Meet “recovering social misfit” & communication coach Craig Gustafson

When Kaitlin Smith and I sat down to unravel the complex world of giftedness and twice-exceptionality (2e), our conversation ventured deep into the heart of what it means to be labeled 'gifted,' particularly for those navigating the dual challenges of exceptional intellect and being part of a minority. Kaitlin shares her battle against the stereotypes that sought to undermine her journey during her studies in psychotherapy. This episode promises to be a beacon for anyone who's felt too intense, too passionate, or simply too much for the mainstream narrative.

The path to self-empowerment is often obscured by the fog of cultural misconceptions. A moment of stark confrontation during Kaitlin's psychotherapeutic training brought the issues of race and identity to the forefront, leading to the creation of Our Wild Minds. This venture seeks to celebrate and uplift gifted and BIPOC adults. Our discussion peels back the layers of cultural competency, urging a move beyond broad-stroke assumptions to embrace the unique stories that shape every individual's experience. Join us as we confront these issues head-on, championing the rich interior lives of those who don't fit comfortably into society's predefined boxes (or dare I say stereotypes).

Our final thoughts cluster around the creation of sanctuaries for underrepresented voices, specifically black adults in the gifted community. Kaitlin shines a light on the Our Wild Minds Community and the Black Brilliant Circle, spaces designed to offer refuge and fellowship for gifted adults of color. Inspired by the work of Dr. Joy Lawson Davis and Dr. Donna Ford, these platforms offer twice-weekly calls, networking opportunities, and a guided journey to help members navigate giftedness and racial trauma. By sharing these stories and resources, we hope to offer a tapestry of support that recognizes the full spectrum of giftedness, fostering inclusive environments where intellectual and emotional growth can thrive.

https://www.ourwildminds.com/

Would you like to work with me 1:1 as your gifted and 2e coach? Please send me an email at hello@giftedunleashe.com or find more information about my coaching offer on my website giftedunleashe.com/coaching

https://www.giftedunleashed.com

Feeling misunderstood or out of place can be a common experience for twice-exceptional (2e) individuals. This episode of Gifted Unleashed welcomes Julie Skolnick, author of "Gifted and Distractible," to shed light on the unique challenges faced by this remarkable group. Driven by self-love and understanding, Julie navigates us through the wide spectrum of conditions under the 2e umbrella and the importance of focusing on the strengths of these individuals.

Through an enriching conversation, we delve into the fascinating concept of 'masking', a coping mechanism often adopted by 2e individuals. Julie generously shares her "cycle for success" and provides a checklist that can help you find professionals who truly understand and support 2e individuals. We also discuss her much-anticipated book dedicated to adults in the 2e community, a beacon of hope and understanding for many.

Julie's passion for supporting and advocating for 2e individuals is further reflected in her website, withunderstandingcomescalm.com, offering free resources and a membership program for 2e adults. She also shares her upcoming course for parents, a priceless resource for those seeking guidance. As we round off our discussion, Julie emphasizes the importance of validating effort over outcomes or external motivation, a mantra not only for 2e individuals but applicable to all. So, join us on this journey of understanding and loving the twice exceptional individuals in our lives. Don't forget to follow the podcast, leave a review, and stay connected with our newsletter for all things Gifted Unleashed.

WithUnderstandingComesCalm.com
GiftedandDistractible.com
The Hay Stack A community for 2e adults

Would you like to work with me 1:1 as your gifted and 2e coach? Please send me an email at hello@giftedunleashe.com or find more information about my coaching offer on my website giftedunleashe.com/coaching

https://www.giftedunleashed.com

Ever felt like a square peg in a round hole? Maybe it's not you, maybe it's your giftedness. I, Nadja, once wrestled with this notion, but through my journey of self-discovery, I've come to embrace my giftedness and ADHD, viewing them as unique strengths rather than limitations. Join me on this exciting journey of Gifted Unleashed, where we talk about personal experiences of how we navigate the world as gifted and 2e individuals.

The Gifted Unleashed podcast is not just about me and my guests sharing our stories. It's a platform for all of us to connect, support, and be our authentic selves. I'm thrilled to announce the relaunch of our space, where we'll explore thought-provoking topics that challenge stereotypes and stigma surrounding giftedness and twice exceptionality. Here's a little teaser for you: the upcoming episodes include an intriguing conversation with Julie Skolnick about her book "Gifted and Distractable". So, gear up for some insightful dialogues that promise to inspire and enlighten your perspectives about giftedness.

https://www.mytrudesign.com

Would you like to work with me 1:1 as your gifted and 2e coach? Please send me an email at hello@giftedunleashe.com or find more information about my coaching offer on my website giftedunleashe.com/coaching

https://www.giftedunleashed.com

Eshwari is a young woman who grew up in India, feeling out of place and intense. She learned about giftedness and Overexcitabilities through the Unleash Monday podcast and got inspired to learn more about the topic and is on her journey of finding her way in the space and field of neurodiversity.

TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Your job title doesn't define you
• Currently there is no gifted psychologist in India (yet!)
• (Existential) Depression is not just in your head! And you need support from like minded minded is critical.
• Gifted brains are not better but they are wired differently from the majority.
• Overexcitabilites are your supper powers, not a faults!
• Learning about your own (gifted) needs is essential and existential! Giftedness needs are not about being smarter but it is about being able to live according to your values.
• Gifted people usually doubt that they are gifted in the beginning. It is not something that is obvious or comfortable to embrace.
• As a gifted person we try and do a lot of things, make sure you don’t overwhelm yourself with tasks.
• Take take to recharge! Make sure your energy level as a gifted person does not run low.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

If you would like to send Eshwari a message, you can send it to hello@unleashmonday.com, I will pass it forward.

Julia Cameron’s book The Artist’s Way 

More about Overexcitabilites in episode 33 with Chris Well

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Would you like to work with me 1:1 as your gifted and 2e coach? Please send me an email at hello@giftedunleashe.com or find more information about my coaching offer on my website giftedunleashe.com/coaching

https://www.giftedunleashed.com

Ludmila N. Praslova, Ph.D., SHRM-SCP uses her extensive experience with global, cultural, demographic, and ability diversity to help create inclusive and equitable workplaces. She is a Professor of Psychology and the founding Director of Graduate Programs in Industrial-Organizational Psychology at Vanguard University of Southern California. Prior to her academic career, she built and led successful intercultural relations programs in global organizations. Her current consulting is focused on supporting organizations in creating systemic inclusion informed by an understanding of neurodiversity. Her other areas of expertise include organizational culture assessment and change, workplace justice and civility, and training and training evaluation. She is a contributor to Fast Company, Harvard Business Review and SHRM blog, the editor of the upcoming book “Evidence-Based Organizational Practices for Diversity, Inclusion, Belonging and Equity” (Cambridge Scholars), and the editor of upcoming special issue of the Consulting Psychology Journal: Practice and Research on Disability inclusion in the workplace: From “accommodation” to inclusive organizational design.

TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Diversity at work includes different aspects such as race, gender but also neurodiversity.
• Autism Autism Doesn’t Hold People Back at Work. Discrimination Does. (HRB)
• The unemployment rate amongst college graduates with Autism in the US is 85 %! The discrimination might not be intentional but it is systemic!
• If you met one Autistic person, you have met one Autistic person.
• There is a misconception that autistic people are not empathic. However, autistic people might be so overwhelmed with empathy that they don’t have energy to express it or it might be too overwhelming to express.
• Autistic people might develop trauma patterns due to the way people react to them over and over again.
• Having an Autistic diagnosis can be empowering and helpful for self advocacy.
• Moral injury can happen at work and we need to address it! This might be more prevalent in neurodivergent people. Sign up for the newsletter to be updated on the results on the study!
• Even if you didn’t now things earlier, you know now and you can implement and change from this day forward! Your life experience is what it is and now you can move from this point forward!

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Connect and learn more about Ludmila and her work on LinkedIn | Twitter

Organizational Psychology at Vanguard University

Read her articles: Autism does’t hold people back at work. Discrimination does. - Harvard Business Review | Neurodivergent people make great leaders, not just employees - Fast Company |

Would you like to work with me 1:1 as your gifted and 2e coach? Please send me an email at hello@giftedunleashe.com or find more information about my coaching offer on my website giftedunleashe.com/coaching

https://www.giftedunleashed.com

Dr. Sarabeth Berk is the leading expert on hybrid professional identity, and a hybrid professional herself. She was featured in Forbes, and is a TEDx speaker, author of More Than My Title, and recipient of a Colorado Inno on Fire award for her innovative work. Her hybrid title is Creative Disruptor because she works at the intersection of being an artist, researcher, educator, and designer.

Through groundbreaking research, Sarabeth developed a one-of-a-kind approach that takes personal branding and career development to a whole new level. Today, she helps professionals discover and articulate their hybrid professional identity and unique value in the workforce. As a result, her clients feel more seen, empowered and confident, and teams recognize each other as more than their job titles, valuing the critical yet different roles of experts, generalists, and hybrids in the workforce.

TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE:

• What is your professional identity? This is different from your job title!
• There are three different types of worker identities: 
  • Singularity: Single professional identity
  • Multiplicity: Having many different but separate professional identities
  • Hybrid: Having intersections of different professional identities which form a new identity (as a result from reintegration via Debrowski’s positive disintegration)
• Having a hybrid career personality is common in gifted people
• It takes a bit of work to identify your primary set of identities vs. your non primary identities (secondary and tertiary identities)
• Vann Diagrams help to visualize and understand the intersectionalities of your hybrid professional identity
• You have the permission to have a hybrid professional identity!
• We go through multiple cycles of (career) identities throughout our lives: Phases of explorations followed by achievements of a certain identity.
• a/r/t (artist, researcher, teacher)
• Hybridity is a choice and it is developmental.
• Work is like a three legged stool: 
  • 1. Knowing your passion 
  • 2. Your purpose, why you do what you do 
  • 3. Your identity, who are you when you fallow your passion and purpose.
• You need to make sense of yourself first! No one is going to make sense for you. Especially in the gifted space. 
• Prefixes:
  • Intra discipline = single
  • Cross  and multi disciplinary = separate
  • Inter (between) and trans (beyond) disciplinary = hybridity

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Learn more about Sarabeth Berk and her work: morethanmytitle.com | TEDx Talk

Connect on Instagram: @morethanmytitle | LinkedIn

Venn Diagram

Learn more about Dabrowski’s theories: Episode 33

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Would you like to work with me 1:1 as your gifted and 2e coach? Please send me an email at hello@giftedunleashe.com or find more information about my coaching offer on my website giftedunleashe.com/coaching

https://www.giftedunleashed.com

Colin Seale was born and raised in Brooklyn, NY, where struggles in his upbringing gave birth to his passion for educational equity. Tracked early into gifted and talented programs, Colin was afforded opportunities his neighborhood peers were not. Using lessons from his experience as a math teacher, later as an attorney, and now as a keynote speaker, contributor to Forbes and author of Thinking Like a Lawyer: A Framework for Teaching Critical Thinking to All Students and Tangible Equity: A Guide for Leveraging Student Identity, Culture, and Power to Unlock Excellence In and Beyond the Classroom, Colin founded thinkLaw, to help educators leverage inquiry-based instructional strategies to close the critical thinking gap and ensure they teach and reach all students, regardless of race, zip code or what side of the poverty line they are born into. In 2021, Colin launched The BEE Project, a non-profit organization redefining who qualifies as gifted and who gets to teach gifted children by inspiring, training, and certifying Black and Latinx educators to equitably design and lead gifted programs. These programs identify and meet the unique needs of brilliant Black and Latinx children and their families who have been overlooked and underestimated by our current system. When he’s not serving as the world’s most fervent critical thinking advocate, Colin proudly serves as the world’s greatest entertainer to his two young children.

TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE:

• We are all neurodivergent. But some of us are part of the outliers.
• Children can have behavioural challenges because they are not being challenged at school! 
• The order of being identified can have a big impact of how we get support! 
• The label doesn’t matter, the support matters!
• High achieving is not the same as being gifted.
• It’s not about the achievement, it’s about the performance of the achievement!
• Critical thinking skills is crucial but we treat it like a luxury good! What if we gave all kids access to critical thinking?
• Recognising that none of our learning was actually objective.
• Although brilliance is distributed equally, opportunity is not!
• Doing right is more important than being right!
• We came to normalise inequity
• There is no master plan.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Learn more about Coline Seale and ThinkLaw here: thinklaw.us and raisingcriticalthinkers.us

Follow Colin on Twitter @ColinESeale @thinkLawUS | Instagram @ColinSeale @thinkLawUS | facebook thinklawUS and the facebook group tangibleequity | LinkedIn Colin Seale and his company ThinkLaw

Colin Seale’s books: Thinking like a Lawyer and

Would you like to work with me 1:1 as your gifted and 2e coach? Please send me an email at hello@giftedunleashe.com or find more information about my coaching offer on my website giftedunleashe.com/coaching

https://www.giftedunleashed.com

Alice Bauer was born under the zodiac sign of Virgo and she is an orderly and organized type of person by nature. She is curious, inquisitive and likes to develop herself in all areas of life. Her interests are wide-ranging, including yoga, travel, art and music, but she is particularly fond of interior design. Already in her childhood she was constantly browsing through her mother's home magazines only to rearrange and reorganize her room afterwards. In 2007 she graduated university as an interior designer.

In spring 2017, she had a very enriching, life-changing experience decluttering her life by listening to the audiobook "The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up" by Marie Kondo. While she had a wonderful, beautifully decorated apartment and had accumulated all sorts of possessions from the various decades of her life so far, she still always felt like she was living like a student, not like an adult.  She wanted to live the way she had always dreamed of: like a lady. She decided to give her apartment a drastic detox. Within two weeks, she took every single item she owned into her hands and examined it for its importance in her future. She has parted with half of her belongings and it still feels great! She wanted to give others this revelation of satisfaction and order in their lives and therefore she completed the KonMari Consultant Trainee Course in Los Angeles in 2017. She is now officially a Certified Master KonMari™ Consultant and is working in Switzerland and Austria.

TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Tidying is an act of self love. The process of tidying can support you to figure out who you want to be and what brings you joy in your life.
• Tidying can be a form of meditation.
• Most people do not ask themselves how they want to live in their space. Create a vision to help you stay focused and motivated to get through the tidying festival.
• The KonMari Method™ is simple but not easy. It follows 6 basic principles: Commit yourself to tidying, start by creating a vision, declutter first, tidy by category not location, follow the right order and always make the decision based on the question does it “spark joy?
• Tidying helps you to get to know who you are. In order to love yourself you need to embrace all sides of you, the good and the ugly.
• Tidying can be freeing and empowering.
• If you need support, hire a tidying coach!
• Sometimes chaos is needed for a creative process. But sometimes we need to tidy in order to organize our thoughts. Understanding where the balance lies for you is the goal.
• Only keep in your home and in your life what “sparks joy”, let go of all the rest! Life is too short!

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

konali.ch | Alice on instagram

The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up by Marie Kondo

Atomic Habits by James Clear | The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron | Bullet Journal by Ryder Carroll

Messy - How To be Creative and Resilient

Would you like to work with me 1:1 as your gifted and 2e coach? Please send me an email at hello@giftedunleashe.com or find more information about my coaching offer on my website giftedunleashe.com/coaching

https://www.giftedunleashed.com

Ilana Grostern is a Montreal-based Self-Attunement and Somatic Coach. Her early career took her from graphic design to the launch of a sustainable business venture – a cloth diaper company that she ran for fifteen years. Her sensorial over-excitability attuned her to the needs of the body, leading her to pursue a certification as Canada’s first Whole30 coach. 

TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE:

• People who don’t know about their own giftedness lack information about themselves.
• Lack of self-understanding leads to frustration and being misunderstood. Therefore, it’s important to know who we are in order to have a better relationship with ourselves but also with others. 
• The giftedness theme is completely missing from the mainstream. 
• The giftedness angle gives a lot of clarity in the coaching realm.
• Somatic coaching is about healing the somatic-mind (Cartesian) split. No more “I think, therefore I am!”
• A lot of chronic illnesses in the gifted population due to the resonance between the body and mind.
• Ilana shows you to value neutral experiences of the body (soma) and map out what’s in the physical realm.
• The mind is a “meaning making machine”! The mind will jump to mental conclusion about the body from learned paste experiences without actually tuning in. We need to break this jumping to conclusion cycle.
• You are encouraged to flip the right with the left side! Ilana gives you the space to try new things without making you feel stupid.
• Coaching is about accepting where you are in this moment and learning a new way of doing something.
• The parents need to feel and relate to what their children go through. We start with our own healing first before we can support anyone else.
• People who are in chronic survival mode, are dis-regulated and might feel overwhelmed by this approach. 
• Learning to increase the tolerance in the uncomfortable somatic moments will allow you to learn what the body is trying to tell you.

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

ilanagrostern.com

Ilana Grostern on instagram | facebook and LinkedIn

PDF “Gifted people and their problems” by Francis Heylighen

Overexcitabilities (OEs)

Mind-body dualism

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Would you like to work with me 1:1 as your gifted and 2e coach? Please send me an email at hello@giftedunleashe.com or find more information about my coaching offer on my website giftedunleashe.com/coaching

https://www.giftedunleashed.com

Bayo Moses has 8+ years as a Book Coach and Developmental Editor. When he's not looking into manuscripts, you can find him on Google Meet catching fun as a personal development coach. He shares his story growing up neurodivergent in rural Northern Nigeria and how he learned about autism in adulthood. 

TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE:

• Bayo could not connect with his peers in school but was able to connect with older people.
• Realising there is nothing wrong with yourself but with your audience. 
• Sometimes there is nothing wrong with you but with the teaching method.
• A hearing issue can be a sensory processing difference.
• Being neurodivergent is not a curse, being neurodivergent is not a problem that need fixing! It is not a disease that needs curing!
• Not fitting in socially can be a pain but can also work to your advantage! It depends on how you approach it.
• Being neurodivergent can be your personal super power!
• The journey of self-awareness is not about happiness, it is about helping yourself!
• The presentation of your story needs to be simple and audience centred! The idea might be simple but the impact can be profoundly. 
• We don’t need to balance things! Things are already balanced, we simply need to find what the balance is.
• You are OK the way you are! There is nothing wrong with you. 
• Your happiness does not depend on social approval. 
• Purpose Driven Self-Awareness: The best way to help yourself is to help others!
• Social experiences the same but the personal experience is divergent for autistic people
• Let’s Talk 2e adults’ conference is the first of it’s kind you can purchase access forever, use my affiliate link

MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:

Connect with Bayo on LinkedIn

Book The Gifted Adult by Mary-Elaine Jacobsen

Join the Let’s talk 2e adult conference with my affiliate link here

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Would you like to work with me 1:1 as your gifted and 2e coach? Please send me an email at hello@giftedunleashe.com or find more information about my coaching offer on my website giftedunleashe.com/coaching

https://www.giftedunleashed.com