Gifted Outlier Coaching
Whether you are a gifted outlier yourself – brilliant when motivated; frustrated when misunderstood and in danger of blowing up your career – or whether you manage and lead them – and need them to produce at their full potential as a functioning part of your team – I can help.
If You Are a Gifted Outlier
Together we identify what I call your unassailable competitive advantage, so you can then help other people understand it. Because no one can do this for you – you have to educate the people around you about how best to work with and value you.
If You Manage Gifted Outliers
I help you translate between you and your gifted outliers, to explore what’s not working and what needs to change. Because you need your gifted outliers – they are typically your most highly talented, even brilliant team members. That’s why you hired them in the first place. However, once hired the challenges of their diverse ways of thinking and working become apparent, and it becomes painful, for you, for them, and for those around them. I help them understand and speak your language, and you to understand and speak theirs.
They want to hire the best and the brightest, they get us in place, then they haven’t a clue what to do with us.
Gifted Outliers are people who…
- Are deeply curious, bright, intelligent, capable, with strong intuition.
- See things coming before the rest, but aren’t always believed.
- Look at the world differently, and connect dots others can’t.
- Often feel like outsiders.
- Are capable of having a huge impact on their organization (and the world).
- Don’t fit the mold, won’t play the game, and being a team player is not typically their forte. (the truth is that they usually walk to their own damn drum…).
- Are too often demoralized, demoted, sidelined or even fired.
Too often the perspective of those who are on the outside looking in is dismissed or never heard in the first place. Yet that is where innovation and creativity come from, and the capacity to be resilient in the face of chaos, complexity, and upheaval. My approach to coaching Gifted Outliers draws on research and experience from disparate arenas including innovation, mental health, complexity theory, high sensitivity, and trauma as well as the lived experience of e.g. people of color, to help my clients understand the gifts in their difference.
I provide a customized approach for uncommon leaders who have the capacity to see what others don’t see, helping our outliers get engaged so they can bring their unique value, and helping their managers and peers understand how best to work with them.
As someone wrote to me recently:
It takes courage to own that sense of being on the outside.
If you relate to my definition, or manage/are responsible for developing talent who fit this description – let’s chat. Particularly if you or your gifted outliers are people of color, or other so-called minorities.
How I help
Whether you are a gifted outlier yourself or you manage talent who are gifted outliers, I can help.
I work with leaders who too often don’t completely understand or step into their full leadership capacities, because they are uncomfortable with an aspect of themselves that – with a slightly different perspective – they will come to recognize as their unique talent or gift.
Once they stop trying to fit in and be like everyone else and become fully themselves, they become much stronger, more focused, and more inspiring leaders.
Results include an increase in:
- Self-confidence and executive presence
- Calm and therefore focus
- Clarity of vision and purpose
- Authenticity, which begets trust
Deborah, Live
Deborah appeared on the Cam & Otis Show early in pandemic Spring 2020. This podcast – created by “a father-son duo working through business and life problems together” – is hosted by dad Otis, a former Green Beret; and his youngest son Camden, an entrepreneur.
From My Clients
I became a coaching client of Deb’s when I was working at the University of Massachusetts as a Campus Planner, which really benefited me in dealing with the protocols and behaviors of academia. I’m sure I surprised her when I accepted a position at Pfizer Research & Development as a Facilities Planner, since I had developed a rewarding career at the University.
However, I wanted to prove I could have that “six-figure” income. We kept in touch as I struggled with the corporate world, since I never totally felt like I fit in. After I retired I reconnected with Deb as she was offering a new course – Your Uniqueness Is Your Business. I had been very frustrated with not having been able to achieve my personal goals in the corporate world. They simply didn’t understand the way I thought, and how best to use my talents.
Out of this course evolved the courage to fully step into my unique combination of interests, talents, abilities, and experience, all of which led me to start a home staging business. This has finally been my dream job – I’m thankful every day that I have opportunities to help people sell their homes by bringing both my artistic talents as well as my technical know-how to showcase their homes to best advantage, expressing my creativity and problem-solving skills in diverse ways that fully engage me.
I’m happy and fulfilled, and a good part of that is due to once again accepting Deborah‘s help to value and appreciate the things that make me stand out from the norm and step more fully into the gifts that they are.
— Judy Sutherland, Founder, The Art of Staging
Deborah has coached me for five years. I’m a “creative” who loves to collaborate, which to me is the secret to success (bonus, it’s really, really fun). However, I’ve often found myself in situations where the word “collaborate” is used with great conviction but little understanding.
I’ve collaborated with some of the best in my industry. So how frustrating (and not fun) is it when I’m told, “You’re not collaborating” when what the accuser actually means is “You’re not doing what we want you to do”? How to handle this scenario has been the subject of many of our conversations.
Enter Deborah’s work on Gifted Outliers. As I get older, I have less patience for what I was framing as a business-versus-creative mentality. But the GO idea has completely changed my thinking and my attitude. It’s an incredibly empowering, motivating and productive way to approach what I’d seen up to now as an intractable battle of mindsets. She’s also galvanized me into re-envision myself, my potential contributions, and my responsibilities.
It’s truly exciting, and I look forward to more as I move into the third act of my career!
— Jocelyn Stevenson, Children’s Media Professional, and Co-Founder, It’s About Water Ltd.
Case Studies
Catherine’s story:
Understanding and working with Gifted Outliers is a much-needed service … for both sides of the fence. The world needs people like us – now more than ever – but mostly we end up leaving organisations.
I was lucky to be able to hire a London Business School professor when I was International Communications Manager at Shell in the 1990s. It was ostensibly for technical support but turned out to be for my sanity and – I suspect – some of what you are talking about re: Gifted Outliers. He said I should have a sign on me saying Warning! Armed with large and unpredictable brain.
Corporates do know that they need changemakers. That’s how I got into Shell in the first place, despite being female, from the wrong part of the country, and from the wrong sort of school. They had a policy of employing 1 in 10 stirrers. Gifted Outliers as you say. I’d get called into meetings that I had nothing to do with, just to be the person who might say “Hey! Not wearing any clothes!” or “How about we look at it another way?”. It was a stimulating and satisfying role to have, and maybe I could have relaxed and enjoyed my special status a bit more instead of squirming if I’d understood myself a bit more, understood that I was a Gifted Outlier.
But as that professor also said to me – you’re the bit of grit in the oyster. They end up with the pearl but what do you get out of it? It took me a few more months to make the move but his question was the death blow to my 17-year Shell career.
Because while organisations need GOs, they also need to know how to handle us. And they need to accept that GOs have different motivations. They also need reminding of the benefits GOs bring – which might be improving HSE (Health, Safety, and Environment) in a mining company, or bringing street culture in a clothing chain, both roles I’ve played since.
GOs see things no cookie cutter mainstreamer would notice. We join the dots in new ways and some of us are brave enough to mention it. It’s about innovation, breakthrough thinking – stuff every organisation is starting to value.
Understanding Gifted Outliers is learning how to manage the “unmanageables”, without driving us away.
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This was a client on partner track yet unhappy in his job, doubting himself and his abilities despite his Oxbridge education. He came looking for help with low self-esteem, and to help him decide whether to leave or stay with his company, as he felt like he just didn’t fit. We did co-active tele-coaching (including exploring giftedness and high sensitivity) which illuminated a couple of issues (he was being bullied, and needed some polishing of communication skills).
However, his issue of feeling like an outsider remained, so we did a customised 360˚ review, with feedback from his bosses, direct reports, and peers.
The feedback was clear – this client’s colleagues valued that he was different, seeing those differences as strengths that comprised his unique contribution to the company. My language for it when we worked together in the mid-’00s was that he was a right-brained engineer, one of maybe 3 in a company of way less than a hundred. Nowadays I have the language to explore with him whether he’s a Gifted Outlier.
Either way, once he understood how valuable his peers thought him, my client shifted his focus, raised his visibility, increased his pay, and achieved the next step on partner track.
Ralph Reid, Inventor, UK:
This client was working on career choices, and his struggle to connect with fellow employees. He literally felt like an outsider with his team.
When he took the ISPI™ (Innovation Strengths Preference Indicator®), it revealed that while he was totally happy to take risks in his approach to ideas, he was totally the opposite – or risk-averse – when it came to the process of implementing those ideas. Meaning his colleagues didn’t feel they could trust him, because they never knew who was going to be in the room with them.
Nor did he understand the cognitive dissonance these opposing preferences set up in himself, until we talked about the results of his assessment, which helped him add a key piece of the puzzle to his self-awareness. He then consciously chose positions in which he could work on strengthening his skills in the areas on which he wanted to focus, now with a clearer idea of the direction he wanted to head, and what might be in the way of him getting there.
When I subsequently talked his newly-arrived boss through his ISPI™ results, (by this time my client had sadly been terminated) she said to me “if I’d only known, maybe I could have kept him. We needed his skills. With this information, I could have worked with him; the challenges would have made so much more sense.”
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I’ve had a number of clients who are incredibly gifted — everything from an actual rocket scientist starting a business in his basement, to the above-mentioned Oxbridge grad, to a visionary middle-manager who created a key Center of Excellence in one of the top global financial services providers, to a Hi-Po in a top pharma’s talent development program, the goal of which was to jump two tiers (in fact, she jumped three).
For all these people, once they understood what it was about them that they hadn’t seen – typically a difference that had made them uncomfortable and self-doubting, because of the drive we all have to fit in – they were fully capable of gathering the resources and putting in place the structures and the support they needed to take the reins and achieve their goals.
What they had most needed was to see something about themselves that either they hadn’t seen before or had seen but been trying to ignore and avoid, because it was painful. Because that which is their gift – whether it came from their gender, their color, their sexual orientation, or the way they think about, interact with, and look at the world – had so often set them apart from everybody else and made them feel like an outsider.
As a coach of mine once said, if as a child everyone else is playing with Barbie dolls and G.I. Joes and you’re studying sculpture and listening to classical music, you’re not going to have a lot to talk about with your peers, and people may see you as weird. But if you are supported to understand how what makes you different gives you something special to work with, then you can seek out the allies and the positions that allow you to use your talents and abilities – what I call gifts – to the fullest.
— Deborah Huisken
That’s what this is all about. How we help people bring all of themselves into their work, doing the work that they’re most capable of doing, that needs doing, to the benefit of all.