We talk a lot about mental health, but not enough about confidence. They're two sides of the same coin - and one is being hoarded.
Last night, Sir Ken Olisa, the King's Lord-Lieutenant, addressed The Transformational Leaders' Club on social mobility.
He made a simple point - give young people the tools to speak, network and build presence, and you change the game. These skills are often held back. Not because they’re hard to teach, but because they’re treated as elite privileges.
I’ve coached hundreds of people in communication and media. Speaking well is not a mystery, but it is often reserved for CEOs and senior teams.
We ask for a nation of confidence while hiding the tools that build it.
Why are schools not teaching confidence? It is often said confidence is implicit from capability - but that is a chicken-and-egg argument.
At the launch of the Club at Sir John Soane’s Museum, Dan Brown made the case for change in the way we enable social mobility. As someone who was once homeless himself, Dan has won some brutal battles to build his career and is so passionate to make progress in this area.
Last night he introduced new members to a goal that would drive a better economy by enabling social mobility through better connection. In a world addicted to AI, Teams and transactions, human connection and confidence die in isolation.
Schools aren’t teaching confidence because they still prioritise compliance over communication. The system was built to produce workers, not leaders. It rewards silence, obedience and rote output. Presence, persuasion or personal agency are dimly viewed, when actually they are what drive success.
Many will have you believe confidence comes after capability. Do the work, get good and confidence follows. True - but you have to have the guts to start somewhere. Capability without the confidence to express it goes unnoticed. And confidence without early validation often never develops.
Confidence is a skill, like maths or writing but it gets treated as personality. If a child speaks up, they’re called “outspoken.” If they don’t, they’re “shy.” Both are boxed in.
We’ve built a curriculum that punishes failure, ignores soft skills and hides performance until it’s too late to learn. By the time a student is expected to stand up and speak at a point it really matters, they're so nervous because they’ve never been shown how.
The result is a confidence gap that compounds poor social mobility. Quiet students stay quiet, loud ones are misread and talent gets missed because it never had the chance to show up.
That is unless you've been taught how to speak to a room full of people.