Four Signs You May Be Gifted
Contrary to past beliefs, there’s much more to giftedness than a high IQ.
Psychotherapist P. Susan Jackson states:
“In their innermost core — at their best — the gifted adult is a passionate, deeply curious, sensitive and intense person, with a vast appetite for learning, for profound experience, for deepest understanding, for creating anew, and for contributing and participating wholly in the world.”
The term “gifted” is first given to specific children in their early school years, and it’s usually based on testing and IQ scores.
For example, the Michigan Association for Gifted Children reports:
“Although there are no standard IQ levels of intellectual giftedness, some experts suggest the following IQ ranges: Mildly gifted: 115 to 129; Moderately gifted: 130 to 144; Highly gifted: 145 to 159; Exceptionally gifted: 160 +.”
For children identified as gifted, many schools provide accommodations to help foster their high aptitude for learning.
One such accommodation when I was in school was a daily “pull-out” session. For a short time each day, a handful of other children and I were taken to a separate room with a different teacher. We were exposed to enrichment activities and more rigorous academics during this time.
It’s been a while, so I don’t remember many specific things we did. Still, I distinctly remember learning the word “idiosyncrasy” in third grade. As a matter of fact, I still feel extra special when I use it in conversation.
However, psychologists today have a less limiting definition of what it means to be gifted, one based on more than educational testing.
For example, Frontiers in Psychology notes:
“Traditionally, intellectual ability was the central variable used to discriminate high-ability individuals from the average population. Nowadays, however, various authors agree that intellectual quotient (IQ) cannot be used as a single variable in the conceptualization of high abilities.”
So how do you know if you may be gifted?
Delving into the vast array of research studies and psychological theories of giftedness can bring you closer to an answer.
However, a few tell-tale traits of giftedness are both timeless and universal.
Here are four of them to consider.
You’re curious.
My children and husband think I’m stupid. They hate to watch movies with me because they have to stop every five minutes to answer my questions. They assume I’ve not “put the pieces together,” but the reality is that I want to know why each piece was chosen and why it was designed the way it was.
If you share this constant questioning and insanely obsessive need to know more, there’s a good likelihood you may be gifted.
Psychotherapy Services for the Gifted explains the “why” behind the gifted person’s highly inquisitive nature. They state:
“[Gifted people have]an intense drive to explore, understand and master the environment. This drive can feel like a powerful physiological force that is difficult to describe and hard to control or direct.”
Furthermore, The International Gifted Consortium suggests that for the highly gifted person “there really is no ‘good enough’ point [concerning comprehension]; everything is subject to change and question. There is never a place to stay, never real ground beneath their feet. Every supposed answer only generates a series of new questions, as though what most consider knowledge and facts were only a portal to more mystery and intrigue.”
You’re lopsided.
When most people think about giftedness, they think about all “A” students with near-perfect SAT scores. After all, when you’re gifted, you’re good at everything, right?
Wrong.
The truth is gifted people tend to display what psychologists call “asynchronous development.”
Psychology Today explains this term as someone “remarkably ahead in some areas while being average or behind in other ways.”
For example, I outperformed ninety-nine percent of other students in reading in both third and sixth grades. In addition, I won two very prestigious creative writing awards in high school.
At the arts school I attended for theater, my professors pulled me aside and urged me to go to New York and enroll in a conservatory for the arts. They stated the college I was attending held little value for me and that I needed to be somewhere where my true potential could be reached.
Ironically enough, the English professors at the college said the exact same thing about my writing skills.
However, for all my artistic prowess, when it comes to anything technical, scientific, or mathematical, I bomb.
Physics? I flirted with the teacher to pass. (Just kidding. Kind of.)
Fifth-grade math? That’s the last grade I could help my daughter with her homework.
Many people make the mistake of assuming giftedness bleeds into all areas. However, researchers of giftedness actually categorize it as involving one (or more) of six specific domains:
- general intellectual ability
- specific academic aptitude
- creative or productive thinking
- leadership ability
- visual and performing arts
- psychomotor ability
So if you possess excellence in any one of these domains, this may be where your giftedness lies.
You’re highly sensitive.
According to research done by psychologist Elke Van Hoof, eighty-seven percent of gifted adults are highly sensitive. Mary-Elaine Jacobsen, author of The Gifted Adult: A Revolutionary Guide for Liberating Everyday Genius, comments below on why she believes the association between these two things is so high.
“It appears that highly gifted adults may be more finely tuned in to the subtleties of life and more easily aroused than others around them.”
For example, the hallmark traits of high sensitivity are explained by Portland Professional and Psychotherapy through the acronym DOES:
- Depth of processing
- Over-Arousability
- Emotional Intensity
- Sensory Sensitivity
Like most highly sensitive people, gifted people are exceptionally aware of the external stimuli surrounding them. This includes attention to something as simple as the physical temperature of a room to something as complicated as a room’s “emotional” temperature.
For this reason, both highly sensitive people and those who are gifted possess an increased sensitivity to the feelings of others around them. As a result, this trait often makes them extremely empathetic.
Advanced Psychology elaborates on this quality as it relates to gifted children:
“A child with high OE [over excitability]does not simply care about the feelings of others and want to help — he quite literally feels what other people are feeling. He experiences other people’s emotions as though they were his own.”
You’re a perfectionist.
It’s no secret that giftedness often comes with its share of psychological baggage. For example, one of the most cumbersome weights for many gifted people is the pressure to be perfect.
Psychologists speculate that the root of the problem may lie in the praise usually doled out to gifted people. For example, gifted children are often alienated by their peers, so their primary form of validation comes from the glowing words of teachers and other adults. As a result, they may feel they have to be perfect to maintain their self-worth.
Psypost offers another reason gifted people are obsessed with perfection.
“A lack of challenge at school has been said to deprive [gifted] students from opportunities to cope with failure adequately, leading them to be intensively preoccupied with avoiding failure altogether.”
The bottom line:
Maybe you have some of the traits above.
Better yet, maybe you have all of them.
In reality, other than being a self-esteem boost, it doesn’t matter if you’re the world’s definition of giftedness or not.
For example, as a teacher, I see students in high school who read at a sixth-grade level soothe a broken-hearted peer when no one else steps up to help. I see students with learning disabilities who refuse to tell a lie to save themselves from getting in trouble, and I see adults who flunked out of school go out into the world and change it in remarkable ways.
The truth is we all have gifts, and they can each work miracles if we put them to use.
Author Craig D. Lounsbrough says it best:
“We may not necessarily be all that gifted, but we certainly have passion. And maybe we should start understanding that passion is a gift of such importance that without it any other gift doesn’t matter. Therefore, we are gifted indeed.”
Yes, Mr. Lounsbrough, “we are gifted indeed.”
All of us.
End of story.
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