How to become a blossomed gifted adult?

Being a gifted adult is to have a different functioning. Thus, becoming a gifted adult is not always simple, and sometimes flourishing can become complicated. Between the flow of incessant thoughts and hypersensitivity, getting a path in society is not a rest.

I don't claim to have found all the answers. In my opinion, everyperson with a High Intellectual Potential is different. This is only my way of thinking and seeing adult life. I hope she can help you find your own personal development as a zebra adult.

Personal development of the HIP adult

First we'll talk about developmentpersonnel. In other words, how can I love myself?Me. How to be happy, with "just"Me. In reading other stories and experiences, I realized thatmany other zebras like to be alone. And this is also my case. I'm fine, alone, in my head. I learn, I create, I discover. Anyway, I think it's a lot more fun than the activities of my friends of the same age.

In my opinion, the most difficult part is self-acceptance. To this end, first of all, to become aware of what the gift involves is doing a lot of good. I put words on sensations that I had.

Feed your insatiable curiosity of gifted adult

The gifted adult is someone very curious. He's interested in everything, all the time. To satisfy this need, I advise you to continually give yourself something to learn. We need to feed your curiosity. I read a lot, for example. Whenever a subject interests me or I ask myself questions, I seek to deepen the subject to master it. And then little by little I will drift and end up in a place where I didn't see myself at first. Recently, I sought to understand how the real estate market worked (in order to make an investment in it). Looking quickly at what was available on the internet, I quickly came across the book Father Rich Father Poor by Robert Kiyosaki (he is great, you absolutely have to read him!). Then I read the following two books to further deepen his notion of financial intelligence. In parallel, I wanted to be interested in stock markets, ordered me several books on the subject, and I continue my race today by being enrolled in a course on cryptocurrency.

The message I want to convey is that it is important to understand and accept this curiosity – and above all to feed it! Promote a documentary rather than fiction, or go to the museum! Immerse yourself in the world around you. I don't know if I'm gonna become the future Warren Buffett. On the other hand, I know that for a few weeks I've been having fun in there. And all this started with a search for real estate investment information. Besides, this information about real estate must have come from a previous point, but I don't know at all how I got there.

If you are interested, heremy favorite books on the HIP.

Unlock your adult artistic potential as an HIP

Studies have shown that a person with high potential uses much more right hemisphere of his brain than a "normal" person. Our cognitive functioning is different. Ideas and words are associated with more creative concepts, such as images, colors or sounds. In other words, the zebra adult will be more creative. And this creativity is not necessarily expressed by drawing, painting or other artistic performance. This can be the construction of sentences for example. I love creating automatic calculation systems (Excel is my best friend) and business. That's why I have an Excel binder for almost everything: everything is calculated automatically, I have statistics on each topic, etc. My boyfriend finds it strange – even strange and incomprehensible – but I love to analyze. And more than the result in itself, I think it is the construction and creation of the calculation tool that I prefer.

Besides that, I also love business and the business world. So I started a business. What I preferred was the creation itself: image, name, administration, site, my analysis tables, etc. Pure day-to-day management is less my thing. Today, I think I like the idea of the blog because it allows me to create something I had never done before: the text. So find what you like to create and jump!

Adult Zebra: A complicated social and love life

Social life HIP may have some difficulty finding a group of friends because it simply does not have the same interests as many. From his point of view, others may be "fades", "flats" or uninteresting. Only, the zebra has one profound need: to be loved. So he finds himself stuck between his disinterest in others, and the fact that he needs their love.

Love is just as complicated. Because of its hypersensitivity, the gifted adult feels everything stronger. And as I said, he has only one goal: to be loved, at all costs.

Finding love by being a hypersensitive adult

Hypersensitivity is a major feature in adults with high potential. The idea is that he will feel everything, stronger (too loud?), and without being able to sort between relevant information and another useless. The light is fast too much powerful film too much sad, the music of the car passing through the street too muchstrong, etc. In other words, he absorbs everything, and he feels everything. He likes too much and the impression that the other loves him not enough. It's really complicated to handle. For a long time I tried to block this influx of sensations and feelings because I felt constantly attacked. I understand now that this is not the right technique at all. If you're caught in a torrent, there's no point in trying to overcome it. Try to sail with him, you will go further. It's called it. emotional regulation.

Let us return to love. Finding love when you're a zebra adult is complicated. He will most likely find it difficult to find someone with whom he feels well, simply because he will interpret micro-details (to whom only he pays attention) as evidence that the relationship ends. Actually, he'll be careful about everything. And since he's only looking to be loved, he's going to be a self-boycotter looking for clues that prove he's not (loved). Yes, the zebra is a sadomasochist.

Yesterday, for example, I wanted to surprise my boyfriend by inviting him to a rather nice restaurant. At the last moment, he canceled and preferred that we stay home because he didn't feel well and was a little sick. There was certainly only one second between the moment he said he was cancelling, and the moment he gave me the reason. But during this second, I can tell you that I've seen our whole relationship end. He doesn't like me anymore. It's over. Pack up Paul. Obviously, I quickly realized that it wasn't about this and I was able to reason. Nevertheless, feelings of despair, sadness and disappointment were there for one to two hours. He was convinced that I was making a face, when I had just been at the end of my life for a second and that I was getting rid of it. Great night.

Making friends when you're an adult with high potential

A principle applies to both love and friendly relationships: the zebra adult seeks to be loved. While in love he usually seeks to be himself, in friendship he tends to establish a kind of second protective personality: false self.

The false self

The false self is therefore a sort of second personality. In fact, it's like a second version of self – false – that serves as a public image. False self is perfectly suited to the carcans of society. He is sociable, interested in the same subjects as his colleagues, laughs at everything, in short the perfect person. Except that this false self has the sole purpose of protecting the true self of the outside world. The zebra is too different from the others, so it makes itself a kind of mask that allows it to integrate at best – and thus to satisfy its need to be loved. So yes, it is true that many people wear a mask when they are in a group. However, here the difference between the two personalities (True and false-self) is great. They can have little in common. It is this false self which sometimes prevents the detection of intellectually early children. They melt so well into the mass that they are not seen.

Difficulties can occur when the real self has been buried for too long. As I grew up, I surrounded myself with a group of friends. It was great at the moment, I was always surrounded and felt loved. However, I now realize that it was just a facade. I wasn't totally Me. So, by moving and being a little alone, I took a long time to find myself. I no longer knew what I liked to do or why I did it. For several years, I had been guided by group movements that I supported, while they did not correspond at all to the choices that my real self would have made. My fake self had taken over for several years.

Friendship when you're a zebra

After all these explanations about false self, it may seem complicated to imagine that a friendship can take place with an adult zebra. Moreover, taking into account different interests, this does not help. Nevertheless, I prefer to nuance these words a bit. Indeed, it is not because a person is friends with our false self that our friendship is less real. My friends were far from knowing everything that was going on in my head, and that's not why I didn't consider our relationship to be friendship. In my opinion, it was rather a (very large) secret garden. Besides, my close friends are aware of my gift, which helps me to let myself go without feeling rejected.

Over time, I learned to differentiate between my false and true self. I think putting forward the fake reassures me a lot during first contacts, or in more "professional" relationships. Nevertheless, I realized that overcoming my fear of rejection to let appear this real self, sensitive, terrorized and buried, usually brought only good.

Gifted adults at work

Now we're going to focus on the development of the zebra adult in the professional environment. This is the area in which I still have the most discoveries to make. In fact, I think it is linked to the health crisis in the Covid-19 which has put me into partial unemployment since mid-March, until at least the end of 2020. There, I am sure I have time to think about my professional life and question things.

How to find your professional path with an unusual profile?

As a gifted adult, it can be very difficult to channel and focus on a single mission. We get bored quickly. We took a quick look around the station. So now what do we do? The same for years? No way!

Finding your career path is therefore a constant anxiety. I mean, it's not about finding her that's complicated, but it's about staying there. The great curiosity of the zebra adult makes him interested in many fields. But this same curiosity pushes him to always look for (and find!) new ones that look very interesting. In my opinion, he will find no ideal career path. Therefore, the most relevant seems to be adapting to these volatile desires. I recommend to focus either on a professional activity that allows to vary the pleasures, or to lead a slasher life.

Find a position with various activities

Look for a job that offers you a wide variety of missions. Thus, you will be less likely to be bored or to have gone around (or it will take you longer). For some years now, I have organized events in the Paris region. And I love it because I do a lot of different things:

• The place of the event is never the same, with its own technical peculiarities;
• The customer changes;
• Catering and catering are different;
• The activities and other elements proposed are adapted to each service;
• My schedule is not fixed.

At the moment, I don't get tired because I still don't feel like I've been around. No project is identical.

In addition, I recommend favouring a small, human-sized business. It will allow you to have a more transversal view of the activities in relation to a large multinational where you will be attached to your post with eyelets. It is indeed important for an atypical profile to be aware of the overall objective of its mission. Without a general vision, you will feel that your work is of no use and you will disgust yourself even faster.

Diversify your activities

I don't know if the term "slasher" really exists. In any case, the idea is to carry out several activities in parallel. Do a job on Monday and Tuesday, another from Wednesday to Friday, and an associative activity on weekends for example. The goal again is to give many different stimuli to your brain so that it always asks for a little more (and a little of each!). Note: with several jobs, you will therefore have several bosses. The relationship to authority is very particular among gifted adults (which is also the next point) and that is why I recommend considering self-entrepreneurship rather than wage earners.

In the long run, I would really like to focus on this lifestyle that I think is more promising over time. Indeed, I think I'm getting tired of the event in a few years, and I'd like to have managed to find a plan B by then.

The (complicated) report to the authority

For the zebra adult, authority is earned and won slowly, but above all it needs to be founded. In fact, it is not because you are a manager that you deserve to have any authority. Thus, without knowing the individuals, the opinion of the great boss of the company will have no more importance (in the eyes of the gifted) than that of his colleague. The atypical adult will instead judge individual ideas and decide, on his own initiative, whether they are good or not. So, it's not because the idea comes from the big boss that makes it a good idea and you have to obey it. Say like that, it seems pretty clear: he will only obey the ideas he finds sensible and fair. In life, however, it may be more difficult to explain to his manager that his idea does not deserve to be applied because it does not meet our criteria for finding meaning.

During my two years of alternation, I had a manager whose orders I couldn't keep. His ideas were, in my opinion, not the right ones. And my courses (master level) tended to support my comments in relation to his ideas (he had stopped after his license). Okay, I know, it's stupid to stop at a level of study. Nevertheless, I couldn't stop thinking that my reasoning was therefore better, fairer and smarter. Everything went much better when I explained to him that I needed to understand the justifications behind what he was telling me. A " 'Cause I'm asking you. I was not enough. So we were able to talk and debate together around our ideas and our work became much more productive! In turn, we realized that our objections could be bad, and therefore everyone has progressed towards a more optimal path. The relationship turned from manager to co-workers.

Conclusion: How to be a blossomed gifted adult?

So, how do you become a mature zebra? First of all, I think that it is perfectly feasible to be fulfilled and happy, even if you are gifted. Jeanne Siaud-Facchin wondered in her book whether a person High Intellectual Potential was too smart to be happy. So we agree that this is quite possible, despite many sources of failure.

Here is a list of practical tips that you can put into place in your daily life and that follow the various points of this post:

• Always try to learn something new. Many solutions exist for this, whether with books, trainings, reports, videos... Find the channel that suits you best, and exploit it.
• Let your creative soul wander. Take a two-hour slot every week, and create something. Do what you want: drawing, sewing, DIY, Excel paintings (this is me!). The important thing is that you do something you love. Personally, it relaxes me and it allows my brain to go to many different places.
• Do not fight against your feelings: kiss them. When you feel something (too) strong, ask yourself if you have not amplified it on your own. Feel this emotion (don't turn it back!), and try to control your reactions.
• Take time for yourself, to find yourself. Dissociate as much as possible your real and false self. Think of their existence.
• Don't be afraid to reveal yourself completely. Your sensitivity is your highest quality.
• Don't try to find a perfect job. Instead, look for a job that will allow you not to get bored and that will meet your need to be stimulated. Consider a slasher lifestyle.
• Take the time to ask for justifications on the orders you receive.

Sources:

• Siaud-Facchin J.,Too smart to be happy?, 2008