What does it really mean to be gifted?
Victoria Seiketso Sethibe | Thursday July 14, 2016 11:24
While some people might perceive giftedness to mean scoring high on academics, others might place higher value on visual-spatial strengths or arts. There are also those who embrace a wide variety of strengths or gifts.
Opinions about gifts also extend to how long they are expected to live in the gifted person. Some might perceive giftedness to be a short-term opportunity, like in activities that require high physical intensity. Others might see giftedness as a long term opportunity that matures with time, such as academically inclined skills.
It can be very frustrating for anybody who displays a high level of strengths in an environment where those strengths are not valued. Below is an example of some of the social and journey gifted people can go through:
*Kenosi is a 14 year old teenage boy who stays with his mother *Mpho and her younger sister in a well secured apartment.
Being a personal assistant in a well established organisation, Mpho places strong value on organisational skills. She is very immaculate, not only in the way she organises documents at work, but also in the way she organises her home. Mpho finds a place restful and productive when things are in their rightful places and she is gifted in making her environment is neat. Kenosi on the other hand, is a very curious young man who likes to disassemble anything from a piece of furniture to an electronic gadget, just to find out how individual parts have been formed, and later on rebuilds them. For Kenosi, rebuilding products means coming up with something that pleases him, without necessarily maintaining its original shape. When his mother is not around, Kenosi would sneak out and spend the day with older men who fascinate him by producing and selling furniture by the side of the road. He learns a lot from them.
Other teenagers in Kenosi’s neighbourhood spend their free days playing and swimming in their communal pool. Kenosi’s mother is really stressed up by the choices made by her son. She keeps complaining that she does not understand why her only son would aspire to work under a tree, after all the effort she put to “raise her well.”
Kenosi’s mother’s wish is to see her son spend his free days alternating between their communal playing ground and engaging in computer games in the safety of his home.
Kenosi and his mother typically show two people living together with totally different and even conflicting gifts and values. Mpho has always scored very high in keeping her environment neat from a very young age, something that later influenced her vocation that requires her to organise her manager’s activities impressively well.
On the contrary, Kenosi is intrigued by disassembling his mother’s expensive household items. He shows high level of interest and aptitude in Realistic areas such as carpentry and a bit of Enterprising potential, thanks to his older friends who work under a tree by the side of the road.
Conflicting gifts are not only restricted to parents and children, peers too can experience discomfort in the differences in their gifts. In some cases, a person who scores exceptionally well in certain skills might experience rejection from his or her peers who are weak in the same skills.
When the same gifted person shows imperfections in other skills, the peers might go all out of their way to capitalise on those imperfections to try and “level their own ground.” Since people with special gifts have a general tendency for low frustration tolerance due to the fact that they constantly find themselves feeling out of place, they could easily downplay their gifts and disintegrate just to ‘fit in,’ especially at a young age. It is for that reason that gifted people need to be highly supported because their social and emotional development tends to be indirectly proportional to their gifts.