Bringing our Giftedness into Therapy: Struggles and Growth for Gifted Therapists & Gifted Clients

Gifted Coaching, Gifted Therapy, PsychologyLeave a comment

Bringing our giftedness to therapy isn’t always easy, both for gifted therapists and gifted clients alike. The shame or fear we feel around our gifted complexity and/or gifted wounds, and the lack of support we’ve had for integrating our giftedness into our lives, show up in ways that dampen our ability to give and receive good gifted-specific therapy. Jennifer Harvey Sallin has written this article to open a collective discussion on the need for us to be able to bring our giftedness into the therapy process, so that our whole gifted self can heal and provide healing to others.

Supporting Gifted People: Guidelines for Therapists & Coaches (and Advice for Gifted Clients)

Coaching Process, Gifted Coaching, Giftedness, Healing, Psychology, Recommended Reading1 Comment

It is essential that therapists, coaches and other helping professionals know what giftedness is, how to recognize it in clients, and how to best support their gifted clients. Anyone helping a gifted person is, by necessity, helping a gifted mind – and gifted minds work in unique ways, have unusual needs, and grow in unconventional directions. Here are some guidelines for helping professionals and the gifted clients they support.

Mastery

Mastery: The Gifted Coaching Process

Coaching Process, Creativity, Gifted Coaching, Personal Effectiveness, Potential, Recommended Reading, Tools for Positive ChangeLeave a comment

As a gifted person, what should you do with your life? How should you use your talents? How can you find your inner callings and attain excellence in your domains of interest? Robert Greene’s fifth book Mastery is an exceptional step in helping all of us in search of answers to these often complicated life questions. Greene’s process toward mastery mirrors my own coaching method and process remarkably well, outlining the specific steps of the very same process I have been intuitively guiding my gifted clients through for years. If you are curious about where the coaching process would take you, are currently coaching and want to accelerate your progress, have been coached before and want a useful review and resource, or plan to start coaching and want to ‘get a head start’, I highly recommend you read this book!

The Stages of Adult Giftedness Discovery & How Gifted Coaching Can Help

Coaching Process, Gifted Coaching, InterGifted2 Comments

The discovery that you’re gifted as an adult has personal and social implications that are known to create some measure of chaos in your self-understanding and in your understanding of the world, until you learn to integrate your gifted mind fully into your life. In my experience as a psychologist and coach, I have witnessed a fairly predictable pattern that follows the discovery of one’s giftedness. It includes some of the famous stages of grief from researcher Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, as well as some key aspects of giftedness researcher Kazimierz Dabrowksi’s Levels of Positive Disintegration.

profound giftedness

High, Exceptional & Profound Giftedness

Exceptional & Profound Giftedness, Gifted Coaching, InterGifted12 Comments

Giftedness is averaged to make up well less than 5% of the general population, and within that small number, there are subclassifications: mild, moderate, high, exceptional and profound giftedness. Relatively little has been written about the later three of these, with the unfortunate result that the net is cast wide in the existing literature on giftedness. With various levels and concepts of “giftedness” often grouped together into a one-size-fits-all description, the highly, exceptionally and profoundly gifted are misrepresented in important ways. We all know that a mild or moderately gifted person can feel a strong sense of being an “alien” in a group of non-gifted people; so too can a highly, exceptionally or profoundly gifted person feel a strong sense of being an “alien” in a group of mild or moderately gifted people (the same is true between profoundly and highly gifted too, and so on). This article clarifies these differences and why they are important to know about.

values

Discovering Your Highest Values

Coaching Process, Gifted Coaching, Personal Effectiveness, Tools for Positive Change, Values2 Comments

If I ask you how a bicycle works, you probably will say yes; but if I ask you for a precise explanation of exactly how all of the bicycle’s parts work together, you may have to think longer, and might even need to consult an actual bicycle in order to answer the question competently. It is similar with our values: we think we know what we value in life, but when it comes to fully understanding our highest values, and living by them consistently, we aren’t so sure anymore. Sometimes, we need to consciously examine our most authentic values, and like with the bicycle, observe them closely to fully understand how they work. This article holds a favorite values exercises that I regularly do with clients in coaching.