“What we know matters, but who we are matters more. Being rather than knowing requires showing up and letting ourselves be seen. It requires us to dare greatly. To be vulnerable.” – Brené Brown
You might think that your life would be easier and infinitely more fulfilling if your IQ were higher. Don’t smarter people have it easier, because they always have the answers? And don’t they get the best career opportunities and make more money than anyone else? A recent article in Business Insider crushes any ideas we would have around life being easier when one is smarter. Shana Lebowitz and Allana Akhtar discuss six surprising downsides of intellectual giftedness. I would like to explore some of these downsides here to illustrate how the LEAP Journey might help those individuals who have become stuck, because they have too many options or because they are afraid of failing or making a mistake.
When you are a high achiever, or highly intelligent, people expect you to be a top performer and to have all the answers. Consequently, top performers often have no-one to talk to about their weaknesses and insecurities and can feel misunderstood and isolated from others. You are expected to live up to others’ expectations of you. Consequently, you live in a state of constant stress and fear about what would happen the day that you don’t have the answer of fail to live up to outside expectations. When we fear that we might fail at something and be humiliated by that failure, we are only willing to try at things we know we can succeed at; resulting in a limited list of new things we are willing to try.
At the LEAP Academy we create space for our clients to be who they are – irrespective of whether you are highly intelligent or not. We believe that you are naturally creative, resourceful, and whole and that you can solve your own problems. But we also know that sometimes you might feel that you don’t have the answers or that you are at a stage in your life where you haven’t uncovered the answers yet. That’s ok, because at LEAP Academy we know that you often stumble on the answer as we work with you on The LEAP Journey and that you will usually also learn a heck of a lot more along the way. Most importantly, you learn who you are, and who you can be; you learn how you are being in this world and you start exploring how you want to show up in the world, without fear of being judged by those around you for not having all the answers.
When you become unwilling to learn and stretch yourself, because you are afraid of making a fool of yourself and you prefer to maintain your status as the smartest person in the room, you might realise one day that people have moved on and your skills no longer fit the situation – especially in a dynamic and unpredictable new world of work where you greatest assets are flexibility and openness to learning new things. You end up limiting your own potential and before you know it, you have made yourself obsolete. So, if you are a highly intelligent or highly gifted person, you should consider asking yourself what the cost is of resisting change or wanting to safe face if, in the long run, you are smart enough to know you will become outdated if you are not willing to risk trying new things?
In a highly competitive and challenging world, any parent secretly hopes for a gifted child whose intelligence and potential will serve him/her well in navigating the complexity of a future world of work that they themselves cannot fathom. We celebrate when our children demonstrate high IQ at an early age. But what happens to these gifted individuals when they grow up, if they were not encouraged to also make mistakes and fail along the way?
Unfortunately, most of the research on intellectual giftedness is conducted on children. There is very little information on the impact of high intelligence in adults. When intelligence is studied among adults, the emphasis tends to be on external markers of achievement, such as occupational success or publicly recognised accomplishments. In other words, there is a heavy emphasis on doing rather than being. In an excerpt from Smart Parenting for Smart Kids, the authors write that parents are generally most anxious about their children’s achievements when those children are smart and already doing well in school. Unfortunately, they write, “sometimes that can lead to too much focus on what they do rather than on who they are.“
On the LEAP Journey we advocate for a balance between being and doing. We have discovered that some of your greatest talents or gifts actually result from who you are and not from what you do. Being authentic and real; coming to the pitch with your whole self, thus becomes much more valuable for not only surviving, but thriving in the new world of work.
When we only focus on what we do or how smart we are, we limit our capacity for experiencing life in all its dimensions. Any high achiever can tell you how pointless it all becomes, when it’s just about being the smartest or just about solving problems, and where people are not allowed to bring their whole selves to the situation. Very quickly, we lose meaning and our lives feel empty or pointless and we start to question the significance of anything we do.
Carol Dweck taught us about the difference between a fixed mindset and a growth mindset. High performers and gifted individuals who discover early on what they are good at, limit the scope of things they do in their lives, because of their developed fear of failing at something. They unintentionally cultivate a fixed mindset over a growth mindset, because adopting a growth mindset requires embracing the possibility of failure.
On the LEAP Journey we advocate for a growth mindset and for learning how to see failure as opportunities for learning. Gifted and intelligent people learn with ease and know how to apply what they learn as they go, but their fear of failure or ridicule might hold them back in times when they actually need to take big, uncertain leaps and embrace the possibility of failing and learning as they go. Only in retrospect does one realise that failing was part of the necessary steps towards self-innovation. But taking those first steps can be hard when we worry about what others might think.
For this reason, it is so important to live an authentic life from the inside out, focused on your own journey and with little concern for others’ expectations. It’s only when you learn to focus on what the value is that you bring to the table and what you are called to do with your life, that you stop caring about upholding your reputation for being the smartest person in the room. And that is true wisdom and real leadership.
High intelligence also becomes a problem when those who have it, discover early in life that they don’t need to work as hard to keep up with their peers. Consequently, they never develop a good strong work ethic, because success comes easy to them. One study found for example that conscientiousness — i.e. how hard you work — is in fact negatively correlated with certain types of intelligence. The researchers propose that highly intelligent people might feel like they don’t need to work as hard to accomplish what they want. What this means is that when the going gets tough, high achievers might not have the resilience to face challenges that push them beyond their intellectual boundaries or place them outside of their comfort zones.
In a new world of work that is constantly changing, being agile or flexible and able to adapt to changes are critical for navigating the complexities of this new work landscape. It requires the ability to be comfortable with not always having all the answers and a willingness to go the extra mile to learn new skills if one is to overcome obstacles and thrive in life and work.
High achievers are thus confronted with the challenge of letting go of their need to always have the answers and of getting comfortable with what they might not know. The new world of work has levelled the playing field for both high achievers and those of average performance. It’s not the smartest person in the room that succeeds, but the one who doesn’t give up and is open to continually learning new things. It’s the person who remains flexible and agile whilst navigating the complexity brought about by the Fourth Industrial Revolution, who will reap the benefits.
Additionally, high achievers tend to think that they can go it alone, because they are smarter than everyone else. The new world of work requires collaboration and strong networks of people who are interdependent. Those with strong, sustainable long-term relationships and extensive social networks who have learnt to collaborate instead of competing with others, will end up having a competitive advantage over those who only know how to compete with others or be the best. Learning to lose with grace and accept help from others, is key to building lasting relationships with others. Those who want to thrive in the new world of work will learn how to generate win-win solutions that allow for symbiotic relationships to evolve.
On the LEAP Journey we believe in collaboration instead of competition, because we believe that “together we are stronger”. When people pool their skills and resources, they can accomplish so much more than one really bright individual can, by going solo. Some of the brightest and best among us have demonstrated how much they rely on others to accomplish their goals. They are called to lead with a vision of what they want to create and to empower those around them to help them accomplish it. Think Elon Musk, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffet etc.
Another challenge that highly intelligent people face, is that they tend to overthink things. This often leads to analysis paralysis, where you overthink things to the point where you are simply unable to take action. Fear of the unknown and fear of failure then prevents you from taking those leaps that are so pivotal for self-innovation and for living a more meaningful and engaged life. Additionally, overly reflective people can get themselves in quite a morbid state of mind by questioning the significance of everything. Your search for answers could drive you crazy.
The LEAP Journey is specifically designed to help you break down the obstacles you have put in your own path and to “unparalyse” you so to speak, so that you have no choice but to take action. How do we get you into action? We help you access your own inner resources by discovering and getting to know your authentic self. We help you reframe self-limiting beliefs and embrace the opportunity to fail as an opportunity to learn. We champion you and challenge you to take the steps we know you are dying to take. We hold your highest agenda – i.e. your greatest dreams and aspirations – up for you to inspect and we ask you to question what the cost is of sitting on the sidelines and watching the opportunities pass you by. We help you discover that you are enough as you are and that you already possess everything you need to take the first step. You’ve got this. And we’ve got you.
We understand that highly intelligent people already know how much they don’t know. Being super-intelligent often means appreciating the limits of your own cognition and abilities and being super realistic about what is possible. Try as you might, you know you’ll never be able to learn or understand everything. But that’s the beauty of living in the new world of work; you don’t need to know everything. And most of the time, you already know more than most people around you about a specific topic. In the new world of work, knowledge truly is power and sharing your knowledge to have a positive impact on the world, is real leadership.
Through collaboration, it’s also possible to expand your horizons and learn more than you would by yourself. If you can embrace the idea that you don’t have to have all the answers to have a positive impact on the world and you are willing to suspend your judgement of others and approach them with curiosity, you might discover so much more about who you are than about what you know or don’t know. Those who are truly successful, embrace who they are – strengths and weaknesses, quirks and all. They embrace their failures as people with limited knowledge and capacity. At the same time, they embrace the possibilities that come from empowering others with that knowledge and by allowing for collaboration in order to shape the way they move forward. Sometimes our biggest obstacle is not what we don’t know but who we are not willing to let ourselves be.
Our message to high achievers and highly intelligent or gifted individuals is that your intelligence is only a gift when you put it to service of the whole world, by allowing yourself to be vulnerable, fallible and ignorant at times; by embracing failure as an opportunity to discover something about yourself. After all, you are foremost a human being, not a human doer or a human knower.
References:
- Dweck, C. S. (2007). Mindset: The new psychology of success. New York: Ballantine Books.
- Kaufman, S. B. (2019). Are intellectuals suffering a crisis of meaning? What is the relationship between intellectual giftedness and meaning in life? Scientific American, February 2019. Available online at: https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/are-intellectuals-suffering-a-crisis-of-meaning/
- Kennedy-Moore, E. & Lowenthal, M. S. (2011). Smart parenting for smart kids: Nurturing your child’s true potential. San Francisco, California: Jossey-Bass.
- Lebowitz, S. & Akhtar, A. (2019). 6 surprising downsides of being extremely intelligent. Business Insider, July 2019. Available online at: https://www.businessinsider.com/downsides-of-being-smart-2016-7
- Powell, P. & Haden, T. (1984). The intellectual and psychosocial nature of extreme giftedness. Roeper Review, 6(3), pp. 131—133. Available online at: http://www.davidsongifted.org/Search-Database/entry/A10083
