About Managing others is strength. Managing yourself is true power.
Tao Te Ching
Multi-talented gifted and creative adults possess high intelligence, multiple talents and abilities, a commitment to excellence and an internal locus of control.
Coaching and psychotherapy with these gifted adults is not your ordinary coaching and psychotherapy. Working with 'multi-gifted' adults requires specialized knowledge, training and skills.
In this article, Lynne Azpeitia details the approach she's developed and used successfully in her work with multi-talented gifted adults.
Successful Coaching and Psychotherapy with Multi-Talented Gifted and Creative Adults
An article by Lynne Azpeitia
Gifted adults face challenging intrapersonal and interpersonal dilemmas because of their multiple abilities. Crucial to the therapy and coaching of people with multiple talents and abilities is the identification of their own differences in perceiving and experiencing the world and how to optimize a suitable personal, social and work environment, one which nurtures the person as well as his or her own unique talents and abilities.
The Role of the Therapist & Coach with Gifted Adults
Gifted adults work best with therapists and coaches who collaborate with them. Collaborating is key because gifted adults are independent thinkers who maintain an internal locus of control and do not automatically adopt or rely on the opinions of authority figures for direction or instruction on what to do or how to do it.
While gifted adults may respect a therapist or coach’s ability and experience, they also respect their own. Any suggestion, solution or direction offered to them will be thoroughly considered on its own merits and if selected, customized to the gifted adult’s own situation. It is very important that the therapist or coach not take this personally if they are going to work with gifted adults.
A therapist must remember that a gifted adult’s motivation and drive is to become the best they can be. However, gifted adults are not asking their therapist or coach to make them the best, they are interested in doing it themselves.
Gifted people do many things alone and on their own, so it is very meaningful to them when someone understands them and works together with them. There is no greater gift a therapist or coach can give to the gifted than working together with them.
Overview of Therapy & Coaching with Gifted Adults
First and foremost gifted adults need to understand that just because others’ feelings, thoughts, perceptions, drives and behaviors are different from theirs, there is nothing wrong with them. Although this may seem hard to believe, this is difficult work for a gifted adult.
While gifted adults may know cognitively that “there’s nothing wrong with me”, many years of being the “odd one out” with feelings, thoughts, perceptions, goals and behaviors has resulted in the fact that they subtly, and sometimes not so subtly, disbelieve the validity of what they think, perceive and experience. As one highly gifted coaching client said recently, “I have high self confidence, but low self esteem.”
A therapist who acknowledges and supports a gifted client’s intuitions, perceptions and thoughts is important because the majority of gifted adults live much of their daily lives without anyone who can share or understand what they are seeing, thinking or experiencing.
Gifted adults need to learn from their own experiences that their feelings, thoughts, perceptions, intuitions and sensitivities are valid and can be understood by others. Until a gifted adult fully understands and appreciates how his or her thinking and perceiving system operates, he or she will experience intense worry, doubt, and anxiety.
Whenever a therapist or coach is able to consistently relate to a gifted client and his or her point of view, there is a turning point in the client’s sense of aloneness and alienation.
The experience of being supported and understood facilitates a gifted person’s acceptance of self and his or her talents and abilities, which, in turn, frees the gifted adult to focus on utilizing his or her talents and abilities in new and different ways. This is the most basic work in therapy and coaching with gifted adults.
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