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.

I have the pleasure to work with many gifted people from all kinds of backgrounds, sectors and nationalities. Also, quite a few highly and exceptionally gifted men and women have crossed my path. A recent blog zooming in on what it’s like to be Highly Gifted, went pretty viral on LinkedIn and ended with three possible follow-ups, the first of which I present today: the answer to the question Do you need to be gifted yourself to work effectively with them?

During the many interviews Kim Castenmiller and I conducted for the Analysis of the Giftedness Chain 0-22yrs (referenced in this blog), we regularly heard that being gifted yourself is a plus when it comes to teaching gifted children. So the short answer seems to be ‘it helps’ but there’s much more to consider. This blog provides the long answer and also makes a distinction between gifted and high/exceptionally gifted.

Supporting the Gifted

Gifted individuals often stand at the threshold between high potential and existential tension. They grapple not only with cognitive depth but also with questions of meaning, identity, contribution, and belonging. Their greatest struggles are rarely intellectual; they are emotional, relational, and existential.

For highly and exceptionally gifted individuals this tension becomes even more pronounced. Their combinational abilities of heightened perception, imagination, ethical sensitivity and rapid processing, create a lived experience that diverges sharply from the norm as the ‘Marching to a different drum’ blog shows.

Supporting gifted individuals requires attunement, self-awareness, and a capacity to meet them at the level where their inner life unfolds.

Teachers vs. Coaches: Two Fundamentally Different Roles

Teachers

Teachers working with gifted children face the challenges like supporting asynchronous development. A child may process information like a teenager, feel emotions like a much younger child, and question the world like a philosopher. Within the constraints of curriculum, assessment, and classroom management, teachers must balance intellectual challenge with emotional containment and practical limitations. Group dynamic can also greatly influence what a teacher can or cannot do. They must, and should given their own education, at least have a working knowledge of pedagogy and didactics.

Coaches

Coaches of gifted adults inhabit a different world. Adults arrive with complex histories, professional identities, and often a profound sense of misalignment. The coaching context is more fluid and intimate, allowing for deeper exploration. Here, the aim is not adding to their educational development, it is integration. They must at least have a working knowledge of psyschology, personal effectivity and self-management.

In addition, a coach for gifted adults must:

hold existential complexity,
help clients navigate nonlinear development,
and create emotional safety for intensities most people never encounter.

These differences also make the role of the practitioner and their required skill set fundamentally distinct.

It starts with observing and listening

Observing and listening are foundational when working effectively with people irrespective of the role you find yourself in. This is especially true when working with gifted and highly gifted individuals because much of their inner world is implicit rather than explicit. Gifted people often communicate in layers:

what they say,
what they implicate, and
what they withhold

each carry equal weight.

Their rapid cognition can cause them to skip steps in conversation, compress meaning, or mask vulnerability under abstraction or humor. Or they end up in mental loops because they immediately focus on possible solutions, often while running many scenarios through their heads, instead of sticking to the process and focusing on the first step at hand. Their ‘creativity’ in finding reasons why a specific solution will not work for them, can be amazing and tragic to behold.

Deep observation allows the practitioner to notice micro-signals: the moment their eyes spark with recognition, the subtle hesitation before revealing something meaningful, or the shift in energy when a topic touches a hidden vein of truth. Attuned listening, not just to content, but to structure, rhythm, emotional undertones, and conceptual leaps, creates the psychological resonance that gifted individuals need to feel seen and met. Without this level of perceptiveness, much of their experience remains underground, unarticulated, and unreachable. With it, a transformational connection becomes possible.

What giftedness Practitioners also need to have

1. Meta-awareness

They track their own thinking and emotional responses in real-time, always seperating between their own ideas, preferences and experiences and the reality of the gifted client.

2. Deep understanding of gifted frameworks

While you can fail to understand giftedness despite of knowledge about it, you do need a solid foundational insight into giftedness and the many faces it may wear. Effective practioners are familiar with models such as Dabrowski, Renzulli, Mönks, Gardner and the Delphi model. And preferably have read Misdiagnoses by James T. Webb.

3. Emotional resilience

They do not become overwhelmed by intensity or speed. They dare to venture outside their own comfortzone and know how to keep their emotions in check while doing it.

4. Non-defensiveness

They are unthreatened by clients who may be faster or sharper. Their own ego must be in check. The last thing you want is to end up in is an intelligence match or a proverbial pissing contest.

5. A capacity to work systemically and existentially

They see the bigger patterns and the deeper issues that shape a client’s life. They feel comfortable with paradoxical and complex situations.

Gifted vs. highly Gifted: A Difference of Degree and Kind

Gifted individuals

Gifted adults often thrive when given more autonomy, more challenge, and intellectual companionship. They benefit from a coach or teacher who understands depth, speed, and multidimensionality.

highly gifted individuals

Highly gifted adults often experience the world at a level of intensity and complexity that can feel isolating. They see patterns others do not, question assumptions others accept, and may struggle to find environments that reflect or support their inner reality. They march to a different drum.

Their needs are not merely greater but different. They require a practitioner who can:

understand high-level intuitive and systems thinking,
hold existential inquiry,
navigate emotional and intellectual intensity without collapsing or pathologizing.

This is where the question of whether the practitioner must also be gifted becomes especially relevant. Not so much as a property by itself, but as an influence. Recognition and Resonance are foundational to the working relationship between teacher/coach and the highly gifted individual. Without them, the developmental process cannot even start.

‘Giftednesscoach entering a client’s MindMatrix’ by Dirk Anton van Mulligen, 2025.

With the highly gifted, their inner world often functions like a multidimensional Mind Matrix: a fast-shifting landscape of associations, intuitions, abstractions, and symbolic meaning. Entering that field, or even resonating with it from the outside, demands not only cognitive openness but a native familiarity with this kind of inner architecture. It is less about matching intelligence and more about sharing the internal operating system. For this subgroup, it may indeed take one to know one: only another gifted mind can intuitively track the implicit leaps, layered thinking, and rapid cycling of perspectives that define their experience. Without that resonance, the highly gifted client may feel unseen or slowed down, and the transformative potential of the work remains untapped.

However, it’s not strictly necessary that the coach be more gifted rather, that they be cognitively resonant. A coach with sufficient cognitive openness, emotional maturity, and metacognitive skill can create a spacious field that encompasses the client’s matrix, even without matching its intellectual horsepower point for point. The essential ability is not to out-think the client, but to hold their complexity without fear, impatience, or reduction in order to be able to mirror it back coherently. Giftedness in the coach can make this natural. Only very profound awareness can achieve the same.

The best coaches or teachers for highly gifted individuals are those who combine a rare triad: high cognitive capability, high emotional integration, and a deep sense of inner spaciousness. They can both enter the Mind Matrix and see beyond it, guiding the client not by control, but by containment and resonance; akin to the way a larger pattern gently enfolds a smaller one, allowing it to unfold in its own right direction.

So, Do You Need to Be Gifted Yourself?

‘Giftedness coach at work’ by Dirk Anton van Mulligen, 2025.

As we’ve just seen, the essential qualities for working with gifted individuals are not raw intelligence but rather properties like:

emotional depth,
psychological grounding,
intellectual humility,
curiosity,
and the ability to hold paradox.

A practitioner who is not gifted can be extraordinarily effective if they possess these qualities. Conversely, a gifted practitioner may struggle if they lack emotional maturity, boundaries, or self-awareness. However, the chances of gifted people possessing these qualities do seem a bit higher than for the general population.

Especially when it comes to ‘Capacity to work systemically and existentially in the face of complexity’ giftedness can be a big plus. A lot of gifted people possess that capacity, it’s inherent to their make-up.

Some non-gifted coaches however, excel with gifted individuals precisely because they do not compete or overidentify, which is an obvious pitfall when you’re gifted yourself. These coaches succeed in creating grounding, space, and clarity. They’re not trying to match the cognitive speed of their clients or pupils, but match them in presence.

So the conlusion is: being gifted yourself is not a requirement to work with the gifted but it can in certain respects be helpful. This equation does change however when talking about working with highly and exceptionally gifted individuals. Then giftedness becomes of increasing importance and quite possibly even prerequisite.

But wait, There’s more!

So why then do we at Your Evolving Self explicitly work with practitioners that are gifted themselves and have another professional pillar next to their work with the gifted? We regularly encounter gifted clients who’ve had iq tests, giftedness- and talent analyses and still are at a loss when it comes to actually integrating the results into their lives and careers. And to us that’s only to be expected. The role of teacher, analist or coach by itself falls short.

Successful support and achieving sustainable results for gifted individuals regarding their lives and careers requires more. And it requires a practitioner that is well-versed in four different roles. Curious what those roles are and where they fit in the developmental process of a gifted client? Next week I’ll publish a follow-up blog that delves deeper into this. So stay tuned!

Dirk Anton van Mulligen
Your Evolving Self — exploring giftedness, development, and the art of guiding exceptional minds.

Please note: This article is the result of regular and long reflection on this matter, supplemented with my experiences with gifted people. In other words, I put a lot of time and energy into it. No part of this article may therefore be reproduced without acknowledging the source and author. If you want to use more than a single quote or insight, please contact me for permission.

Do You Have to Be Gifted to Work with the Gifted?