I stopped at a Starbucks on a road trip and ended up in a conversation with a guy who had just gotten his first job after a stretch of homelessness. I don’t remember exactly how we got there, something about the line being long and one of us making a comment about something, but twenty minutes later we were deep into the idea of knowing how to talk about yourself. Not performing with confidence, not rehearsing a script, and just being able to say clearly what you bring and why it matters.

He got it immediately. Faster than most professionals I’ve worked with.

He knew what he was good at. He just didn’t have language for it yet, and nobody had ever told him that the language was something he could develop, that it wasn’t a personality trait you either had or didn’t. We talked about what an elevator pitch actually is when you strip away the buzzwords. Not a sales pitch. Just a clear, honest answer to the question every room asks whether it says so out loud or not: who are you and what do you bring when you show up?

By the time we left he had a rough version of his. It wasn’t polished. It didn’t need to be. It just needed to be true.

That same week a college student I’d never met connected with me on LinkedIn and said my posts were the first thing that made work feel like something he could actually handle. Not navigate perfectly, just handle. And someone else, a teacher, suggested I should be teaching executive functioning to middle and high schoolers.

A guy at a Starbucks who just got back on his feet. A college kid scrolling LinkedIn trying to figure out how to start. A high schooler who hasn’t had a first job yet and won’t for years.

The conversation is the same at every level. How do I talk about who I am and what I bring to the table when I show up? How do I know where I fit? How do I walk into a room, any room, a job interview, a team meeting, a networking event I didn’t want to attend, and not feel like I have to make it up as I go?

This isn’t really taught in school, workplaces, or anywhere with any consistency. There are pockets of it. Good mentors, the occasional manager who actually develops people, a career center that goes beyond resume formatting. But as a foundational practice, something that every person gets before they enter the workforce, it’s mostly absent.

And the gap shows up everywhere. In the new grad who can’t convert interviews. In the mid-career professional who gets passed over and doesn’t know why. In the senior leader who built an entire career on competence and suddenly needs to articulate their value in a room where competence is assumed.

The people who figure it out aren’t smarter or more talented. They just got the conversation earlier. Someone asked them the right question at the right time and helped them build an answer that actually held up.

That’s not a complicated thing to give someone. It’s just not something we’ve decided to prioritize yet.