Why don’t businesses want to talk about their success?

Sometimes they do, of course, and the hundreds of emails I get each week as The Northern Echo’s Business and Commercial Editor are proof of that. But I think that still only touches the edges of what this region is doing.

The region’s megaphone-in-chief, Ben Houchen, is showing how it can be done, completely unafraid of telling everyone everywhere that this is the best place in the UK for investment potential.

He’s right, but the confidence is sometimes seen as over-confidence by some people and they are more likely to say ‘Alright Ben, dial it down a bit....’ than decide to turn it up to 11 themselves. But why?

Maybe enough people out there who went through the heartbreak and mental furnace of the steel collapse still fear the worst even as the balance of good news and bad news is shifting so dramatically. To some we are still a region that needs handouts and aid, rather than one that is getting hard-earned support for an intense and carefully-plotted timetable of growth and partnerships.

They can see the bridge stretching across the North-South divide, they can see how securely it is anchored and how well it is built. But it is a still a long drop and it takes a lot of confidence - even bravado - to trust it enough to take the first step.

Another challenge will be that many of the plans coming our way have what will be considered to be long lead times. Their sheer scale and ambition means they will take time to build, test and then fill with eager highly-skilled workers.

But we have to hold our nerve and understand the process, then find our pride again and shout about what we are doing to show how far we have come and how much further we are determined to go to Level Up.

Companies from across the world understand that process and have enough faith to invest hundreds of millions of pounds into our futures and theirs.

Hopefully we can match that confidence and have the foresight to invest in ourselves.