It's so easy to spot pride. Okay let me say that again. It's so easy to spot pride in other people. There, that's far more accurate. You see pride all the time. You know people who are too proud to ask for help, or ask for advice, even when they desperately need it. You see people clinging to their ways even when they're bad ways, because they are too proud to change. You know of people who are always one-upping others, people who love to go on and on about all their accomplishments. You know people who brag about everything they've acquired, achieved or experienced.
How does someone become that kind of person? How do you become the one others secretly roll their eyes at, the one who makes people cringe, the one no one wants to listen to?
Pride disguises itself in many ways. It is so pervasive that it has to be subtle. If it only appeared in one form we would have stopped it long ago. But pride is different, it creeps in using methods that often go unnoticed. Pride at its heart is an obsession with self. It generates the desire you feel to protect, project, manipulate, advance, pretend , inflate and brag. If we are honest, we may agree that pride emerges out of a place of insecurity.
How do you know if your insecurity - your sense that you don't measure up - is driving your unhealthy focus on yourself? In this post I'll share at least 5 ways insecurity drives pride.
You compare yourself to others: Insecure people are not driven so much by a desire to learn as they are by the desire to know whether they are better or worse than others. There is a world of difference between tracking with others to grow, learn, empathize or celebrate verses tracking with others to see how you stack up. One is fundamentally healthy and the other is destructive. There's a lot of sin involved with comparison.
2. Your self worth is determined by your latest performance. This is a challenge for all of us who are driven by results, which would include me. I'm addicted to progress, if things aren't moving up and on I can become discontent very quickly. In some ways that approach to life is good, and in some ways it can warp your sense of security. On sure sign of insecurity is that your opinion of yourself rises and falls with how you perform or what others say about you. Your identity should be more secure than your latest results, but for many of us it is not.
Watching the Olympics with my family, quickly reminded me that you are only as good as your last race. Some athletes won the prelim very easily but struggled to place in the final, and ultimately struggled to win a medal. If our self worth is determined by our latest performance than we are setting ourselves up for a failure.
3. You Can't Celebrate Someone Else's Success: Insecure people struggle with celebration. They have a hard time celebrating their own progress because they are never sure they have done enough. They equally have difficulty celebrating the accomplishments of others because someone else's success threatens them.
If you're insecure, someone else's victory means your loss. Its a zero-sum game. If someone else does well, you can't help but wonder why you didn't see the same results, or you feel that the odd are stacked against you. Because you feel bad about yourself, you can't feel good about others. Once again insecurity has led you to focus on yourself to the exclusion of others.
4. You squeeze gifted people out of your life: Pride doesn't make room for the gifting of others. You'll find yourself drifting away from highly successful people because you fear comparison. Instead you will drift toward people who are less achieving than you so that you can end up with the best stories and feel superior by comparison.
Ask yourself, How comfortable am I around people I think are better than me at the things I'm good at? That will give you a fair measure of your security. One sign of a humble person is that they have an ability to attract and keep people more gifted and competent than themselves for the sake of the team.
5 You want some say in everything: Proud people end up being controlling people. If insecurity drives you, you'll always want to add your little bit of knowledge, insight, or even an anecdote to everyone's story. It won't feel complete if the other person gets the spotlight.
These signs of insecurity are realities in many of our lives. They keep us worried that we're not enough, or don't have what it takes. They keep us afraid to fail, afraid to be honest and worried about being seen for who we really are. Pride is a great enemy of us all. Let's be different let's battle pride with a posture of humility.
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