We are not paying enough attention to trying to teach gifted people how to cope with their lives in the adult world. Far too many of them find their drive and creativity thwarted by persons or establishments who regard them as either silly or threatening.                               Marylou Kelly Streznewski 

 

Gifted adults, because of their giftedness and multiple abilities,  have to deal with difficult people and situations all day, every day.

Most often gifted adults receive inappropriate and inadequate advice about dealing with difficult people and situations--from coaches, counselors, teachers, mentors, peers, and other trusted advisors who don’t factor in or aren’t familiar with the genuine difficulties and situations where envy, misunderstanding or prejudices about giftedness are a significant factor in the interaction, bullying, workplace mobbing, or sabotage.

Gifted adults need coaches, counselors, and advisors who understand what giftedness is, what gifted people need, and the challenges they face. 

Gifted adult advisors need to provide gifted adults with solutions that work to help them realize their potential, earn a good living, live fulfilling lives and deal with the sabotage and prejudice they will experience throughout the lifecycle because of their giftedness.

Where giftedness and employment intersect, here are some of the challenges that gifted adults face on a regular basis at work—and in the community:

• Gifted adults exhibit an intensity, an insistence on the integrity to do the work at its best—which is most often beyond what is required and what they are compensated.
• Gifted adults have chronic impatience with shoddy work and slow thinkers.
• Gifted adults work too quickly, get bored, and show it. 
• Gifted adults raise the standards for everyone else, and that is always resented. 
• Gifted adults have odd approaches to things, which irritates their coworkers. 
• Gifted adults ask for more work and make enemies because of that.
• Gifted adults still have the idealism of a young person which can cause problems with peers, authority figures or with fellow executives. 
• Gifted adults, with their bright mind, have difficulty in accepting the illogical and may be very stubborn in expressing doubts about a project or in criticizing others.
• Gifted adults, whether they have a college degree or not, carry around in their feisty minds questions the boss or superiors cannot answer.
• Gifted adults sometimes, unwittingly, threaten the boss, because that odd approach turns out to be better than the boss’s idea.
• Gifted adults are often the first to go when downsizing begins because of peer group rejection—even when they are the best and highest performer in productivity or prolfits

Job performance is not a significant factor in promotability.

Social acceptability, the ability to fit in, to think as the rest of management thinks;   these are the factors which make a person promotable. 

The gifted employee is not readily promotable. This idea that the gifted will get ahead anyway, and if they do not, they were not really gifted, has no basis in fact.                                                                                                                             David Willings, Industrial psychologist, 1981.

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