Shownotes
Many of my entrepreneurial clients have ADHD and a growing number of them are women identified as gifted in childhood. While they are exceptionally bright, creative and original thinkers, gifted entrepreneurs struggle with perfectionism, imposter syndrome and overcomplicating their business.
In this episode, we will highlight the nuances and commonalities between these two facets of identity and delve into the 7 areas of overlap between ADHD and giftedness in entrepreneurial women.
What you’ll learn from this episode:
👩💻Understand the challenges of gifted women entrepreneurs, including lack of support, feeling misunderstood, and social dynamics
👩💻Exploring the impact of giftedness and ADHD on career decisions and workplace experiences
👩💻Examining the overlap and distinctions between ADHD and giftedness in entrepreneurial women
👩💻Recognizing the individual differences and varying factors that affect the experiences of gifted women and those with ADHD
Mic Drop Moment 🎙️
"I also think that our culture needs to do a much better job of actually valuing diversity of thought, recognizing unique contributions and providing resources for both personal and professional development for the people who choose to work for them."
Mentioned in this episode: Why Smart People Hurt by Eric Maisel https://bit.ly/3RDnYCk
The year is almost over, but you can make the decision now to start 2024 off right.
My signature program, The Boss Up Breakthrough 🔥 can help you right-size your business so that you can avoid burnout, establish sustainable boundaries, and uncover the profit potential in your coaching or consulting business. Many of my clients are gifted and/or 2e, and so am I, so I am both like minded, and like brained.
I work in 3 month engagements and help you clarify what’s working, what isn’t and what your options are for bringing the joy back to your business.
It’s hard to identify and implement what’s truly necessary on your own, so if you’ve been thinking about making these changes for a while, let me help you actually move the needle.
Since the holidays are upon us, we will be starting in January. At this time, I am only accepting 1:1 clients and the first step is to schedule a free 30-minute consultation right here: https://bit.ly/3qrJ9YQ 🌟
Want to put Insight from this episode into action? Here are some thinking questions:
🔍 What strategies have you found effective in managing the pressure and expectations that come with being gifted and driven?
🔍 How can individuals with ADHD and traits associated with giftedness leverage their unique perspectives and abilities to succeed as entrepreneurs?
🔍 What are some practical strategies for managing challenges related to sensory sensitivity and emotional attunement that are common in both ADHD and gifted individuals?
Want to let me know what you thought about this episode or make a suggestion for a future one? Here are the options:
Email: diann@diannwingertcoaching.com
Voice message: https://bit.ly/3we0Kri
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Transcripts
Well, hey there, and welcome back to the Driven Woman Entrepreneur. You know, it has been said that most entrepreneurs have ADHD or at least ADHD traits and there's an ongoing controversy about whether ADHD is the entrepreneur's superpower or its nemesis. So in today's solo episode, I want to bring attention to a specific group of women who have strengths and struggles in their entrepreneurial journey, but not because of ADHD. These women were identified as gifted in elementary school, and their challenges bear a very strong resemblance to those who actually have ADHD. Now to make things even more interesting, it's also possible to be both gifted and have ADHD. Something that is referred to as being twice exceptional or two E now we're gonna come back to that later in the episode.
But because there's so much overlap in the traits experienced by women who are gifted and those who have ADHD, and many entrepreneurs self identify with ADHD. I wanted to highlight a few of the areas that I think it's important for us to pay attention to. If you are an entrepreneur, especially a female entrepreneur, and you happen to have been labeled gifted in grade school and think you outgrew the gift, well, spoiler alert, you didn't. Now before we dig in, depending on what generation you grew up in, and where you grew up, and whether you went to public school or private school or were homeschooled, I'm gonna be using the term gifted to refer to anyone who is placed in gifted classes or who is enrolled in the GATE program. That's an acronym that stands for gifted and talented education.
Now your school might not have had a gifted program so if you skipped a grade or you were sent to another campus for external, quote unquote, enrichment activities based on either standardized testing or a teacher's recommendation, then you, my friend, are also gifted, and this information applies to you. Now I wanted to make this information as simple, straightforward and listener friendly as possible. So I'm going to limit this episode to sharing 7 areas of overlap and separate them into the ADHD perspective and the gifted perspective.
Ready, okay, here we go, let's start with high creativity. Now this is something I see a lot of in my entrepreneurial clients, whether they're ADHD, gifted or both. Now from the ADHD side, individuals are often really creative in all kinds of forms. It could be artistic expression. It could be their problem solving abilities or the fact that they simply think outside the norm, outside the box, outside conventional boundaries. They may excel in certain tasks that require creative problem solving or spontaneity and this is how a creative person with ADHD looks. Now the interesting thing is that many of them don't think of themselves as creative largely because many of us confuse creativity with being an artist. But there's lots and lots and lots of ways to be creative.
Now if you happen to be a gifted person, your high level of creativity might demonstrate through advanced problem solving skills, wildly original thinking and a propensity to have innovative ideas. Gifted people in the workplace are often very disruptive. And if you're not in a workplace that welcomes and invites that, you could find yourself being on the receiving end of more than 1 pink slip in your lifetime or just get so frustrated you quit. Now a gifted person's creativity can be evident in one particular area of interest or across a broad range of intellectual pursuits.
Okay, next item, intense focus, now I'm sure you are familiar with ADHD hyperfocus. I've talked about it a lot, plenty of people talk about it. So from the ADHD perspective, because folks with ADHD are associated with having an attention deficit, I mean, that's how the label got its name. But it's also possible for them to exhibit extreme focus, hyper focus in an area of interest. Now this intense level of concentration can lead to exceptional performance in that specific area. If they're not interested, they're not going to do well. In fact, this is one of the things that makes kids with ADHD so perplexing for both educators and parents. Because they can be incredibly talented in an area of interest and suck just about anywhere they're less interested.
Now on the gifted side, a gifted individual may exhibit intense focus when they're engaged in tasks that they experience as intellectually stimulating. This can look and feel very much like hyperfocus, but it's probably closely related to flow state. The gifted person's ability to concentrate deeply on a subject of interest is usually going to contribute to advanced learning, advanced achievement, and true mastery in those areas. This is not always true of people with ADHD. As a matter of fact, one of the cautions that I give to people about their expectations for stimulant medication is stimulant medication helps a person with ADHD focus on something longer. It does not direct their brain at the right thing to focus on. So a person with ADHD may hyper focus on something that is a complete and utter waste of time. But a gifted person is more likely to focus on something that is intellectually stimulating and leads to deeper mastery on that subject.
Next up, impulsivity and restlessness. Now these are traits that both people with ADHD and people with giftedness experience on the daily, and it's often referred to by other people as hyperactivity. Women with ADHD often struggle with sitting still, waiting their turn, thinking before acting, and this can manifest as either physical or verbal impulsivity. There are plenty of women with ADHD who have no trouble sitting still. In fact, they may even think of themselves as slothful or lazy, but they can't stop talking, or they can't stop doodling, or they can't stop knitting or crocheting or fidgeting or clicking their pen or shaking their leg. So the restlessness is just part of their internal mechanism, and it can be verbal, it can be physical, or it can be both. The gifted person will also experience restlessness, but it's not typically because of an internalized state.
It's more related to a constant need for intellectual stimulation. They simply cannot be bored so they might appear to be impulsive when pursuing a new interest, a new idea, a new hobby, a new area of focus, and they may appear to be hyperactive and impulsive because they may jump from one topic to another. But it's typically in a quest for knowledge so that's, I think, a really important and key distinction. Somebody with ADHD might just be restless because they're freaking restless. They don't want to sit still. They feel restless. Someone who's gifted is more likely to feel restless because of a need for intellectual stimulation. Their threshold for boredom and their ability to tolerate boredom, meaning they're not stimulated enough is what causes their restlessness. You see there's a lot of overlap, and it can be really nuanced to tease these things out, especially if the person we're talking about is both gifted and ADHD.
Next up is multitasking, now multitasking has gotten a really bad name from virtually all of the productivity specialists, and I understand why. In reality, nobody can genuinely multitask, it's actually task switching. And the reason why the productivity pundits don't want us to do it, no matter how well we might think we are doing it, is because there's a lag time in returning your focus to the thing you shifted away from while you were doing the other thing, and calling multitasking. Now if you have ADHD, you might think you are adept at multitasking and I have famously told the story of being in grad school, paying rapt attention to the lecture that I was attending, while simultaneously highlighting a paper for another class and balancing my checkbook.
I didn't think there was anything wrong with any of that at the time. I felt I was fully attending to the lecture. I was fully attending to my checkbook, and I was fully attending to the other article I was highlighting. But of course, I couldn't have been fully attending to any of those things. It was just that I had a need to be doing multiple things at once to have my brain fully occupied. Now needless to say, it drove the people around me completely nuts, and they asked me to stop so you can make yourself wildly unpopular if you are trying to multitask. And It's also dangerous because if you happen to be one of the many, many people who are trying to check their DMs, send text messages and operate a motor vehicle. You don't need me to tell you that is not a good idea.
Now, if you are gifted person, a gifted person may believe they can handle and even excel at dealing with multiple tasks simultaneously. But the drive is curiosity, the drive is their desire to explore intellectual pursuits and their drive is to not waste a single minute because they're really interested, really curious, and they want to consume as much information as possible. These are gonna be the folks who have multiple tabs open on their computer at the same time. And here's a key distinction, because I see all the memes, I see all the ADHD memes that say, you know, I have 49 tabs open and I can't remember any of them, kind of thing. A person with ADHD might have 49 tabs open at the same time because they're bouncing around amongst a bunch of different things. Looking for a recipe, doing some online shopping, checking their kids grades and so forth. A person who is gifted, who does not also have ADHD, might have 49 tabs open, but they're probably all related to the same topic area.
Okay, next step, can we talk sensitivity? One of the complaints that many people who are gifted here and also many people who have ADHD here is how sensitive we are. I have done a number of podcast interviews on other shows about rejection sensitivity, and I've spoken about it a great deal on this podcast as well. So if rejection sensitivity is something you're dealing with or something you're interested in knowing about, definitely do a keyword research on that with rejection sensitivity and Diann Wingert, and you will be led directly to all that. But what I'm talking about today is that women with ADHD tend to be sensitive to their environment, as well as their emotions and sensory input. You've heard about people who have multiple chemical sensitivities, a lot of women with ADHD identify with this heightened sensitivity to sensory input through all of the senses, taste, sight, smell, touch, hearing.
Sometimes it's just one, like it could be tactile. You hear about kids with ADHD, you have to clip out the tags. I had to clip out the tags from my kids clothing because they would just feel that it was so scratchy and so irritating, and they couldn't concentrate and that's first very typical also of people on the autism spectrum. But a lot of women with ADHD that I have worked with tell me that they can't tolerate bright lights. They can't tolerate loud noises. They can't tolerate environments that have too many different odors. Even if their pleasant odors could be the perfume counter in a department store, it's overwhelming to them. Some people have a really hard time being touched because of their sensitivity, even positive non sexual, non exploitative touch, like getting a massage or a pedicure. This heightened sensitivity can also contribute to emotional reactivity and hyper awareness of surroundings. This is very, very common with people with ADHD and it can cause a lot of discomfort and stress.
Now, folks on the gifted side are also often demonstrating emotional sensitivity, often being deeply attuned to their own emotions and the emotions of others. Many people who are identified as gifted growing up, later self identify as an HSP or a highly sensitive person. It's because they have a different level of attunement, a different level of introspection, a different level of self awareness, and often a different level of empathy. Gifted people can also be really sensitive to the nuances of their intellectual interests. So you will hear someone, a gifted person, talking about a really rare interest that maybe they and 10 other people on the planet have. But man, if you they get in front of a receptive audience, they can almost tear up when they have the opportunity to share about it. So there's a lot of overlap in this area too, one of the areas that I think is most fun to witness and participate in, when I am brainstorming with a gifted or individual with ADHD, is the divergent thinking. I love this divergent thinking. I love this about both groups so much.
Now gifted individuals typically display divergent thinking and If you're not familiar with that term, I'm referring to what most people call thinking outside the box. Creative brainstorming, creative problem solving, creating novel approaches to things, things that other people probably wouldn't think of but once they walk them through it, they're like, Oh yeah, I get it now. I like to refer to it as people who have divergent thinking, make more connections between the dots, and they also make a lot more dots. Now, if we're talking about a person with ADHD, their divergent thinking may be along the lines of generating multiple ideas or multiple solutions for a single problem. Folks with ADHD excel in brainstorming sessions, and typically contribute to adding a creative perspective or a creative solution to the problem. I think many many many workplaces would do well to recruit, hire, retain, and support individuals who think differently, especially if they are in rapidly moving industries like technology.
Now there's a ton of people with ADHD working in tech already, but there are many other industries, health care and education to name two biggies that are desperately in need of some divergent thinking, and I don't see any evidence, well maybe very little evidence, that they understand the value of people who think differently to help them disrupt the status quo, evolve their thinking, and move forward with fresh approaches, and new ways of thinking about old problems, and new ways of thinking about new problems. Obviously, this is an area that I have a lot of thoughts and a lot of passion about. Now an area of difficulty that both groups have is organization. And I think this is one of the reasons why so many formerly gifted girls, who grew up to become gifted women. Because I got news for you, you may have never unpacked the gift, but it does not go away. You do not outgrow being gifted but most women that I meet, that I think, I think she's gifted. So I'll ask them, by any chance were you in the gifted program as a kid, the typical answer kind of makes me tear up a little bit to think about it.
The typical answer is this, yeah I was gifted as a kid. Huh? I was gifted as a kid. The vast majority of gifted women no longer think they are, and I'm gonna get into that a little bit further in a few minutes. Because while it may seem really cool, and you might even be envious if you are not gifted of those who are, it is not necessarily the easiest way to get through life. I'll come back to that a little bit later so with respect to organization, the organizational difficulties of folks with ADHD are legendary, and plenty of podcasts talk about them. Most women with ADHD struggle with organizational skills because they have challenges in their executive functions.
Executive functions are things like planning, prioritizing, maintaining order, anticipating future needs, having a reasonable time horizon. Meaning, how long is it going to take to get this done. How much time do I need to plan ahead to do this? What order do I put these tasks in and if something comes up that interrupts me or distracts me, how difficult or easy is it for me to plugged back into my to do list and continue to move forward. Clearly, this is an area of extreme challenge for most people with ADHD, and they have varying degrees of skill in managing it with systems, structure and supports, but this difficulty for women with ADHD tends to extend to managing time, tasks and other people. So the folks that I think are really, really, really in the trenches, and really need a lot of help and a lot of respect is mothers who have ADHD, who are raising one or more children with ADHD. Because her challenges with executive functioning make it really difficult for her to manage a household and manage kiddos.
So the gifted side of things, folks who are gifted may prioritize their intellectual pursuits over other things, including being organized. So their house may look like a mess, they may not know where their stuff is. They may go out and buy something again, rather than take the time to look for it, just like a woman with ADHD would. But the difference is, not because of an impairment in executive functioning, but because their focus is so exclusively on exploring ideas and learning and things of interest, that they simply haven't made it a priority to maintain order, and to deal with chaos in their physical or digital environment. So I think this is really an important distinction. A woman with ADHD struggles with organization because she has challenges in her executive functions that are hardwired. A woman who's gifted may be disorganized because she's never developed enough interest in managing stuff, because she's so busy pursuing her intellectual interest over everything else.
Now, I just want to pump the brakes here for just a quick second before we continue. Because I think it needs to be said that it's really critical that we emphasize that any individual differences, whether you have ADHD, gifted or twice exceptional, they vary widely, really widely. And not all people with ADHD or giftedness are going to exhibit any of these traits in exactly the same way. To make things even spicier, each trait manifests on a spectrum and there are other factors that intersect such as personal strengths, or parenting, or whether there's been a trauma history or not. Whether they have other mental health conditions or other challenges, so I do not want anyone listening to this to think, okay, now I know. You need to consult with an expert trained in these areas to provide a more accurate assessment and the appropriate level of support. You are not going to get this by just listening to this podcast, or going to TikTok, or a Facebook group.
Okay, I said what I said. Now, it should also be said that while being identified as gifted, it sounds like a cool thing, like gifted, that sounds good like, who doesn't want a gift? But it really does come packaged together with its own unique set of challenges. Now if a person had supportive parents and educators, and I mean, it would be wonderful if they had a mentor. Like if their mom or grandma or neighbor was also gifted, and could help them navigate the unique experiences that they encounter, so that they could become well rounded adults. But that often doesn't happen. Now there are several books that have been written by mental health professionals on the specific and unique challenges that are faced by gifted individuals.
So I'm going to link to those in the show notes for reference, so you can go deeper into those if you like. There's one that I really like called, Why Smart People Hurt and I think and I'll get into this a little bit more in a few minutes, but I think as I've gotten to know so many more gifted women, specifically gifted female entrepreneurs in the last few years. Universally, they struggle with feeling misunderstood and lonely because they're different. And you'll note the last few podcast episodes this year, as well as the 1st couple into the new year, are all kind of circling around this theme of how do we think of ourselves as a person with difference. I'm not gonna spoil it but if you're paying attention to the podcast titles, both the solo episodes and the guest interviews, I wanted to end this year and roll into the next with a genuine focus on people who are different, and how they accept that difference.
Now, going back to gifted individuals, they are very often driven by a sense of purpose and a need to have an impact on the world. You're gonna find a lot of gifted individuals in politics, but not the greedy, sleazy kind, but they want to change the world. They are in health care. They are in education. They want to fulfill their purpose by having an impact and making a difference to others. However, as their interests evolve over time, their career paths do as well and many a gifted woman explores multiple different avenues before finding one that aligns with all of her passions and strengths. What's also true, is that she might be inclined to reinvent herself multiple times during her adult life as she continues to grow and mature. That has certainly been my story. Now, I've referenced the challenges that gifted people have, and of course they vary widely from one individual to another, but I wanted to highlight some of the common themes.
Now, you will note that these are things that are also experienced by women with ADHD. Gifted women tend to set extremely high standards for themselves. This almost inevitably leads to perfectionism. This drive for perfection can create such intense feelings of pressure, an over riding fear of failure, and difficulty accepting anything less than flawless performance. Now, I worked with a gifted woman a few years ago, who was in medical school, which was her parents dream for her. It was not her dream for herself, but she was so terrified that she would get less than a perfect score on any of her exams. That she would put off checking online for her grades for weeks at a time, which only created more anxiety and pressure. This is not fun. There are a lot of people who say, oh, I'm a perfectionist.
And I remember this used to come up in job interviews tell me, you know, strength and tell me a shortcoming. Well, I'm kind of a perfectionist, which was supposed to be like a strength in disguise. It is not fun, and if you are living with perfectionism, I see you. And this has been an overriding concern in my life for a very long time, and something I have to actively work on. Because whether you are gifted or whether you are twice exceptional, it's really hard to know when enough is enough, and that is a genuine struggle. Now a companion struggle that many gifted women also experience is imposter syndrome. They doubt their abilities, and they feel like they don't honestly deserve their accomplishments and achievements despite no amount of competence evidence. No amount of accolades, no amount of degrees, no amount of certificates, no amount of honors, no amount of awards, convince them that they actually deserve their achievements.
So they persistently doubt them and think, I was lucky or I was in the right place at the right time. Perfectionism and imposter syndrome, and this constant drive to learn, obviously creates some pretty massive issues with work life integration. It's one of the reasons why many gifted women do not marry, and those that do are more likely to get divorced. Balancing career ambitions with personal and family life can be really, really challenging for these driven women. The pursuit of excellence in their careers can sometimes lead to finding a harmonious relationship or lasting success once they've gotten into one. I think it can be really hard for many people to accept that this woman is driven by something that really feels like it's beyond her control. That's not to say she can't work on it and gain awareness, but her internal wiring is too much is never enough.
Expectations and pressure, I cannot emphasize enough how much gifted women face high expectations from themselves, but they also face really high expectations from others. Being told that you're gifted in elementary school, most of the women that I have talked to and worked with, it creates this notion that, oh great, now everyone's gonna expect me to be really, really good at everything and definitely awesome. I mean that's a lot to deal with, even if you are incredibly capable. So the pressure to continuously excel and continuously meet higher and higher standards, puts these women at a high risk for burnout. Talking with Cait Donovan about burnout is another recent episode something that was a little bit more nuanced, and I didn't understand right away, was lack of recognition.
Many gifted women find that their abilities are not necessarily recognized, valued, or appreciated in the workplace, this is a little bit of a flip side of the imposter syndrome. So while they might be recognized in the workplace, they don't feel they've earned it, but many gifted women feel that they are overlooked entirely. Now, there are stereotypes and biases that impact how contributions are perceived. But what I often hear from gifted women is that they are overlooked, underestimated, misunderstood, and frequently have their contributions taken advantage of and cited by men. So they may speak up in a meeting, and everybody ignores what they say but one of the men in the meeting later presents her idea as his own and everybody applauds. That is unfortunately all too common. What is also all too common is difficulty that gifted women have in navigating their social lives.
I mean, gifted people tend to experience challenges relating to others who may not share their same intellectual interests or abilities. So navigating the social dynamics, both in the school and later in the workplace, really requires very deep, self awareness and self acceptance, or it's going to be difficult. If you are frankly talking over the heads of people, or around people, or you're simply not vibing with them because you're just not interested in the things that other people are talking about. You're going to be a bit of an outlier or a misfit fit in the workplace, unless you happen to be in a workplace where there are a lot of outliers and misfits, which if you're lucky and you know these things about yourself, that's not a bad career path. Societal expectations and stereotyped, gender roles can also affect how women who are gifted are perceived in the workplace, because lots of times smart women are actually held back, either because of envy or because other people don't want to work with or for someone that they think has some sort of an advantage over them. It can be really, really challenging.
What's also challenging, and I've heard this from a number of my clients, is gifted women tend to have trouble with authority figures. Now, I used to think this is like daddy issues or mommy issues, but I've really come to understand that gifted individuals by nature tend to question authority, because they question the status quo and establish norms. It is not meant to be insubordinate, disobedient, oppositional. It's that they tend to question everything. Now, in the right workplace, in the right environment, this questioning of the way things are being done can often lead to innovation, but in a more hierarchical workplace it is definitely going to lead to some career stabilizing conversations, to say the least, and I have certainly experienced this myself, where I thought that If I saw that something could be done better, why wouldn't I suggest it? That often did not go well, because I misunderstood that the organization I was a part of was not as open to change as I thought they were, or that they even claimed to be.
I never saw myself as having resistance to authority, but I can look back and see many examples of that's how I was perceived, and I've seen this with a number of my clients as well. And it's one of the reasons why so many women decide to step off that ladder, and go out and start their own business, because they're more than happy to be the boss. They simply don't want to have a boss. So fulfillment with career choices is another area of struggle because gifted women tend to face the dilemma of choosing between a career path that aligns with their intellectual passion, and compared to one that might be more socially expected or financially stable. This is true for all women.
It's true for all humans, quite honestly. But the more you are influenced by other people's expectations, and the more you place high and probably unreasonably high expectations on yourself. Making the right decisions about career path, and what will be sustainably fulfilling for you, can be really really challenging. And I am not the only woman I know who has felt the need to reinvent and start over in a completely new career path after a number of years. I mentioned earlier about isolation and loneliness, and I think this is one of the things that I didn't see right away. But the more I worked with women like this, the more they confided in me, the more I realized when you have a relentless need four stimulation it can be really hard to connect with peers who have those same interests, to even find them and that can contribute to feelings of loneliness.
Some people perceive gifted women as overly competitive or overly ambitious when that's not what drives them. It is the need for intellectual stimulation, even if it's not rewarded, even if it doesn't elevate them up the career ladder. And that can be misunderstood good and contribute to feelings of isolation and loneliness as well. Now, clearly addressing these challenges requires self awareness, self acceptance, if you are in a workplace, it requires self advocacy. Being able to seek out and identify sources of support in the workplace, possible mentors, and at the very least a cultivation of coping strategies, because entrepreneurship is not for everybody. I also think that our culture needs to do a much better job of actually valuing diversity of thought, recognizing unique contributions and providing resources for both personal and professional development for the people who choose to work for them. I do not know very many gifted women who are finding a supportive environment, whether they are in academia, the nonprofit world, or in corporate.
These environments are really, really hard to find, and the higher your needs, the harder it's going to be to find an environment where you can not only survive, but genuinely grow, evolve and thrive. And I think we need to do so much better because these individuals can make really, really meaningful contributions to the workplace. They should not all have to leave and start their own business to craft an environment where they can thrive. So did you notice how many of the traits and challenges of gifted women that I describe sounded similar to, if not exactly the same as those of women with ADHD. Well, this is why I think it's so so so important to get accurate information, and really take the time to understand these nuances. So you know who you are, how you are, what you need, and how you can succeed and thrive. This is especially true for women that are twice exceptional, ADHD and gifted. Because I'm sorry to say the vast majority of mental health professionals, well meaning and competent that they may be, do not fully understand the needs of this particular group.
As with most areas of life, being able to thrive really depends on our ability and our willingness to take full responsibility for developing our own awareness of these things. I have heard far too many stories from women that were seeking help, but were misdiagnosed, mislabeled, and spent years, if not decades, looking for help and not finding what they really needed. That makes me so frustrated, and more than a little bit angry at the mental health profession. So I think it really is up to us if these things apply to you, someone you work with, someone that's in your family, someone you care about, like we need to do better, and we really need to be accurate. There are so many people who watch a few TikToks, and all of a sudden they start referring to themselves as ADHD. And the next thing you know they've enrolled in ADHD coach training, and they're offering to help other people. There's a lot of people who are looking for help, but they're not really finding it because there's a lot of nuance.
And while I'm very, very supportive and encouraged by the growth in this industry, I really hate seeing how many people are hiding in plain sight, looking for help and not finding it, because too many of us do not appreciate the overlap between similar but different individuals. I want to wrap with a question that I got from a listener, and it's come up a few times. So, I think it's a good time to answer it, especially because so many people are learning about differences from their family members and people they work with, and expressing a lot of curiosity about what is neurodivergent. So I was recently asked, so are you saying that gifted women should be considered neurodivergent? Full disclosure, I got a little help from ChatGPT to answer this one.
So are gifted women considered to be neurodivergent, well, the classification of gifted women as neurodivergent is a matter of ongoing discussion. I would even say controversy, and it really depends on the perspective and the definitions that are being used. The term neurodivergent is typically used to encompass people who have neurologically based differences that affect cognitive, sensory and social functions. You are always going to find this term encompasses autism, dyslexia, and more recently ADHD. Giftedness, it's not considered a neurological disorder. As a matter of fact, gifted individuals have cognitive abilities that differ significantly from the norm. They are also more highly intellectually functioning, more creative, have more advanced problem solving skills, but giftedness is not classified as a neurodevelopmental or a neurological condition in the same way that ADHD or autism is. Now, some people argue that gifted individuals, especially those who experience intensities, sensitivities, and asynchronous development, meaning what I call scatter skills.
Some skills that are really highly developed, and others that are underdeveloped, I think that it does make sense to incorporate these individuals into the family of neurodivergent individuals. Cognitive and emotional experiences of these folks are gonna deviate from typical developmental patterns, so they will have unique challenges as well as unique strengths. The jury is still out on this, but I do think in recent years, there has been growing awareness, growing curiosity, growing recognition of the neurodiversity paradigm. I think we are still figuring this out so what is the diversity of neurological experience and how can we reject pathologizing of difference? In this context, some people would say giftedness should absolutely be included under the umbrella term. But hey, whether giftedness is a form of neurodivergent or not, it really depends on how we conceptualize these terms, giftedness and neurodivergent. What is important? While the jury is still out, the controversy is still going on, and people are still deciding what to include in this term.
What is important is that the field of psychology and the field of education are continuing to evolve, and the discussions of neurodiversity and giftedness are ongoing and nuanced. The most crucial aspect is recognizing the individual needs, strengths and challenges of individual, regardless of whether they fit under a particular umbrella term or not. As I said before, I really wanted to end this year, and roll into the beginning of next, focusing on the importance of knowing who we are and how we are developing systems of safety and trust. So each of us, regardless of labels, can grow in our visibility and our authenticity, and each of us can find ways to thrive and avoid burnout.
So if this information has been helpful to you, and you would like to hear more on this podcast about creating success on your terms with giftedness, ADHD, or both I want you to connect with me and let me know. You can email me at diann@diannwingert coaching.com. There'll be a link in the show notes. If you prefer to leave me a voice message, there is a SpeakPipe widget on my website Diann Wingert coaching, or you could slide into my DM on either LinkedIn or Instagram. The links are all in the show notes, and I promise I will respond personally to each and every one. We're going to be back next week with another inspiring guest expert interview, so I hope you will join me then.
