Every man is running an audition. Most of them do not know the name of the judge.
He performs competence at work, steadiness at home, and ease everywhere else, and somewhere underneath it he is waiting for a verdict that never arrives. The rules he is being judged against were never written down and they contradict each other on purpose.
Provide, and expect nobody to notice what providing costs. Be strong, but not in any of the ways that make people uncomfortable. Take a risk and get called reckless. Play it safe and get called weak. Lead and get called domineering. Wait to be told and get called passive.
Nobody sat down and wrote those. They accumulated. And a generation of men learned from the pile that the safest thing a man can be is small, quiet, agreeable, and useful.
So that is what a lot of us became. Employed and unmoored. Providing without being known. Present in a house without leading one.
Here is the part nobody says. A man who lives to satisfy those rules will never satisfy them, because they were never written to be satisfied. They were written to keep him managing everybody else’s comfort instead of answering to God.
The way out is not confidence. Confidence is just a better performance. The way out is a change of judge.
The only opinion you were ever accountable to belongs to God, and that verdict was settled before you did anything to earn it. Live for that one and the rest loses its grip. The contradictions do not disappear and nobody suddenly appreciates you. You just stop auditioning, and a man who has stopped auditioning is unrecognizable to the man he was.
You were not built to be managed. You were built to build.
This is drawn from Whose Approval?.