Gifted But Still Struggling, with Mark Talaga

[chuckles] I think what I'm really interested about is that we, we've talked before and we, uh, we talked about how I found it quite difficult as a parent to be able to talk about it, because people often think if you're gifted, then sh- what are you complaining about? Surely life is now super easy because you're really bright, and what...

Stop complaining.

You know, I've got it much harder with my son or my daughter or whoever, whoever.

Do you come across that a lot i- in parents maybe that you work with in families?

Well, you'll, you'll see it a lot with people that struggle with the term, right? Gifted.

Because it sounds very much like, oh, that means something.

That means you're going to go to MIT or Harvard or Cambridge.

You're gonna save the world.

You're gonna be-

Yeah

... you know, a person that fixes everything.

And yes, your life will be meaningful and, and, you know, easy and, on some level.

Um, and so it's, you know, people try to distance themselves.

And so there's a lot of difficulty integrating and owning what that word means because we all wanna come across as like, it doesn't mean what you think it means.

It doesn't mean that I am better than you or smarter than you or more capable than you.

What it does mean is that somewhere in the way that I developed as a human being, the way my neurophysiology interacts with the world, it was way out of the norm.

It was accelerated in certain areas, and again, behind in others.

There was those gaps.

So, you know, my, my co- I quote this all the time.

My colleague, uh, Jen Merrill, works with gifted as well, and she wrote a book called "If This Is a Gift, Can I Send It Back?" Which I think is the perfect- [chuckles]

What a fabulous title.

Isn't, isn't that good? Right?

We're gonna put that in the show notes to have-

Sh-

... people to have a look at.