Every day, I read the chapter in Proverbs that corresponds with the date. If there are only 30 days in the month, I read both chapters 30 and 31 on the last day. It’s a discipline Steven K. Scott learned from Gary Smalley, and the logic is simple: if wisdom is available, why wouldn’t you train yourself to recognize it daily?

Ryan Holiday says in his new book Wisdom Takes Work that wisdom isn’t a trait – it’s a practice.

• Learn.
• Apply.
• Repeat.

Which is exactly what Proverbs trains into you when you approach it as an open-source manual for making better decisions, and not as a religious performance.

How I Read Proverbs: Through the Lens of Metaphysics

Here’s something important: I don’t read Proverbs like a checklist for being “good” or “religious.” I read it through the eyes of metaphysics.

In simple terms, metaphysics asks:

• What’s really going on beneath the surface of the words?
• What is the deeper pattern, principle, or energy this is pointing to?
• How does this speak to consciousness, alignment, and how we create our experience?

So when I look at Proverbs, I’m not just seeing moral instructions. I’m looking for the energetic law underneath: how thoughts, attitudes, and choices shape results. That’s how I unearth rare jewels in a book many people think they already know.

The Verse I Sat With Today

Today’s verse was Proverbs 15:33 from The Passion Translation (Special Edition):

“The source of revelation-knowledge is found as you fall down in surrender before the Lord. Don’t expect to see Shekinah glory until the Lord sees your sincere humility.”

On the surface, it’s easy to hear this as: Be humble. Bow low. Then God might do something beautiful in your life.

But if you pause and look at it metaphysically, something richer emerges.

• “The source of revelation-knowledge” speaks to a deep inner well of wisdom. Not random flashes. Not borrowed insight. A source.
• “Surrender” is the release of ego-control, the loosening of “I know” and “I must manage everything.”
• “Shekinah glory” is the manifest, felt presence of God – the radiance of alignment, the sense that your insides and your life are not at war with each other.
• “Humility” becomes the inner posture that lets all of that actually reach you.

So at a deeper level, the verse is saying:

Revelation doesn’t come to a crowded, defensive mind. It comes to a receptive one. Glory doesn’t land in ego’s performance. It lands where there is enough honesty and spaciousness for truth to live.

That’s humility, metaphysically: not self-erasure, but receptivity.

How We Misunderstand Wisdom

We tend to think of wisdom as a badge: something you earn with age, experience, or titles. Wise people are the ones who’ve “seen things,” built things, survived things. They talk, we listen.

But if wisdom really is, as Ryan Holiday says, work – something you practice – then it’s less about possession and more about posture.

Wisdom is not having all the answers. Wisdom is being willing to be taught.

It’s the continual cycle of:

• learning,
• applying,
• observing,
• adjusting,
• and learning again.

Proverbs, read this way, isn’t a list of rules. It’s a pattern language. It shows what happens when you live with awareness, attention, honesty, discipline – and what happens when you don’t.

In that light, humility isn’t one more virtue on the list. It’s the condition that makes wisdom possible. Without humility, you can read the same chapter every day and never actually change. You’ll collect verses and remain the same kind of person.

The Humility We Inherited

Many of us did not grow up with this kind of humility. We grew up with a different version:

1. Don’t speak too boldly about what you know.
2. Don’t appear too confident.
3. Don’t talk too much about your gifts.
4. Don’t “boast” about your work.
5. Don’t charge too much.
6. Don’t promote yourself.
7. Don’t stand out.

Humility, in that world, meant staying small, soft, quiet, non-threatening. It meant hiding your brilliance and calling it “being modest.” It meant underplaying your value and calling that “being grounded.” It meant pretending you didn’t know what you know so no one accused you of thinking too highly of yourself.

And that version feels especially holy when you put religious language around it. Verses about pride. Warnings about boasting. Stories about God resisting the proud and lifting the humble.

But this is where the distortion creeps in: Humility becomes less about being receptive to wisdom and more about being invisible.

Why Promotion Feels So Hard
(Especially for Service Providers)

If you’re in the world of services – consulting, coaching, facilitation, therapy, design, writing, strategy, teaching – notice this: your work lives or dies on your ability to communicate what you do and how you help.

Yet for many of us, promotion feels like walking into a room and violating some unspoken rule.

• We hesitate to talk clearly about our services.
• We downplay what we’re actually brilliant at.
• We soften our language until it’s vague enough to be “safe.”
• We wait for others to validate us before we dare speak with conviction.

We tell ourselves:

“I don’t want to appear arrogant.”
“I don’t want to sound salesy.”
“I don’t want it to be all about me.”

But under that, if we’re honest, lives a deeper script:

“Good people don’t draw attention to themselves.”
“Spiritual people don’t talk about money or offers too directly.”
“Nice women don’t center their own work.”
“Humility means letting others shine, not stepping forward yourself.”

• And so our services stay underexposed.
• Our solutions stay underexplained.
• Our business stays under-earning – not because we lack value, but because we’ve tangled humility with hiding.

We call it humility, but often, it’s fear, conditioning, and internalized shame about wanting to be seen and paid for what we do well.

Returning to Metaphysical Humility

If we take Proverbs 15:33 seriously through a metaphysical lens, humility has nothing to do with erasing yourself and everything to do with being honest about reality.

Reality includes:

• You have gifts.
• You have experience.
• You have perspective.
• You have solutions.
• You have receipts – evidence, proof, screenshots, messages, dates, details – to back up whatever you are saying.

Pretending that none of that exists is not humility. It’s dishonesty.

Metaphysical humility sounds more like this:

• I don’t know everything, but what I do know can genuinely help.
• My wisdom isn’t self-generated; it’s been formed through grace, failure, learning, and practice.
• I am not the Source, but I am responsible for stewarding what I’ve been given.
• It’s my job to speak clearly about how I can help, so the people who need it can recognize it.

That kind of humility doesn’t silence you. It stabilizes you. It doesn’t shrink your business. It gives it a cleaner signal. It doesn’t pull you out of visibility. It pulls ego out of the center of your visibility.

You stop promoting from insecurity (“Look at me, please validate me”) and you start promoting from stewardship (“Here is the work I am called to do. Here is who it helps. Here is how you can access it.”).

Humility isn’t bad. The meaning we inherited is.

If humility is receptivity to Truth, then surely that Truth includes the reality of your calling, your competence, and your capacity to help. To hide that is not humility; it’s withholding.

And withholding is its own form of pride: I’ll decide, in advance, who deserves what I carry.

Strategic Reflection Prompt

Where have I confused “being humble” with hiding, withholding, or minimizing my work – and what would it look like this week to practice humility as honest, grounded communication about the value and wisdom I actually bring?

About Giselle

I’m Giselle Hudson — writer, possibility thinker, musician, Organization & People Development Sensemaker™, and MCODE Legacy Coach. I help leaders and soul-driven professionals decode the deeper patterns shaping their business, work, identities, and results especially when it look like a performance issue but it’s really misalignment in disguise.

If something in your life or business feels off and you can’t quite name it, message me. Sometimes one conversation is all it takes to see what’s really going on.