Why Being Gifted Actually Makes Life Harder

you know people grow and change but even for gifted kids it's a different kind of challenge what they need to grow and change is actually different because what they have to do is abandon everything that they've invested in so let's talk a little bit about gifted kids so i want to start this off by sharing a little bit about how we learned what we're going to share actually let me just take a step back let's start over so let's talk about giving kids so what i want to share with you all today is why especially

as adults it's hard to get help as a gifted kid so the thing about gifted kids is that you know we kind of grow up and then especially once we reach adulthood there's a certain stickiness to being gifted there's a certain stickiness or inertia to changing right so even if i know i'm gifted even if i know that like i hyper intellectual eyes and things like that it's hard to actually change and it turns out that the reason it's hard to change the reason a reason actually has to do with sort of the gifted kid

complex and what we tend to find is that for some reason kids who grow up gifted really struggle as adults and it's my belief that the reason that they continue to struggle as adults is because they're actually resistant there's a resistance to change i don't mean like internally like you don't want to change i mean that something about the way that your psychology is formed makes it hard for you to change and that's why they actually struggle as adults because we can have all kinds of problems as kids but generally speaking as we grow into

adults like a lot of them get better right because we're able to change them we can put in effort we can put in time we can put an energy and they can change but when it comes to being a gifted kid even if you put in the time the energy and the effort and even other people try to help you it seems like something about that complex is resistant to change so that's what i'd like to talk about the cool thing about this is that this is something that we sort of discovered here at hg

by virtue of kind of how we do things so we made a couple videos about gifted kids and so this is what's really neat about the aoe healing kind of perspective we made a couple of videos about the gifted kids we streamed about it so people joined our community they shared their problems with us and so what we're really noticing is as groups of people share their problems with us we can synthesize all of those disparate experiences and distill them down to certain principles this is basically how research is done right so like we take

a bunch of different cases and we kind of like figure out okay what's the common thread the neat thing is that what i'm noticing is that mental health problems seem to be evolving rapidly so the old paradigms don't seem to be working and what we actually do is we'll assemble data from for example all the gifted kids who joined our coaching platform and then we'll kind of like talk to the coaches okay what worked what didn't work what seems to be the problem we can kind of distill things down and we can figure particular things

out so what i'm sharing with you all today is actually is distillation of what all of the gifted kids who have been a part of not all but you know what the gifted kids who participate in our community what we've sort of learned from them and what we noticed is that even though they want to change and even though they try to change and even though they know they should change it's hard for them to change so we're going to share that with y'all today the first thing to understand is that the brain is an

efficient organ so if you think about your dominant hand versus non-dominant hand which one do you use more use your dominant hand more right so anytime that you have a task you can make it easy by using your dominant hand or you can make it hard by using your non-dominant hand and so over time actually what happens is as you lean into the things that are easier for you as you use your dominant hand your dominant hand actually becomes stronger it becomes reinforced and so what happens with gifted kids is they've got one excellent advantage

which is their iq so what happens is they use their iq as a substitute for all kinds of other things right so a simple example of this is like let's talk about study habits so when i'm like seven and i'm gifted or let's say nine and some kids are learning how to study because they don't pick it up right away my mind is like why am i gonna waste time developing study habits when i can just understand everything with my intellect right it's kind of like the same reason why every day when you brush your

teeth you use your dominant hand you don't use your non-dominant because your brain is like why bother making doing things the hard way when we can do things the easy way so what happens is we lean into our intellect and generally speaking school is sort of designed for the average kid and we sort of like pace things you know and so we sort of teach we don't teach study habits to like five-year-olds we start teaching them the eight-year-olds nine-year-olds 10 year olds 12 year olds 14 year olds and the amount of studying you need to

do like ramps up over time so what happens with a gifted kid is they don't need to study at seven they don't need to study at nine they don't need to study at eleven they don't need to study at 13. they're not going to learn it right because you don't need it and then 14 happens 15 happens 18 happens you go to college and then you hit a brick wall because at this point your intellect is insufficient and you don't know how to study because you never built up you know it's like going straight you

know these open world games where you go to a zone where you're not supposed to be that's what it's like to be a gifted kid in college like level one and you can go through all the stuff then you find yourself in this level 100 zone and suddenly like you didn't level up you didn't go the way you were supposed to and then suddenly you're like getting one-shotted by everything so one of the key things here is one of the the faculties that gifted kids almost have underdeveloped is emotions the awareness of emotions being able

to understand your emotions being able to operate from your emotions we tend to see is that these kids are hyper intellectualized right so i use my intellect for everything so i know this sounds kind of weird but there's even a term for this in research which is called cognitive empathy versus emotional empathy so when we think about empathy we think it's emotional right so like like i see someone else crying and then i feel like crying and then once i feel like crying i know how they feel and i operate from there but there's a

second kind of empathy which is something called cognitive empathy and cognitive empathy is not when you feel what they feel you still know how to respond in the right way but that's because you logic it out you use reasoning to figure out okay what am i supposed to do in this situation wow that person is really crying you don't feel sad but you're like okay let me like figure this out okay i should like pat them on the back and tell them oh my god it's so it sounds terrible what you've been through so even

emotional like interpersonal relationship kind of things become like cognitive things and why is that it's because your brain has one thing that it's really good at so it uses that tool because the emotions are underdeveloped and the more that you get by with cognitive empathy you level up your cognitive empathy skill but then once again that's going to hit a wall as well when it comes to like a deep relationship for example or making friends later in life so you've leaned so much into your intellect that other parts can be underdeveloped and so the reason

this this is important is because of issues like motivation and change so what happens when a gifted kid tries to change what do they do right they figure out what they should do does that make sense so let's kind of like recap a little bit so gifted kids high iq right so then they level up intellect we become a one-trick pony right if you're a d and d character strength is three dax is three con is three int is twenty five wisdom's three christmas three right yeah there is a well let's give you eights okay

fair enough fair enough chat so you level up your intellect and so what that sort of means is that even when it comes to emotions we end up using cognitive empathy to navigate personal situations interpersonal situations now what happens though is that when you try to change right so when you have particular behaviors like if i'm like okay i need to change i need to start studying the problem is that the difficulty with studying is not intellectual so you can read a book about how to study but it doesn't make you study and this is

the crux of the first problem that gifted kids sort of struggle with is that no amount of logic actually creates behavioral change and what and the reason that what really creates behavioral change or the fastest the most potent change of behavior is actually emotions right so if i like feel really embarrassed by giving you know a presentation i will do my best to never give a presentation again when i feel really really fantastic after making a comeback in a dota game or league of legends game or valorem game or whatever cs go that emotional reinforcement

makes me want to play again so behavioral change comes from emotions now there's an intellectual component as well but what we tend to find is that the change that requires just intellect is the change that gifted kids can do and the change that requires emotion is what they get stuck in the second thing to consider so we're going to sort of touch on the vedic model of the bind for a moment so if we think about the three parts of our mind there's the emotional mind the ego and the intellect so intellect is like our

logical capability our analytical reasoning emotions or things like you know fear joy excitement right you'll get that these are like fundamentally different so there's there can be reasons they they can interact with each other they're gonna be reasons that you're joyous but the experience of joy and the reason that you're joyous are two different things and then what i think is actually under appreciated in some parts of psychology but definitely appropriately appreciated another is the ego is the identity so the sense of self who i am is not necessarily analytical reasoning there may be analytical

reasoning involved and it's not emotion it's an identity so what happens with the gifted kids identity let's understand this like do a quick recap okay so when i'm a gifted kid i'm young and i'm smart and everyone tells me i'm smart and so i develop an identity i'm a smart kid why am i smart what makes a smart kid things are easy for smart kids when i don't have to study at all and i get an a on a test that makes me smart and this other kid over here who has to study for six

hours to get an a on a math test that kid is an idiot so a key part of being gifted is effortless success that's what it means right oh he's so he's so talented it's so easy for him so now we get into a big problem because then i've got choices as a kid oh i'm so gifted do you want to do gymnastics yeah that sounds fun and when i go to gymnastics do i experience effortless success no what does that mean about me oh crap if my i probably experience failure or at best effortful

success and are either of these things gifted do gifted kids fail no they don't do gifted kids work really hard no they're gifted it's a gift there's no effort so we don't want that because we want to be a gifted kid because everyone is so positive emotionally towards us for being gifted so what this means is that we move away from gymnastics we're not going to do gymnastics because if we do gymnastics then we're no longer gifted so over time let's say there are five tasks that i five things i could do i'm not going

to do this one because it's hard i'm not going to do this one i'm not going to do this one i'm not going to do this one this is the only thing that's left i'm going to do this one because this one i can do effortlessly and then as life goes on our range of what we can participate in to maintain our identity as a gifted kid shrinks and the problem is that the less we do these things these don't become a part of our identity so all we have left is the gifted kid so

i'm not a gymnast at this point i'm not a hard worker so the more that my experience is narrow and the more i avoid the more my identity doubles down triples down quadruples down into being a gifted kid this is ego and identity now the problem the real problem with being a gifted kid what makes it hard to change is that our intellect is super super strong but it is going to sound kind of weird our ego is actually weak or our control over our ego is weak our control over our emotions is weak so

these two faculties are under underdeveloped and what do i mean by weak what i mean is that gifted kids have not done a lot of that trial and tribulation work to discover who they are right because actually what happens is they get given a label and instead of actually discovering who they are they're told who they are and then they avoid all the experiences that help you develop a healthy identity so they have an unhealthy identity it's a oversimplification to be sure now here's the real tricky thing these parts of the mind interact with each

other and depending on the quote-unquote strength of a particular part of mind one will win and one will lose so i'll give you all a simple example so this is something we understand very well in psychology so sometimes i can intellectually have a good reason to do something but emotionally i don't want to so what happens there's a war between these two parts of my mind so our amygdala which is where which is our fear and survival center is telling us don't do this thing and our frontal lobes are telling us but by the way

we need to do this thing and so then they fight and one of them comes out on top now this is where gifted kids may think oh but my intellect is so strong doesn't it mean that it comes out on top and actually the answer is kind of no that the less in touch with our emotions we are the less we're able to regulate those so actually emotions outweigh the strength of the intellect in this kind of situation because you don't you've learned even though your intellect is robust your analytical capability is robust your control

over your emotions is so atrophied that you don't even realize it that you're kind of feeling negative emotions but you just kind of feel stuck the more insidious thing and this is kind of what we're going to focus on is the relationship between the intellect and the ego so the less in control of our ego we are the more it actually hijacks intellect so i'll give you all an example if someone says dr k you taught something that was wrong on stream and they present me with some evidence there are two ways that i can

approach that so if my ego wins out i'm like who is this random person on the internet telling me that i did something wrong did they train at harvard medical school are they medical doctors are they dr k did they study in india for seven years that's ego overcoming intellect and even if you think about it what am i actually doing in that moment i'm providing a lot of justification right so my mind since it's so strong says oh look hms monk training dr k these are all evidence right so what my ego does is

it goes to my intellect and it says come up with a bunch of reasons why we can ignore this person right and then the intellect is like yes sir happy to since i'm so smart i'm gonna give you a thousand reasons and they can try to argue and convince you as much as they want to that you made a mistake but since we are so intelligent we have such a powerful research computer that we will be able to refute every single point that they can ever come up with the problem here is that this is

the ego in control of the intellect so the problem that gifted kids face is that they have a very very powerful intelligence which is out of their control gets hijacked by their ego and their emotions so it's almost like like you know i'm kind of envisioning like a super powerful robot with a tiny little person inside pulling the levers and so the the gifted kid has an ego that's like this gigantic robot which is so strong can move mountains walk through the ocean smash cities lift thousands and thousands and thousands of kgs and inside is

this tiny little ego controlling everything so if you think about it if my intellect is really really strong what does that mean about the strength of my cognitive bias second reason that gifted kids struggle their cognitive biases are far are much harder to dislodge it's interesting it's the case of a very powerful tool that you have lost control of and so when gifted kids try to get help they actually will shoot it down so let me tell y'all what this looks like in the mind of a gifted kid so if i read a book that

tells me how to overcome your procrastination as i'm reading the book as a gifted kid what am i going to be doing am i going to be learning everything in the book actually no what's going to be happening is i'm going to be poking holes in it as i read that won't work for me this person is saying this but they didn't consider this right and it's going to be critical like you're not going to be shooting everything down i'm a special case beautifully said rebooted life and this isn't wrong right because how does the

person start to believe that i'm a special case by the way which of these three parts of mind do you think that this is coming from this statement is coming from ego but how do they become a special case let's look at look at that for a second it's because when they were 14 and they'd never learned how to study and they need to start studying their parents would say just study and if the parent says just study and just studying works for everyone else and it doesn't work for you what do you logically conclude

i'm a special case this thought is not wrong this is the key thing to understand none of the thoughts in the gifted kid's mind are actually wrong the problem is the direction so what do all of these thoughts move you towards in terms of behavior what is the consequence of these thoughts being true it ain't gonna work you're going to shoot things down and you all may have have talked to someone who's also a gifted kid or maybe people have talked to you where people have tried to help you and so now we move on

to number three gifted kids are help seeking and help rejecting there's this really tricky thing well they'll ask for help and then they'll push it away what's going on here by the way i need help oh read this book right so we sort of set that up these are the kinds of thoughts that we have how does help seeking help rejecting thing work i need help but it won't work and this is where things get a little bit more insidious so the higher your iq is the more you can read into possibilities in the future

right so like if i'm like playing a chess game and i have a high iq and chess is a skill right so it's not just all about iq but let's say i can look at move number one move number two move number three and then if i have a higher iq i can go move number two move number three move number four move number five move number six move number seven and so sometimes what happens with gifted kids is they're able to see into the future and they'll they'll try the first step the problem is

based on the first step they will actually have a deterministic view about where they're going to end up because the truth of the matter is that we could go to a over here we could go to b over here we could go to c over here and then from c we could go to delta you can't actually predict the future so the way this looks in gifted kids is that okay like people are telling me if i want to make friends i need to just go to parties so what'll happen is a kid will go

to a party and they'll be afraid that no one is going to talk to me and if no one is going to talk to me i'm going to be like a loser at the end of the night i'm going to go home and i'm not going to have any fun they go for 15 minutes and no one talks to them and then their mind actually tells them hey by the way we've calculated this out we know this is how we know how this is going to end just go home now they go to the party

they spend 15 minutes in a corner on their phone their mind is like this is gonna suck let's go home and they know that if they stay i don't wanna sit at a party in a corner for three hours just being on my phone and then they go home because they've calculated everything out and so if you try to help a gifted kid and sometimes gifted kids will ask right if you try to help a gifted kid this is what you'll see they'll take the first step and then they'll reject and what statements do they

use all these ego statements i'm a special case it ain't going to work for me so it can be incredibly frustrating to be a gifted kid in this situation because you're asking for help you know you need help and when you ask people the help that they give you is never going to be enough it's never sufficient because they didn't consider this and they didn't think about that and they didn't realize why that won't work for you but let's think let's understand this okay tunnel down what's the goal of going straight to seven in your

mind what does your mind get when it tells you oh by the way this is exactly what we thought don't bother with all this crap just go home what does it gain very good magic man ah oh so many good answers right it's protecting itself because if we were to sit and efficiency we'll get to that in a second if we were to sit in a room on our phone for three hours each hour that goes by how are we gonna feel about ourselves we're going to feel pathetic so this is the key thing to

understand about the mind the purpose of the ego is to protect us why can't i erase it erase nope okay gg see if this works there we go the purpose of the ego is to protect us so what our mind is doing is it's anticipating this negative emotion we already feel pretty useless anyway before we went to this party and all it's going to do is confirm our suspicions and if it confirms our suspicions we're going to be more hopeless so best leave now so what it's what it's trying to do is it's trying to

protect you from feeling pathetic so it tells you go home it tells you avoid because remember your ability to manage emotions is also underdeveloped because you could get by with intellect for so many different things so it's kind of interesting because we end up avoiding even though we know we need help and we ask for help and so we become help seeking and help rejecting at the same time and that's why it's hard for us to change because when help comes down the pipeline we're afraid and we end up rejecting it we know we need

help but we reject it now there's another very very insidious part to the help rejection so sometimes the help rejection is because gifted kids look for the perfect formula there's definitely a way to solve my problem i'm sure it can be solved i just have to find the perfect formula and so if someone says something we're going to kind of that doesn't account for this variable so if you like talk to them they'll sort of you know it doesn't account for x so that's not enough and then we have to account for y so that's

not enough then we have to count for z and we're looking for the perfect formula why are we looking for the perfect formula because we're actually terrified of trying and it not working so here's the other reason why gifted kids really reject help because if i try and it doesn't work the possibility of help goes away right as long as i don't try as long as i'm looking for more variables there's a chance i can figure it out and if i find that perfect formula it'll be perfectly successful but if i try a half-baked thing

and it doesn't work then like what if nothing works so this is something that's very important to understand is that's part of this avoidance is because you can actually preserve hope if you haven't figured out the perfect formula for formula yet and it's out there but what if someone says oh my god so they say like look dude you've asked me for help 15 times i'm telling you there is no perfect formula you just gotta do it that's the only thing that'll work you just gotta do it and the gifted kid is like okay fine

but in their mind what are they terrified of if everyone is telling you you just gotta do it you just gotta do it you just gotta do it and you do it and it doesn't work what then you're screwed then there's no hope so this is why as long as the advice they're giving you can be dismantled in your mind there's hope for you but the moment that you accept what they say and if you actually roll the dice and it doesn't work then you're screwed it's finished so if i try something and it doesn't

work how can i preserve hope oh i didn't i didn't find the perfect formula oh i didn't i didn't account for this i didn't account for this i didn't account for this but it's very paralyzing for gifted kids and this is why they'll reject a lot of the hope that people are help that people will offer them there's other things involved here as well which is like if someone tells you just do it and then you do it and then it works why didn't you do it 10 years ago if you're so gifted why didn't

you just do it 10 years ago and so oddly enough the most bizarre thing is that if you put your life together trick question what does it say about you hmm let's say i screw around fail out of college and things like that i don't know how to study and i'm 28. and then if i start college at 28 and i graduate at the age of 32 what does it say about you so now you've got a choice do gifted kids write on chat graduate from college at the age of 32. no that's what stupid

kids do so now you've got a choice do you want to be a stupid kid with a life or a gifted kid without one and this is the problem so this may sound like if i'm laying it out like this you may say like well obviously i'd rather be a stupid kid with life because i want a life i want a life i want to life but this is what you've got to understand that if you've grown up as a gifted kid this is all you've got left this is all you've got left this is

all you are is a gifted kid and to give up the one thing that you have left is terrifying because here's the other scary thing you failed out of college one so here comes the intellect again you ready for it here comes the intellect you failed out of college once what happens if you go to college for two years and you fail out again because we did it once then you're gonna be a stupid kid without a life and two years of debt so it's like uh-uh we don't want that no way buddy no chance

so it's kind of interesting because the more gifted we are the more we think that things should be easy for us right that's what it means to be gifted effortless success but what we tend to find especially as gifted kids grow up is they tend to get stuck they're not able to change they're not able to break out of it and then that like triggers this whole cycle of if i'm not able to fix this oh my god what does it say about me it's hard because the very thing that sort of like you know

people grow and change but even for gifted kids it's a different kind of challenge what they need to grow and change is actually different because what they have to do is abandon everything that they've invested in and that's scary like think about that like who would do that who would do that if you've invested your entire life in a particular direction you're 30 years old and someone was like abandon it buddy abandon it girl go for it get rid of it and you're like that's insane there's no way that people would do that and yet

we expect gift gifted kids to do it we expect them to give up everything because that's what they have to do to change and it's hard how does that happen it starts because our brain is an efficient organ it starts because once my brain knows how to use my right hand since this is my dominant hand it's not going to waste time leveling up my left-handed skill and it's no different when it comes to intellect versus other faculties of the mind so we see in gifted kids is that their emotional awareness tends to be underdeveloped

they can sometimes be a little bit on the alexa thymic side which means inability to determine what your internal emotional state is so if you talk to gifted kids about their emotions they're not going to know like how to answer some of those questions they'll give you a lot of reasoning and logic and they'll tell you what's wrong my problem is that i have my problem is that i have lexithymia which is not actually noticing your emotions it's an intellectual conclusion they'll do a bunch of research right and they'll say oh i have this kind

of ayurvedic thing or i have this kind my five factor personality assessment shows me is low conscientiousness and high neuroticism and high openness and low agreeableness and this is why i'm doomed in life because my conscientiousness is low i've done research all hyperintellectualization now the problem with that and that's it's not their fault right because like the reason that they get to that point is because you know when you're seven and your brain is like okay do we want to use our intellect or emotions to navigate the situation and your intellect can map it out

for you so you're like okay let's use the intellect great plus 10 xp and the more you level up your intellect the more useful of a tool it becomes and so the more you use it the more you level up this is an interesting observation that was made by malcolm gladwell in outliers where he's like looking at you know kids who were born at a particular time and so kids who are older when they start sports right because six year old some people will be like six years and 11 months and some people will be

six years and one day so one of those kids is basically seven and one of them is six and so what happens is the kid who's almost seven gets viewed as more talented and as they get viewed as more talented the coach they get picked first on the team and they play more and they get more practice and the coach spends more time with them because they're more talented in this kid it's not worth investing in this kid and so what happens over time is you see a exponential effect of investing in an early thing

so over time the more your intellect grows the more your mind relies on it the more it relies on it the more swole you become the more swole you become the more you move into the identity of the gifted kid the problem is that as these other parts of your mind like your identity as the identity of the gifted kid becomes stronger as you become more disconnected from your emotions you struggle because logic does not actually change things or it's not sufficient to change everything let's put it that way the other more insidious thing this

is what we sort of learned from vedic psychology is that sometimes your intellect can be hijacked by your emotions by your ego and so what we see in gifted kids is they have the toughest cognitive biases because those biases were built from a high intellect and so these cognitive biases combined with these ego sort of statements result in all of these kinds of things like this won't work for me you recognize you need help you reach out for help you seek help and then you reject help this won't work for me i'm different i'm a

special case this solution does not consider these variables and so they'll seek help but what they'll do is shoot it down and that's because their cognitive bias is so strong that like they're looking for you know the perfect answer or they have a lot of good reason because they've learned early on that i am different so a best-selling book that works for normal people won't work for me because i'm not normal so they end up rejecting help this can be further reinforced by your ability to predict in situations and so what happens is that as

gifted kids make predictions about situations and as they get the first step down that road and that step is what they expected they assume that the rest of it is going to be exactly the same so if i go to a party and no one talks to me in the first 15 minutes the whole night is gonna be miserable so i might as well leave and that in and of itself is very insidious because the only way to change your cognitive bias the only way to change your expectation is to stay at the party and

so the very thing that is capable of changing your mind is the thing that you retreat from if you're a gifted kid because maybe an hour in we start playing board games and maybe you crush it at a particular board game and you feel fantastic and so the very thing that you need to change your mind is exactly the thing that you avoid because of that anticipation of pain and the last thing to consider and this is actually quite devastating is that if you're a gifted kid and you have so much potential and you're 25

now and you've wasted so much of it if you put together your life today what does it say about you and so sometimes what gifted kids will do is they'll find solace in being both blessed and cursed i'm brilliant and i was born with low conscientiousness i have the gene in my life in my i have the laziness gene the brilliant but lazy person and alas it is a tragedy and that's comforting right because if you were born with laziness gene it ain't your fault you're not stupid and if all you've been for 25 years

is a gifted kid then like that's all you've got left and you can't risk being stupid and so it becomes incredibly paralyzing because the very things that you need to do to actually get out of the situation are the things that almost being a gifted kid like prevents you from doing it's a very very tricky situation which is precisely why i think we see so many gifted kids who struggle as adults it's almost like a psychological trap where the tools that you're supposed to use to overcome these things are being leveraged against you right when

your intellect gets hijacked into a cognitive bias that only leads to one thing all roads lead to one place and when your intellect the godzilla of your intellect has one goal then it's tough so what do you do about it everyone asks right so here's what we've seen through working with people and in our coaching program and stuff right there's a terrifying process of abandoning your identity terrifying hard to do on your own right there's a terrifying process to substitute ex theory with experience because the whole point of a gifted kid is they map everything

out in their head it won't work because of this if i say at the party it'll be three hours of misery so what happens that's really tricky is that theory becomes a substitute for experience and the less experience that you have the more you have to lean on theory right and so it becomes a vicious cycle where now that i have less experience less experience less experience the more theoretical models i make and the more that i'm making theoretical models that are advanced and divorced from experience the more i become separate from reality and like

that's where the bias comes in right why do we call it a cognitive bias because it's actually incorrect so what we've sort of seen when working with these kids right and now we feel pretty confident about this because we've had a lot of gifted kids come through is that it's about first of all strengthening your understanding of your emotions you have to increase the emotional awareness so we even now have we're trying to develop or we've got i think a study running about whether eq emotional quotient or your emotional awareness is a mechanism for progress

within coaching so it starts by recognizing your emotions and like getting in touch with your emotions and recognizing when your emotions are controlling you instead of your intellect because the issue is not the gigantic monster it's the tiny little person inside who's controlling the monster so when your intellect is hijacked by other parts of your mind so the other thing that's kind of important there is that as we sort of understand your emotions we can also like validate a lot of those emotions because here's the thing for a gifted kid life is supposed to be

easy so does that mean you get to say that your life is hard no no no no no life is hard for the stupid kids not for us life is easy effortless success and so when gifted kids deny themselves the right to struggle devastating so we've got to get in touch with our emotions and also acknowledge validate that just because you're gifted it's not sufficient to living an easy life are there advantages 100 do we want to be honest about those advantages 100 but we also want to be honest about the shortcomings of those advantages

so you gotta understand your emotions second thing gotta understand your ego what does that mean gotta understand your ego i'll break it down for you a little bit i mean this is a complicated process that takes weeks but as you engage in certain behaviors or you think about engaging in certain behaviors it's really important to ask yourself one question which is if i do this thing how will i feel about myself how will i it change the way that i see myself what will it do to my sense of identity what will other people think

of me that's more than one question right this is why it's a process you have to ask all those questions and for any individual person one of those questions will sink in and will lead to understanding or catharsis or one of many others but you've got to think about how will this affect my identity and so even when you go away like you know when you're thinking about going to the party how would i think about myself if i did not have fun at the party and that's when you start to realize i will think

that i am pathetic because no one wanted to talk to me and that's when you have to really leverage your intellect in kind of the right way which is well like what are the different reasons why people may not have fun at parties this is why it's hard to do this on your own because it's hard to kind of think up and think of these questions that's why it's useful to work with someone right because they're going to be able to see well actually like if you really think about it there are a lot of

reasons why people don't have fun at parties it's not because they're pathetic the problem is that your intellect is not being used it's being used to protect you in a particular way because that's the only way it knows how to function it's not being used to challenge you right and we can kind of see that because when some other people try to help you and now we kind of move on to the help seeking help rejecting part what do you do about that when other people give you a different perspective what is the function of

your intellect it's to dismantle it so what you're actually doing is doubling down on your particular view you're not actually challenging your assumptions you're reinforcing them and the more that you reinforce your own assumptions the more that you enter the echo chamber of your mind the more that you drink the kool-aid the more that you feed yourself propaganda the more stuck you're going to be see there's a shout out for raph raph is a fantastic coach i'm glad that people have been helped by wrath glad it's resonating so you've got to challenge your assumptions when

people ask you for help notice in your mind that you're shooting it down and you've got to step away from and this is where like notice that the more you shoot it down your mind is going towards avoidance avoidance avoidance avoidance you have to notice what it's doing it's not that it's logically incorrect it's that it's logically selective and we're going to select whatever logic we can to encourage you to not do it so don't fall into that and the last thing to understand is that as long as you're operating from theory the data set

that you're using is not ideal so what you've got to do is start getting experience in the smallest way possible you don't have to go to a party or you can even go for a little while right you can even go like there are little ways you can do this you can go to a party to drop something off you can say hey i'm busy tonight i just came by wanted to say sorry i can't make it i brought some cookies hopefully you all can enjoy them and then people like oh oh like you should

stay right and then you're like okay i'll hang out for a little bit and then you hang out for a little while now you've got an excuse it's ego saving let's see if you can have fun if you have fun for a little while you can hang out longer but put your put yourself out there a little bit right try to take a chance even when it comes to something like graduating from college at the age of 32 if you're 28 graduating is four years away you can enroll for a semester acknowledge for yourself that

this is going to be hard but this is a step in the direction that i want to go let's see what happens with one semester i'm going to give it my all the problem is that they use theory as a substitute for experience the more used theory is a substitute for experience the more divorced from reality you become so your theoretical models become more and more incorrect and now you're navigating life with an incorrect theoretical model and how's that going to work for you not well and that's what you see with adults who are gifted

kids is they're operating from a well-constructed beautifully theoretical model that's a little bit divorced from reality and that's why it's hard for them to change questions so miss mr coffee is an enlightening teaching i wish i had known this for 30 years i'm glad i tuned and thank you you're very welcome um so someone else is saying the oncoming is saying i was meant to graduate 21 in good college but i'm going to graduate at 31 at best this crushed my expectations of myself and my soul my heart goes out to you it crushed your

ego which can be expectations of yourself it didn't crush your soul what's going to rise what you'll rebuild from the rubble i honestly believe this what you're gonna rebuild from the rubble is actually much more strong much more reliable and is going to help you so much more than the expectation that you had so it's okay to crush to have your expectations crush from yourself that's when you can rebuild because you can't develop a new identity of yourself while this gigantic identity that fills the room of your mind of being gifted kid exists there's no

room for anything else it's gotta be dismantled this person sounds a little bit unlucky in a sense kinda like me where mine was crushed a failure after failure after failure after failure and i'm sure that even today there are going to be setbacks in my life i'm sure some of them will be devastating and that's life you got to pick up what you can and you got to move on so it's hard i i get it this is one of the few things that i honestly can say i've had personal experience with so it's like

i know it's tough and also keep going that's the most important thing who's this person andrew tate all i see is comments about andrew tate i'm agreeing with andrew tate is that they make it sound like an accusation all right it clipped i don't even know why is that clippable i look let me explain something to y'all this is a twitch stream in a twitch stream there's communication i teach something and you all teach something so like i don't know this is if it weren't for y'all i wouldn't know half the things that i know

right like there's something going on some somewhere in on the internet is it on you know he's a new controversial dude on twitch okay thanks for letting me know now i won't get i don't know now i know if he's controversial like that's i i don't i don't know what to think about that okay i've never met the guy like i don't i don't know what to think about him you know so here's like just in general like it's really easy to judge people on the internet right it's easy to judge people but i one

of the things that we really try to do and i hope we've demonstrated this so like sometimes people will think they know someone right and the whole point is like when we talk to people on stream what we try to do is like treat them with compassion we don't want to come in with judgment like we want to recognize that human beings are human beings no one's perfect no one's a complete waste of space like everyone's just on their own journey you know interview him and you'll get 100k viewers look how can i say this

viewership matters and at the same time chasing viewership is not what we do right like we're here to try to help there's no shortage of people to help and that's what our focus is going to be i'm not saying no i'm not saying yes it's just like i people ask us to interview people all the time like that's not how can i say this we're happy to interview people who are aligned with the mission of what we're trying to do here which doesn't necessarily mean they need to agree with us does that make sense like

we interview people for the purpose of aoe healing and sometimes we'll interview people that are um seem on paper like they can't be a part of that but what i've loved about this experience of streaming on twitch and interviewing people is that we get to see the humanity within everyone is there a meditation to help with being avoided 100 let's do it okay so hopefully for people who've been spamming chat about this andrew tate dude hopefully you all are satisfied let's move on to meditation [Music] um so let's do a meditation about dealing with avoidance

so what i want you all to do is sit up straight take deep breath in and out close your eyes take a few moments to just breathe and now i want you to think about something in your life that you [Music] are avoiding now even that can be a little bit difficult because oftentimes what we avoid we actually don't even realize that we avoid it we'll even avoid it in our own mind we'll come up with excuses like i'll get around to it there are more important things to do it won't really matter so if

you know you're avoiding something focus on that for a moment the other thing that you can do if nothing comes to mind is look for those statements i'll get around to it later there are more important things to do it doesn't matter and so if any of those statements leads you up to a particular thing sit with that thing take a moment to breathe just acknowledge and set firmly in your mind this particular thing the first thing is that as you concentrate on it notice what changes in your body there may be a tightness in

the chest the beginnings of perspiration forming now what i want you to do is think a little bit about if you were to do that thing what are your concerns what are you concerned about happening and notice how those outcomes would affect you they may cause you pain in your mind disharmony in a relationship people shaping their opinions of you differently notice that the avoidance is actually a attempt at protection protecting you from those things and now breathe into those fears those consequences and slowly breathe out and now i want you to take notice of

yourself in this moment feel the stability of your body even though we're thinking about things that are hurtful or fearful that in this moment we ourselves are not hurt it may be in there but it doesn't dominate us and now start to appreciate that that who you are is stable and strong at its core and that there may be hurt that just in this moment as you have withstood it so too will you withstand whatever happens there will be pain but you are strong enough this person that you are in this moment is strong enough

and know that as you engage in this task you are signing yourself up for hurt but that's okay it'll be painful for a time but just as you found this state you can find this state again and appreciate for a moment that all of life's pain is transient and that all of life's joy is transient what exists always is the person that you are in this moment calm peaceful that the fluctuations of the mind disturb this thing that you are but that you can return here and now ask yourself are you ready to do this

thing can we resolve to do this thing and if the answer is yes solidify that answer recognize there will be pain recognize it will be difficult but that you can do it you are strong enough and that you will survive and if the answer is no notice that have compassion towards it from this peaceful calm place notice that there's a part of your mind that's too terrified is standing at the edge of a diving board ready to dive into a pool of water but is afraid of the jump is afraid of the cold water and

needs some time some patience some encouragement before it's ready to dive in and have compassion for yourself for not being ready yet and assure yourself that even if we're not ready today the day will come when we will be ready put your palms together in front of you in namaste position give gratitude to yourself to existence for being able to experience this for the last few moments a place of stability in a chaotic world and now bow your head to the universe and give gratitude when you're done go ahead and come on back open your

eyes so that's pretty true is saying oh i'm back to me that's a sad pepe right sad here's the thing that's pretty true which one is the real you what you were a few moments ago you carry with you if you practice you'll be able to tap into it like that and as chungli is saying it's hard to feel compassion for myself it's one of the hardest things the hardest person to be compassionate towards well not the hardest for some people the hardest some victims it's easier to feel compassion for yourself than it is to

the person who hurt you but forgive yourself for being hard it being hard accept that it's okay to be it's it's okay for it to be hard to feel compassion towards yourself that too is something that you're going to have to develop over time be patient with yourself even if you can't feel self-compassion you