What is gifted?
To be gifted is to have exceptional talent or natural ability, according to the dictionary.
It’s a good start. But what qualifies as exceptional? And in which talents? Abilities?
I could roll out a long list of definitions and descriptions for giftedness here. Look around the internet and the literature, and you’ll find various definitions and metrics for giftedness. IQ, of course. Multiple intelligences. Giftedness profiling. These are helpful – to a point. And that point is where each gifted individual is, well, an individual.
In some regards, I’m very much a numbers person. And yet – in other aspects, it’s all about the feel, the sound, the smell, the experience.
It’s not the numbers for the sound system – how does it actually sound playing your favourite music? Not the price of the perfume, but what it smells like on your skin – fresh, after a few hours, when its really permeated and mingled with your own scent? Not the top speed of the car, but how it feels as you drive, manoeuvre, and take corners?
So when it comes to getting to know someone’s giftedness, my approach is (unsurprisingly) consistent: it’s all about the feel of our interactions. Much like driving: how does this person respond? How quicksilver is their thinking? How agile? How broad, how deep, how dimensional? How responsive are they to new ideas? To challenge? What throws up their curve-balls?
If I had to boil giftedness down to one metric, I’d pick fluidity. The more gifted the mind, the more fluid it feels. The easier it moves, the wider it spreads, the vaster the terrain it can cover.
What I’ve observed is the more gifted a person, the more fluid their mind is. And what comes as a surprise to many gifted people, and is part and parcel of processing one’s giftedness, is recognising how much more fluid their minds are compared with the general population. How far apart we are.
Even more so for those of us in the top 0.1% and fewer. The cognitive difference between the top 1% and the top 0.1% is roughly the same as between the top 1% and more-or-less average folk. So we’re not just different – we’re vastly different.
Think peregrine falcon to sparrow, for instance. Fighter jet to flight school Cessna. F1 car to an around-town throw-your-shopping-in pootle-mobile.
While numbers and metrics can give you interesting insights into yourself, how you handle yourself and navigate the world as a gifted person needs a different approach.
Giftedness means we see things differently. We notice differently. We remember more. Make more connections. Understand deeper and broader complexities.
We perceive, process, and do differently.
Very often, we’re breaking other people’s expectations of us – of what we ‘should’ be like. That makes them uncomfortable, and their discomfort sometimes gets projected onto us.
People back away, make an off-sounding comment that seems to have nothing to do with what we were saying, and everything to do with saying it in a gifted kind of way. Make fun of us with the usual stereotypes about intelligent folk.
Attempts to bridge communication gaps often flail and fail, somehow worsening the mismatch by trying to clear it up.
Rejections, small and large.
We also internalise these expectations and rejections. Everyone else is having a good time, so why am I not? Everyone else seems to like this, so why don’t I? Everyone else is finding this hard, but I’m…not?
We think there’s something wrong with us, or with how we’re doing things. We think there’s something about us we should maybe change.
But there’s not.
Discovering the expectations we’ve internalised, tending to the wounds of rejection (hi, Gifted Trauma), and being aware of expectations put on us, can be liberating. We see through to the reality of how we are – not the illusion of how we’re supposed to be.
Dropping those expectations – which might well work for 99+% of the population, but not us – we head towards a more grounded-in-reality experience. A more authentic (ew, cliche, sorry) experience of ourselves as we are (yes, hello non-duality peeps – seeing through the false-expectations self can be a useful step towards seeing through the illusion of self, but I digress).
Knowing about, and letting go of these expectations makes it easier to spot them in the wild. With consequently less internal baggage and more awareness, these kinds of expectation-mismatches get gradually less painful both on your ownsome and with other people. You feel at home in your own skin. Less trauma, less stress, more happy. And that is a gift indeed.
What next?
1. Do nothing
Haha, if only. You’re gifted, right? You’re reading this, anyway, and you’ve scrolled to the bottom. So you’ll do something. I’ll leave that to you and the rest of the whole wide universe to figure out ;-)
2. DIY it
Autodidact, much? You’re in good company here.
3. Do it with someone(s)
Hi. Have a look at what I offer.