Discovering Your Giftedness
A Step-By-Step Guide
Finding Your Pattern
Now that you’ve identified the relevant details from your Giftedness Stories, you need to determine which ones repeat and recur throughout your stories.
Click here for a form entitled, Giftedness Patterns >>
It looks similar to the Giftedness Story Summary form, but it’s designed for you to collect your observations from all of your stories onto a single page. So you just need to make one copy of the Giftedness Patterns form.
Your Abilities
Lay out the eight Giftedness Story Summaries that you and your partner completed. Look at the abilities listed in the box for Abilities on the first Giftedness Story Summary. Compare those abilities to the abilities shown on the second Giftedness Story Summary. Then do the same for the third through the eighth summary forms.
What abilities do you see repeating and recurring?
Note that you may not have used the exact same words to describe an ability, but it’s obvious from the stories that the same or a similar ability is involved.
Example:
Story 1: “I stirred up the pudding and then poured it into the glasses my mom had set out.”
Story 3: “I found a recipe in my mom’s cookbook for cherry pie. That was always my brother’s favorite. I made a list of the ingredients and went to the store to buy them. When I got home, I followed the recipe to put the pie together.”
Story 4: “When I heard what the caterer wanted to charge, I said, ‘No way!’ So instead I went to Sam’s and bought a lot of flour and sugar and chocolate, and then I rounded up my kids to help me make all the cookies. We were stirring batter in buckets and pots and pans. It was crazy! It took us two days to get them all baked. But most all of them turned out pretty good.”
Story 6: “She was in tears because her husband was going to be home in an hour, and the dog had ruined the cake she’d spent all day working on. I told her, ‘Honey, don’t worry. I’ve got an idea.’ I just happened to have some cherries from a drive my husband and I had made to the countryside that weekend. So I pitted a bunch of them and threw them in saucepan with some spices and water and sugar and Irschwasser and reduced it to a glaze. I was working so fast. It was like an episode of Chopped. When it was finished I ran it over to her house and told her to pour it over some vanilla ice cream and stick a candle on top. I rushed out the front door just as my son-in-law was coming through the back door. He never knew that the dessert she gave him came from me. He thought she had made it, and he loved it!”
Story 7: “They asked me to be a judge, so I thought, ‘Why not?’ When it came time to judge the entries, there was this one velvet cake that was to die for. I asked the lady t tell me what was in it. When she told me she had used evaporated milk, that’s when I went, ‘Ding!’ I finally realized why my velvet cakes had also lacked that smooth buttery texture I was looking for.”
What ability is this woman consistently using throughout her stories? Baking or cooking. She only uses the term “baked” one time (in Story 4), but it’s obvious that baking is an ability she regularly uses.
If you’ve provided enough detail in telling your stories, you should see certain abilities repeating in at least three or four stories, if not more. If you don’t see any abilities repeating more than once or twice, you need to go back and provide more details about how you did the activities in your stories. Don’t speak in generalities. Get specific. Describe exactly what you did, even if it seems obvious to you.
As you and your partner start seeing abilities repeat and recur, list them in the box labeled Abilities on your Giftedness Patterns form.
Example:
