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Gifted Neurodivergence: Twice Exceptional, Twice To Give
Episode 6 • 5th September 2024 • Spark Launch: Neurodiversity Ignited • SparkLaunch.org
00:00:00 01:12:20

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In this episode, Mike and Chaya chat with Youssef Sleiman, a neurodivergent writer and gifted individual. Yousef details his personal journey with understanding 2e (Twice Exceptional), how he leverages his differently thinking brain to the cause of neurodiversity, the transformative power of storytelling on self-discovery, and deep dives the neuroscience behind Twice Exceptionality.

We Also Cover:

  • The Folly of IQ Tests
  • Misconceptions of Neurodivergent Intellect
  • Tips for Identifying 2e
  • The Reality of Giftedness vs Media Portrayals
  • Brain Structures and Functions
  • Trauma and Neurological Changes
  • Developmental Psychology

Quotes:

  • "Their neurodivergence is so far from the neurotypical that the things that they are processing and trying to work through -- types of existential questions or types of physiological questions."
  • "There's no coincidence that most young adult literature works this way, where you have a protagonist who's starting off seemingly normal, but things are a little bit hard for them."
  • "I do distinctly remember there being an ongoing tension where my teachers would know this about me, would have seen a score on file and been told, 'his mother doesn't want him in these the classes, so stretch him in any way you can.'"
  • "In a in a typical brain, there's a certain amount of gray matter, how many however many ounces in the fMRI scans and in autopsies. There's a greater amount of gray matter in gifted brains."

About Youssef:

Youssef Sleiman, a 2e neurodivergent professional writer, combines creativity, AI tools, and SEO expertise to make important topics engaging. As a former copywriter for top brands, Youssef harnessed tools like Frase, ChatGPT, and Google’s AI to analyze search rankings and create high-performing articles and blog posts. His unique blend of left-brain and right-brain strengths ensures cutting-edge content. Drawing from his experience as a newspaper reporter, Youssef’s problem-solving skills enhance his work as a copywriter, resulting in informative and engaging campaigns.

Connect With Youssef:

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As always, thanks for lending us your ears and keep igniting that spark!

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Transcripts

Speaker:

You've landed at Spark Launch, the guide star for embracing what it means to be neurodiverse.

Speaker:

I'm Mike Cornell, joined by CEO of Spark Launch, Chaya Mallavaram.

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Here, we navigate mental health triumphs and tribulations from all across the spectrum, charting a course of the shared experiences that unite us, and discovering how to embody the unique strengths within neurodivergent and neurotypical alike, igniting your spark and launching it into a better tomorrow.

Speaker:

Hello, everyone.

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I'm Mike.

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I'm Chaya.

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We are joined today by the quirky, wordy, lightning fast keyboard, Youseff Sleiman, who is a neurodivergent professional who tells stories for a living.

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He sets editorial direction and writes for a national brand, consults on AI based SEO strategies, works as a co admin to an online community for gifted and twice exceptional adults, and coaches gifted curious individuals with the bright insight support network.

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Welcome to the show, Yousef.

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It's it's good to have you here.

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Thank you.

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Thank you for hosting me.

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And, yeah, thank you for hosting me generously while I am such a quirky individual.

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So if I do anything super surprising, let me know.

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We love quirkiness around here.

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What I what stood out to me in the word story.

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And before we go into what stories you're sharing, I wanna know we wanna know all about your story and your journey.

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Oh, absolutely.

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Well, I'll skip the Steve Martin joke of way back when I was a young girl.

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So I am a former newspaper reporter.

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And for most of my life, I have driven toward creating stories or being a storyteller in some way.

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And presently working as a professional at that at that national brand, I bring a lot of story focused life.

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When I was a really young kid, I came out of very term traumatic and turbulent household.

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And one of the things that I started doing to create sense, to make meaning out of my world was recognizing story.

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Loved movies, I loved the way that anyone could share a story and it created meaning.

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And I saw that other people were using story and even as a little guy, I was recognizing that if I told a story in a certain way, I could get adults to laugh.

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I could connect with other peers.

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And they didn't necessarily connect back with me in the same way, but story was a way of understanding the world.

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And so I went full bore into studying it.

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And from the age of I was in 3rd grade, and I was like, this this is what I kind of wanna do.

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This is me.

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And studying story, you wind up becoming a kind of stud a student of psychology.

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Good psychology makes for great story.

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And great stories really rely on accurate psychology.

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So it's in a way, that's what makes some of the most memorable characters spring to life.

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And even when it comes to the melodramatic stories like Star Wars, the original series or the original trilogy, it was very much melodrama, but the intact accurate psychology in play was what hooked me when I was a kid and then kept me a fan for however long.

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And, yeah, today I'm a little bit more of a Star Trek guy, but that journey was what led me into finding my degree as an English major, wanting to become a adult fiction writer, and then doing more young adult fiction writing on the side, and then realizing, oh, well, I could actually make a living doing the journalism thing.

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So let me try that.

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And that brings me back full circle to today.

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Using story was how I processed the world.

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But, of course, part of everyone's part of most stories include rediscovering a lot about yourself.

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When I was in kindergarten by the 1st day of kindergarten, my teacher pulled me aside after watching me stare at a numbers chart and said, hey, can I ask you something?

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All the other kids have been moved into other seats, but can you count to 100?

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1st day of kindergarten, she just watched me staring at this thing.

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And I did.

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Can you count to 100 by fives, by tens?

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And I did.

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And I did by threes, by 4 by threes and by twos.

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And she was like, oh, okay.

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I have an appointment we should schedule.

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And that became like a first my first experience with getting identified where somebody in public school said, okay.

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Let me sit down with you.

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And when I was a kid, it was the middle early to mid eighties, and you can look up what gifted and talented programs looked like at that time.

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But I sat down across from a, like, a diagnostician, maybe a psychologist.

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I'm not sure exactly what their what the standard for diagnosticians in schools are, but I knew that if I scored well enough on this test, I would be potentially moved into a higher grade or put into a different program or all those things.

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The way that my story turned out because of that turbulent home life that I've mentioned earlier, and my mom had been a part of a gifted program when she was a kid.

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She was like, it's going to be a lot of exercise, a lot of work.

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It's more worksheets.

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It's stress.

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You don't seem to need stress in your life.

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She would witness me as this kid who was very quiet, very passionate or very compassionate listening to everybody, and then nervously, like, itching his legs under the table or jittering his hands.

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And just like, Okay, let's not do gifted and talented for him.

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Now, I passed, I got in on that first assessment from, like, the 1st week of kindergarten, but I didn't hear that.

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I didn't know that.

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It had somehow been right past me that I got in and that this was a thing that is true about me.

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Instead, I actively walked around with this false negative, you didn't get in.

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So all these other kids who got pulled into the gifted and talented program were able to say, well, we are.

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Why aren't you?

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What is this well, gifted and talented and how we approach that has changed.

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And I say we in the mental health community, that has changed quite a bit.

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And I I mean mental health, like mental yeah.

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Psychology experts, people who study how brains work.

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Like, the way that that has evolved since the early to mid sixties through the eighties, a lot has changed by the year 2000.

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Now we're talking about neurodiversity and neurodivergent and it's more common to and I say, it's a more common concept, but not as many people recognize it, but the idea of a whole person neurodivergent experience.

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Because when I was a kid, it was like, oh, you're gifted.

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What and I'll explain a little bit about what that means specifically because I don't think it's just shifts your brain's perspective and makes you diverge from the standard brain.

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Well, that gave me a little bit of insight when I was a much younger kid.

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It also means I can do worksheets like crazy.

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I saw a funny meme where it was like a long list of very simple multiplication problems, and I was and the caption on it is, like, yeah.

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I used to dust every kid in school when it came to these.

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Yeah.

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I can do, like, 29 little simple math problems.

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It was, of course, fun.

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You don't think that that little the thing that makes that possible might also affect how you view your appearance in the world, might change how you view relationships, might change what kind of information you pick up when somebody shares the latest rumor?

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Your perspective diverges wildly.

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So, like, I I think I've shared a lot about my story, but I haven't shared in the details.

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I was born in Birmingham, Alabama, moved around a whole lot.

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My dad was an aeronautical engineer, and my brother today is an aeronautical engineer.

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And so I grew up traveling quite a bit.

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And then after my parents' divorce in the late nineties, mid nineties, went on to high school and finished my degree at University of North Texas, English degree, yay, composition and writing and worked as a newspaper reporter in the Pacific Northwest.

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Are there any other parts of my story that I have not yet shared that I probably should?

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So many.

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My ADHD brain is going with, like, where what do I ask next?

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What do I the it's so fascinating.

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So, one thing I wanna address is is that as a child and that's why my empathy is towards people who do not have power, which is children and the elderly, the super elderly.

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And and so with the child, you did not have any decision making powers back then, and somebody made the decision for you from their own personal experience.

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Correct?

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Is actually so that is a fascinating part of it.

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My mother was a fantastic parent because at every possible choice, and that was, like, really large and meaningful, she put a lot of power back into my hands.

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Like even to the point where I was born in October and so the question about preschool, should I start kindergarten in the year above and be like the oldest kid in the class or should I wait and start kindergarten later and be like the youngest father or vice versa?

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She actually handed me that decision.

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The story about the gifted and talented program, I would have sworn and I still might have made that same choice, I would have sworn that she and I had 2 different conversations.

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I may have been very stressed that day, but it wasn't the conversation that had come up regularly.

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So it was one that I'd revisited when I was, 37 years old.

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I became very, very serious about my mental health and started working closely with a therapist and a handful of psychiatrists.

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And, like, they handed back this thing of, like, you you do realize that your brain are you sure?

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I know I have trauma.

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Trauma makes my brain behave differently, but is there more to it than that?

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Flatly, yes.

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You need to go talk to somebody or get this sorted out or assessed.

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And that's when I started revisiting a whole lot of my history.

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So her conversation was, alright.

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I came to you and asked, like, how do you feel about it?

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It's going to be more work.

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You're already very stressed.

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It it it is a thing that would be true.

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If you got in, would you even want it?

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Now it was an opportunity where I could get more power from that conversation, but at the time, I I was already so powerless.

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It was as if I had also had my hand on the steering wheel and given it up because I was so unaccustomed to driving.

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So there's a lot of opportunity for me to say, Oh, I didn't have as much power in that moment.

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But that is, like, the one time where my experience was that I normally have those types of decisions or normally had those types of decisions in the relationship I had with my mother, but I didn't necessarily grab onto or get the understanding.

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Like, I didn't get the information.

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I still don't have the the true test results.

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I know that 150 had to be the barrier to get in and I clearly scored above 150.

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I don't know what the test is, so that number is meaningless.

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I don't know whether or not that was actually true.

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It's from kindergarten.

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Can I trust that memory?

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Partially, apparently.

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Neurodivergent brains, especially gifted ones, have certain have a neurophysiological disposition toward x explicit memory, the thing where you sit down and try to remember what were the words or what was that number.

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So, yeah, when it comes to the powerlessness as a child, for me, I do want to also add that I didn't get to carry a whole lot of information about myself as a child.

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As much as my mother in the 9 in the early eighties and mid nineties was avant garde and trying to shift the power dynamic and include me in decisions, even then I didn't necessarily get as much information as I would have liked.

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And I didn't I hadn't empowered myself and it was part of the story of my home life that power was not easy to get a hold of or that most of us were being trained out of power.

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So, yeah, even asking for more information or getting back to those test scores.

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So I do distinctly remember there being an ongoing bit of tension where my teachers would know this about me, would have seen a score on file and been told his mother doesn't want him in these the classes, so stretch him in any way you can.

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So I have, like, bizarre little anecdotes all the way up to 5th grade where teachers would be would try to work with me, would offer me this extra thing, or just hand me a spare assignment, or here's an errand.

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Go take care of it while the rest of the class is working on this because you're not this is going to be boring for you.

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It was an interesting time.

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I feel like I may have opened the lid a little bit on what is giftedness and what is IQ, and that is definitely going to lead us right down the road of what is twice exceptionality.

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Yeah.

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So one thing that came out of that is for some somehow you perceived we don't know how that conversation went back then.

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You perceived it as a lot of work because there is some kind of a a pain in that, and you had to go through that.

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And and as a mother, I think she was protecting, which is a natural instinct of a mother.

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But but so I'm very curious about giftedness.

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Is it is it something that you just have, you know, you're good at, there's no rhyme or reason for it, you just are?

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Ah, this is a good one.

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So really quickly summarizing the history.

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We, as a society, got very excited about trying to help individuals who were noticeably behind in school.

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Right?

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We saw that these kids were not necessarily grappling with things.

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How do we find the individuals who need help?

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And some of the earliest IQ tests were designed to help identify individuals who were behind.

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One of the offshoots of it is that he started also finding and I am going to misremember it, so I'm not gonna say the inventor of the IQ test.

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You can Wikipedia that.

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But one of the things that he also found was that there were a class of kids who did score above it and that the IQ was set as a bell curve scale, and this is a, let's see a mental age.

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And if you're, like, right on 100, that means you are 100% the mental age you're thought to be.

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If you are like a little lower than maybe your brain's age is younger than what you are physically.

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If you're a little bit older, then maybe your brain's age is actually much older or if you're a little bit higher on IQ points.

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It has adjusted and evolved, but it was like these explicit tests where if Johnny has 5 apples and his mother takes 3, if I hand you a logic puzzle and the train is arriving at the certain day, sometimes all the and those tests have evolved over time and it's an explicit test on a timer that's asking you even visual processing and spatial relationship questions.

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Like, follow the pattern.

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Can you see where the next three dots are going to be if I present you 4 dots?

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If I show you a string of numbers, what's the following number?

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This is all heady intellectual work.

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Right?

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We would think, okay.

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This is how a brain and I this is how the result of that type of study is that you're going to see an intellectual prowess that the brain, different from the other parts of the body, like some kids are smart, some kids are strong, some kids are beautiful.

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Well, that test identifies is one of the markers we use today for marking intelligence.

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Giftedness is what I would call a a form of neurodivergence that society sees as beneficial because it takes those tests generally pretty well.

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In your brain, there are 2 types of matter.

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There's gray matter that we're all familiar with, like the gray matter is neurons that like process and hold on to information.

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They also pass information back and forth, but it's like the very gray matter is also how your body learns to move, how it controls motor functions.

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Some of it's a lot on autonomic work, so it goes down to, like, even processing and holding on to memories.

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There's a second type of matter in your brain called white matter.

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And I thought of this or conceived of this as the fiber optic cable of the brain.

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It's got really long cells, it goes up and down the spinal column, goes in between cells inside of the brain.

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And so like what connects the gray matter to other gray matter is generally this white matter and sometimes they're right beside each other.

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While we're studying while we as humans are studying this odd effect of academic improvement or academic prowess.

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Some of these kids in standardized testing are definitely performing better than other kids and what is going on here?

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They seem to be able to process information very quickly or very differently or something else is happening on top of this.

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What what is the answer to it?

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They must have a high IQ number, IQ being an intelligence quotient.

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So their brain is just very, very smart, nothing else.

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Giftedness basically stops below the ear.

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The truth of the matter is that it affects your entire physiology, that it affects the way you perceive the world.

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I mean, the thing that is at the core of your nervous system, which is how you process your consciousness as a slight divergence from the normal that actually in a in a typical brain, there's like a certain amount of gray matter, how many however many ounces in the fMRI scans and in autopsies, you have more.

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There's a greater amount of gray matter in gifted brains.

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Well also, if you sit down and do an fMRI scan on neurotypical individual and you ask them to think of a concept like a bear, then their brain is going to have a certain amount of or their nervous system is going to have a certain strength of activity through the white matter.

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Well, in a gifted individual, it is a much stronger, more focused line.

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We are and I say as a society, we are coming into a stage with neurodiversity at large, where if we embrace neurodiversity and we even hold out our hand and say, like, neurodivergence is something that's acceptable, then because a gifted brain is different than a neurotypical brain, it is a neurodivergence.

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And what does that mean?

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Well, there's more electrical signals passing through the white matter.

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There's a greater amount of gray matter that affects like the whole body.

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One of the simplest definitions that the president of Bright and Sight, Doctor.

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Patty Gently uses is that all humans all humans use like pattern finding and meaning making in their life.

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Well, with gifted individuals, there is a greater capacity for pattern finding and meaning making.

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Now this is like, a binary version of neurodivergence as I've described it so far where there's just neurotypical individuals and gifted individuals.

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What about autism?

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What about ADHD?

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What if somebody has dyslexia?

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Is that going to affect their IQ score?

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Yeah.

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Does that mean they are somehow less gifted?

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Well, their brain is neurophysiologically different, but I can't measure it using this written test with a timer.

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I've lately taken to this metaphor of saying that, hey.

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If you want to measure intelligence, the IQ test is, the best we got and it is the world's worst version of measuring intelligence.

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It's like trying to find basketball players by measuring the length of people's toe.

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You're gonna find some correlation there, but there are a lot of reasons why somebody's toes might be short and they'd be very tall.

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So how do you identify intelligence?

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Humanity has grappled with what is intelligence since Socrates was asking questions and trying to position himself as society's fool and try to understand and ask as many questions as possible and consider himself the least intelligent because he didn't know anything.

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He just wanted to ask a lot of questions.

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So inside of the education field, teachers have a pretty hard job ahead of them where they have a series of units, a lot of curricula that they wanna pass on to the kids around them.

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And so they pass on this information as clearly as possible in ways that most people will accept, most people will get.

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Like and if you're processing, I don't know, hundreds of students in a year, you're gonna find, like, there is a commonality within a big chunk of them.

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So, yeah, it's efficient to take the most common way of teaching to kids.

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Some of those kids are going to diverge.

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Their minds operate very, very differently.

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With a gifted individual, their pattern finding and meaning making is cranked up to 11.

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That means that anything they witness, they draw out more information.

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One of the books that I'm very, very excited about comes out August 13th 2024, is intersection of intensity by doctor Patty Gently.

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It's about the intersection of trauma and giftedness, where if you are experiencing a kind of trauma as a kid, you may also pick up the societal implications associated to that trauma.

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Not just what's happening to you, but you may your heart may break for the fact that it's happening to you and happening to others, and it happens at such a big scale.

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There are a lot of parents, gifted kids, who are trying to protect their kids and find out how do I help this kid who is processing at the age of 4 his own death.

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Why is that happening?

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How do I mean, it the mind is very, very different when you're a gifted kid.

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If you're asking these top shelf questions that, like, most philosophers feel uncomfortable asking, yeah, and it's happening inside of your household and it's a child who has still so few years under their belt, so their emotional strength is still developing and growing, and yet they have such great emotional capacity, intellectual capacity, even psychomotor capacity where their bodies are moving faster or twitch moving differently or have stronger twitch factors.

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So giftedness, what is it?

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Yeah.

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It is something that is encoded into your body.

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It's part of how your brain works.

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It's sometimes measured in a way that society really, really is excited about and likes and loves to make TV shows about those types of people, but also has a very one-sided dimensional one dimensional understanding of it.

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And so somebody who is gifted might be just good at trivia.

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It's not entirely the case.

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Somebody who is good at trivia, you don't wanna get into an argument about who said what because they're they may have that explicit memory while reaching all the way back and they themselves may be traumatized if you forget what you said back then and you're now saying the opposite.

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Can you imagine living in a world where you have I remember what we talked about last month and then now you're asking me this question again.

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Are you purposefully gaslighting me or is this something else?

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Like, that is a chronic trauma that can happen with somebody who is who has a solid memory, gifted or not.

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So the real kicker that goes into it is ADHD, autism, dyslexia, these neurodivergences also affect how we measure basketball players' toes.

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It affects the IQ test scores.

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And so twice exceptionality is as a doesn't have a firm definition in the diagnostic manual, but, one of the psychologists that I'd recommend, Linda Silverman, published an article about gifted compensation where if you experience a sense of difficulty in one area and you crank up your willpower to overcome what you perceive as a difficulty and that extra effort you're putting into it allows you to perform it just right about par for everyone else, does that mean you are on par with everyone else?

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No.

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You are actually doing more work, more creative work and arriving at the same level that other people are.

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So there are individuals who are overcoming dyslexia through sheer inventiveness or through ingenuity or just flat out thinking super hard and spending extra calories in their brain to arrive at something that handful of neurotypical individuals would say, oh, yeah, that's normal.

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I know how to spell onomatopoeia.

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And other individuals like, well, I'm dyslexic.

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It becomes very, very difficult, not just that it's not how my brain worked.

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And yet in the case of one individual I know, their gifted brain had them grab onto a very, very expansive vocabulary to avoid using words that spell check couldn't correct Because as they would type or write, they couldn't they would write it in such a way that even spell check doesn't know how to correct it.

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So then they would grab and find that grab and find a different word of another word so that they could keep trying.

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They wound up building this huge vocabulary, gifted compensation, to arrive at being able to write just like everybody else.

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Is that normal?

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That right there is a prime example of twice exceptionality, an individual who has 2 neurodivergences, one of them being giftedness and then something else.

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Now, it's very, very common to also see multiple exceptionalities, but what's what the common term is twice exceptionality.

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There's giftedness and something else going on.

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Typically, and typically, this something else falls under the umbrella of ADHD, autism, ADHD and autism, some other neurotypes in there.

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So just having dyslexia or dysgraphia, if those are active in your neurotype and you're gifted, you may be doing a lot of extra work.

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Well, that's going to mess with how we measure intelligence.

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And at the same time, when you sit down with these individuals, you talk to them, you engage with them in a problem solving work, there is no question in my mind how that I experience them with that they have this giftedness at large.

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There is a spark in their eye, a speed of book of speech.

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There's something else happening there.

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It is phenomenal to witness.

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And yet, they would come back with a IQ score and be like, I don't think I got the right thing.

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This came out bad.

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Then when they sit down with a an actual psychologist for a neuropsych evaluation, that individual takes the score, takes all of these other factors, is like including a full psychological profile.

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And it's an yeah.

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It's an expensive process that involves a lot of work to sit down and understand yourself, but I would have loved to understand myself understand yourself, but I would have loved to understand myself better when I was a kid.

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And so I'm not always a fan of somebody going out and chasing labels.

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But if a label can help you understand yourself, can help you operate yourself better.

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I I actually started owning up to the gifted label when I started working through difficulties at work.

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I I was holding a lot of coworkers to some very unrealistic standards because if I'm normal and they're normal, then my standards can't be that far off.

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That's not only is that incredibly self centered way of looking at things, it it's also detrimental to the way that other people see themselves.

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Like, if you think about that memory example and you're wondering why don't I remember what this guy who clearly is very confident that he remembers it.

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I had this conversation.

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Is my mind slipping?

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Do I I'm 29 years old.

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Am I undergoing, like, Alzheimer's right now?

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Is there something else happening?

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Help.

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Help.

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Well, there's different brains work different.

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And I believe that that's one of the earliest lessons we get when we do personality typing.

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When you take, like, Myers Briggs personality type or the Enneagram or even back in Shakespeare's day, the forced humors, the, like, manic, melancholic, and choleric, and sanguine.

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Those would be the 4 different ways that certain people behaved.

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This at that time even, people were saying different brains work differently, but we just understood them in handful of ways.

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What if there's only those 4 types?

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Well, in the field of psychology, we are now processing something beyond personality down to what is the best way that your brain work and how does your brain process information?

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What is the way that you need to work?

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And one of the things that I try to also throw in whenever I describe giftedness is that when you meet one gifted individual, you've met just 1, borrowing from the old autism adage that was part of the neurodiversity movement, the earliest versions of the neurodiversity movement.

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There is a lot of variety within neurodivergence.

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The more divergent that you are from the norm, the greater divergence you'll find from people who fall in that divergent.

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The outliers of outliers is one of the things that we talk about when I'm a part of as one of the admins for a gifted and twice exceptional community on Facebook called Bloomers.

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Bloomers hosts these individuals who are outliers of outliers.

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Their neurodivergence is so far from the neurotypical that the things that they are processing and trying to work through the types of existential questions or even the types of physiological questions.

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One of the things that doctor Patty Gently has been studying and identifying is what is the connection between women who are gifted or twice exceptional and certain chronic illness?

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She's found a link and I think she's still doing more research about it, but a link between Ehlers Danlos syndrome and, yeah, handful of other chronic illness things that seem to be very comorbid with giftedness or twice exceptionality.

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So as a as you can imagine that if you're an admin of a Facebook group, which is where Bloomers is hosted, yeah, you get a lot of different types.

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Inside of the Bloomers group, we get some wildly different type.

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And we work very hard to make sure that it's a safe space because where else do some of these outliers go to feel a sense of belonging, to feel a sense of connection?

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How else do they feel a sense of mirroring where their even though they are so very different even amongst themselves, they witness somebody else sharing a similar story or they may stem and self soothe or self stimulate in a way that reminds them of how they self stim that makes them feel a little bit more accepted.

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I don't I almost said normal, but accepted, feel like they belong, feel like feel like there's a new normal amongst themselves.

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So how does that It's so amazing.

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So many things again.

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I'm like, oh, wow.

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So and when I look back at my own life and my ADHD ness in my school, especially I was not present at all.

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My my mind was somewhere else because it wasn't presented in a way that I could consume it.

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But I've always been a learner wanting to learn, but it was not for whatever reason, my mind was somewhere else.

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And it was in a happier place, I'll bet.

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Right?

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It just on and off into this beautiful dreamy place to make me happy.

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But but once I started owning to my own interests and gifts or whatever we wanna call, it it just it started life started becoming so much easier, and I didn't have to work hard.

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I didn't have to burn that extra fuel because that was challenging.

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That was so challenging.

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It felt like going against the force, studying, in in linear way, learning everything in a linear way.

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And when I I but it was still up to me.

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And and that's why and it was up to me to discover those things.

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Of course, I'm grateful to my cousin who introduced me to technology, who somehow showed up in my life and convinced my mother that I enrolled into this class.

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So I'm extremely grateful.

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So but but then it was still up to me to to go after what I wanted, what I liked actually.

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Not even I didn't have any big visions that I something that I enjoy to do.

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And for to a world that is built in a linear way.

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Mhmm.

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And and and everybody it's this box.

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Right?

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It's this kind of little box that, you're measured by that, whether you fit into that box.

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So it's still up to the kids and the individuals, grown adults to find what is that one thing that works for you.

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So it's still up to us.

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So we have to claim back that power and invest time in ourselves and our own happiness, our own peace, on our own growth because that's where the magic happens.

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Absolutely.

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And I imagine that as when you were a kid, it's not as if all learning was gone.

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Right?

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You had those places where your mind went.

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Do you still distinctly remember certain things that you were interested in?

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Oh, yeah.

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I love math.

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Algebra was my favorite, and and I think that's why I love writing code.

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So What?

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Yeah.

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And and English too because I do speak good English.

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So I think I was present.

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Right?

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I must have been present.

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Mhmm.

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But then there was a lot of times it it just wandered and I but those subjects are not interesting to me even now.

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So so a lot of it was only a few things that I was just so passionate about.

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And so if I didn't go to engineering school, but if I did go, I still I I don't think I would have been interested in so many other things.

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It was only a few things and but I yeah.

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I especially the nonlinear thinking, the brain and pattern recognition.

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I see that a lot now, especially in human behavior, in psychology.

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I I don't have to go and read a book or get a degree.

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I just am interested in the human behavior.

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Yeah.

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Well and it's also part of how you make your social world work.

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Right?

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No matter how you structure your social world, like, society or normal isn't this one monolithic thing.

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It's created by the groups that you're in.

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And so sometimes we as a neurodivergent individual, you are 1 in 10,000, 1 in a 1000000.

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Even if you're 1 in a 100, you might be in a school of 50 kids.

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Like, how do you make your social world work?

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Well, you have to study the people around you.

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You recognize, okay.

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There's a thing about me that's not quite matching everyone else's pattern.

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Well, if the sooner you can cease to tell yourself something is wrong with me and you stop punishing yourself for for things that are fitting in with normal, then you start grab grabbing onto this.

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If they even though they all do it differently, you can grab onto a a shift in behavior.

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Even something anti societal will even if they learn very linearly, I'm gonna skip to the end of the book or I'm gonna browse through the chapters that I care about.

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I'm gonna follow my interests and see how much of this I can pick up.

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Well, I'm gonna also do it this specific way.

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I had an experience where I was learning a very specific type of dance.

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I'll skip the actual type of it was Texas 2 step.

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I really once learned Western's West Coast Swing, but the instructors for it were very linear.

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Put your hand here, take one step this way, and do that thing here.

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And I just wanted to watch somebody move through the whole thing at once.

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I had a very normalizing experience one time where I was watching Star Trek Next Generation.

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Data wants to teach him wants to learn how to dance.

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And I think it's either doctor Krusher or the counselor, another crew member is teaching him step by step.

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Here's how to dance.

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First, you're gonna put your foot here and put your foot there.

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And he stops her and says, I believe it is the doctor.

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Doctor, it might be helpful to me if you would show me the last step first.

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Show me it all in completion, and then I will see how much I pick up.

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And he picks it up from there.

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You can your your ability to recognize patterns and to perceive and decode the world, your brain works differently.

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And in a way, you're now working with your brain, the more you understand it.

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And then suddenly, the rest of this stuff works.

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One of the funniest things is that while we're talking about learning mathematics or dance or these discrete skills, there's a transferability of the skill of learning to accept yourself.

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When you do that, that suddenly becomes a very that one skill of radically accepting your self and say, okay.

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My abilities are different.

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In what ways may I do it?

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And I definitely want to make sure I underline this because it's part of it sometimes is included in the word gifted or it's connotation connotated with the word gifted, that gifted is somehow better.

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It is a learning difference just as ADHD is a learning difference or dyslexia has a learning difference.

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Now it's a my difference is in a way that most society might look at and go, Oh, yeah, that's so easy or that's so much better.

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Look, switch seats with me for a bit.

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It ain't like sunshine and roses.

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In fact, one of the funniest things that I'd heard recently was a couple of individuals were a part of these high powered AI conferences and they came out of the room going, this bizarre guy thinks that the smartest people in the room have PhDs, but I've met so many smarter people who do not have one, who For the truly intelligent, getting a PhD is pulling teeth.

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Or like like you were describing earlier, like, if you were trying to study engineering directly, it may have put you off because the linear pathway of information was going to just degrade how you're interested in, no matter what your interest was.

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So I don't know if my voice carries some of it, but I happen to have, like, this natural enthusiasm.

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I have an ability to find interest in a lot of different things, and so I think that has helped me carry forward.

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When I was a newspaper reporter, I loved getting assigned to the most boring beats.

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Crime's not boring.

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I liked crime, but also, like, city zoning or economic development.

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And I just developed an interest in all of it.

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And as long as I stayed interested, I was able to guide my way through it.

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People would be like, wow.

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Why would you be interested in wastewater treatment?

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That's so fascinating.

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Well, okay, guys.

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I don't still geek out about wastewater treatment.

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Although if anyone wants to know, I'm sure.

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I'll I'll share.

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But the the experience is that we, as humans, are passing through a series of circumstances, and we're also equipped with this inner self talk or this self reflection where I look at my abilities in the world compared to other abilities and go, am I somehow lost?

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Is something broken about me?

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And if you can start with accepting yourself first, and if a label is helpful, grab it.

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If a label is helpful for a period of time, grab it and then let it go.

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If it's been helpful for a while and it no longer is helpful, release it like a balloon into the air.

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It was useful for a time and now you accept yourself beyond it.

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One of the things that I am humbled by is how very, very recent neurodiversity and neurodivergence within the scientific community is.

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We're talking psychology as a field is so young.

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And then within the 2000 I think it was in 2007 that the a New York Center For Autism was trying to raise awareness about autism but was doing it in such a pathologizing way that parents of autistic kids, autistic individuals themselves who are grown up and in professional fields would come forward and go, this is wrong.

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Please take these ads down.

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It's not even the story that you're going to ruin my that I ruined my social connections or so on.

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It's so it's still very, very recent in history.

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And at the same time, I love seeing the context, but we who are in the living experience are on the cutting edge of that context.

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So, Chaya, what you're doing with the learning platform you're developing, that is cutting edge material because you with your lived experience and I I do not have ADHD.

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I actually don't qualify myself as a twice exceptional individual.

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The trauma I have experienced as a kid does affect how I approach the world, but it's a circumstantial experiencing that alters things.

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And at the same time, if you're out there listening and you hear that trauma is not twice exceptional, but it would be helpful for you, take trauma as twice exceptional for yourself.

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It's gifted plus another neurotype or a neurodivergence in some way.

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And, yeah, anyone who has read a Batman comic would tell you that trauma makes your brain think differently.

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Thank you for chuckling at that, Mike.

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I appreciate that.

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And actually kind of slowly going off that point, curious in regards to kind of education and finding yourself you're a neurodivergent or or twice exceptional.

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The use of storytelling, that's something that I'm always very interested in, and how storytelling can be utilized in a more productive way for helping neurodivergence find themselves or learn concepts, even just basic education, more so than what is commonly prescribed to us by the particularly American education system.

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How do you feel like that could be utilized as an aid?

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Oh, my war.

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One of the things we do with literature, in schools is we study with critic and I mean criticism in the way where you take it apart and put it back together, where you try to understand a thing.

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You imagine a world where the story you're taking apart kinda reflects yourself a little bit.

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So representation inside of storytelling becomes a big deal.

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One of the funniest experiences I had was when I was first identified as gifted, I started thinking back through different shows that I liked or what I really appreciated.

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And TV shows that reflected back to me myself that kind of resonated.

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One of them was BBC Sherlock that I felt like I was enjoying a TV show that was operating at the pace that I was, and I didn't realize that half of the show was a totally different experience to my ex wife, my then partner at the time.

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And her experience in the show was varied.

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Now me seeing myself and Sherlock, oh, that sounds great.

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Nice and gifted.

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Right?

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For kids who with for dyslexic kids who may see themselves and go, hey, I am not Encyclopedia Brown.

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I'm not like Nancy Drew.

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What is happening or is something really wrong with me?

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Then a show like Star Trek Strange New Worlds or Star Trek Discovery comes along and puts the character of Spock in the position of having the Vulcan version of dyslexia.

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It has its own alien name.

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It has a it's qualified as a learning difference that Spock himself has struggled with and has compensated for over how all these years, and he's been working in Starfleet.

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He is an accomplished scientist.

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I am studying stars and Spock.

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And then it comes along to a start to a certain episode where they are doing like a time like a time traveling episode and something is distorting their understanding of the world.

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And because he is dyslexic, because his brain works differently, he can understand more about and within the the the construct of the story.

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Because his brain is dyslexic, he can understand the timeline better and he becomes the one that helps the crew move through this bizarre time anomaly and it saves the day.

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So, yeah, there's a lot of people who saw themselves in in Spock.

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Well, a lot of autistic individuals who saw themselves in Spock and then using that same character more recently to say, hey, here is this dyslexia, a learning difference.

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It's just a neurodivergence where I there is no neurodiversity movement on Vulcan as far as I can tell, but there's a lot of work inside of Star Trek to create an accepting society where your difference is embraced.

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And in a way, some of the stories of x men become one of those, like, beacons for kids.

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It there's no there is no coincidence that most young adult literature works this way where you have a protagonist who's starting off with seemingly normal, but things are a little bit hard for them.

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Then something comes along and says, oh, you're a wizard, Harry.

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Oh, you have soup you have a different x gene.

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Oh, something about you needs some fresh attention.

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Allow me to lead you into a space where you are both accepting your difference and learning to work with your difference.

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And perhaps working with your difference means creating a bigger, better world for everyone else too.

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And maybe your difference doesn't have to be the thing that cures cancer.

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Maybe just accepting who you are makes the world slightly better for your neighbor.

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So in a way, we've seen these stories already work inside of classrooms and outside of classroom?

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The times that you have an intuitive instructor who pulls along the right story so The The Giver is another book where the the little kid doesn't fit into their dystopian society.

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There's some other gift that he has, and the giver is a person inside of that society who is tasked with remembering.

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Let me sit down and work for anyone who I'm not a fan of the author, but the story still works well.

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And I just did The Qualifier, so I completely spaced on the title.

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But Ender's Game is another book where you have an individual who, and that book is one that where it's explicitly saying, we're trying to grab the most intelligent and gifted kids, and what happens if we change those kids into soldiers?

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Well and you get a situation that at the very end of the story that you don't really expect.

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And it's a kind of tragedy as the story tells, but at the same time, that individual in the sequels afterward becomes somebody that changes a a broader space society.

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The use of story is so important because unlike being able to deliver a definition and I think I've done the same practice throughout this conversation.

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Unlike delivering a simple definition or an adage or a proverb where you should always do it this way, A story gives you a lot of different facets and it is intended to maintain interest all the way through and then it has you recognizing multiple nuances within the and as long as the story stays true to the human experience, then humans will start will resonate with it in some way.

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There are a lot of different frameworks for positioning stories for that, but one of the things that I've one of the frameworks I've liked to use when I'm evaluating stories for kids, I have 3 daughters, at the very at the very simplest form, you have a story where it is also a very clear moral direction, where the the good guys wear these certain type of hats and the bad guys wear these types of hats, and it's very obvious.

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So think of He Man or Star Wars.

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There's no question in anyone's mind that Darth Vader is the bad guy when he first walks onto the scene.

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Right?

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That cape and the hat and the oh, the red lights, that is telling a very specific story.

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And then there's another framework where the line between who gets counted as good and bad, it's not always obvious.

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You wait until that person's actions determine whether they are good or bad.

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And that's where you get more of the Harry Potter type of stories.

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And Harry Potter is one that transitions from that younger structure where it's very clear who's good and who's bad, and then you move out later.

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The later on, there's an going further down that continuum, there are stories where the individual protagonist, the line between good and bad actually runs through each individual, where and this is more of your present day detective stories where they may do something good or may do something bad, and they are themselves evaluating and changing and adjusting even in the context of their society where and that's where I would put a show like BBC's Sherlock where the character knows that he is willing to cross lines that his peers, even his partner Watson, are unwilling to cross, but he is.

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And is that good?

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Does that count as good?

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Well, he's aiming for a higher good, but he to to what extent that the character does, he grapples with it.

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So using story to help us reflect and see in others Mhmm.

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Like, those create a another I wanna call it like a cushion around society because real life is still your society.

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No matter how many books you read, that this was my story.

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No matter how many books I read, no many no matter how many short stories I found where I was reflected in it, I still had to deal with the bullies at school.

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I still had to deal with home life.

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I still had to find a job where I had to fit into some kind of a cookie cutter.

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But then I've realized that maybe maybe I don't have to fit in exactly the way that they expect.

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So that type of framework when you get kids exposed to a lot of good storytelling and, yeah, I I think I laid out, like, a structure where you see what counts as good storytelling all the way down to the more nuanced and harder and incisive ones where you are evaluating the line between good and evil within yourself and ethics versus non ethics.

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That would be one of the ways that I'd want to see story used more often in schools.

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And sometimes learning basic information literacy is part of that experience where you are learn becoming more media literate.

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If you are watching a show or if you finish watching any TV series and you go on to YouTube and you find a video essay where somebody's describing how Snape was actually a good guy or how somebody how the Mandalorian flips the the bounty hunter trope on its head for Star Wars where they were driven as a neutral person.

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Maybe there's a reason that the force operates well with them.

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Well, all of that is a way to explore and understand story.

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And when you pick it apart and put it back together, part of your own experience is evaluating yourself and looking at your own work.

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Do I think that Din Djarin did a good deed?

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Do I think that Sherlock was right to shoot that one guy?

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Do I believe when you begin those types of self reflective questions, that becomes a beautiful space in which to discover and find yourself?

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One of the follow ups is when we do accept ourselves, it becomes easier to spot yourself in media.

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And you get to spot when media turn is purposefully driven to say this person does not exist or that it is neurodiversity demeaning in some way.

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So I hope that that answers the question.

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What I love about storytelling and and the way you're explaining it is it's so beautiful.

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You it it gives an opportunity to remove yourself from it and look at it from the outside.

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And when you look at it from outside as somebody else, your own story, it gives that opportunity to look at it from all different angles and all the other people in it also from different points of view.

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And it becomes less about you and me.

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It removes that personal you know what I mean?

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You don't it's not about you said or he said and she said.

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It it actually removes all of that, and then you can just watch it, from from a distance, and and it makes so much sense.

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You can go back.

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You can look at the history of other people's behaviors, their ancestors, and all that.

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It's so magical because when when somebody as I'm talking today, right, there's so much of history behind me and and my upbringing and my parents and all of that.

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So there's so much to it.

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Yeah.

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There's there's so much going on, and sometimes it's easy to look at a TV character and see a map of their selves even if it's somebody who has even it's it's a TV character that has a very, very simple life.

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Like, if we take the character of Batman, while it is a tragic story of individual who is really trying to come to terms with his history and, society, there's not that many steps to it.

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It's not a complex story.

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It it has some complex psychology behind it, but there's there's some there's some pretty strict core steps.

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As individuals, as humans who are still living in the moment, it's very difficult to examine your story, to look back at your story, and then try to own up through certain pieces of it.

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And that's where developmental that's where I I found myself falling backwards into developmental psychology.

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So one of the experiences that it can bring up is that as I'm was working through my understanding of twice exceptionality, somebody else was doing that same work.

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Doctor Patty Gently presented and was working through her through her doctorate and was doing research into adults who twice exceptional adults who had transitioned into having, like, a sense of personal agency in their life.

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What we would what they would call themselves successful, what what did it look like?

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What were those success stories for somebody who had kind of grown up, had these difficulties in their life, and then be had somebody became somebody who would say, I've I've made it.

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I've got some agency in my life.

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I've got some stability that I can create.

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I know how to soothe and calm and work with myself.

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In so doing, she uncovered and found discovered a theory of identity development called that she calls identity development gear theory.

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And we are presenting it this week at the serving the emotional needs of gifted conference in Berkeley, California.

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And I made a game out of that theory.

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Okay?

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If you visit bright insight dot support and browse through, there's the the website just has a page for the theory and it describes that every individual has come into the world with some innate abilities, some innate gifts, like your genetic training, the superpowers you got from a Krypton, the dyslexia that is going to be useful later.

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Like, these things are innate to you.

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And then there's things that happen to you.

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A second gear that is, like, the circumstantial experiencing that is that would include what somebody might call good or somebody might call bad, but it's just circumstances around you.

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And then there's a third thing.

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So if the first two are nature and nurture, then a 3rd gear kicks in and it's what you do with it.

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Then you've been handed those 2 things.

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How did you try to work through it?

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And there's a miniature process inside of that 3rd gear where you are try you're noticing you're asynchrony to the rest of society.

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Well, I'm going to try and make something work.

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Well, I've got to try to make some anti societal shift.

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And you start to make a choice where you're like, okay, if I beat up bad guys on the street while I'm dressed as a bat, that is meeting an internal need of mine.

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This is objectively good.

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And then you work through and develop a sense of identity.

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And that's a 4th gear where you radically accept all of the difficulties associated with who we are, you accept all of the gifts or and I I say that kind of broadly, not meaning to relate to giftedness itself, but you accept all of the good and the difficulty, the struggles and the strengths together, well, that becomes a 4th gear, the what I did.

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And some individual and at that point, you have developed an identity, but some individuals develop a 5th gear.

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Individuals who have had the greatest struggles when younger or greatest struggles, greatest circumstantial experiences that were most difficult came to an identity that also, in a 5th gear, altered how they go about the world and inform something that should that doctor Patty Gently calls what I do.

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So it's a theory of identity development that she identified from twice exceptional adults, and it became very, very broad, like, as it's been validated and applied successfully in therapy sessions and so on or therapy modality or therapy operations and in schools and hanging out with people.

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And it's one of those theories that actually feels very, very new.

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As you're working through it or as I was working through it for myself, I was like, you know, I play role playing games where the the entire task is watching a person develop over time.

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Let me make a board game or a storytelling game that allows people to work through the theory.

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And as you play it, it's essentially a very large creative writing exercise.

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But as you're playing through the game, you are creating the story and watching the story of somebody come to terms with their selves and with the circumstances around them.

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It's been a fascinating experience for me because I'm a writer, I love telling stories.

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I made a game, but now in 30 minutes, you have an individual who starts off with only 3 gears where they're trying to struggle through something that they have their own history.

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I took all of the I also have a bunch of pre filled character sheets from popular characters that start at the very beginnings of their origin.

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So Spock, before he gets into Star Fleet, Superman, before he picks up the red cape, Batman, before he stops like, just trying to get revenge for his parents.

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But I also have, like, Dorothy of Oz, Cinderella, Alice in Wonderland, Indiana Jones, and even a blank one for individuals to put themselves into it.

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And as you play through the storytelling game, you recognize the power of accepting yourself and finding an identity or finding your identity authentically through your experiences.

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It's fascinating.

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I'm looking down because I have with me some of the play sheets that I use.

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So

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it's identity gear theory.

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If you

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check out brightinsight.support, no.com, that's gonna be the website that has the identity gear theory.

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And I'm as a a cheeky kid, I I was designing this and going, you know what I'm gonna do?

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I'm gonna just call it identity theory, the game.

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So it it's a little bit glitz and simple and schmaltz, but I thought, well, if you're gonna take a psychology theory and apply it to fictional characters and help people understand themselves, you should have a little bit of fun while doing it.

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I love that.

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I I love that.

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Thank you.

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Thank you for creating that, first of all.

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I'm deaf I actually have some people I really wanna share that with, and I'd like to take a look at it myself.

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So that's that's really awesome.

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We gotta have you back on at some point because I feel like we could talk about these topics forever, particularly, like, I could really deep dive storytelling for hours on end and how it relates forever.

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I do an entire other podcast about it essentially.

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So, yeah, I'd love to have you back on.

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Thank you so much for sharing everything about you in this way and letting the audience hear your perspective and and your views.

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I I think it really gives really strong insight for people and for us right here.

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I feel like I've I've learned a lot from you just just hearing you hearing you talk.

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So I really wanna thank you for for coming on and joining us.

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Oh, oh, Mike.

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Thank you so much.

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I appreciate that a lot.

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I do hope I I bring as much as I can, and I know that I'll start a sentence and may not finish it, but I hope everyone was able to follow along and get something out of it.

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But, yeah, I I love for me, one of the things I like to do most is I I'm a I'm a kid who likes to work things out and find things, But my personal mission, I've got to drive to make the important stuff interesting.

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And so I want to leave a trail for others as I'm figuring myself out.

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I'm not that far ahead.

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I'm just maybe 1 or 2 steps.

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But even then, there's something that I can learn from others while I'm sharing about myself.

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So thank you.

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This has been especially fun.

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Thank you.

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That was beautiful.

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Thank you.

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And where can everybody find you?

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One of the easiest places to find me is actually through Facebook.

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The bloomers group is, live and well in on Facebook, so bloomers gifted into the adults.

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Also, you can find the website with bright insight, bright insight dot support, no.com.

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And I should develop some more socials, but those are the main places where you'll find, like, blogs I've written, content that's there.

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Also, I have a very Googleable name.

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Great.

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And okay.

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I'll be sure to put all links to everything in the show notes for anybody who wants, easy access.

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Spark launch, of course, as always, can be found at sparklaunch.org.

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The podcast can be sparklaunchpodcast.com.

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And I can be found on LinkedIn, and I'm on Instagram @followshisghost, where you can find links to some support groups I do and my neurodivergent support group, Motley Minds.

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If you follow that link, the 1st month will be free as always.

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Chaya, is there anything else you'd like to add?

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No.

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I just wanted to thank Yousef, to have come here as a guest and shared your insight.

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And I wanted to ask you if there's one piece of advice that you have or or some kind of a tip for people who are wondering, how do I find out if I'm gifted or how do I find out if I'm twice exceptional?

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Maybe they are hearing these dumps for the very first time and are wondering if they are.

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Oh, that is such a good question.

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One of the first places that I would go is and not to plug myself because one of the things I one of the coaching opportunities I open up is all gifted curious where if you're just curious about it, I run a short a short run one on one personal experience where you're just talking with me and I'm walking through, like, other individuals to help them find and learn more about it.

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But if you are just now wondering about twice exceptionality, like, I you might be gifted if you hang out with a lot of these individuals and you feels like for the very first time that you feel seen or understood, if you feel like you've come home when you've hung out with a handful of them.

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One of the things I've found is that not everybody has the attention and attention span or interest level or even the focus to sit and listen to me talk.

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So if you come if you come hang out with me and you're suddenly, like, engrossed, you might be gifted.

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There's also but, yes, you can go and get an IQ test.

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But like I said, getting a like, it's getting a tone measurement, it not to demean them.

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It's data.

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It's one piece.

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It's not all.

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So you can also seek out a qualified diagnostician, mental health professionals who are actually skilled at identifying both ADHD and giftedness.

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There's also doctor Patty Gently is a one of those qualified diagnosticians, so you can reach out and contact her.

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We also have a list of professionals that are on the Bright Insight website.

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There's a resources page for that.

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I'd also really encourage individuals who have stepped into this world and start wondering about, like, a holistic approach to it.

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Look up the group intergifted, I n t e r g I f t e d.

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Intergifted has a group of assessors who offer a qualitative, not a quantitative, a measure of giftedness where they look at all of these other aspects.

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They bring in they listen to you talk.

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They evaluate you just as the neuropsych in the way that a neuropsych evaluation would include.

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They interview, but from their experience, they would off offer, like, here's validation.

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Here's placement.

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Here's what we see.

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It's insightful.

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In some cases, when you take an IQ test, you'll get a score.

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You'll get, like, series of scores as if it were like a character sheet and just about your brain, like visual spatial, lexo lexical intelligence, mathematics scores.

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If you're looking for something a little bit broader, then visit intergifted.

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It's insightfully useful.

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Their assessors are kind and thoughtful and very accustomed to working with neurodivergent adults.

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So if you show up and you're like, I don't even know if I would be identified as gifted if I took an IQ test.

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Let me sit down with somebody who actually knows these individuals.

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I found it to be incredibly accurate and helpful.

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So I hope Yeah.

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It was not like a the simple an simplest answer, but

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It's the best answer.

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To engage.

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Yeah.

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Yeah.

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It's the most helpful of answers.

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Yeah.

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Thank you.

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I'll be sure to include that as well.

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I think that's a really valuable resource that I previously did not know about.

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So thank you for thank you for sharing that.

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As for Chaya, myself, and for Yousef, we will see you next time.

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Stay curious, friend.

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