Science & Self-improvement

It is false the common belief that gifted people because of their greater capacity are predestinate to enjoy success and that they always get over any obstacle. In reality, there exist environmental and psychological causes that can impede maturation and the expression of talents. Poverty, race, lack of comprehension, or simply the absence of opportunities can hinder self-actualization. The same occurs with psychological factors such as lack of self-confidence, fear of failure and humiliation, and excessive subjugation to social rules.

A gifted person must face many adversities in everyday life: pressures to be like the average, and hostility and resentment from those that regard him as intellectually superior, are common. He must be able to adequately administrate the use of his faculties and collaborate with other people (relatives, chiefs, workmates, and neighbors) to correctly manage situations that can be controversial. Besides struggling with these external factors, he must also struggle with internal ones such as lack of assurance and perfectionism. Imposing to oneself excessive demands produces a feeling of inferiority that turns to be a further obstacle.

The gifted person that has not been identified as such in his childhood and has not been treated adequately by knowledgeable people must, before resolving the problems already discussed, deal with one even more important: to know what he is and what is his position in the world. The fact of not identifying himself as gifted can lead to sadness, disappointment, and depression–the subject will feel that he is inappropriate for some reason. For some ones this will lead to conclude that they must accept things as they are and they will not likely experiment further development.

While it can be asserted that there is a positive relation between intelligence and self-actualization, gifted people are not the only ones who can attain self-actualization. Every person may attain self-actualization by the full exploitation of his capabilities. A person who does not exceed conventional development may obtain professional success and have a happy and satisfied life.

People that grow beyond the conventional stage, are generally affected by disappointment and confusion before reaching higher levels. Inner, emotional growth does not happen spontaneously, but it is the result of an intense struggle by the individual. When depression and unhappiness are experienced, this is generally an indication of the subject’s effort to attain self-actualization, which, when it comes, is denoted by satisfaction and confidence. When the person has a clear sense of himself and of his objectives, it can be said that he has reached an advanced developmental stage and that he is an emotionally mature person.

Having professional success and inner growth are unrelated facts. All levels of emotional development can be found even among people that are not professionally prominent. So that advanced emotional growth can be attained more easily, it is extremely important that the person received adequate care during his first years. Environmental and family conditions strongly affect the sense that the individual has of his own value, his self-esteem, and his self-image. When one or both parents are hostile to the child, this may cause that the subject arrives to middle age with profound emotional conflicts. People that achieved high levels of emotional development had at least one person that took care of them.

It is commonly accepted that when a person attains success he achieves significant financial and professional levels in agreement with his own standards and with those of the people around him. He is also expected to enjoy a condition of comfort and personal satisfaction. However, sometimes these results are not obtained. There are people who can achieve financial and professional success, and feel not satisfied with themselves. On the contrary, other ones may not seem successful to the eyes of other people but may enjoy emotional well-being and inner satisfaction. Finally, there are those that achieve no satisfaction and no success.

By the conventional definition of success, a successful person is someone who has achieved high social status and income. It happens, however, that some intelligent people do not aspire to this kind of success and that other ones, once they achieve it, do not seem to be fully satisfied with their achievement. It seems then convenient to use for these cases another definition of success, related with Abraham Maslow’s concept of self-actualization.

According to Maslow, the self-actualized person is one that has developed all his capacities. The application he makes of these capacities can be to obtain conventional success, but it is not necessarily so. This person considers that what really matters is his own satisfaction and not other people’s opinion. The measure of the degree of self-actualization of a person is how he has used his potential, either to obtain conventional success or to obtain his own personal happiness. A person that has achieved conventional success but not self-actualization may feel unsatisfied with what he has obtained.

The self-actualized person of Maslow has similar characteristics to the kind of person that other development theories situate at the top of the scale. It is a person that feels well with himself and the others, who tend to collaborate, and has confidence in himself and in his purposes.

The self-actualized person is not selfish because he has understood that personal well-being derives from general well-being. He does not accept life as it is, but tries to bring to reality his vision of what it should be. As a consequence, he suffers inner conflict, self-criticism, anxiety, and feelings of inferiority with respect to his own ideals.

Various obstacles can interfere with the actualization of a person’s talent: self-criticism, doubt, feelings of inferiority, and others. If talent is not allowed to manifest, it remains in a latent state and is a frequent cause of depression and distress. For example, a very strictly upbringing may hold the adult from living experiences that could enrich his creative development.

A person that is confined to a conventional role, such as that of being a good father or a good son, may have no possibilities to manifest his real self. This person needs to be assisted to show his creativity through the self-imposed role.

The main causes why talents are not externalized are shame and fear of humiliation. They make the person to avoid anything that may constitute a humiliation, and this hinders his capacity for expression. By reason of his extreme sensibility, the gifted person reacts intensely to a humiliation in childhood. When the inner drive to manifest creativity meets with the repression produced by shame, people are overwhelmed with feelings of rage and resentment, followed by episodes of depression and hopelessness.

When teachers and parents consider the precocious gifted child as a problem whose solution is to make him ‘normal,’ they produce a burden of guilt and resentment that is added to the child’s problem of expressing himself. Having been punished for being different the child will grow conflicted because he will feel guilty whether he follows or not his parent’s rules.

The aim of the earliest intelligence tests, as the one devised by Alfred Binet in the beginnings of the 20th century, was to predict school performance. When using school grades as a reference, one can say that intelligence tests have a good performance. It must be noted, however, that school learning depends not only on intelligence, but also on other factors such as the persistence and the interest of the pupil. It is also important the influence of parents, schoolmates, and teachers.

Researchers not only investigated the relation of school grades with IQ scores. Social success, measured by social status and income, has also been analyzed, and a positive correlation has been found. The same occurs with the social status of the individual’s parents, but when this effect can be neglected, as in the case of siblings, it is observed that a greater IQ gives more possibilities to attain high status and income.

It must be realized, nonetheless, that individuals with the same IQ may differ amply in social status and income. The variation is so large as to turn practically impossible to predict if a person will have a successful life taking into account only his intelligence score. If we define a successful person as one that achieved high social status and income, it is clear that to be a gifted person does not guarantee to be a successful person. There are several reasons for this, but the most important is that gifted people have troubles in establishing their own identity, and this affects negatively their possibilities of success.

Although intelligence enables the person to learn faster than the others, which generally result in a successful career, greater intelligence does not enable him to solve his emotional disorders and social maladjustment. In addition, the gifted person experiments difficulties during childhood to establish satisfactory relationships and to find an adequate role, and during maturity to integrate within a labor environment.

It is often assumed that the gifted person can manage on his own and needs not support, but it is not so. To be more intelligent does not imply that is unnecessary the support of other people; neither it excuses a thorough practice in the selected field. Many people stood out because they had opportunities and impulse given to them by other people.

Having special capacities is a highly disturbing experience and the outstanding child or teen-ager needs support and comprehension from the adults. If these elements have not been present, the grownup may find his talent uncomfortable. A higher intellectual capacity permits to develop faster, but does not assure reaching a higher emotional or moral level.

Intelligence tests’ scores may be used to predict social success. In the United States, certain universities demand from applicants for prestigious professions–as law and medicine–to have high scores on tests like the LSAT and the MCAT. Consequently, a high score on these tests can predict a better occupation and, to a certain extent, a good income.

However, the variance of a psychometric measure of intelligence is large enough to allow substantial variations in social status (and even bigger in income) for people with the same IQ. IQ is not, therefore, a good predictor of social status or income. It cannot be said that a gifted person will be necessarily a person with high social status and good income.

Although a correlation of 0.33 was found between status level and IQ, the psychometric score is only one of the factors that contribute to social success. The social status of the individual is also affected by other factors such as the social status of the parents. Parents’ social status is responsible of one third of the variance of their children’s social status, and about one fifth of the variance of their income.

Intelligence scores have been applied to predict work performance as it can be appreciated through supervisor reports and similar information. In the majority of cases, intelligence scores are weakly related with work performance. Other traits such as ability for social relations, personality type, etc., are of equal o greater importance than intelligence as what to respect to work performance.

Low self-esteem in the gifted adult is often the product of his lack of knowledge about his condition when he has not been formally identified and is not socially recognized as an achiever. Not understanding his differences and not identifying himself as gifted, he will be driven to isolation and will have emotional disorders. He will feel frustrated without knowing the cause of his frustration and without knowing how to mitigate his frustration. When the gifted adult is recognized as an achiever, he may still suffer from the impostor syndrome.

When a gifted adult is aware of his condition, he may blame himself for not being good enough as a result of comparing himself not with other people, but with an idealized image of what he should be. As a product of the socialization stage, the internalized voice of his parents may constantly accompany him telling him his deficiencies.

Another frequent cause of low self-esteem is that gifted people usually take their abilities as normal and granted, and think that people with different abilities are the really smart. They give more value to something that they cannot do or that they have to work hard to obtain while someone else can do it easily.

A feeling of inadequacy and incompetence can be the result of focusing on weaknesses, comparing with out of the norm people or idealizations, and valuing other people’s abilities. A gifted person may consider that his abilities are ordinary, and that a colleague is brighter because he has, for example, a better memory. In addition to the general feeling of oddity that almost every gifted person experiments, this leads to an unreal self-image and an inadequate self-esteem.

Knowing oneself is a requisite to a good self-esteem. This is not easy for a gifted child because introspection is not common in infancy. The child tends to assume that he is like the children that he can see around him. The absence of knowledgeable people (like parents and teachers) that tell him what his differences with the other children are may cause problems that arise because he cannot discern that he has other capabilities.

If the gifted child is confronted with the fact that the other children leave him alone, he will conclude that something is wrong with him, but he will be unable to ascertain what it is. He will not realize that he is simply different, but will deduce that he is bad. He may not understand that his strangeness is the cause of his isolation. Being unable to comprehend why the others feel uncomfortable with him, he will reason that he is like the others but worse, and will think: “I must be really bad if nobody wants to play with me.”

In addition to arising in the interaction with other children, problems can also arise at the child’s home. The child’s parents may not be themselves gifted or they may not be aware of the right manner to raise a gifted child. If the parents are not gifted, they may reject the gift of their child as being an ‘abnormality’ that must be corrected to make him ‘fit in.’ They may even become envious of the child and may try to make him a ‘normal’ one by imposing harsh punishments.

Parents not always love their children. Children are often an unwanted byproduct of sexual desire and it is not guaranteed that every child that comes to this world will have a couple of loving parents to take care of him. If the parents are not gifted and they do not love their child, he may become the subject of verbal and physical abuse.

There may be parents that are not gifted but whose love for his child leads them to seek counsel on how to raise him. The result can be better than if the parents are gifted and do not know about the special care that they should have with their gifted child. These parents could be inadvertent of their own peculiarity because they were never detected as being gifted. They may suppose that they are only a little different from the rest and that the same happens with their child.

Some people incorrectly suppose that because the gifted child’s intelligence corresponds to an older child he has also to show a social behavior corresponding to that age. However, the social resources of a gifted child can be those corresponding to his chronological age or may correspond to an earlier age. He may feel confused when certain events occur because he is unable to understand the rules that govern them. This contributes both to his feelings of inadequacy and to his doubt about his capacity.

Social interaction can be very difficult both for the gifted child and the adult. When the child’s IQ is over a certain threshold (say 160), he will certainly experience isolation and loneliness. He will have problems in relating to age peers because of his lack of conformity to cultural expectations corresponding to his age. Emotional intensity can aggravate adjustment problems as other children may ridicule a gifted child because of his strong reaction to an incident that they consider trivial.

Being a gifted adult may be the cause of problematic social interaction both at the workplace and at home. Problems may arise in relationships with work mates when the person does not realize that has a greater intelligence. On the other hand, people that are aware of having obtained a high score in an intelligence test may take this as a sign of superiority over the rest.

The moral concern of the person may make intolerable unethical practices at the workplace. Emotional intensity, that could be valuable in certain activities (such as the arts), can be a disadvantage in others. When holding a managerial position, the gifted person may become overextended, impose unreasonable standards, and be reluctant to delegate.

Being different implies having few people with which to share things that one is interested in doing. If he is not in a career that permits contact with other gifted adults, the person will feel a lack of appropriate companionship. He will find association with non-gifted people tiring and frustrating because of the need to weigh his words and to simplify his ideas. When he finds out that the level of interest or understanding of his companions is not the same as his, he will need to hold back in conversations and social events will become boring.

Lacking adequate companions, the gifted person may refrain from interacting with others and lead a solitary life. It is difficult to spend time in company of people that one perceives as being different. Moreover, ordinary people usually do not understand the need of the gifted person to spend much time alone doing his work instead of spending that time with friends. This conflict may result in having only a few friends.

Many reasons can lead a person to deny his gift. He may simply fail to understand what it means to be gifted. He may be aware that he is different, that he has greater capabilities, and find that this is cause of others’ jealousy. He may decide (consciously or not) to hide those abilities to get by, and this hiding may become a lifelong denial.

If a person does not consciously realize that he is gifted, he will be alienated from himself. He will have troubles that he will not know how to solve and his adult life will be problematic and painful. He will have a drive that he will be unable to deal with because he will not understand its nature.

When a gifted person has acknowledged his special condition, he may still deny it for fear of failure to live up to the label of gifted. This label can also be rejected if the person thinks that it implies considering himself better than the others. Finally, a person may decide to deny that he is gifted if he concludes that there is nothing he can do about.

When a gifted child is not reared satisfactorily, a number of low and medium intensity emotional disorders may appear in addition to the problems caused by denial, all contributing to an unhappy life.

Rage and pain can arise from being punished for being gifted, anger and guilt from the conflict with his parents’ expectations. Low self-esteem, shame, and fear may obstruct self-actualization. Being told that one is not what one is may cause identity conflicts and depression, as well as frustration. The real self of the person may become damaged by oversocialization.

When a gifted child is not given schoolwork according to his capabilities, he will have low tolerance for frustration because he will be used to get by with little effort. Intrinsic characteristics of gifted people can cause troubles that need orientation and counseling: self-criticism and self-doubt may produce inferiority feelings; society’s injustice may throw a gifted child into despair. Important consequences of these troubles are an unsatisfied need of expressing creativity and a lack of sense of life that may lead to addiction or suicide.

Gifted people frequently experience a feeling of being different. However, noticing their differences does not mean that they know which way they are different and what are the implications. This lack of understanding can originate lack of confidence and avoidance of decisions. Being insecure, they may let other people take decisions, may decide using emotions as a guide instead of reason, or just let things happen.

This feeling of being different usually leads to try to make sense of the world and of the person’s position in it. Failure in this attempt may be the cause of sadness and disappointment, and may induce the person to seek counseling. Counseling is appropriate when the person has feelings of being frustrated, of being tied, of lacking fulfillment, and does not know the reason for these feelings. He may need a way to give an outlet to his capacities, and be unable to find it or even to see the need of it. Actually, he may be completely unaware of the source of his problems.

When the gifted person has multiple abilities, the lack of comprehension of his situation may make him face a career choice taking into account factors such as convenience or prestige, rather than considering personal fulfillment.

Gifted people have abilities that must be provided with a suitable environment to thrive. If this condition is not met, the person will be frustrated and will have feelings of anger, even if he does not know the cause. Not knowing what one’s abilities are, may lead to addiction or to a purposeless life.

Moral concern

Gifted people usually have a highly developed moral sense that makes them concerned about right and wrong behavior. They can be depressed when faced with circumstances characterized by a decline in moral standards, feeling angry or sad.

Having to deal with moral issues, they may choose to make the best of an imperfect world. An empathic gifted child, affected for what he can see around him, may feel responsible for what he is seeing.

Impostor syndrome

As a consequence of their increased intelligence, gifted people can make certain tasks with less effort than ordinary people. For example, a gifted person that does his office work in much less time than a non-gifted person may believe that success belongs only to those people who earn it with great effort. He will consequently think that he is deceiving those who praise him, and experiment what is known as the impostor syndrome.

A person who suffers from the impostor syndrome tends to attribute success to external causes, like having been helped or being lucky. He thinks that he is fooling other people by faking it. Consequently, he develops a feeling of being inauthentic and is afraid of being exposed as a fraud. He cannot believe that his success is deserved, he is constantly in doubt of his capabilities, and tries to play safe by avoiding competence. He rejects intellectual challenge by concealing his gift.

Sometimes people who are gifted do not manage to succeed. They are called ‘underachievers’ because it is usually believed that a person with superior abilities must give some demonstration of this superiority. In reality, there are no grounds for this assumption. The confusion between ‘gifted’ and ‘talented’ is responsible for this mistake. A talented person can make something better than the others: painting, singing, dancing, etc., generally in the arts.

A gifted person, on the other hand, is a person that sees differently and processes differently. He does not necessarily perform anything better than the others. A gifted person may employ his especial abilities in a field that is socially valuable, or he may not. He may for example become a scientist, or he may dedicate himself to solve crossword puzzles.

The term ‘gifted’ when applied to high intelligence people has been the source of much confusion. This usage conflicts with an older usage of the word exemplified by the phrase ‘gift of the gab.’ The person who is endowed with a natural talent may also have a high intelligence. The two things have no relation, in the same way that having a good voice for singing is not related with having blue eyes.

The gifted adult that shares the belief that only achievers are gifted will fail to recognize his condition if lacking achievement. His emotional responses may then have to be shut down. If he was identified when a child, he may suppose that his gift has disappeared, or he may let denial expunge the memory of this identification.

The fact is that circumstantial factors can stop gifted people from making use of their abilities. These factors can be poverty, ethnicity, opportunity, lack of understanding in the family, or gender. Poverty and ethnicity can make that the person does not receive the proper education. To have an opportunity one must be born at the right place and at the right time. Families sometimes do not know how to deal with a gifted child, perhaps for lack of antecedents in the family. To be a woman may prevent access to certain types of education or work.

A child may have his gift inhibited by way of abuse or criticism. Parents and teachers can contribute to this attack to self-esteem. Lack of respect and disapproval can cause more damage to a gifted child than to a normal one. An incident that would affect only temporarily a normal child may be the cause that a gifted child back off permanently from expressing himself.

Being gifted in an environment where there is none of your kind is very difficult, and not every person is suited for this situation. To handle it, people usually hide their intelligence. This hiding may become so perfect that intelligence is shut off forever.

There are many fears that can prevent a gifted person from making evident his intelligence. One of them was already mentioned: the fear to be different, which is common to all people, but there are other fears specific to gifted people.

Oversocialization is the situation in which the personality of a person is absorbed by his social role. Sometimes the fulfillment of a social role stops the development of potentialities. For example, a daughter who must take care of her parents may not be free to move to another city to get higher education.

Low self-esteem and self-limiting beliefs can also be the cause of poor achievement. It is well known that one will never go beyond what one believes to be his capacity. Lacking a counselor that tells him what he can achieve, a gifted person may never discover it by himself. The situation is aggravated when the person suffers from low self-esteem as a result of parental criticism or abuse.

Some factors that prevent achievement are peculiar to gifted people. While others are eager to be admired, gifted people may stay away from situations where they may be seen as superior. Increased sensitivity can make gifted people avoid expressing themselves for fear of criticism.

There are some traits of introvert people that can contribute to the feeling that most gifted people have of being different from the rest. The extroverted is easily accepted in society because his tendency to share his emotions make the others feel comfortably with him. If he is gifted, he may use his intelligence to assume a leader position. An introverted gifted person has a double challenge in his attempts to socialize. The distrust that inspires an intelligent person in those of lesser intelligence is aggravated because the introvert is reluctant to open himself emotionally. The feeling of insecurity that most gifted people experiment can also be made greater for the introvert’s tendency to think before acting, contrasting with the normal behavior of acting first and then think.

Over-excitability

According to K. Dabrowski’s, gifted people are over-excitable–they have a higher than average responsiveness to stimuli. Stimuli may affect one of the psychomotor, sensual, emotional, imaginative, or intellectual areas, or a combination of them. Over-excitability in the emotional area of the personality can be matched with the emotional intensity and sensitivity already mentioned.

Nonconformity and independence

An independent behavior that is not restricted by social rules is a characteristic of gifted people. They do not mind acting in a way that may be disapproved by society. In addition, an independent thinking is observed, which is not guided by common prejudices.

Divergency

Divergency is a modality of mental processing in which the mind, faced up with a problem, seeks non-conventional responses. The divergent thinker is able to provide creative solutions.

Sense of humor

A ‘weird’ sense of humor is usually present in gifted people. Things that make them laugh are not the same that make the rest laugh. This type of humor is produced by a philosophical point of view that leads to perceive the incongruity of many everyday situations and even to laugh at oneself, which is not comprehended by the majority.

Consistency

The gifted person strives to maintain consistency between actions and values. This is related with the moral concern already mentioned–a part of morality consists in keeping parallel what one says and what one does.

Purpose

A sense of purpose is innate in gifted people. Sometimes called ‘entelechy,’ it means that life must have a goal for the person, that something must be actualized and must not remain as a mere potentiality. If the accomplishment of this purpose is thwarted by circumstances, the person may be led to a life of mere subsistence.

Other traits

Other traits that have been mentioned as appropriate to gifted people are: creativity, imagination, insight, intuition, openness, impulsiveness, curiosity, high energy level, perceptivity, low tolerance for frustration, easiness in getting overextended, reluctance to delegate, projection of exorbitant standards onto others, persistence, resilience, risk-taking, self-discipline, self-efficacy, tolerance for ambiguity.

Many traits have been viewed as characteristic of gifted people. Nevertheless, the great majority of them is not well defined, lacks a standardized measurement tool, or is just contradictory with other reports. While some of the following traits are easily detectable in every gifted person, some others can be present but not be observable because the person has chosen to hide them. Some gifted people live in an environment that is hostile enough to force them to adapt themselves as the only way to avoid madness or suicide. As part of this adaptation process, they recur to hide those traits that make them different from the average person.

Perfectionism

A trait that can be observed already in gifted children is perfectionism–the need to do things as best as they can. The word ‘perfectionist’ is almost always used disapprovingly. It is usually employed to try to discourage any attempt to do anything better. However, the so-called perfectionist may be not a fool that tries to reach something impossible, but a person who knows that something better can be reached–even if it is still imperfect. The idea of perfection changes with the age and the knowledge of the person, and also the idea of what is attainable and even acceptable. In the case of the gifted child, the appearance of being a perfectionist may be the consequence of the asynchronous development of the child. The early development of the mind may enable him to imagine things that his neurological system may be not in condition to accomplish.

Perfectionism can be understood as an attitude of pursuing an ever-higher performance, or as a strong will to not make errors. In either of these senses, it will be the source of anxiety and worry, so it is justified to call it bad or misguided perfectionism. Bad perfectionism may be induced by parents and teachers when they set unreasonable goals for the child. These goals become later the goals of the adult and prevent satisfaction because the person will never reach them.

Perceived expectations of parents and teachers, and the desire to please them may lead the child to excessively criticize himself and to concern with producing a flawless performance. He will doubt of his capacity, avoid doing his work for fear of failing, and employ a great deal of time when he does it.

As well as bad perfectionism, which looks for an ideal result not minding reality, there is good perfectionism that takes reality into account and is satisfied with a result as good as possible. Good perfectionism allows the person to derive pleasure from his work even if it is not perfect. Problems derived from trying to observe an ideal behavior are avoided when the person accepts that perfection is not to be expected in the real world.

Introversion

Introversion has been associated with intelligence: the more intelligent the person, the more introvert. The consequence would be that the majority of gifted children would be introverts, but this is not what can be observed. The characteristics of introversion, as were defined by Jung, dealt mainly with the relation of the individual with the others. From this point of view, it cannot be said that among gifted people there are more introverts than extroverts. What happens is that, as a result of being isolated among people that are not like himself, the gifted person is led to observe behaviors that are similar to those of the introvert. Only when the gifted person is watched in the company of similar people, one can say if he is extrovert or introvert. It has been reported that people who were considered shy changed this behavior when they at last find congenial people.