I spent the majority of my younger life with debilitating confidence problems.

In jr. high especially, I was jealous of the popular kids. They always said the right things, did the right stuff, wore the right clothes. They could do no wrong. I, on the other hand, seemed to be incapable of anything right.

One day, in Coach Isles’ history class, we had a pot luck for some reason, and I brought a huge bowl of mom’s pork-and-beans that I dropped in front of everyone. Coach, not a compassionate man, yelled, handed me a plastic spoon, and told me clean it up. When my spoon broke, I heard one of the cool kids lean over to a friend and whisper, super loud, “Pat…. hey Pat!!! His spoon broke!!!”

Everyone laughed.

This happened all the time, even when I wasn’t screwing something up. I’d go to bed, every night, worrying about how I’d get picked on the next day.

I did what most kids do in this predicament, I decided there must be something wrong with me, and entered early adulthood with big confidence problems.

The first plan in building my self confidence was to lift weights, get tougher (at least appear to be so), and fight back when someone gave me a hard time. It helped, especially with my anxiety, gave me a greater sense of control, and “cooler” friends to be sure, but it caused other problems, namely, that you can’t always throw punches when things get difficult .

My next plan, a few years down the road, was to do something cool with my life. I took the $5,000 grandpa had given me for my 16th birthday and signed up for pilot lessons. I went on to get my instrument rating, my twin license, commercial license, and instructor ratings, finally landing the not-so-glorious job of “flight instructor.”

If that sounds cool to you, it’s because you’ve never done it. Here’s a picture of the airplane I’ve spent over 10,000 hours in, teaching civilians, some of them in their early 70’s, how to fly:

That’s not me in the picture, just needed to give you some scale. And I could never help you understand what it’s like to be in one of these on a windy day.

In early adulthood, I had a ton more self confidence than in my jr. high chapter, but my building this was dependent on two things, my appearance, and my career.

Just about the time I was ready to advance in aviation, I hit the eject button and began a career as a pastor. I didn’t know it at the time, but this was a place where a slim physique, and saying things like “yeah, I’m a pilot,” don’t get you anywhere.

Pastoring was the toughest job I’ve ever had. It exposed my weaknesses like nothing else up to this point, and resurrected the confidence issues that I thought were annihilated.

I worked as a pastor for awhile, then raised a ton of money and started my own church. A few years later, after flying that venture straight into the ground, my wife and I landed at the church we now attend, pastored by a guy who’s confidence levels I found striking.

He’s not a sexy man by any stretch, doesn’t dress very well, or have sweet hair, or any of the other things us Western Christians think we need to have before we can be confident. He’ll probably read this, but won’t be bothered much by my assessment, that’s how much confidence he has.

When I first met him, I wanted what he had.

Building Beyond Self Confidence

A quick disclaimer – he’s a passionately religious man. For my non- religious folks reading this, what follows is not some attempt to warm you to my faith, it’s merely an example of where real, sturdy, hard-to-eradicate confidence comes from. You can have this too, regardless of what you believe or don’t believe about God.

This guy believes that Jesus is real and that everyone needs to have an encounter with Him, and ultimately a relationship where Jesus calls most of the shots, and in those moments where the shots are difficult, accept the hope, peace, and joy that Jesus offers.

He claims that he’s seen Jesus change too many lives, his included, for him to shut up about it. He lives with great hope and confidence that people can change, that we can actually become the people we want to be.

So, when my friend runs into the difficult parts of pastoring, his faith drives him to push them towards a better life – more peace, more hope, more humility, better relationships, etc.

I know tons of other pastors who believe something similar about Jesus, but not to the point that it drives an insane, unshakable level of confidence. Most pastors in the US have set their minds to filling pews and telling their congregants what they want to hear so they’ll stick around.

I was like that as a pastor.

Many, myself included, find my confident friend, at times, annoying. His pushy, know-it-all brand of confidence is difficult to hear at times. I once heard a famous musician call him “an insufferable bastard.” He was joking around, but he wasn’t joking around.

I took a leadership position at my friend’s church and worked closely with him for awhile. I was initially shocked at how direct he was with people, then soon came to realize that pastors who don’t always tell you what you want to hear, the ones who’ll fight you for you, see more life-change in their congregants than the pastors who want to be everyone’s friend.

I followed suit, best I could, and helped to change more lives than I ever had up to this point.

I also learned that building self confidence has almost nothing to do with building confidence in yourself.

My friend’s confidence comes from embracing a vision for his life that extends far beyond himself. He wants to see people change, and believes that it can happen. The only question for him is “what’s my role?”

For example, if he’s sitting with a couple that’s struggling in their marriage, he’s going to ask difficult questions, encourage them where possible, make them angry if needed.

He’s not asking, “Do they like me? Will they leave my church? Am I wearing the right shirt?” Those insecurities get in the way of the bigger goal – “heal the marriage at all costs.”

Those questions are a waste of time for someone living with purpose and vision.

The best question is not, “How do I become more confident?” but, “How do I live with a vision for something bigger than myself?” People who lack confidence lack a good vision – plain and simple.

To be sure, we all live with vision, but it’s typically limited to “us” – get a better job, make more money, get more respect, etc. For some, that’s enough. They’ll fight tooth and nail, grind whatever grist the mill requires, to “arrive.”

For many others, the American dream is not nearly big enough.

For those of us in that boat, we’re going to have to believe in something that’s so compelling that we don’t care what it takes to attain it – something so big that the cost won’t bother us enough to back down.

Regarding these costs, let’s be honest, most of the time what destroys our confidence is the opinions of others. People who struggle here are scared to death, not about failure, but about what others will think when they fail.

Us Americans love the failures of others, while our lives are simultaneously dictated by fear of failure on a personal level.

As a former pastor, I’ve learned that people who enjoy the failures of others, and folk who love to talk about it when our backs are turned, are unhealthy. Their opinions don’t matter. I screwed up a TON in my leadership life, but none of the opinions of unhealthy folk determined my failure or success. Letting them scare me, however, did.

My non-sexy pastor friend taught me that the more my life revolves around a purpose higher than myself, the less other people’s opinions matter and that, when I screw up, as people who live with a higher purpose often do, it’s OK, it’s a sign that I’m moving in the right direction.

But how does one find this higher purpose? If you’re reading this, feeling like your life’s been too much about you, and not about something bigger, what can you do?

For most of us, we’re not going to be visited in the night by three ghosts who’ll drag us around London on Christmas eve in our pajamas showing us how shallow our lives have been up to this point, then scaring the crap out of us to the point that our values are drastically shifted by the time we wake up the next morning.

But a drastic values change is what most of us are in dire need of.

We live for ourselves. People with purpose and vision, on the other hand, have adjusted their values to the point where their money, time, and emotional resources are expended, in significant measure, on behalf of someone else. The benefits they personally reap are just as significant.

They might not take it as far as Mother Theresa did, or even as far as my confident pastor friend. Truth is you don’t have to sell everything and move to Africa, or quit your job and go work at the local soup kitchen.

In any career, any situation, any neighborhood, we’re surrounded by broken things that can only be healed by the input of a person who’s values have been readjusted just enough for them to step in.

Feel like you’re not qualified? Ha! You’d be shocked at the bumbling, clueless, insensitive perpetrations I’ve managed in my attempts to fix broken things. You’d also be as shocked as I am at how many healed things I’ve left in my wake.

Before you ask “What higher purpose should I adopt?” or, “Can I handle this?” or, “What shoes should I wear?” take a seat, get quiet, and think about the broken places in your world, the suffering that they cause – the busted marriages, hurting children, poverty, depression, loneliness, anxiety, anger.

If you’re an American, you’re surrounded by these.

Think about how much you’d love to see a broken life mended. If you do this exercise right, you’ll find that you already value things higher than yourself, you’re just in need of waking up.

But be careful, you’ll be waking up a monster. Vision and purpose have little to no respect for your personal comfort. Living with your deepest values can turn your life completely upside down.

But they’re also no friend to your confidence problems. Let your deepest values off their chain and you’ll begin to worry less, far less, about what people might say when you screw something up, or wear the wrong dress, or get a bad haircut.

Who cares? People with vision don’t have time for this crap.