Penelope Monger
Beverley Paine was identified as ‘bright’ and ‘gifted’ as a child. She inhabited a world where an A- was considered a personal failure and where no one took the time to help her identify her “true strengths”. Years later, Beverley is circumspect about her ‘giftedness’ and is still trying to overcome the damage caused by the label.
"Personally, I don't consider myself to be gifted,” says Beverley. “Having explored the concepts of learning modalities and styles I feel confident saying that I have an even spread of above-average abilities with some areas not so developed.”
“But I do have a natural, inherited inclination towards achieving high standards. Until my mid-40s I expected and demanded 95 per cent plus from myself and everyone else. Now I’m in my 50s I’m much more realistic and relaxed, and easier to live and work with!”
However, her attitude as a child was quite different. “A- was always a failure to me,” says Beverley. “I was an A+ student, no less.” Added to that, she found that being bright meant that “adults had their own agendas about what was good” for her future.
“I was expected to do well, go to university, be 'successful'; but my concept of success was different from those who expected that. Their disappointment... was hard to cope with.
Beverley believes that being gifted is much more than showing above-average aptitude and a desire for consistently high marks.
“To me it means a person has exceptional talent in one or more areas. He or she may not be passionate or driven to pursue activities that demonstrate and develop that talent, though most gifted people tend to be.
“Some people only realise their giftedness late in life when they have time and have overcome obstacles that deny them the ability to pursue their gifts earlier in life.
Gifted or not, those who put pressures on themselves to achieve to a high standard often have to compete with a sense of failure, even where that ‘failure’—an A- for example—would be someone else’s success.
But Beverley, at just 16 years old, had the insight to consider failures to be “positive and constructive learning experiences”.
Nonetheless, she says, “It took a long time to lessen the anxiety I felt when things I had a hand in doing didn't work out the way I wanted them to or thought they should. In my late 20s I coupled this with an affirmation that I was okay just the way I am, that I didn't need to do anything to prove my worth to anyone.”
“Both are powerful ways of undoing the conditioning that to not succeed is to fail. I don't deal with failure simply because I don't fail; I learn. However, it did take about thirty years to not feel dreadful and let go of the guilt if I burned the dinner. Now I simply cook another.”
Similarly, Beverley measures ‘success’ by the level of satisfaction when goals are achieved. “If you consider that you are learning from everything you do and everything you experience, then you can't fail, because learning is always is the successful outcome,” she says. “I am lucky in that I have a keen interest in my own learning process and can see how I'm learning from my experiences in most moments of the day.”
Added to that, she does not believe that you can quantify giftedness, no matter how many tests a student might pass. “Measuring giftedness seems a bit of a silly idea,” she says.
“Who cares how gifted you are? Just get on with what you love doing, knowing that if it comes from a position of centredness then you will be spreading joy with each breath.
“It is hard to say who is and who isn't gifted—we may all be gifted in some way.”
Beverley Paine is now a proponent of home schooling in Australia. You can read more about her and about home schooling here.
Think
- How do you define giftedness?
- Can you identify reasons why being labelled 'gifted' may be detrimental to a young person?
- How does giftedness, as it relates to intelligence, compare with giftedness that relates to the spirit or the emotions?
- Was Jesus gifted? In what ways?
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