Nurturing Gifted Minds Beyond Intelligence with Gordon Smith of Gifted and Growing. Ep.54

Episode Overview

• Episode Topic:
  Welcome to Mastering Counseling, we engage in the groundbreaking intersection of improvisational techniques and mental health practices with Gordon Smith from Gifted and Growing. We explore the transformative potential that improv holds for therapy sessions, offering a fresh perspective on therapeutic engagement. Our discussion illuminates how “Improv in Therapy” not only enhances the therapist-client connection but also encourages creativity, spontaneity, and emotional resilience. We dissect the mechanisms behind why and how improv can be a vital tool in mental health practice, providing valuable insights for both therapists and clients looking to break through traditional therapy boundaries.
  
• Lessons You’ll Learn:
  This episode is packed with a comprehensive understanding of “Improv in Therapy” through a series of valuable lessons. Discover how improvisational techniques can break down walls of resistance, foster trust and safety between clients and therapists, and promote an environment where play and therapy intersect beneficially. You’ll learn the significance of spontaneity in emotional expression, the role of play in adult therapy, and practical ways to integrate improv into therapeutic practices. This episode is a must-listen for those interested in expanding their therapeutic toolkit with creative and effective strategies.
  
• About Our Guest:
  Gordon Smith, the founder of Gifted and Growing, is our esteemed guest who brings his rich experience and innovative approach to “Improv in Therapy” into the spotlight. With a career spanning over two decades, Gordon has successfully merged the realms of improv and therapy to create a unique therapeutic model that caters to the needs of gifted and twice-exceptional individuals. His work emphasizes the importance of safety, trust, and play in therapy, making him a pioneer in utilizing improv techniques to enhance mental health outcomes. Gordon’s insights into “Improv in Therapy” are not only inspiring but are also reshaping how therapy is perceived and practiced in the modern world.
  
• Topics Covered:
  Throughout this episode, we cover a wide array of topics surrounding “Improv in Therapy,” providing listeners with a deep dive into its application and benefits. Discussions range from the foundational principles of improv in therapy, case studies highlighting its success, to the practical challenges and rewards of integrating improv techniques into clinical practice. We also explore the specific impact of “Improv in Therapy” on gifted and twice-exceptional clients, underscoring the versatility and adaptability of improv as a therapeutic tool. Additionally, Gordon Smith shares his personal journey and experiences, offering a unique perspective on how improv can revolutionize therapy practices and client outcomes.

Episode Transcript

Gordon Smith: They surprise themselves with something they say and everyone laughs because it’s just so real. That’s what happens again and again. I don’t do this out of a pursuit of performance. This is about play. The necessary precursor to play is safety and trust. You don’t get to play with someone unless you’re safe and you trust each other.

Becky Coplen: Welcome to Mastering Counseling, the weekly business show for counselors. I’m your host, Becky Coplen. I’ve spent 20 years working in education in the role of both teacher and school counselor. Each episode, we’ll be exploring what it takes to thrive as a counseling business owner. From interviews with successful entrepreneurial counselors to conversations with industry leaders on trends and the next generation of counseling services, to discussions with tech executives whose innovations are reshaping counseling services, if it impacts counseling, we cover it on mastering counseling. Thank you for coming back to Mastering Counseling. We’re so happy to have our listeners on here again for a great time of exploration today. I am excited to have Gordon Smith, who is the founder of Gifted and Growing, and I think we’re going to focus on a lot of things that we haven’t talked about before. Welcome to the show, Gordon. When looking at your website and things, it looks like you have counseling, coaching and that you use a lot of improv for all kinds of ages, and we haven’t gotten to talk about using improvisation as a great therapy tool, so I’m looking forward to hearing about that. Why don’t we go ahead and just start off? You’ve been in this for about two decades. Why don’t you take us back to the beginning and how you started on this path?

Gordon Smith: In the beginning, I was a member of a dysfunctional family, so I came to mental health early in high school. I wanted to be a psychologist, got to college, hit organic chemistry, and was like, oh, hell no. I’m not trying to do all that and meandered for a while and came back to it and went to grad school in 99 to get my master’s in community counseling at Western Carolina University, then looks like a fairly conventional route. I was housed in an agency for a while, bounced to a couple of different agencies, and got an office as a clinician after doing some in-home intensive family stuff, and a lot of cut-your-teeth young therapy. Then in 2008, the agency I was with folded, and all of the clinicians and psychiatrists decided to go out on their own into private practice and formed a cooperative model. That’s how I ended up in private practice.

Becky Coplen: You said the agency split off, but then you went on your own. But did you say, like a group of you stayed together to create your own?

Gordon Smith: That’s right. The agency folded. We were all people without a home at that point. So we formed this cooperative business model where we all had our own individual practices. But then we shared marketing and sales.

Becky Coplen: Talk to us a little bit about how you ended up focusing on people who find themselves thinking differently than a lot of the population, and what struggles come with being gifted.

Gordon Smith: In late 2016, I was doing a kind of whole-life review. I, at the time, had a full private practice as a generalist on every insurance panel under the sun. I was also an elected official on the Asheville City Council. So I was I had that kind of full-time job in addition to my practice, and I was coming to the end of my second term and trying to figure out what I wanted to do going forward, and a review of my practice was a part of that process. I used to keep paper calendars. Remember those? I’ve gotten away from it now. It took a minute though, but I took seven years of those and just started reading through all those names and thinking about all those people that I’d spent time with, and pulled out the names of the people that I felt like I’d done my very best work with. And then I asked myself what they had in common. This was it that they were all very bright and complex and intense, and, I wondered if there was any literature about this and went down the rabbit hole pretty soon remembered that. Oh yeah, I’m a grown-up kid too. There is a wealth and a growing wealth of literature about giftedness, neurodivergence, therapeutic approaches, as well as educational and more holistic approaches, including coaching and other modalities. So I dove in. This was the area that I feel best in and the people that I’ve been able to help the most. So I just made it my whole practice. I think that a lot of the conventional wisdom in private practice land right now is too niche, is to find a specialized population, and focus there. Young clinicians are asked to do this before they even know what they’re good at or what they like. So there’s a lot of guesswork, but I can’t imagine that happening without stepping into a lot of potholes and bear traps along the way or trying to read the tea leaves on, like where the public needs it. It all seems very guesswork versus “just get out there and do some work”.

Becky Coplen: Now this is a little more personal, but when you say grown up and gifted, did you feel like you didn’t understand that until more into adulthood? Or did you know that when you were younger?

Gordon Smith: I Identified in third grade, like so many people are with some teachers said, hey, you should test this kid. So I got tested and I was actually placed in a school for the gifted down in Florida called Pine View, and went there for my fourth-grade year. I took four different languages. When I was in fourth grade, and then you was supposed to choose one at the end of your fourth-grade year, and then you would do it for the next seven years, so you’d be fluent by the time you got out. But my dad got a job in another town, So I got pulled out of that school, and I got put back into the general population public school. I had my once-a-week pull-out for gifted or whatever, but I was a gifted student. The way that showed up for me wasn’t straight A’s, far from it. It was a recognition that I wasn’t interested in what they were trying to teach me, and I wasn’t interested in what they were selling. I very studiously got B minuses and C pluses, so I didn’t raise expectations. Still met enough of the minimum requirements that I was going to be able to get a GPA to get me into a school that was good enough. I like, formed a fake club so I could get out of class.

Gordon Smith: Then what I did with my time when I was skipping class was to go find an empty classroom and read the books I was interested in, like the nerdiest subversion of the school system I’ve ever heard. So you see gifted kids, who are those high achievers? You also see those gifted kids who are not seen, who end up failing out, or just jumping into drug use. The gifted profile can look a lot of different ways. When I rediscovered it and began to look at my own life through this lens, what I saw was what I see in a lot of my clients, which was a pervasive sense of not feeling seen, a recognition that I had been masking a lot of parts of myself for a lot of years in order to establish a connection with others, to establish acceptance in neurotypical situations. So many of my clients have been doing this, masking their whole lives. Talk about giftedness as a type of neurodivergence, in that it’s so far out of the norm. We’re at the third standard deviation and beyond. So this is depending on which numbers you use, about 2.1% of the population. And once you get into the highly gifted, it’s about 0.1% of the population. So these are folks who are outliers by nature and living divergently from the kind of narrow majority.

Gordon Smith: As we get into that type of divergence, you find the other divergences as well. You find characteristics of what they call ADHD, characteristics of what is known as autism, and characteristics of dyslexia. All these neurodivergences tend to start showing up because we are outside of the rulebook. Once you’re out here on the skinny end of the bell curve, because the diagnostic manuals, the therapeutic techniques, we’re all normed on the 95% of the people within two standard deviations of the norm, as makes sense, if you’re building broad systems, you want them to apply broadly, but then trying to apply those systems to people who are outliers is where the trouble begins. Whether it’s an educational norm, a mental health norm, or a diagnostic norm. It just looks different out here on the fringes. I certainly had that experience in my life, So many of the clients who come to see me are people who have been misdiagnosed or have had their diagnoses missed altogether because they’re so good at masking, that they haven’t been identified as autistic or ADHD or some of these other learning differences. What I would say is that the number one affliction of gifted people is loneliness. Finding people to connect with in meaningful ways, to have the depth of connection that we need as people is simply harder.

Becky Coplen: How do you use improv? I saw on your website that it can be families, it can be, I think, groups of teenagers, it can be therapists. I can’t wait to hear about this as a former drama teacher.

Gordon Smith: Improv grew out of improvisational theater. What we call improv today was created in Chicago by a woman named Viola Spolin, who was a drama teacher, she also ran a place called Hull House, which was a halfway house for immigrants coming to this country under this roof, where people from all these different nationalities, this is back in the 1930s. She was looking for a way to connect with people rapidly and to help them build skills and confidence. She started using these theatrical games, and this developed into these improvisational games. And she started writing about fast-forwarding a generation. And her son is founding Second City Improv, born of theater, born of social work. It is the crossroads where these two places, these two roads meet. So I am primarily a therapist, like I said, and I’ve done some coaching work in the pandemic, I was looking for ways to establish intimacy more rapidly in online spaces. So I started attending all these different experimental groups, and I stumbled into a second city improv class. Within five minutes, people who had never met each other were being super goofy and vulnerable in that way, and I’d never seen anything like it. So I was like, I want to keep doing this. This is because there’s something juicy happening here. After the fourth session of that improv, the facilitator let me know that there was an improv for the therapist class, and it started the next day. So I got into that, and then I took level two of that and then advanced again.

Gordon Smith: Then they invited me to be on the board of the company, which is called Improv Therapy Group. They run improv groups not only for therapists but for clergy, for emergency service workers, for all these affinity groups to be able to utilize these skills and just. Shut up and just have some fun. Fast forward a little bit and I’m teaching and then bringing the improv classes under my own umbrella because what I was seeing as I formed these improv for gifted adult groups was people who had never been in a room of self-identified gifted people where that was just allowed to be true, where you were going to be accepted and respected, and whatever you brought was going to be yes ended, which is a central tenet of improv. Yes, we’re going to accept what you’re bringing and we’re going to build on it. This is a new experience for so many gifted people to be in this room where they’re not told that they’re too much, or to tone it down, or that they’re going too fast, or that they’re being confusing or too complex, but to be in a space where they can take the governor off of the engine, take the editor out of the room, and just explore and experience what it’s like to feel socially safe and to just let their brains do what they’re built to do.

Becky Coplen: This episode is brought to you by mastersincounseling.org. If you’re considering enrolling in a master’s level counseling program to further your career, visit mastersincounseling.org to compare school options via our search tool that allows you to sort by specific degree types, tuition, our costs, online flexibility, and more. This is typically online, I’m thinking where if you are the coach or teacher of it, everyone meets and then you provide them some kind of general “This is our setting”, and then they roll with it and just work off of each other.

Gordon Smith: It’s a process. So like I said, for a lot of folks, this is their first experience in a situation like this. There’s a lot of recognition and realizations that happen pretty early on in the process of how much people have been masking. It can be a pretty emotional situation for a lot of people. So we kind of tiptoe up to it. We set some culture around being an anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-ableist, neurodivergent affirming space, and then we’ll do some warm-up games that are easy. It’s just about letting your brain bubble up with ideas. It’s not character work right away. Then we’ll do a lot of short-form improv. So brief games, things like storytelling games where each person might have a different letter of the alphabet that they have to begin their sentences with. And you’re building on the last person’s story, and every story is unique. There are hundreds of these games that we might play that are these short-form games that are endlessly hilarious because as people get relaxed and feel safe, spontaneity begins. Because it’s improv is not about trying to be funny. It’s quite the opposite of that. It’s about trying to be real and allowing the next thing to fall out of your mouth because that’s when it’s funny. You then in these rooms with people surprise themselves with something they said, and everyone laughs because it’s just so real. That’s what happens again and again. I don’t do this out of a pursuit of performance.

Gordon Smith: This is about play, and the necessary precursor to play is safety and trust. You don’t get to play with someone unless you’re safe and you trust each other. Then play is available. Through play, we get to discover ourselves and discover our imaginations, emotions, and intellect in new ways. If I could back up for a minute, Becky, and just talk about giftedness. It’s so often housed in the domain of education and looked at as intellect, analytical skills, problem-solving, vocabulary, etc. but the same brain that does math and science and English and all that cool stuff is the brain that does emotions and imagination and sensuality and physicality and existential sensibility. So many gifted people have intensities in these other dimensions as well, or their primary intensities may not be intellectual, they may be emotional where their emotional lives are just highly sensitive and highly complex and scaffolded. Their imaginations may be so rich and deep. This is why many people who are later diagnosed with inattentive ADHD have these very rich, imaginal lives that, compared to a boring lecture in civics in seventh grade, are much more interesting. So these improvisational settings allow people to explore these other dimensions of giftedness that haven’t ever been named or noticed outside of some pejorative, and that allowing an exploration brings all these parts of people out that have been forgotten or buried or just never allowed.

Becky Coplen: This is very exciting. When you talked on the website about the improv, and there’s a testimony of a family that had gone through a very traumatizing time, is that one of your most successful scenarios? Do you want to talk about that a little bit?

Gordon Smith: It was so meaningful for the family. This was a family where a daughter who had just entered adolescence was diagnosed with cancer and spent the better part of a year in hospital in treatment and nearly died several times. It was very close, wasn’t clear she was going to make it. Then she did, and then she’s 13 and the whole family has been traumatized through a year of hospital living and near death. Sister has been largely neglected by necessity and the whole family. The mom said to me was we had forgotten how to have fun together. We’ve just been living in crisis. So over the course of four sessions, they projected me onto their living room wall and they were all in their living room, and we did four successive weeks of just pure play. Over the course of that, they were able to not be in their old roles, but to be in these imaginary roles and to play with those roles. I would give them games to play with each other between sessions that they could do in the car or at the dinner table. They started practicing playing four weeks later and just reported a sense of a fresh start, a new beginning. We get to now let that be passed. Recently had another family come to me because mom’s ADHD, dad’s autistic, youngest is super ADHD and just the middle child, hyper middle child in it and like always peacemaking, pleasant daughter, she was a walking eye roll and they were in conflict all the time. They came to practice the second improv tenet, which is we are all going to support each other and there are no mistakes.

Gordon Smith: You can’t get it wrong. We’re gonna make this scene not only work but be awesome every time. And they got to practice that. Over the course of time, I watched their relationships go from being five individuals to being this ensemble, this actual working-together family. It was awesome. To be clear, what we’re doing is playing and letting that be enough. It’s not about an achievement. It’s not about whether we succeed or fail, that those paradigms are unhelpful. It is fun. I came into it, as I told you, for the reasons that I explained, and I recognize that so much of what we’re trying to do in counseling and therapy can also be approached from this other medium. Folks who have been in a bunch of therapy to work on perfectionism or social anxiety or whatever it is, come into improv and find a new way of coming at those things. The term social anxiety is misleading when it comes to gifted people because the anxiety is well-founded. It’s a reasonable fear of rejection because it’s been repeated thousands of times. They’ve been having these micro-rejections again and again and again and again. So the anxiety is real. Longing for connection is true. The number of times they’ve been called weird or too much or odd or look how quirky you are. That’s just Esmeralda. Don’t pay her any mind that oftentimes they’ll find that this felt sense experience of safety and play gets them there in a way that therapy never has.

Becky Coplen: I did want to just be on the business, more technical, not as a fun side, but improv and for our listeners. So you have coaching counseling and then you do the improv. How does your schedule look? Does it change by the month? Do you a lot certain days for which type of work you’re working on that day? How does it look?

Gordon Smith: It looks like a gifted person’s counseling schedule because most gifted people are what they call multipotential. So there are lots of ways that you want to be able to exercise your consciousness. The pain of choosing can be a lot. So we end up doing a lot of different things. If someone had told me I was going to be in the same profession for 23 years, I would have laughed them out of the room. But I can do it because every person who walks through the virtual door is different and every situation is different. Then I get to add on these improv classes. I’ve currently got it set up so my gifted adult and twice exceptional teen groups are filled to go. This means when they fill up, I’ll schedule it with improv for therapists. I do that one in person here in Asheville, North Carolina, and when I hear rumblings of interest, I’ll schedule one and we’ll do it. With the families, it’s just when people reach out. So I max out at 20 clients a week in a Monday to Thursday schedule. When it’s time to run an improv class, I’ll often do that on Sunday afternoons because it’s when people can come.

Gordon Smith: Then my work week is Sunday to Thursday for a period of six weeks. While I’m running these, while I’m playing on Sundays, and generally I’m like 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. I’ll see 4 to 6 a day, depending on how it shakes out. I schedule 4 to 6 weeks of vacation time for myself every year, just to be able to keep my feet on the ground and recognize that what we do for a living is only one dimension of our lives and that there’s a lot of life to live outside of work. To be clear, I’m making a living by cutting up with the smartest people in the world and helping them at the same time. That’s my actual life. The reason that I say it in that way is because it feels so aligned. I’m doing the work where I feel best and most competent and most lit up, so it does feel like a gift and a joy. I’m not punching it. I am living a life that feels like one of integrity and alignment. So it is fun.

Becky Coplen: Anything else that you feel people looking into this world you want them to know or anything else you want to share?

Gordon Smith: Gifted people are often identified in school, as we talked about. Then you become an adult and it’s never mentioned again. That intensity and complexity and curiosity and conscientiousness remain with you. Through finding some kind of support, counseling, or coaching groups, however it is, you can step into more of yourself and become unmasked more and more as you have more and more agency and autonomy in your own life. And there is a lot of juiciness there. There’s a lot of letting go. So it ain’t easy, but the payoff is worth it. I will invite everyone to come over to the resource. Page on my website, giftedandgrowing.org. There’s a list of all kinds of other websites there as well that are about giftedness. Gifted adults, parenting kids, neurodivergence writ large, podcasts, articles, books. There are a lot of ways for you to dive into this rabbit hole, do some exploration, and figure out what’s going to be most helpful. A lot of the folks who come to see me have done some cursory reading are having a series of epiphanies, and looking for someone to work through all of these awakenings with. Check out the resources page, and get some support. We are a tiny little group of people, percentage-wise of the population, and alone it can be pretty miserable and together it can be quite joyous.

Becky Coplen: Have you found even any other therapists or counselors who are doing this exact work, as you or not?

Gordon Smith: There are a few and it’s growing. We now have a Facebook group of therapists and coaches for gifted and twice-exceptional people, and there are about 70 of us listed on there. But in my work, I have people contacting me from all over the world. There are so few of us.

Becky Coplen: I love your story and the work. I love the improv and how you’re using that in how it brings you a lot of joy as well. So thank you so much for your time today and just for all of your insights, and the excitement, I would say that you’re bringing to the field, we appreciate you being here today.

Gordon Smith: All right, Becky, thanks for your work too.

Becky Coplen: To our listeners, we’re so happy you’re tuning in to Mastering Counseling. We hope you continue to ask questions and leave us comments about this field. Please check out the Gifted and Growing website, especially if this part of the population and thinking is appealing to you for you to know more about. Hope everyone has a wonderful day to signing off a Mastering Counseling. You’ve been listening to the Mastering Counseling podcast by mastersincounseling.org. Join us again next episode as we explore what it takes to be a business success in the counseling industry.