Tal­ent was not rare; the abil­ity to sur­vive hav­ing it was.

Neal Stephen­son, “Quicksilver”

So, I apol­o­gise for not hav­ing a page ref. for you, but I’m lis­ten­ing to the audio book. I heard that line last week, and thought it was a per­fect place to start an arti­cle from.

I really don’t think the con­text is all that impor­tant, but this line comes from one of the pro­tag­o­nists observ­ing Isaac New­ton as a child, as other kids attempt first to mock him, then to bully him, then to beat him up. (None of which was suc­cess­ful in the least.) The nar­ra­tor is com­ment­ing about the nature of social pres­sure, as it is exerted against those who stand out.

Let’s see what we can see!

Tal­ent was (is) not rare

So, Sep­tem­ber 2011 will mark the 30^th anniver­sary of my begin­ning my train­ing as a psy­chother­a­pist. (He says that with a small sigh and shake of head…) With­out bor­ing you, here’s how that goes: you’re in class a lot, you work with 10 clients a week, and you’re super­vised. Back then, that meant being observed through two-way-glass or video. Twice a year, there’s a writ­ten eval­u­a­tion, again two-way. You answer essay ques­tions about who you are and how you’re doing, and your super­vi­sor does the same.

In my sec­ond year, my super­vi­sor wrote, in her first eval­u­a­tion, “Wayne often has much higher expec­ta­tions for his clients than they have,” as if this was a prob­lem. In later dis­cus­sion, she said she thought this approach might lead to dis­ap­point­ment on my part, and too much pres­sure for my clients.

At the end of sec­ond year, she wrote, “Wayne con­tin­ues to have much higher expec­ta­tions for his clients, and he is almost always right.” I just smiled. I had real­ized I could see poten­tial, and I was not about to ignore it.

Tal­ent is not rare. For most of my clients, it’s sim­ply been buried under years of neglect and dis-use. It’s been put down by sig­nif­i­cant adults dur­ing child­hood, beaten out of them through crit­i­cism and threat, and finally given up on as a pipe dream.

Exam­ple: Through grade 3, I was a straight “A” stu­dent. One day, in grade 4, I was walk­ing home with a hulk­ing dude named Danny. Here’s an inter­est­ing tid­bit: he car­ried a switch­blade knife in his boot, and took it out once in class, when I was try­ing to strip a wire. The teacher said, “Thank you for shar­ing Danny, now put that back in your boot.” And hey! We all lived!

Any­way, Danny lived across the street, and we walked home a lot. One day, he said, “You know, I don’t have a sin­gle friend that gets good grades.” Now, there was no threat—but to my 9-year-old mind, it sounded like, if I wanted him as a friend, I’d bet­ter “dumb down.” So I did—I became a “C” stu­dent for a year or so. As sim­ple as that. Imag­ine what hap­pens when real pres­sure is exerted.

Again, Danny is a benign exam­ple. Here’s another, with a bit more pizazz.

There once was a woman we knew, who basi­cally, at 28, was stum­bling along, putting in time. She was in a dead end job, failed mar­riage, fail­ing rela­tion­ship, “numb” sex­u­ally, unhappy and shut down.

She started spend­ing time with Dar­bella and me, wanted to learn to give and receive body­work—she would come for the week­end, and the three of us would work on each other.

You want to be a what!!??

One day, she described her “grow­ing up” environment.

She was con­tin­u­ally paint­ing and draw­ing. Her par­ents, both doc­tors, took away her art sup­plies, repeat­edly. She’d find ways to draw. Finally, though, she just gave up. She rebelled, by drop­ping out of school, etc. And why did this dance play out? Mom and dad wanted her to be a doc­tor. Quoth they: “We sup­port the arts–we don’t make art!”

She showed me a photo of a paint­ing she’d done, on a whim, with no train­ing, and it was stunning.

After a while hang­ing out with us and hear­ing “encour­ag­ing words,” she went back to school, and started paint­ing. We lost con­tact with her, but I don’t think she ulti­mately stuck with it. She declared “game over” in her 30s, because,

Tal­ent was not rare; the abil­ity to sur­vive hav­ing it was.

I don’t have per­mis­sion (she no longer com­mu­ni­cates with me–bad guy that I am, sug­gest­ing she live from her tal­ent…) to show you the photo, but it’s in my office, and I do show it to clients. No sur­prise, many of my clients are artists of dif­fer­ent stripes and dis­ci­plines, and many of them are non-productive.

Why?

Because sur­viv­ing hav­ing tal­ent is tricky

Our cul­ture, prob­a­bly for­ever, and espe­cially in the last sev­eral decades, prizes “fit­ting in” while blam­ing oth­ers over vis­i­ble expres­sions of tal­ent. Oh, we’re will­ing to read about tal­ented peo­ple, and we give lip ser­vice to want­ing our “kids” to be tal­ented, but only if they don’t rock the boat, and still fit in.

Again and again, I see par­ents force feed­ing their kids this “party line”—fit in, don’t make waves, be rea­son­able, don’t have “unac­cept­able emo­tions,” etc.

Or, my per­sonal favourite, telling their kids to excel, while refus­ing to bring forth their own tal­ent and pas­sion. “Do as I say, not as I do” is the motto.

And the tal­ented who are also “out of the closet of repres­sion” shake their heads and wish for a “bet­ter day.”

We’ve all been con­di­tioned to dial down our pas­sion and our cre­ativ­ity, to refuse to “go for it, damn the con­se­quences,” and the world is poorer because of it.

I look at my clients, and see their poten­tial—their blocked or poorly used tal­ent, which to my eyes, is just under the sur­face. And I see their pos­ture, and hear the words of the beaten down, who have for­got­ten what lies right there.

My goal is to shine a bit of light, hold up a mir­ror, and through talk and body­work, to help them open the flood­gates, so that my clients might get a glim­mer of what’s avail­able to them. Some of them get it, embrace it, and start liv­ing their tal­ent, their passion.

Sadly, other times, I watch this curi­ous phe­nom­e­non, like what our artist friend, in the illus­tra­tion above, chose:

They open, swim in the cre­ative flow, sigh with relief. And then they tighten, re-play the old, old story, and things go back to nor­mal. They do as they were told, except it is they that are now doing the telling–the restricting.

Tal­ent is hard to survive.

Unless, of course, you choose to let the blocked, inhib­ited, shut down ver­sion of you “die,” unless you choose to face the fear, the bul­ly­ing, the restric­tions head on, and step through.

Then you dis­cover that what was hold­ing you back are your sto­ries, and your sto­ries are as insub­stan­tial as smoke.

And there you are, as you are, and act­ing in a new, clearer and more “in the flow” way, in your rela­tion­ships, as you pro­duce your magic, has the power to change everything.

But only if you choose not just to sur­vive your tal­ent, but to embrace it.

Next week, two views on unearthing tal­ent and passion.