Gifted and Humble: How Does That Work?

Most intellectually gifted adults don’t think of themselves as gifted. Smart enough maybe, but not so special as to be gifted.

Most intellectually gifted adults don’t think of themselves as gifted. Smart enough maybe, but not so special as to be gifted. After all, they were lucky, or worked hard, or didn’t get the best grades, or … whatever. Because of this reality, this tendency, it is that much harder for advocates to get the systems in place that might help gifted children thrive and turn into gifted adults who thrive. And by thrive, I mean they will be able not only to intellectually “fire on all cylinders” but to be emotionally and socially healthy, too.

Few Gifted People Walk Around Trying to Act Gifted

Because people generally don’t like people who are vain or “full of themselves,” many children are taught very early that it is bad manners and poor behavior to brag or show off. So, from early on, many gifted people may have received confusing comments from parents and others around them about their cleverness, talking too much, always jumping in with their own thoughts and ideas, etc. And, at best, these comments were couched in how or why it isn’t good if you don’t give others a chance to talk or win or be the best, or — at its worst — these messages were as clear as, “Who do you think you are?”

And for people who are highly intelligent, giftedness is not, as some seem to believe, a ticket to knowing everything or understanding the reactions and behaviors of others to them. And there’s a whole lumpy continuum of what gifted — aka, highly intelligent — people do with their “trying to fit in” approaches. Some show off, compete endlessly, diminish others, avoid others, hide themselves, lose confidence, refuse to perform in public, drop out of the game or sport or activity, etc., or they try to please everyone, fit in, and play down any of their talents so others feel better.

So, sometimes, the messages about giftedness and being smart are brushed off by the gifted person so as not to offend others or make the gifted person feel weird or too different in the different environments they find themselves in, e. g. family, school, faith community, neighborhood, career role, and extended family. In fact, it seems to be the polite response to deny one’s own cleverness.

Most of This is About Fitting in or Not

My role as a High Intelligence Specialist (my “elevator speech” answer to what I do for a living) has been one of helping people understand giftedness and the affects is has on a person’s life. There are some things that simply affect how we navigate in life, and these differences between and among us start at the very beginning.

Our differences are related to how people — and society’s norms, perhaps — see us and react to us at some level. Are we male, female, nonbinary? Do we catch on quickly or are we slow to learn? Are we extra tall, or skinny, or heavy? Is our skin color or ethnicity unusual in the environments we find ourselves? Do we attract a lot of attention for some of our talents or for being physically beautiful or unattractive? Are we acceptable to others? Did the messages from our parents, neighbors, other relatives, siblings, teachers or peers leave us confused about who we are? Are we emotionally and socially okay or is something wrong with us? How on earth does anyone sort this out?

Well, it’s complex, isn’t it? The thing is that if we are an outlier — different from others in any way — we attract attention. The attention can be good, bad or at least noticeable. And we tend to interpret ourselves in the context of what others seem to think and how they seem to like or not like us.

And if we are intellectually very distinct from the different groups of people that we find ourselves in, it can add another layer of confusion. Most adults can think of times when they simply felt unwelcome or not so special. And you don’t have to be gifted for that to happen; it can happen to anyone. My message in this article is about how you might consider the effects of your unusually high ability or talent as part of this confusing mix. I give you three examples from some exceptionally gifted adults I’ve worked with.

A teacher who was in graduate school shared a house with half a dozen other women one summer on the university’s campus. One of the women brought out her guitar and the women started to join in singing songs. The teacher was having a wonderful time and felt comfortable and part of the group when another stood up, glared at the teacher, and before stomping out of the room, said, “Oh, great! And she can sing, too!” Imagine the teacher’s confusion and pain. The group slowly drifted away and no group activities occurred among them for the rest of the summer semester. In fact, this highly gifted teacher was socially marginalized by the other graduate students. And she wasn’t sure what she’d done wrong.

Another client, and a member of an intellectually elite group invited on a political tour overseas for a month, was very tall and handsome. One evening the group attended an event that lasted well into the night and their only way back to their accommodations was by train. There were no other waiting passengers at this time of night, and the group felt vulnerable in the unfamiliar land at a train station. Several of the men and women singled him out as the one — because of his size — who would save them if anyone appeared and started trouble. He told the group not to count on him because, in his experience, ruffians deliberately picked out the big guy to attack so they could show how brave they were. How is this related to denying giftedness? The man’s size was part of what was different about him, and it added to different confusing episodes in his figuring out who he is and what parts of him are sometimes good and sometimes not as far as other people’s view of him.

In another example, a family of highly gifted individuals had one member who was the accepted smartest one. The family, two young adults and their parent, was in a foreign country on vacation and the family members clearly had certain assumptions about the “smartest” one, the one who seemed to know the most about well, everything. He was an expert in geography and history and maps, and they expected him to respond to the rest of them any time they had a question about where they were or what they were seeing. Of course, no one knows everything, and he wasn’t an experienced tour guide for the area they were visiting, so he didn’t have all the answers. They teased him and were clearly surprised that he didn’t know the answers, but to him it seemed like they were making fun of him, and he was angry and hurt.

The point is, what part of each individual caused the problem? And was it their problem or the problem of what others expected? We don’t know. But the individuals themselves end up tossing these episodes around and around in their minds — sometimes for years — and can make decisions not to let this or that happen to them again by withdrawing and becoming a smaller part of their natural selves.

How Confusion About Giftedness Figures into Difficulties Discovering Who We Are

I remind readers that there are multiple definitions of giftedness. And, as I’ve said before in other writings, I believe and view giftedness as being about how you “be.” Yes, the gifted person is smart and probably does well in many things, but it shows up in the way one talks, thinks, sees things, and makes connections that seem out-of-the-blue to others. It isn’t only about scores or achievement or high income, although there is often a correlation to those factors. In many cases, though, highly intelligent people don’t have access to good testing or interpretation of results, or don’t have support systems that allow them to thrive in their educational settings. So, they may come across to others — among many options — as either smart or a smart-aleck. Sometimes we call it “book smart” or “street smart.” What smart children and adults have available (or not) to them, like emotionally healthy parents, stable living arrangements, financial stability, and excellent educational settings with like-ability and like-minded classmates, plays a big role in people even showing up — seeming to be — as gifted. Sadly, there are many under-identified and underserved gifted people in the world. And, as James Flynn discovered, when the basics of access to the above-mentioned socioeconomic and emotional needs are met, giftedness shows up in higher numbers across every population[1].

There are the cases of gifted people who think getting good grades and going to college is what makes a person gifted. They deny they’re gifted by saying things like, “I wasn’t a good student.” “I didn’t get the best grades.” “I skipped school and dropped out before high school graduation.” “I was identified as gifted but I didn’t like school and was too lazy to do the work, so … I might have been gifted, but I’m not now.”

And, when a highly intelligent person doesn’t see or understand they have an intellectual advantage, they may interpret others’ behaviors as “stupid” or “lazy.” Or they might see others as slackers because they interpret slower learning or just not “getting it” behaviors this way: “They don’t even try to do it right!”

Did I mention this is complex? Conversely, many people who don’t understand or recognize their own unearned[2] advantages at least sense they are smarter or “better” and become arrogant and smug. Some even become unethical and unfair to others because they think they are simply being smart when they dupe less clever people. Something is missing from a person’s background when they use this advantage in such a way. And that kind of thinking and reasoning also tends to run in families because those viewpoints can be passed from one generation to the next by granting approval or disapproval for certain behaviors and so-called “successes.”

And if the highly intelligent person hasn’t learned how to handle their intellectual power and advantage in a suitably humble way, and their achievements may or may not rise up to meet the expectations others have of how a gifted person looks and behaves, the gifted person is going to cause problems for him- or herself. Like, maybe others will work to “take them down a notch or two.”

How Humility or Denial Can Get in the Way of [Appropriately] Owning One’s Talents

Before I ever got into studying high intelligence, in the early 1980s, I already had two children who were clearly very smart. One was sweet, attentive, attuned to others, and advanced of others his age. His brother was advanced of people well beyond his age and was seemingly too busy to work at relating to others the way his older brother did. I hadn’t thought of myself as gifted, although I knew I was smart enough, until I started to read books about gifted children to see what I was dealing with as a parent. I was already seeing that as a former 4th- 6th grade teacher, I may not have met the needs of some of my former students very well because I didn’t “get it” about giftedness before I had my children.

One morning, my kids and I were in the kitchen and the TV was on, tuned to the Today Show. The host interviewed Steve Allen[3], a famous television entertainer, comedian, musician, and co-founder and early host of the Tonight Show, who was on the morning program to promote meeting the needs of the nation’s gifted children. My ears perked up, and I paid close attention. As the interview was ending, the host sweetly asked him, “Well, Mr. Allen, are you gifted?”

Mr. Allen stumbled a bit, apparently looking for the right way to answer, when he said, “Oh, not me. I’m not gifted.”

I don’t know how I found the address to write to him, but I did find it and I did write to him. I told him that he should find a way to honestly answer the question, a humble, not bragging way, but some way, because he added to the confusion of his audience by denying he is gifted. After all, many observers might have concluded, “If Steve Allen isn’t gifted, I’m certainly not!”

There is a fine, nearly invisible line, between being confident and being a pain in the neck. We try to build people up when we see they are insecure or doubt themselves, but we can be fairly merciless to those who are too sure of themselves or clearly believe they are really something! Humility is greatly valued pretty much all over the world. Even our leaders are viewed more favorably if they have found that humble “sweet spot.”

So, here is a possible approach to weave into your own way of dealing with the “gifted” issue: “Thank you. That’s kind of you to say.” And let it go at that.

If someone directly asks the questions “Are you gifted?” you can respond with something like this: “I do know I’ve had advantages in some ways in that regard. Whether it’s genetics, hard work, whatever, I know I can get pretty passionate about what interests me and it leads to my getting pretty good at it!” And, if they push the topic more than that, try to find that balance that makes it clear you don’t see yourself as an amazing whiz kid but do acknowledge you do seem to have strong abilities in some areas. And pat yourself internally on the back for whatever your talents and hard work have brought your way.

Additional Information

[1] I took a similar path to Flynn’s path in looking for the environmental effects on IQ. Neither of us knew that’s where our research would take us. He reached out to me in 2015, (he died in 2020), and wanted to possibly work together on something, but I wasn’t ready and clear on what I thought at that time. Here’s a good synopsis of his views and theories. https://scottbarrykaufman.com/podcast/nature-nurture-and-human-autonomy-with-james-flynn/

[2] High intelligence comes from many places, but the overwhelmingly strong factor is genetics. You get it from your parents who got it from their parents and so on. Whether you develop it further or not doesn’t keep you from thinking differently than most people in the world. It is largely an unearned advantage to be “gifted” or intelligent at much higher than average levels than others.

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My current published books about the gifted:

The Five Levels of Gifted Children Grown Up: What They Tell Us (2023). https://www.amazon.com/Levels-Gifted-Children-Grown-Up/dp/B0C9SHFRLH or https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/the-5-levels-of-gifted-children-grown-up-phd-deborah-l-ruf/1143719859?ean=9798988323709. This is an 18 year longitudinal study follow-up about the original gifted child subjects in 5 Levels of Gifted: School Issues and Educational Options (2005, 2009).

Keys to Successfully Parenting the Gifted Child (2023). Keys to Successfully Parenting Gifted Children (2022, 2023)

5 Levels of Gifted: School Issues and Educational Options in 2009. Here are links to the 5 Levels of Gifted book on Barnes & Noble: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/5-levels-of-gifted-deborah-ruf/1126358834 and Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Levels-Gifted-School-Educational-Options/dp/0910707987 or directly from the publisher: https://www.giftedunlimitedllc.com/store/p12/5_Levels_of_Gifted.html

Environmental, Familial, and Personal Factors That Affect the Self-Actualization of Highly Gifted Adults: Case Studies (D. Ruf, 1998) doctoral dissertation. Free PDF https://dabrowskicenter.org/ruf

Losing Our Minds: Too Many Gifted Children Left Behind (Oct. 2024). Available now on both Amazon and B&N.

Follow this link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DL3BSC9X or this link: https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/losing-our-minds-deborah-ruf/1146410968?ean=2940185888872

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