Challenges and Strategies for a Career On The Road Less Traveled

We believe it's never too late for another, and another career jump

Professionals and communicators with gifted minds appear to most as smarter, faster, accomplished, and maybe even luckier and happier than others who applied for the top job, which they landed.

If you interview them and ask for the back story of their career path, the response is often obtuse and complex. They don’t know how this happened and they are not done following their curiosity, intuition, and sense of wonder on the road less traveled for career progression.

The adults we see in our community of Gifted Professionals and Communicators may or may not have gone through a formal diagnosis because they learned how to navigate the world with their innate qualities of giftedness. They have always been different thinkers. They’ve learned how to turn what makes them ultra-aware and extremely intuitive into superpowers of listening and compassion.

Most of them are elected by peers to leadership positions for their specific professional community. Most of them have never gotten a diagnostic assessment as autistic, dyslexic, dyspraxic, or ADHD (attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder). That’s not our community. It’s possible that some have these other challenges, but that’s not the core of our conversations with each other.

The conversations we have about careers and our exceptional talents are mostly invented and innovative.

Somewhere around high school graduation or into college years, we learned that the guidance counselors handed out advice and tips for selecting a profession and getting someone to hire you—all of which assumed a level playing field. For many of us, so very early in the career journey, the wheels came off when the standard tests and standard advice did not come up to the level of our higher standards and visions of multiple professions and more than one “calling” in our lifetime.

One of the most prolific writers on neurodiversity is @Prof. Amanda Kirby. She writes books and a newsletter on LinkedIn which has more than 100 thousand subscribers. While she goes more into the world of the children, parents, teachers, and school administrators struggling with diagnosed neurodivergent characteristics, her writing and perspective have a lot we can apply to the challenges and strategies faced by the everyday genius who became a professional and communicator.

This is an article we find especially valuable and we hope you do too. It’s Neurodiversity 101: Unlocking the Path to Talent Progression. It’s long and worth your time to see yourself in the challenges described, then shift to the strategies you may have tried already or may be glad to discover now.

Two things are for sure with the gifted professional: We believe it’s never too late to learn something more and jump to a new path. We believe there's no one-size-fits-all approach to success and hacks are for everyone else to try. We learn our strengths, try out many different jobs, titles, and projects, and enjoy what motivates us.