This Conference hosted by Julie Skolnick is an online event with recordings of presentations by 16+ experts on being a gifted and twice exceptional adult.
Learn more in article "How To Thrive More as a Gifted Adult - the Let’s Talk 2e Adult Conference" https://highability.org/7639/
"The experience of the gifted adult is the experience of an unusual consciousness, an extraordinary mind whose perceptions and judgments may be different enough to require an extraordinary courage." Stephanie Tolan
Many creative, sensitive, highly intelligent people may feel like misfits.
Therapist Sharon M. Barnes notes that "Many creative, sensitive, intelligent and/or gifted youth and adults feel like misfits, or as many have expressed, like aliens from a different planet."
See link in article to her Social-Emotional ACES Home Video Program to “help you become skilled experts in the Social-Emotional arena.”
“The cumulative effect is that many creative, sensitive, intelligent and/or gifted youth and adults feel like misfits, or as many have expressed, like aliens from a different planet."
This program helps people become "skilled experts in the Social-Emotional arena. You’ll learn to ride the intense waves of emotion in your life, instead of being pulled under by them."
Being highly sensitive is a common experience for many, if not most, gifted people. It is related to intensity and excitabilities such as emotional, intellectual and imaginational and sensory.
Mary-Elaine Jacobsen comments in an article of hers about the high sensitivity aspect of giftedness.
Emotional health for creative, gifted, highly sensitive people
Creative, sensitive, gifted kids & adults can "ride their waves of emotion instead of being flooded by them." The Social-Emotional ACES Home Video Program http://thecreativemind.net/ACES
Author Mary-Elaine Jacobsen writes about the experience of being exceptional:
"To feel like an outsider, to constantly pressure yourself to hold back your gifts in order to fit in or avoid disapproval, to erroneously believe that you are overly sensitive, compulsively perfectionistic, and blindly driven, to live without knowing the basic truths about the core of your being – too often this is the life of Everyday Geniuses who have been kept in the dark about who they are and misinformed about their differences.
One of my related articles: "Celebrating giftedness: You may be gifted – get over it" - We may not have realized all or even many of the promises of our identity as a gifted kid, and through circumstance or suppression left talents unmanifested or unspoken. But that doesn’t mean we have lost that aspect of who we are. http://highability.org/67/
We all like to think we are the greatest person this earth has ever seen. This article from the Creativitypost makes the point that that can never be true, and what is means for the tomorrow of our youth if the common person believes they are the gifted kid our mothers tells us we are.
By Sharon Lind. Key areas for gifted adults include acknowledging gifts; identity development; permission to be growing; overexcitabilities; coping skills.
By Lisa Erickson, MS, LMHC : The caller says they went to my website and started to cry. I have heard this reaction before. It isn’t because they read the page on addictions or the one on depression. There is only one page that evokes this response.
"When we equate giftedness with achievement in school, or with the potential for noteworthy achievement in adult life, we create an inequitable criterion for children of color, children who are economically disadvantaged, and females. Throughout history, those who attain eminence have been predominantly white, middle or upper class males...
"By way of contrast, giftedness is color-blind, is found in equal proportions in males and females... and is distributed across all socio-economic levels... While the percentage of gifted students among the upper classes may be higher, the vast majority of gifted children come from the lower classes... Throughout the world, there are more poor gifted children than rich ones."
Douglas Eby's insight:
"The vast majority of gifted adults are never identified. Even those who were tested as children and placed in gifted programs often believe that their giftedness disappeared by the time they reached adulthood.
"It does not seem to matter how much success a person achieves—hardly anyone is comfortable saying, “I’m gifted.” That is why this book, Enjoying the Gift of Being Uncommon, is such a major breakthrough." - Linda Silverman in post: The Gift of Being Uncommon
"George Harrison's life as a creation of personality. ... For psychologist and theorist Kazimierz Dabrowski...personality meant something quite different, requiring us to suspend our usual understanding of personality and replace it with something else entirely. According to Dabrowski, a personality is something that we give ourselves, that we can create and shape, especially in adulthood, through continual change.
Douglas Eby's insight:
Related article: Theory of Positive Disintegration as a Model of Personality Development For Exceptional Individuals, By Elizabeth Mika
We may not have realized all or even many of the promises of our identity as a gifted kid, but that doesn't mean we are not still gifted as adults. What kinds of thinking and feeling get in the way?
Mary-Elaine Jacobsen on being exceptional: "To feel like an outsider, to constantly pressure yourself to hold back your gifts in order to fit in..." -- Also see other perspectives on being a gifted, creative person.
“What drives the world no longer drives them. Seeing the madness of our civilization so clearly, they may feel somewhat alienated from the culture around them.
“Some feel that they inhabit a no-man’s-land between two worlds. They are no longer run by the ego, yet the arising awareness has not yet become fully integrated into their lives.” — Eckhart Tolle
Sharon M. Barnes, MSSW, LCSW, Therapist For Sensitive And Gifted, works with children, teens and adults who are creative, sensitive, intense, and often gifted people.
She comments that "many creative, sensitive, intelligent and/or gifted youth and adults feel like misfits, or as many have expressed, like aliens from a different planet."
“I don’t think I’m even close to fulfilling my potential.” Actor Kerry Washington
Psychologist Kenneth W. Christian delineates some of the most prominent patterns of thinking and behavior he has found that may lead to undermining and underachievement as adults.
He says "Pulling back from your potential is a kind of abdication, an abandoment of your own best interests."
What Is Impostor Syndrome? That was the question we attempted to answer during #gtchat as well as ways to combat it. Feeling like a fake, just lucky, or false modesty are all characteristics of Imp...
Douglas Eby's insight:
Actor Emma Watson commented: “It’s almost like the better I do, the more my feeling of inadequacy actually increases, because I’m just going, Any moment, someone’s going to find out I’m a total fraud, and that I don’t deserve any of what I’ve achieved." - From article "Getting beyond impostor feelings" http://talentdevelop.com/2434/
“Anxiety keeps me humble.” AIDS researcher Anthony Fauci, MD notes that pursuing excellence in your life and work is not without emotional challenges: “One of the by-products of being a perfectionist and constantly trying to improve myself are sobering...
We need to celebrate and tolerate individual difference. - by Allen Frances, M.D. - "The 3-5% of kids who are particularly gifted are also at special risk for being tagged with an inappropriate diagnosis of mental disorder.
Marianne Kuzujanakis, MD, MPH is the perfect person to explain why. She is a pediatrician and a Director of SENG (Supporting Emotional Needs of the Gifted)- an organization dedicated to helping the gifted and their parents. She is also a co-founder of the SENG Misdiagnosis Initiative..."
To get content containing either thought or leadership enter:
To get content containing both thought and leadership enter:
To get content containing the expression thought leadership enter:
You can enter several keywords and you can refine them whenever you want. Our suggestion engine uses more signals but entering a few keywords here will rapidly give you great content to curate.