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.