Despite a lot of encouragement, despite political freedoms and psychological exhortations, we
suffer, still, most of us, in silence. We don’t say quite say – until it is way
too late – what is wrong, what we want, how we are angry, what we’re ashamed of
and the way we would like things to be. It shouldn’t perhaps really be a surprise how
hard the speaking up continues to feel. For most of the history of humanity, speaking
up was about the most dangerous thing an ordinary human could do. There were mighty superiors
above us, who demanded complete obedience and were strictly uninterested in anything
we might have to say. Speaking up would have got one flogged, excommunicated or killed.
Democracy is, at best, some two hundred and fifty years old and our psychological development
has a habit of lagging far beyond our social realities. Long after a war is over, we respond
with the fears of the hunted and centuries after the last feudal lord moved into an apartment
in town, we behave with some of the meek humility of the cowed serf. In personal life, similar
principles of submission have applied. Throughout history, a good child did not speak up in
any way. If we were sad, we cried softly in our pillow at night. If we mistakenly spilt
some ink, we’d try to hide the evidence. The adult does not have to be an outright
bully to disable a child from speaking. If they are often on edge (preoccupied by matters at work),
or seem depressed and close to breakdown or have elevated yet rigid ideals of who their
children should be, the child might as well have a belt around their mouth. So most of
the years human beings have been on this planet, it’s been a story of festering, of sulking,
of bitterness, of suppressed rage, of bitten lips – and of saying, openly, nothing. Only
very recently, in the last second from an evolutionary perspective, have we awoken to
the possible benefits and sometime necessity of speaking up. We know that it is good in
offices if people lower down the organisation speak up to those towards the top. We know
that it is good, in love, if partners who feel aggrieved and sad about something (however
small and petty it might sound) speak up, so as to be able to feel affection and desire
once more. We know in families that it is good if children manage to tell their parents
they’re not interested in certain sorts of jobs or complain if they are being mistreated.
But the legacies of our unfreedom are everywhere to be seen. We smile a little too readily, we try a little
too hard to appease; we are a little too slow to articulate a hurt. We aren’t, in this
respect, just being nice; we’re scared and ashamed. Our friendliness is born not out of choice,
but out of an inability to dare to cause upset. To learn to speak up requires two rather odd-sounding
things. Firstly, a recognition that, at some level, we are afraid, afraid that if we speak
we will be killed. It sounds odd, and humiliating, but that is how little children feel when
dad has slammed the door or mum has said enough times ‘you’ll be the end of me’, and
it is in the childhood imagination that our picture of what will happen if we speak are
first formed. And secondly, we need to acknowledge, in our mature moments, the adult truth that
we will not after all be killed if we sepak, because enough people have already died on our behalf to
guarantee us the freedom of speech and our right to cross town and start a new life somewhere
else. We need to turn what is already enshrined in law into what finally feels believable to
us psychologically – that we do, bravely, have the right speak up.
At The School of Life we believe that confidence is a skill we can all learn.
Our Confidence Prompt Cards are designed to help us master this essential skill. Click now to learn more.