Adults With High Abilities, What Are They Like?

Highly gifted or gifted adults don’t always know they are. By spending their childhood in an atypical way, it is common for them to reach maturity feeling excluded, disconnected from an unstimulating, rigid and monotonous reality. Not all of these brilliant-minded people achieve career success and even happiness.

Calvin Coolidge, who was the 30th president of the United States, used to say that the greatest problem in society is that he is not given the opportunity to demonstrate his true potential. Almost 100 years have passed since that phrase was uttered. However, this same problem continues to exist despite all the scientific, social and psychological advances.

Thus, figures such as Carol S. Dweck, professor of psychology at Stanford, point out that many of us continue to think that intelligent people are almost guaranteed success. However, something that is frequently observed is that gifted adults as well as gifted children live with the eternal feeling that “there is something wrong with them.”

In their day to day, they only appreciate dissonances. Contradictions between what they feel and what others express. Distances between what they seek and what is offered to them. In turn, they experience that the world is too rigid and structured, and their minds are excessively curious, defiant, and nonconformist.

All these internal realities define, on average, those adults with high capacities who continue to need adequate guidance, effective mechanisms to build a more satisfactory life.

Characteristics of gifted adults

There is one aspect that we must clarify first. There is no cause-effect reality that shows us aspects such as that all gifted children will be unhappy adults or successful adults who enjoy a high index of well-being.

As with any person, everything depends on the environment, on a more or less affective upbringing, on whether they have received adequate curricular adaptations at school, on whether they have suffered bullying or have had a childhood with a favorable social circle.

Thus, gifted adults make their lives what they really can, based on their personal circumstances. One thing to keep in mind, however, is that if we don’t nurture these rare gifts early, they may not flourish to their full potential.

• Not identifying the student with high competencies is an obstacle for everyone to achieve professional and personal fulfillment. Furthermore, society itself also loses incredible potential.
• If we do not give them the means, if we do not facilitate their path by giving them adequate support, many will not have access  to those scientific or artistic careers where they would surely facilitate multiple advances to our world.

Let’s see below what characteristics tend to define adults with high capacities.

Dissatisfaction with not meeting your expectations

Highly skilled adults can occupy well-positioned jobs. They may have a job to earn a living from. However,  there is something wrong, something that goes out of tune in that lack of goals, monotonous and gray everyday life.

• His mind is full of high goals. They are very demanding people who collide with that reality that is too structured and not stimulating.
• This often leads to problems with their co-workers, with their superiors. What they experienced often in their school years is repeated again. They are those people who ask challenging questions, those that nobody understands and that they label as hyperactive, weird, nonconformist …

High emotional sensitivity

Gifted adults have a long history of disappointment. They are profiles with high values, with a very marked sense of justice. These dimensions often cause them to feel frustrated by a reality that does not fit their schemes.

• It is common for them to make an effort to hide their suffering. May they long to lock it up, silenced layer after layer. However, sometimes when disappointment reappears, the pain instantly surfaces the feelings.

• Whether they want it or not, they are profiles with a high sensitivity, hence at the very least they feel hurt, cheated, and live in an emotional wheel where they go from effusiveness to sadness in a very short time.

Need to connect deeply with other people

Studies such as those published in the journal  Behavioral Science, and carried out by Dr. Francis Heylighen, give us an exhaustive summary of those everyday problems that gifted adults encounter.

Thus, an idea that is often taken for granted – when it does not correspond to reality – is that this personality lacks social skills. Let us think that in many cases they have grown up surrounded by people with little likeness. For profiles that did not share their interests, who did not see the world in the same way. This has made it difficult for them to be able to socialize with the quality that they needed.

As they reach adulthood, they continue to experience social gaps. They crave that emotional and above all intellectual connection, where passions draw the same goals. Where interests share the same spaces in which complicity runs, the need to learn and challenge the established, to contribute something more to the world …

Personality traits of gifted adults

In them we can find as many personality configurations as in the rest of the population. Well, there are shy people among them, but also extroverted, people in need of achievement and also without it, or people open to aesthetics or not so much.

On the other hand, if we take the model on the most recognized personality traits (Goldberg’s big five), composed of the following traits: neuroticism, openness, extraversion, responsibility and affability, we can find a certain tendency in people with intellectual giftedness.

That said, we found that gifted adults:

• They tend to score high levels in neuroticism, that is, high emotionality.
• High openness to novelty, mainly in Ideas, often also in fantasy, feelings and values.
• Low levels of gregariousness, a component of extraversion that indicates that they enjoy being alone and that they do not seek too much social stimuli.

However, it is important to emphasize that personality is nothing more than a trans-situational pattern of behavior, thought and emotion that is relatively stable over time that explains how we perceive reality, the judgments we make about it, or the way we interact with the environment.

And since the source of thought, emotion and behavior is the brain itself, it is not surprising that for gifted people, their high intelligence is actually a central axis around which their personality pivots. That is, they perceive, think and feel differently from the normal population.

To conclude, as we can see, this group of our society continues to need many answers, strategies and changes. Early detection in children, as well as that psychological support in adults, can facilitate the way for them not only so that they can be carried out based on their personal expectations. The most important thing is that they achieve well-being, happiness.