Gifted, Neurodivergent and having a tough time
Were you someone who actually kind of liked school and maybe even found it fairly easy? Did you enjoy the challenge of achieving high grades and feel satisfaction from learning subjects that interest you? Did you feel pretty confident until either university or the working world suddenly hit? If so, this post might be for you.
Firstly, this blog today is based on a YouTube video I put out. If you would prefer to watch instead of read, you can find the video here:
Many of my clients, whether they identify with the name itself or not, tend to be 2e, or twice exceptional. These are people who, as the name suggests, are exceptional in two ways, one in that they are gifted and the other in that they have something that makes life a little bit harder, usually a neurodivergence such as ADHD, Autism, dyslexia and the list goes on.
People who are gifted usually have a reasonable time when it comes to the academic side of school, though the social side may be harder. They might develop vocabulary very young or they may pick up extra curricular skills at a lightning pace. There’s the stereotype of the autistic maths nerd which, if I’m honest, I am probably an example of, but it can also be people who excel in other subjects like drama, languages and even, believe it or not, sport. From my experience, the martial arts world is full of neurospicies.
The amount of times in BJJ when I've told someone I'm ADHD/autistic and received the response: "Oh me too!"
The thing about being 2e is that there becomes an expectation of high performance; we performed well as children, why wouldn’t we continue to perform to a high standard? But eventually, unless we’re exceptionally lucky, it comes to a time when suddenly high performance doesn’t come as easy in this situation as it used to.
This sudden squeeze on the breaks happens at different times for everyone. There are incredibly intelligent people who struggled to pass university because the structure of university clashed with their neurodivergence in a difficult way. Others didn’t make it to university in the first place despite being capable and interested in going.
Yet others entered the working world and encountered difficulties for the first time there, or were even many years into their career before they hit the brick wall. I myself fell into the latter category before things started to feel like they were falling down around me.
Regardless of when in your life or career this happens, it often follows a similar pattern, with the twice exceptional person still feeling that pressure to perform and anything less than a high performance feels like failure.
This is a huge weight to carry because being gifted becomes part of your identity, whether that becomes flat out arrogance or quietly holding yourself to a higher standard than those around you. And so to suddenly be struggling can feel like losing part of your identity, that maybe you weren’t as gifted as you thought you were. That everything you thought about yourself wasn’t true.
Many clients arrive at my door around the time they’re going through this crisis, or when they’ve taken some time out after it and are trying to rebuild their life. I often hear similar sentiments that they aren’t sure the things that they were good at still apply anymore or that they don’t actually know how they got to where they were before. So I wanted to spend this video talking a little bit about how we end up here, share the experience of some of my clients and then talk about one of the best ways that we can tackle this.
So in order to contextualise this I want to go back to school as for many of us this is something that dominates our early childhood memories. One of the most useful things for neurodivergent brains, especially ADHD and autistic ones, is structure. I spoke about this in my post How To Make Work More ADHD & Autism Friendly but even though ADHD fights structure at every corner, both ADHD and autistic brains perform better under structure and routine.
So if you look back at school, this is what it was. Five days a week you’d go to the same building at the same time. There was a timetable of classes to follow, a consistent lunch break. For those of us with ADHD there was enough variety through the switching of lessons that we didn’t get too bored and even if we did, if we were a good student teachers were more lenient about us doodling in a book or playing with a rubik’s cube.
I love that whenever I've posted about my rubik's cubes online someone always excitedly tells me about the new innovations in cubing technology now.
For those of us who were autistic the consistency was also comforting. There were rules and to how the school day operated, and once we understood the rules then things were a lot more comfortable for us.
School also has clear expectations, something one of my clients shares as a frustration with work now; never knowing what “done” actually means. Homework was set with an objective definition of what “finished” meant, we knew when exams were, what the syllabus was, what coursework deadlines looked like. There were many ways in which school was hard, especially on the social side, school can be terrible for neurodivergent kids from a friendships and bullying point of view, but the structure, if it suited your flavour of neurodivergence, was a big win.
So the step beyond there from school to university or work was a huge one. Suddenly you have to structure your own time. Suddenly expectations were less clear, without mark schemes to check your own work against or a boss that knew all the answers. As part of this, you acquired a lot more responsibility and much of it you weren’t exactly taught how to handle before. The difference is jarring and regardless of how well you initially cope, it all starts to build up as stress over time.
One of the most powerful quotes that recontextualised my own crisis that led to my diagnosis and career pivot was a quote from the paper “It’s like it’s designed to keep me stressed - Working sustainably with ADHD or autism” which I’ve quoted many times now but here it is again:
“It was not that they had poor self-esteem; they were being broken down by always being at the end of their tether.”
And this is what I think of when a 2e person goes from being the person who is gifted and doing okay to becoming the person who hits the wall and loses their confidence and their identity. It’s a blow to our self-esteem, but it comes from the amount of time we’ve spent at the end of our tether.
And of course, when we get to this point, it has compounding effects. When our self-esteem has dropped we’re very likely to hit impostor syndrome, doubting our abilities and feeling like our past successes were fake. Now we’re the impostor that is just trying not to be found out. And the more we feel like this, the more we’re holding ourselves back.
It's become a thing now where I search for these little guys whenever I use the term "impostor".
I spoke about this with a client recently, one who had hopped around a number of jobs but found it difficult to stay at one. He’d had years of experience and a highly sort after technical background, but he was applying for graduate roles and disappointed that he wasn’t hearing back from them.
He said to me the words that I’ve heard in some format from many of the people that I’ve worked with: “The trouble is, I don’t really know what I’m good at.” This coming from a man with incredible programming skills, a honed mathematical brain that took interest in physics and chemistry as well who turned to me and said that he didn’t really think he was good at anything.
He’s not the only one. Another client came to me in a new leadership role, telling me he had no idea how he’d gotten here. He knew he must have done well somehow to get to where he was but he had no idea what his boss had seen in him and frankly no idea how to use what he was good at to even begin to start to take on leadership.
A third client, a freelancer, who had been hand picked for her latest project due to her amazing skills turned round and told me the words “I feel like I’m not good”. Because all this time we’d been measuring good the wrong way.
School taught us to measure good based on marks, based on exam grades and coursework scores. So we brought that idea of looking for tangible rewards into the real world. The equivalent became getting promotions or new roles that we wanted. Signs that we’d “passed” the stage we were in and moved onto the next one. But while we could be good at exams and coursework, being good at promotions doesn’t really work the same way.
Instead we need to find out what we are fundamentally good at. The ways in which our brains operate in this world that bring a benefit that few others do. I’m talking about brains that excel at ideation, coming up with different creative ideas to solve a problem that others may not have come across.
I’m talking about brains that are able to uncover the individual talents of each person they come across and use that to bring people together in a way that gets the best result for the team by bringing out the best complimentary parts of each individual.
Some people are just amazing at bringing people together and building relationships. Yes this is a cop out of an image to break things up...
I’m talking about brains that are able to take control of a situation and make decisions, that are able to turn a chaotic and conflicted situation into one that moves forward in a uniform direction.
This stuff isn’t taught at school and it’s not stuff that you can just learn the fundamentals of, pass a test on and be on your way laughing. But the truth is that there are strengths like this inside all of us, we just don’t tend to know what they are.
One of the things I work on with my clients is strength finding assessments that help the person find out these strengths inside of them. What tends to become apparent as part of their process is how these show up in their lives; that the times they’re doing well in their career, and probably the times they’re enjoying it most, are the times in which they’re best aligned with these strengths that they have, and that by getting them back on track with using those strengths we can get them back on the journey of performance again.
It’s a journey and people don’t recover from a confidence knock overnight, but by having an objective statement of your strengths and bringing them into your daily life and career, you can start to build something that sets you up for greater success again in the future.
If this resonates with you and feel you would be interested in talking to an adhd and autism-friendly coach, feel free to get in touch. If you’re looking for more blog posts, you can find them here.
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