A Reflective Study of Work Opportunities and Challenges for Gifted People

Business

By Ruth P. Wachter 17. September 2014

A Reflective Study of Work Opportunities and Challenges for Gifted People

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Do gifted people really have different work opportunities and challenges than all other employees? It is not the task of this paper to analyze the testing methods for IQ (intelligence quotient), and EQ (emotional quotient) which are the approaches that identify people as gifted or sensitive, but to identify the specific work opportunities and challenges from biopsychosocial perspectives.

The German Magazine Der Spiegel, has published an article one year ago, “Zu schlau für den Job (Too smart for the job)”.

Bärbel Schwertfeger, author of this article wants to address the problems that gifted employees have to deal with. Gifted employees are far too fast, perceived as rivals by their bosses, and irritate their colleagues. Schwertfeger points out that gifted people have problems in dealing with socio-dynamic power games within

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organizations. This may be the fact why they “rise rapidly like a rocket and crash in the same way”. She argues that gifted people have fun solving a problem without chasing a target. The author itself who is known as “gifted and sensitive” is reflecting her career progression to add a more practice-oriented approach. The paper consists of four main sections. The first section gives a brief introduction to holism and how it can be applied to career

progression. The second section analyses the possible reasons for being gifted. Moreover, the phenomenon of being sensitive is explained from a holistic perspective. The third section shows the opportunities and difficulties that gifted people face, based on the biopsychosocial model. The fourth section highlights the opportunities and challenges in the author’s career progression due to this special characteristic, including her future job challenges.

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The holistic approach is well-known from medical practice. Holism must not be confused with alternative medicines that have no scientific background. It stands for the integration of physical, mental, and social perspectives on mental health and not for the endorsement of any techniques.

Why is the Holistic Model the best Approach?

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Based on the slogan, “The whole is more than the sum of its parts” (Aristotle, Metaphysics 1037), the holistic approach represents the constituent opposite of the reductionistic approach. A very popular contemporary and holistic approach is the biopsychosocial model. In theory, Engel’s biopsychosocial model (1977) is based on the General System Theory (GTS) from Ludwig von Bertalanffy. GTS as well as the biopsychosocial model are open systems without isolation, but just the biopsychosocial model takes into account the perspectives of biology, psychology as well as a social science. It seems best, following Richardson (1996), Zunkre (2008), and Farmer (2009), to analyze the nature of work and human life needs by different academic disciplines. They argue that the employee needs to be seen from the total person perspective. Career problems are influenced by personal problems and vice versa. The bio-psychosocial approach is a chance to observe the connection between

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the perspectives of biology, psychology, and social science of career and personal concerns. (Trull, 2005; Innstrand et al., 2008). Sulsky & Smith (2005) define that any factor (stressor) that affects biological and/or psychological demands on an employee leads to biological, psychological, and social (behavioral) effects. Take, for example, the case of employees without clear role descriptions. According to Sulsky & Smith, these employees tend to feel insecure about their responsibilities, which can be defined in this case as a psychological stressor. Due to this, a risk for the organization occurs because stressors increase stress which continues in reduced productivity, increase absenteeism, and susceptibility to change jobs (Schultz & Schultz, 2010; Salminen, 2010). This raises the question, how many employees do not have a proper job description? Does that imply that all of them struggle with productivity and absenteeism?

Let‘s stress out that this result is only provisional and further research is required.

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Discussion Opportunities & Challenges Witelson et al. (2006) attempt to analyze the relationship between intelligence and brain size.

But at the end of the day what matters is that this study does not provide any conclusive scientific proof for the correlation of intelligence and brain size. Without wishing to take sides, the authors ignore completely that it is much more important to understand how efficiently the brain is used rather than the volume and size of the brain.

The biological perspective of EI is analyzed by Goleman (2008). He argues that the identification of mirror neurons is the philosopher’s stone. For example, if an employee feels uncomfortable in a specific situation, a highly sensitive person (high EI) reproduces the same emotions due to the mirror neurons. This action of understanding he defines as empathy. In his earlier study, he differs between real and false empathy. To take a concrete example: a colleague is talking about an embarrassing situation in his private life.

Intelligence Quotient and Emotional Intelligence It is not the task of this paper to analyze the testing methods for IQ (intelligence quotient), and EQ (emotional quotient) which are the approaches that identify people as gifted or sensitive, but to provide overall knowledge about the attributes of high IQ and high EI.

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One of the most well-known IQ tests is the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scale, revised by Lewis Terman. He used this test to identify people that are above the standard norm for his Genetic Studies of Genius (1925-1959).

Terman follows the ideas of Wundt and Galton who state that gifted people have a higher sensitivity and better acuity of hearing, vision, and thought (1906). As already mentioned in the introduction, the issues on the psychosocial level are inevitable due to the fact

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that gifted persons are different. As Lewit & Baker have already argued in 1994:

“Differences cause conflicts”.

EI is a much more complex intelligence theory.

Salovey & Mayer (1990) defined EI as “the ability to perceive emotions, to access and generate emotions so as to assist thought, to understand emotions and emotional knowledge, and to reflectively regulate emotions so as to promote emotional and intellectual growth”. Support for this interpretation comes from Thorndike (1920) who defines EI as the ability to identify others’ motives and behaviors to respond to them in an adequate way.

The evening before he had a huge dinner with his new girlfriend. As he recognized that it was a really bad decision to eat spicy curry, a noisy flatulence escaped. The listener now reacts to this story. He feels the same emotions due to the mirror system (real empathy). If he is thinking about the feelings that would arise to him in this situation, this constitutes false empathy. Empathy is one of the most important properties of modern society. Due to the activated parasympathetic nervous system, social life is improved. Empathy is one of the positive emotional attractors that arouses the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), which gives more access to neural circuits and improves the immune system functions (Boyatzis et al. 2006). Boyatzis et al. make a number of valid points. A high IQ often results in solving problems that others cannot succeed in.

This often leads to ongoing activation of the sympathetic nervous system (SNS). SNS activation causes a flight-or-fight impulse that releases adrenaline and noradrenaline. Moreover, an increase in blood pressure, breathing and heart rate are the consequences. The body shunts blood to arms and legs, suspends the immune system, and produces cortisol (Sapolsky, 2004; Goleman, 2009). Usually, after the problem is solved, our body relaxes and switches to the PNS. If the person is not able to deactivate the SNS in a reasonable time because of solving one problem after another (i.e. chronic SNS activation), the risk of heart disease (Gold & Chrousos, 1999) and depression (Glassman & Shapiro, 1998) increases.

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The chronically high level of cortisol effects in the long-term the immune cells (Weinstein, 2004). According to Heintze (2013), people with high IQ and EI struggle with two main challenges: perfectionism and the impostor syndrome (IS). According to Hess (1994), perfectionism is the ambition to bring excellence to its extreme. From a psychological perspective, perfectionists put an overabundance of pressure on themselves due to thinking that they should be able to achieve impossible targets. This is the reason for the self-fulfilling prophecy, which starts the vicious circle of chronic stress followed by a chronicel activation of the SNS. Blatt et al.

(1982) as well as McGirr et al. (2009) fail in proving a significant correlation between depression and perfectionism.

Curisously, they have used the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST) as a negative emotional attractor for perfectionists. The authors underestimate the power of internal drivers that perfectionists have. A 20-minute long stressful situation does not knock them out because cortisol does not significantly increase by using the TSST (Bollini & Walker,

Author’s experience My first exposure to the conflicts that occur due to giftedness was at primary school. An older girl who had repeated primary classes three times attacked me after lunch. She threatened to thump me if I did not stop being cute and bright. I told this to my father and he decided that I needed to learn how to defend myself more effectively. When I was 13 years old, my father left the family because of another woman. My trust in men became profoundly injured. At this time, I learnd to protect myself by building up a wall around me.

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The concept of having just a few people that were allowed to trigger my high sensitivity prevented me from really close romantic relationships as an adult. This was a significant milestone for my future career.

Having no romantic relationship enables endless possibilities to solve the problems of other people. To this day, I believe that no problem exists which cannot be solved.

Organizations have recognized this benefit and have hired me for very difficult and time consuming-projects that were often not wholly successful. That was the key trigger for my personal devil’s circle. Failure was solved by a higher effort that was considered by myself as a failure and the inability of doing a good job. Self-doubts were my

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2002). The level of cortisol is the measurable quantity that indicates depression. Due to these explanations, the hypothesis (i.e. perfectionism causes depression) of Hess and Heintze cannot be disproved by Blatt et al. and McGirr & Turecki.

The IS is another challenge for gifted people.

Whittenburg & Treat (2008) argue, in a study of gifted youth that the IS drive gifted people by the fear that “being gifted” is a lie. The authors believe that gifted people who also have a high level of EI, is a major impact on their chronic stress level. Due to self-doubts and latent dissatisfaction with themselves that are caused by the social feedback of their environment, an irrational feeling of being an impostor develops. Gifted people often tell just a few success stories and are only rarely satisfied with themselves. The majority of them believe that they do not deserve success because they are worried about creating the impression of incredibility. This belief mixed up with the IS sometimes lead them to hectic, badly-planned actions. Heintze believes that gifted and highly sensitive people tend to overtax their own

companions in my daily life until my first biopsychosocial burnout occurred with asthmatic choking seizures, depression, and isolation. Hardly recovered, I started to give my career a second try. I decided to study International Economics parallel to my fulltime job. Surprisingly, not burnout occurred because the social group of students was like a social safety net. They did not ask me to solve their problems; quite the opposite, they allowed me to be the person I am. In the last years, I was professionally focused on company reorganizations and restructuring, which confronted me with unmanaged staff, a wide range of economic problems, dissonant leaders, and many stakeholders that put pressure on me.

This set up a new challenge for me: using my IQ together with EI. Today, I have already discovered the key to success. A course at the Western Case University brought the solution: Leadership by EI. Within this course, Boyatzis reported the effects of being a resonant leader and provided me tools (e.g. the calculation of the renewal ratio) and examples leading to the aha experience. My high sensitivity, my well-known Achilles heel, enables me to be a fantastic resonant leader.

Moreover, I can now use the SNS for the problem-solving process and to have the possibility to switch back to PNS whenever I want. This capability

forces. She based her argument on the fact that (1) ongoing adjustment can be stressful, (2) perceiving their environment in a condition of sensitivity can be tiring, (3) the inability to say NO and being the mug can be exhausting and (4) self-doubts can be a cause to question constantly oneself.

Support for this argument comes from Henderson (2009). It ,therefore, follows that gifted and high-sensitivity people often suffer from burnout syndrome on all levels of the biopsychosocial model. Due to the ongoing release of stress hormones, the body is driven to achieve top performance for a long period. The consequences are overuse and fatigue. From the psychological perspective, a vicious circle of emotional disinterest, selfdoubts and compensation due to excessive work enthusiasm often leads to dissociation (Wellisch & Brown, 2013). Furthermore, antisocial behavior with poor peer relationships develops. Social contacts are considered to be stressful and burdensome. Based on Webster’s definition of isolation, MooreRichardson (2002) shows that the feeling of being a part of a group is very important for gifted people.

enables me to motivate people, develop their careers and manage organizational turnarounds better than before while having the chance to relax and recover. My life now is purely filled with close social contacts, fewer self-doubts, and a lot of sports that help me handlethe biological challenges that have never disappeared fully.

With this new concept (e.i. alternately using high IQ and EQ), I face the future with confidence from all perspectives of the biopsychosocial model.

Conclusion In conclusion, this paper shows that the hypothesis (H0) is false. This suggests that gifted employees need to be handled in a different way because of their specific challenges and opportunities. A number of tentative conclusions can be drawn. The paper underlines the importance of having selected and sympathetic social contacts to avoid the development of insecurities and isolated environments.

Gifted and highly sensitive people need to avoid overtaxing their own forces. Although they have a lot of power and intelligence, they need to switch from time to time to their PNS to reflect events and decisions. In this way, they are able to find their own unifying thread for future development and success.

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Acknowledges This work was supported by the University of Liverpool for the case of MSc in Applied Psychology.

Conflict of interest The author declare the she has no conflict of interest.

Mag (FH) Ruth P. Wachter, Senior Business Consultant, Certified Business Coach

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e-mail: wachter@re-act-online or ruth.wachter@online.liverpool.ac.uk

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