The idol of pride is putting your hope in what you've accomplished, your resume, your credibility, your track record, instead of in God. It doesn't feel like something bad. It feels like confidence. It feels like earned trust. And because it can be concealed behind false humility, it works behind the scenes longer than most. The signature it leaves isn't failure, it's coldness. As I developed real skills and real results, my heart was hardening without my knowing it. I was judging faster, empathizing less, treating people as problems to solve rather than as people to love. That's what pride does: it shifts you from 'how can I serve this person' to 'here's what I can fix,' and the shift is subtle enough that you can go months without noticing. And then comes the fall. In my case, two of them: the early business collapse that stripped my identity, and the Alaska move that stripped my reputation. Ezekiel 36:26: I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. That transformation is not something I produced. It's something God did when everything I was standing on was removed.
Pride doesn't look like an obvious idol because it comes from real things. I got good at telling brand stories, led an e-commerce launch that generated industry attention, helped transform an organization's culture from the inside out over five years. Those are real achievements. And as they accumulated, something shifted. The more comfortable I became in the role, the more confident, the more disconnected I became from people. I was judging faster. I had less patience for people who hadn't figured out what I had figured out. I was entering rooms with my resume rather than my presence. I didn't recognize it as pride because it looked like competence.
The fall did what nothing else could: in the Alaska move, my reputation, my community, my role, my comfort, everything I had built my professional confidence on, disappeared overnight. I was blindsided by how hard it hit me. I thought I'd be fine. I was excited. And then months of emotion followed, walls peeling back, a callousness dissolving, a heart softening in ways success never produced. Ezekiel 36:26 is the anchor: I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you. I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. That's not something I produced. It's something God does when the thing you were trusting gets taken away.
- Pride is not always an obvious sin. It forms quietly from real success: real skills, real results, real achievements. The signal isn't arrogance. It's a growing coldness and a shrinking capacity to love.
- The longer pride builds undetected, the more calloused the heart becomes. The more comfortable and confident I became, the less empathetic and the more judgmental I grew. I didn't see it. The people closest to me might not have seen it. But God did.
- Pride can wear the costume of professionalism. You can say the right things about servant leadership while the heart underneath is getting colder. False humility is still pride.
- God uses the fall to expose what you were standing on. The Alaska move stripped my reputation, my role, my community, everything I had built my confidence on. What was exposed was that I had been standing on those things, not on him.
- Ezekiel 36:26: I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. A heart of flesh is not something you produce. It's something God does. And he often does it through loss, not success.
- Leading with love means asking what does this person need, not what's wrong here and what can I fix. Pride converts people into projects. Love converts projects into people.
- The goal isn't to defeat pride permanently. It's to recognize it faster each time. My prayer is that I become less and less and he becomes more and more.
What is the idol of pride in business and how does it form without you noticing?
Pride forms from real success, and that's exactly what makes it hard to catch. You develop a skill and get good at it. You deliver results. You build a track record. Each of those things is legitimate. But somewhere in the accumulation, you start putting your hope in what you've built rather than in God who gave you the ability to build it. And the warning sign isn't failure. It's a change in how you treat people.
The more comfortable and accomplished I became, the more disconnected I became, the less empathy I carried, the faster I judged. I was entering situations with my experience as the credential rather than my attention as the gift. I wasn't asking what does this person need. I was assessing what's wrong and what I could fix.
Pride is also sneaky because it can wear the mask of professionalism and competence for a long time. You can say the right things about being a servant leader while the heart underneath is getting colder. It shows up in the fruit: less love, less patience, less connection, more judgment.
The more comfortable I became, the more confident I became, the more disconnected I became, the less empathetic I became. My heart became colder and more calloused in the process. And I started judging people quicker and faster.
Amy Dardis, Episode 26What does the fall that follows pride actually look like and why does it happen?
The fall happens because God doesn't let pride build indefinitely. Pride comes before the fall, and it's something I've lived through twice. What the fall does is strip away what the pride was resting on. Not punishment. Exposure. It reveals what you were actually standing on by removing it.
The Alaska move is the cleaner example because I was more aware going into it. Fourteen years in the same town, the same church, the same community. Five years in the same role. I honestly thought the move would be fine. I was excited. I believed God was in it.
And then it was very hard. Months of emotion I didn't expect. The wall I'd built up over years of accumulated competence started to peel back. I found myself feeling more for people, more touched by other people's stories, less inclined to judge. The callousness that had built up quietly started to dissolve.
That's what the fall produces. The humbling season. Ezekiel 36:26: I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you. I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. The transformation from stone to flesh is not something you engineer. It's something God does when the right things get removed.
How do you guard against pride when building genuine expertise in your field?
The first is abiding. The fruit of the spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Those are produced when you're connected to the vine. When my confidence is coming from that connection rather than from my track record, the pride doesn't build the same way.
The second is leading with love rather than with credentials. Not walking into a room asking what's wrong and what I can fix, but asking who's here and what do they actually need from me. Recognizing that the Holy Spirit is the one who changes things, not my expertise.
The third is the credit question. When something goes well, where does the credit land? If it automatically lands on me, my skills, my hard work, my strategy, that's something to examine. If I can honestly look at a result and say God did that, he opened that door, he gave me that idea, the pride idol has less to grab.
The goal isn't to defeat this permanently. It's to recognize it faster each time. My prayer is that I become less and less and he becomes more and more.
Resources mentioned
- Ep 25 — The Idol of Advice — Previous episode: seeking guidance from experts over God
- Ep 27 — The Idol of Ambition — Next in the series: doing it for the wrong reasons
- Free Hiring Resources
Full transcript
In today's episode, we're continuing on in this series on idols in entrepreneurship, idols in business. And this episode specifically, we are diving into the idol of pride, of leaning on our qualifications, our expertise, our credibility, putting our hope in that instead of in God. An idol is an object or a concept that we give a higher priority than God. It's anything we rely on for blessing, help, or guidance instead of God. Anything that consumes our heart, our imagination, our devotion more than God. It's any good thing that we elevate to a position of more power, more prominence, more influence in our life over God. And the question is: where is our hope? Is our hope in God? Or is our hope in our credibility, our experience, our accomplishments, our qualifications?
This series is not me coming from a place of authority. It's me sharing my story, which is not pretty. Hey, this has been real for me, this has been a struggle, this is how it looked, this is how it showed up, these are the consequences I paid. Not because we overcome it all the time. Sometimes these are things that can easily be elevated and re-elevated and taken back down and then put back up. And I think that's more often the path we take.
This series is more just bringing an awareness to it. The more we're aware of it, the more we understand what it looks like, the faster we can get at recognizing it, addressing it, and reshifting our priorities, putting God back at the center because that's where he should be. That's where he deserves to be. And this journey of life is this constant competition for these other things to take a more elevated place than God.
A lot of these idols don't come across as bad. They're not necessarily bad things. I mean, pride, pride's not a good thing, that's not a fruit of the spirit. But where our pride comes from is not always necessarily a bad thing. So where does pride come from? Well, pride came, in this case for me, from doing things well. Pride came from developing, learning, growing, developing my gifts, becoming good at things, having success in achievements. It wasn't always ugly, and it's actually gotten better. I've developed gifts, I've developed my strengths and my abilities. I got really good at telling people's brand stories. I learned a brand new industry. I launched an e-commerce project successfully, and it made ripples within the industry. Other companies came asking for advice and asking how we did it and what we learned along the way. And we got to be an authority in that space. And through this brand clarity process, I got to help completely revamp an organization's reputation and culture and processes internally and externally, so that when I left, it was a completely different place than when I first got there.
These are all things I have contributed to. Things I have done and done well and had success with. But sometimes it's just about loving the people where they're at. Not looking at a person or a business or an organization as a project or a problem. But realizing that I don't know their story, I don't know what they've been through, I don't know where their struggles are, and I don't have to fix it. I am not the one who works through things. That is God, that is the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit changes things, the Holy Spirit moves, God is in charge. And if he gives me ideas or solutions or revelation, it still comes from him. It does not come from me.
And so in this process, the more comfortable I became, the more confident I became, the more disconnected I became, the less empathetic I became. My heart became colder and more calloused in the process. And I started judging people quicker and faster. And unfortunately, pride comes before the fall. And oftentimes it's a fall that follows the pride, a fall that strips us away of those things that we rely on, that credibility, that success, that reputation. And here I was putting a lot of stake in that, putting a lot of emphasis and security in what I had done and what I had accomplished. And it was turning me off from loving people, from showing grace, from forgiving, from just remembering that we all go through hard things and we're all struggling.
And I'm not here to make a judgment or an assessment. My heart should be first and foremost to listen and to love and to show people the hope and the faith that we have in Jesus Christ. And I remember after we moved, because I'd been in the same place, the same comfortable role for five years, the same town, the same church, the same community for 14 years, and I thought pretty highly of myself. Like I just had everything I needed to do what I needed to do, and it was gonna be easy because I've done this and I've done that and I've been in business for 15 years. I have what it takes. I know what to do. I'm gonna do it and it's all gonna work.
And we end up moving and uprooting everything, moving to a whole different state, and my reputation, my security, my comfort, all of these things were stripped away, and I felt like I was upside down. I was really surprised at how hard it was for me. I honestly thought I was gonna be fine. I thought some big move was gonna be like no big deal, that I was gonna just handle it just fine because I was a military kid who grew up moving around. I was like, oh, I've done this before. I'm ready, I'm excited for this new adventure. God's in this, God's got us, and it's all gonna be good.
And while things have worked out for our good, it was not easy. It rocked me so hard, and I reeled from it for months. I was so emotional, so all over the place, and everything I thought I knew, or everything I had put my security in, I realized: when all those things are taken away from me, I'm really lost, I'm really confused, I'm really struggling. Because apparently I wasn't nearly as grounded and rooted in Christ as I thought I was. And then came all the emotions, the anger and bitterness and a lot of emotion bubbling to the surface that started to peel away this wall I had been building up, this callousness I had been building up, and this whole process started to soften my heart again and make me feel a lot more for people and be so much more aware of other people and what they might be going through.
This was not the first time in my life that this had happened. There was another very difficult season that had also stripped away so much pride. I was in a season where I kind of thought I had it all together. I thought I was a pretty well-rounded person, and then through a very difficult season, I realized that I was really a wreck inside, and I was super judgmental. Early adulthood, before I became a parent, thinking I knew everything. Had kids. Whoa, that was a wake-up call. Everything I thought I knew about being a parent was totally challenged. Taught me to have way more empathy for other adults and other parents. And going through that season of building our business, going through being broke and going through depression and anxiety. I used to honestly look at people's weaknesses and just judge them for it and just think that they just weren't strong enough, didn't have enough faith in God, and it was just all on them. And that season really wrecked me and showed me that I just had no idea what I was doing.
And then years go by, and it's like you hit rock bottom, your whole life falls apart, and you're just like, wow, I got nothing. Like who am I? And it's very humbling. And then as you kind of crawl out of that season and things kind of start to put themselves back together, and you kind of get to the other side, the further and further away from that I got, I kind of started to revert back, never to what it was before, but it was easy to kind of be like, oh well, I have this figured out and I have that figured out, and this person doesn't, and I could help them with that. Putting this pride first, what I've done and what someone else hasn't.
And then once again here you have this fall, this completely humbling season where the comfort you had, the security you had, the income you had, the benefits you had that were really padding this pride and this false sense of security that I had this all figured out, and then all that gets stripped away. Through these falls, through these really difficult seasons, God softens our heart. There's a verse in Ezekiel, Ezekiel 36:26: I will give you a new heart and put a new spirit in you. I will remove from you your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. And I don't know how many people read that and are convicted by that, but I read that and that wrecks me. Because I have felt like I have had a heart of stone. I have felt like I am callous and cold and prideful and selfish.
Having a heart of flesh is something that only happens through the power of the Holy Spirit. It is only him at work in me that gives me a heart to love other people, that gives me a heart to care and to not be afraid to show emotion and to be touched by someone's story, to feel their pain when they share it. There were years of my life where I just did not want to feel, I didn't want to cry, I didn't want to feel sad, I didn't want to feel all of these feelings. But in fighting that, in guarding my heart and building up those walls, I hurt relationships and I hurt my ability to connect and to be vulnerable and to have real connection with people.
But it's just God at work through our life. God can strip all these things away. And in the end, I was putting my hope in what I could do. I was putting my hope in what I had done, in my resume, in my credibility, my past experiences. And pride is one of those things where you can kind of get away with it for a long time. We can present false humility and kind of hide it easier from other people, but it's there and it's destroying things in our life. Because it's not as obvious, it works behind the scenes longer. And that's why sometimes it's that fall that breaks us, and that fall is so big and so hard and so ugly because pride was building quietly for so long and was becoming so destructive.
And to break that hold, sometimes it's a really ugly rock bottom to strip that away and for God to remind us who we are, who we are in him, and that everything we have, everything we've done is by the grace of God, through his power at work in us, through the gifts he gives us, through the experiences he provides, through the doors he opens. It's not me. It's not me. And just when I meet people, God talks about in the Bible: the first will be last and the last will be first. And Jesus washing the disciples' feet and coming to serve people and having that heart of not what I can do and what I can fix, but what just serving and loving first and foremost.
God says, love the Lord with all your heart, soul, mind, and strength. And second, love your neighbor as yourself. And that is something that has not come naturally, that has not come easily. It's taken a lot of really hard lessons and really hard seasons to give me that heart of flesh and allowing the Holy Spirit to work in my life and to soften me, and to continually remind me that we only produce fruit in our life when we're connected to the vine, like when we're abiding in him, when we're in his word, when we're seeking him in prayer, when we're allowing him into our heart and inviting him to clean our heart, to purify our heart, to repent, to be active and engaged in that relationship with him. And when we do that, then we're producing the fruit of the spirit: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control. And pride is the opposite of that. Pride is us not abiding in the spirit, but just abiding in ourselves, trusting in ourselves because of what we've done, because of what we think we've accomplished, because of the track record, because of the resume.
That's not leading with love. That's not leading with a sense of just serving and having a heart for people. And so that's something I hate the really hard seasons. I really do. And there's two very prominent seasons in my life that have really just fundamentally shifted my faith and my walk with God, but also me. And I wish that they hadn't have had to be so difficult or so hard, but pride is just a sneaky, sneaky thing that it can fester and build oftentimes when we don't even realize that it's building or that it's happening. I honestly, this last difficult season, I didn't think I was being prideful. I didn't recognize it, I wasn't aware of it. And now I can look back and be like, yep, I was being prideful.
And hopefully, as I continue to grow in God and continue to just seek him out and be molded and refined, I hope that's something that I become less and less, and he becomes more and more. And it's laying that down. And that's a hard thing to do, especially as an entrepreneur and a leader, because that's not what the world promotes. In business, we want to lead with our strengths, we want to lead with our capabilities, we want to lead with our case studies and our reviews and our testimonials. But we have to be aware of what that's doing deep down in our heart. And we have to guard our heart, guard our mind, and keep our eyes on Jesus and stay connected in the vine. As always, you can learn more at clearauthenticbrands.com. Thanks for joining. See you next time.