Over the years, I’ve watched the same story unfold in boardrooms, meetings, classrooms, and everyday conversations. Two people can walk into the same room with the same skills and experience, yet one commands attention while the other fades into the background.
It’s never about talent alone.
It’s always about confidence.
Confidence, I’ve learned, follows a clear pattern. I call it The 4 Ps of Confidence: Place, Power, Personality, and Presence.
In this newsletter, I want to focus on Place.
Here’s a fact we often overlook:
Put a capable person in the wrong place long enough, and they will be made to feel incapable.
There’s a reason the proverb says, “Don’t cast your pearls before swine.” Not because the pearls lack value, but because the environment can’t recognise them.
I know this firsthand. For years, I was underappreciated because of my dyslexia. Some people went as far as telling me I had Down syndrome, not because it was true, but because they didn’t understand how my mind worked, and they couldn’t see the strengths I brought.
That wasn’t a confidence problem. That was a place problem.
I am not good at manual work or roles that rely heavily on traditional academic processing. But I am pretty good at structure, systems, organisation, and seeing the bigger picture. When I stopped trying to fit into environments that dismissed me and started working where my strengths mattered, I became a publisher and built success by doing what I do best. The environment doesn’t create talent. It either reveals it or crushes it.
Know your strengths. Know your limits. And stop offering pearls to places that can’t see their worth.
Here’s another example.
Over the past three months, I have been visiting several Toastmasters clubs, looking for the right one to join. At one club, something unexpected happened.
The culture felt off to me. People regularly used risqué jokes, occasional swear words, and presented themselves in a way that felt scruffy and careless. When it was my turn to introduce myself at the end of the meeting, I said something I would normally never say—I told a vulgar joke. Almost immediately, I felt ashamed.
When I got home, I reflected on why I had done it and why it felt so wrong. The answer was simple and uncomfortable: I was trying to fit into the environment.
That moment made something quite clear to me. If an environment pushes you to act against your values, your standards, or your true personality, it doesn’t elevate you; it pulls you down.
So I made a decision not to return. Not because the people were “wrong,” but because the environment was wrong for me.
Confidence isn’t just about speaking up. It’s also about knowing when to walk away. And choosing environments that bring out your best.