Gifted Adults: Intellectual Challenge and Fulfillment

Trying to better understand what it means to be a gifted adult often means I often wind up looking at information about gifted children instead as gifted children have been studied much more than their adult counterparts.  I came across this article,  Counseling Gifted and Talented Students by Nicholas Colangelo which I found interesting both as a gifted adult as well as a parent of gifted children.  In the article, Colangelo suggests that “meeting the cognitive needs of gifted students often simultaneously meets their social-emotional needs”.  Or put another way (and I believe this could be extrapolated to also apply to gifted adults), if we are challenged intellectually, it’s highly likely that gifted adults will result in broader emotional satisfaction and be surrounded by a peer group.  Those of us who are gifted know that ‘meeting our cognitive needs’ is a high bar; however, if Colangelo is correct than he has also provided gifted adults with a roadmap for finding fulfillment.

Cognition, or the mental act of knowing, is often reduced to theoretical knowledge.  Gifted adults who are academically or book minded might hear ‘cognitive needs’ and reduce cognition or ‘knowing’ to what they might find in school or a book.  Without drifting into a larger, philosophical digression about the idea and limitations of cognition or knowing, I am inclined to think that cognition is multi-dimensional and there are many things that must be experienced rather than simply thought about if one is to satisfy cognitive needs.  For example, I love to ski.  I could read everything there about skiing, I can have people describe their experience of skiing to me; however, I cannot actually know what it is to ski until I actually put on the skis myself, head up a mountain and slide down.  So if it is correct to say a gifted adult’s cognitive needs are about more than just books and theory than satisfying a gifted adult’s cognitive needs is a considerable thing to contemplate.  IMary Rocamora suggests that gifted adults have to start with self-recognition to be the full extent of themselves.  I wonder how many of us shy away from satisfying our cognitive needs because we’re daunted by the extent of them.  Or perhaps Marianne Williamson’s suggestion that, “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure” offers a better explanation.  For myself, sometimes I think it’s no more complicated than that I don’t know where to begin.

To return to an earlier theme, which I raised in my post Underachievement and the Gifted Adult , we are sent  a lot of powerful messages in our society about achievement - grades, money, professional recognition.   So where does satisfying cognitive our needs fit into this message?   For some of us, at times, satisfying one’s cognitive needs might be in direct conflict with traditional ideas of achievement and success.  Or traditional ideas of achievement and success may be a distraction.  I’m not suggesting that doing well in school, having professional prominence cannot be part of achievement for a gifted adult, but I am suggesting that unless we understand how it fits in meeting our broader intellectual needs, it’s unlikely to work. I am inclined to think that, generally speaking, Colangelo is correct, gifted adults are likely to be fulfilled when they’re intellectually satisfied and I also think that intellectual satisfaction for a gifted adult is specific to each person and seeking that satisfaction a significant undertaking.  Yet I wonder - what it would look like if, as a group, gifted adults set aside conventional messages about achievement and actively pursued  satisfying the full spectrum of our ‘cognitive needs’?

Tagged as: adult, cognition, emotion, Intellectual giftedness, intelligence, IQ, Nicholas Colangelo, satisfaction