A teaching post for women who lead well — and need to know where their gifts can lead them off course
“Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.”
— Proverbs 16:18 (NIV)
Every strength has a shadow side.
This is one of the most important things I’ve learned about leadership, about calling, and about what it means to follow Jesus with everything you have — including the parts you do well.
We talk a lot about recognizing and developing our gifts. We spend significant energy identifying what we carry, where we’re most effective, what God has uniquely placed in us. And that work is necessary and good.
But there is a conversation we have less often — about how our greatest strengths, operating without guardrails, can quietly lead us somewhere we never intended to go.
Martha’s story is the best illustration I know. Her gift was real. Her drive, her organizational capacity, her instinct to create a welcoming environment — these were genuine expressions of who God made her to be. No one invited Jesus to their home more readily. No one made the space for community more faithfully.
And those same strengths — her drive, her capacity, her sense of responsibility — were the exact qualities that led her into anxiety, comparison, and eventually a frustrated confrontation with the Lord she was trying to honor.
She didn’t fall because she was weak. She stumbled because she was strong, and her strength ran ahead of her surrender.
What a Shadow Side Actually Is
Let me define this carefully, because the goal is not to pathologize our gifts or spend our energy in suspicion of our own strengths.
A shadow side is not a character flaw. It’s a strength operating outside its right context — without the accountability of relationship, the grounding of His presence, or the wisdom that comes from regular surrender to someone other than yourself.
Every significant gift has one. Here are some patterns worth recognizing:
The leader — whose strength is vision, decisiveness, and momentum — whose shadow side is control. When leadership isn’t accountable, it can become domination: the conviction that things must be done a certain way, that others who don’t share the vision aren’t pulling their weight, that the fastest way to get it right is to do it yourself.
The servant — whose strength is generous, consistent, self-giving care — whose shadow side is self-neglect and eventually resentment. When giving isn’t bounded by wisdom, the servant depletes herself and wonders why the people she’s served don’t appreciate what she’s sacrificed.
The teacher — whose strength is clarity, depth, and the capacity to communicate truth in ways that land — whose shadow side is rigidity. When teaching isn’t kept humble, the teacher can become inflexible — unable to learn, unwilling to be corrected, gradually more certain of their own interpretations than is warranted.
The encourager — whose strength is the gift of seeing what is true and good in others and naming it faithfully — whose shadow side is flattery. When encouragement is not anchored in truth, it becomes what people want to hear rather than what they need to hear.
The compassionate — whose strength is meeting people in their pain with genuine empathy — whose shadow side is enabling. When mercy is not paired with truth, it can protect people from the very growth that their difficulty was designed to produce.
None of these are signs of bad character. They are signs of good character operating without the guardrails of accountability and surrender.
The Nine-Month Lesson
I learned this personally during one of the hardest seasons of my life.
For nine months, I watched my mother decline. Strokes. A broken hip. Each day harder than the one before. My drive and decisiveness served our family well in that season — I could make decisions, manage logistics, hold the pieces together when everything felt like it was falling apart.
And then one night, standing in her room after putting her to sleep, I crossed a line.
I looked up and did what Martha did. I commanded God. Don’t You care? Take her home.
It wasn’t a prayer. It was an ultimatum. My strength — my capacity to see what needed to happen and move toward it — had run ahead of my surrender. I wasn’t bringing my grief to God. I was bringing my agenda to God and expecting compliance.
He was gracious with my frustration. He is always gracious with honest pain. But in the space between that prayer and what came next — my mother went home on my father’s birthday, a detail only God could have orchestrated — He showed me the difference between bringing my heart to Him and attempting to manage Him.
My strength had become my stumbling block. Not because the strength was bad. Because it wasn’t surrendered.
The Moment Strength Becomes a Liability
Proverbs 16:18 doesn’t say pride comes from weakness. It often comes from strength — from a pattern of effectiveness, from the confidence of having done something well before, from the track record of a leader who has learned to trust her own judgment.
It worked before. I know how to handle this. I’ll figure it out.
There is a version of that confidence that is genuinely useful. Competence, earned through experience, is a gift. Knowing your strengths and operating from them is stewardship.
But there is a version of it that is pride — where the confidence in your gifts quietly displaces the dependence on God that was supposed to be underneath them all along. Where the strength that was originally surrendered to Him has gradually been reclaimed as your own. Where your leadership has stopped asking, Lord, what do You want here? and started telling Him.
The Proverbs aren’t describing a dramatic fall. They’re describing a drift — a gradual tipping where the strength that was once surrendered becomes self-reliant, and self-reliance unchecked becomes pride, and pride sets you up for the kind of fall that surprises everyone, including you.
The Guardrails That Keep Strength Accountable
This is why guardrails matter — not as a form of self-distrust, but as a form of wisdom. Here are the ones I’ve found most essential:
Accountability with someone who will tell you the truth. Not someone who admires your gifts and validates your decisions — someone who loves you enough to name it when your strength is running ahead of your surrender. This relationship doesn’t exist automatically. It has to be sought and protected.
Regular return to His feet. Not as a spiritual practice to feel better about yourself, but as a genuine act of reorientation. The daily, deliberate choice to sit at Jesus’ feet before going out to serve with your hands is not just about receiving from Him — it’s about being reminded, again and again, who is actually in charge. That your gifts are gifts. That your calling is His, not yours. That you are the instrument, not the source.
The willingness to be corrected. Strong people — leaders, drivers, high-capacity women — often struggle more than they admit with being wrong. Not because they’re arrogant, but because their competence is real, and being wrong feels like a crack in the competence they’ve built their effectiveness on. The women who sustain their callings longest are almost always the ones who have learned to receive correction with grace — from God, from trusted people, from the outcomes that don’t go as planned.
Seasons of intentional stillness. The stronger you are — the more naturally you move toward action, toward decisiveness, toward getting things done — the more intentionally you need to build in the posture of stopping. Not because activity is bad, but because strength that is never still is strength that is never truly submitted. Stillness is where surrender happens. It is where you return your gifts to the One who gave them, and invite Him to direct what comes next.
The Gift of the Shadow Side
Here’s the reframe I want to leave you with: knowing your shadow side is not a reason for discouragement. It is a gift.
The woman who knows that her leadership can tip into control is the one who builds in accountability before she needs it. The woman who knows that her giving can tip into self-neglect is the one who protects her replenishment before the depletion arrives. The woman who knows that her clarity can tip into rigidity is the one who stays learner enough, humble enough, to keep being shaped.
Self-awareness rooted in the reality of your design — both the strengths and the shadow sides — is one of the most important forms of wisdom a woman in calling can develop.
It doesn’t diminish your gifts. It protects them. It keeps them accountable to the Source. It ensures that what you carry is always held in His hands, not just yours.
And that is where gifts do their best, most durable, most Kingdom-worthy work.
For Reflection
- What would you identify as your top one or two strengths? What is the shadow side of each — the version of that strength that can drift out of alignment?
- Looking at your current season, where might one of your strengths be operating ahead of your surrender?
- What guardrail — accountability, regular stillness, a relationship where truth is spoken — do you most need right now to keep your gifts accountable?
This teaching is part of the At His Feet, In His Service series — for women who want to steward their calling with both confidence and humility. Learn more at https://awakewomensministry.com.