Consult — Gifted Nuance

Consult/Coaching

Gifted consult/coaching is a cognitively-focused yet emotionally-present conversation. It moves forth from the background, stories and growth-momentum you bring to our conversation. I bring into our discussion context-clarifying knowledge, case examples, explorative questions and advice.

The dynamic of this kind of session is unique, and it’s hard to find an exact analogy of it from relationships that we are more familiar with in life. I find that gifted people (myself included) tend not to enjoy purely question-driven coaching except occasionally, finding it overall too slow. Instead they prefer dialogues that allow deeper cognitive dives (could be intellectually-cognitive, emotional-cognitive, creative-cognitive, perceptual-cognitive dives, etc.), integrating context along the way that they could use to come to their individual conclusions without exchanging back-and-forth on every point. To start to develop a sense of the dynamics of this blended approach of consult/coaching, I’d suggest picturing a medium point between experiencing tutoring and experiencing support for self-tutoring.

What happens in a session and between sessions?

A. Thinking together: complex pattern discovery, life theme apperception, hypothesis-exploration, introspection, mindset finetuning; questions or advice responding to your situation; weaving “why”, “what is” and “how to”.

B. Resource development: finding or developing external resources such as knowledge, tools and practices that you can try in the near-future timeframe. To respect client autonomy, I like to be mostly non-directive about applying resources, but this direction is available to lesser or greater extent if fitting and desired. Furthermore, resource development can also mean inner resources such as your giftedness and over-excitability traits.

C. Future growth: trying out mindsets and resources from our session in your personal time when you feel ready. If needed or desired, try emotional integration practices to help propogate the cognitive-genic change from our session to more levels in your system.

When connecting the above steps into a cycle, the overall goal of gifted consult/coaching comes into clarity. It’s to illuminate or reach deeper into your self-knowledge, to grow fuller sympathy for the unique, non-replicable qualities of your mind and guide them towards constructive outlets, to strengthen your connection to your proto-natal values and truths, to grow toward (or rediscover) versions of these values & truths that are more life-affirming and more subtle, and when the time is ripe, to cultivate & sustain channels in real life to express these.

I further condense this consult/coaching process as the following: the development of enactable personal wisdom, enriched by an understanding of the realistic, longer-term needs of your gifted self.

The more implicit, longer-term goal of this process is for you to genuinely develop into your own, giftedness-informed friend and companion. This may be realized within the duration of working with a coachly/mentorly person, or it may be realized in its natural timeline when favorable factors accumulate and align.

In sessions I support you to explore your experience through a range of lenses:

Personal trajectory:

the complex challenges and fortunes when growing up as a gifted person
the developmental synergy between giftedness, temperament and other individual qualities
time-saving identification of gifted lines-of-reasoning & giftedness-based expectations that tend not to pay off
giftedness-informed evaluation of personal choices or institutional choices, fluidly through short-, medium- or long-term lenses
dynamically and systematically guiding oneself through giftedness-informed social-emotional & intellectual re-development (can be compared with concepts such as “second childhood”/“second adolescence”)
emergence of individualized views on longer-term life-satisfaction, especially views that involve a growth mindset
lifespan personal development, with an awareness about a complex range of gifted desires, potencies, complications and self-undoings

Special interest:

topics on generalization (polymathy development) and specialization (domain-expertise development), and the cross-section thereof
broad-spectrum creative expression for gifted adults
navigating relationships across giftedness ranges & foster a constructive mindset
the sensory-perceptive dimension of daily experience and identity-formation
the dynamic balance and integration of personal drives, social values and existential values

Special population:

topics for self-awareness-driven high-achievers
topics for highly, exceptionally and profoundly gifted adults (commonly corresponding to 3 standard deviations beyond population average, inferred from qualitative or quantitative assessments)

Consult/coaching may be potent for you if you thrive in both an interpersonal and intra-personal learning style and benefit from personalized, differentiated discussion. With the exception of specialized issues which I have some familiarity with but don’t solely focus on (such as culture, micro-culture, health concerns, age-specific groups etc.), I don’t consider myself as having a dedicated niche and support people from diverse backgrounds for as long as our range of activated interest overlap.

To book a session, please message me at info@giftednuance.com. With your message, please be sure to share a bit about your personal background and what you believe you’d like to discuss in sessions - a brief summary works great. It's not necessary to mention achievements or eminance, but you are welcome to mention them if they pertain to the things you’d like to explore. Please be sure to mention your time zone and preferred time frame (how many weeks or months into the future, what days work better for you) so I’m able to locate the most convenient time for both of us - I’m located in California, U.S. My rate is $165/hour.

*Important awareness about consult/coaching work vs therapy-level work:

Consult/coaching can complement therapy-level work but doesn’t replace it. Sometimes consult/coaching can catalyze a person to pursue therapy-level work: after they experience an above-threshold amount of interpersonal mirroring on a giftedness plane, they free up more faith to complete the hard work of therapy-level healing.

What is therapy-level work? I’ve constructed a definition that seeks to describe the shared goal of a range of therapy approaches, from talk therapy to somatic therapy:

Deliberate practice that systematically transforms formative memories that were once imbued with negative or overwhelming emotions and became toxified and stagnant, eventually rendering these memories tolerable-to-neutral. The function of the self is also optimized in this process. Beforehand, the self-function leans towards distorted, conflictual, disorganized, fragile, rigid and unstable. In the process of successful therapy-level work, it moves towards: unparadoxical, coherent, organized, robust, supple and stable. If surface behavioral change is the goal, positive change can happen quite quickly. For deep-reaching, long-lasting change in the structure and the homeostasis of the psyche, the process is usually much longer.

If you are currently experiencing notable psychological challenges while also resonating with the goals of gifted consult/coaching described on this page, it's best to still first secure professional support in mental health from a variety of therapy approaches available. If professional support in mental health is not availlable for various reasons (such as finance, goodness-of-fit, interpersonal safety), be sure to secure access to high-quality methods of self-therapy that work for you.

The psychological foundation ideally wants to be solid or near its final phase of becoming solid, otherwise gifted self-work is unlikely to stabilize for long or progress in a smooth way. Sometimes, though, it does appear to progress, or actually does progress, but the progress can risk getting folded into the personality in a premature, unconstructive way, due to a dynamic that I can describe as “gifted-self-identity-driven bypassing” (aren’t there so many ways of bypassing that we humans can engage in!). Giftedness is a vitalizing and uplifting lens through which to relate to oneself - not only is it practical and useful, but it can also symbolize thus connect us to the pure, high-potential and wise aspects of ourselves. However, there are other levels of self-work that need to be involved, too - maybe not all at once, but at some point - if a deeper level of integration and alignment is sought.

Still, I believe some gifted self-work can be constructive at this stage, especially if your goal is to nurture awareness of your gifted needs and use it to guide your self-care choices, or if sessions take place at longer intervals as a general learning aid.

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