For example, I kissed a girl in 4th grade who swore she wouldn't tell anyone and then she immediately ran all over the playground shouting, "Johnathan kissed me!" I was humiliated and my standing in the class only went downhill from there. I held onto this for almost twenty years. I felt so embarrassed and betrayed, like no one who claimed to like me ever would but was just waiting for a chance to hurt me.

What I was doing was saying she had the power to determine my self-worth and she had found it lacking. If I had already determined my self-worth and knew it was enough, first, I wouldn't have been pressured into kissing her, but second, if I had kissed her, I'd just own up to it. I'd take the teasing and it would blow over because it wouldn't affect me. I could forgive her, too, both for lying and for trying to humiliate me.

Think of the grudges you have in your life. It could be against a romantic interest who lied to you. It could be against a boss for treating you unfairly, or against a friend for turning against you when you needed them most. It could be against someone for an insult or cruel joke at your expense. It could be against your family for not supporting you enough or paying as much attention to you as you would have liked. All of these things need to be forgiven because none of them determine your actual value. If you hold onto them, you're claiming they still have the power to lower your self-worth, that their opinion of you is more important than God's opinion of you.

Here's what I want you to do: take a notebook and just start writing the names of every last person you can remember from your entire life. If you remember a person, but don't remember the name, write down a description that you'll understand when you go through the list again. It's important to do this first because remembering everyone will help make sure your next list is complete. Then, go through the list carefully and think about every person. If you get even the slightest twinge of not liking that person, regardless of whether you remember exactly what they did to you, write their name on a separate list (I recommend a computer for this one). This is your grudge list.

For all the people on it, write down any and all offenses you can remember, anything that shapes your opinion of this person in a negative light, as openly and honestly as you can. Don't be nice and euphemistic about it; this list is for your eyes only. Say whatever is on your mind. Then write down how it made you feel, detailing exactly why it hurt you. Let out all your feelings here. And then, the final part is forgiving them.

This is tricky, I know. Some people you won't want to forgive, either because they hurt you so deeply or because there is no reason but malice behind it. Most hurts are unintentional or caused by selfishness and stupidity, but some people hurt others just to make themselves feel more powerful and these hurts are hard to forgive. Forgive anyway. And this forgiveness can't be, "Well, I have confidence now, so you don't matter. Neener, neener, neener!" You have to forgive from your heart. God loves you, so what they did doesn't affect your value, but God also loves them and wants them to have the same self-confidence He wants you to have.

This may take just a day or a week. In my case, I've been going through it off and on for months, the product of a very good memory and very low self-esteem. You'll find a couple things happen as you go through it, though. First, it gets easier the more you do it. The message will start to sink in that only God's opinion matters. Letting go of these grudges is going to feel like dropping weights from off your shoulders and you'll notice a difference in how you treat people. For some of them that made the list, you may have to reread your section for them several times for it to soak in, but when you really have forgiven them, your relationship should see improvement.

Second, you'll be able to more easily see where you've gone wrong. Many of our grudges are times we've taken offense for something that was unintentional. We assume the worst about the other person when they were simply thoughtless or they wanted to avoid hurting our feelings so they didn't tell us the truth we needed to hear. For a number of these grudges, you might need to include another section, put just above the forgiveness, on your own failures. In a few of your grudges, you might see that the fault was almost entirely yours or that there was a simple misunderstanding and nothing to forgive at all.

Being able to see your own shortcomings honestly will help you in the next, and probably most difficult part of this. Add another name to your grudge list: your own. You'll probably have more to say about this name than any of the others. I know I did (and I'm still not done yet). Of all the people on this list, though, this name is the most important to forgive. God doesn't hold your sins against you, and He doesn't want you to, either. Confess them all, every one you can think of, including why you did it and how it made you feel. Then forgive yourself, making it a point to write down how your value doesn't come from your mistakes or all the time and talent you may have wasted or all the money you've burned through. It comes from God and God alone.

Last, but not least, add one final name to the list: God. You don't need to forgive God, of course, because He's never done anything wrong to you. You do, however, need to let go of any grudge against Him. For me, I have to write down all the times it seemed He didn't come through for my family and I when I was growing up and for my long-time belief that I might as well have been made of estrogen repellant. The reason is that you can't want to draw close to someone that you have a big grudge against. Having real self-confidence requires knowing God because you are trusting in His opinion of you; you can't trust an opinion of your value from someone you don't know at all. You have to realize that all of the times you think He's failed you are really times when He was looking out for your needs over your wants, like a good father should. You have to know that He's always been there for you, guiding you to where you are now. And you have to remember that many of the bad things in your life have been because you've made choices other than Him. He never has and never will do anything that requires forgiving, but you have to let go your grudge against Him all the same if you want to know Him...and if you want to have the confidence He wants so much for you to have.

The Core Truths, Part 4 of 4 (You know you were expecting it)

Time for the last of the core truths: Confidence is something you have, not something you keep having to prove. This goes back to the driver's license example I used a few posts ago, about how you don't pull out your DL every five minutes to prove who you are, either to yourself or others. If you believe you have real worth, you don't have to prove that worth to yourself or those around you. Neither do you have to say, "Look how confident I am now!" all the time. You can simply be who you are.

To be honest, there's really not much more to say on this. Besides, I'm starving and have had a really bad day so far. Tomorrow, if I can, I do have one more message to share with you, and that's the importance of forgiveness in having self-confidence. That will be a long post, so if I keep this one short, it evens out, right? :)

The Core Truths, Part 3 of 4

Time for the fourth core truth about confidence: Aside from God, whatever you base your sense of self-worth on will fail you at some point and heap pressure on you every time you feel it is threatened.

This is another one I've mentioned several times in the last few weeks, but the reason I want to bring it up is to focus on our failures as humans. It's axiomatic to say that everyone screws up. We know it. For most offenses and most people, we're even willing to give them second chances. We know we screw up ourselves, too, yet for whatever reason, we seek our self worth in methods that require absolute perfection to achieve. It could be a certain figure you'd like to see in the mirror but never seem to manage to achieve, let alone keep. It could be being the best employee in your office, but that's always one failure away from changing. It could be having the coolest toys, but new technology rolls out every month. It could be having the hottest girlfriend or boyfriend, but there's always that risk they'll find someone else or someone else will be hotter than they are. The risk of failure is everywhere...No, let me rephrase...Risk implies the possibility of it not happening. Failure is imminent. It will happen. And it won't just happen once, but time and time and time again. You're too human not to fail.

This, though, is where we need to start being honest with ourselves even though it hurts. I'm not just talking about a failure to accomplish something a few times, but that you'll eventually get. This is not like Michael Jordan not making his high school basketball team, then going out and busting his rear for a year to get better. This is about becoming Michael Jordan, but still not achieving what you really wanted.

Here's what I mean: a few years ago, Jordan, John Stockton, and David Robinson were all inducted into the Hall of Fame together. John Stockton gave the status quo speech, thankful, with some humility (whether feigned or real, who knows?), and simple. David Robinson gave the class act speech, thanking pretty much everybody and deferring a lot of the credit to those who had helped him along the way. Jordan came up and basically tried to humiliate everyone who had said he wasn't good enough along the way. His speech was short on thanks, and even that was marred with self-aggrandizement. In short, he still wasn't satisfied that almost every basketball fan on the planet thinks he's the best player to every play the game; he had to rub it in the face of those who told him he wasn't.

The point is that you could achieve your dreams, the very thing you're striving so hard for right now, and it won't be enough. You'll be happy for a while and feel pretty good about yourself, but then that thing will be threatened somehow, or you'll at least perceive a threat, and then you'll try to hold on to that thing. This is a subpoint of this core truth: We cling to that which gives us our value. We are loathe to let it go for any reason, which is one of the reasons it's so difficult to switch over to having a true Christian confidence. It's also why it's so important that we let it go.

The Core Truths, Part 2 of 4

It's time for the third key truth about confidence, and this is the one that I put first in my book: Your view of God and your view of yourself will determine how you view everything else in life.

If you see God as holding out on you, as a great cosmic killjoy who burdens you with rules, as a weakling, or as cold and distant, you will not be depending on Him for your sense of self-worth. You may view Him as your source for things, but you view these things as giving you your value. I did this for years, pleading with God to give me a girlfriend. My value was in that, not from Him.

And if you can't depend on Him for your value, then you will turn somewhere else. God will be at best a source for the things you're turning to and at worst a hindrance to what you believe is your happiness. Either way, you won't want to get to know Him because a relationship with Him isn't important to you with these viewpoints. It's still all about you.

Which brings us to how you view yourself. If you think you're either better or worse than others, you're going to treat them in ways you shouldn't. For the former, you'll be proud and haughty, very likely unmerciful or at least condescending. For the latter, you'll get into either arrogance or self-condemnation because you're trying to earn affection and acceptance from others. With either path, when someone does something you don't like, there will be judgment, either against them or yourself. Also, whatever path you see as being most likely to give you happiness becomes right in your eyes, regardless of morality or how it affects others. You may care about people, but you care about yourself more.

Essentially, if you see God in any but the right light, He will not be enough for you to get your need for value met, and so you will turn elsewhere. And if you don't see yourself the right way, you can't love others. The affection and acceptance you're seeking you will see as existing in a limited quantity, and always at risk of being taken from you. It becomes this massive competition with no end game, no final victory, nothing but casualties and memories. You always have to get some share of the acceptance pie from people and you feel threatened when someone else becomes more popular or is better at your job or has the coolest toy or is better-looking.

If you try to avoid this by seeing everyone as equal in an evolutionary worldview, then we all have the same value, but that value is 0 because we're nothing more than the product of random chance. If you worship another god, all of them offer works-based salvation, so you don't know if you've ever done enough. Most of us, though, simply worship ourselves, trying to get all the glory and love we can.

The point is that you need to see both yourself and God the right way to have confidence. If you don't, everything becomes works-based and you'll see what you seek to be in limited supply. The truth is that there's more acceptance and love than you can even handle waiting for you for free, if you only know where to look.

The Core Truths, Part 1 of 4

I was going to do one post for each of the five core truths, but I already did one of them back on January 26: Your faith in yourself can never be stronger than your faith in God.

There's another one that I've been hammering pretty hard: that your value isn't based on a relationship, looks, possession, job, ability, or even what you do for others. This will be a short post about that, mostly because I think it needs to be focused on. We have been trained by people who have been trained by people who believe that we need to be good at something to be valuable. We need to be married or have kids. We need to have a good job. A nice house. A good figure. Sexy. Smart. Funny. All of this says that if we aren't at least some of these things, we're not valuable or, at best, that we'd be more valuable with these things.

And it just isn't true.

I'm not going to dwell on this as I did in other posts, but I do need to say it once here: your value comes from God, because He created you, died for you, made you and adopted child, and loves you with a passion you will never fully understand. This love cannot be earned, not even a small part of it, and that's the best thing about it: it's pure and unchanging.

What I want to focus on in this post is actually the importance of not going halfway with realizing this truth. It's one thing to say that your confidence isn't based on things other than God and another to say it comes from God.

If you went to the dentist with a cavity, she should drill out the cavity and then fill the tooth. If she just fills the tooth without drilling, your tooth will rot from the inside. If she just drills and doesn't fill it, the hole will be bigger than before and the rotting will soon start again.

It's like that with where we get our self-worth. If we just say it comes from God without actively getting it off these other things, we will rot from within. It may be slow, but it is inevitable. If you just tell yourself your worth isn't from these other things, but don't believe that it is from God (even if you tell yourself emptily that it is), you are digging a hole that needs to be filled, that will be filled with something.

You will always have a need to feel valuable. God created you that way. But He also intended for that need to be fulfilled in Him, in a pure and eternal way that no other source could hope to match, so you wouldn't thirst for it from anyone else anymore.

Because of this, though, if you don't really believe your value comes from God, telling yourself it comes from nothing else will set you up for failure because you will have that need and it won't be getting met by anything. It won't die, but become stronger and more desperate until it overcomes you, usually leading you into sin. I know this from recent experience. I thought I was good in my self-confidence. Then I tried ignoring God for several weeks as an experiment. My confidence slowly but surely crumbled, and I returned to several sins I had thought I'd kicked.

The point is that the need has to be met in one way or another. In our flawed human way, we'll always keep feeding it and it will never be enough. With God's way, we will never be perfect at this, but we can meet this need how it was meant to be met. This requires getting to know God on a deep and personal level, not just as holy Judge and Creator, not just as Savior, but as our Father.

Writing on a Sunday, Yep, That's How Awesome I Am!

And now we've come to the third and fourth masks. The third one, and the one my title jokingly refers to, is the mask of arrogance. This, along with exuberant extroversion, is probably the mask people fall for the most. After all, such a person has no problem telling you all of their accomplishments and they've led such interesting lives. Look how much they like talking about themselves. Surely, what they have to say on the topic must be interesting, right?

Here's the problem, though: if that arrogant person really is as confident as they claim to be, why do they need you to affirm it or even know about all their accomplishments? Why does he have to brag how badly he's beating you at even a simple card game? Why does she have to make catty, condescending comments about how to land a great guy? Why does this person need everyone to know about their gym routine or what they're doing at work, even when they're not asked?

It's attention that they're seeking, attention that they need.

There's an 80's martial arts movie called Bloodsport, where fighters from around the world compete in matches to crown a champion. The "bad guy", Chong Li, looks to be as strong as a gorilla and he's fairly quick with good martial arts training, the easy pick for favorite to win. Yet after each victory, he jumps around the stage, working up the crowd, feeding off their adulation. He needs it. He gets angry the one time he doesn't get it. And because he needs it, he enslaves himself to them. He depends on them for how he feels about his work, his effort, himself, and, because of this, no amount of praise will ever be enough. They could love him 1,000 times and if he doesn't get praised the 1,001st, he'll be upset.

A friend of mine once argued that confidence and arrogance can co-exist. I strongly disagree with this. If you're confident in who you really are, you don't need to prove yourself to anybody. If you're arrogant, you do. You can know that you are good at something and be arrogant in that, but the confidence in knowing you're good at something is not what I'm talking about. In fact, it's the antithesis of what I'm talking about because it's based on you and what you can do. Take that ability away and what becomes of your self-worth? That, to me, is why it is not real confidence. I know that I'm exceptional with Excel formulas, but that is no longer something that gives me value. If I couldn't do it anymore for whatever reason, my value is still the same.

Spotting a mask of arrogance is easy. Just look at whether the person can shut up about themselves, whether they can simply play a game without bragging, whether they feel they have to dominate a conversation, and how easy it is for them to insult (or how hard it is for them to compliment) someone else.

The last mask is not caring what other people think. I've heard so many people say that, to be confident, you just have to not care what others think of you (I disagree somewhat, but I'll get to that in a minute). Certain people, though, don't care what others think at all. These are the prototypical bad boys that women seem to fall for, especially in their teens and early 20s. They do what they want, when they want to do it, and don't care who doesn't like it. They're seen as people who know what they want and aren't afraid to go for it, but the reality is that they're just bullying their way through life, thinking they're better than everyone else.

A Christ-based confidence sees everyone as equals. There's no pride, nor is there reason for any.

I'm not saying a truly confident person can't go for what they want - they definitely should - but they won't feel the need to achieve it over a pile of bodies left in their wake. They won't have to order everyone around imperiously, berate those who don't listen to them, or try to control everyone. They'll have a faith that what God wants to happen will, regardless of whether people help or not.

As for not caring what other people think about you, I think a confident person should still care about it to a small extent. A friend of mine from Virginia, one of the few people who was bold enough to take me aside and correct (something for which I will always be grateful), once scolded me for being moody at parties and other social gatherings. And I was. I knew others noticed, but I had no idea it was actually bringing them down at all. I didn't know anyone aside from maybe two or three close friends cared at all. She pointed out that I was wrong to try to manipulate people into feeling sorry for me, which is what I was trying to do, even if at least partially unintentionally, and that others were indeed being affected by it. Had I not cared at all what she thought of me, I'd have ignored it and kept doing the same thing. Because I cared, I was able to listen to her correction and start changing.

The difference is that, with confidence, you don't have to be controlled by what others think of you. You can listen, then decide for yourself whether you need to change or not.

To put it another way, I've always believed that a good manager gives raises and promotions when they are deserved, not needing an employee to ask or have a personal situation that requires more money. If a manager is not aware of a specific employee's contribution, but then it is pointed out to him, that manager should decide the proper response to the new information. He shouldn't give more money to someone because they are getting married or for other personal choices, but for good work. If the money is deserved, it should be paid without the need for some personal life choice to call it into the light.

Likewise, you should be the one looking for your own flaws the hardest. That said, sometimes you will be blind to them and need others to point them out to you. When they do, you should decide whether you need to change. If you do, then change it, but don't change it based on whether the person pointing it out to you will be mad if you don't. Change it based on whether it's right to change it on its own merits. If it's not, then leave it alone and deal with whatever consequences. Take into account what others say about you, especially if you hear it more than a couple times, but don't let it control you.

I think it's time for another change of pace. I'm going to go through the five core truths of confidence next. After that, this series may well be over. It's not everything that is in the book, and that's the point. I want people to get the book. It's not because of money or fame, but because the more people buy the book, the more likely it is that complete strangers will buy it and so it will get out and help others. I'm still offering a free copy to anyone who wants it, though I don't know how much longer this will last. If you want it, buy the book, then send a screenshot of the receipt and a paypal email address to jnesscpoa@gmail.com and I will happily refund it, whether you like the book or not.