Silver Huang

Are You Making Time to Listen?

26 February 2018 by Silver Huang

Are you investing in your authenticity?

And I’m not talking about learning or doing more. I’m talking about making time to stop completely, and in stillness, listen.

There is nowhere outside of you that will be able to teach you how to be your authentic self—How could there when authenticity is about being you?

How can you learn about you from someone else?

True, other people, like therapists and coaches, can give you perspective, heck, they could even try to force-feed you the answers that you need.

However, external input seldom triggers transformation quite like internal insight does. External input can sometimes trigger internal insight, however, one must already have done the work to ready oneself for that insight to blossom in the right conditions.

And the work is often not what we think it is. It is not about working harder, or even smarter.

The real work is to deliberately, intentionally carve out time in your life to stop and listen to you.

Choose & Create Who You Are Instead of Searching

22 February 2018 by Silver Huang

I spent my entire childhood looking for, trying to find out who I am. I always believed that the answer was, “Somewhere out there.” That if only I could search hard enough, dig hard enough, the answers would be all waiting for me somewhere, as if I just needed to read the right book or pay the right coach who would tell me who I am.

Then I hit adulthood and learnt that, “Ohhh… The answers are not ‘out there’ somewhere… They are ‘in here’ somewhere’.” Didn’t help me any. All that happened was that I did the same things all over again, except this time the shovel was aimed at myself.

I got so angry over the years. I felt I was working so hard, doing all the right things. So why weren’t the answers coming to me? “Why won’t someone just tell me who I am, so that I can get on with the being?!”

I’m Not Here to Be Perfect. I’m Here to Be Me.

21 February 2018 by Silver Huang

I’ve struggled with content creation for my entire entrepreneurial life. It used to literally hurt me.

It was made worse by the fact that I had no idea that I was profoundly gifted up until last year. Before that, I had my writing critiqued by well-meaning but non-gifted people who were incapable of following, much less understanding, the intensity and complexity of a gifted mind.

I used to spend six hours a day struggling to translate my native thought modality into language and then slaving over the flow, structure and wording. I wanted my works to fit the standard that non-gifted educators, editors, coaches and friends drove into me—Polished, professional, easy to read and simple to understand.

I was forced to operate at a fraction of my natural cognitive speed, depth, breadth and complexity for an audience who still could not relate anyway.

Authenticity Is Just as Much About Knowing Who You Are Not.

20 February 2018 by Silver Huang

Authenticity is just as much about knowing who you are not, as it is about knowing and being who you are.

On today’s Pioneer group coaching call, the discussion moved towards the topic of parenthood and how some parents, trapped by fears socioculturally conditioned into them over a lifetime, may end up making choices that may be non-beneficial to their children.

The Pioneer who shared the story went on to describe how she was able to choose actions that made a direct difference to the child in question, without unnecessary and most likely non-beneficial potential conflict by pointing out the impact of the parent’s choices directly to the parent in question.

Subtlety and tact are not particular strengths of mine.

A Working Definition of Integrity & Authenticity for Gifted Adults

3 November 2017 by Silver Huang

During my journey to understand and learn how to be an authentic gifted adult, I found the etymologies of the words “integrity” and “authenticity” to be highly instructive in themselves:

Authenticity: From Greek authentikos “original, genuine, principal,”  from authentes “one acting on one’s own authority,”  from autos “self” + hentes “doer, being.”
Integrity:  From Latin integer “intact, whole, complete,” literally “untouched,”  from in- “not” + tangere “to touch.”

Integrity and authenticity, therefore, literally mean being and expressing one’s untouched, original and genuine self on one’s own authority.

Through my own process, I have come to experience integrity and authenticity as a mindset of self security and freedom of choice that arises from one’s inherent source of self worth, authority and direction:

Integrity: “I am secure in my own authority of being and becoming who I am.”
Authenticity: “I am free to choose my own experience and expression of who I am.”

Therefore, I see integrity as an internal experience, and authenticity as the external expression — two halves of the same whole of being. Authenticity is how we choose to express our experience of integrity within.

This applies to everyone.

However, the intrinsically intense, complex, sensitive, fluid and n-dimensional lives of gifted people can make integrity and authenticity particularly tricky and challenging, for two reasons:

How does one settle on a single state or way of being when one has no one fixed state of being and is different in any given moment? Gifted people experience life as Heraclitus of Ephesus so befittingly expressed, “You could not step twice into the same river.”
How does one feel safe or validated enough to freely express one’s multitudinous self—selves!—in a world where immutable and simplistic are social and cultural norms? As a neurosocial minority, gifted people suffer from a dearth of affirming social modelling.

I think most gifted people know that the answer is to embrace and embody one’s naturally intense, complex, sensitive and fluidly n-dimensional self.

Unfortunately, most gifted people are unconsciously limited and consciously bound by social and cultural constraints.

It doesn’t help that there are few resources or services that provide for and support the gifted search for—much less experience and expression of—integrity and authenticity.

When one grows up confined in a psychological coffin not of one’s making or choosing, liberation is neither simple, easy nor quick.

More than most, I feel, gifted people need a lot of time, safety and support towards exploring and experimenting—playing!—with what integrity and authenticity means, feels and looks like for themselves. However, they need not go it alone.

Intrepid Integrity provides coaching and community for the gifted maverick seeking to learn and practice integrity and authenticity as a way of life.