Self-confidence

Women’s tennis star Madison Keys had been around the sport for a decade and a half, a much-admired player with sizable talent, but…never…quite…breaking through on one of tennis’s signature stages. Until she finally won the Australian Open in March of 2025.

Before Australia, Keys reached only one major final, the U.S. Open in 2017. That had been a cruelly brief day, as she fell 6-3, 6-0. As she reached her late 20s, the notion of not living up to expectations gnawed at her.

“It started becoming this internal build up…is it ever going to happen?” Keys recalled. “It was getting to the point where I was fairly unhappy with myself, and not just on a tennis court. It was starting to bleed into my life.”
“I was supposed to be great, but I’m not,” Keys remembered thinking.
Finally, she confronted the isolating pressures of her sport. Self-worth had become tied to results, or the lack thereof.

“It was one of those things where you say it out loud, pause, and you’re like, “Wow, that’s a lot to carry around,” she said.

Keys made a critical choice: She would stop defining herself by wins and losses. She was an elite athlete with plenty to be thankful for. The realization was liberating. “You can finally get to the point of letting some things go,” she said.

In a recent article in The Guardian, Oliver Burkeman describes how to be liberated from people-pleasing:

“Great news! I found the cure for my anxiety!!” the author Sarah Gailey once announced on social media. “All I need is for everyone I know to tell me definitively that they aren’t mad at me, once every 15 seconds, forever.”

I know how she feels. For years, I possessed a remarkable superpower: I could turn almost any work opportunity that came my way into an unpleasant emotional drama, simply by agreeing to do it.

Once I’d accepted a deadline or signed a contract, there was now another person in the world who might be growing impatient that I hadn’t finished yet, or who might end up disappointed in what I produced. And the thought that they might be harboring any negativity towards me felt hugely oppressive. This same overinvestment in other people’s emotions meant I was always saying yes to things I should really have declined, because I flinched internally at the thought of the other person feeling crestfallen.

It bears emphasizing that the people you’re worried might be angry with you, disappointed in you, or bored by you almost never actually are. The liberating truth is that they’ve got their own troubles to worry about…. As the novelist Leila Sales observes, poking fun at this tendency in herself: “It’s weird how when I don’t respond to someone’s email, it’s because I’m busy, but when other people don’t respond to my emails, it’s because they hate me.”

The liberating truth about life as a finite human is that…you’re never going to please everyone, or do everything, or accomplish anything perfectly. So, what would you like to do with your life instead?

Former Oregon Ducks star Greg Bell remembers a pivotal moment that changed his relationship with his daughter Sofia.

Greg had just finished watching Sofia, then eleven, cross the finish line at a track meet. When he went over to congratulate her on her finish, she had a question for him. She asked, “Dad, why are you and everyone yelling at me while I’m running?” Greg laughed. “Sweetie, we’re just trying to help you run faster.” Sofia looked around and tersely replied: “What do you think I’m trying to do?”

Sofia is now a sophomore at the University of Oregon, and a star ball player in her own right. She won a national championship in a Nike invitational tournament with her AAU team, and was named a McDonalds All-American in 2023. And she credits both of her parents for their encouragement, especially her dad.

Sofia said of her dad, “He definitely gave me a lot of guidance and still does. He is pretty consistent with his texts and his little stuff.”

Reflecting on how he changed his own parenting style, Greg said, “(For) most kids, I think, the worst part of sports is the ride home. We didn’t want sports to be a negative for her. She’s already going to be self-critical.”

Greg is convinced that Sofia chose the same path he did, playing the same sport at the same school, because he gave her the space to express her own personality. By allowing her this freedom, he believes she was able to find her own way and make her own decisions. He says parents can help their kids the best when they’re not lurking or overbearing with parental interference. Greg told a reporter:

So much of it is just having a strong relationship with her. What’s the relationship going to look like when the ball stops bouncing? If I’m a jerk to her while we’re in the gym, what’s that going to look like in five years?... I shot all the baskets I’m going to shoot… It’s her legacy. Not mine.

Possible Preaching Angle:

Like a loving parent guiding a teen into adulthood or a coach guiding a star player into a successful athletic campaign, God walks with us every day and gives us what we need to become the people we were created to be.

Picture this: you’re nestled comfortably in your airline seat cruising towards your holiday destination when a flight attendant’s voice breaks through the silence: “Ladies and gentlemen, both pilots are incapacitated. Are there any passengers who could land this plane with assistance from air traffic control?”

If you think you could manage it, you’re not alone. Surveys indicate about 30% of adult Americans think they could safely land a passenger aircraft with air traffic control’s guidance. Among male respondents, the confidence level rose to nearly 50%.

We’ve all heard stories of passengers who saved the day when the pilot became unresponsive. For instance, in 2022, Darren Harrison managed to land a twin-engine aircraft in Florida – after the pilot passed out – with the guidance of an air traffic controller. However, such incidents tend to take place in small, simple aircraft. Flying a much bigger and heavier commercial jet is a completely different game.

Takeoffs and landings are arguably the most difficult tasks pilots perform, and are always performed manually. Only on very few occasions, can a pilot use autopilot to land the aircraft for them. This is the exception, and not the rule.

Landing is complicated, and requires having precise control of the aircraft’s direction and descent rate. To land successfully, a pilot must keep an appropriate speed while simultaneously managing gear and flap configuration, adhering to air traffic regulations, communicating with air traffic control, and completing a number of paper and digital checklists.

Once the aircraft comes close to the runway, they must accurately judge its height, reduce power, and adjust the rate of descent – ensuring they land on the correct area of the runway. On the ground, they will use the brakes and reverse thrust to bring the aircraft to a complete stop before the runway ends. This all happens within just a few minutes.

Both takeoff and landing are far too quick, technical, and concentration-intensive for an untrained person to pull off. So, if you’ve never even learned the basics of flying, your chances of successfully landing a passenger aircraft with air traffic control’s help are close to zero.

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Pride; Self-confidence; Self-exaltation – This illustration speaks to the overconfidence of the human nature. We have been encouraged to overestimate our abilities and underestimate our shortcomings in today’s culture; 2) Criticism; Pastor; Minister – This could also apply to a church setting in which members criticize the performance of the pastor and leadership and often have the thought “I could do their job so much better!”

One day in 1995, a middle-aged man robbed two Pittsburgh banks in broad daylight. He didn’t wear a mask or any sort of disguise. And he smiled at surveillance cameras before walking out of each bank. Later that night, police arrested a surprised McArthur Wheeler. When they showed him the surveillance tapes, Wheeler stared in disbelief. “But I wore the juice,” he mumbled. Apparently, Wheeler thought that rubbing lemon juice on his skin would render him invisible to video cameras. After all, lemon juice is used as invisible ink so, as long as he didn’t come near a heat source, he should have been completely invisible.

Police concluded that Wheeler was not crazy or on drugs – just incredibly mistaken.

The saga caught the eye of the psychologist David Dunning at Cornell University, who enlisted his graduate student, Justin Kruger, to see what was going on. They reasoned that, while almost everyone holds favorable views of their abilities … some people mistakenly assess their abilities as being much higher than they actually are. One study found that 80 percent of drivers rate themselves as above average – a statistical impossibility. This “illusion of confidence” is now called the “Dunning-Kruger effect,” and describes the cognitive bias to inflate self-assessment.

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) Hiddenness; Omniscience of God – The belief that sins can be concealed is as old as the Garden of Eden. Adam and Eve mistakenly thought that they could hide from God. To their shame, they learned that no one can escape the all-seeing eyes of God. 2) Ego; False beliefs; Self-deception; Sowing and Reaping – An over-inflated opinion of oneself generally leads to a sudden reality check (1 Cor. 10:12; Gal. 6:7).

Christian Coleman is the reigning world champion in the men’s 100 meters. From time to time, strangers approach the 26-year-old Atlanta native with a proposition. He said, “People will look at me, like, ‘You’re Christian Coleman. Hey, you want to race?’ And I mean, like, we’re in the middle of the mall. It’s like, obviously not.”

It’s a remarkably common occurrence, top sprinters say. Against all odds, overconfident average citizens size up these singularly skilled and sculpted specimens and think they have a chance to win. The urge appears to be universal, spanning national boundaries and identities.

Karsten Warholm, the 26-year-old world record holder in the 400-meter hurdles, works out at an indoor public facility in Oslo, in his native Norway. Mr. Warholm recalled a training session when a man, not dressed in running clothes, asked him to race.

Mr. Warholm said, “I was like, ‘Sure,’ because I was going to do another run either way. Of course, I smoked him, obviously.” At the finish line, the man insisted he had a bad start. He wanted to race again, Mr. Warholm recalled, chuckling.

Writing in the Atlantic, author and researcher Arthur C. Brooks says, “Money is one of the things Americans worry about most in the world.”

One survey found that even when the US economy is thriving more than half of Americans felt anxious or insecure about money sometimes, often, or all the time. And during the COVID pandemic, another survey found that workers were almost five times more likely to worry about money than their health.

But many of us really don’t need to worry about money. Only 11 percent of Americans live in poverty. And yet, according to a recent survey, more than half of Millennials with a net worth greater than $1 million feared losing their wealth “a great deal” or “somewhat,” as did more than a third of similarly wealthy Baby Boomers.

Brooks concludes, “For millions of people, then, worrying about money is not a reflection of whether their basic needs are being met. In fact, this anxiety reflects deeper concerns that money can’t solve.”

Many middle-school boys have memories of barbershop haircuts. But for one boy, his most memorable cut happened elsewhere. Anthony Moore is a student at Stonybrook Intermediate and Middle School, and like many boys his age, he occasionally struggles with his confidence. This explains why last February he was confronted to remove his hat, a choice that placed him in defiance of the school’s dress code.

Moore caught the attention of Jason Smith, the principal at Stonybrook. Smith said, “I sat across from him and asked, 'What's wrong? Why are you being defiant, why are you refusing to take your hat off? It's a pretty simple request. And he explained that his parents took him to get a haircut and he didn't like the results."

What Moore didn’t know is that his principal, Mr. Smith, moonlights as a barber. "I told him, 'Look, I've been cutting hair since I was your age,' and I showed him pictures of my son's haircuts that I did and some of me cutting hair in college. And I said, 'If I run home and get my clippers and fix your line, will you go back to class? He hesitated but then he said yes."

After getting his parents’ consent, Smith retrieved the clippers and fixed Moore’s haircut. Smith said, “He didn't say straight out, but I feel like he didn't want to be laughed at. The barbershop and haircuts as Black males are very important in the community and looking your best and being sharp--it's just a cultural aspect."

Smith said he followed up with Moore and verified that he was abiding by the rules, learning in the classroom, sans hat. Smith said, “All behavior is communication and when a student is struggling, we need to ask ourselves what happened to this child instead of what's wrong with the child. What need is the child trying to get met and really, the future of urban education rests on that question."

Possible Preaching Angles:

1) When we encounter someone in distress and we have an opportunity to meet that need, we honor God as Creator, both of the person with the need as well as the creator of the talent that could meet that need. 2) When we encounter rebellion, especially in a young person, we must look deeper than the superficial.

Some people know that the musicians, Taylor Swift and Kanye West, had a very public falling out in 2016. What people didn't know until recently was why the incident affected Taylor so much that she hid from the public eye. The Washington Post reports what she said in a Netflix documentary: "When people decided that I was wicked and evil and conniving and not a good person, that was the one I couldn't really bounce back from, because my whole life was centered around it."

She even describes getting into the music business for the very same reason: "We're people who got into this line of work because we wanted people to like us, because we were intrinsically insecure, because we liked the sound of people clapping, because it made us forget how much we feel like we're not good enough."

Possible Preaching Angle:

It might seem that legalism is dead and gone in this "live and let live" world, but experiences like this tell us that legalism is still very much alive. Many, like Taylor, experience a relentless drive to prove themselves “good enough” to those around them.

Imagine that you've decided to go sailing. The problem is that you know next to nothing about sailing. So you to the store and you purchase several books to find out what's involved. You carefully read them and then you talk to a veteran sailor who answers questions for you. The next day, you rent a sailboat. You examine it closely to make certain that everything needed for a successful sailing experience is present and in good working order. Then, you take your boat out onto the lake. Your excitement is at a fever pitch, though you're also afraid. But you follow the instructions you've read and the counsel received from the experience sailor, and you launch your boat into the water. You carefully monitor each step and hoist the sail.

At that precise moment you learn a crucial lesson. You can study sailing. You might even be able to build a sailboat. You can seek from the wisest and most veteran of sailors. You can cast your boat onto the most beautiful of lakes under a bright and inviting sun. You can successfully hoist the sail. But—and this is a big "but"—only God can make the wind blow!

Possible Preaching Angles: Sam Storms adds, "You and I can study the Bible…. We can orchestrate a worship service according to biblical guidelines. We can do everything that lies in the power of a Christian man or woman. But only the Spirit can make the wind blow.

In Yosemite National Park stands a 3,000-foot wall of granite known as El Capitan. It's long been a rock climber's dream, but it's a daring dream. Reaching the top "used to take days to complete with the aid of ropes, safety gear, and a partner," Olga R. Rodriguez reported in TIME. "In the past few decades, speed climbers working in tandem and using ropes have set records in reaching the top of the steep cliff."

On June 3, 2017, Alex Honnold smashed those records, taking about four hours to summit El Capitan—without ropes, safety gear, or a partner.

Honnold, a native of Northern California, is 31 years old but has 20 years of climbing experience—at 11, he started indoor rock climbing. He left the University of California Berkeley in order "to conquer major summits around the world."

He prepared for this El Capitan climb for two years. While the climb is certainly an extraordinary physical challenge—at one point "2,300 feet off the ground … there are very small holds where only a thumb can fit"—Honnold said that the "mental hurdle" was even harder.

"To walk up to the base of the climb without rope and harness, it just feels a little outrageous," he said. "Getting over that side of it was the hardest part."

Potential Preaching Angles: With his incredible feat, Honnold proved to the world that El Capitan can be conquered solo—but just because we can do something on our own doesn't mean that we always should. What we need is a community around us and a reliance on our God. Take these famous words from Proverbs: "Trust in the Lord with all your heart / and lean not on your own understanding … " (Prov. 3:5).

The Walk is the 2015 motion picture, and true story, about high-wire artist Philippe Petit. In 1974 he fulfilled his dream of walking between the World Trade Center towers, but in an early scene from the film he's in a Big Top circus in France tying a rope to a beam. Philippe says, "So [my mentor] Papa Rudy let me travel with his troupe. Of course I never did any performance. But any time the big top was empty, I would practice on the wire."

In the next scene, Philippe is high up just under the tent's ceiling and balancing himself on a wire with a pole. Papa Rudy enters the tent and looks up at Philippe, who was walking carefully but confidently across the thin wire. He hesitates as he is about to reach the platform and then takes a more assertive forward step. But suddenly Philippe and his wire start shaking precariously. He falls to the side, grabbing on to the wire with both hands, barely avoiding falling to his death as the pole plummets to the ground.

As he hangs onto the wire with both hands, the ground a great distance below, he slowly works his way to the platform. Breathing heavily and making his way down the ladder he faces Papa Rudy who tells him, "Most wire walkers, they die when they arrive. They think they have arrived, but they're still on the wire. If you have three steps to do, and you take those steps arrogantly, if you think you are invincible, you're going to die."

Editor's Note: This scene starts at Chapter 5 at 25:29 and runs to 27:02.

Writing in The Harvard Business Review, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a CEO and business professor, had some surprising conclusions about self-confidence and leadership. Thomas wrote:

There is no bigger cliché in business psychology than the idea that high self-confidence is key to career success. It is time to debunk this myth. In fact, low self-confidence is more likely to make you successful. After many years of researching and consulting on talent, I've come to the conclusion that self-confidence is only helpful when it's low. Sure, extremely low confidence is not helpful: it inhibits performance by inducing fear, worry, and stress, which may drive people to give up sooner or later. But just-low-enough confidence can help you in the following three ways:

1. Lower self-confidence makes you pay attention to negative feedback and be self-critical.
2. Lower self-confidence can motivate you to work harder and prepare more.
3. Lower self-confidence reduces the chances of coming across as arrogant or being deluded.

Of course Christians would add a fourth and most important benefit for low-enough self-confidence—it helps us put our ultimate confidence in the Living God. But Christians can agree with this article's conclusion: "In brief, if you are serious about your goals, [low-enough] self-confidence can be your biggest ally to accomplish them. … It is therefore time to debunk the myth: High self-confidence isn't a blessing, and low self-confidence is not a curse—in fact, it is the other way around."

There's nothing wrong with thinking that you're smart. You probably are pretty smart, and we commend your healthy esteem and belief in yourself. But healthy self-esteem has its limits. Those limits were pushed a couple years ago, when dating website OkCupid revealed how thousands of its users had answered one particular question in a survey to measure partner compatibility: Are you a genius?

Amazingly, according to OKCupid's blogger Christian Rudder, two in five people (and nearly half of all men!) said yes to that question. Rudder said, "2 out of 5 think they are one in a thousand." Now, as there's no single scientific definition of "genius," Rudder's "one in a thousand" is kind of arbitrary. But to qualify for most high IQ societies—"genius clubs" like MENSA—you usually need to have an IQ at least in the 98th to 99th percentile. That's about one in a hundred. So there's something seriously wrong when 50 percent of men think they are geniuses.

January 1969, two great quarterbacks faced each other from opposite sidelines in Super Bowl III. Both Johnny Unitas and Joe Namath were raised in the steel towns of western Pennsylvania. But they had grown up a decade apart and lived in different moral cultures.

Unitas grew up in the old culture of modesty and humility. His father died when he was five and his mother took over the family coal delivery business. Unitas weighed 145 pounds while playing quarterback for his high school team, and he took a beating during every game. He went to church before every game, deferred to the authority of his coaches, and lived a football-obsessed life. After college he had a brief tryout with the Pittsburgh Steelers but was cut. Then he got a long-shot call from the Baltimore Colts. He made the team and spent many of his early years with the Colts steadily losing. Unitas was not an overnight sensation in the NFL, but he was steadily ripening, honing his skills, and making his teammates better.

He was a deliberately unglamorous figure with his black high-top sneakers, bowed legs, stooped shoulders, and a crew cut above his rough face. He was loyal to his organization and to his teammates. In the huddle he'd rip into his receivers for screwing up plays and running the wrong routes. Then, after the game, he'd lie to the reporter: "My fault, I overthrew him" was his standard line. Steve Sabol of NFL Films captured Unitas' character: "He was an honest workman doing an honest job." Unitas came to embody a particular way of being a sports hero.

In sharp contrast, Joe Namath was the flamboyant star, with white shoes and flowing hair, brashly guaranteeing victory. Broadway Joe made himself the center of attention, a spectacle off the field as much as on it, with $5,000 fur coats, long sideburns, and playboy manners. He openly bragged about what a great athlete he was, how good-looking he was. "Joe! Joe! You're the most beautiful thing in the world!" he shouted to himself in the bathroom mirror as a reporter looked on.

He created an early version of what we would now call the hook-up culture. He told a reporter, "I don't like to date so much as I just like to kind of, you know, run into something, man." He embodied the autonomy ethos that was beginning to sweep through the country. "I believe in letting a guy live the way he wants to if he doesn't hurt anyone. I feel that everything I do is okay for me and doesn't affect anybody else, including the girls I go out with. Look, man, I live and let live. I like everybody."

Possible Preaching Angles: Namath or Unitas—two great quarterbacks, two very different ways to live your life. They represent two different ways to approach humility, teamwork, service, or the use of our talents.

J.J. Watt was a defensive end and tight end for the NFL's Houston Texans (retiring in 2022). He was one of the best players in the NFL, and of course, often asked for his autograph. But the tides were turned on him when a seven-year-old sent Watt an autographed game jersey. The accompanying letter read, "I am sending you my autographed game jersey so you will know me when I am a famous NFL player." Talk about a kid who knows what he wants to be when he grows up! Watt loved it and tweeted a photo of the letter and jersey with the response "This kid has some guts … I like it."

Possible Preaching Angle:

Sometimes, we need to look to the future with earnest expectation that God's work is so sure that it's as if it's been done already—like the present day autograph of a pro footballer from the future.

In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine Johnny Depp admitted his difficulties in connecting with other people. Depp said:

Covering myself up in makeup, it's easier to look at someone else. It's easier to look at someone else's face than your own. I think for everyone. You wake up in the morning, and you brush your teeth, and you're like, "Ugh, that [idiot] again. You're still here? What do you want?" Hiding: I think it's important. It's important for your—for what's ever left of your sanity, I guess.

The World Puzzle Championship takes place every year at locations around the globe. In 2023 the event was held in Valladolid, Spain and drew contestants from 54 countries. According to an article, these connoisseurs of puzzles "eat, dream, and on rare occasions when they sleep, dream about puzzles full time." They're the true fanatics and geniuses of the puzzle world. But the article also noted that hundreds of millions of people around the world do crossword puzzles, play Sudoku, or participate in puzzles on their computers, phones, or tablets.

Why are puzzles so wildly popular all around the globe? Will Shortz, the crossword editor of The New York Times and NPR, has this to say:

We're faced with problems every day in life, and we almost never get clarity. We jump into the middle of a problem, we carry it through to whatever extent we can to find an answer, and then … we just find the next thing. [But] with a human made puzzle you have the satisfaction of being completely in control: you start the challenge from the beginning, and you move all the way to the end. That's a satisfaction you don't get much in real life. You feel in control, and that's a great feeling.

Possible Preaching Angles: (1) Control; Self-reliance; Self-sufficiency; Pride—This story illustrates our human but prideful tendency to control our own lives rather than surrender to the Lord, asking for his help in the challenges of life. (2) Mystery—God is not a puzzle that we can figure out and control. God will always remain beyond our grasp.

In his book Invisible Men, Dr. Michael E. Addis tells the story about meeting a middle-aged man named Patrick. Although by all accounts Patrick was an easygoing, happily-married family man who ran a successful business, he had just tried to take his own life. After some prodding from Dr. Addis, Patrick finally divulged the events that led to his suicide attempt. His business had steadily slowed until he was unable to make the mortgage payment on their new house. Things went downhill financially from there. Then the economy crashed.

Dr. Addis writes:

[But] it was Patrick's response to these events that really struck me. Rather than letting his wife and close friends know about the struggles he was facing, Patrick kept it all to himself. Over time, the gap between what people thought was going on in his life and what was actually going on grew larger, and Patrick became profoundly depressed. He couldn't face working, but he also couldn't face telling people how bad things had gotten …. Eventually the depression became so overwhelming that he saw no other way out.

"How could I face them?" he asked. "What would they think of me? In their eyes I'd look like a has-been, somebody whose time had come and gone, only because he couldn't handle it."

"But those were extremely difficult experiences you had," I said. "Nobody could have foreseen the financial difficulties."

"I should have been able to. Besides, that's not what I'm talking about. I should have been able to handle it emotionally. Instead, I fell apart and turned into a sniveling little boy. What was I going to say, 'Oh, Mommy, please help me?' I couldn't let people see me like that."

On the one hand, it seemed obvious to me that no man would want to see himself like a little boy asking for Mommy's help. But then if you stopped and thought about it, is asking for help worse than dying? How far will a man go to hide his shame? How many Patricks are there who would rather [suffer alone] than try to break through the gauntlet of silence and invisibility that prevents them from finding the support they so desperately need?

Florence Foster Jenkins, a soprano, loved to sing—especially the great operatic classics. She inherited money when she was in her 50s, which funded her musical career. It wasn't long before her popularity skyrocketed, holding annual recitals at the Ritz-Carlton in New York throughout the 1930s and 40s. But as one writer puts it, "History agrees, with hands held over its ears, that she couldn't sing for sour apples. Jenkins' nickname, behind her back, was 'the Tone-Deaf Diva,' or 'The Terror of the High C's.'" The writer adds that if you ever hear one of her old recordings, all that you'll hear will be "squeaks, squawks, and barks."

But get this: she didn't ever grasp that she was bad! When people laughed and hooted as she sang, she took it to be delirious enthusiasm for great music. She thought they loved her and her music.

In 1944, when she was 76-years-old, she did a benefit concert for the armed forces at Carnegie Hall in New York. Thousands lined the streets to get tickets, and the performance sold out in minutes. The recording of that concert is still the third most requested album from Carnegie Hall recordings, punctuated by a painful rendition of "Ave Maria."

What can we learn from Ms. Jenkins? People will say, "It doesn't matter what you believe, so long as you're sincere." But it does matter. Belief must match reality, or it is laughable, a delusion.