“Despite the enormous diversity within the gifted population, the goal of professional work should always be the same: for the gifted adults to re-encounter, explore, and value the gifted self and allow it to grow in its own unique way. It is the professional’s job to provide whatever each gifted individual needs in order for this to happen. ”
“I have been consulting with Lynne for the past three months. She is fantastic! I`ve been so pleased to work with her in the areas of self-care, self-management, communication, blockages to success, planning and motivation and more.
She`s consistently held a positive vision for me, been generous with helpful tips for improving my life and flexible in understanding my unique needs. I wouldn`t hesitate to recommend Lynne for your own personal and/or professional project.”
Email Lynne or give her a call to have a conversation about the benefits of Coaching for Gifted Adults
“Gifted individuals face many challenges. One of them may be in getting correctly identified by psychotherapists and others as gifted.”
“The ability to see how one might perform, combined with emotional intensity, leads many gifted children and adults to have unduly high expectations of themselves and others.”
Advanced Coaching & Psychotherapy for Gifted Adults
Are You A Gifted Adult?
Discover Your Unique Advantage & How To Use It
Understand who you are, where you want to go, and how to get there
Be Confident About What to Do Next
The need and desire for inner transformation is an expression of what Dabrowski called the third factor—the drive behind autonomous, self-conscious, self-chosen and self-determined efforts at guiding one’s development. Elizabeth Mika
Smart Advice for Smart People
Talking openly with an informed, supportive, and experienced gifted adult therapist or coach can be an invaluable experience.
Psychotherapy and coaching specially designed to meet the needs of gifted, talented and creative adults can help multi-talented adults identify and develop themselves, their potential, and the necessary skills and self awareness needed to increase personal, professional, relationship, and creative satisfaction.
If you had the opportunity to be fulfilled in your life, would you do it?
Vision without action is a dream. Action without vision is simply passing the time. Action with vision is making a positive difference. Joel Barker
Because most gifted adults have little understanding of how their own giftedness and multiple abilities impact their lives and how it often creates significant problems, conflicts, challenges, and dilemmas at home, work, school, and in relationships, they can benefit from working with a therapist or coach who understands gifted adults—and who knows how to help gifted adults understand exactly what it means to be gifted.
Star performers require star treatment that reflects the high expectations they bring to life, love, work, and art.
Without accurate identification, information, guidance, and self-understanding, Gifted, Talented and Creative Adults are unlikely to have a good understanding of what their unique needs are, what makes them different from others, why they don't fit in well with peers, and why they aren't comfortable being so different than everyone else.
A Gifted Adult Therapist can help gifted adults:
Discover and appreciate their unique strengths, creativity, talents, and abilities
Learn how to live with what they see and perceive as imperfections in themselves, others, and the world.
Understand and value the full range of their intellectual, emotional, and creative experiences.
Accept and value themselves and their unique point of view
Here are many of the books I recommend to my gifted adult clients.
A Gifted Adult Coach can help gifted adults:
Understand themselves and others
Cope with and anticipate people's reactions to their giftedness and ways of doing things
Deal with difficult and challenging situations
Leverage their talents for their own advantage
Get specialized support and solutions tailored to their needs
Specialized coaching and psychotherapy services for gifted individuals, couples, and families help gifted, talented, and creative people address and resolve these issues. Psychotherapy, counseling, and coaching for gifted adults is important.
Hollingworth (1942) found of all the special problems of general conduct which the most intelligent children face, she mentions five:
1.) To find enough hard and interesting work
2.) To suffer fools gladly—not sneeringly, not despairingly, not weepingly-but gladly; meaning—learn how to tolerate the foolishness of others, failure leads to disillusionment, misanthropy and the ruin of potential leaders
3.) To keep from being negativistic toward authority
4.) To keep from becoming hermits
5.) To avoid the formation of benign chicaneryKaren Morse. (1942)
Coaching or psychotherapy with a knowledgeable, skilled therapist or an experienced and informed coach who understands gifted adults and their wants, needs, motivations, problems, strengths, skill set, and drive—and how to guide, coach, mentor, help and inspire gifted people—can help you understand yourself, your giftedness, and your talents.
Without additional training and education, mental health professionals will seldom realize the contribution giftedness makes to difficulties or problems, nor will they sufficiently appreciate the need to provide the gifted client with authentic intellectual respect.
James Webb
Turbocharge your successul outcomes so success can be easy, fast and fun.
Dignity is the ability to fine-tune our internal gyroscope of balance regardless of what the world throws at us, and to respond with clarity and compassion for ourselves and others. Anonymous
As a licensed therapist and experienced coach, who works exclusively with gifted adults, I know something about the particular challenges gifted, talented, and creative adults face in life, love, and work. Perhaps you do, too.
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change. Charles Darwin
In my experience, the challenges gifted and talented people face are little understood by most people—including parents, educators, coaches, business leaders, and therapists.
Consequently, gifted people of all ages are mislabeled, misperceived, misunderstood, and misdiagnosed by others—and by themselves, too.
For more than ten years I've been working with gifted, talented, and creative adults, couples, and families as a therapist, counselor, speaker, trainer, educator, coach, and mentor using a solution oriented and positive psychology approach.
Alienus non diutius. Pixar University
As a result of my work with gifted people, I've developed many effective and useful tools, models, and rapid success strategies for working with gifted people of all ages.
On this site you will find many of these, as well as the books , articles, and resources I use with my clients.
Be sure to check out the articles and links at the bottom of each page—and the books I recommend here for gifted and creative adults.
If this section speaks to you as a gifted adult, give coaching or psychotherapy a try.
If you'd like to explore gifted adult coaching or psychotherapy with me, call me at 310-828-7121 or email me—include your phone number so we can meet by phone and have a conversation about what you need and what I can provide.
Take charge and get started.
Lynne Azpeitia, MFT
310-828-7121
3025 Olympic Blvd, Santa Monica, CA 90404
Coaching, Psychotherapy & Consultation
Contact Lynne About Services for Gifted Adults
Coaching, Counseling & Consulting Services Also Available by Phone & Skype
Interested in reading more? Click here for books for Gifted Adults
All of our dreams can come true, if we have the courage to pursue them.
Walt Disney
“We all walk in the dark and each of us must learn to turn on his or her own light.”
“Be master of your petty annoyances and conserve your energies for the big, worthwhile things. It isn’t the mountain ahead that wears you out - it’s the grain of sand in your shoe.”
To schedule an appointment or arrange a free phone consultation, email Lynne or call her at 310-828-7121
“Learning how to read and interpret their own and other people’s body language can help gifted people become more aware of their own feelings and the impact their behavior and gifts can have on other people, as well as to help them become better able to anticipate the probable consequences of their statements and actions.”
“Info written about gifted children growing up applies equally to the gifted adult.”
Misdiagnosis and Dual Diagnosis of Gifted Children
James T. Webb
Many gifted and talented children (and adults) are being mis-diagnosed by psychologists, psychiatrists, pediatricians, and other health care professionals. The most common mis-diagnoses are: Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), Oppositional Defiant Disorder (OD), Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD), and Mood Disorders such as Cyclothymic Disorder, Dysthymic Disorder, Depression, and Bi-Polar Disorder. These common mis-diagnoses stem from an ignorance among professionals about specific social and emotional characteristics of gifted children which are then mistakenly assumed by these professionals to be signs of pathology.
In some situations where gifted children have received a correct diagnosis, giftedness is still a factor that must be considered in treatment, and should really generate a dual diagnosis. For example, existential depression or learning disability, when present in gifted children or adults, requires a different approach because new dimensions are added by the giftedness component. Yet the giftedness component typically is overlooked due to the lack of training and understanding by health care professionals (Webb & Kleine, 1993).
Despite prevalent myths to the contrary, gifted children and adults are at particular psychological risk due to both internal characteristics and situational factors. These internal and situational factors can lead to interpersonal and psychological difficulties for gifted children, and subsequently to mis-diagnoses and inadequate treatment..... More
10 Traits of the Greats
Bob Kodzis
So you want to be a creative genius...If you really want to become a creative genius surround yourself with creative geniuses for a few years. Work with them, play with them and take great notes. Here’s a glimpse at some of the nuggets I’ve uncovered so far...More
If Only I Had Known: Lessons from Gifted Adults
Mary-Elaine Jacobsen, PsyD.
Every week since the publication of my first book, The Gifted Adult (previously Liberating Everyday Genius), I have received phone calls, letters, and e-mails from gifted people around the world and have been fascinated by the similarity of their impassioned comments. Whether from New York City, rural Arizona, Costa Rica, or France, each of them has voiced astonished relief: “For the first time I feel like somebody gets it.” “At last I can see myself clearly!” “Finally I have figured out what has always been wrong with me, and it’s not wrong at all!” “If only I had known!” No matter what their background, they confess to having felt misunderstood for years; to being bored, held back, and plagued by self-doubt; and to struggling with loneliness.....More
Theory of Positive Disintegration as a Model of Personality Development For Exceptional Individuals
Elizabeth Mika
Positive Disintegration and Levels of Development
Dabrowski believed that the most important aspect of human development is the emotional one, since only in the area of emotional growth, transformation of behavior and character is possible. He saw development as a progression from the level of primary integration characterized by rigid, automatic and instinctual egocentrism to conscious altruism based on empathy, compassion and self-awareness, expressed the fullest at the highest level of development, the level of secondary integration. This growth takes place through the process of positive disintegration, which is the loosening and partial, or sometimes global, dismantling of the initial character structure during the course of one’s life and replacing it by consciously created personality – the goal of life-long development.
Positive disintegration results from and is expressive of multilevel inner conflicts – conflicts between one’s ideals and values (what ought to be) and the existing reality of one’s internal and external life (what is), which falls short of those ideals and values. Those who most readily experience multilevel conflicts are individuals possessing high developmental potential – high and broad, multisided intelligence, special talents and abilities, various global forms of overexcitability and the need and desire for inner transformation – for transcending one’s psychological type and constraints of psychobiological maturation process. The need and desire for inner transformation is an expression of what Dabrowski called the third factor—the drive behind autonomous, self-conscious, self-chosen and self-determined efforts at guiding one’s development...More