All of you who read my blog posts and who signed up on my website to eliminate a limiting belief are “weird,” according to best-selling author and popular blogger Seth Godin.

Why would he apply that term to you?

Seth uses the term “weird” to describe anyone who is not “normal,” in other words, people who express their uniqueness and who don’t try to fit in with what “most people” are doing.

What makes YOU weird? 

Most “normal” people are not interested in personal growth.  You—who are on my mailing list and reading this blog post—are a distinct minority.  Because you want more out of life … because you are willing to spend your time, energy, and money to create a better life for yourself.

Most “normal” people do not have this awareness and commitment. …

Continued: You are weird.

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“In my opinion, women need and want someone to look up to that they feel have the full sense of who they are, and says, ‘I’m great.’ ”

She also sees herself as unique: “I don’t see myself as ever being like anybody else. I don’t see myself as an heir.”

More quotes:

“When I say to you, there is nobody like me, and there never was, that is a statement I want every woman to feel and make about themselves.”

“I am focused on the work. I am constantly creating.”

See more in my Women and Talent post Lady Gaga: “I don’t see myself as ever being like anybody else.”

Dr. Cheryl Arutt

Topics in our audio interview include high sensitivity, regulating disruptive feelings, destructiveness vs creativity, pain and creativity, being unconventional vs rebellion against the self, the fight-or-flight response, and other issues which can impact creative artists and other people as well.

Listen to the interview: Psychologist Cheryl Arutt on Creative Artist Issues.

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“I think being different, being against the grain of society, is the greatest thing in the world.”

That’s actor Elijah Wood (“Lord of the Rings”), quoted in my post Exceptional and out of bounds – eccentrics and society.

Being unusual and eccentric may be easier for some people. It may not be so easy for many of us who are different on account of being highly sensitive – but we can choose to embrace our exceptional qualities as valuable.

In her post Why it’s hard to be a highly sensitive (HSP) introvert, Susan Biali, M.D. writes about what many of us HSP people can relate to: “A handful of years ago I was so relieved to discover that there’s a name (Highly Sensitive Person, aka HSP) for what I thought were uniquely weird sensitivities.

“I also finally understand and now even celebrate the fact that I’m highly introverted. Thanks to these new insights into my personality, I’ve come to appreciate that the traits that make me seem ‘strange’ are also the reasons that I’m an effective personal coach and a successful writer and author.”

Being different is not a disorder

Dr. Biali adds, “For most of my life I felt that if people knew what I was really like, they’d write me off as strange or different. What a thrill to discover I’m not alone: 15-20% of the population are thought to be highly sensitive (according to HSP expert Dr. Elaine Aron), and around 20% of all people tend towards introversion. Of the 15-20% who are HSPs, 70% are introverts.”

As an HSP and introvert, I fit into that group – and have often felt “wrong” or “weird” during periods of my life, and at least uncomfortable, if not downright anxious on account of being so different than mainstream, extroverted society.

But it’s important to distinguish introversion from shyness, or its more extreme ‘cousin’ social anxiety – see my post Shyness, Introversion, Sensitivity – What’s the Difference?

Also see the article How about a new approach towards Social Anxiety?, By Rob Shapiro, AnxietySecrets.

Learning to celebrate being an HSP

Jenna Avery, CLC, MCP, MLA, is a Creative Vision & Life Purpose Breakthrough Coach, and Sensitive Living Expert, who counsels HSPs – highly sensitive people.

She describes her Self-Study Classes for Sensitive Souls as “the product of my many efforts to find ways to be a happy, healthy, highly sensitive soul.

“I have investigated everything I could get my hands on about energy skills, energetic boundary strengthening, interpersonal boundaries, flower essences for sensitive souls, empathy, intuitive development and more.

“I wanted to find out everything I could about how to feel happy about my life without feeling so assaulted by it — other people’s energy, emotions, and criticisms, and the life stresses and challenges that go along with day-to-day life.”

So, celebrate being one of the unusual people who have a highly sensitive nervous system, but take care of your emotional needs – such as relieving anxiety.

highly sensitive people, highly sensitive and stressed, sensitivity and stress, energy sensitivity, relieving sensitivity, protection for sensitivity

I’ve always been embarrassed by my history on the job.

So many failed idealistic attempts to change things. So many years working at jobs where I didn’t fit and wasn’t using my talents.

If I’d understood a bit more about giftedness, I might have sought out more appropriate situations.

The research of Roland S. Persson, Ph.D. focuses on giftedness and talent, with an emphasis on gifted individuals in society.

Dr. Persson says the workplace can often be difficult for high ability people.

The gifted have problems with co-workers because of being more efficient, knowing more, and learning faster than the more regular workforce. This creates social tension.

They also tend to run into trouble with their managers, who do not understand them and who fail to provide appropriate work suited to their skills and efficiency.

However, 25% of the studied group did indeed thrive and could not imagine having a better and more rewarding job than they already had. This group was comprised of top executives and individuals running their own business. This is not a surprising finding.

It has been known for a long time that one of the main factors in creating work satisfaction is to experience that your own effort, suggestions, and decisions have a direct influence on your work situation.

In other words, you have to be allowed to perceive yourself as being important, with a view to making a difference where you work.

For the academically gifted, this seems only possible if they position themselves as top executives or run their own business. In most other types of work, they risk becoming misfits of sorts…

Gifted individuals interested in, for example, technology, medicine, or finance—“the nerds”—all serve supportive functions in society. They are rarely controversial because their skills contribute towards maintaining society, its leaders on all levels, and its power structure as a whole.

Also individuals gifted in sports, music, and the arts are much appreciated. A few are rewarded more for the moments of release from stress that their gifts offer. They allow us for a moment to escape into a very positive experience…

The greater the prestige to be lost, the more severe the battle to retain dominance and authority. Or, as Ellen Winner (1996) put it Gifted Children: The gifted are risk-takers with a desire to shake things up.

Most of all they have the desire to set things straight, to alter the status quo and shake up established tradition. Creators do not accept the prevailing view. They are oppositional and discontented.

From An Interview with Roland S. Persson: The Talent of Being Inconvenient.

Related

Post: Giftedness in the work environment.

Site: High Ability

Articles: High Ability – gifted/talented

Books:

Heroes, Nerds or Martyrs? On Giftedness and the Leaderships of Tomorrow, by Roland S Persson.

The Gifted Adult: A Revolutionary Guide for Liberating Everyday Genius, by Mary-Elaine Jacobsen

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giftedness and leadership, gifted adult books, gifted adults in the workplace, gifted talented characteristics, gifted adult information, giftedness and social change

“Norms influence what people believe is right and wrong just as surely as real laws, but with none of the permanence or transparency of written regulations.

He continues, “The purpose of norms is to provide a stable and predictable social world, to regulate our behaviour with each other. In many respects norms have a beneficial effect, bolstering society’s foundations and keeping it from falling into chaos.

“On the other hand stability and predictability are enemies of the creative process.

“When groups are asked to think creatively the reason they frequently fail is because implicit norms constrain them in the most explicit ways.

“This is clearly demonstrated in a recent study carried out by Adarves-Yorno et al. (2006). They asked two groups of participants to create posters and subtly gave each group a norm about either using more words on the poster or more images.

“Afterwards when they judged each others’ work, participants equated creativity with following the group norm; the ‘words’ group rated posters with more words as more creative and the ‘images’ group rated posters with more images as more creative. The unwritten rules of the group, therefore, determined what its members considered creative. In effect groups had redefined creativity as conformity.”

Pushing beyond those group norm constraints can enhance creativity

Management expert Tom Peters notes in his article The Entrepreneurial Spirit that “weird” can be good, “if we don’t judge others through our lens… Being weird increases creativity if we allow it to flourish.”

And Psychologist Robert Ornstein, PhD (author of The Psychology of Consciousness) has pointed out, “If you spend too much time being like everybody else, you decrease your chances of coming up with something different.”

More related quotes in my post Being eccentric and creative and productive – non-conformity and your creative potential.

“Gifted kids tend to hide their intelligence, as well as their talents, for a very simple reason:  Conformity.” Claudia, 16

That quote is from the book When Gifted Kids Don’t Have All the Answers: How to Meet Their Social and Emotional Needs – quoted in my post Gifted Kids: Nerds endure and create even without support.

In his post Do You Have the Weirdo Syndrome?, “incorrigible polymath” Charlie (Productive Flourishing site) quotes Judy Garland: “Be a first rate version of yourself, not a second rate version of someone else.”

He continues: “One of the things that comes up over and over again in my conversations with a lot of the cool, creative people that I meet is what I’m calling the Weirdo Syndrome. The Weirdo Syndrome is the love/hate relationship some people people can get from their own uniqueness.”

Also see multiple posts on Eccentricity.

developing creativity, creative potential, creative personality type, creative experience characteristics, psychology of creativity, creative mind

Oh My God! car by Harrod Blank

Filmmaker Harrod Blank grew up in the isolated Santa Cruz mountains of California, without a TV and with only roosters and chickens for friends. At 16, driven by a desire to communicate who he is with others, he began decorating cars, beginning with his bland, white Volkswagen.

The resulting car,”Oh My God,” introduced him to a community of other kindred-spirit eccentric art car creators, led him to write the book Art Cars, establish the Art Car World museum, and eventually into filmmaking with “Wild Cars” and “Automorphosis.”

From the “Carthedral” to Uri Geller’s fork-and-spoon-covered “Peace Car,” Automorphosis draws us into the tuck-and-roll interior lives of some very creative and independent non-conformists.

“There’s a lack of smiles. I’m filling a need. I had no idea,” says the creator of the “Shark Car.” One artist, a cancer survivor covered her vehicle with chains – a metaphor for her illness – and found healing in the process. “The very thing that says you’re going to die ends up being the thing that sustains you.”

“Ever since we’ve been born, we’ve been conditioned with the imagery and the messages that we should live a certain way,” says Blank. Automorphosis is an inspiration to throw off the restrictions of convention and live more authentic, independent and expressive lives.

“Automorphosis” is Blank’s second art car film, a follow-up to “Wild Wheels.”

Art Cars: the cars, the artists, the obsession, the craft book by Harrod Blank

Related:
Eccentricity
Being eccentric and creative and productive – non-conformity and your creative potential
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art cars, eccentric people, being a nonconformist, Automorphosis

In his post Ignore Everybody (on his gapingvoid blog), Hugh MacLeod provides a stimulating list of tips to help us “be more creative, in art, in business, whatever.”

Here are some of those tips :

1. Ignore everybody.

2. The idea doesn’t have to be big. It just has to be yours.

3. Put the hours in.

4. If your biz plan depends on you suddenly being “discovered” by some big shot, your plan will probably fail.

5. You are responsible for your own experience.

6. Everyone is born creative; everyone is given a box of crayons in kindergarten.

7. Keep your day job.

8. Companies that squelch creativity can no longer compete with companies that champion creativity.

9. Everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were put on this earth to climb.

10. The more talented somebody is, the less they need the props.

11. Don’t try to stand out from the crowd; avoid crowds altogether.

12. If you accept the pain, it cannot hurt you.

13. Never compare your inside with somebody else’s outside.

Hugh MacLeod is author of the upcoming book Ignore Everybody: and 39 Other Keys to Creativity.

British neuropsychologist David Weeks would no doubt agree with Tom Waits and a number of MacLeod’s tips. In his book Eccentrics: A Study of Sanity and Strangeness, Weeks says, “One of the principal reasons eccentrics continually challenge the established order is because they want to experiment, to try out new ways of doing things. That quality is most conspicuous in artists and scientists.”

From the page Eccentricity.  [Photo: bullhorn waits by rashbre.]

personal growth development, self growth, creative inspiration, developing creativity, developing multiple talents

“They do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being. They knock on silence for an answering music; they pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean.”

Rollo May, in his book The Courage to Create.

From poem Much Madness by Emily Dickinson (Complete Poems, 1924):

Much madness is divinest sense
To a discerning eye;
Much sense the starkest madness.
‘Tis the majority
In this, as all, prevails
Assent, and you are sane;
Demur, –you’re straightway dangerous,
And handled with a chain.

Image from news story “Odd behavior and creativity may go hand-in-hand” on the page Eccentricity.

“Psychologists believe that a number of famous creative luminaries, including Vincent Van Gogh, Albert Einstein, Emily Dickinson and Isaac Newton, had schizotypal personalities.” From the post Schizotypal personalities and creative achievement.

Related article: Creativity, the Arts, and Madness, by Maureen Neihart, Psy.D.

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Rollo May, creativity book, gifted talented characteristics, creativity and madness

One of the personal qualities that seems to be shared by most gifted children is being different and divergent – in terms of thinking, interests, values and behavior. Many gifted adults feel “wrong” or anxious about “not fitting in” even though being different can be a strength, a positive attribute.

In the movie “Nancy Drew,” the heroine (played with style and grace by Emma Roberts) uses and celebrates her intuitive and intellectual abilities as a teen sleuth, and accepts the fact she is exceptional, and does not fit in with her high school peers mainly concerned with cliques, clothes and boys.

[From my post Entitled to Be Exceptional]

“When I met her [actor Scarlett Johansson], OK, she’s 15, but she could easily pass for 30. She’s a very attractive girl, but she’s sort of a weirdo. I like that about her.” Terry Zwigoff – her director for “Ghost World” (2000) [From the page Eccentricity]

In her article Counseling Gifted Adults – A Case Study, counselor Paula Prober writes about Susan, who “had known that she was different since she was seven. Her thoughts and feelings had never fit into the box that was comfortable and reassuring for most children.” ….

Continued on High Ability