People who have a great ability to do many things and study a variety of subjects often ask themselves questions such as "what is my purpose?" "what is my career?" Faced with the difficulty of finding a concrete answer to these questions, they often feel helpless, not being able to find their place in the world. This fact is characteristic of multipotential people.
In this Psychology-Online article we will discover what it is to be a multipotential person and how to identify it.
What does it mean to be multipotential? Multipotentiality (from English multipotentiality) identifies the quality and capacity of people who have more interests and activitiesThey excel in more sectors and have greater creativity and intellectual curiosity. These types of people are defined as multipotential.
Multipotentiality has been talked about since the 1970s, mainly in psychology and educational psychology. It is precisely in 1972 when Frederickson defines the multipotential individual as a person who, in the appropriate contexts, can select and develop a set of skills high level.
Starting in the 1990s, attention has increasingly focused on the following contributions on multipotentiality:
- Barbara Kerr (educational psychologist and professor of counseling psychology): she helped to delve further into some issues related to multipotentiality and she defines as "the ability to select and develop multiple careers (career options) due to a wide variety of interests, attitudes, talents and skills". In turn, Kerr analyzed the problems related to the planning and development of careers. One of the difficulties of multipotential people is choosing which training and professional itineraries to undertake. This difficulty is very present in this type of person, especially in school age, but it can also have consequences in the later phases of life.
- Tamara Fisher (education of gifted children): in 2010, Tamara Fischer speaks of multipotentiality in an in-depth article and defines it as "the condition of one who has many exceptional talents, each or most of which may constitute a good career for that person. person". Despite the positive aspects of this condition, it is also worth noting the great difficulty that multipotential individuals may have to make important decisions related to their training and race.
- Emily Wapnick: Emilie Wapnick's 2015 Ted speech entitled "why some of us don't have a single true vocation" has been one of the events that has contributed most to the dissemination of the concept of multipotentiality. According to him coach, a multipotential is "a person who has many interests and creative activities in life. Multipotentials don't have a true vocation like specialists do." Another word that Wapnick uses to define multipotentials is puttylike.
Among the characteristics and abilities shown by multipotential people we can find the curiosity, interest and vocation for different areas, flexibility and resilience. Here are some ideas to know if you are a multipotential person:
- You are enthusiastic by nature.
- Sometimes you have a hard time finding time for all your passions.
- You are about to enroll in another course or training opportunity.
- You've had so many different jobs that your resume looks like a concept map.
- You love to learn new things.
- You always sit in the research phase.
- When they explain something to you about a subject, you always try to inform yourself to know more about it.
Advantages and disadvantages of being a multipotential person
Being a multipotential person can have a number of advantages for the person. Here are some:
- Ability to adapt and reinvent yourself.
- Love for change.
- Open mind and capable of being transversal.
- cultural wealth.
However, it can also have drawbacks such as:
- Difficulty focusing attention.
- Tendency to get bored easily.
- Dispersion risk.
If you have trouble concentrating, you may also be interested in the article "I have trouble concentrating: why and what to do".
What is it to be multipotential? Wapnick identified three main characteristics of a multipotential person:
- The ability to synthesize ideas: allows multiple fields of knowledge to come together to create something new.
- Quick learning: multipotential people tend to learn new activities quickly.
- adaptability: allows the person to easily move from one area to another.
It should be noted that there is no single type of multipotential person. We can classify them into the following:
- hug approach: characteristic of a person who moves in the same disciplinary field but experiments with different roles within it.
- slash approach: refers to individuals who divide themselves during the day between different activities, often very different from each other, that they carry out in the same way.
- Einstein Approach: characteristic of those people who exploit one of their passions, turning it into their main profession to finance the rest of their activities. The name comes from Albert Einstein, probably the most famous scientist of all time for his scientific discoveries.
- phoenix approach: It is the most recognizable of the four and includes those people who jump from one activity to another the moment they lose interest in one of them.
Being multipotential is an attitude of life and a way of facing things that has many virtues. Being passionate about many different fields broadens our vision and approaches. In a hyper-specialized world like the one that has been developing in the last 50 years, having lateral and transversal thinking outside the schemes is becoming increasingly important. Therefore, being multipotential can be an advantage and make us stand out in labor contexts and not historically hyperspecialized.
The other side of the coin is success in managing multipotentiality. The "multipotential" have a more difficult life than the "specialists", since, wanting to carry out several projects and interests at the same time, they run the risk of suffering from impostor syndrome and feeling bad prepared. In this case, we must learn to live with this feeling, identifying what each experience has given usregardless of how much time we decide to spend (or not spend) on it in the future.
How can we take advantage of being a multipotential person? First of all, we have to be aware of what it means to be a multipotential person and knowing the drawbacks that being one entails, but without forgetting the great advantages mentioned previously.
A resource that helps to assess multipotentiality is rely on hyper-specialized people. In this way, the multipotential person will have someone by his side who will teach him to remain focused, while that the hyperspecialized individual will be able to enrich himself from the broad vision and outside the schemes of the multipotential.
Sometimes it is difficult to find a specialist who sees the appearance outgoing and volatile of multipotentials as a quality and not as an obstacle, but once this detail is resolved, it's done!
This article is merely informative, in Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.
