For Your Own Goodness' Sake?
Humility, from above and below the line.
I was taught to want to die for something.
Not literally. To be fair, nobody handed 6yr old me a plan for saintly martyrdom, but somewhere in the architecture, “there is no greater love than to lay down one's life for others” got wired directly into my definition of a good life. Dying to yourself wasn’t a metaphor we used carefully, it was a tentpole of the whole curriculum.
My grandfather gave so much of his meager wealth away to the ‘less fortunate’ and his congregation, that while I never confirmed it, I imagine his humility came at a great unknown cost to his family’s ability to better themselves. Why live in more comfort when the goal of this life is to suffer for Christ?
My father once spent thousands of dollars buying new hymnals for our church. When the pastor asked where he wanted his name printed on each… he vehemently objected to any mention of his gift, written or otherwise. Anonymity was a necessary result of his humility.
I, in turn, spent years championing being the one behind the scenes, the skeleton supporting others. I even named my long-running consulting company Hailyard - the rope or wire that holds up a sailboat’s sail from inside the mast. Critically important, but never seen. And don’t you DARE call me out for my helpfulness in front of other people… you might stoke up that sin of pride.
Here’s what nobody tells you about that generational curriculum: it doesn’t teach you what I’d now call true humility. It teaches you a very specific, very effective way to disappear.
And the tool I eventually found for telling the two apart didn’t come from theology at all. It came from a life changing book I found along the way.
The Four Zones
Gay Hendricks, in The Big Leap, lays out four zones we all operate in:
Incompetence. Things you’re bad at. Nobody expects much from you here, including you. One of my zones of incompetence is pottery.
Competence. Things you can do fine, and so can plenty of other people. This is most of the labor market. I’m quite competent at fixing a broken toilet. Done it many times, but it’s not really… me.
Excellence. Things you’re genuinely good at. You get praised for this. You get paid for this. People come to rely on you specifically. This is where careers are built and where most people, Hendricks argues, quietly stop. I’m really excellent at data analytics. My nickname in the startup world was KPI Keith. Need a dashboard that shows you all the big important numbers at a glance? Come find me. (Same for financial modeling, by the way. Made plenty of money making really fun and informative spreadsheets… doesn’t that sound exciting?!).
Genius. The narrow, specific thing that’s… yours. The work only you do in exactly that way. The thing that makes time disappear, that doesn’t feel like effort even when it’s hard, that other people can’t quite replicate even when they copy the method. This is a core piece of that Japanese concept of Ikigai - the overlapping zone of what you’re good at, what you love, what the world needs, and what you can get paid for. One of my zones of genius? Group facilitation.
Hendricks’ whole thesis is that almost nobody lives in that fourth zone 100% of the time, and it’s not for lack of talent. It’s because Excellence is safe and Genius is exposed.
Excellence is provable, fundable, promotable. You can point to it, and everyone nods.
Genius requires you to say, out loud, this is a specific thing that I do better than almost anyone, and I know it. That sentence has a shape.
In my historical community, that was the shape of a sentence you get punished for.
One Word, Two Contexts.
Here’s the thing I got wrong for a long time: I thought humility and martyrdom were two different words describing the same thing. Setting yourself aside for the benefit of others.
Martyrdom is a topic we’ll come back to, but let’s focus on humility.
Be humble. Live those Christian virtues without public recognition.
Here’s the thing though: humility below the line and humility above the line will use the exact same sentences. It’s not about me. I don’t need credit. Let someone else go first.
Said by two different people (or by the same person on two different days) and meaning almost opposite things. We’ll get into context at a later date, but this is a great example. The words can be the same, but the meaning is drastically different.
Below the line, humility is a transaction wearing a monk’s robe. It says: I will erase myself. And in exchange, I will be granted something.
Meaning. Moral high ground. A story where I’m the one who suffered “correctly.”
This is where martyrdom lives: not as some separate darker cousin of humility, but as humility’s most committed below the line form. And below the line humility has a zone all to itself: Excellence.
You may be very good at something. You may even be praised for it. But whatever you do, never call it Genius. Because Genius requires ownership, and ownership is the one thing the framework of faith struggles to claim. Your humility, even the lessening of yourself, comes from God - not from your broken sinfulness.
Above the line, humility is just an accurate attribute. Same words, similar posture, but nothing is being extracted in exchange, and nothing is being capped.
It’s not about me is simply… true. It’s not a tool used for increasing your faithfulness or demonstrating your righteousness.
And crucially, it doesn’t require you to undersell what’s actually yours.
Above the line humility can say “I was wrong about that” and “this is my Genius“ in the same breath, because both are just accurate reports. Facts. Neither is a bid for anything, let alone salvation.
The framework I grew up in taught me the first kind of humility, but told me it was the second kind. For decades I couldn’t tell them apart, because from the outside they’re identical. You can’t spot the difference by watching someone’s behavior or listening to their sermons. You can only find it by asking about motivation: the WHY. What is this humility trying to achieve, if anything?
Excellence is an Upper Limit
Guess which zone that unconscious, below the line humility trains you to live in?
If the whole architecture of your worth runs on staying small, on not being the one who thinks too highly of himself, then Excellence is exactly where you’re supposed to stop.
You can be very good at something in that zone and still be functioning entirely below the line. Competent, praised, useful, and quietly making sure nobody mistakes you for someone who thinks he’s got a gift… or is using his God-given spiritual gift for anything other than subservient service.
Claiming Genius, out loud, on purpose, can feel like the one sin the whole system was built to prevent.
Who do you think you are, you boastful boy?! Shove that back down, now.
I lived an awful lot of my life in Excellence. Hell, I started this whole thing with the statement of: “I was very, very good at being Christian.” I was good at the job. Good at the role. Reliable, over-functioning, competent in six directions at once, and every ounce of it still ran through the old architecture.
Staying in Excellence let me keep being useful and keep being humble, because Genius, in that framework, was the thing you weren’t allowed to claim without it curdling into pride.
Hendricks has a name for the subtle mechanism that enforces this: the Upper Limit Problem. His observation is that people will unconsciously sabotage their own success the moment it exceeds what their nervous system has decided they’re allowed to have. A fight with a partner right after a big win, a missed deadline right after a promotion, a sudden illness right after things finally start working... He frames it as a thermostat.
Go too far above your internal setting, and something in you reaches over and turns the heat back down.
I didn’t need a thermostat metaphor to understand this. I had two decades of theological training in exactly this function. My upper limit wasn’t a vague nervous-system quirk: it had a name, and a Bible verse, a whole community reinforcing it, and even (for a time) one of my favorite songs:
Pride goeth before a fall. Every time something in my life started looking like Genius instead of Excellence, some old alarm went off: this is the part where you’re supposed to get small again.
Below-the-line humility isn’t just a distortion of sacrifice. It’s an Upper Limit Problem with theology built in.
What Martyrdom Is Actually Protecting
Notice something? Every one of those below the line humility thoughts is still “to me.” Something is being done to the person wearing that virtue.
I don’t need anything, I’m fine. Said by someone who is very much not fine, and often furious that no one noticed. Villain mode.
I’ll just do it myself! The sentence that births a hundred resentments before breakfast. Hero mode.
This is my cross to bear. Used to justify staying somewhere that is actively harming you, because leaving would mean you weren’t chosen for the suffering. Gotta suffer for that salvation, right? Classic victim mode.
I am still the object of the sentence, not the author of it. The posture is smallness: the engine underneath is the exact same victim architecture built into the framework of faith.
Martyrdom? That’s just what you get when this version of humility is run at full volume, publicly, for an audience. And here’s the part I didn’t see for years: martyrdom is also a very effective way to never have to find out what your Genius actually is.
If your whole identity is organized around what’s being done to you, you never have to answer the much scarier question of what you’d build if nothing were.
I didn’t leave that pattern behind when I left the church. I just found new altars. New audiences to perform the smallness for. Leaders and teams are full of below the line humility dressed up as work ethic. Founder mode. Burnout worn like a merit badge. “I haven’t taken a vacation in three years!” said with pride instead of grief. Same architecture, same Upper Limit, different building.
Above the Line: Same Word, Different Context
Here’s the uncomfortable part of conscious reconstruction: once you take the transaction out of humility, there’s less of a story to tell about yourself. That’s the whole point, and it’s also why it’s really, really hard.
Above the line humility doesn’t announce itself. It doesn’t need a witness. It looks less like lay down your life and more like I can hold being wrong without it meaning I’m worthless. I can give something up because I chose to, not because giving things up is who I am. Or…
I’m really, really, really, (extraordinarily) good at this thing… and I know it. And that’s ok. It’s better than ok… it’s me. There is Genius in me. (and you too, btw)
The same instrument that can honestly say I was wrong about that can just as honestly say this specific thing, I do better than almost anyone, and hiding it doesn’t serve anyone.
Below the line, both of those sentences get distorted: the first into self-flagellation, the second into forbidden territory.
Above the line, they’re just two facts, held with the same open hand.
I didn’t find my way to ‘Coach Keith’ by getting more humble in the old sense. I found it by finally letting Competence and Excellence stop being a hiding place: by letting the thermostat go up to Genius and sitting in the room while it did.
(and trust me, it was freakin’ uncomfortable. it still is. again… living those questions…)
Where am I? (the question returns…)
When I catch myself reaching for the quiet self-erasure, the martyr’s little noose, I ask one question:
Am I doing this because I chose it?
…or because of some old chorus of ‘my life’s not a story about me.’
That question cuts both ways now: it applies to the sacrifice I’m about to make, and it applies to the gift I’m about to hide. If it’s got that twinge of shame or meek compliance, I’m not being humble - I’m just running the old path again, resetting the thermostat back down to where I learned it was supposed to sit.
Above the line humility has room in it for me to matter. That was the part I could never get the framework to admit: that the same word could hold both a context of erasure and of accuracy, and that claiming Genius honestly is not the opposite of humility, it’s humility finishing the job.
You can be small in the right ways: wrong sometimes, not the center of the universe, genuinely in service of something bigger than yourself, without disappearing.
In fact, you have to still be there, still authoring, still acting from presence and consciousness… or it isn’t humility at all. It’s just a more sanctified way of vanishing, at a very comfortable, very praised, very safe altitude.
I’m not interested in vanishing anymore.
I spent enough years being excellent at it.
Where did you learn your version of this? Was there a moment you realized the sacrifice you were so proud of was actually just a very effective way of staying in Excellence instead of claiming your Genius? I’d love to hear it. ❤️
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