blogs Over begaafdheid, loopbaan en persoonlijke ontwikkeling
High+ Giftedness: Marching to a different drum
Since writing about my own experiences as a highly gifted individual, a specific kind of people found their way to Your Evolving Self for career development support.
Many of them were not merely gifted in the usual sense. They showed a level of complexity, speed, intensity, alienation, autonomy and inner pressure that pointed to something more specific. Some had formal IQ test results. Many did not. But in conversation, the pattern was often unmistakable:
They were not just quicker thinkers, they were operating from a different inner architecture. They were marching to a different drum.
The Dark Face Of Empathy And How To Lighten It Up
Empathy has exceptional PR. In leadership, coaching, HR and cultural work, it is often treated as a moral trump card: more empathy means better people, better organizations, better everything! But that equation is incomplete.
In its healthy form, empathy helps us understand another person’s inner reality without losing our own center. In its unhealthy form, it becomes emotional fusion, moral theater, or self-image maintenance. A blog about the Dark Face of Empathy and how to lighten it up.
Why Maslow’s Pyramid Often Works in Reverse for the Gifted
Psychologist Abraham Maslow famously described human motivation as a hiërachy of needs, later to be simplified into a pyramid by others: first we take care of our physical needs, then safety, belonging, and status and only then do we focus on meaning, purpose, and self-actualization. For many gifted people, especially the highly and exceptionally gifted, this order does not match their lived reality. They often start at the top and seem to live by a reversed piramid; a way of life skillfully pushed to its extreme by the Wandering Mathematician Paul Erdős.
Do You Have to Be Gifted to Work with the Gifted?
Working with gifted and highly gifted individuals is both a privilege and a challenge. Their minds move fast, their questions run deep, their intensity overwhelms and their sensitivity often extends into territories that many professionals have never had to navigate. And that makes working with these remarkable people a delicate and responsible job, especially when clients have had more than their share of negative experiences in life. But does that mean you have to be gifted yourself to effectively work with them?
The Predicament of the Gifted Hunter
A lof of gifted individuals are biologically and psychologically wired for short, high-intensity sprints, while their existential purpose unfolds across a marathon arc. Read more about this phenomenon and how to deal with it in this blog.
When the first domino falls: parenting gifted children
Discovering your child is gifted is often like the first domino to fall. A series of events are set in motion and life changes from one moment to the next into a quest, an obstacle course, a war of attrition and a rollercoaster all at the same time. During the interviews we did for the analysis of the giftedness chain in the Tilburg region and for the book on the state of education that Kim is working on, it became crystal clear how complex and confrontational parenting a gifted child can be. Especially when your gifted child is a mirror for you.
In this article we share the most important insights and challenges surrounding parenting gifted children, but we also give you tips on how you can keep things manageable and take care of yourself and your own development creating a two-way street. Learning to live with your own giftedness becomes more of a blessing for yourself, but also for your child(ren)…