Renaissance Soul, gifted adult personality, psychology of giftedness, gifted books, scanner personality

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Do you feel a pang of envy when someone says, “I’ve always known exactly what I wanted to be ever since I was a kid”?

Do you consider yourself a dilettante because you have so many interests but have never become an expert at any of them?

Or are you an expert at something but find yourself dreaming of pursuing something else, something that doesn’t fit in with other people’s expectations of you?

Do career books and life design workshops fail you because they insist that you identify a single passion or goal?  

WHO ARE RENAISSANCE SOULS? 

In a nutshell, we are people whose number one career choice is "Please don't make me choose!" and whose underlying passion is to constantly redefine our passions.

We are people who pick up one thing and drop something else as frequently as we need to--lucky people who, if left to our own devices, can never be bored for long. 

Yet at first glance we don't feel so lucky. In fact, we seem to have a problem, an inability to pick one specific career path and happily stick with it. This "problem" can wear several, seemingly contradictory, faces.

Some Renaissance Souls change areas of endeavor frequently only to have their expanded repertoire of skills held against them when they go for job interviews.

Others have successfully climbed one particular career ladder only to be inexplicably miserable at the top.

Still others stay with waitressing, temping, or other entry-level positions to avoid choosing any one path to the top. They tend to work at positions far below their abilities, struggling with the resultant low pay and security.

Let's look at some examples of what I mean.

Staying at the bottom to avoid choosing a path to the top 

Marcie saw me after a hectic day as a receptionist for a busy medical practice. She was a bit late because her ancient station wagon had broken down again, and she had to borrow a car.

"That's the bottom line reason why I’m here,” she told me. "I need to earn more money. I need to find a career and get moving. I can't be scheduling pediatric appointments for the rest of my life unless I want to be a bag lady when I retire!" 

When I asked Marcie what else she'd done with her life, she went on at length. After “working herself silly" in college, pursuing a double major in astronomy and French and also being exceedingly active in theater, she had taken a break by traveling abroad for a year.

Then she'd worked as a waitress to pay off the money she'd borrowed to travel, and then she'd worked as a set person off-off-off Broadway. And then she'd been a nanny and then worked in a travel agency and then... 

"Well, you get the picture," Marcie said. "My parents are getting tired of explaining to people,  'Oh, Marcie just hasn't settled down yet.' And it's true. I have never picked just one thing and stuck with it. How could I?  I have no idea what that one thing could possibly be... Anything I think of makes me think of at least two other things as well. So I go on filling my time with unsatisfying dead-end jobs, like the one I have now." 

A variety of successes barring entry to a new field 

Unlike Marcie, Ben had successfully developed many of his artistic talents. A published poet, he was the recognized leader of a popular band when I met him. He arrived at his first appointment feeling stuck and very angry.

"I just don't get it," he almost yelled. "I've been talented at just about everything I've put my mind to. I have letters of reference that would turn most people green. But just because I have done lots of different things, just because my resume is unconventional—the woman yesterday called it a 'hodgepodge,' if you can believe it— no one wants to hire me!

"I've gotten really intrigued by financial planning management. But even when I say I'm willing to take an entry-level position, everyone keeps asking me if I took any business courses in college or whether I've ever 'been in sales.'  'Everyone in the art world is in sales,' I say, but they just don't get it. I never even make it to the second interview... Is it a crime to be multi-talented?" 

Reaching the top, and hating it  

Contrary to Marcie and Ben, James had a résumé to die for but also felt very stuck when he came to his first career session. Wearing an elegant three-piece suit and driving a shiny black Lexus, he exuded success.

He had entered the family construction business as a young man and had shown a great flair for the financial, construction, and human resources sides of the business. By the time I saw him he was running a hugely expanded enterprise.

As he approached his forty-fifth birthday, everything seemed to be going his way.  Except…   

Except that Jim was now avoiding going to work. Avoiding doing outreach calls. Avoiding working on the upcoming five-year plan. Not answering his phone. His wife was concerned and referred him to me.

What was the matter? 

 "To put it bluntly, I'm bored silly!" Jim finally blurted out. "I just cringe inside when I think of spending the rest of my life on proposals and bidding and merging and schmoozing and hiring and firing. I know I'm good at it all, and I know most people would love to be in my shoes. But I'm not most people. In fact, I've never been like 'most people.'"   

Jim talked about how he had enjoyed the first five years of his career, learning the business and developing his talents. "But, between you and me, I hadn't even been there five years when it began to go stale. Now and then something like computer blueprinting would come along and I'd get jazzed for a bit.

"But basically I knew even then I had lost the spark. That was the period when I got all interested in the green revolution in agriculture, and picked up Italian too—I love learning new languages! Anyway, I wanted to leave… and do something else. But that isn't what grown men do, certainly not any men I know, not any responsible men... So I stayed.  

"But now I am about to be forty-five, and I just can't do it anymore. My family thinks I'm nuts to want to walk away from success, but I'm just shriveling up inside... This can't be all there is to my life, there's too much else I want to try..." 

Jim, Marcie, and Ben are not isolated examples.  In the thousands of sessions I have had with clients who want to redesign their lives, I have seen some of the most gifted, curious, multi-faceted people floundering. Why? Why should people with multiple interests, skills, and talents have such a tough time? Are they flawed in some way?  Do they have a problem that has yet to be identified?    No. The problem is that their inability to pick one specific career path and stick with it shouldn’t really be labeled a “problem” in the first place!  Here’s why. 

THE BELL CURVE OF INTERESTS 

Picture a bell curve of the human race, where the ends represent two extremes and the "bell" in the middle represents the bulk of humanity.

At one end of the curve, you have people like Mozart, consumed only with music, music, and more music.

He would never have needed a self-help book or career workshop to figure out what he was interested in and what he wanted to do with his life.      

At the other end of the bell curve are people like Ben Franklin.

If he were alive today, and had played his key role in the drafting of the Declaration of Independence, the recruitment folks at Harvard's J.F.K. School of Government would eagerly try to pin him down to a career in government.

But what about his strange fascination with kite and key experiments?

Forget government, now it’s the folks at MIT who want to interest him in a career in science, right? But no, it turns out Ben wants to go to France to study French culture and language! Great—get him a job at the U.N., or with Berlitz.

But wait—he also has plans to design a post office! 

As the bell curve demonstrates, there's a continuum between the Mozarts on one end, who have one lifelong passion, and the Franklins on the other, who have many disparate passions.

Is one personality type any better than the other? Would we want a culture without either the Mozarts or the Ben Franklins?

Of course not.

And yet the Franklins of this world are written off as the lesser beings—as “dilettantes” and “dabblers.”

The Mozart types are defined as the norm, and those of us on the Ben Franklin side of the curve are not given the positive reinforcement and role models we need. ////

In our culture, we often assume that to be passionate about something requires us be unswerving in our focus.

We picture the fanatical scientist working away day and night in the laboratory or the obsessed writer pouring out her soul in a romantic garret.

Implicit in such images is the idea that once we commit to our own strong passions we will have to give up all the other things that we love. 

This is absolutely NOT the case. Renaissance Souls are quite capable of bringing a passionate attention to a variety of interests, often simultaneously.

My client Carlie is both a professional clown who entertains children and a Holocaust educator who gives talks on the lessons of Auschwitz.

Another, Cindy, spends part of her time showing visitors from France the hidden joys of Boston and the rest of her time on importing antique china from England for sale to American collectors.

My client Don, meanwhile, combines his passion for the outdoors with his mission to work with troubled inner city teens.  ////

Other Renaissance Souls pursue their variety of interests seasonally.  My client Betsy, with her love for gardening and quilting and making a difference, is a good case in point.

During the winter she makes unusual baby quilts to sell over the Internet. In early spring she offers quilting projects specially adapted with Velcro for seniors with arthritis in their hands. 

From late spring through early fall she has a position developing outdoor gardening and landscaping projects with prisoners.  Then in late fall she gives seniors quilting workshops. ////

The Renaissance Soul is not to be confused with genius. It's true that the Renaissance swans we are likely to have heard about are people like Leonardo da Vinci and Ben Franklin, but that doesn't mean they're the only ones out there.

We've heard of them because they were geniuses—just as we've heard of Mozart because he was a genius.

My clients say to me, "But Margaret, I'm no Ben Franklin!" 

My response: “Renaissance Souls don’t have to be brilliant at everything they do. After all, we don’t expect everyone on the Mozart side of the bell curve to be a child prodigy!”

> This is an excerpt from Chapter One: Telling A Ben Franklin From A Mozart, A Swan From A Duck, from Secrets of the Renaissance Soul: How to Make “Too Many Interests” Work For You, by Margaret Lobenstine.

Republished here with kind permission of the author.

Her site: Renaissance Soul Life Design