We shouldn’t lose the praise we are given as young people when we become adults. When was the last time you felt praised in your career? Do you leave work with the same thrill you did when you received a shiny gold star at school? Or do you feel you’re more often told when you’ve done something wrong than something right? While I can practice self-love and affirm myself I am doing OK until the cows come home, the real way to tackle gifted kid burnout comes from employers themselves. She was resilient and managed to achieve so much. When I look back on my school years, I feel proud of my younger self. It can be a real struggle navigating the world outside academia. The comfy blanket that was essay writing and lectures was stripped from me and I knew work would be a very different reality to what I was used to. The job hunt at the end of my degree felt like stepping outside a cosy cottage into a snowstorm. When I worked in a dessert cafe alongside university, I thought it would be a doddle, but I was so bad at making crepes I was practically banned from making any hot food and was stuck to cleaning tables and making ice cream. This mentality loomed over me into adulthood, but the world of work can be a humbling experience for the gifted kid failed job interviews, rejections and brutally honest feedback take a toll. I would ask, why was I not good enough this time? When my friend earned her music badge and I didn’t, it felt like the end of the world. We had just sat our final round of mocks before the ‘real thing’ and the teachers were counting down and listing off names of people who had achieved the best marks, until they named the person who scored most of their target grades – me.Įach one made me want more. All on the cusp of exams, the naive bliss of teenagehood encased us in the room. Not to brag or anything.Īt 16, I sat in an assembly surrounded by my peers. I had brilliant grades, I hit all my targets, I won an ‘Oscar’ for being the best actress in my year, and I spent most of my childhood taking home the title of ‘star of the week’. I was bullied, shy and looks were definitely not my strength, but one thing I knew was that I was smart. I grew up feeling I never had much to offer. Labelling kids as gifted can appear to do more harm than good when those children grow up into success-hungry adults that will realistically never receive that same level of praise in the working world. This is why I think we need change: Change in how we praise and raise kids, and a shift in how we work as adults. But as I grew up and entered adulthood, this flow of praise trickled to a complete stop and I hit a wall as a result. It’s something I’d regularly hear as a kid at school.
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