25. Do you need a Nerd Coach? Meet Tracy Winter

Jun 21

Tracy has been an executive and leadership coach for over ten years. She helps neurodivergent leaders become superstar leaders through nerd coach, her coaching practice.

Tracy has coached up and down the career ladder, from job seekers to vice-presidents, and has worked in different industries, including technology, government, academia, and health care. Tracy helps her clients, individuals or teams, develop new perspectives that lead to new behaviors, behaviors more likely to get the results they want, whether it’s a promotion, more team cohesion, or just being heard, seen, and valued for their ideas.

Tracy also teaches doctoral classes Organizational Leadership and Business Psychology Department at The Chicago School for Professional Psychology. She earned her PhD in Human Development, her M.A. in Human and Organization systems, and her Evidence-Based Coaching Certificate from Fielding Graduate University. And she can jumprope tap dance.

TAKEAWAYS FROM THIS EPISODE:

Gifted adults are an underserved population and people think they're okay, just because they're gifted. And that's not necessarily the case.
for some reason the G word is really loaded
Gifted adults do well as individual contributors in the workplace but they may have trouble socially.
When you are gifted your experience interacting with others can be like looking into a funhouse mirror! Instead of an accurate reflection, they are getting the reflection that people expect them to be a certain way and they are not. The reflection is inaccurate and gifted are being perceived as weird over and over again from childhood into adulthood and it’s hurtful.
Gifted adults oftentimes don’t recognise their own giftedness. They feel more like they are missing something.
Giftedness is not just about being smart, it is this qualitative difference. The Columbus group definition says that you are actually getting different, more intense information than other people are getting.
Gifted adults who tried to work with non-gifted specific therapists or psychiatrists say that they think beyond them, they think circles around them.
Giftedness is about so much more than IQ. It's the quick and easy way to talk about it. Two standard deviations from the curve, three standard deviations from the curve. But there's so much more to it: It’s also about intensity, not being understood, about the not fitting in part. It's about overexcitabilities and never being able to shut your brain off because everything is so interesting, or having shut your brain off entirely. Or not being interested because it was so overwhelming. The label “gifted” is simply helpful in adults to identify each other.
Find the people who you fit.
Be kind to yourself and allow yourself to feel whatever you are feeling.
The challenge is that there are a lot of adults who don't identify as gifted, even if they were identified as gifted as a kid. Which is one of the reasons we are more often using the term “neurodivergence” as a way of talking about this topic.