This verse sits inside the father's lecture on trusting the LORD, Proverbs 3:1–12.
Quick answer
The negative image of verse 5: do not crown your own judgment. Being "wise in your own eyes" is the book's most hopeless condition; the cure is a right orientation toward the LORD.
Read the whole unit
The father's lecture on trusting the LORD is built with unusual symmetry: six pairs of verses, each an instruction followed by its outcome. Keep the teaching, and find long life (vv. 1–2). Bind mercy and truth to yourself, and find favor (vv. 3–4). Trust the LORD, and find straight paths (vv. 5–6). Fear the LORD instead of trusting yourself, and find health (vv. 7–8). Honor the LORD with your possessions, and find full barns (vv. 9–10). And then the pair nobody frames for the wall: do not despise the LORD's discipline, because it is the treatment sons receive from a Father who delights in them (vv. 11–12). That last pair is not an afterthought; it is the lecture's safety rail. Five pairs of blessing language could curdle into a formula, as if trust and generosity were coins for a vending machine. The sixth pair breaks the machine: the life of trust includes correction, and correction is not the system failing you. It is the Father loving you. The whole lecture describes how life tends to go inside a relationship with the LORD; it observes the grain of the world under God's active government. It does not sign contracts, and it never asks the reader to earn what the relationship already holds.
What this verse contributes
This verse names the disease that makes trust impossible. Proverbs reserves its bleakest verdict for the man wise in his own eyes, "there is more hope for a fool than for him" (26:12), because self-assessed wisdom cannot learn, cannot be warned, and cannot trust; its own opinion occupies the seat where the LORD belongs. The fear of the LORD here is not terror but the orientation taught since 1:7, and departing from evil is what that orientation looks like when it stands up and walks.
Related: Proverbs 26:12 · Romans 12:16
New King James Version®, Copyright © 1982, Thomas Nelson. All rights reserved. Full copyright information. Scripture provided by API.Bible.
Go Deeper
If this verse has been used to put weight on you that it was never carrying, ask about it directly.