Recover from your mental health conditions, if you have any, through specialist therapy, mindfulness meditation and/or another mind-body approach: mental health conditions can hinder the full use of giftedness.
Giftedness · Fulfilment
Making giftedness a strength
10 ways to live with and use your giftedness better
Discovering your giftedness can be the missing puzzle piece for understanding your history, relationships and sense of being out of step. However, identification is only a beginning: the next challenge is turning this knowledge into freedom, choices and fulfilment.
Video in French. The article below is available in English.
Knowing about your giftedness is not enough: you need to embrace it
Assessment or identification provides words and pointers. The essential work comes afterwards: understanding your strengths, accepting your characteristics, reducing obstacles and building a life better suited to your functioning.
10 tips to make your giftedness a strength
These ten tips share one aim: using your resources without denying your difficulties, and gradually becoming freer to be yourself.
Use your strengths: the cognitive abilities, emotional abilities and creative abilities identified by the psychological assessment that identified your giftedness.
Understand yourself: read, read, read, and never stop this process of self-development: it is necessary for gifted people.
Love yourself: love your giftedness. It is a precious gift that can become the key to your success.
Develop a vision of what you deeply want by regularly taking time to look within: what drives you, what sparks your passion, what you want to do and the direction you want to give your life. Then dare to take one step towards that vision, then another, and another…
Fail: gifted people struggle with failure. Yet success means accepting failure, bouncing back, failing again and bouncing back again, using your resilience.
Be imperfect: perfectionism holds gifted people back. Whether we have High Emotional Potential, High Intellectual Potential or not, our species, the human species, is deeply imperfect, and being able to accept this matters.
Do not listen to those who criticise your originality or try to belittle you: stop letting negative people’s jealousy hold you back!
Dare to be yourself without adapting excessively to others. Instead, adapt your environment to your characteristics to avoid living too much through a false self.
Take time to show others the quality of your achievements! Too many gifted people create extremely creative, brilliant, original and innovative things but keep them to themselves, particularly because of their impostor syndrome.
A common thread: conform less, choose more
Several tips converge on the same idea: gradually moving beyond the false self, accepting failure and imperfection, sharing your achievements and building an environment where your characteristics can truly become resources.
Frequently asked questions
Is discovering giftedness enough to feel better?
Not always. Identification can make considerable sense of things, but fulfilment then depends on how a person embraces their strengths, limits and needs.
Why can an assessment be useful beyond a result?
Because it describes a profile: strengths, vulnerabilities, differences between abilities, and emotional or personality characteristics that make sense of overall functioning.
Where should I start if I do not know whether I have HIP or HEP?
You can start with the screening tests page to choose the possibility that best matches your current question.
What if your first strength were finally understanding your own functioning?
Screening can be a first step. An assessment then goes further, connecting your abilities, difficulties and distinctive way of experiencing the world.
